Andersonville Revisited

No amount of historical markers can truly paint the picture of the horror that took place at Camp Sumter near Andersonville, Georgia. The Andersonville National Historic Site that I was visiting this day as part of a national tour around the country following the events of September 11, 2001 preserves an oxymoronic institution, a concentration camp in the United States of America. This is one of the largest and oldest in the country, operating from February of 1864 through to the end of the war in April of the following year. Both sides in the War Between The States were guilty of inhumane conditions as the war dragged on, certainly by the latter stages of the contest. Particularly in the south food and weapons for the front lines were hard to come by leaving even less for the care of POWs at places like Andersonville.

In a war no one expected to last all that long prison camps seemed initially to be an afterthought. Both sides figured they would fight a few skirmishes then life would get back to what each considered normal with everyone home in time for dinner. Didn't happen that way. And POW camps no one had a master plan for sprang up and, despite the best of intentions, broke down rapidly and appallingly. Early exchanges of prisoners fell apart over levels of authority and particularly over the status of Black soldiers, former slaves, that were captured in the south. It is not hard to imagine what the Confederacy wanted which in no way matched the Union desire to treat White and Black with no distinction. "Negros belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange," was General Lee's reply.

As bad as the outside forces were there was a unique troop at the camp known as the Andersonville Raiders. These were fellow inmates who bullied and killed other prisoners for the sake of food, tradable goods and other comforts before they were caught by an opposing group called "the Regulators" who sought justice such as it was available. Six of the Raiders were hanged for their crimes in a mock court of their peers while their captors looked on. Politics on both sides through intractable demands and poverty throughout the Confederacy combined to make conditions worse by the day and fueled a growing resentment up North towards the people of Dixie.

In a camp built for 10,000 there were three times that many enlisted men here after hardly eight months of operations. The cemetery to the north of the camp holds the remains of its victims, nearly 13,000 people, over 900 of those unknown. The six Raiders are here, too, though buried some distance away from the honorable dead. Of particular note to me are the markers of "USCT" troops buried here. "USCT" stands for United States Colored Trooper, a man on one side, returned property on the other. How they must have been treated by the guards.

Andersonville is yet another part of the Civil War that most in this country simply prefer to avoid discussing. The battlefields draw millions as do the museums but few travel to a place the combatants themselves located well off the beaten path even then. The history of the Civil War prison camp includes over 150 such camps, some probably worse than Andersonville, some with familiar names like Belle Isle in Richmond or Rock Island, Illinois, even Ft. McHenry in Baltimore, where Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner! Ft. Delaware, a union camp outside of Wilmington and Elmira, New York are both said to have rivaled Andersonville in nearly every respect except scale. Elmira charged 15-cent admission just to watch the prisoners mill around.

I joined the line of cars on I-75 north to Atlanta. Some of my fellow motorists might have been interested in the events that occurred less than 20 miles off the highway. Others roared past in a hurry no doubt to no place really that important. If asked they surely would have said "Such things simply could not have happened here."

Gotta go.

An American Concentration Camp

This man did not survive a concentration camp in Europe during World War 2. Andersonville is not even the first place that comes to mind when asked to name a concentration camp. The name alone is too Anglicized, most think, and certainly such a place could not have existed in the United States of America. Until the reality that it did exist in the U.S. sinks in the vast majority will insist on more well known places such as Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Treblinka and Sobibor. During the Second World War those camps and dozens of others like them were used to eliminate or at least imprison political opponents, ethnic minorities, gays and the Jewish people. Soldiers were killed or left to die on the battlefields of Europe or in death marches across Southeast Asia. In 19th Century America slaves died in the fields and on the run while soldiers died in battle or in places like Andersonville.

Andersonville did not have gas chambers but it was a "konzentrationslager" in just about every sense of the word and, along with its sister camps in both the North and the South during the Civil War, it operated on American shores. "Camp Sumter" as it was officially known was built east of Andersonville in February of 1864 and would receive roughly 45,000 Union prisoners. In 13 months of operation the heat, humidity, starvation, parasites and lack of sanitation and poor treatment at the hands of the guards and each other contributed to outbreaks of scurvy, exposure, dysentery, diarrhea and other diseases led to the deaths of nearly 13,000 of those soldiers.

