Julia and me in front of the former Canaris home. Like the touch of the Porsche and BMW.
Admiral Canaris, his wife, and two daughters had lived at Waldsangerpfad 17, also in Zehlendorf and southwest of the center of Berlin. (UPDATE: A little more research reveals that the address of the house when the Canarises lived there was Betazeile 17.)
By the time my parents lived in the house — beginning November 1945, six months after the end of the war — no one from the Canaris family lived there. Based on mounting evidence that he had been working against Hitler, Wilhelm Canaris had been dismissed and the Abwehr disestablished in early 1944. After Canaris’s personal diary, containing additional evidence of his opposition, was presented to Hitler, Canaris was arrested, convicted by an SS summary court, and sentenced to death. He was executed on 9 April 1945.
While my parents lived in the house, my mother became pregnant with me. This is a picture of my mother, in spring 1946, sitting on a cot out on the second-floor rear deck of the house. She told me later that she was suffering from morning sickness at the time. Sure looks it.
On 14 June 2019, Julia and I joined members of the extended Canaris family on a visit to the Canaris home. The neighborhood is quite nice, featuring generally large homes, expansive yards, and cobbled roads. (I’m not sure I’d enjoy driving on the cobbled surfaces, but they lend a certain style and do tend to slow drivers down.)
(Julia and Sam had previously visited the house in December 2017, when they went to Paris and Berlin for their honeymoon. She had tracked it down using WWII-era photos as reference.)
Isabel had made arrangements beforehand, of course, with the current occupants of the house, who were very gracious in inviting us onto the grounds. We spent 15-20 minutes in the back yard, which contained wonderful plants and landscaping. I believe the current owners learned about the home’s history only a short time before the visit (it was 72+ years ago) and of its importance to me personally only during our visit.
We were met at Tegel Airport at about 10:30 am June 13 by Isabel Traenckner-Probst and her daughter, Eva. As we emerged from customs, we saw two tall women waving balloons and heard them yell our names.
Isabel drove us to the hotel she had so kindly arranged for us, but our rooms were not ready and would not be for several hours. Recognizing we had taken a redeye, Isabel, again kindly, made her home available to us for naps. Isabel and her family, also including husband, Reiner, and son, Lars, live in one of what the locals call “American homes,” apartments originally built to house American service members and their families.
(Isabel is a great-great-grandniece of Wilhelm Canaris, German admiral and head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency, and she was our principal contact with the extended family. [More about the Admiral later.] My parents had lived in the Canaris house 1945-46, returned to the U.S. with two of his personal photo albums, and we were in Berlin to mark the return of those albums and other material to the Canaris family.)
After we grabbed a few hours sleep, Isabel drove us to the Hotel Haus Leopold, a favorite of her and her family, located in an upscale neighborhood of Berlin, Zehlendorf.
We came to realize that Zehlendorf was the area where my parents were married in November 1945, and where they lived after that. Most American forces lived and worked in this section of Berlin during the occupation and for many years thereafter.
That evening, we met other members of the Canaris family at a reception held at Chalet Suisse, located in a forest setting, Grunevald, in Zehlendorf. Below are scenes from Chalet Suisse.
I was surprised to learn that there were several members of the family meeting each other for the first time. Then again, as I learned more, it was not so surprising. The Canarises, while well-established in the first half of the 20th century and before, had been very much disrupted by the war and different elements of the family dispersed near its end and afterward to other parts of Europe and beyond. Many had traveled far for this night and they had a lot of catching up to do.
Isabel was also trying to develop a family tree and had brought her intial draft, sketched out on attached sheets of paper perhaps 5 ft X 12 ft in size. Family members added to the names listed there. At one point, Isabel apologized to Julia and me for everyone speaking in German. I said, “No need to speak English.” And a young woman, who was writing on the family tree, looked over at me and, with a smile, said “But we all could.”
Reiner and Isabel lay out family tree.
At dinner, I sat alongside my first personal contact with the Canaris family, Patricia Highfill, another great-great-grandniece. (Her picture appeared in the Christmas letter post, as I had delivered the albums and other material to her in the fall at her home in Palm Desert, Calif. She then brought them to her family’s home in Switzerland and they were conveyed to Berlin.) She urged me to try a meal with one of her favorites, rösti. I would describe rösti as high-end “hash browns.” When Julia told Eva our version of “rösti” was a popular breakfast side in the U.S., she was surprised.
