Life at the Cellular Level

     No, this isn't some esoteric treatise on biology. It's about my experience with cellular telephones. The first time I had access to a mobile cellular phone was as a field supervisor for a security company. Because we had a contract with an alarm company to provide armed response, and no central dispatch, the field supervisors got to lug around this hefty piece of technology that was almost the size of a military man-pack radio like the AN/PRC-77 we used in Vietnam. 

AN/PRC-77 radio                   

       

Nokia Senator 21 lbs.

     In the military, there was usually someone to tote the 13+ pound PRC-77 around for you. I got to carry my own phone. We weren't supposed to use it for anything but alarm response calls, but since it was our only link to the office, it got used, with explanations and justifications, for other things as well. When I went to another security firm, that anchor was a part of my past.

     I by-passed the classic brick phone for a Motorola MicroTac, which looked like the communicator in Star Trek. (Not an accident, I later learned. A Motorola engineer I met doing tours told me that they used the familiar form factor to make adoption easier.)

Classic '80's brick phone  

     We started using the Motorolas in the Institutional Police and officers were able to get them for their own use at the same price and with the same deal as the City, so I ended up with two of them, one for department use -- all of us on "special details" got one -- and one for personal use. When I left the IP, I quit using mine and it sits in a box somewhere with a couple of spare batteries and the charger.

     I managed to live without a cell phone for a few years, but I did buy a Palm III to keep information, calendar and so forth upgrading to a slimmer Palm (actually a Handspring Visor Edge, a Palm-compatible device. Handspring was acquired by Palm shortly thereafter.) I got a great deal, since they were offering a deep discount if you gave your older Palm device to someone and they filled out the paperwork. I gave mine to my girlfriend Ana (now my wife) but she never used it.

     And then I was forced back into the cell phone world. When I started driving for California Jeep Tours, the boss was surprised to learn I didn't have a cell phone. I told him that I had been encumbered with a radio and two cell phones as well as a couple of pagers when I was a cop and wanted no part of the tethered world, thanks all the same. One day, he handed me a small cell phone the size of a bar of soap. I was back in the cellular world

    At some point, I realized that carrying two electronic devices -- my Visor Edge PDA and the cell phone -- made little sense, and I bought a Palm Centro, their latest smart phone, in 2007. I had expected that I could just port all my Visor Edge information over to the Centro, but that wasn't going to happen since the OS on my old Visor was one generation too old for that.

     I kept the Palm Centro-- and the service -- even after business slowed down and I was seldom needed to drive. I will confess to a rather selfish act. I kept the service with AT&T even after I moved to New Mexico, meaning but never getting around to changing over my service and getting a New Mexico number. And then, a month ago, my service ended. I wasn't all that surprised and can't fault my former boss for terminating my service. I had what I called my "Census burn phone" a Virgin Mobile phone I got when I was taking census back in 2010, so I bought some minutes, reactivated it and began the search for a new service and solution.

     I wanted to keep my Palm Centro. I had a lot of information on it, much of it no longer relevant, but enough that was to want to keep it in use. My old service -- and Ana's -- was with AT&T, so we looked to them first. Now, the serious drawback to the Centro is that it has a terrible browser, so I never used it to search the web. But because it is a smartphone, AT&T made a data plan at $20 a month mandatory. There was, apparently, no way around it. They also wanted a chunk of change to move Ana's service from California to New Mexico with a delay of a week or more. Needless to say, we were both . . . miffed, perhaps? Only more than that.

     One of the providers would sell me a SIM card to unlock my Centro, but, again, since it was a smartphone and technically capable of going on-line, they all wanted to make me take a data plan, even if I never used it. If I was going to have to pay for a data plan, I wanted to be able to use it, and that meant a phone with a significantly better browser. I was looking at Android phones, but they were pricey. And then I saw the LED signage at the "cricKet" store near us advertising "Free Android Phones." Well, free under certain circumstances. And it looked as if it would apply to us, although it wasn't going to be free for the phone I wanted. But at the discounted price, if I ported my phone number from Virgin, it was a good deal.

     Well, for some reason, which no one can explain, my number wasn't portable. But, I was told, the discount will hold. We'll see. It seems that one of the salespeople and the manager are of different opinions on the matter. And when Ana decided to upgrade to an Android phone, we got a run-around and she decided against it. 

