Earth Day

So its Earth Day, and everybody that had the opportunity to toke a joint on 4/20 is now stretching that day into Earth Day.  There are of course many sober conservationists too, those who are angry with the over many beating hearts upon the earth.  They feel (themselves excluded) that some great culling or elimination must come forth or manifest itself in order to to right the wrongs and save the earth.  The Earth after all lives, it breathes, it is an entity and it is our goal to love it.  I remember the 70s song in a long lost musical "Zero Population is the Answer My Friend".

I chuckle when I think on that.  It is the same mentality that occurred to Grizzly man Timothy Treadwell who became one with the grizz, you can find his last moments in a chilling sound recording on youtube as he was embraced by nature one final time.  I wonder if he had that moment of clarity that told him in the end, he was one in the only way one can become one with nature.

But then that is the way of nature.  To the Earth life is an infection that needs a cure.  The Earth's core existence or role is to wipe the petrie dish of who we are clean.  Not just humans, but everything.  The evidence? Look at the massive die offs.  Consider the dinosaurs of another age, they were probably the most benign group upon the earth, they were part of nature, they did not seek to control or change their environment, they were every Earth Day advocates dream of how we should be.  How did existence repay their most excellent balance?  It snuffed them out so that I could enjoy some coal fired electricity these millions of year later.  Guess the joke was on them.

At one time life was almost frozen out as the Earth became a giant snowball and dealt pretty much a cold hand to life as the Earth froze the oceans where it could.  Wonderful stuff that.  There was Tambora 70,000 years ago which wiped out so much of the plague called humanity that our DNA from this period shows us as a bottle neck when only a few of us were left.  There have been other calderas, Yellowstone is a favorite that recurs like a trip to Disneyland.  North America will be buried under ash next time.  Dekkan Traps anyone?  Or perhaps Siberian Traps? 6-7000 feet of lava flows pushing out of the Earth giving us 750,000 square miles of lava.  That one came close, 90%+ of sea life and 75%+ of land based species gone, snuffed, poof!.  Or so the fossils of extinct ammonites tell us.

Hurray, its Earth Day.  Pick up your litter, pick up your trash, place all kinds of restrictions on technology, growth, food, reduce populations!  All the wonderful stuff we were told in the 70's with dire stories of imminent destruction illustrated in the fake book "Silent Spring", or predictions of us dying soon.  We want the Earth to be clean and hospitable when it is our turn and we are wiped out.  You gotta love the Earth, such a trickster.

What is a veteran?

What is a veteran?

Someone asked me that the other day.  The answer is pretty easy, but its meaning escapes me.  A veteran is someone who served in the military to protect our nation.  A pretty simple statement but when you think about it, it hides great complexity.  Among veterans I count my three brothers who each served in different branches.  I am proud of them for that, but their lives are different from each other and from mine.  It seems veterans are made up of people from all walks of life, different demographics, different belief systems, different politics, and have different ideals of nobility.  The quintessence is that they serve.  I want to speak of one veteran in particular, my father,  someone who no longer lives but has left a legacy.  His is a complicated life to speak of in my view.  But as the son of a veteran who has done much.  There remains much to say.

My father was an easy man to like, and difficult to love.  His was a personality full of laughter but to those of us who knew him there was also harshness and anger.  He was provocative to say the least and my main memory of him was his anger at the world.  For years I thought that anger was simply a mean streak that he chose to develop.  It wasn’t until the end of his life when he chose to speak with me that I realized there was more to him than what I knew, a depth that required understanding.

I wish I could say that all vets like my father were perfect men, that their sacrifice defines them as givers in this life.  But we know that what drives these men and women is as varied as the people that exist.  My father was very patriotic in his own way, but also very cynical of the patriotism he saw.  I am not sure if what made him that way was his military service or his life, neither of which was cheaply bought, both of which were hard fought battles in their own right.  Often the military is an escape of sorts, a change in a pattern that may be used to mold us into one thing or another.  For some it is viewed as an escape from circumstance.  Little do they realize that they do not escape the freight they carry with them.


My father's early life existed around two coal mining towns in Russell County and Dickenson County Virginia. Trammel and Dante are their names.  Locals by the way will not call it Dante in terms of the Renaissance poet, they will refer to their town phonetically as "Daint".  I know something of Dante, Trammel, and southwest Virginia, it can be a hard and harsh place filled with good people who have adapted to the harshness of the limestone and coal.  There isn't much to draw one seeking out a life in Dante.  Built in the rugged Appalachians it reflects a poverty we normally expect of the third world.  There are old burnt out clapboard houses that sit on the edges of town.  Men aged before their time with black lung on the rickety wooden front porches, rocking their chairs watching the cars and trains go by.  Faces are drawn hard and tight by years living underground or winters that were warmed by the coal in potbellied stoves.  Eyes are often clouded by the alcohol they have used to drown away the pain of a continued existence with no escape, or crushed hopes and horizons that will forever elude them.  Most do not realize that cost in their lives before they are old and retired.  They work from holiday to holiday.. deer season giving them respite in the beginning of fall, showing them signs that another year is passing.  Lamentations as old as the bible are voiced through blue grass songs, and like the slaves of old; they endure.  Their hands, when you shake them, are calloused and hard and their lungs, already weak from the coal, catch pneumonia easily from too much time in ankle deep water.  The sides of the hills around Dante are 40 degrees steep and houses sit precariously upon them, their precariousness reflected in the income of miners whose lives depend on the coal they spend their existence removing from below.  The community is poor, but its people stand ramrod straight and dare you to make light of their mismatched clothing and hand me downs.  Some on welfare survive from check to check living in a temporary and to them shameful existence while their children are socially promoted in schools that have inadequate funding and parents too concerned with making rent to spend time making sure homework is done.  The focus is on making it to the end of the month, not on which university or college they hope to attend.  You have a lot going against you in Dante and there isn't much attention paid to this part of Virginia as the noble class of courtesans from DC gallantly suck up all the attention up North in Fairfax county.  Dante is a place to be from, not a place you seek out.  Believe it or not, my father's time was even more difficult and harder on the soul and life of an individual than what I saw there in my own youth.

His call to duty came in the death of friends in a coal mine and the very young but mature decision that life will drown him here and his escape had to be done then or never.


At 15 he was working in the mine loading coal in the McCoy mine at night while going to school during the day.  A pony would come up to the top level and they would hand load the coal at night.  This paid 1 – 2 dollars a night and all the coke and “nabs” they could drink and eat.  McCoy owned a small store and his sons worked by my father's side.  One night while he was working in the tunnels, a roof bolt collapsed and shives (splinters) pronounced "shiv's" from the wooden beams shot out and killed two of his friends.  He knew it was bad, and in the end a similar fate awaited him too.  So he tried to join the military at 15.  He was a good size for his age, but the recruiter would have none of it.  They went to the local school board for age verification, he was fifteen and that was the end of that.  The maw of the mines waited for him.  Except for him that wasn’t going to happen.  His destiny would change, and he knew how.  So he asked for a draft card under the pretense that he could show it to his friends.  The recruiter saw no harm in it, after all, he wouldn’t be allowed to join until he was 18.  So he got one.  It was 1949 and the cards were hand written for the most part.  Later that day he hopped a train to a city further away.  By the following morning he was gone following a different path.

“I want to join” he told the recruiter.
“Well son, how old are you?” came the questioning reply.
“18”
“Do you have proof?”
“Here is my draft card”.
“OK son, sign here”…. And it was done.
He’d escaped to a better life, maybe.

He was signed up and sent to boot in Massachusetts.  There he won soldier of the year at the base and was given a ticket to the World Series.  At around his 16th birthday he hit the beaches of Inchon as part of MacArthur’s invasion of Korea.  The water, he told me was to his chest and the mud on the beach was knee deep as he carried his BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle).  The North Koreans were taken completely by surprise and they had made it inland a good 20 miles before there was any resistance.  There he captured his first North Korean, an officer, and so sought to hand him over to a Major Forrester.  The order was to have the Korean dig his own grave and then shoot him.  Which my father promptly did; heck of a start to his 16th year.

So they moved forward, all the way to the Chosin Resevoir when the Chinese communist came in waves cutting them off and driving them back into pockets.  He told me he remembered that it was colder than he had ever been in his life and people around him were felled as much by hypothermia as bullets.  Nights were full of fear as the enemy would mass and prepare, the mornings were spent marching and calling in air support.  During all of this he received his first wound.  So at 16, while recovering he was sent back to be a desk sergeant and MP.  He did not like it, nor has he ever liked authority.

He then skipped over and remembered Vietnam.  He was one of the first advisors in Vietnam,  an NDIC (non commissioned officer in charge) with a five man unit over various villages working with local militia against the Viet Cong.  A Major Bear was in charge (called running bear because he hit the bunker running when a firefight or mortar fire began).  His contact was a barefoot Vietnamese Lieutenant who was disciplined and warned him of eminent attacks.  One indication -  when 20 of the lieutenants men disappeared, they were told by Viet Cong family members that there would be an attack that night and not to go in.  It was a crazy war.

My father told me of the Tet Offensive which started just as he was about to go on leave.  He remembered trying to keep Major Bear calm who was running around with a bag of grenades and how my father fell as a bullet ricocheted off his belt.  He mentioned working with PsyOps and nothing more, Vietnam taught him to love the grenade launcher and he was very accurate with it.  There were numerous other fire fights he referred to, but did not speak of.  Other things too, like the barber who shaved him with a straight razor turned out to be VC.  He still smiles at that.  Later he saw the man being led away even as the country slowly disintegrated, another casualty.

So he comes home, teaches counter insurgency for two years at Loyola University, wins ROTC shooting championships, finishes at Fort Gordon and after a tussle with a major (and revealing the lie of his age) finished the military demoted to Senior Master Sargent.

In the end though, he didn’t escape. There is something about the stark beauty of those hills that calls one back.  I myself don’t want to go back, but sometimes when there is a crispness in the air, I can hear its siren song whispering.   In the end he returned to the home of his youth, the Appalachian Hills and brought his German wife and children with him.  There he raised us in effect as he was raised.  We saw the poverty, we lived in it for a time (though like all children we didn’t know we were poor, we simply ran through the forests enjoying what was around us).  He had spent years seeking an escape, but the mines called him back, and back he went.  He was a union man; he loved the union and embraced it as did his father before him.

And so he finished and retired union.  In the interim he divorced his wife, took on another, led a separate life, and moved on until he died.  He was tough, he was mean but that toughness was an integral part of what he was; not only in the military where he had seen more fighting in more climates than most can imagine, but also in the harshness of his environment that raises such young men

He lies there now in those hills he so loved with the laurel and the deer that still creep to the graves of the family plot high in the wooded land.  His struggles are over and he is done, having fought the hard fight.  In the end there really isn’t a winner where this life is concerned, we do our eight hours and then punch our time clocks at the end of the day.

But the final question still remains.  What is a vet?  I can only look to my father in trying to answer that question.  We praise these men and women on Veterans day, and we see them for one day as heroes.  But like the ancient heroes of Greek history, they did great things as men and did them with the flaws of who they were.  They fought, they died, and it is the sweat and blood of their sacrifices that make the cement that holds the walls which protect our society and keeps us from those who would destroy us.  That is the true heroism.  They are imperfect, and they do not want to be seen as gods or super men (or women).  They served, their reasons are myriad, but in their time, they stood ready to risk all.

