The New LAX

Los Angeles needs a new airport. There's very little new about that statement, to be sure, but the fact remains that Los Angeles International is fast running out of room to do what it needs to do in serving the 2nd largest metropolitan area in the United States. So we can concentrate on the uniqueness of "LAX," let's get the other airports in the area out of the way right up front.

Ontario, Burbank, Orange County and Long Beach are "satellites" that serve their immediate area with domestic and some international service to Mexico and Canada. None of them are big enough for much of anything else so the locals are accustomed to driving up to 70 miles to get to LAX where nonstops to Hawaii, Asia, Australia or Europe are readily available. These four have little hope of becoming another Gatwick or Orly for Los Angeles in the way those airports compliment Heathrow at London and Charles de Gaulle at Paris, respectively.

The terminal complex at LAX has been redesigned at least three times from the original concept, including the Tom Bradley International Terminal, the Delta Flight Center and various gate reconfigurations to accommodate the 777 and A380. Another redesign of over one billion dollars is underway to carry the airport for the next 50 years or so. What next? Let's say there will be and the 747s, 777s and A380s of the present day will all be long gone, outliving their usefulness by contemporary standards. Will airports even look or operate the same by then? Before this turns in to a commercial piece on Star Trek, let's go with the technology in hand and figure out what to do with LAX or figure out where to put its replacement.

Palmdale has been bandied about on numerous occasions. It is in the high desert with plenty of land around it that nobody seems much interested in. It is also a good 50 miles north of L.A. past the San Fernando Valley and right next to Edwards AFB, the reason so many seem enamored of the area. Edwards is an active military base that serves as protector of Los Angeles in case of attack, a shuttle landing site and an airplane graveyard. In short, though historically significant to American aviation (Chuck Yeager's breakthrough happened here) on paper it seems, it doesn't have much to do but has a ton of land and plenty of potential to turn in to the kind of commercial facility Los Angeles needs.

The government won't give it up without a fight, the locals don't want to drive there and no airline will support any move to pay for the kind of facility they constantly say they need but is not their responsibility to build. I don't live in the area so all of this is easy and academic to me. I'll put up with Los Angeles until a better solution comes along - some thought it might be El Toro but that hasn't happened either. I say do what the Chinese did in Hong Kong: Spare no expense, go with Edwards, build a freeway and high speed rail network to support it and let the future, unborn tax-payers finish paying for something that was always a part of their lives and therefore no big deal.

Gotta go.

Birthdays Abroad

Today is a member of the family's 45th birthday. Nothing unusual there, true, but it reminds me, as it should, of the place in time where the blessed event occurred, Stuttgart, Germany. For Americans born overseas most are usually like mine in being part of the United States Armed Forces. Otherwise unassuming and ordinary citizens like my family member always get a double-take when the starter topic of where one was born comes up. Unexpected answers like Korea, Turkey, England and Germany come up followed by the innocent question of "What was it like?" right behind it.

Of course the person being born has zero collection of the event or the conditions of time and place but a small sample of things at the time would include a divided Germany only just recently rebuilt from the Second World War, an escalating Cold War between the NATO powers and the Soviet-backed Warsaw Pact and a Black-American family stationed in a foreign country at the height of the Civil Rights Movement back home in a branch of the service that was integrated only 12 years before.

At one extreme one might say ours was just one family not welcome at home in America, grudgingly tolerated by the service, targeted for elimination by the Soviet opposition and bitterly resented by the citizens of occupied West Germany. It wasn't that bad in truth though the Soviet threat was as real as the confusion back home across the Atlantic. Though it took some time, once the order was given the service, to its credit, followed the orders of integration to the letter and beyond. Civil unrest in the United States military was not tolerated as all families got along well enough to understand we were the only support each other had while overseas, regardless of whatever was going on back home.

The Germans were supportive and friendly as well, appreciating the civilian jobs that came with keeping a multi-national foreign defense force running smoothly and taking every opportunity to share language and cultural exchanges. Getting on and off the military bases around the country generally required a military ID or escort but those checks were very perfunctory, nothing close to the car and body searches required post-9/11. It was generally understood that, welcome or not, military bases, especially American ones, were off-limits as far as demonstrations or terrorist activities.

So now, 45 years later, we are left with the memories of the birth of my family member and certainly do wish them all the best and many happy returns. What we are unable to do these days is actually visit the location where the blessed event occurred. Not only is it in the heart of Southern Germany and a long distance away but the actual facility is no longer a part of the US Military system of hospitals. Access to the housing area we used to live in is also behind high walls with barbed wire and restricted access only.

Sometimes it is exactly the same here in the United States. I was born on a military base here which is now also restricted access only. I've never seen it with my own eyes but from the pictures my parents saved of that place oh so long ago it has most definitely changed from the dusty backwater it once was.