     So, I find the Samsung Vitality smartphone I chose is pretty amazing, compared to what I was used to. When I came out from California with my stepson, Chris, he with an iPhone, I suffered a bit from phone -- and app -- envy. The Samsung does most of what his iPhone does, enough for me, at any rate. It is so far in advance of my old Palm Centro that I don't care that it lags behind the curve and isn't cutting edge. It does what I want, cost -- it would seem -- a reasonable amount and has enough "coolness" factor to keep me happy for some time.

Six years ago I wrote a piece for the Lew Rockwell site. Recently, I got a request from a gentleman in Romania, asking to be allowed to translate the piece into Romanian. I gave my permission. Below is the original piece. Here is a link to the translation: http://webhostinggeeks.com/science/lewrockwell-comorig-ro

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Listening for a Sound That Won't Be There by Jamie Fraser-Paige by Jamie Fraser-Paige Once upon a time we fought a war in Southeast Asia, a war we pretty much lost, no matter what Nixon said. Let's not get into the whole set of lies and half-truths that got us into that war. Nor the lies that kept us there or the lives thrown away and the patriotism squandered. All on an unwinnable war far from our shores whose end result was a peace that we could have had thirty years before. I mention the war only to provide context for a small glimpse into how we fought that war in the intelligence arena and why so much of today looks so very, very familiar to me. I was drafted in September of 1965, one of the 50 thousand that Johnson requested to escalate the war in Vietnam. I didn't have any strong feelings one way or another about the war. I wanted to believe that we were doing something good and noble over there. Call me naïve, I probably was. I grew up reading about World War Two and watched Korea unfold on the screens of the local movie houses in the newsreels – I'm of the last generation so privileged. I felt it was my duty to serve my country when asked. I admired the writing of Robert Heinlein and found the premise of granting suffrage only to veterans that he put forth in Starship Troopers to make some degree of sense. When I went down for my induction, I opted to enlist, choosing the Army Security Agency as my branch. I made this choice because my cousin had been in the ASA and several of my other friends had served either in that branch or in the Air Force equivalent. I had a facility for language and was fascinated with the world of intelligence. Blame Ian Fleming and Graham Greene for that. I tested well, too well in fact to be trained in any of the languages I really wanted like German (which I'd studied along with Spanish in High School) Russian, Czech, Hungarian and so forth. I scored in the top one percent on the Army Language Aptitude Test, the ALAT. I was doomed to be sent to learn an Asian language. Even that might have been alright. Chinese, Korean, Japanese – Japanese, especially since I liked the culture and had some family history in the area. But no. The Army had other ideas. I was selected to be trained as a Lao linguist and area analyst. I spent thirty-nine weeks in the Foreign Service Institute – or rather in a contract class taught in some anonymous high-rise in Alexandria, VA – on civilian status learning the language of Laos, a language spoken by only about six million people. I did reasonably well, spending six hours in class each day and an additional two to four in the language lab working with tapes. My classmates and I spoke Lao among ourselves, sitting in bars and clubs in the District and being enigmatic. I went up to Ft. Meade, assigned to the ASA unit located just outside the grounds of the NSA headquarters known as the Puzzle Palace, America's codebreakers. America's eavesdroppers, phone tappers, cable interceptors. It's called Signal Intelligence – SigInt – and it was considered a very important part of our defense against the great enemy against whom we were struggling, World Communism. I learned my trade there under a very informal Navy Chief Petty Officer who insisted we all call him "Bob." It was anything but glamorous, but you knew that, right? Intelligence is mostly a lot of drudgery unless you're a field agent and even then there's more paperwork than anything else. For that matter, that's true of a lot of jobs that people who don't do them consider exciting and glamorous. Like being a cop. I've done that, too, for that matter. While I was at NSA, assigned to the Southeast Asia desk, clipping newspaper articles that mentioned my unit's target, the Lao Neutralist Army of Kong Le, there was a major flap in the Royal Lao Air Force. I was at my desk, going through the day's papers when I came across a front-page story about an attempted coup in Laos. At dawn of 22 October 1966, under the command of General Thao Ma, commander of the Tactical Air Force, eight RLAF T-28s set out to strike different targets in Vientiane. I was about to call my boss when some of the upstairs brass strode into the area demanding to know why they had to learn about something like this in the morning's paper. Since it was my desk they seemed to be gathering at, I attempted to answer. I said that, in all probability the coup attempt – Ma's second in a little over a year – had been a closely held operation with radio silence maintained. Since we had no real assets on the ground and no penetration of the Lao military, there was no way for us to know until it was fait accompli. They wanted to know how a Reuter’s correspondent had gotten the story so quickly and I told him that he was probably standing around the air field when the planes took off from Luang Prabang where he and his most loyal pilots had essentially been exiled. He'd seen the direction of flight – toward Vientiane, not Vietnam – and followed up. "How did he get this information and how could he follow up so quickly?" they asked. "Well," I replied, "they probably pay him a pretty good bonus for scoops like this." They were not amused. People were not all that amused with General Ma, either. His sortie attacked two ammunition depots and the main command of the armed forces along with the homes of several Generals. Thirty-six people died on the ground and dozens more were wounded. Then the American and British Ambassadors interfered and forced the general to give up. He and 12 of his pilots then fled to Thailand, where – after several months in prison – all were granted political asylum. The T-28s were repainted with the Royal Thai Air Force markings and flew missions in support of various secret wars in the area. Now, the relevance of this to the present situation is this: We have come to rely heavily on technology. We can eavesdrop on just about anyone, anywhere at any time. We have super computers and thousands of specialists in a variety of fields who can take any piece of Electronic Intelligence and process it, mine it for every bit of information and then make pretty good guesses as to what it means. But the best way to foil us is to use low tech. Meet face to face. Plan the operation before you start, meeting in small cells with little chance of penetration and then carrying out the mission with no further discussion outside that cell. No phone calls, no radio transmission, no email, nothing that requires technology or lends itself easily to technological interception. The concern currently over the illegal use of no-warrant intercepts of domestic conversations is certainly valid, but it's not the first time we've done something like this. In theory, NSA must have a warrant. Of course, the CIA isn't supposed to operate domestically either, but they do. The practical ex-spook, ex-cop some days yearns for the freedom to use any means necessary to do the job. There's been an internal struggle for years with the two sides of my personality and the civil libertarian always wins, damn his eyes. In my opinion, no amount of wiretaps, radio intercepts, fancy programs to sift among the millions of transmissions of all kinds, analog, digital or any combination legal or illegal will prevent or even warn us of the next terrorist attack if they are following good practice. That's the really sad part. And it makes you wonder – it certainly makes me wonder – if the Bush administration knows that. I think they do and that means that all of this is a ploy to be able to control the American people. And that's not how it is supposed to be. Well, I told you I was naïve. February 14, 2006 Jamie Fraser-Paige [send him mail] is a former member of the Army Security Agency, shorn of his Top Secret Crypto clearance for his political unreliability. He nonetheless served in the US Army honorably from 1965 to 1969 as a non-com. He is also a former police officer and security consultant who lives with his lady, a chef and their cat in the San Francisco Bay area. Since 1984 he has voted Libertarian and done volunteer work for the party. In 1985 he wrote the California party flyer on the Second Amendment and ran for a seat on the Berkeley City Council. Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com

