A big dog Happy Birthday to John Mayall, and if you don't know who he is you should. His musical influence spans generations and genres. Good God Awmighty, the Blues Breakers are legendary. His album "Road Dogs" (2005) is a classic. John turns 78 today, Nov. 29, and still rides the tour bus. He physically wore out in 2008, said the "retirement" word, and then came back with another tour in 2010. How can this guy not be the hero to all Road Dogs?
In Road Dog style, the music dedicated to him today on the office iTune is his.
BUT, the finale set for this evening won't be his. They'll be in his honor by other old dogs, Elton John and Leon Russell just did their future-classic album, The Unon and the song for John Mayall, the rest of the dogs out there will be "Never Too Old". Follow that one up with Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias singing "To All The Girls I've Loved Before"; and you've got a Road Dog birthday.
Happy Birthday John, you've influenced more than you know.
.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
The Dog Returns for Veterans Day
It's Veteran's Day... the big news is people "stranded" on a luxury cruise ship being forced to eat Spam with their free alcohol. Not having ice is apparently a major hardship. In other news, Marines of the 3/5 are pinned down in Afghanistan and I'm pretty sure they're worried about those folks on the ship with the smelly toilets.
Anyway, enough sarcasm Dog, get to the point. It's Veterans Day and people around the country give their token "thank yous" and wonder how to treat these dogs of war. To answer that question, I give you the following definition of Vietnam Veterans. If you, or someone you know, is a veteran of another "conflict", all you have to do is change the enviornment adjectives to get to the root definition.
In 1996, a college student asked "What is a Vietnam Veteran?" Following is the answer written by Dan Mouser. It is the truth.
Vietnam veterans are men and women. We are dead or alive, whole or maimed, sane or haunted. We grew from our experiences or we were destroyed by them or we struggle to find some place in between. We lived through hell or we had a pleasant, if scary, adventure. We were Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, Red Cross, and civilians of all sorts. Some of us enlisted to fight for God and Country, and some were drafted. Some were gung-ho, and some went kicking and screaming.
Like veterans of all wars, we lived a tad bit -- or a great bit -- closer to death than most people like to think about. If Vietnam vets differ from others, perhaps it is primarily in the fact that many of us never saw the enemy or recorgnized him or her. We heard gunfire and mortar fire but rarely looked into enemy eyes. Those who did, like folks who encounter close combat anywhere and anytime, are often haunted for life by those eyes, those sounds, those electric fears that ran between ourselves, our enemies, and the likelihood of death for one of us. Or we get hard, calloused, tough. All in a days' work. Life's a bitch and then you die. But most of us remember and we get twitchy, worried, sad.
We are crazies dressed in camo, wide-eyed, wary, homeless and drunk. We are Brooks Brothers suits wearers, doing deals downtown. We are housewives, grandmothers, and church deacons. We are college professors engaged in the rational pursuit of the truth about the history or politics or culture of the Vietnam experience. And we are sleepless. Often sleepless.
We pushed paper; we pushed shovels. We drove jeeps, operated bulldozers, built bridges; we toted machine guns through dense brush, deep paddy and thorn scrub. We lived on buffalo milk, fish heads and rice. Or C-rations. Or steaks and Budweiser. We did our time in high mountains drenched by endless monsoon rains or on the dry plains or on muddy rivers or at the most beautiful beaches in the world.
We wore berets, bandanas, flop hats, and steel pots. Flak jackets, canvas, rash and rot. We ate cloroquine and got malaria anyway. We got shots constantly but have diseases nobody can diagnose. We spent our nights on cots or shivering in foxholes filled with waist high water or lying still on cold, wet ground, our eyes imagining Charlie behind every bamboo blade. Or we slept in hotel beds in Saigon or barracks in Thailand or in cramped ship berths at sea.
We feared we would die or we feared we would kill. We simply feared, and often we still do. We hate the war or believe it was the best thing that ever happened to us. We blame Uncle Sam or Uncle Ho and their minions and secretaries and apologists for every wart or cough or tick of an eye. We wonder if Agent Orange got us.
Mostly -- and I believe this with all my heart -- mostly, we wish we had not been so alone. Some of us went with units; but many, probably most oof us, were civilians one day, jerked out of "the world", shaved, barked at, insulted, humiliated, de-egoized and taught to kill, to fix radios, to drive trucks. We went, put in our time, and were equally ungraciously plucked out of the morass and placed back in the real world. But now we smoked dope, shot skag, or drank heavily. Our wives or husbands seemed distant and strange. Our friends wanted to know if we shot anybody.