I also met at dinner Michael Günther, a TV documentary producer, who is heading up production of a documentary on Admiral Canaris. Julia and I would become friends with Michael and his wife, Cornelia (Connie). More on them later, too.
Back to the hotel around 11, we rested for a big day ahead.
As stated in the 2018 Christmas post, daughter Julia and I planned to visit Berlin this year. Last month, I and Julia traveled separately to Boston, arriving on June 11, and then jointly the next day to Berlin on Aer Lingus, arriving on June 13.
It was the first time I had flown on Aer Lingus since 1972. Back then, the flight– Boston-Heathrow, England — was on a Boeing 747, I believe. This time — Boston-Dublin — it was an Airbus 330. Very nice. Seating was 2-4-2, so Julia and I had a pair of seats adjacent to a window.
The entertainment interface was more advanced than that on my usual airline, JetBlue.
The maps showing progress of the flight were particularly impressive. Here’s a collection of those:
More surprising, based on my U.S. flying experiences, we were offered meals. Options were “beef stew” and pasta. I mean, come on, we were on an Irish airline. Beef stew, please.
The flight took only five hours, give or take a few minutes. We left at 6 pm and were flying toward nightfall. By the time we landed in Dublin, five timezones ahead, it was morning again.
Waiting in Dublin for our connecting flight to Berlin, I was quite disappointed in the beer selection. Being early morning, I wasn’t planning to get one, but still . . . .
Dublin was overcast and cool.
In Dublin, Julia approaches our connecting flight to Berlin.
Our plane to Berlin was an Airbus 320, with no entertainment options. There was another meal, though. By the time the flight attendants got to us, they had run out of “Irish breakfast,” so Julia’s second choice was a scone with jam and tea.
Here’s Julia’s time-lapse of our descent into Berlin’s Tegel Airport.
The Farmers Insurance Open this year at Torrey Pines Golf Course, La Jolla, featured its best field (19 of the top 30 in FedEx standings), the 2019 debut of Tiger Woods on the tour, and what one TV commentator called “spectacular weather.” I concur. Best weather throughout the tournament in the seven years I’ve been a marshal.
Leader and eventual winner Justin Rose on the tee of 9 South, with a schematic of the hole at right.
This year’s tournament didn’t have the excitement of the extended playoff last year. World #1 Justin Rose took the lead in the second round and came to the final hole with a two-shot advantage over Adam Scott. Each birdied the hole, so Rose won by two. His total of 267, 21 under par, was a tournament record. Rains the previous week made the rough very thick, but also made the greens somewhat soft and better able to hold an approach shot.
Tiger on the fairway, 9 South
Tiger was back at Torrey, where he has won various tournaments nine times, for a second year following an absence of a few years. Crowds following him were the largest Thursday-Saturday and, if smaller than that with the leaders on Sunday, not by much. He saved his best for the final round, shooting five birdies for a score of 67. Overall, he finished 11 shots behind Rose, tied for 20th.
Screenshot from a video broadcast by CBS showing a surfer, with La Jolla in the background.
With high temperatures around 70 and bright sunshine throughout, the telecast of the tournament was also an advertisement for San Diego. In addition to the visuals provided by the Goodyear Blimp, CBS added video snippets of local scenes and announcer Jim Nantz piled on with praise for the region. On the first of my three seemingly interminable drives back from La Jolla to Fallbrook during rush hour (Wednesday), Nantz was interviewed on a local sports talk show and he basically said then that he was going to talk a lot about how much he liked San Diego.
Aerial view of the North Course, top, and some of South, below. Nine South is at lower right.
Wednesday is the pro-am tournament and it is essentially the toughest single day of the year for me. This year, I was there from pre-dawn to post-sunset and, to do that from 40 miles away on a weekday, meant I left at 4:45 am and got home after 7 pm. At the course, I met the 14 marshals, both returning and new, assigned to 9 South, and assigned them positions for the day.
Nine South, which plays 608-615 yards depending on where they place the tee markers, is a gentle monster. For professional golfers, especially, it’s a gentle par five. In terms of average score, players hit under par and on that basis it’s one of the easiest holes on the course. For a hole captain walking up and down the 600 yards, checking in with marshals assigned to the elevated tee area, the first landing area, second landing area, and the green, it’s a monster.
