Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking and other works, has died at the age of 36.
Jonathan Dresner posts a brief assessment of her work at the Japanese history blog Frog in a Well, and re-examines his own reactions at the History News Network’s Cliopatria.
On U.S. election day, Oxblogger Patrick Belton had an article in The Hill on How world capitals see Bush and Kerry. Here’s what he had to say about Africa.
Ambassador Princeton Lyman, a former envoy in Nigeria and South Africa, fears a Kerry victory “might spell difficulty in obtaining congressional support for Bush’s various initiatives for Africa–President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the Millennium Challenge Account–since Republicans in Congress would be less likely to support these for a Democratic Administration at the same level.”
Many African leaders, accordingly, prefer Bush. According to an official in the Central Intelligence Agency who studies the region, he has shown greater interest in Africa than its predecessor. Africa policy has been largely guided by energy interests, combined with a need for military support for regional peacekeeping missions such as in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Bush has formed close personal relationships with many west African heads of state, including the evangelical Christian Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Paul Biya of Cameroon, whose invitation to a state dinner in Washington in March 2003 represented a breaking point with his country’s traditional alignment with the Elysée. (The shift was reinforced one year later, when Biya visited London and was greeted by working sessions with ministers and a reception by the Queen.) Conversely, there is growing discontent in Nigeria with the increasingly authoritarian and corrupt Obasanjo, whom the same analyst notes in 2003 received from Washington and London “a free pass in a very flawed election.” Whichever administration finds itself in power during the next cycle of African elections in 2007 will have to choose whether to side with Washington’s friends, or withhold its blessing should elections again result–as in 2003–in massive irregularities and evidence of violence and voter intimidation.
South Africa, which harbors ambitions of a global role via a permanent seat in the U.N. Security Council, is in the opposing camp and prefers Kerry as more likely to support the institution, notes Murray Wesson, a South African law researcher at Oxford.
In light of the results, Macam-macam summarizes the reactions of several Southeast Asian leaders, and Siberian Light discusses the prospects for Russian-American relations.
Yet it was the Indians of Long Island–not Nantucket–who had taught the pioneers how to whale. According to contemporary accounts, the Indians set out from the beaches of the Hamptons to pursue their prey in dugout canoes, attacking passing whales with bone harpoons that were attached by thongs to “drags” made of wooden floats or inflated deerskins, and then killing them with bows and arrows. Each canoe was crewed by six men–four oarsmen, a steersman, and a harpooner–and the procedure of the chase was the same as that followed by thousands of American whalemen for the next three hundred years.
In the beginning, the European settlers had been satisfied with cutting up carcasses that drifted ashore during storms. The arrival of one of these “drift” whales heralded a village bonanza, because whale oil burned with a much cleaner, brighter flame than tallow, even if the blubber from which the oil was rendered had been rotten. Not only did the pioneers use it themselves, but it could be sold in New York for a gratifying sum. Then, as the Long Islanders noticed the yearly migrations of right whales just a few miles offshore, and learned that the Indians had a tradition of taking their canoes out after them, they took a more entrepreneurial stance. Instead of waiting for the whales to die of natural causes, they hired Indians to go out and kill them, supplying the crews with cedar boats, iron harpoons, and lances, all of which were much more efficient than the dugout canoes, bone harpoons, and bows and arrows that had been the old tools of the trade. The carcasses were towed up to the beach, where the Indians’ employers waited with knives and cutting spades to flense the blubber and then boil–or “try out”–the oil in “try-pot” cauldrons that had been set up on the sand. This was known as shore whaling. As time went by, the Indians realized they were in a strong negotiating position. Not only did they become much more expensive to hire, but there were too few of them to meet the growing demand. So the settlers were forced to take a more active role, going out in the boats themselves.
This enterprise proved so successful that in 1672 James Loper of East Hampton was invited to Nantucket to teach the Nantucketers how to whale. Other shore settlements, including Edgartown in Martha’s Vineyard, also followed the Long Islanders’ lead. Then, in 1712, the Nantucket whaling industry suddenly overtook the rest, after a whaleboat was blown offshore in a gale, and came up with a pod of sperm whales. The headsman, Christopher Hussey, harpooned one, and then the boat outlasted the storm by taking shelter in the smooth waters at the lee of the oily carcass. Once the tempest was over the prize was towed home, to the amazement of all, and with instant enthusiasm a fleet of single-masted craft called “sloops” was assembled and sent out.