Maybe its not that complicated?  Maybe it is the nobility of human nature coming through imperfect beings.  My father did much in his life and while he never made the long service to his nation the centerpiece of who he was, nor demanded to be honored, he served.  It was tough, it was gritty, it wasn’t pretty.  It was like him, complicated and not.

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Ghosts of the Aztecs, Or The Strangest Lunch I Have Ever Had

Here is the entire incident as it occurred so many years ago

Templo Mayor

I lived in Mexico for several years.  The diversity of its landscape and people are lost to most of us living in the US.  We see only those who struggled and were willing to take the great risk to better themselves in a land and culture alien and foreign to them, but beckoning with hope.  The United States is a wondrous trap in that way.  We don't always see Mexico at its best with these men and women, even as its people strive to bring the best out in themselves.  I have traveled now the depth and breadth of that nation, I have seen their hopes and dreams, their intial alienness to me is less alien than it once was and I can spot regional differences that make up a mosaic of a nation state whose people are different nations tied by a mythos that is often frayed by its poor leadership.  It is a nation whose people are to be admired, whose organization is to be pitied.  The strongest ties are familial and obedience to the patriarch, for either good or ill, this is powerful throughout that land.

Today I will speak of something that is in the mist of reality, a surreal thing that brings to my mind the question of what is real, and what is myth.  As Mormons we believe that there is no difference between the spirit and the flesh, that all things that exist have a spiritual origin and that origin exists forever changed only by the experience that we will upon ourselves.  While that view is known to us, it is sometimes disconcerting when it actually descends upon us from the unknown places.  For myself I cannot claim great spiritual insight, it would be hubris for me to do so, I am very much based on the reality of this life and its effects on me.  So I remain relatively blind to the corners of existence that hold surprising things that perturb the placid waters of my life.  Routine is comforting and safe, it also blinds us.

I had been working in Mexico for several years developing a routine that would suffice to my needs as I strove to develop a career in international business, using the Spanish I had developed from my time as a missionary combined with degree in economics.  It is not a easy life, this career development thing, but it is a living after all.  We lived on the coast in Mexico developing hotels and golf courses for the well heeled that would come into the nation and bring their much needed dollars and our lives were not difficult when compared to those living in our host land.  Once or twice a year I would take my four wheel drive Eddie Bauer Bronco II up the United States for a thorough inspection and bill of health by a certified US mechanic I knew and trusted (this kept the warrantee active).  That trip was done alone and lent itself to some wonderful adventures with people who became close if temporary friends.  Driving along those long thin two lane highways one is often pushed over to the side by 18 wheeler trucks madly hurtling freight to their destinations going in the opposite direction.  But the scenery, now that was something else it is desolate and beautiful in its isolation and empty hills.  Whether plush hills of the Sierra Madres or the extensive undulating ocotillo and palo verde hills along with the long stark empty beaches whose silence is only broken by crashing surf and windswept sand.  Those are views that I will always treasure.  On the road, appearing on either side were often empty smaller avenues that stretched off into the distance disappearing into hills for destinations unknown.  When I took these trips I had some leeway in time built into them so I could do what I loved to do when I traveled alone.  I would go on an "explore".  A small voyage of discovery to see what was "out there".  I am no Magellan, I am just curious.

Most of the time such deviations would conclude by leading up to an isolated "rancho" somewhere that rarely encountered guests.  Some few small adobe buildings and a tienda with little else of note in the orange ground beyond the desert cactus, ocotillos and palo verdes.  Such a visit was a call for certain celebration by these hard working families attempting carve a life out of what is still a harsh wilderness.  They would gather together that evening for a small bonfire with talking, singing, someone would break out some goat meat for a barbecue and people would laugh, converse, and share stories of families and friends, with a heavy dose of gossip to spice up the conversation with the stranger.  I too contributed and sang as loudly and off key as I could, they would laugh and shake their head at my antics.  That was my entertainment for them.  More often than not I left a few dollars to help them along for the food they prepared and the company they gave me.  Years later I still smile at the memory of wonderful people whose love of life, tempered by a grim determination of survival found the time to bless a stranger with their happiness.

Deviations exist as learning experiences whereby we have the opportunity to experience something outside the routine.  In one of these trips I descended to a place that was different as I drifted up the North of Mexico.  I had been driving on a somewhat isolated stretch of road, bored of the music and time when a side road made itself known to me.  Turning right I kicked up the gravel  as I took an empty road and disappeared into the brush with little more than a cloud of desert dust to mark my passage.   The ocotillo and cactus ranged heavy on either side as I drove on towards the mountains with the morning sun continuing its hot torturous climb.  After the miles ranged underneath I began to wonder if maybe I needed to turn around and come back, it seemed to be a road that led nowhere.  Gradually the road became harder with more rock as it descended into an isolated valley with high walls on either side leading down a narrow stretch.  Down the center following the road was an arroyo, a dry river bed with not even the tantalizing temptation of water, but the road was more defined now, and there in the distance I saw some houses, even an old church that seemed to lord over the small pueblo.  A farming community to be sure.  That single road cut through the adobe town with an unusually large pile of white rocks on the opposite side that marked an end to the road.  It is rare to see the end of a road, usually we only see the beginnings, as they lead us from our front door into the world.  But endings?  Very rare, and in most of our lives, a surprise.  This was no exception.  Along this ending lay on either side some old destroyed adobe homes which had been left to erode to the elements along with some old wooden buildings in this dusty windswept town.   Nothing was more than a single story, except the church, its tower stood erect and tall at the entrance of the town with cracks on the wall and tower.  The reality of earth and gravity had not yet crushed this building of faith, I supposed its time would come too.  All of this seemed built around or toward that unusually large pile of bleached white stones piled up haphazardly.   People did live here, there was activity and movement even as the rising dust set motes in my eye.  I parked in front of a half collapsed building labeled "loncheria" for those who entertained the idea of being fed (being fed what?!?! is often a question I asked myself at some of these places).  I stepped out of my Bronco (one of only two or three vehicles in the entire town from what I could see), and climbed the wooden steps squinting my eyes for protection from dust and bright sun.

As I walked in, my hopes for a good meal while not dashed were somewhat shaken. Half of the building was weathered and wooden and half eroded adobe, as if they could not be bothered to continue hauling wood from some other place in order to finish the building.  The floor was a mixture of uneven clay tile and brick that remained permanently dusty.  The hiss of a propane burner could be heard from the back room while a small girl in ragged clothing carried out the futility of moving sand and dust from one corner to the other with the sparse brushes of an old broom.  The chairs and tables were made of that ubiquitous cheap hollowed out white plastic found in all parts of Mexico.  Chairs that could easily buckle and collapse as you leaned or put weight on the back legs reminded one to always sit up straight for fear of that sudden collapse.  The wooden portion looked older than old with its weathered shelves and walls that disappeared into the darkness that one experiences when the sun is overly bright outside that the far corner of the room offered no light to define its borders.  I took a seat in the semi darkness for the coolness it offered and carefully sat down.  An older girl of a similar nature came by and handed me a worn plastic menu offering the barest of staples.  At the bottom printed in bold, "sodas frios", caught my eye; something that suddenly made the accommodations much more appealing.

"Unos tacos p'favor" I said. "Y dos gaseosas", My Spanish was of a South American variety and training.  After a questionable second, before I could clarify for  her, she understood and left to bring me my sodas.

They were very cold, and for me this was the saving grace of the whole town.  The warm container of bottled water in my car had long since lost its appeal to me beyond survival and here I was being offered what can only be described as nectar of the gods.  There was ice on the outside of the bottle, inside you could see that thin layer of ice crystals forming on the very top, creating a semi slushing frigidity.  As the liquid poured down my dry, parched throat, I gave thanks to the inventor of refrigeration that allowed it to exist even here in this empty place.  That feeling of the dust being washed away is, I think, one of the highlights of life.  I was partially finished with my drink when I heard a sound in the darkness...  A kind of dry raspy smacking of dry lips and a clucking tongue.   It came from somewhere in the darkness of the shadow, as my eyes adjusted, I saw an old man in patched and worn clothing staring at me.  He had white hair and a short white beard.  This old man had seen life, probably had embraced it, and like so many, had not been embraced in return.  He was poor, he was tired and the lines etching his face were deep.  Again the smacking of lips as he looked right into my eyes.  He wasn't quite asking for something to drink, he was no beggar, but it did not bother him to let me know that he wanted one.  As my eyes adjusted more to the shadow I saw how close he really was and his smile, was one more of a person judging than it was a petition.

I was young, full of brass, and stared back at him.  "Oye, viejo" I said in a slightly disrespectful tone. "Que quieres?" or "Old man, what do yo want?".  He acted neither shocked nor insulted.

"Tengo sed" he rasped with a trace of a smile.

"No never mind" I thought.  He was thirsty and it looked like he could use it more than I could.  It wouldn't hurt to buy him one.  So I ordered another gaseosa for the old man.  It came out and without another word he drank it.  Not a sip either or even a strong draft, he chugged the entire soda down in one long draught.  That is pretty surprising, and he must have been pretty thirsty, no, bone dry would have been a more accurate word.  I ordered him another.  He repeated the same act, one long chug that would have made a frat boy proud.  I ordered a third, this time he took a strong swig, gave a long burp and exhaled as only a man who rarely knows, but appreciates those moments of complete satisfaction.

"You know gringo" he said mimicking me with his own sardonic tone.  "I like you, you have a good heart.  He took another sip.  "I will tell you two stories.  You will not interrupt these stories but listen with our ears.  Agreed?"

I wasn't in a hurry and this small half empty dust bowl in the middle of a desolate valley offered little in the way of amusement.  The sound of lunch being prepared and the familiar smells of Mexican home cooking convinced me to carefully sit back and nod my head.  "Bueno Senor, a su servicio"

"Gringo, you know of the Aztecs? And their sacrifices?"  He asked as he eyed me.  I had in fact been very interested in the Aztecs.  So I replied.

"An amazing people whose pyramids were adapted to the wholesale slaughter of victims to their hummingbird god Huitzilopochtli, it is rumored that in one religious ceremony they cut out the hearts of almost 30,000 to feed their god.  Using an obsidian knife they would cut underneath the sternum and then reach in and pull out the still beating heart and place it in the mouth of their god statue, all the while the man receiving this was conscious and aware.  Their temples are said to be rounded in order for the bodies to be rolled off rather than carried down.  Indeed their sacrifices were so numerous as to be so hated that when Cortez entered Tenochtitlan, he had almost 100,000 indian allies who also wanted the destruction of the Aztecs...."

"Gringo" he said with a touch of irritation "You are interrupting me.".

I nodded my head and apologized.  He went on.

"Cortez and the traitorous Malinche led an army to the Aztec capitol and over time battles were fought and Cortes was driven away.  Even during the height of the fighting priests would snatch or capture any warrior they could, drag them to the top of the temple and tear the heart out.  Begging their warrior god to kill these invaders for them.  Fighting was everywhere in patios, terraces, along the roads as groups or forces surged in and out driving the conquistadores back, or being forced away by the conquistadores.  Two of the conquistadores found themselves at the base of one portion of the Templo Mayor.  The northwest, and there were only a few Aztecs of noble birth standing guard.  They were not fighting or even looking outward towards the battles, their gaze and guard were focused deep into a narrow opening peering intently with their long tepoztopili in one hand along with a maquahitl in the other.  The tepoztopili is a long seven foot spear and the maquahitl a sword with razor sharp obsidian edges.  The maquahitl was powerful enough to decapitate a man in one fell swoop.  With their swords they came up behind these distracted nobles and thrust deep and true killing all three before any could react.  Such narrow openings were not unknown to the Spanish, since they often led to secret passages.  The small opening meant only one thing to these men "Aztec gold".  But the entrance was slight and very dark.  They released the straps of their cascadas and breast plates and dropped them in a pile near the entrance in order  to fit inside this cramped opening, then with the lust of gold in their eyes they were enveloped into the darkness of the passage.