And life went on, had been going on, as if we hadn't been there, as if Vietnam was a topic of political conversatioin or college protest or news copy, not a matter of life and death for tens of thousands.
Vietnam vets are people just like you. We served our country, proudly or reluctantly or ambivalently. What makes us different -- what makes us Vietnam vets -- is something we understand, but we are afraid nobody else will. But we appreciate you asking.
Vietnam veterans are white, black, beige, and shades of gray; but in comparison with our numbers in the "real world", we were more likely black. Our ancestors came from Africa, from Europe, and China. Or they crossed the Bering Sea Land Bridge in the last Ice Age and formed the nations of American Indians, built pyramids in Mexico, or farmed acres of corn on the banks of Chesapeake Bay. We had names like Rodriguez and Stein and Smith and Kowalski. We were Americans, Australians, Canadians, and Koreans; most Vietnam veterans are Vietnamese.
We were farmers, students, mechanics, steelworkers, nurses, and priests when the call came that changed us all forever. We had dreams and plans, and they all had to change...or wait. We were daughters and sons, lovers and poets, beatniks and philosophers, convicts and lawyers. We were rich and poor, but mostly poor. We were educated or not, mostly not. We grew up in slums, in shacks, in duplexes, and bungalows and houseboats and hooches and ranches. We were cowards and heroes. Sometimes we were cowards one moment and heroes the next.
Many of us have never seen Vietnam. We waited at home for those we loved. And for some of us, our worst fears were realized. For others, our loved ones came back but would never be the same.
We came home and marched in protest marches, sucked in tear gas, and shrieked our anger and horror for all to hear. Or we sat alone in small rooms, in VA hospital wards, in places where only the crazy ever go. We are Republicans, Democrats, Socialists and Confucians and Buddhists and Atheists -- though as usually is the case, even the atheists among us sometimes prayed to get out of there alive.
We are hungry, and we are sated, full of life or clinging to death. We are injured, and we are curers, despairing and hopeful, loved or lost. We got too old too quickly, but some of us have never grown up. We want, desparately, to go back to heal wounds, revisit the sites of our horror. Or we want to never see that place again, to bury it, its memories, its meaning. We want to forget, and we wish we could remember.
Despite our differences, we have so much in common. There are few of us who don't know how to cry, though we often do it alone when nobody will ask "what's wrong?" We're afraid we might have to answer.
If you want to know what a Vietnam veteran is, get in in your car or cage a friend to drive you to Washington. Go to the Wall on Veterans Day weekend. There will be hundreds there...no thousands. Watch them. Listen to them. We'll be there. Come touch the Wall with us. Rejoice a bit. Cry a bit. No, cry a lot. We will. We are Vietnam Veterans; I am a Vietnam Veteran, and after 30 years I think I am beginning to understand what that means.
Anyway, enough sarcasm Dog, get to the point. It's Veterans Day and people around the country give their token "thank yous" and wonder how to treat these dogs of war. To answer that question, I give you the following definition of Vietnam Veterans. If you, or someone you know, is a veteran of another "conflict", all you have to do is change the enviornment adjectives to get to the root definition.
In 1996, a college student asked "What is a Vietnam Veteran?" Following is the answer written by Dan Mouser. It is the truth.
Vietnam veterans are men and women. We are dead or alive, whole or maimed, sane or haunted. We grew from our experiences or we were destroyed by them or we struggle to find some place in between. We lived through hell or we had a pleasant, if scary, adventure. We were Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, Red Cross, and civilians of all sorts. Some of us enlisted to fight for God and Country, and some were drafted. Some were gung-ho, and some went kicking and screaming.
Like veterans of all wars, we lived a tad bit -- or a great bit -- closer to death than most people like to think about. If Vietnam vets differ from others, perhaps it is primarily in the fact that many of us never saw the enemy or recorgnized him or her. We heard gunfire and mortar fire but rarely looked into enemy eyes. Those who did, like folks who encounter close combat anywhere and anytime, are often haunted for life by those eyes, those sounds, those electric fears that ran between ourselves, our enemies, and the likelihood of death for one of us. Or we get hard, calloused, tough. All in a days' work. Life's a bitch and then you die. But most of us remember and we get twitchy, worried, sad.
We are crazies dressed in camo, wide-eyed, wary, homeless and drunk. We are Brooks Brothers suits wearers, doing deals downtown. We are housewives, grandmothers, and church deacons. We are college professors engaged in the rational pursuit of the truth about the history or politics or culture of the Vietnam experience. And we are sleepless. Often sleepless.