The sloops were only about thirty tons in size and were outfitted for voyages that lasted no more than about six weeks, but it was the world’s first attempt at a sperm whale fishery. As the whales were hunted farther and farther out to sea, the vessels became bigger, reaching about sixty tons, some of them schooner-rigged. Indians made up part of the crews, the Nantucket shore-fishery having developed in a similar pattern to the Long Island enterprise, and Nantucketers commanded them. Then, as available men became scarce, the Nantucket owners lobbied for Vineyard mariners to make up their crews. And so men from Martha’s Vineyard could be found in increasing numbers serving on Nantucket ships. Some even reached the rank of captain.
It was not until around 1738 that the Vineyard commenced its own sperm-whaling operation, and then it was a whale man from Nantucket, Joseph Chase, who led the way, after he moved to Edgartown and took his sloop Diamond with him. Even then it was hard for him to stimulate much local interest. This was partly because Vineyard whalemen were already sailing on Nantucket ships, and partly because of the differing physical terrain of the two islands. While Martha’s Vineyard was only marginally fertile, Nantucket was not fertile at all. Nantucketers were forced to find the whole of their living at sea. By the year 1775 Nantucket listed a fleet of 150 vessels with an average burthen of one hundred tons, while the Vineyard could claim just twelve.
SOURCE: In the Wake of Madness: The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon, by Joan Druett (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004), pp. 23-25
Filed under U.S.
The Hart-Rudman report [commissioned by U.S. President Clinton in 1997 and completed in March 2001] established the nation’s vulnerability, but even it could not say when, how, or from where that vulnerability might be tested. Its conclusions, however striking, therefore fell within the realm of the hypothetical. Press coverage was minimal, and the response of the newly installed Bush administration–like that of the outgoing Clinton administration–to the commission’s preliminary findings was little more than polite thanks. That the foundations of national security were about to suffer a seismic jolt was still by no means clear.
There was yet a third reason for the surprise, though, which went beyond the concerns of Hart-Rudman: it had to do with a widespread sense in the academic and policy communities during the 1990s that the international system had become so benign that the United States no longer faced serious security threats of any kind. Paradoxically, the success of American grand strategy during the Cold War encouraged this view.
The record was indeed impressive. The United States had used military occupations to transform Germany and Japan into thriving capitalist democracies, and the Marshall Plan had secured similar results elsewhere in Europe. Over the next four decades democracy and capitalism spread much more widely, even tentatively into the Soviet Union itself. Meanwhile the world’s other great communist state, China, was pulling off a dialectical transformation that neither Marx nor Mao could ever have imagined, becoming a hotbed of capitalism, if not yet of democracy. By the time the Cold War ended, no other models for organizing human society seemed viable: Americans were remaking the world, or so it appeared, to resemble themselves. And the world, it also seemed, was not resisting.
Certain theorists concluded from this that the movement toward democracy and capitalism was irreversible, and that “history” therefore was coming to an end. It might have been an innocuous enough argument, given the care social scientists had taken in recent years to ensure that their theories bore little connection to reality; but this particular theory–associated most closely with the political scientist Francis Fukuyama–did wind up shaping the course of events. The Clinton administration drew from it the idea that if progress toward political self-determination and economic integration was assured, then the United States need only, as national security adviser Anthony Lake put it, “engage” with the rest of the world in order to “enlarge” those processes. The hegemony by consent the United States had won during the Cold War would simply become the post-Cold War international system. President Clinton himself saw little need for a grand strategy under these circumstances. Neither Roosevelt nor Truman had had one, he told a top adviser early in 1994: “they just made it up as they went along.”
There were several problems with this position, quite apart from the chief executive’s shaky knowledge of World War II and early Cold War strategy. It encouraged a tendency to view history in linear terms, and to ignore the feedback effects that can cause successes to breed failures by inducing complacency–just as failures can breed successes by shattering complacency. It sought coherence through alignment with vague processes rather than through the specification of clear objectives. It brought the Clinton team closer to the examples of Harding and Coolidge than to those of Roosevelt and Truman, for those presidents of the 1920s had also allowed an illusion of safety to produce a laissez-faire foreign and national security policy. Finally, Clinton and his advisers assumed the continued primacy of states within the international system. If you could make most of them democratic, if you could bind them together by removing restrictions on trade and investment as well as on the movement of people and ideas, then the causes of violence and the insecurity it breeds would drop away. The argument was well intentioned but shallow.