According to the Health app on my iPhone, I walked 6.7 miles, taking 17,258 steps and climbing 15 floors, last Wednesday. The mileage total meant I had walked the equivalence of the length of the hole about 20 times. Over the other four days, I spent less time moving about. It was better for me to assist at the first landing area, where maybe two dozen golfers hit drives over a fence into a concession area. When that happened, we had to move people away from the ball or the point at which it had crossed over the fence to permit the golfer to hit, usually after a free drop.
My walking distances for Thursday-Sunday were between 2.8 and 3.4 miles. Totals for the five days were 19.4 miles walked, taking 49,767 steps and climbing 46 floors. I also estimate that of the approximately 40 hours I spent on the course over the five days, I stood or walked for perhaps a total of 39 of them. Times to sit were very brief. When I got home each night, I was tired.
On the final round, 9 South featured what some called the shot of the day. Hideki Matsuyama hit his drive into a sand trap on the right. His ball was about 280 yards short of the green. As he lined up to hit, TV commentator Sir Nick Faldo advised viewers, “Don’t try this at home!”
Matsuyama’s three-wood shot out of the sand landed on the green, less than 20 feet from the hole. He missed the eagle putt, but made his birdie easily.
All the images here were captured off telecasts. While spectators can take photos with phones, not cameras, during the tournament, marshals cannot, or at least are not supposed to.
I had recorded the telecasts of the tournament and went through them Monday and Tuesday to see if any of my marshals could be seen. There were a few, so I took screenshots and sent copies to them. I also looked for myself. And the picture here was the closest I found. (My uniform is predetermined: black pants, provided polo, wide-brim hat, white [only white] lower sleeves.) Last year was even worse, as I only appeared in a shot from the blimp. Only I would have known I was in it, just like this year. Nothing since has quite matched what happened in my second tournament (2014), which you can see below.
Middle photo shows Alice, Winter, Adeline, and Meredith on Oceanside Pier. Outside photos, clockwise from lower left: Julia, Sam, and Juno; Golden Eagle me; Dillon and Baxter.
It was a year without the “excitement” of evacuation due to wildfire :), but a year not without moment. Perhaps most noteworthy was the 50th anniversary of our graduation from Boston College. I’m a Golden Eagle!
While our class reunion was at the beginning of June, I had spent the previous 10 months or so working on a blog about our years in college and those tumultuous days. In doing ProudRefrain.org, I renewed friendships with some classmates and made new ones. I had a great time at the reunion and enjoyed so many wonderful moments with friends, old and new.
It was also the occasion for another personal appearance on Twitter (my first is shown a little later in the post). BC used me and my BC bowtie in a tweet about reunion.
As part of our Golden Eagle year, I made three trips to campus during the year, instead of the usual single annual sojourn. First was a “Winter Weekend,” when I joined the Sutherland Road gang (close classmates) for four BC men’s and women’s basketball and hockey games, all on the same weekend.
During that weekend, we squeezed in a brief meeting with new BC athletic director Martin Jarmond, who liked my retro Eagles jacket and tweeted a photo of us and it.
After the June reunion, the Andersons (Meredith, Winter, Adeline, and Alice) picked me up and we journeyed down to Martha’s Vineyard to visit sister/aunty Ann and Gordon. After too brief a visit, the Andersons brought me to West Yarmouth on the Cape, where I joined the gang of classmates for several days in a wonderful seaside “cottage.”
My final “East Coast” fling was in October, to watch the Eagles beat Miami and visit friends and family, including Julia and Sam in their new home.
Because of the truncated note last year, I wasn’t able to give the attention I would have liked to the December 1, 2017, marriage of Julia and Sam and their honeymoon later that month in Paris and Berlin. This summer, they moved from Athens, Ohio, to Columbus, where Julia works at Defense Finance and Accounting Services, the people who send me my Navy retirement check!
Meredith and Winter and the grandgirls came out at the end of February for a week or so. Did Disneyland/California Adventure again. Adeline turns 7 in January and is in first grade. Alice is 3 1/2. This is a very recent pic.
Dillon also changed jobs, moving from event coordinator for Deepak Chopra to grants administrator at Scripps Research Institute. He works right across the street from Torrey Pines Golf Course, where I marshal at the Farmers Insurance Open. At the 2018 tournament, I was captain at a new hole — the 9th on the South Course. 601 yards. I definitely pile up the steps over those five days. I’ll be there again in January.