The entire camp is hidden behind tall trees as I drive up through the main entrance off of Pecan Lane and Georgia Highway #49. A massive field is dotted with memorials and other markers from the different regiments of the various states whose men were imprisoned here. Tall ones, short ones, squat ones and simple ones lay strewn around the grounds almost haphazardly, representing Michigan, Massachusetts and Rhode Island to name a few.

The grounds within Prison Site Road that rings what was "Camp Sumter" near Andersonville, Georgia appear well cared for and neatly trimmed which of course is what entices tourist from all over the world to visit the place. At the same time it does little to evoke the true squalor and conditions of the place when it was in operation. Part of the 15-foot high wooden stockade fence has been restored as have a few of the prison tents half-buried in the ground for temperature control along with some office buildings from the time. The stream that served as both water supply and latrine babbles bucolically downhill towards the southeast, fresh clear water gurgling and bubbling through its roughly ten foot wide pathway. There is no stench of feces, urine and decay, no swarm of blue flies that rose in to the air like a waving curtain of misery. There wasn't even much in the way of heat in the air given that this was early December when I rode through.

Rest assured, however, the camp sits in what remains rural Georgia cotton country so humidity is never far away.

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.

Target Destroyed

I had just gotten home from work, put away some clean clothes and whipped up a quick roasted tomato-garlic pasta dish. Another day near an end as I cast around on the web for something I can read or watch while munching. Sometimes I can indulge a taste of the grotesque or at least unusual during dinner but decided I'd rather not worry about my constitution or moral compass this evening. I'd seen just about every documentary there was on lions, orcas and boa constrictors along with homemade videos of laughing babies, howling beagles and Honey-I'm-Home-From-The-War or Pregnant family surprises Looking around for something, anything old but new, something I at least hadn't seen in a while.

I have to admit I can whip up a fairly quick and tasty plate of pasta so there wasn't much time before dinner started to get cold and I would need that mental cool down from the office. Then it hit me: I'd spool up something from YouTube on Korean Air Lines Flight 007. Back when South Korea had only one international airline, back when long-range flights had to stop in Alaska to make it across the Pacific, back when Reagan was in the White House and the Cold War in full swing, #007 was the regular service between New York City and Seoul with a fuel stop in Anchorage.

The short version is this: a Boeing 747 with 269 passengers and crew on board flew a beeline directly to Seoul from Alaska over Siberia instead of a longer hook-route well to the south over Central Japan to avoid Soviet air space. The beeline route flew first over the Kamchatka Peninsula and then over southern tip of Sakhalin Island, a place few westerners had ever heard of before, alerting the Soviet Air Command to each intrusion. He-said/she-said later, after the second unauthorized incursion missiles were fired that destroyed the airplane and all on board, including 22 children.

The Soviets denied it, then blamed the US for provoking the whole thing as a way to test their defenses. The U.S, of course, went off and the world held its breath, horrified at the loss of life yet far more alarmed that this might be the last straw to a winner-take-all (or what might be left of the world) war between the two superpowers. The investigations that followed pointed to navigational errors (duh), conflicts between Korean top-down societal hierarchy versus cockpit check and balance procedures (did anyone question the captain when clearly someone should have) and the then-standard Western cries of Soviet paranoia and over-reaction. Even today the whole incident may be largely resolved yet still hotly debated concerning the overriding contributing factor(s).

The biggest results from this aerial Titanic? Certain air routes through this part of Siberia are now authorized while Reagan himself ordered the release of then-classified GPS technology to the private sector specifically so mistakes like Korean Air-007 would not happen again. As for the incident itself it is, sadly, largely forgotten save for the families of the victims, aviation aficionados and government watchdogs.

And it all happened on September 1st, 27 years ago today. May they rest in peace.