For what if the power of states themselves was diminishing? What if the very remedies the Clinton model prescribed–political self-determination and economic integration–were slowly undermining the authority of those for whom the prescription had been intended? What if the hidden history of the Cold War was one in which the great powers, under American tutelage, ultimately resolved most of their differences, only to find that their own power was no longer as great as it had once been? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how this might have happened.
Self-determination certainly enhances legitimacy: that’s why democracies during the Cold War proved more durable than autocracies. But it can also expose an absence of legitimacy, which is what led to the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia after the Cold War. There are now more independent states than ever before–almost 200, as compared to about 50 at the end of World War II–but that doesn’t mean that the international state system is stronger. It means just the opposite: that there are more “failed” or “derelict” states than ever before.
Integration certainly enhances prosperity: that’s why so many people benefited from the liberalization of trade and investment that took place during and after the Cold War. But the resulting global market has also constrained the ability of states to determine the conditions under which their citizens live. Marx was right in pointing out that although capitalism generates great wealth, it distributes that wealth unevenly. States used to have the capacity to cushion that process, thereby minimizing the resentment it generated: progressivism and the New Deal in the United States, social democracy in Europe, and their equivalents elsewhere provided the social safety nets that saved capitalism from the self-destruction Marx had forecast for it. Now though, in an unregulated global economy, those nets are sagging and becoming frayed.
It’s also the case that states–even democracies–used to have some control over movements of people and exchanges of ideas. We tend to celebrate the fact that it’s more difficult to impose such restrictions in a world of cheap air travel, liberal immigration policies, fax machines, satellite television transmitters, cell phones, and the internet. But there’s also a price, which is that it’s harder than it used to be for states to monitor the activities of those individuals, gangs, and networks who are their enemies.
The bottom line, then, is that states are more peaceful these days–that’s a major accomplishment of the Cold War–but they’re also weaker than they used to be. That situation too contributed to the events of September 11th, and it’s certainly shaping the era that has followed. The most important failure of strategic vision in Washington, therefore, lay in the inability of American leaders to look beyond their Cold War victory to the circumstances that might undermine its benefits. As after World War I, they allowed the absence of visible danger to convince them that nothing invisible could pose a threat. They assumed that it was enough simply to have won the game. It did not occur to them that the arena within which the game was being played–together with the rules by which the United States, its allies, and its defeated adversaries had played it–might now be at risk.
It was not just the Twin Towers that collapsed on the morning of September 11, 2001: So too did some of our most fundamental assumptions about international, national, and personal security.
SOURCE: Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, by John Lewis Gaddis (Harvard U. Press, 2004), pp. 74-80
I was in the Army at a time when there were beer machines in the barracks, dope in many lockers, and cigarettes in our C-rations. I mostly smoked nonfilter cigarettes (usually Pall Malls) because the butts could be “field-stripped”–torn up and scattered outside without leaving a filter as litter. (I stopped smoking soon after getting out of the Army.)
In my barracks at the 95th Civil Affairs Group in Ft. Gordon, GA, you could usually tell when the old supply sergeant who lived in his own room downstairs woke up in the morning. It wasn’t his alarm clock. It was the distinctive sound of the pop-top coming off his can of beer for breakfast.
After I reached the rank of E-5–SP5, the specialist (noncommand) equivalent of buck sergeant–I got my own room upstairs, which PFCs (E-3s) Carter and O’Neill would occasionally borrow to shoot up. By that time, I was the company clerk–and everyone’s servant.
These two happy-go-lucky NYC delinquents, drafted out of Riker’s Island, were fresh back from Vietnam. After each payday, they would make a trip into Augusta to score a fix, come back to the barracks and shoot up, then puke their guts out and sleep it off. Between paydays, O’Neill would hock his stereo to get another fix, then buy it out of hock the next payday. And so the cycle would repeat at roughly weekly intervals.
After I bought a used car off a company first sergeant who was leaving, I once made the mistake of agreeing to drive the weekend junkies into Augusta to get their stuff. I took the two New Yorkers (one black, one white) and another local black guy whose name, I believe, was Miles. I parked at a KFC near a housing project and three of us waited while Miles wandered off into the projects in his slovenly fatigues–shirttail and pantsleg half out, boots half unlaced. I started to get nervous after he returned with the goods.