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When you declare war, what you get are soldiers, not cops

Many years ago, one of our Presidents, it might have been Johnson (actually, Jamie, it was Nixon, in 1971; sorry) declared a "War on Drugs." The dynamic of law enforcement was set on a new path -- or back on an old one reminiscent of the days of prohibition and anti-labor activities. In some places, it began even earlier. Not long after I was discharged from the Army, I was living in Greenwich Village, on MacDougal Street, sort of the Main Street of the Beat/Hippie/Folkie world at the time. I was managing a coffeehouse across the street that was, at that time, known as "The Cafe Feenjon" but had existed since the late '50s as "The Commons, "The Fat Black Pussycat" and perhaps other names now forgotten, at least by me.

Now all of this is to set the stage for a bit of history. In the late '60s -- I left the Army in September of '69 and moved to New York in early '70 to place it all in a chronological context -- the civil rights movement was taking a decidedly un-civil shift. There were the Black Panthers, The Black Liberation Army, The Symbionese Liberation Army and other, lesser-known Black radical groups and a lot of fringe folk with no real ties to any group, just a serious case of the mads with white people. In NYC, cops were being killed in larger numbers than anyone could remember. The Mafia pretty much had a rule that cops were off the table as targets because a cop-killing brought a lot of heat down in an area and often right into the middle of a healthy business operation. This was not a Good Thing. But the Black Militants had no such scruples. In one instance, in 1972, an undercover police officer was fatally shot at the #7 Mosque of the Black Muslims in Harlem. Two cops, one black and one white, were gunned down on the outskirts of the Polo Grounds Projects, a public Housing development on the site of the old NY Giant's baseball stadium -- and one-time polo field. The NYPD, fearing a continuation of what had been dubbed "The Long Hot Summer" re-energized the Tactical Patrol Force, originally created in 1959 to deal with a rise in crime rates.