The passage itself was narrow and both men were forced to walk in a stooped sideways motion, it would zig one way and zag another.  There was no light, there was no torch for them to carry and the walls were one moment smooth and another disconcertingly rough hewn, as if not more than piled rocks, then smooth again.
No light was found and the sides grew closer and closer until both men were almost wedged in.  Was this some cruel joke with a guarded walkway that led nowhere?  A last turn with jagged stone pressing on their cheeks showed them a light.

"Joven" the man said to me as he pulled me out of his story.  "With all those sacrifices, why weren't the temples red with blood?"

"How do you know they weren't?" I asked.

"Read what they wrote" he replied

I had read Bernal Diaz Castillo's "The Conquest of New Spain" and one of the things he mentioned was the alabaster whiteness of the temple of the sun.  The old man surprised me, not many were as well read as that, I would be surprised even more later.

"So where did the blood go?" he asked.  I shrugged and indicated with a wave for him to continue with his story.  Just then a little girl brought some appetizers or tapas were brought out and I offered the old man a bite, but his face went back to the intensity as he thought back.  He wasn't interested in food right now, the sharing of what he knew was his priority and food, even for this man who could use it, became secondary.

The light beckoned, but the path had grown slender and almost impossible to maneuver.  Conquistadores did not conquer by not taking chances.  They expelled the air from their lungs, with nothing left and pushed/scraped their way to the soft light.

What they saw, shocked them utterly.  These were hardened men, not some caballero of old money, they had been mercenaries and their origins were Extremadura or "the hard land" that had given life to Cortez and Pizarro.  But nothing they had seen or done ever prepared them for this.  The light was faint but their time in the darkness had made their eyes sensitive to what was there.  While not as high as a cathedral, the roof was high, and the light was from some small gaps in the stone that allowed for some faint beams to pass.  A stone gutter from the top made its way down the sides and through those gaps came a dark crimson liquid, not in any regular way, but in spurts first fast and then dripping slowly.  The gutter would catch it and send it on its way down to a trough sitting far below.  That however wasn't the shock.  It was the being inside.  It was bent over the trough, its head drinking in the liquid when it became aware of the two men.  It stood up and turned.  A mixture of ashen whiteness, as if it had never seen light, and markings on its face and upper torso like the scales of a snake.  No hair was upon its head, the eyes were wide and open, the head bore the grotesque cranial deformation that was long and oblong something the Mayans sometimes had for royalty.  The teeth were filed into triangular daggers, even in this darkened cursed place one could see them flash.  From waist down he appeared as any man, but the torso, the chest and arms were what only could be called monstrous in their mass.  Nor did he walk, it was more of a swinging shuffle with the great arms, like an apes, swinging loosely at his side.  He smiled, but there was no humor in him.  It was as if being human was the mask that was a living parody which covered something past feeling of any humanity.

It seemed to drag itself towards the first man, both conquistadores still stared in shock at the spectacle, as their minds attempted to make sense of what it was they saw before them.  It grabbed the nearest one and with almost casual ease snapped the neck of the man and drove its dagger like teeth into the neck.  As blood spurt out, the second man could hear the sickening chugging of the beast swallowing the gory discharge.  This saved his life.  He was shocked into action and fled to the exit behind him.  But it was an impossibly thin crack and he could not force his way in.  Meanwhile the thing was finishing up, partially sated and looked to the man with the same smile and slowly made his way forward.  No hurry, no speed.  There was no concern for escape.  The food was trapped.

The man was desperate, "if he could enter, he must be able to leave", his mind raced as he banged himself against the very thin opening.  His thought of escape seemed almost helpless, he was prepared to pray to his God for the last time, and with that moment came calmness.  His mind cleared and he knew, or rather remembered, and in that moment he exhaled sharply and drove himself with all his strength into that incredibly thin fissure.  The impact almost made him lose consciousness but he was in and pushing deeper.  Suddenly the thing was behind him, just outside the fissure, its massive arm reached in and grasped deeply into the man's shoulder.  So powerful was the hand that it and its dirt filled nails broke flesh and tore into muscle and sinew.  The panic returned to the man and gave him the strength to pull away even harder, coupled with the blood from the tear acting as a lubricant, he broke away.  The beast thing could not enter the fissure, its physique was too large and with a look of regret and pleading its eyes followed the back of the conquistador as he disappeared into the darkness.

Dazed, wounded, and bleeding the conquistador stumbled not feeling the walls as they ground into him.  The entire way his only thought was to place distance between himself and the terror that was behind him.  "Some possessed demon of the underworld?", what manner of men were these Mecheeca or Aztecs to create and cage such things.  As he wound left and right, he prayed fervently to God that no other entry or exit or passage way existed, he prayed that he would not slip or flounder and turn himself around.  He could not bear that, anything but that.  Finally after much turning and twisting he came out into the blinding light of the sun and fell to his knees in thanks.  Fighting was still going on and so he quickly donned his armor as best he could and made his way to other Spaniards.

Infection set in that night and he went into a fever, during his deliriums raging about a beast no one seemed to understand.  Eyes wide with fear he would start and scream through anguished sweat drenched eyes only to collapse with shivers.  None were sure if he would survive but if so he would be needed.  The Spaniards had to abandon Tenochtitlan, Moctezuma was dead, and their preservation depended on every man fighting as they made their escape.  Eventually the capitol city would fall, the people would be disposed and a new European ruler would stand in the valley.  The Spaniard recovered, though he seemed different somehow, quieter.  The story he told were dismissed as a simple fever and he chose not to pursue it.  He remained off the island though, and found some post around the lake that would keep him busy.

The dust settles, the new kings and gods set up their monuments and continue robbing the earth of its riches for the glory of their own, history is always that way.  Months later, groups like those of DeSoto began heading north to explore and map the new world that was theirs.  These expeditions went out at different weeks and months.  Some returned, others never did, but that was the lot of a conquistador, to risk all for riches beyond the avarice in their souls.  When one bets, one sometimes loses, and these stakes were the lives set against the unknown.  One such group went out into the desolate North with with Indians as guides and translators.  They were a small army, well armed, well provisioned, carrying their priests as talisman for luck, and determined to find the Cibola of their dreams.  The cracked desert and valleys offered a myriad of hiding places for the imagined kingdoms of gold, every corner must be scoured and every map meticulously maintained.  A benefit that later generations would use, even as the bones of these men bleached the deserts.

Several weeks out, people began disappearing.  First it would be an indian, the later a another.  The leader of this group, whose name is as forgotten as this town you are now in, he took little notice, they were Indians and of little consequence in a land full of them.  But then one of the priests disappeared, and then a Spanish servant, he felt bad about that one, he had promised the mother to watch over him. Then coquistadores began disappearing and he could not have that.  It had to be the indians, so they were put to the question under supervision of the priests.  These priests were familiar with "the questioning" and the various devices used to ferret out heretics.  Even the Indians were impressed with what the priest could do with a knife, but while there was confession, no detail to prove the confession came, even after two were crucified in the way of our Lord and left as a sign.  At best they referred to the pagan god seeking revenge for his people.  That indian was slowly drawn and quartered while the conquistadors and priests made the sign of the cross to protect themselves from what they saw as their own vulnerable faith being assailed.  No other indian spoke, they knew their fates if they chose to speak their minds and so remained stoic, saying nothing.

They halted by a small oasis in an uncharted valley.  It was there that the mystery was solved.  Settling in this valley of the Raramuri, a tribe even the Aztecs feared, to reinforce their provisions and water, many more guards were posted.  These Raramuri indians, even in the mountains today, need no horses, they were swift and could run for days with little rest.  The conquistadors used them as scouts or slaves as they plundered on towards the north.  And still people in the encampment disappeared.  Early one morning, the leader and two of his guards, without schedule, inspected the grounds before patrol.  They heard a slight scuffle in one large tent, they pulled open a flap and saw two men.  One whose head had been twisted to face back to the tent's entrance while body faced forward to the back, and holding him up almost effortlessly was another conquistador, this one had carefully slit the man's throat and was rapidly gulping down the blood of the victim.  It seemed so casual and practiced as he effortlessly held up the other man.  So intent was the one conquistador in drinking the blood of the dead or dying man, he did not see the leader staring in shock.  With a shout, their captain called out in alarm for assistance, snarling the killer spun and dove at his captain who was saved by his breastplate as he went flying backward. Dozens of men rushed to their leader's aid and many more threw themselves upon other conquistador who seemed incredibly strong.  The numbers were too great and the killer went down and was held.  One of the priests holding him down kept repeating "Conde Estruch" while the indians fell to their knees shouting "Cijuateteo".  The fear and sweat was palpable as these men bound the killer in rope, then in chains, as he struggled wildly with no semblance of the fellow conquistador who marched beside them all of these miles from the Valley of the Mecheeca.

The priests attempted to effectuate an exorcism but to no avail, they could see the madness in the man's eyes which seemed to be a mixture of regret and intense burning desire.  He no longer controlled who he was, he had given up his humanity and was past feeling as a human.  He could not make a choice, no choice was open to him as he had surrendered himself to whatever it was that possessed him.  In that harsh environment, their fears of the darkness, the unseen, the demons of their religion, the loss of trust in their companion, all combined to envelop their souls in spasms of terror.  Few would sleep well for many nights to come.  The priests ordered a deep pit dug the width of four men and the depth of three, and at the bottom of that pit another smaller pit sized for the man and his many chains.  They lay him there face down and alive, then as he screamed to hoarseness they placed an incredibly large stone over him, even as they prayed fervently to make the ground too sacred for him to crawl through should he escape from shackles and manacles that bound him.  Then they gathered every stone they could find, whiteness being a reflection of purity and piled it upon the heavy flat pillar.  They could hear the muffled shouts and curses as rock upon rock was thrown into the pit all of that day, and all of the night until dawn the next morning when the hot sun brought its clarity to the chill that they lived with.  No sound left the pile of stones, and without sleep, without delay the left this cursed place, leaving with it a local legend the Raramuri kept alive.

"OK, viejo" I said with a smile and some affection.  I liked this man, he knew how to transport people to another place and time.  "Are you telling me that pile of rocks on the other side of town holds the grave of a conquistador from the 16th century?"

He looked at me and frowned.  Looked down at himself for a moment, and then seemed to gather himself and said "Gringo, you are interrupting me again".

I was.  There were no two ways about it.  And while parts of my upbringing were rougher than others, in both of the cultures I was raised in, a modicum of respect even for an old man, was called for.  "I apologize, please go on."

"Little more happened here.  A small village sprang up by the well.  Jesuits came, and then they left.  The tribes abided in the mountains and eventually came down, Franciscans came for a time, and then they too left, and finally some vagabond priest set up and built the chapel.  We were never a rich community, we were never prosperous, like the seasons we harvested our food and sold some.  The Sierra Madres offered some metals, but none were found near us and even the government almost forgot about our town".  He then laughed.  "The census did not find us last time, or the time before, but the Bimbo truck brings supplies now and then."  Then he was quiet for a moment, as if remembering, or perhaps trying to remember.  He sipped more of his drink as if noticing me for the first time and then smiled.  His eyes squinted at me and said "Are you listening gringo".