This year was also special for a very unusual reason. My parents married in Berlin in November 1945 and were billeted in the former home of Wilhelm Canaris, Navy admiral and head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence operation. They came home with personal photo albums of Canaris and other personal items. After my mother died in 2001 and I came into possession of these materials, I tried to find out how they might be returned to where and whom they belonged. I kept hitting dead ends. Then Julia, who had been sleuthing online, recently sent me an item about a German woman seeking information about her great-great-uncle, Wilhelm Canaris.
Long story short, I was able to contact Isabel Traenckner-Probst. She has been working with a German professor who is preparing a book and documentary about Canaris, particularly his efforts opposing Hitler. The photo below shows me holding one of the albums, with Patricia Highfill, another great-great-niece of Canaris, who lives in Palm Desert, Calif. (Convenient!) Patricia will convey the materials to Isabel early next year. And Julia and I will be traveling to Berlin next June to participate in ceremonies tied to the historical projects and celebrating the return of these materials. We also plan a side-trip to our ancestral land (in addition to Ireland) — Lithuania.
Finally, I’m doing another blog. (But of course!) BlueandGold1968-71.org is about my 1,035 days on active duty in the Navy 50 years ago. I’ve reached out to fellow members of my platoon at Naval Officer Candidate School and we have found and contacted more than half of them so far. Next year, the blog will focus on the ship on which I served, USS Biddle (DLG-34), and our deployment to the Western Pacific, i.e., the Gulf of Tonkin.
Wishing you a very merry Christmas and that your twenty-nineteen is pristine.
I lived in New Hampshire at the time and was at Greeley Park in Nashua, N.H., on September 27, 1999, when John McCain formally announced his candidacy for the Presidency . . . the first time. It was supposed to have happened earlier, in the spring. In March, however, the Kosovo War broke out and, while he issued a simple statement then that he was a candidate, he postponed the “roadshow.”
In one respect, at least, the schedule change worked out. His memoir, Faith of My Fathers, was published in August and it’s best-seller status gave an impetus and brought a strong message to the start of the campaign. After Sen. Warren Rudman (N.H.) read a brief passage from the book when he introduced McCain to the crowd, McCain thanked Rudman and then added, “You can still buy the book.”
Cindy McCain brushes some New Hampshire dust off the Senator as he awaits to talk.
Here is a video of the event (16:07)
I edited out many of the many applause sections. This was his crowd, so applause, approval, respect were extensive. Even had the University of New Hampshire cheerleaders on his side.
His talk summed up much of the philosophical underpinnings of his campaign. I edited out much of the specific policy commitments. It seems he was prescient, at least a little, talking about the need to change the scale of division and cynicism among Americans. At around the 12:10 mark, he says, in the context of protectionism and isolationism,, at least, “Walls are for cowards.”
He also speaks about how he intended to campaign respecting the dignity of the office he sought and of the people whom he would serve.
It is also a bit eerie, hearing it now, how often he makes reference to “when my time is over” and such as the speech concludes. And, also, that the first burst of song at the speech’s conclusion is the recitation of “Freedom, freedom, freedom” by Aretha Franklin.
Being the start of a Presidential campaign, the McCain family was there. Well, at least his wife, Cindy, and the children they had and had adopted. (He had adopted his first wife’s two children and they had a third, born in 1966.)
Meghan, John IV, and Jimmy McCain
Children present were: Meghan, then just about to turn 15; John Sidney McCain IV, 13; Jimmy, 11; and Bridget, adopted from a Bangladesh orphanage at the age of three months, 8. Meghan’s the most well-known, of course, as a co-host of The View. John graduated from the Naval Academy and is a helicopter pilot. Jimmy joined the Marines at age 17 and deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. Bridget, I believe, lives at home.
You’ll also see some media types from the day, both local (John Henning and Dan Rea of Boston’s WBZ 4) and national (Jack Germond and Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman [remember Newsweek?]).
At one point, McCain says that soon every school will be connected to the Internet. Remember, it’s still the 20th Century and a lot of people are worried about Y2K.