We pushed paper; we pushed shovels. We drove jeeps, operated bulldozers, built bridges; we toted machine guns through dense brush, deep paddy and thorn scrub. We lived on buffalo milk, fish heads and rice. Or C-rations. Or steaks and Budweiser. We did our time in high mountains drenched by endless monsoon rains or on the dry plains or on muddy rivers or at the most beautiful beaches in the world.
We wore berets, bandanas, flop hats, and steel pots. Flak jackets, canvas, rash and rot. We ate cloroquine and got malaria anyway. We got shots constantly but have diseases nobody can diagnose. We spent our nights on cots or shivering in foxholes filled with waist high water or lying still on cold, wet ground, our eyes imagining Charlie behind every bamboo blade. Or we slept in hotel beds in Saigon or barracks in Thailand or in cramped ship berths at sea.
We feared we would die or we feared we would kill. We simply feared, and often we still do. We hate the war or believe it was the best thing that ever happened to us. We blame Uncle Sam or Uncle Ho and their minions and secretaries and apologists for every wart or cough or tick of an eye. We wonder if Agent Orange got us.
Mostly -- and I believe this with all my heart -- mostly, we wish we had not been so alone. Some of us went with units; but many, probably most oof us, were civilians one day, jerked out of "the world", shaved, barked at, insulted, humiliated, de-egoized and taught to kill, to fix radios, to drive trucks. We went, put in our time, and were equally ungraciously plucked out of the morass and placed back in the real world. But now we smoked dope, shot skag, or drank heavily. Our wives or husbands seemed distant and strange. Our friends wanted to know if we shot anybody.
And life went on, had been going on, as if we hadn't been there, as if Vietnam was a topic of political conversatioin or college protest or news copy, not a matter of life and death for tens of thousands.
Vietnam vets are people just like you. We served our country, proudly or reluctantly or ambivalently. What makes us different -- what makes us Vietnam vets -- is something we understand, but we are afraid nobody else will. But we appreciate you asking.
Vietnam veterans are white, black, beige, and shades of gray; but in comparison with our numbers in the "real world", we were more likely black. Our ancestors came from Africa, from Europe, and China. Or they crossed the Bering Sea Land Bridge in the last Ice Age and formed the nations of American Indians, built pyramids in Mexico, or farmed acres of corn on the banks of Chesapeake Bay. We had names like Rodriguez and Stein and Smith and Kowalski. We were Americans, Australians, Canadians, and Koreans; most Vietnam veterans are Vietnamese.
We were farmers, students, mechanics, steelworkers, nurses, and priests when the call came that changed us all forever. We had dreams and plans, and they all had to change...or wait. We were daughters and sons, lovers and poets, beatniks and philosophers, convicts and lawyers. We were rich and poor, but mostly poor. We were educated or not, mostly not. We grew up in slums, in shacks, in duplexes, and bungalows and houseboats and hooches and ranches. We were cowards and heroes. Sometimes we were cowards one moment and heroes the next.
Many of us have never seen Vietnam. We waited at home for those we loved. And for some of us, our worst fears were realized. For others, our loved ones came back but would never be the same.
We came home and marched in protest marches, sucked in tear gas, and shrieked our anger and horror for all to hear. Or we sat alone in small rooms, in VA hospital wards, in places where only the crazy ever go. We are Republicans, Democrats, Socialists and Confucians and Buddhists and Atheists -- though as usually is the case, even the atheists among us sometimes prayed to get out of there alive.
We are hungry, and we are sated, full of life or clinging to death. We are injured, and we are curers, despairing and hopeful, loved or lost. We got too old too quickly, but some of us have never grown up. We want, desparately, to go back to heal wounds, revisit the sites of our horror. Or we want to never see that place again, to bury it, its memories, its meaning. We want to forget, and we wish we could remember.
Despite our differences, we have so much in common. There are few of us who don't know how to cry, though we often do it alone when nobody will ask "what's wrong?" We're afraid we might have to answer.
If you want to know what a Vietnam veteran is, get in in your car or cage a friend to drive you to Washington. Go to the Wall on Veterans Day weekend. There will be hundreds there...no thousands. Watch them. Listen to them. We'll be there. Come touch the Wall with us. Rejoice a bit. Cry a bit. No, cry a lot. We will. We are Vietnam Veterans; I am a Vietnam Veteran, and after 30 years I think I am beginning to understand what that means.
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