"I am"

"Then let me tell you what happened one hundred years ago...."

"Look around you gringo, the adobe here is old.  But the wood in the broken half of this throw away house, it is older still.  Just over a hundred years ago fourteen of your people" and he said this with some sadness in his voice, but also with anger "came to our village.  We had some of the indians still here, some Yaqui and some Rarmuri and the rest like me, "mixtos".  "Ahhh," he sighed after a pause "still poor, - it is our lot to never know the rest of riches"

I did look around, and yes one half was old rough hewn timbers, the wood had long since rotted in the hot sun and assault from the weather.  It seems it was allowed to crumble slowly, you could see the makings of what was once selves on the wall and the end supports for a counter.  The center looked little better than kindling wood if that.  It could have been a bar at one time.

"These outlaws, they came riding in from the north, well armed.  They had ridden hard, and were glad to be away from the law of your land, while the chaos in our own did nothing to them, so they rode in with the arrogance of men who could take what they would from anyone they desired.  We had seen such men before and we knew to hide our comely women, leaving only the very old, usually they left those alone.

They rode into this bar and took what we had, mostly tortillas, meat, pulque and a little tequila.  So they sit in here as you and I do and wash this desert off their throats.  One enquired of the stones out there and a simple minded doddering old woman repeated the tale of the indians instead of feigning ignorance.  These hard men were like the conquistadores.  They were the takers, the robbers of lands, outlaws and they had long since abandoned God for their own riches.  Their suspicion is the same as all of their kind, Aztec gold.  So in they spoke, and as they rested they decided that the next day they would see what was below.  We did not speak their language and did not know what they planned, the old women tended them as they pulled their saddles into this room and made it their bed for the night.

Morning came and as the sun rose, they rose with it.  Walking out they began removing the stones heaped high.  At first such a thing seemed strange to everyone here, but when it was understood they planned to remove all of the stones panic ensued.  Several of the old ones and even some of the younger children came out and begged them not to remove the stones.  In a final effort would run and throw the rocks back on the pile.  These outlaws looked at them in wonder.

"What in damnation?!?" their leader exclaimed in surprise.  That tall dark one was the hardest of them, like a devil, he had no heart, no mercy and simply pulled his gun and began shooting every villager nearby.  In neither anger nor hatred, but as a simple act of removing minor obstacles.  We are a small town, we had no weapons beyond our pruning knives and machetes.  They had guns and rifles and cared nothing for the lives they ended .  After five lay unmoving upon the earth, everyone else fled the town.  There was no hope or safety here anymore and we abandoned everything and ran to the mountains praying to gods or god to deliver them from what would happen."  I gave a wry look at that, wondering who would die for some rocks.  "You smile gringo, with your nice car and the many luxuries that separate you from the land.  But for us it was as real as our sitting here now."  Upon reflection, we do indeed die for rocks, or land, or country.  Who was I to question another then?

"They worked all of that day, and removed the stones they could and while much remained at dusk, there was enough extracted to expose the large pillar lain upon the bottom grave.  By then it was dusk and the the desert winds had begun to rise.  We get these dark dusty winds in seasons, some call it a "Chocolatero" or "Norte" and it darkens everything with its heavy dust stopping everything when it falls upon our small town.  As it blew the men retreated to this bar, leaving two to guard the grave.

The roar of the wind grew heavy and the dust so thick that even the lanterns inside were almost useless.  Dirt and dust swirled everywhere, when speaking under a kerchief one could feel the grit on one's teeth.  On days and nights like that, one usually simply endured and waited for the winds to die and the dust to settle.  The men settled as such men do while the winds grew louder and began to whistle and moan incessantly, they stared blankly or dozed for even in here the sands built up.  The heightened wind however could not drown out the gunshot and shriek.  To a man they grabbed their arms and ran out with the lanterns to see what had happened.  The indians might have returned, there were even Apache in the area, and one does not put anything past the Apache or the Raramuri (at this the old one smiled silently to himself, as if he were sharing a quiet joke, I didn't get it, at least not then).

They went out and found no one, but then what can you see in the height of such a storm, they looked into the pit itself but it was too dark to see much, though the pillar seemed to have shifted, everything else was obscured to empty shadows of nothingness.  So en mass they returned to the bar, this building (he again looked around and past me as if seeing right through me).  "There behind those boxes is an old window frame and door that was the main entrance" he said.  "They took positions" and he slowly got up cradling his soda in one hand as he slowly shuffled; "here, and here.  To guard, and to watch.  Two more over here in the back" as he walked to where the roof had collapsed and pointed it out.  He wheezed as he walked but it was important for him.  He needed me to know where everyone was.  Then he slowly sat back down, he had expended his energy and breathed hard.  We sometimes forget that age may bring infirmities to others.  He was sick, possibly dying.  I suddenly felt bad for a man I had referred to as "viejo".  He saw the pity in my eyes, and smiled as the eyes crinkled behind those large grey eyebrows.  "No need for your pity gringo.  My life, my choices are my own, they have not all been right, but they are my only possession which I can claim".

His declaration was profound and I think on it sometimes, how we own what we do, and how our choices are what create in the visage staring back to us from some distant future.

He gathered himself and continued.  "Those outlaws heard a voice with a lisp speaking in Spanish, but not our Spanish, no the style was that of an old Castilian type, as if a caballero were here in polite company.  Even in the wind they could hear its sibilent whisper 'como ethoith' and 'bienvenidoth'.  A dry cracking and rasping voice it would break into a mad man's chuckle or soft laughter.  'Heh heh heh, como ethtath... bienvenidoth' the voice would repeat as it blended in and out of the wind and earth.  An almost mocking madness.

These outlaws held tighter to their guns like religious talismans.  Suddenly a man was pulled through the window, before anyone could react, he was gone.  They ran out the front there to see, but saw nothing as the wind and voice continued to mock them.  These men turned to come in when another screamed, disappearing into the swirling dust.  There was no one, they saw nothing.  The outlaws, they pulled away from the doors and windows forming a tighter circle and yet it helped not at all.  A lantern fell and went out and their circle of light grew smaller still.  As the light diminished more were pulled away.  Slowly one by one they were all taken, now and again a shot would be fired but that was the only feeble retaliation.  Even their cold hearted leader began praying to a God he had long since repented of and had forgotten.  But there was no mercy here and he too succumbed.  After some hours only two remained and they stood in the center of the most feeble lights, back to back, guns drawn and hammers cocked...

The next morning, in the light of the new day a large group of Rurami Indians rode into town, perhaps 30 of them.  These are fierce warriors that even the Aztecs feared in their day, and the Mexican government wisely chose to avoid when possible.  They were a great people.  They came with great anger and fear in their eyes.  They saw the scattered rocks, and then entered this bar knowing this to be where the outlaws would stayed.  Unlike we poor people of the puebla this tribe was armed with guns, bows, and knives.  They entered ready for war, but instead saw there against the wall over there (he pointed out the place) the last outlaw, he was the youngest of them, he was no more than perhaps sixteen perhaps seventeen with a shock of blonde hair and blue eyes. Those eyes wide in terror as they kept staring at what wasn't there.  His guns empty, there was a methodical click, click, click, as he continued to pull back and the hammer with his thumb and then pull the trigger.  He stared past the savages at a memory that left him bereft of speech or a even a mind.  Rather than torture, they bound him tightly and left him lying there.  There were other worries to deal with first.  They ran to the pit.

Dirt from the storm piled in places obscuring some details but they could still see the great pillar had been shifted.  Six of their bravest jumped in and shouldered the great pillar back into place.  With great speed they ran to the walls of the tomb and jumped or were pulled out by their fellow tribesmen.  Then with as much haste as possible, all of these men gathered every stone they could, and began refilling the pit.  They continued this all day.  They even ranged further out and brought more stones and piled them over the previous ones heaping the stones even higher than before.  By dusk they had finished and then, like gargoyles squatted on some gothic cathedral they began their vigil.  All held their weapons in the ready, as they sat around that small stone hill in a large circle.  They eyed the rocks with such a mixture of fierceness and terror one was not sure, should a single rock fall, whether they would remain and fight or flee back into the hills.  Words whispered between them "Cijuateteo" was mentioned once or twice as they held their own charms close to them.  All night they stared, tense and in fear.

Dawn came and for the first time they rested and even in those stoic faces one saw relief.  They gathered the bodies of their dead kin for ceremonies and then turned their attention to the young man who was bound.  In the many hours he was restrained, his sanity had returned to him.  Now a new but more mortal fear lay in his face.  They would not follow the norm of their tribe and torture him to the ending of his life.  This boy had been touched by a great spirit, an evil one, but it's power would curse them if they killed that young man.  The leader of this band came to him and said "What your eyes have seen, no man should see.  What your tongue can speak no man must hear".  And with that he held his head down and cut out the eyes of the man and then pulled and severed the tongue.  That poor man had no idea what was said to him then.  To him it was only the mumblings of a dangerous brute and then eternal blindness and pain.  Later he would learn the language and the words would be repeated to him, for he would live but his life was now the darkness and the confines of a village he had barely seen and a terror he had no understanding of.  The rest of his life the images of what was before him would haunt him, even as the women dutifully continued to care for him until he breathed no more.  One not so beautiful crone even took him to her bed.

He lived his life here and is buried in the church yard across the way.  Choices after all, we all make them and we live with their results.

I had finished my lunch and looked at him.  "That is a heck of a story old man, you know you should write...."

For the first time I saw real anger flash his eyes.  He stood erect and said to me.  "Gringo, my words this late in life have no reason to deceive.  They are true!  I know them to be so because that man, that man was my grandfather." he hissed.

I was embarrassed, I had offended in the casual way unthinking people often do.  Presuming my words and the smile of my youth would cover and forgive all sins of disrespect.  "I am sorry old man, you are right to be offended, and I can only ask you to forgive me."

He eyed me in an almost contemptible way and then with resignation said "You are young, foolish, and you will make.... wrong choices"  He let it go at that and said nothing more to me but settled back in his chair.  Some bridges can be built, some can be broken, and some will never span the chasm between us.  I regretted my words.

I paid for my meal and went to the lady of the loncheria.  "Digame senora" I asked "Is the old one cared for?"

"Him?  Sometimes". she said with a shrug.

I gave her the equivalent of 50 dollars in pesos and said "this may help for a while". And I walked out.  As I got into my car, I frowned to myself.  The old man did have blue eyes after all, but then life is full of coincidences, and I left this small village and its large pile of white rocks.

Six years had passed.  In the interim they had found the Templo Mayor and I had risen to the level of Regional Controller and Vice President of Finances for Latin American in a large firm.  I had one of many offices in Polanco in the DF or Distrito Federal the capitol of Mexico, so in my time there I decided to satisfy my curiosity.

I walked into the area where the ruins were still being cleared.  They had excavated them almost to the base that had existed so long ago.  The old man had told me  the entrance was in the Northwest area, and so I hoped to make my way there.  It was closed, the excavations were still going on carefully, but it was a weekend and the archeologists had gone home so no one was allowed there.  I spoke to the security guard and he told me that under no circumstances could anyone enter.  I was familiar with the place and culture by now, perhaps not so arrogant as  I once was, and certainly more appreciative.  I also knew what is required when one wishes to paint outside the lines.  I offered the man a 20 and told him under no uncertain terms would I touch anything and I was merely asking him to accompany me to that portion.  The money would be to simply cover the cost of his time to watch me as well as the ruins.  It was a reasonable request.