I volunteered to assist the McCain campaign and ended up being designated chairman of the Durham McCain Committee. I also ended up the only member of the committee. I don’t mean to say there were no other McCain supporters in town. Indeed, McCain trounced Bush in Durham, 882 to 440. Those other voters were just not as public as I was, I guess. In the Democratic primary, Durham voters were more numerous, with 1,333 voting for Bill Bradley and 802 for Al Gore.
A stump speech by Senator McCain. Daughter Julia, 10, is sitting on the floor at right.
I attended strategy meetings and fundraising events, as well as several of McCain’s “town halls.” I had the pleasure of shaking hands and chatting with the Senator several times. He signed a copy of Faith of My Fathers, along with a personal message. Closer to election day, I made phone calls. On the day of the primary, I stood outside a couple of different polling places, pretty much all day, with my McCain sign. At one point, I think mid-afternoon, some GOP officials dropped by to say hello to the volunteers. A woman, whom I later learned was a member of the Republican National Committee, came up to me and said, sotto voce, “Your guy seems to be doing really well.”
He did. Totals at the end of the night were McCain 115,606 and Bush 72,330. What Senator McCain described as a “mission” in his announcement turned out not to be successful. A reprise in 2008 got him the nomination, but not the prize. I’m disappointed we didn’t get to know what John McCain would have done as President.
When I wasn’t walking around Yongsan on duty, or sitting in my hotel room, I spent a lot of time walking around Seoul. As you’ll see in the videos, the Hilton was located in central downtown, near many tourist sites, as well as market areas.
Dongdaemun GateSchool kids
There are three videos in this post. Part I has scenes of the hotel interior and street scenes, particularly the Dongdaemun Market area. Part II focuses on the Deoksugang Palace complex and Namsan Park. Part III contains clips from Korean television. I found the ads particularly interesting in terms of conveying Korean life. Not that it portrayed the lives of average Koreans accurately, but gave glimpses of styles, etc., I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. There will be a gallery of video captures with each video, so you can see whether the content may be of interest.
(I apologize for the graininess of the videos. I shot them, I believe, on a VHS video camera. I then digitized that video relatively recently and edited in iMovie. It’s like watching broadcasts of old football games on TV now.)
First, an anecdote about something that did not involve walking around, shooting video. As I mentioned in the earlier post, it’s about eating traditional Korean food. Actually, it’s more about just an interesting experience that involved dinner.
A fellow reservist, from San Jose, was big in the Jaycees, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, which had an international component. Through that organization, he had come to know a Korean who owned three, as I recall, Holiday Inns in Seoul. The reservist told me he had been invited to join this gentleman for dinner while we were in Seoul and he invited me and another reservist to come along. We went to one of the Holiday Inns one evening, going through a restaurant that had a humungous buffet to the owner’s private dining room.
There, a low-set table with place settings awaited, a much more traditional setup than the buffet area. I recall there was also a recessed area under the table, to accommodate Westerners less able to sit with their legs folded. Thank goodness. Also awaiting us was the owner and his wife, in their early to mid-forties, as we were. I ended up sitting next to her, which as the evening wore on, was a special treat.
I had tried to learn some elements of social exchange in Korean. At one point, the wife offered me something and I said Kamsahamnida, Korean for “thank you,” slowly stating each syllable. She giggled, and said something to her husband in Korean. Of course, someone more learned in Korean would have said it more quickly, in fewer syllables, something like Kamsamnida.
Among the food items served was bulgogi, again, the marinated grilled beef. This time, the wife showed me how to prepare it in a traditional way, using a lettuce leaf as a wrap and placing the bulgogi, rice, scallions, kimchi, sesame seeds, etc., within. There was other food and dessert, brought in by attendants, but I don’t remember much about them.
We also had the national drink of Korea. Soju is a clear liquid distilled from rice (as is sake, the Japanese drink, which is brewed and considered “rice wine”). Soju is generally about 40 proof, half of what vodka, for example, might be. It’s basically tasteless and without the alcohol “burn” one would experience with stronger stuff. We were served it in regular size water glasses, filled to the brim. I had read that Korean table manners did not permit a guest to fill his or her own glass, but called for the host to maintain guests’ glasses be always full. I also just recently read that South Koreans drink more hard liquor than residents of any other country in the world.
At one point, there was something of a kerfuffle, because our host noticed that one among us was not drinking his soju. That gentleman, a fellow reservist, pointed out that he was Mormon and did not drink alcohol. Our host seemed to consider that an affront to his hospitality. That took some multicultural discussion to iron out and I recall it ending not entirely well.