Gotta go.

The Peace Museum of Hiroshima

Honestly, if walking through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is particularly disturbing then you will not be ready for the actual Peace Museum just to the south. You've come this far, however, so go all the way but steel yourself well before going inside.

The museum, a flat slab of a building suspended two stories above a huge expanse of undeveloped land is where artifacts and recreations from the first atomic bomb attack are kept along with models of the city before and after the attack. I don't know if this was the intent but the barren expanse to me evoked what it looked like after the attack, pebbled rubble and pulverized stone. Where the grounds were barren, after paying a nominal entrance fee and heading up to the exhibit level was going in to the throat of hell itself.

Decorum and sheer awe prevented all but the most desensitized individuals from taking pictures of every little thing on display. There were two three-dimensional recreations of the city at the time, the "Before" and the "After." Where the "Before" showed a densely built and thickly populated metropolis like any other would be in the country, the "After" grabs the throat and tightens its grip with each second of staring. The first thought in my mind was to get oriented to where I was standing in relation to the map, to find the "T-Bridge" that was the target of the bomb.

That was easy, really, since it was right under the huge red ball suspended in the air above the city, the relative position of the bomb when it exploded. Maybe a dozen large structures are seen at ground level, the only ones to survive the blast. All else is a street grid of incineration in every direction. Eighty thousand died instantly and nearly double that over the course of time from the direct after effects. Things were only just beginning.

Brooding darkly in a corner and above the visitors is a full scale replica of "Little Boy," the atomic bomb delivered by the B-29 "Enola Gay" that fateful morning. It is primitive compared to the sleek, needle nosed warheads of today, looking as if Lego had designed a kit for a six year old but without a doubt the most sinister thing in the room. The next few exhibits depicted the results of "the little gadget."

One was a set of concrete steps that flashed white from the blast. In the center of the top step was the shadowed outline of a human bottom, marking the spot where a woman sat waiting to hear from her daughter when the bomb went off and incinerating her. A display case contained a wrist watch with the hands frozen at 8:15AM, the moment the bomb exploded over the city. Near to that some glass panels that did not shattered were nonetheless covered with long, thin vertical streaks of what looked like black soot.

It was rain. "Black rain" created from the pressure effects of the mushroom cloud over the city that included rain water and the soot and ash from the destruction sucked up in to the boiling cloud. Even with that it was hard to tell if the photos or the recreated models were the worse to look at. One famous photo shows the back of a women with the pattern of her dressed burned in to her flesh. A model showed a young mother with children walking the streets, hair off to one side, flesh melting off her forearm and fingers in droplets on to the ground beneath her exposed feet.

They had no idea what was coming or what had hit them. Winds up to 1000 miles per hour were recorded along with a blast temperature exceeding one million degrees Celsius. Communications to Tokyo were cut, what help was available was slow in coming. Leukemia slowly killed thousands of survivors over the years after while physical disfigurement and emotional scars took care of the rest.

I will not use this forum to debate whether Hiroshima or Nagasaki should have been attacked in such fashion. I will say that it is impossible to come away from such images of destruction and not ask why it had to happen in the first place.

No man or country is weak for wanting peace. Neither are they absolved if they have engaged in wrong-doing.

Gotta go.

The Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park

This part of Hiroshima was once where the upper class lived. It was the center of a thriving city at the northeastern headwaters of the Inland "Seto" Sea; everybody who was or wanted to be anybody in pre-war Hiroshima society lived, worked and shopped here. To most of Western Civilization Hiroshima did not even exist before that fateful day in August of 1945. It's been around since the late 1500s, first as the stronghold of a regional warlord who built for himself the Hiroshima Castle at the center of town. After the Shogun and Imperial periods and the switch to heavy industry, Hiroshima found itself to be a densely packed and buzzing urban metropolis of roughly 350,000 people.