We walked around to that area and made small talk about the pollution and weather.  Then as we turned I began scanning the cleared floor or what would be the upper part of the base.  There in the northwest I did indeed see what appeared to be the beginnings of a very narrow opening.  I stared at it for a good two to three minutes wondering at the implications before the guard nudged me to move on.

How does an old man, in a half abandoned village know about a temple entrance buried for almost 400 years?  I don't know.  I would like to find that village again.  The old man is probably just another cross in the church yard by now, and the rocks probably remain unmolested.  I would like to go back, and I would like see what is under that pile of rocks.  I don't care about riches, my riches reside in a wife that loves me (or puts up with me depending on our mutual mood) and children who are now making their "choices" but there is an itch or desire if you will, the need to know things.  I really would like to know.

• But then, would I also regret it?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

My Father, A Veteran

In my youth I existed in a dichotomy. My earlier years were in a city far away from the country I reside in now. I was American in name only having an absentee father from the hills of Appalachia who fought in Asian wars and stood guard in a German outpost. My mother being German, and having fallen for a man who served in that outpost. Honky Tonk blues would fill our German household when he arrived, and when staying with my Oma (Grandmother) it would be classical baroque music such as Wagner. I did not know the difference, I simply called it “music” and enjoyed both (as I still do).

The city of Berlin, which is the place of my birth, holds a special place in my heart. Its vibrance and the embrace of its people to a future are remarkable. I love walking its streets, and nearby villages with ancient walls and homes dating to the Renaissance. A sense of history that makes the young United States seem like an awkward teen at a high school dance (granted a well armed awkward teen that tries to do the right thing). Cobble stone streets and clock towers in the forest along with cloisters and modern malls mix and jumble. One is imbued with a sense of the historic and jarring modern there that escapes many who live here in sunny southern California where history is basically the Dodgers stats with barely a nod to Brooklyn where they started and acquired their name (Trolly Dodgers). Berlin recently celebrated its 750th birthday, that adds some context given that it exceeds the US years by a factor of three.

But for me, perhaps of even greater potency and reflection is that chaotic cauldron called the USA. Immigration, or rather the argument of immigration, is a more recent phenomenon in the many more mature nations of the old world, but here in the USA, it remains as old as our founding (Ben Franklin complained about the over representation of German peoples) and it is an integral part of who we are. We have always embraced and been disturbed by our new neighbors, their crazy music (African slaves brought us the banjo), and to borrow a metaphor from Berlin, at one time the world center of calliopes, a cacophony of languages and foods and ideas brought to disturb the placid waters of our neighborhoods. They came, all of them, from everywhere, sometimes as a trickle, sometimes in waves. My friend Henry, his family left Spain in the 1870s during the upheavals of the Glorious Revolution, they traveled to many countries, most to Brazil, some to other parts of South America and a few to Cuba. Henry’s parents fled Cuba under communist rule and came to America. He recounts to me how Ricky Ricardo used to buy musical instruments from his father’s shop in Havanna. That family now stretches from the Jersey shore to the California Coast, and if they are like Henry, they are musical prodigies who also know how to run a firm. My own Kiser’s can be traced back to the French and Indian Wars and pretty much every war in between then and now. The influx of fresh ideas springs from who we were, combined to who we become. It is perhaps the greatest and most powerful secret of America, the integration of peoples into a nation. Which of course brings me to focus on a smaller area. An area that has produced more than its fair share of people who are willing to die for that nation. It’s green hills, the Trail of the Lonesome Pine, its stories, and its tragedies still whisper to me, even as I fight the California traffic for another meeting, or look distantly at the snows blanketing far off mountains when the smog clears. Its people have often been forgotten, sometimes remembered, but always there. Southwest Virginia, Eastern Kentucky/Tennessee are often remarked to with disdain as “the coal fields”. And what those people do have, …..even as they enter those mines and see the white dust on the walls, and smell that all too familiar smell that miners know better than most, is heart. The overlooked heart that gives fire of our industrial age, a heart that for so long ensured (and continues to ensure) that the lights stay on, the computers purr, and the microwave cooks. It is what keeps the Tesla auto moving (the effete snobs at the local dealership get upset when I call them coal cars).

That area is a contrast. The men leave the beautiful streams and the greenest of rainforests to enter the darkness like Tolkein dwarves to bring out the riches for the world. They prefer not to. You speak to most of my family and they will tell you they prefer a day of deer hunting (which in my youth was considered an excused absence from high school), a day of fishing or even a day of walking in the forests which are ubiquitous in the region. It is these men and women I think of today. They have no desire to leave their green hills, even with the hardship in their lives, they love where they are. It is as deep as the hollows and as inexplicable as foxfire. It dwells in their souls like a hidden lover. The heart of these people love the streams, the hot and humid summer days where the community pool was their gathering spot, or some lonely picnic table on a roadside by White Top, worn, the paint and varnish long since weathered off, and only feet from the laurel bushes and stream where deer, wild turkeys and adventure hide waiting for the next young man to enter. No, they don’t want to leave, their dream is their idyll.

I look at my father’s portrait, he loved the area, so much so he only felt at home there and nowhere else. His fondest memories are of the Virginia Creeper trail, a coal route changed from iron cars that carried power to iron men who walked slowly in the winter of life. 

Like so many lovers who did not return the feeling, the hills can be beautiful but hard. My father’s story illustrates that. At 15 he needed to leave and lying about his age joined the military. For twenty years he let flow his sweat, the heartbeats of his life, and sometimes his blood, risking all for a nation that at times tossed him into the breach as a cheaply as we do expendable printer cartridges today. His is a loyal and royal legacy. His father was a machine gunner in another war, and of course generations before fought and died for causes and country often forgotten in tombstones lost in the thick forests of these hills. I would like to say that my father is unique, but he isn’t. So many he grew up with left and fought, and came back, and left again, and came back. It is said that even Ulysses felt the call of sirens long after his ship had passed the islands of shipwrecks. These men and women too hear it all their lives. It is bitter in some ways, pressing its hurt into their memories, but there is also the most profound sweetness. A beekeepers first harvest of the hives in early summer that sits longingly on the tongue. Yes, it can be like that.

I am sometimes conflicted when writing about my father, he wasn’t the most understanding of men. I was the son he could not understand or mold, I suppose I might be the rebel born of the blood that came from a rebellious region, and unwilling to conform to his world view. When you think on it though, I was perhaps prideful, young and, well, rebellious. My world view did not encompass friends dying and retreating in Korea, blood spilt in the jungles and rivers of Vietnam. His view saw that world, saw it at its worst as he fought in the muddiest and dirtiest places against a people who often cared less about life than he did. He prevailed, that is to say he lived to come home. The forge of those times, like our own forges today, hardened him, and inured him to hardship. He took his pleasures where he could find them, perhaps he might have been too grasping at times, but then he was a prime witness to the shortness of life as those around him fell away, in the mines during his youth, in the mountains and valleys of Korea, the jungles of Vietnam, and the black lung clinics in the Clinch Mountains. 

He’s found his rest though. The poplar are there, the squirrel nests sit out starkly on autumn branches, and the deer in the spring come to chew on the grass. The wind flows over him, sometimes cold and bitter, sometimes heavy with the smell of honeysuckle, and they blow his troubles away so that his body can rest. It is where he was happiest, and it was from where he tried so hard to leave in his youth.

His headstone doesn’t carry much beyond his name, his birth and the day he departed. The granite hardness is silent to his time serving his nation. If you look around you will see many granite headstones like his. Many witnesses testifying mutely to lives of sacrifice, to lives that fought and died for a nation that is also the very definition of freedom. They are vets, they are vets from this small corner of the world called the Appalachians. They loved their families, their traditions, and after all is said and done, the granite that tells no story beyond the date they drew breath and the date that breath left them, that granite silently guards over those who loved this nation.

• 
  

My Opa- Life, Death, Resolution and Love in World War II Germany

Opa

I spent several weeks enjoying time with my family and Germany, getting reacquainted after many years of absence.  Germans tend to range between two forms in their social interactions; they are either loud and boisterous, with arms widespread like an Octoberfest beer on a hot day (non alcoholic for me or perhaps an apfel saft).  There will be garrulous arguments, jokes, double entendres, stories, epic poetry, adventures and whatnot, Valhalla would be jealous.  Or sometimes they were dour and darkly serious seeking to understand  lessons or proverbs from a dismal past when hope seemed lost (some families are very Old Testament that way), even as they soldiered on.  It is then that their voices and words take a more demanding tone as each phrase requires an attention of astute clarity.  A single day conversation can range between the two, especially when life has afforded both the valleys and the peaks, much as it has with my uncles.

We were sitting in the outdoor patio under a palapa or palm roof that my cousin Dirk had built.  Germans love their city of Berlin, but always strive to make their private gardens seem like a place outside the city.  It is a dichotomy I have learned to love and appreciate in them, they are of the city, and yet seek to hearken to a mythos long lost to their generation, so the veneer of wildness will have to do.  Everyone needs a place for their secret gnomes and fantasies of alone in the wilderness, especially in a place like Berlin.  The talks were of the garrulous nature as jokes and stories of the Maur, some tragic but funny.  Or how someone tricked someone else into paying for the crematorium urn (yes that is German humor).  My uncle Detlef spent years rebuilding the roads of West Berlin, and he loved telling of how all three sons, sons of privilege, all made their way into a bombed out city with little left and were part of that era when the baseline was zero and you literally had nowhere to go but up.  So that day they argued, they smoked (as it seems most Germans do), they drank, talked, and drank some more always tossing, lobbing and hurling words to each other.

After a time of my sharing some of my stories, along with theirs, the tone became more somber, it seems the ghosts began to flicker in the edges of their memories.  There arose a darkness in their stories now, not without hope, but a darkness all the same.  It would venture forth and then retreat like some cur of the past seeking leftovers at the table.  Hard memories are like that, we bury them, but cannot exile them from us, they resurrect just to let us know they continue in our minds.  So I ventured a question, one that I sincerely wanted to know, but wasn't sure was my place to ask.  It seemed the time to ask such a question.  I wanted to know of my Grandfather or Opa.  Not the one my grandmother married as a widower, the one I knew and the one buried next to her in the cemetary.  The man I wanted to know was the serious figure in some very old black and white photographs.  Heinz-Karl Schoenicke (no umlauts on this keyboard).  How did my grandfather pass away?  I was told the war killed him, the Russians killed him, but he had died in 1949.  The war was over in '45 and it seemed to me the vague stories and inconsistencies were not "helpful" at least not to me.  Dirk, my cousin and Detlef's son himself had never asked, so he too felt compelled to add his voice when he heard me ask.  My cousin Dirk is a tall lanky man in his late forties.  Blond hair and blue eyes, a somewhat typical German, he was easy with a laugh, though you could tell his life wasn't always convenient to the idea of laughter.  He had done comparatively well in business and then lost it, and was in the process of rebuilding, his wife Julie was sometimes a writer and worked in a bookstore, she remained by his side through the thick and thin, both good people.  In a way I could ask because unlike Dirk, I was nephew, not a son.  I could blithely walk past certain lines and the charity of my ignorance allowed for it.  My son Dirk knew family protocol too well to take such a chance.

Detlef's grey blue eyes flashed at me and while the smile did not leave his face, it stopped below his eyes.  Detlef was always a keen analytical man, even in his youth, he could measure numbers and men.  His only weakness was his first wife, who left him in a miserable state with two young sons and limited means of support.  