Maybe one day but for now, Happy Birthday, and many happy returns!

Gotta go.

They Were Soldiers

It is over 700 miles from Japan and yet is still today considered a part of Tokyo. Surrounded by the deep Pacific Ocean, from the air it looks like a bone-in pork chop with one of the vertebrae still in at the southern end. That round vertebra is Mt. Suribachi, the extinct volcano that came to symbolize the ultimate sacrifice of thousands of men and women during the island hopping campaign of the Second World War. It was only the fourth day of the fighting in February of 1945 that one of the most iconic photographs of all time was taken, capturing a signature moment pride and entirely by accident.

There had already been one flag raising on the island much to the outrage of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers garrisoned to defend the island and support the airbases there protecting the southern air approaches to Japan. As with all things related to politics and propaganda the first raising was staged and the flag was smaller although certainly no less patriotic. To the men who were there it remains the only raising that really counts.

The second was to raise a larger flag to give to a government bureaucrat observing from the beaches that day so six guys at random were tapped to do the honors. A photographer named Joe Rosenthal who happened to be nearby turned around at the last possible second, saw what was happening and captured the image that almost literally saved the war in the Pacific. By then Americans were grown weary of death and telegrams and war budgets were getting precariously low. Washington brought three of the flag raisers home for a war bond tour - the other three were killed on the island - boosting morale and the national coffers to see the fighting through to the end later that year.

Nine years later the United States Marine Corps War Memorial, more popularly known as the Iwo Jima Memorial, was dedicated outside of Washington, D.C. on a hill in Rosslyn, Virginia overlooking capital city. It is a particular favorite place of mine to go and relax, reflect, enjoy the views of the city and consider all things unique to this monument in the annals of American and world history. I simply love being there and took Mom this time as part of a visit to Arlington National Cemetery to pay our respects to Senator Ted Kennedy.

As we walked around the memorial several busloads of tourists arrived shortly after we did. These were not just any tourists. These were actual veterans of World War II, some from the Pacific Theater, and all participating in Honor Flight. This volunteer network is across the country and serves to honor and serve those who served our nation by taking them on tours to the capital to see how their efforts have been acknowledged through the various artworks around the city. Some in their nineties, some in wheelchairs, one guy from Tennessee as chatty as you please and all quite happy to be out and about on a glorious day in D.C. Mom made sure to thank as many as she could personally before they loaded up on the bus and we headed over to see Teddy. He's on the left in the picture below, Bobby on the right.

The country and the world have come a long way from that brutal and blustery day in 1945. For me it is always good to remember and for the veterans who just happened to be there it simply became priceless. No longer merely statues, names etched in marble or photos from other events; each and every one of them for the first time in my life were alive that day. They were soldiers.

Gotta go.

The Burma Railway

High prowed "long-tail" boats buzzed up and down the River Kwai, carrying villagers, livestock and other goods and adding to the exotic surroundings I found myself in on a day trip to Kanchanaburi, Thailand. My purpose was to see the famous World War II bridge over this river that served as part of the "Burma Railway" supply route for the Japanese but I had also never seen a long-tail either. In this case it was little more than a wooden canoe with a car engine and drive shaft and a propeller stuck on the end. Strange, yes, loud, definitely but it works.

After leaving the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery I pressed on to the north towards my goal of "Bridge #277" as the Japanese called it during the war. Over 240,000 indigenous laborers and allied prisoners of war constructed a 260-mile railroad supply line between Bangkok and Rangoon when the Japanese believed this route to be easier to protect in their campaign to control Burma. Disease, starvation and brutality killed many of these workers, including more than 350 Americans.

At the end of the war Japan was ordered to rebuild the bridge in reparations to Thailand after allied bombing raids had destroyed the middle portion of the structure. Before I got to the bridge however there was a simple, square park next to the road known as the War Reparations Memorial, built by the Japanese where an annual ceremony is held in atonement for the atrocities committed over the length of the project. Right around the corner from here sits a museum as chilling as any commemorative exhibit associated with the war anywhere in the world.

The Thai-Burma Railway Museum displays artifacts of clothing, weapons, tools, supplies, mess kits and other items discovered, left behind or donated by survivors of the construction project. Guard towers, a push-car and examples of living quarters for both overlord and laborer are also on display including a brooding hulk of a rail engine, rusting but still imposing as the unforgiving and unfeeling monster the laborers were pressed to serve. Then there were the models, life-sized recreations of gaunt, unkempt and malnourished men engaged in various stages of work, exhaustion and death. Wearing hardly so much as a loin cloth it required very little imagining of the sweltering heat, festering wounds and biting insects every day of every week these lost souls endured.