Back to the wife. As the evening progressed and more soju was imbibed, she started leaning over to tell me things I assume she did not want others to hear. Nothing lascivious, mind you. More like telling me about her most recent shopping trip to Paris. How she often went to Paris, Rome, New York, San Francisco for shopping. How she had her own business and her own money, neither of which her husband knew about. When she went shopping, of course, she whispered with a smile, she used her husband’s money, not hers. I think it may have been one of those cases when someone realizes she and her husband will never see this American again and just wants to let it rip.
On to the visuals.
Part I – The Hilton and Namdaemun Market
A gallery of images from the video (14:01) (The galleries are automatic slideshows. You can wait or click on the right-hand side of the image to move ahead.)
Part II – Deoksugung Palace, Dongdaemun Fabric Market, and Namsan Park
Deoksugung is a walled compound of palaces and other buildings, the earliest originating in 1398. Only a third of the structures that were there in 1910 remain, the rest having been destroyed in the Japanese occupation of Korea, 1910-45.
It’s mostly ads, some music, some sports. The ads feature a lot of cartoony material, lots of laughter, a lot of fast food. Also among the ads in the video are a couple for “white” lotions. Seeking lighter, whiter skin apparently has been a goal among some/many Asians for centuries. Even back in 1991, seeing these was something of a surprise. A 2012 article in Asian Scientist — “Who’s the Fairest of Them All?” — talks about it.
Also, I recorded this in a pretty crude manner. I sat in bed, in front of the television, with a video camera. You’ll sometimes see the edges of the screen and even the reflection of the bedside lamp on the screen. 🙁
Finally, I’ll close this travelogue about Korea with something I read in material in my hotel room. It was an article in a politically oriented magazine, as I recall, about the possibilities of reunification of North and South Korea. The Korean author was enthusiastic about the prospect. The combination of South Korean know-how and the physical resources in the North would make a united Korea very strong. And, he concluded, that would mean Korea could take on Japan! There is no love lost between Korea and Japan, at least among older generations.
Last December, when Korea was “in the news,” I put up a post — “Antsy at DMZ” — talking about my brief trip to the Joint Security Area on the border of North and South Korea in August 1991. In that post, I said I would be posting something about the rest of my trip to Korea “soon.”
“Soon” has finally come.
My “trip” to Korea was actually Special Active Duty for Training for me as a Naval Reservist, in addition to the mandatory two-week Active Duty for Training I had done previously that summer. I volunteered to participate in Ulchi Focus Lens 1991, a joint exercise between the US and the Republic of Korea (ROK). Indeed UFL was the largest computer-assisted simulation exercise in the world at the time, involving more than 200,000 troops from both countries. A fellow reservist who had previously participated vouched for its worth and I thought it a great opportunity to see Korea.
I flew from Oakland to LAX, where I connected with an LA-Seoul non-stop. I remember the flight as being about 11 hours, of which I slept about eight. Landing in Seoul as a member of the Navy, on orders, I had a distinctive process, requiring no passport. I had my Navy ID, my orders, and a special location for processing. Everything went smoothly.
Until I got to the hotel. I recall it was either very early or very late, because it was dark. When I attempted to check in at the Seoul Hilton, I was told there was no reservation in my name and no available room. Hmmm. I had contact info for no one and figured everyone was asleep. I milled about smartly. Somehow, I saw someone I recognized or he saw me. Within a surprisingly short time, I had a room.
I was told standing orders were to eat only at the hotel or on base, the nearby US Army Garrison Yongsan, headquarters for the Army in Korea. There had been an outbreak of cholera in the Korean capital. My first meal was at the hotel. I had read up on Korean cuisine, but was certainly a novice. As I looked at the menu, wondering what I should try, a Korean mother and two kids sat down at the next table. Great! I will listen to what they order. Two spaghettis and meatballs, with the kids splitting one.
I ordered, I believe, bulgogi, rice, and kimchi. Bulgogi means “fire meat” in Korean and is marinated grilled strips of beef. Kimchi is a salted and fermented mix of vegetables, mostly cabbage and radish, but with added peppers, etc. Maybe because most of the hotel guests were waeguk-saram (“foreigner” in Korean), the meal was not as spicy as it could have been.