"So you wish to know how "my" father died." he said.


"Yes, Onkel Detlef" I replied. "It is important for me to know.  I am not here in this land the way you are.  I am not surrounded by memories like you.  When I speak to my children of who they are and where they come from, part of what I speak of will be about you, and part of it is Opa, your father.

"You did not know him"

"That is a more important reason for you to tell me.  I cannot share what I do not know", and I would not have them forget Germany and the people who had such an influence on their father, especially through you my uncles". 

Detlef is no fool, he knows when he is being handed a line. I can be most diplomatic when it is called for, or audacious if it suits the situation.  He appreciated the audacity of my words, and like a key, a locked door was opened.

"Yes" he said, it is no secret, but what you ask isn't so easy to tell.....

Germany was upon its last legs, the madness that had been exported as war to the rest of the world had made its way back with a vengeance.  Bombs fell like rain leaving craters of thunder, Russians were an innumerable host who remembered Stalingrad and other depredations.  Their mercy would not be felt upon the German volk, 


Oma, my grandmother, was a beauty in her youth.  She won "best legs" in Germany, or so I have been told.  She does bear a certain classic beauty when you look at her photos from the 20's.  I can see how she and my Opa would have eyes for each other.  Their life together at the start was not a difficult one.  Karl-Heinze was a major distributor for one of the oldest and largest beer breweries in Berlin.  Schultheiss Bier had and has been in production for over a century, though now not nearly as large as it once had been.  In his day it was ubiquitous in an industry that was itself ubiquitous among Germans.  In one sense my grandfather was a dashing figure with a strong income, my grandmother a woman of culture and privilege in a progressive and confident Germany.  To Germans, the fairytale is a combination of pragmatic and poetic, in that sense my grandparents held that dream when they married.  They married during the world wide depression and even in that economic chaos escaped the ravishes that impoverished so many.  While politics became an issue of heat for the few, it was not their forte, as it was not so for most Germans unless of course you were a fascist or a communist.  History tells us that overlooking politics sometimes costs a very heavy price.  It certainly did in Germany.

You sometimes have to wonder, as I often do, how a nation that gave us great philosophers, scientists, and in its very short existence a burst of creativity; how such a nation could also descend into a mechanized barbarism that to this day boggles the mind in its impact on humanity.  I see the old Germans around me and how they lovingly play with their grandchildren and great children, and wonder how many of them bear a darkness in their soul too deep and alien to understand.  My uncles were born just before the fruition of such a dark seed and were swept into its growth and ultimately its harvest.

So my Uncle Detlef turned to me.  He and my Uncle Hans were born before  Germany's drive for world control, so they were children of their times, the nationalism, the incredible heights of military success, and the eventual downfall which must always come to nations who over reach in madness.  


"I and Hans were young men, Hans being older went to Hitler youth camps, while I stayed home.  {he cringed a bit at the term, Germans tend to avoid such words, they have learned} What you see as strange to you today was for us a normal thing because it was what we grew up with.  The martial circumstances of our lives, the militarism that pervaded all we did and were, seemed so quaint then, but looking back, I can see now it was almost ridiculous and combined to how horrible things were.  But then it was different.  Much of our time was spent playing out doors and preparing ourselves to be the next soldiers of the fatherland.  My father, your Opa did not approve of this even though he was a party member, but then if you wanted to be successful in Germany, you became a party member.  Part of the gleichshaltung or "bringing into line" program in which everyone would eventually conform to the needs of the state or party.  


So for some years we frolicked like young stags in the forest, the horror of what we as a nation were doing never touched us because as children the horror was something we were ignorant of.  We played and swam in the local canals and lakes, we would bike and take out our boats to fish and imagined many adventures, we loved your westerns then.  This  carrying on changed over time, and yet we still adjusted and adapted even as our world became less than it was.  While we played, Germany began to pay the price of its own adventure.  Armies advanced against us, the skies began to flare at night with beams of light firing into the darkness seeking out the planes that would drop silhouettes whilst thunderclaps meant the collapse of a neighbors building, or ours, our a friends down the street.  A cellar only gave partial safety, more than a few became tombs when neighborhood rescue teams would dig out the collapsed buildings looking for survivors.  Sometimes storms of fire would rise up in buildings and we knew anyone in them would not live.  My father and mother feared for our safety in those storms and their rain of steel, so we moved many of our belongings away from the target that was Berlin into the small town of Pinnow in Mecklenburg stadt.  It had no military value and so we were safe.


Pinnow is a wonderful small town with several lakes around it and only 24 miles from the Baltic.  We would go to the ocean on warm summer days and sit on a rock (the rock is still there) just a bit away from shore.  All of us have had our pictures on that rock, and last year when we went to the Baltic we saw that same rock to this day, but we are too old to swim to it now (he, laughed at that), and my therapies do not lend themselves to me being out in the ocean.  Though drowning I think would not be unpleasant, certainly it is much softer than cancer.... (at this my Aunt Rita slapped him and said  "Hur auf")


Happy times in our youth became more rare as the war progressed and what was once glad tidings in the news became scarce as censors would make stories of retreats and defeats into victories.  My father taught us how to see through the censorship.  We no longer heard of the capture of cities or the increase of territory, it became more of a game to understand what was actually going on.  If we lost territory the censors would speak of the many enemy dead enemies we left on the field.  You know when you are losing, landmarks are not mentioned and only the fierce bravery of the men who fought are highlighted."


At this my uncle Detlef took a long slow breath.  he appeared older then than ever before.  War I suppose, even for resilient young boys creates a heaviness in life that perhaps those of us who have never been in such a zone cannot comprehend easily.  It has been 70 years since the conflicts end and yet it was still there for him, every memory....


"So a stratagem when the war started, used by Germany, was to drive civilians before the military advance in order to create confusion and stop reinforcements from getting to the front quickly by clogging roads with refugees.  It was also bad press and created panic.  Hitler gave the order that no one was to leave their homes when the Russians came.  We were told to stay and fight.  But our nation was bled dry by our war, we had almost no one to stay and fight but children and old men and women.  Father had a defect in his right eye and so could not see well. We as a "volk" had paid for our ventures and unlike some of the nations we faced, did not have such a deep well of blood to draw from.  Few were left to 'stay and fight'.


We remained in place as the Russians advanced as a result of state police watching to ensure no one left their home, or packed their belongings.  Travel documents were held back or denied and only special members were allowed to travel.  On clear sunny days with blue skies we could sometimes hear In the distance the thunder of guns that carried over the miles.  Everyone knew it was the last remnants of our once vaunted army being worn down to a thin tapestry.  My parents knew the end would come soon and there was no escape from it, we would have to weather it.  Our nation or our land would fall to our bitterest enemy.  I was young and wasn't sure what that meant.  But now that I am old and I have my children here and Rita, I can imagine the despair that would be in my heart.


When that day came it was slow and then suddenly rapid.  First you saw the local secret police no longer making their rounds.  My father would go to get travel documents, only to be rejected every day.  On that morning, the offices were closed in the nearby town.  You saw military command vehicles in the distance moving, and then the soldiers later.  A few first, some in orderly ranks, but that too broke down and soon you had many milling through the grounds over fences and fields.  Their faces were worn and scared, their clothing disheveled dirty, and torn, and they were young, almost as young as we were.  Their eyes stared toward Berlin and you knew that the fight they had just left would be there for them again.  My father pulled a small tractor truck out from behind the house.  He turned to our mother and said "Stop for no one, do not stop for the German soldiers, they will take it from you, the Russians are behind them and you will be overtaken on foot.  You must get the children to Berlin, we will not be so isolated there and perhaps we can hide. I will come with our possession (and these were all of our earthly belongings, our building in Berlin had been thoroughly destroyed in the bombings).  Then as she started the diesel vehicle, he ran into the house and came out bearing a shotgun with a bag of shells.  'Take this', he said. 'Protect the children'.  There were no tears in his eyes, nor in my mothers.  Just determination that this had to be done.  This is how I know they were brave.  The truck started and we made our way.  I remember looking back down the dirt road, my father stared us for a moment, and then turned away to our house.  Our mother did not look back.  

I was finally able to get some clarification from my uncles.  I owe their wives flowers though.  Detlef doesn't need the stress, and Hans is in his eighties too.  But I had to know.

Johanna Schoenicke; her first name is the name my wife and I gave to our oldest daughter.  It is one thing to intellectually know that she had lived through hard times.  It is another to see her confront the most difficult of situations and fall back to that most basic of a mothers instinct.  Detlef went on speaking... 

"The road was unpaved and our jumbling vehicle splashed from mud hole to ribbed eroded streets.  Rains came and went a great deal at that time of the year.  The irony is that it was a German spring, a beginning when in fact the dark skies and the flashing of distant artillery brought only an end.  At first there were a few people here and there walking.  Refugees escaping the oncoming wave of Russians, some soldiers, many displaced or homeless.  The soldiers were the saddest.  They were boys now, and old men.  I remember thinking I might have to be with them, Hans looked stern and he was trying very hard to be brave.  He knew that when we returned to Berlin, he would be one of those boys, and that his will be the last line in a war already lost.  Rain fell upon us for we had no roof on our old Olympia car, that canvas has been torn away and the war required all resources at the front, so we were wet, but we could not stop, things were too serious to worry about being wet.  My mother knew this was now a race, and even if we arrived first, the prize would only be a chance at survival, nothing more.  It was that determination or perhaps fear that kept her moving forward.  There had been stories of how the Germans treated those they conquered in the East, she did not believe they would be any more merciful to Germans.  The few possessions we had with us were under a small bit of tarp between we boys, which Hans and I held down, it seemed the jumbling and jostling would throw us and the package out of the car at times.  I wish I could say we made rapid time, but it was impossible to go very fast.  Sometimes a bridge would be out or a pit from a bomb that had yet to be filled would block us, and we would have to drive down into a ditch or upon a field and find a path around the other-side or even another bridge.  Some lucky individuals had DKW motorcycles that allowed them to travel more freely through the fields, these were wonderful motorcycles for the joy of riding, there was no joy in the faces of those that passed us.  Everyone knew what was coming.  I was surprised to see not a few of those motos going through the fields around us, most had been confiscated for the war effort.  We were so grateful to have our own car which my father kept hidden behind the house under a makeshift lean to.  Everyone had their "things" which they hid, it is just what you did, even if you were a "gute deutche".  

On the main road there were many soldiers, most did not seem attached to any unit and milled forward in the general direction of Berlin.  I am not sure what the apocalypse will look like.  Religion is fine for stories (no offense junge) but if there is one, I imagine I have seen it with the darkened skies and the faces of fear knowing that mercy had been used up and now was the time of judgement.  All pretense or putting things off was gone.  Yes, that was what it felt like.  Every time we heard a plane when the sky was clear, we looked up in fear.  We were mixed with soldiers now and soldiers were targets, even disorganized ones.  The rain then was a blessing in disguise because it made it harder for planes to target us.