I got even more nervous when they wanted to make another stop, this time at a drug store to buy some syringes. At first, Carter wanted me to go in to get them, since I wasn’t a familiar face. I was to tell them I was a diabetic who needed syringes for my injections of insulin. I was reluctant, and Carter then decided to go himself, so he crossed the street in his slovenly fatigues and got the syringes.
Driving back to base, I was more than nervous. I was scared the police would pull us over for driving while military, for driving while black and white, or for some other arbitrary reason, but I don’t think we even saw any cop cars. In any case, we made it back safely, they got their highs, and they were kind enough not to ask me to make any more runs for heroin.
I entered the Army during the era of Project 100,000 (1966-1971), an attempt to enlist the military as a tool of President Johnson’s War on Poverty–and vice versa. I would call it Project Cannonfodder, but the number 1 Google hit for that term bears the discouraging subtitle, Preparing Teachers for Public Schools. (Does that mean that our nation’s public school systems now offer less opportunity for personal growth and career advancement than our nation’s military? I can believe it.)
Under Project 100,000, entrance standards were lowered in order to enable more people to qualify for the military. As Secretary of Defense McNamara declared in a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 1966:
The poor of America have not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of this Nation’s abundance, but they can be given an opportunity to serve in their Country’s defense, and they can be given an opportunity to return to civilian life with skills and aptitudes which for them and their families will reverse the downward spiral of human decay.
As a result,
By [1971], 354,000 L/A [“Low Aptitude”] men had entered the Services under the program. Of these, 54% were volunteers and 46% were draftees. The men who entered under P/100000 were on average 20 years of age, about half came from the South, and a substantial proportion (about 41%) were minorities. The average reading ability of these men was at the 6th grade level with 13% reading below the 4th grade level.
In my Basic Training squad in 1969, there was a trucker from Richmond named Bragg who was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, but nevertheless a good, responsible soldier. Another soldier whose name I’ve forgotten was so exceedingly dimwitted that he had to be reminded to shower and change his clothes.
In the 95th Civil Affairs Group at Ft. Gordon, GA, two New Yorkers back from Vietnam had been juvenile delinquents. At age 17, they were each given the choice between the Army or Riker’s Island. They chose the Army, and they both ended up in Vietnam, where they discovered the dope to be far superior to what they could get in the States. O’Neill, from Queen’s, hoped to join New York’s finest, but Carter chose to go back to Vietnam’s finer grade of heroin.
A follow-up program, Project Transition, was founded in late 1967 in order to help the survivors of Project 100,000 make a transition back into the civilian workforce. I signed up for Cement Masonry under Project Transition when I was getting close to the end of my term of service (ETS date) toward the end of 1971. I picked Cement Masonry because it lasted the longest, 6 weeks (if I remember correctly). One of my fellow cement masonry classmates was a Nicaraguan journalist who spent his time in the U.S. Army as a cook because his English was so limited. Unfortunately, neither of us stood much chance of qualifying for membership in any construction union.
By that time, my Civil Affairs unit had moved to Ft. Bragg, and I was transferred to Ft. Gordon’s Personnel Control Facility (PCF), where I met a different class of Project 100,000 alumni. My job was to escort soldiers in penal custody to the mess hall, to the clinic, or to military courts. Most had just come back from being AWOL, and some had been turned in by their local sheriffs, who were said to collect a bounty from the military. If you went AWOL 3 times for a period of at least 30 days each, you could qualify for a dishonorable discharge for desertion–a surprisingly popular goal. It might take longer than getting three purple hearts to get out of a combat zone, but it was a safer alternative.
I was generally the last of those on duty to volunteer to escort prisoners because I was usually engrossed in a book. My comrades were bored and eager to take a walk. But I remember once accompanying a prisoner to face an officer who tried to convince him that, no matter how much he hated the Army, he would do better to finish his term of service than to keep going AWOL. To make his point, the officer turned to me and asked, “Outlier, do you like the Army?” I replied, “Not at all, sir!” Whereupon he turned to my prisoner, “See? Outlier hates the Army as much as you do, but he’s done his duty and will get out sooner than you will.” Somehow, I doubt my example impressed him all that much.