After that, though, I stuck mostly to American stuff on the base (except for one major exception, to be described in the other post).
Navy officer crest
This exercise was the only time I wore cammies when I was in the Navy. In fact, I don’t believe the Navy had cammies as a uniform option at the time. There were green utility uniforms, pilot suits, etc., but not cammies. For the purposes of this exercise, we were to wear Marine cammies. As has been the case for a long time and remains so, the Army and Navy/Marines do things differently. (I realize I’m getting down in the weeds here, but this is for the record.) Army officers wore the symbol of their rank on the front of their caps, which are rounded, not peaked like the Navy/Marines. We wore the officer’s crest on the front of the cap and the insignia for rank, in my case silver oak leaves, on the blouse collar.
I found it amusing when I walked around the base and Army enlisted men were walking toward me. Everyone in the military has to pay attention to the rank of the individual whom you are approaching, because you are required to salute someone of higher rank, unless both parties are enlisted, not officers. Enlisted have to salute all officers. I could see enlisted guys scanning me, trying to figure out what I was. The rank wasn’t on my cap. There was just this unusual “thing.” Was this guy from a foreign army? They usually figured it out by the time we got close. My uniform did have a patch saying “US NAVY.” I don’t remember if anybody failed to recognize what I was. I wouldn’t have chastised them, in any case.
My role in the exercise, considering this all being “computer-assisted,” was very low-tech. I recall it being something like “messenger.” I think I had to walk among various exercise locations bringing “classified” material. I remember most that it was a lot of walking. First time I’m wearing cammies, it was also the first time I’m wearing combat boots. As any foot soldier knows, new boots can be no fun when you have to use them a lot in a short period of time. I was in pain the first several days. I guess some might consider it payback for what was generally a pretty easy time for me in the Navy.
Two things I remember particularly from the exercise. One was that while, for me, this was something of a lark, it was nothing like that for the ROK Navy types involved. They were in the military service of a country technically still at war with the regime only 35 miles away, and the careers of ROK officers might be determined by what happened in this exercise. I saw ROK officers be very harsh with subordinates, verbally and even physically.
A more pleasant recollection involved language differences. There was discussion of North Korean “mini-subs.” Maybe because it looked as if I didn’t have a lot to do, one Korean approached me asking about the difference between “mini” and “small.” I think he was confused, because North Koreans couldn’t be using miniature submarines. I said that, in this case, the term meant small, not miniature. Noticing that he and I were about the same size, I said, “We’re small, but we’re not miniature.” He nodded, chuckling. A few minutes later, he came back to me, and said, “Remember, the smallest pepper is the hottest pepper!” 🙂
There will be another post about my walks around Seoul as a tourist, with videos.
(Young women, of course. But “surfer young women” doesn’t quite carry the Beach Boys allusion.)
A competitor in the Supergirl Surf Pro event
Back in late July, the Supergirl Surf Pro surfing competition tour came to nearby Oceanside. I showed up somewhat early Sunday morning so that I could get a parking spot. I had tried the previous afternoon and could not find any parking.
The Oceanside event bills itself as “the world’s largest women’s surf event and music festival.” Hard to tell, especially on an early Sunday morning. But this is quintessential SoCal. Surfing alongside an iconic ocean pier with music, booths, an F-16 . . . wait, what? Yes, the Air Force showed up with a pretty large contingent of troops, including a lot of females, even a female brigadier general, and brought along an F-16, for visual effect. It worked.
Following a family “Thanksgiving” on Martha’s Vineyard, it was back to classmates and friends Tuesday, June 5. The Andersons brought me to West Yarmouth on Cape Cod, where Marcy Kenah had arranged for a beautiful cottage for us. Some cottage. Lots of room and beautiful setting for 10 of us – Marcy and Larry Kenah, Pat and Tom Sugrue, Shelia and Dan Downey, Debbie and Ken Hamberg, Ed Hattauer, and me.
We celebrated Ed’s birthday and we also had some visitors – Karen Sullivan and Susan and Reid Oslin, all now full-time Cape residents. Richard Sullivan splits time between Mashpee and Holliston, claiming he still needs to work, and was unable to join us.
While my parents lived in the house, my mother became pregnant with me. This is a picture of my mother, in spring 1946, sitting on a cot out on the second-floor rear deck of the house. She told me later that she was suffering from morning sickness at the time. Sure looks it.