I stepped off the T-Bridge crossing the Ota River and on to the first contemporary "Ground Zero," an island at the Ota River Delta with the Inland Sea just to the south. The clang of the streetcars behind me seemed to dim by half while the birds themselves hushed in favor of a slight breeze whistling through the trees around me. As any tourist would I looked up in to the blue sky above and tried to imagine what a resident might have thought had they seen the formation of three B-29s high overhead with no fighter escort and, more ominously, no fighter protection racing to meet them. Few in the immediate area lived to describe the sound of the explosion some 1500 feet above at 8:15am so for me, the dead calm teleported the senses to that morning of August 6th.

It would have been rush hour; crowded streets, clanging trolleys, lots of bicycles; few cars since by then what little oil made it to Japan was largely reserved for defense and government ministries. It would have been hot and sticky as any Japanese late summer day would be. It was definitely crowded as people started their day weaving in and around each other and through the city itself, some 90% of which was made of wood.

Hiroshima was first on the list as an alternate in part because the weather was supposed to be perfect for "delivering the device." The intended target city was Kyoto but heated debate in the U.S. government saved the cultural capital of the country. Despite a leaflet and broadcast campaign prior to the attack the people of Hiroshima never knew what was coming. Other Japanese cities were bombed with regularity; Hiroshima was to be left untouched, the better to measure the effects of the bomb.

As I walked through the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park, fashioned from the wasteland created by the attack, new grass, young trees and landscaped grounds were on all sides.

In nearly every nook, crook and cranny was a memorial. This one was for the minority Koreans who would have lived had their country not been brutally colonized and cheap labor imported for menial work on the Japanese home islands. Another one, the center of great ceremony every August, is the Memorial Cenotaph which contains the names of all identified victims of the attack. A mound nearby contains their collected ashes, all 70,000 of them. That one over there, at the entrance to the park, featured a "Peace Bell" which visitors are encouraged to ring with feeling for an end to all wars. The "Industrial Promotion Hall" is across the river but it is easily still the centerpiece of the park, it's skeletal dome still standing and looking as it did the day of the attack.

While the "A-Bomb Dome" draws the tourists in, the Children's Peace Memorial leaves one and all flat cold. Sadako Sasaki contracted leukemia as an after effect of the bomb. Swearing she could beat the disease through faith and hard work, she pledged to fashion 1,000 paper cranes by hand in offering to the gods who would grant her wish to be cured.

The story goes that she only made it to Number 644 and thus inspired all Japanese children since to make paper cranes in her honor and place them at the memorial in Hiroshima. This memorial is never without small children visiting and paper cranes laid all around.

Little Sadako is at the top, her arms flung wide as if launching the crane above her to the heavens.

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.

Seeing Berlin

Say "Berlin" in a crowded room and most people, depending on their age, will conjure images of the Berlin Airlift, JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, the Berlin Wall or the gutted devastation following the Soviet capture of the city in April of 1945. Today people might speak of a plastic metropolis completely rebuilt for at least the third time since the war to rid itself of Socialist and then Soviet architecture, a contemporary city refusing to age gracefully and desperately trying to expunge the pain of its past through one too many facelifts.

This was not the city that I saw one Summer Saturday. Starting on the western most edge of my "tour zone" I went first to the Charlottenburg Palace, a major residence for the Hohenzollern Family but I wasn't there to see them. At the time of my visit the Egyptian Museum at Charlottenburg was home to the most famous bust in the world, that of Queen Nefertiti. This is the kind of iconic beauty that keeps the cosmetics industry fat with profits and women the world over vainly engaged in any effort to come anything close to similar. The amazement for me was in discovering that the bust is incomplete. The left eye is missing while both ears have been damaged but it takes nothing away from a masterpiece of art that may have been used for little more than a clothing dummy.

Strolling through the Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate did give me a sense of the military history along the street that would become "Unter Den Linden" on the East side, helped along by the Soviet War Memorial off my left shoulder. The seat of government has returned to the Reich-, now "Bundestag" lovingly restored but again I was on to other things: the "Museum Island" in the middle of the Spree River. On this concentrated plot are housed the Old Museum, the New Museum where Nefertiti and the Egyptian collection are housed today, the National Gallery, the Bode and, target of the day, the Pergamon Museum, also known as the Museum of Islamic Art.