My first thought when I got my orders to report to HQ Co., 95th Civil Affairs Group at Ft. Gordon, GA, after I finished language school in 1970 was, “Wow. I wonder if I’ll be working with civilians and can wear civilian clothes.” Little did I know that Civil Affairs was just a euphemism for what used to be called Military Government, and that my unit’s insignia showed a traditional Korean city gate on it from its first and last major deployment–during the Korean War. (Its only other component, the 42nd Civil Affairs Co., was briefly deployed to the Dominican Republic in 1965.)
The 95th CA Grp. was an officer-heavy skeletal battalion (only HQ Co. and 42nd Co.) with no critical mission, so it functioned as a holding unit for people either awaiting levy to Vietnam or just back from Nam. As a Romanian translator-interpreter, I was initially assigned to the amiable 2Lt Gorniak, who had mastered German, Dutch, Danish, and Afrikaans while in college ROTC. But, like most officers, he was assigned to one of the combat branches–Infantry, Artillery, and Armored Cavalry–and soon came down on levy to Vietnam. (His name was among the handful I looked for a couple decades later when I dragged my daughter over to the Vietnam Memorial on a visit to DC. I was relieved not to find the names, but found the experience too emotional to explain to my daughter at the time.)
Among those just back from Nam were Sp4 McLaughlin, a crazy fearless helicopter door gunner who never hesitated to step between belligerent drunken soldiers; Sp4 Blaisdell, a radio DJ with a mellifluous voice who spent most of his tour in PsyOps, eating dog and other delicacies with Vietnamese villagers; and three former juvenile delinquent New Yorkers, Pfcs Carter, O’Neill, and Melendez (black, white, and Hispanic, respectively), about which more in later posts.
We did only one field exercise: Driving south on bivouac to Florida, where we pitched tents in a wooded military reservation overrun with armadillos (called ‘turtle-rabbits’ in Nahuatl), many of which had themselves been overrun on the road. The excess of officers over enlisted in our unit meant that each of us peons had to do twice the amount of set-up and clean-up that we would otherwise have done. I remember spending one long evening in our tent listening to Sgt Kerwin tell stories and recite Robert W. Service poems. When I asked him why a person with his wide interests stayed in the Army, he said he and his family very much needed the medical benefits.
By that time, I had become company clerk, and rode in the company First Sergeant’s jeep. Just before departure, 1Sg Davis had gone off to take a shit in the woods. Unfortunately for him, he was very short and hadn’t noticed that he had squatted over the back of his own trousers. Unfortunately for me, I had to ride behind him all the way back to Ft. Gordon. (Fortunately, it was an open jeep.) From then on, his epithet was Sgt Shitty Britches.
The only official public service we performed was guarding railroad crossings while a trainload of nerve gas was shipped to Savannah for eventual destruction (perhaps on Johnston Island). We were all issued gas masks and atropine, but were not allowed to keep them on our persons so as not to alarm the populace. So we kept them in the back of our truck, knowing there would be no possible way for us to get to them and put them to use within the 7-10 seconds that nerve gas would take to kill us.
Civil Affairs was relocated to Ft Bragg in September 1971. As a short-timer, with barely 6 months left to serve, I was transferred to Ft. Gordon’s PCF–Personnel Control Facility (the brig), not Patrol Craft, Fast (Swiftboats). In December 1974, the 95th CA Grp was deactivated, and nowadays most Civil Affairs units are found in the National Guard, which I’m sure performs far more capably than the mixed bag of transients in the 95th CA Grp would have.
KoreAm Journal profiles the DLI Korean program at Monterey. (Korean was at the top of my list when I enlisted for language school in 1969.)
MONTEREY, CALIF. — The next generation of Korean speakers at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLI) does not necessarily share the same ethnicity [unlike 95% of Korean language learners in the U.S.]. Hailing from all over the United States, the 300 students who graduate from the school’s Korean language program every year are united by their passion to learn. Plus, they all have a soldier’s discipline needed to endure its demanding training.
Those who are undergoing the minimum of six hours of instruction every day, five days a week for 63 weeks, are men and women of the U.S. armed forces who volunteered to extend their military duties by meeting the needs of the military’s demand for Korean speakers.
“I actually asked for Korean or Arabic because I figured that was probably the two languages that they needed people for the most, and I didn’t want to do something too easy,” said Marine Lance Corporal Tyler Joyner. [What *is* it about the Marines?]