Halfway to Berlin was when my mother was most tested.  A group of soldiers both old and very young were at a cross road and they had it blocked.  Mother drove the vehicle forward but was forced to slow for the makeshift barricade..  As the day had waned people became more desperate and some rode upon our bumper or running boards for a moment until the jolt or pitch of the car into a depression threw them off.   Most of our efforts were made in keeping our much younger Volka and our possessions in the vehicle.  The crowd at the cross roads did not move and Oma slowed, as the desperation of others for a vehicle had risen to a peak.  Suddenly, spontaneously they began jumping on the sideboard and reaching in for the steering wheel.  One was on the hood, and too held on to the rim of the roof of the car.  Both Hans and I shouted at them and all seemed lost.  We had never seen Oma fire a rifle before.  And had rarely seen a gun at all.  The restrictions in Germany were harsh for unauthorized gun ownership.  Only through a license can one buy a gun, and then another license to use the gun and a third for ammunition.  I am not sure if our father had any license at all, so this remained hidden almost as a  secret family heirloom.  Ours was an old Staur 16 guage shotgun with shells for fowling.  My grandmother must have known how to use it because in one quick move she pulled the double barreled weapon from the floorboard and as she pulled it forward her thumb pulled back on one of the hammers.  Her finger must have come around the trigger and she fired full into the heavy nettle coat of the soldier on her running board.  He flew backwards as she stepped heavily on the gas pushing or running over both obstructions and the soldiers in front.  I cannot remember for sure.  She swung the rifle around and fired into the air.  The shock was enough to make the soldiers jump off as she shifted the gear and increased the speed, heedless of who was in front.  

She looked at Hans and for the first time I saw her with tears in her eyes, and panic, and sadness, she shouted "Hans put two more shells in the gun... now!".  I think she was shouting to protect herself from falling apart and simply giving up.  We thought she was angry with us then, but in later years I have come to understand that she was so afraid.  Afraid of what she had done, but more afraid for her husband who was left behind and more afraid for us, her children.  When all is done, children are all you have left.  We were lucky I think.  Things could have been much worse, we could have been left on the road, we could have been exposed when the Russians came, I fear what might have happened to our mother if she had been on those roads.  There were no more obstructions or soldiers at cross roads.  When we came to Berlin, no one asked to see our papers as everyone began manning what was left of the defenses.  It was dark as we drove around debris into a battered and ruined city that was Berlin.  We could hear the distant artillery fire, even now it seems almost dreamlike or perhaps a nightmare.  Spires of stone with empty windows and no floors pled with the darkness of the night.  No one heard or saw through the dust and smoke of the night.

My father, your Opa, pulled the bus from his neighbors barn.  He quickly loaded the last of our possessions on board and then went to see our neighbor.  The old man had been a family friend from Berlin and they were very close.  He knew the man was terribly ill but did not want to leave.  This home had been in his family for years.  His wife had died bearing their only son and his son had died in the war.  Maybe we were the only family he had left.  He was old before his time, worn down by the years, and he was dying.  I am not sure what it was, perhaps like me he had cancer, or something else.  But with a war and devastation everywhere, doctors and medicine were not so easy to find.  If you became ill, you either cured yourself or you went to the next life.  I think he was ready to go.

He lay there in his bed, breathing shallowly.  A few pictures of his wife and child were on the shelf with books, but little else besides the chair. in the living room.  He looked at my father and said "I am dying, stay with me please so I do not die alone."  My father could not refuse.  He consoled himself that his wife and children were well on their way to Berlin, he could stay for a short period.  His friend lingered, the life of even the weakest candle tries to remain lit long after the fuel is gone.  He would fade in and out, mumbling and perhaps calling to family while my father sat by him.  The Russians were coming closer, my father could tell because the front had grown quieter.  When there is no fighting, there is only advance, so the silence is perhaps more fearful than the noise.  The afternoon sunwas setting low as his friend passed slowly slipped away.  My father determined that the next passing he would have to leave.  As it was, his friend breathed his last with my father next to him.  With a sigh my father rose and turned to leave.  There in the front doorway of the living room past the anteroom was a Russian soldier with a rifle trained upon him.  The man fired and hit my father in the chest and he fell over his friend.

Some hours later he awoke on the floor.  There was blood on his chest and he coughed some up as he slowly raised himself from the floor.  His boots were gone, and when he looked outside, he saw his truck was also no longer there.  The pain in his chest was horrible and he could not breath deeply for the bullet lodged there.  He slowly picked himself up and began what was to him the most hopeless of journeys.  He had to get to his wife and children, and so he began;  120 miles, with a bullet in his lungs and the Russians between him and his family.

Final

"My mother came to what was left of our bombed out home in Berlin.  We had three walls, a cellar and little else, it was all dust and piles of brick and while it was not a burned out hulk, it was not very intact either.  The back wall remained exposed to the inner garden while the front facade to the street remained intact (barely).  Hans my older brother went to report to his Hitler Youth group, all of the young boys had to report for the defense of the city, he was all of 14 and old enough to die for the Fatherland, I was but 11 and still felt I should go, but my mother forbade it.  We were raised to put society or the state above ourselves.  When we were young the state taught us what was right and what was wrong, today I know this is wrong, faith in an institution of the state is too full of the holes, of greed and control.  But when you are a desperate nation and a man, even a crazed one offers hope, you tend to follow.  Hans went away and Oma busied herself removing the broken glass and bricks in order to create a living space for us.  She found some chairs that had not been destroyed and a table, candles came from the car along with pots and pans.  She then saw to our little sister, your mother who was only two and had Volka and me continue with the cleaning.  We emptied the car of the last of the our possessions, some clothes, a box of family photos.  I remember finding some things we could use, some blankets under the rubble of stones that we carefully removed and piled near the fallen forth wall.  My mother gave a prayer to God for our father for we did not know where he was and when he would come.  He should have been just an hour or two behind us but we weren't sure.

My father moved slowly over the fields.  He told me he often lost consciousness as he walked.  People who saw him seemed to turn away and it wasn't surprising.  He saw himself in a still ditch and saw he had blood on his face around his mouth, clotted and hard, his chest had blood dried upon the white shirt.  His normally well coiffed hair was bedraggled and his eyes sunken.  He looked as if he were walking death.  Sometimes he would chew on the food he carried very slowly since every movement hurt or drink some of the water from a flask he carried and would refill when he saw clean water.  In a normal day one could make a brisk walk from Berlin to Pinnow or back in a few days.  His shuffle would take much more time.  The roads were clearer now than when my mother had left.  The Russians had rounded up anyone that was military.  They had also rounded up the refugees and taken some of them, women mostly.  It is sad, but we know why they did this.  The thought did not occur to my father, he only knew as he walked that very few people were around and since the path for walking was not generally on the main roads but fields, he was not noticed.  Besides, everyone's attention was focused on Berlin.  The city was the prize and it would fall.

A fever had developed as my father walked.  He could feel it growing and sometimes would become delirious as he walked, he imagined wolves were trailing him once and woke with the thought of and animals jaws clamping on him. Another time in a panic he awoke in a field at night not knowing where he was or how far he might have traveled. The uncontrollable shivering fits would come on as muscles attempted to instinctively warm him but also made him cough up blood.  Even in the hot spring sun he continued to shiver as he walked.  The shivering and fever would come, and break, and then it would come back again.  He could feel it slowing him down and sapping his strength.  'Please dear God' he pled 'is this how I am to die, without even knowing if my family is safe?  Or alive? ' It was family that kept him moving forward, it was the thought of his wife alone in the world, his sons, and his only daughter left to the ravishes of this time.  Family and the shear will to live was enough to maintain his life, nothing more could explain it.  He would walk mostly at night, and rest during the day.  A shed or a barn would be his shelter, once a farmer gave him some food and aspirin in pity, but then hid.  It would not be good to draw attention to ones self helping other Germans in these times, not with Russians and worse all about.  The farmer was kind as he could be in these times and helped clean my father's face as the growth of the beard grew thicker and the face underneath became thinner.  My father could not remember the name, but remembered the face, it was one of sadness.  The man thought for sure he would die but helped him anyway.  

The dead lay were they fell and one could hear their locations by the incessant buzzing of flies around the corpses.  My father forced himself to stop and look or rather scavenge, he found a coat, for the one he lost, He even found a tin of food and can opener, but his hands trembled too much to open it, so he kept it in his pocket.  He laughed at that.  Could he starve with food in his pocket?  Is fate so humorous?  At one point the fever came on strongly and he passed out in a field thick with brush.  I think he might have died, except a strong spring rain came and helped break the fever and the bushes stopped him from getting too exposed while he lay there.  He awoke wet but felt strangely better.  Picking himself up he continued forward.

By now the Russians had begun their artillery barrage of the center of Berlin.  There were no more defensive regiments left in Berlin.  The army had long been broken and now it was little more than Volkstrum (or Peoples Army) and the Hitler Youth in broken formations dealing in some street fighting.  My brother Hans went to his patrol.  A day later he was back and most harsh in his tears.  And was silent and angry for an entire day.  Earlier he had met with his group leader and they were given guns, Hans however was given a Panzerfaust, a type of anti tank weapons that fired a projectile into a tank, in theory they had all been taught how to use these things.  There were two old men with the five boys and they were told to prepare to defend a street from the Russians.  These Russians though, they were the ones who  had survived the deprivations of Stalingrad, the starvation that occurred (and even cannibalism), fighting off the German military machine in some horrible death spiral (my Onkel used the word "dance").  They were much stronger, more battle hardened than old men and boys who had never experienced death and fighting on the front., whereas these boys played army, and the old men had not seen a fight since 1914 if even then.  It was a fools errand and suicide, it seemed the whole country had committed suicide.  While the old men were scared, the children themselves were ready to pee in their pants, as Hans told it.  Terror to them were the Russians that their mothers at one time warned them would come for them.  In earlier years it was merely a distant threat if one did not do their chores or go to sleep.  The idea that the Russians might take you, but no one was really worried then.  Those distant scary monster though were now at their doorstep and prepared to kill their families.  Hans said they set up formation and waited.  He was above the street on what was left of a third floor landing lying flat.  He would fire upon the tank from the top where the armor was thinnest.  The other boys and old men would be below creating a cross fire. Such is the classic strategy in the military, and yet theory and reality rarely coincide in such things.  No tank came but men; men who moved cautiously in skirmish lines with quick eyes and automatic weapons.  Those friends on the street below only had single shot bolt action rifles except Hans who had the Panzerfaust.  But that weapon was useless and he could only watch helplessly from the landing as his friends and the old men were cut down with almost casual ease.  As far as I know this was Han's first exposure to death by violence and I think there was nothing heroic about it.  He could not fight because he had nothing to fight with, he could only watch.  His boyhood companions all became corpses before his eyes.  He could only watch, and remain quiet.  Children often think they can live forever, but only until they meet the reality of death.  Hans then knew that his life was held by the thinnest thread, that at any time it could be cut.  He knew to remain quiet."

Detlef laughed then and wiped a tear.  "And now he is in his 80s.  I think perhaps he should not be here, but he is."

"When the soldiers had moved on around the corner of the street, and when other soldiers had passed, he shimmied or climbed down the landing, he left the Panzerfaust on the landing, it and he were now a useless part of the defense of Berlin, it was time to go home.  The city had fallen.

The relief your Oma felt when Hans returned was in her face as she kissed her brave oldest son.  Hans still felt angry, he was angry because he realized that he could do nothing, and probably was glad that he still lived, or guilty.  We haven't spoke of it in many years. 

Berlin had fallen and the Russians were everywhere.  But it was worse than occupation.  Germany had been a conqueror and its conquests were without pity and without remorse.  The battles fought were fierce and while we had the industry and the technology, the Russians soon matched us and had many many more men. When they came upon us, they showed us the same mercy we showed them.  Soldiers were shot since capture was a waste of time.  Many of the Russian soldiers knew little of the technology beyond the weapons they fired and killed with.  They would wash their potatoes in toilets because such things were unknown to them.  Perhaps the worst though was dragging away women and shooting the children if there was protest.  Only the very old were safe, and sometimes not even then.  Oma smudged her face and tried very much to look like an old crone in case they came through the door.  She would send me out to get things but hid herself as much as possible.  As the days passed, we realized that our father was probably dead and we as an occupied city would find very little mercy at the hands of our conquerors.  We just weren't sure what would happen.