Only 80 miles of this rail line are usable today. Access to "Hellfire Pass," so named because much of the work in cutting this pass through the mountain was done under torch light at night, farther along but still well within Thai territory is possible via walking trails from nearby camp grounds and river hotels. When the properties themselves say that getting to them is "well worth the effort" it becomes clear that heat, bugs and bad memories keep all but the most intrepid tourists out of this part of the country.

If there were a way to expand the museum and de-commercialize what the bridge has become today the entire experience would have a stronger emotional impact. Today's bridge looks like any rail trestle one might find in the Southern United States with arched and squared supports over concrete stands holding an iron and steel rail bed. The exhibits around the eastern shore are placed for maximum information, aesthetics and commercial dining and shopping including ticket sales for a tourist train to trundle across the bridge, ride about 15 miles of rail on the other side and return. Spoon-fed tourists with cameras and misbehaving children gleefully riding the rails with little sense of place? I wasn't about to "honor" horrible suffering in such a Disney-fied fashion and abstained.

It was time to go home.

Gotta go.

Catching Kanchanaburi

This time it was on a bus. Once again in the wee hours of the morning I asked the reception desk how to get to ... and they pointed me this time in the direction of the main bus station for the city of Bangkok. Here is perhaps where my greatest moment of apprehension occurred: I'm in Southeast Asia relying on the honesty of a local cab driver to take me to a bus station that does not normally cater to western travelers which led me to believe that few if any signs would be in English nor would there necessarily be anyone on staff familiar with my language. Be that as it may, I said to me self, I was going to Kanchanaburi with no more thought about it. At least I wouldn't have to transfer on the way.

There were signs in English and the ticket attendant knew enough to get the foreigner, me, situated. Not knowing how or if services were announced or called for boarding I stood on the platform where my bus was supposed to be, ticket in hand like a two-year old and waited for the number on the bus to match the one on my ticket, boarding when everyone else did. Before long we were all bouncing along Highway #323 heading west out of the capital, across the first of many rivers and into the rice field and cow pasture countryside.

Towns and villages with colorful names like Tha Pha and Saen To rolled past the window with signs for active and ancient Buddhist temples running nearly as close together as mile markers under the rolling storm clouds threatening a deluge if I so much as dared to look at them. I just wanted not to sleep through my stop but I needn't have worried; Kanchanaburi rolled up soon enough and it was the turnaround point for the bus back to Bangkok. Did I mention that it was July, the height of the rainy season?

The Burma Railway is not infamous to many Americans as it is to the Dutch, British and Australians. This 260 mile line was to be the main supply route in to Burma from Japanese bases along the River Kwai during the Second World War but it first had to be built. Some 240,000 local workers and prisoners of war from Thailand, the Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong and Singapore were pressed in to service under vicious task masters in the thick of horrendous conditions through the jungle, mountains and rain forests near the river and, worst of all, through the high country between Thailand and Burma.

Bridge #277 as it was identified by the Japanese at the time is the "Bridge over the River Kwai," the most famous and easily accessed part of this link between Bangkok and Rangoon. Walking steadily towards this goal I chanced upon an unexpected yet compelling part of this history at the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery. Here almost 7,000 ANZAC, Canadian, British and Dutch men rest in peace. Anything from murder at the hands of their overlords to death from cholera, dysentery, starvation and sheer exhaustion felled these men, some in mass graves, some "Known unto God" and others like Private H. J. Lampard of the 2/29th Australian Infantry Battalion at least as young as 21 years of age.

Even more wrenching discoveries lay further up the road to the bridge.

Gotta go.

The Optimist Bucket List - Item 7

In all of my professional life I job changes have kept me hovering around only two weeks of vacation. Only once had I finally earned enough tenure to enjoy three weeks but now, after nearly a lifetime of pinching time here and there to stretch my leave over an entire year I now have four and that's not counting holidays. I know what I would gladly do with at least one of those weeks if ever the opportunity arose.

Simply put, Item 7 on my Bucket List would be to spend a week on board a U.S. aircraft carrier while on patrol. I used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area where "Fleet Week" is a wonderful chance to see some of our tax dollars in port if not necessarily in action. Great PR but to me not nearly the same. I've seen the movies, from "Midway" and "Final Countdown" to the documentaries on The Learning Channel and Discovery about life at sea in the largest of floating cities of 5,000 or more and would love to know up close what that is truly like.

I've been fascinated with aircraft carriers since the first time I saw the film "Tora Tora Tora" as a child in the third grade, not too long after my initial infatuation with airplanes. Airplanes actually on ships far out at sea? Far out! How cool would it be to see how the different colored uniforms fill specific roles in the action or to be in CIC, the Command Information Center, to watch how the entire battle group patrols, interacts and manages threats and handles daily routine?