He is just one of the soldiers [bzzt! Marines are not “soldiers”] getting more than basic training on the DLI’s sprawling facilities along California’s Central Coast, where deer still graze on the grounds [and buffalo roam …]. Here, Joyner is sitting through classes to develop the skills needed to be fluent in most Korean conversations at the street level, as well as for military operations in South Korea.
via Budaechigae
One of my unforgettable experiences at DLI about 1970 occurred at the on-base movie theater, where the national anthem was played before each movie. A military dependent and his date stayed sitting as the anthem started, whereupon the man behind them reached over and yanked the guy to his feet. After the anthem finished, someone complimented the Enforcer with a “Good work, soldier!”–whereupon the Enforcer replied, “I’m not a soldier. I’m a Marine!”
Fine. Whatever.
CNN reports:
CAMP ZAMA, Japan (AP) — The U.S. Army is preparing for its biggest desertion trial in decades following the surrender of Sgt. Charles Robert Jenkins, wanted for allegedly abandoning his patrol nearly 40 years ago and becoming a North Korean propaganda tool.
But while publicity is guaranteed, the prosecution might have a hard time winning the case, experts say. And if Jenkins does a plea bargain, as is widely expected, he may suffer nothing worse than a dishonorable discharge.
Jenkins has been living at this base just southwest of Tokyo with his Japanese wife and two North Korea-born daughters since he surrendered on September 11.
My last assignment in the U.S. Army was at a Personnel Control Facility (aka “brig”) where a surprising proportion of the inmates were trying to get a dishonorable discharge by deserting three times (going AWOL for over 30 days each time). Unfortunately, their local sheriffs often turned them over to the military (for a bounty, it was rumored) before the 30 days had expired. It took a lot longer than getting 3 purple hearts, of course, but it was a good bit safer route.
The only long-term friend I made during my Army days was gay. And he wasn’t even in the Army; he was a sailor, one of my roommates at the Defense Language Institute. It didn’t strike me until many years later that a fair number of my fellow students at DLI must have been gay. What a shame it would have been if all their language skills had been rejected.
Gary was an ardent film buff from Tulsa, OK. He and I went to many movies in Monterey, Carmel, and elsewhere on the Peninsula, from Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic “War and Peace” to Russ Meyer’s graphic “Vixen.” We also spent a lot of time exploring local history, from Steinbeck to Robert Louis Stevenson.
One weekend when we had planned to hike over the top of the Presidio along a section of 17-mile Drive and down toward Carmel, he failed to return to our room on Friday night. When he finally got back Saturday, he gingerly confessed to me that he had spent the night with a gay acquaintance in town. I was the first straight person he had revealed himself to, and he seemed to think it would be the end of our friendship. But it wasn’t. The next day we took a long hike together, either all the way to Carmel or to a Carmel Valley movie theatre. I can’t really remember.
After he finished his Spanish course at DLI, he was assigned to Puerto Rico, with some time in Guantanamo. He would write long letters about the local scene there, but nothing quite so explicit as what he later wrote once he got out of the Navy and settled in Westwood Village, Los Angeles, where he found work in a factory that employed a lot of Spanish-speaking employees. Once there, his letters began to reveal much more about his active sexlife, including his bathhouse adventures.
By then, I was in graduate school in Hawai‘i, and my life seemed hopelessly boring by comparison, except when I did a spell of fieldwork. However, it was during graduate school that a lesbian friend recruited me to participate in a new gay rights parade right down the length of Waikiki. I only did it for Gary’s sake. There were hardly more than a dozen of us, and I got filmed passing right in front of a TV camera on the local news. When we got to the end, near the Honolulu Zoo, I spent a long time looking at the monkeys–with considerable empathy.
Later in the 1970s, I visited Gary in LA and we made a nostalgic trip back to the Monterey Peninsula, stopping at Hearst Castle en route. When we stopped at a public rest room after a hike around Point Lobos, Gary confessed he was pee-shy. He couldn’t use a public urinal if other men were around. I don’t know how the hell he survived 4 years in the Navy.
I finally lost touch with him in the late 1970s, after I began writing my dissertation and he began writing about his prior incarnations as Amenhotep. La-La-Land must have begun to take a toll on his sensitive mind. I hope his dangerously promiscuous lifestyle didn’t make him a victim of the early stages of the AIDS pandemic.