Most will call it cultural theft but with the state of things in Iraq and Iran today between the British Museum, the Louvre and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin much Persian culture, art and architecture is preserved and available to the Western world today. Pergamon itself is an ancient city on the western shores of Turkey but the signature attraction is the Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon. "Breathtaking" is only a cliché until the gate actually appears incomprehensibly beautiful before the eyes. Imagine the grandest doorway to the most imposing wall of the grandest city ever built in the fertile crescent, multiply that by a factor of ten and keep going. All that is left of that magnificent city is this gate, leaving one and all to wonder what Babylon itself must have been like, hanging gardens and all.

Checkpoint Charlie is almost not even worth the time to get there since the wall is gone. All one finds today are souvenir hawks selling bits of concrete with graffiti painted on one side making loud offers to buy a piece of the wall. I had one more compelling stop to make before catching my Lufthansa flight out of town and it was not Hitler's Bunker which today is nothing more than a historical marker at the edge of a parking lot.

The "KuDamm" is the massive boulevard through the heart of town that is the very life of the club and underground scene. Lined with shops, restaurants and clubs catering to every above and below the belt taste, this is the Champs Elysees of the city, ripe for people watching and rife with equally high prices and opportunists. There was a street band playing a tight set of instrumental R&B with several members playing drums in sync to set the entire block foot tapping away. Berlin was alive on the KuDamm with the joy of a cool Saturday in July.

Despite being at the center of a major traffic plaza, everything from bands and bars to birds went ghostly quiet upon sighting the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedaechtniskirche (Memorial Church). Constructed from 1891 to 1895 and designed to hold over 2,000 people, British bombing raids in 1943 reduced it to ruins. When plans for a new building were announced shortly after the war the people of the city campaigned to keep the "Hole in the Tooth" as they called the gutted shell as a reminder, if you will, of when God abandoned the Fatherland.

Since the wall came down Berlin competes with Munich for the honor of being party central in Germany and with good reason. Since that wall came down it is clear the people of Berlin have yet to really stop celebrating.

Having grown up in divided Germany in the 70s my one regret is not having been there the day it fell.

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!

A Bad Way to Learn Geography

It was 7:30am and the alarm clock radio went off, nothing new. Like many I lay in bed waiting for a decent song to come on and help me kick start another day at the office working at United Airlines “World Headquarters” in suburban Chicago.

September 11, 2001 wasn’t supposed to be anything special beyond a typical Tuesday. I used to always say Tuesdays were the one day of the week that I could do without. There was nothing special about Tuesdays. Monday started the week, Wednesday was Hump Day, Thursday started the anticipation for the weekend and the eagle flew on Friday. Tuesdays were just…there.

By 8AM I was telling myself the first crash in to the World Trade Center in New York was either an unfortunate heart attack on approach to Newark or some student pilot with particularly bad luck. By 8:03AM I knew two heart attacks on the same day in the same place was not likely. Racing to work, the scene at the office was all the five stages of the Kubler-Ross grief model in full force and then some: anger, denial, depression, bargaining, acceptance, confusion, crying and crowded conference rooms, every TV and monitor tuned to any news source worth watching. And this was the Cargo Division.

My mother reminded me of having called her and asking if she had turned on the television yet. She hadn't but quickly spread the word around the family to tune in. Just in time to see the 2nd plane fly in to the South Tower.

"What the hell is going on here?!" I have shouted to myself, fear and anger rising in equal measure as news of the Pentagon attack began filtering in. I viscerally felt that either they had missed the Capitol building or the White House or that one of them was next in line. Shanksville, Pennsylvania got that one instead, after the passengers fought the hijackers on the fourth and final flight that day.