One conversation with the father of the friend of mine led him to compliment my general knowledge of the American carrier force, being able to rattle off the names of every ship then in active service. I also had the opportunity to see the USS Carl Vinson up close not too long after its commissioning when it called in to Alameda while I was living in the Bay Area. Although tours on board were not permitted, impressive doesn't begin to describe the vessel as it lay quietly at anchor, disgorging the ship's company for some good ol' fashioned shore leave.

This has nothing to do with fulfilling a warmonger's fantasy in wanting to see navy fighters blast and destroy targets or be on the front lines of an actual engagement. I understand that there are days of sheer boredom in crossing great tracts of ocean but a week at sea watching what others consider routine and boring would be nothing short of once-in-a-lifetime thrilling for a civilian like me. What could be more emotionally charged than to sail in to port at Pearl Harbor and salute the U.S.S. Arizona with the entire crew on its way past?

Wanna know what would make it even better? Sailing on an aircraft carrier in one direction and returning to base on a submarine. Boomer or attack class, take your pick!

Gotta go!

Pearl Harbor and the Bottom Line

The same can be said in reverse; what is travel without history. Growing up in Europe both were very much a part of my early life and continue to be defining personal characteristics today. My family traveled constantly around the United States and across the Atlantic thanks to my father's career in the military. We lived in Germany, a nation saturated in castles, cathedrals and human catastrophe. On the first plane ride I can remember my mother and sisters traveled to Hawaii to visit my father on shore leave from Vietnam. I was five years old the first time I ever saw the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.

I've been back at least three times since then. Bottom line for me is, I can't pass up a chance to travel and I certainly can't pass up a chance to visit compelling history.

Today is December 7th, an ordinary Monday for much of the world yet only one calendar day removed from that infamous Sunday 68 years ago. Almost by tradition the event gets maybe 90 seconds of coverage on news networks at the end of a scheduled broadcast, maybe including an interview with a surviving veteran, a cook, a gunnie, signalman or some other average Joe just waking up to find the world as he knew it had changed forever.

In its day, December 7th was to the United States what September 11th is to contemporary culture, a brazen attack on American soil, early in the morning and when the country least expected it. No one believed it could happen, the country was safe across two oceans and secure behind a massive military arsenal that few antagonists in their right mind would provoke. War in 1941 may in fact have been imminent but it was never supposed to happen here.

Pearl Harbor is a working United States naval base but that is not what it's known for. It is the command center of the largest single military operation area of any navy in the entire world but that is not what it is known for. The name derives from its history as a center of pearl harvesting but that also is not what it is known for. The name is synonymous, nearly interchangeable with that of the U.S.S. Arizona still lying on the bottom of the harbor and straddled by the Arizona Memorial.

It is a stunningly beautiful place. Clear water laps gently at the shores and the sides of the ship while overhead maybe a few clouds provide contrast to the blue sky that never fails to draw the eye as visitors look to the heavens trying to imagine the air filled with shrieking bullets, whistling bombs and diving aircraft while concussion impacts and full on explosions wreak devastating havoc in every direction around the base. The complex today includes a documentary theater, a submarine museum and landscaped grounds with information pavilions as well as the ship itself. The lucky few will see an active ship returning to port, the entire ship's company standing in attention and saluting their 1100 fallen brethren still buried in the hulk of the Arizona 30 feet under water.

The truest, most haunting sight of all are without question the tear drops of oil still bubbling from the bunkers of the Arizona. The ship continues to "bleed" or "cry" today with several thousand tons of oil slowly seeping to the surface, stirring gut-wrenching emotions from visitors and hot debate from environmentalists worried about the damage to the harbor eco-system. Even on the sunniest, brightest day in memory, no one comes away untouched by their time at the Memorial.

Many do not see the point in taking vacation time in paradise to visit a national tragedy; why get all depressed when we're just here to have a good time, they ask? Some avoid Oahu all together, preferring the Eden-like environs of Kauai or Maui to the hustle of Honolulu. Certainly for those who have never been to Hawaii it is not the main selling point of the tourist boards. All of that is regrettably understandable.

I live in Dallas, a city still trying to come out from under the shadow of its most popular attraction, The School Book Depository from where Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy. All the same, I would no more visit Southfork Ranch and skip Dealey Plaza where the assassination took place than I would travel all the way to Hawaii just for the surf and sand. The last time I went a new addition was there to greet me: the U.S.S. Missouri moored just to the south of her older sister, protecting her. Where one ship started the war for the United States, the other ended the war for the world in Tokyo Bay.

Waikiki, nothing! It's a beach! The Arizona Memorial is history, and it's only at Pearl Harbor.

Gotta go!