At the same time my father was traveling closer, and while the fever broke, he was still weak, finding some things to eat sometimes from the dead, sometimes from other places. A cough began and that almost killed him.  Each shuddering brought pain to him as he moved.  He told us later he would alternate between pleading with God and being angry with God for putting this upon him.  He would pass out on the road and awake, get his bearings and then continue walking.  He passed around villages because he was afraid a road block would put him in a prison and then he would never see us again.  It seemed a routine of walking, passing out, eating what little he had, and walking.  He said he swore at God, and then begged for His help.  It was like his will was all that was left, and while he spoke with God, and felt God didn't answer, he still needed to talk.  He begged that the family would be safe, even as he kept his head up and moved.  Progress was made, but then he came to an obstacle that he simply could not get around.

There was only one bridge across the canal at Oranienberg and it had Russian military guarding it.  He realized that he did not have the strength to cross the canal by swimming as he hid among the trees.  He would drown, so close to Berlin only 30 KM from home (18 miles) and yet this would stop him and they would take him far from his family.  'Please' he begged to God.  'Help me go home.'  Only silence came back to him.  There was nothing left for him and his shallow breath with the blood on his chest and red sputum dribbling from his chin.  He had nothing more to give and in despair with a final gulp, he passed out hoping to die.

Detlef looked at me then.  "Your generation may never know such hardship, but there are people in the world that do, it is when there is nothing left that you know you are truly broken, when hope ceases and the bitterness of this life lays over you like a blanket that suffocates you.  His eyes grew thin and flint hard.  That is when you know what the end is like.  Oma had no food for us, but if she went out, there is a good chance Russian groups would find her and have their way with her, but we children needed food.  Hans and I went out to find potatoes in a bombed store, we dug through the rubble and found scraps that had been thrown away.  She needed heat, so we went out along the rail lines to seek coal that might have been dropped from the rail car, but that had already been scoured by others, so we would go to bombed out buildings ready to collapse and dig for the foodstuffs and into old furnaces looking for coal.  Sometimes part of the building would collapse while we were in side.  Sometimes we were shot at, and you never knew when a bullet or accident would find you.    There was little in the way of hope and we presumed that this would be our lives from now on.  There was no reason to believe in mercy or hope.  My father was dead and we were left alone with nothing.  That is how and what we thought.

My father woke up, but not where he had collapsed.  He was in a pit or a trench.  As he slowly rolled over he saw a dead face staring at him.  Then he noticed the flies on his face and flying into his mouth and nostrils.  Then he saw legs and arms and bodies all about him.  He thought perhaps he was dead, but as his mind cleared he realized he was not.  But everyone around him was.  Piles of the dead.  It seems the Russians had begun to impose a conquerors discipline, or maybe self preservation.  Units went about gathering up the dead, knowing that to leave them out and rotting would invite disease that could devastate them as well as the conquered enemy.  It was time to clean the mess.  They came across my father, and his breathing was so shallow and his face so dead that they assumed he was one of the many many bodies they had to clean from the land.  They dropped him in a pit with several others, in fact he was one of the last thrown on that day.  The dust of lime was on him and the bodies of the dead and they would probably soon fill in the grave for their makeshift burial, but as luck would have it, not until the next morning.  So in the night, like a ghoul he dragged himself over dead bodies to the shallow end of the pit and pulled himself out.  He did not recognize where he was, he could be miles away and he despaired again.  It was dark and he could see nothing nearby.  Camp lights were down the field, and trees stood beside him  and to his back, he cleared his mind and thought again.  'Where am I?' As he stumbled and his eyes adjusted he saw a blanket which he put over himself and from it fell a half eaten onion and turnips.  Manna from heaven could not be more sweet for him.  Slowly he chewed on the old onion, it was a bit rancid but the sustenance was needed,  then slowly he gnawed upon the turnips, swallowing the pieces in a slow manner so as not to increase the pain in his chest.  The pain in his lungs seemed a constant companion and every hard move he made seemed to cause a sharpness.  Now the early predawn light was making itself known to the world.

And with that light he realized where he was, near Berkenverder, they had taken him over the canal to bury him on the side closest to his family.  He was only 12 miles away, a brisk walk when he was healthy, a dangerous long walk now, but still much closer.  And with renewed strength he began to make his way through the rubble of the city.

The city had settled somewhat as the Russians imposed order, even their own soldiers were now being disciplined and while fear still pervaded, it was taken over by the need to survive as people began seeking to rebuild.  My mother was in the back room preparing food for us when there was a knock at the door.  Hans grabbed the shotgun as my mother moved over to a corner ready to run, she knew she would be caught, but it was better to be far from the children when it occurred.  She told Hans to hide the gun and had me open the door.  There before us stood the ghost that was once my father.  Your Oma was in tears as we all where, he was hardly recognizable but he was there and we knew him.  We ran to hug and kiss him when he collapsed, and it was then we saw the blood on his chest.  Mother told Hans to go find a neighbor who was a physicians assistant and tell him to bring tools, and then with tears in her eyes, she took some of the water we had and began cleaning him.  

A short time later the assistant came by, led by Hans and he saw my father, and the clotted hole over the lung. 'Perhaps we should keep it in there, I am not sure'.  If it moves it could cause more problems, but if we dig it out, it could kill him too.  I am not a doctor and I do not think....'  My mother said with finality 'Remove it', but do so in two days.'  So for two days she fed him soup and they talked and whispered, and talked a bit more.  Germans had begun leaving their hiding places and had started cleaning the many many bricks in the city in order to use them to rebuild.  One could hear the clicking all day long as Hans and I went out and did the same.  We would hire ourselves out for barter with food for something to bring back.  While we were never full, and always hungry, we at least felt we might not starve.  The assistant found a doctor who would come, but there was no anesthesia to be had.  I do not think that it was so hard for my father to lose consciousness, he was very weak.  The doctor dug out the bullet and then placed a bandage and said he should be better.  He asked for nothing, and smiled at us and then left.  I never knew his name.  Sometimes in the most bitter pits, one can find humanity.

The other allies had moved in, and we were grateful for the French and the Americans who were more efficient without the viciousness of the Russians.  My mother found someone who had an intact kitchen and took over the first floor creating a tavern that served beer and food.  My father remained weak for a month and while he improved and his spirits were better, he did not seem his old self.  He had lost his hair in the ordeal and he looked much older than before.  As the months passed his frail body gained little weight but he helped where he could.  My brothers and I all worked cleaning bricks and laying them.  We began apprenticing to be brick layers, we had plenty of practice in a city that had few bricks left in the right place, and many bricks to repair.  We learned to barter for everything since there was little to no money to be had that wasn't worthless.  

My mother was a sharp business woman, she knew how to drive a hard bargain, and soon had a thriving restaurant.  As many as two hundred people could pass through in a night, and even if we came from working all day, we were expected to help and clean at night.  It was a favorite of American soldiers.  Those who occupied the city at first were hard fighters but well disciplined and they were generous.  We gladly exchanged our cooking for the food they brought, or the cigarettes we used as barter, or the chocolates.  We would have loved to eat those chocolates but dared not.  Out mother would not hear of wasting chocolates for the pleasure of a small snack.  Better to exchange it for something better and more nutritious.  Flour to make bread, or better yet, real butter, or spices, or leaven.  She used my fathers contacts to arrange to have beer brought to the pub and as we the economy improved we slowly moved from a barter to a cash economy.

Later American soldiers however were not so well disciplined.  My mother saw how American soldiers would use their rations to barter with German women for sex in the restaurant.  Other Germans who saw this were also dismayed.  So she finally made the restaurant off limits to American soldiers.  The next week someone broke all of the windows in the pub.  A different type of solider."

"And what of Opa?" I asked my uncle.  He caught himself for a moment and looked sad.

In 1946 he wasn't stronger and the doctor diagnosed him with tuerculosis.  At that point we were all tested, but found to be negative.  We all  knew he was dying.  The Americans had just developed a cure, but the cure was limited to soldiers of the American forces and it was harder to find than penicillian.  All of my mothers profits went to make black market purchases to fight the tuberculosis.  Mercury, even chemotherapy, but nothing helped.  When some streptomycin was finally made available, it was too late to do much good in 48.  Our father was isolated from us.  He could no longer touch us or reach out.  We were reduced to staring at him through a glass partition as he slowly withered before our eyes.  He would smile from his bed and wave and he even seemed grateful.  It was a far cry from who he was.  But from somethings you simply don't recover.  And so his life ended.  I think he was all of 40 kilos when he died."

I think then my uncle shuddered a moment and closed his eyes.  "Rita, can you take me up to my room.  I am very tired, and suddenly very old".  We all stood as he did, his wife helped him back into the house, the cancer treatments did tire him more than we realized.  We sat there for a few moments saying nothing.  A window to a not so distant past had been opened for us, and we saw a glimpse of what had once been.  A part of what it meant to be in the Schoenicke family.


Epilogue:

I have had to think on this a bit.  Germans, as a people hold a collective guilt.  On a macro basis there is no denying the horror and blood brought forth upon the world.  It wasn't merely the sheer numbers which on their own are bad enough (though not the worst).  It was, I think, the impersonal nature of death in which many Germans had finally been past feeling for their fellow man.  That their humanity had been somehow set aside and their victims were reduced to non human chattel to be destroyed.  The means was as heartless as the formula for a chemical reaction.  No pity, no mercy, merely the snuffing out of life and lives.  Whether Germany paid in full measure or not, with its incarceration for generations, with the death of its armies of youth, is in no way quantifiable and many will tell you that the debt can never be fully paid.  I tend to agree.  Such things cannot be paid by us in this life since we do not know the genius or saint that might have arisen from the six million victims.  My perspective in understanding this is more to understand the tragedy and hope of a very personal nature.  We are, all of us, swept into the tides and eddies of history.  We are often left with little to make sense in a world beyond our ken.  When we wish to impose order, we are made to look foolish and not wise and it is often the most foolish of ideas, the love of family, the will or desire to be with those we hold most precious, that makes us seem wise.

A cynic will tell you that my Opa was a man cruelly dealt with.  That he lost all and his prayers were the feverish mumblings of a man whose very life was slipping away from him.  It is true, the wound and subsequent journey most probably killed him, and not quickly either.  The pain of a slow death from a man who outwardly sought to hurt no one, is itself tragic and dark.  A man of faith will say my Opa's greatest prayers were answered.  He lived to see his family, to know they were safe.  To know that his beloved wife had survived and that they would move forward in a world that was going to be better than the world that killed him.  I was never much of a nihilist, though sometimes I feel the part.  I think God did hear him, and while God allows us the choice as to how we treat each other, he tempers our freedom with His mercy.  The words of my uncle reflecting on the loss of my grandfather will not be lost in the wind now.  History, my history has spoken and another generation will know the ghosts for the past.  Now no one will claim this as holy writ, but it is a passage in the book of life.  I am sad from what I have learned, but my heart is gladdened by what will soon be a rising sun this morning.  I look to my beautiful wife sleeping next to me and wonder if my devotion to her could possibly equal that of such a man.  I want it to. His DNA resides in me and I too am part of the Schoenicke family.