Stories of sheer chaos and panic in the streets began to fly. The tallest office towers in the smallest cities from Wausau to Wichita were evacuated. Cell signals and rental cars were virtually non-existent. Across the land the sight and sound of arriving and departing aircraft was replaced with the kind of stillness only the early settlers themselves may have once heard.

Flights inbound from Europe and Asia were stopped short in Canada or turned back. Those of us in the business old enough to remember Gander, Newfoundland as a regular stop along the way mentally knew where some of the planes were but even the hard-nosed veterans were stumped with some of the places stranded flights were calling in from.

“What? A 747? You're where? Where the heck is Yellowknife?!”
“Do we even fly there?”
“Does ANYBODY fly there?”
"How did he get in there?"
“How are we going to get the damned thing out?”

Think of a 5lb. bag of rice exploding all over the counter and you have to account for and recover each multi-million dollar grain in that bag. Airline operations centers around the world launched “disaster recovery plans” as they wrestled with how to reset the system from a “not-in-a-million-years” catastrophe featuring thousands of planes grounded at the first available foreign or domestic runway long enough to handle them.

None of it seemed to matter when the first tower fell.

I remember being in New York not two years earlier taking a visiting friend from New Zealand on a tour of the city. We had stopped directly under the South Tower where I explained the first attack in 1993.

“Try to imagine something that big coming down.” The impact on my New Zealand friend was, to say the least, profound. Then the other tower fell.

At the time United Airlines was the premier US carrier, highly ranked and respected around the world for its service, savvy and strength. In less than an hour this major corporation was reduced to a catatonic, nonsense-gibbering, pupil-dilated shell of itself from which it and so many individual lives still have yet to fully recover.

“Where are you?” is the typical opener to any conversation between airline employees and their loved ones. Through work or simply “just because,” someone is on a plane, out of town or out of the country. Those of us that could went home early to find out.

Who could work? Moreover, what was the point? Every project, plan, profit and price was suddenly, instantly way off target. No one said anything if anyone, and most of us did, were to leave by early afternoon. In the airline game especially there was literally nothing to do except go home and light up the phones.

Following the attack articles would appear about high-flying, six-figure executives accepting $9/hour jobs at the butcher’s counter of the local grocer to try and keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. Other stories emerged of people rediscovering the true meaning of life away from the rat race by opening their own small businesses, serving humanitarian causes and remembering the reason why they started families in the first place by deciding at least one parent should stay home with their suddenly much older but still young enough children.

I was a young manager finally on the up, high profile projects, far flung appointments, international contacts and a sense of place and purpose. For seven years after the furlough I drifted, trying my hand at substitute teacher, a disastrous turn at retail, even all the way back to airport baggage handler in Baltimore where I’d moved to be around family and sift through the ashes.

I never use the phrase “My life was over” regarding September 11th because I am still here to reflect upon it and mourn those souls who did live their last that horrible morning. All the same I am only now just starting to feel that I am nearly back to the life I had eight years ago. I will always carry a torch for that day, that life and those lives, however, so long as I live.

May they all rest in peace.

Gotta go.

The Optimist Bucket List - Item 2

In the first installment of my own personal “Bucket List” I mentioned the desire to travel with the presidential entourage on Air Force One. Also, that in creating this list of ten achievements I devised a validity test of at least three of five attributes that each quest must satisfy. In the second of the ten items on my list I would like to witness the discovery of the "Kido Butai," the Japanese fighting force of six aircraft carriers of the "Combined Fleet" that attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941.

The story of Pearl Harbor and the outcome of the Second World War has been told and in many ways is still unfolding. The hole left in this story, however, is why no effort has been made to find these historical vessels. Their combined and individual exploits under the Imperial Chrysanthemum shown above have likewise been well documented; what is not documented is exactly where each vessel rests.

Why not?

A National Geographic documentary highlighting the discovery of the USS "Yorktown" included two Japanese survivors of the Battle of Midway who were on board in case “Kaga,” their home carrier was also discovered. I remember most chillingly from the video that a 30,000 ton aircraft carrier would look like a single grain of rice on the radar screen from three miles down! "Kaga" was not found but the emotions felt by these gentlemen once again sailing on the waters of battle were palpable.

It occurred to me from this documentary and also thru time spent in Japan that this is a people deeply in touch with their ancestors and strongly desirous in seeking to ensure those forebears are able to rest peacefully. Four of the six were infamously lost in one day while the last was sunk nearly a year before the final end of the war.

"Akagi," lost at the Battle of Midway by dive bombers, June 4, 1942. 267 men lost
"Kaga," lost at the Battle of Midway by dive bombers, June 4, 1942. 811 men lost.
"Soryu," lost at the Battle of Midway by dive bombers, June 4, 1942. 711 men lost.
"Hiryu," lost at the Battle of Midway by dive bombers, June 4, 1942. 392 men lost.
"Shokaku," lost at the Battle of the Philippine Sea by submarine attack, June 19, 1944. 1, 272 men lost.
"Zuikaku," lost at the Battle of Cape Enganao by torpedoes and bombs, October 25, 1944. 843 men lost.

The "Titanic," "Bismarck" and "Yorktown" were each found and by the same man leading the way, Dr. Robert Ballard. Surely the families of nearly 4,300 men deserve similar closure over 65 years later?

Gotta go.

Why The Red Snow

"Why?" It was a simple question, yes, but one from a place of incomprehension rather than of curiosity. A co-worker wanted to know what could possibly be of such interest as to use valuable vacation days in going to Auschwitz. And in February, no less. Time off was not to be “wasted” (her word) visiting a WW-II concentration camp.

Auschwitz compels. It demands attention as if witnessing a horrific tragedy in real time. Time away from the daily grind relaxing is good, of course but I wanted to see the camp at its worst, to reaffirm the value of life in as fulfilling a way as any sun-drenched vacation is regenerating.

It was cold the day we toured two of the three main camps, the original Auschwitz and the larger Birkenau barely a mile to the west and made famous in such films as “Schindler’s List” and “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.” The sun shone brightly, however, here in southern Poland, not far from the Czech and Slovakian borders. The sharp winter air seemed quite still as if afraid to stir up harsh memories and scattered ashes.

Easily the most sinister building on Earth stood before us, its central train access port yawning wide as if it were the very mouth of Hell. Inside, where Auschwitz was largely intact the Birkenau camp was indeed stripped of the majority of its buildings. A few bunkhouses remained while the four crematoriums were mere piles of rubble, left as they were the day the camp was abandoned.

The affect was stupefying. Slack-jawed at the expansive visage of a partially destroyed camp the mind begs to know what it was like in full operation. Vintage, grainy black and white photos only imply the true scale of horrors when viewed and imagined in living color. Chilly winds whistled through the rickety barracks and also the barbed wire still surrounding the grounds. The cold concrete of the train platform and the tracks themselves echoed in our steps the cries of the victims gone before while the watchtowers leaned menacingly inward, still daring one and all to put a single toe out of line.

Nine days before the Soviet Army arrived in the area the camp was evacuated in January of 1945 and attempts made to destroy the evidence. Some 60,000 prisoners were forcibly marched 35 miles in mid-Winter at least partly along what is today Route #933 to Wodzislaw Slaski (Loslau), there to be boarded on trains to other camps. In three days roughly 15,000 died on the way from abuse, exhaustion, exposure, murder and starvation, blood marking the death of those eliminated for being unable to keep pace, their essence absorbed into the snowy winter soil.

A satellite image of Oswiecim today shows an unnatural square, a symmetrical scar between the villages of Plawy and Brzezinka, the original Polish for “Birkenau.” If viewed in "Map" mode a single railhead peels off to the west jus above Plawy from the main line, as if serving no purpose but in actuality the end of the line like no other on Earth. It marks the failure to obscure the truth as indelibly as the atrocities here and elsewhere are etched in memory. And it begs the question: What path will others walk? I know what I have gained.

I have sacrificed a few days in the sun to be touched by the souls of the blood red snow.

Gotta go.