By the time the unit was brought up to strength, staffed by young men, six feet tall and athletic in build, the City had cooled down and the incidents of the previous year seemed to be part of history. Once re-activated, however,  TPF had to be used and it was, including in several incidents where a situation was created by officers in the target precinct triggering the call-out of TPF. They were also used for "crowd control" including keeping weekend foot traffic in Greenwich Village moving. They were not popular with many of the locals. I had a friend who served, for a time, with TPF until their use in incidents provoked to justify the use of TPF finally got to him.

Not long after, even small towns began to get "tougher on crime" and the feds were right there with Vietnam War surplus equipment. Many were offered helicopters and those that could field a pilot and a place to tie the 'copter down took the government up on their offer. As I said, war had been declared on drugs and the federal government, long unable to really make much of a dent in the drug trade, enlisted local law enforcement in numerous task forces and gave them military-surplus equipment with which to fight that war.

LAPD created SWAT in 1967 in response to the rise in racial tension during the Watts riots in 1965. (http://www.policemag.com/Videos/Channel/SWAT/2010/04/LAPD-s-Chief-Gates-on-Creation-of-SWAT.aspx is a brief comment on the formation of SWAT by Retired Chief Daryl Gates.) SWAT is, in a very limited fashion, a useful tool when dealing with barricaded subjects, violent, armed offenders and the like. But, as was true of TPF, once you have the tool, the tendency of bureaucrats is to use the tool in order to justify the expense.

Much is made in the press and the blogosphere of police departments getting what they always seem to call "tanks" but are usually armored personnel carriers of some type. Armored vehicles can serve a very useful, even critical, function in law enforcement. When dealing with the situations described just above, having a mobile armored base from which to operate or with which to move on a subject who is armed can be critical. It can save lives, allowing the officers to shield emergency responders while they remove an injured person. However, using an armored vehicle to serve every warrant? Along with the full SWAT team? Nah, I don't think so. But, they do.

There were a couple of Facebook postings recently from a friend -- who I would say is a trifle to the left of me on many subjects -- about the recent bestowing of military equipment as freebies to local cops. One is this, http://www.businessinsider.com/program-1033-military-equipment-police-2011-12#ixzz1fhfo82jd. The other was http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/12/05/120511-news-militarized-police-1-6/

In the second story, one of the recipients of the federal largess, Chief of Police Bill Partridge, who heads a 50-officer department in Oxford, Ala., said “If you’re quick on the trigger on the Internet, usually you can get what you want,” Partridge said, noting his department visited the program’s website “weekly or daily” to check for gear. “My philosophy is that I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”

The problem here being that recent history has shown us that "having it" is almost a guarantee of "using it" sooner or later and not always in the most appropriate manner.

I like "big boy" toys. I have been a shooter most of my life, from about eight, when I went to the shooting galleries in Times Square and Coney Island to pop targets in the arcades with .22 Shorts fired from old rifles. I like things that go whir and clank and bang as much as the next guy, and when I got to shoot fully-automatic weapons on some one else's dime at a conference in Seattle, I was a happy camper. All that said, I find the militarization of our police, to the extent to which it has progressed since the late '50s, is just plain wrong and it is also counter-productive.  Cops have, as the articles mention, become pretty much an occupying army, distanced from the community they are supposed to serve. 

I wore the nearly ubiquitous black battle-dress uniform and high-top boots, carried a high-capacity semi-auto pistol in a large caliber -- .45 ACP -- and was trained on other weapons, as well. There was a riot helmet in my locker and a 36-inch riot baton as well. I always wore my vest, even when I worked plain-clothes. But I was available to talk to the people who worked on my beat at the county hospital or the mental health clinics or, prior to that in the housing projects and the county welfare offices. I didn't let down my guard, but I tried, consistent with that, to be open and available to the people with whom I dealt. I had learned the concept of "Community Oriented Policing" long before it became a buzzword for a federally-funded program from a beat cop who worked in the 6th Precinct and patrolled the streets of Greenwich Village in the late '60s. Jimmy was approachable, pleasant to deal with and alert to what was going on. He was in stark contrast to the TPF cops who lorded it over the citizens, bohemian and tourist alike, on those crowded summer streets.

There is a major fundamental difference between the police and soldiers, although both are armed and may use similar equipment. The police, ideally, keep the peace and arrest wrong-doers. Soldiers maintain peace by killing the enemy and occupying territory. There is a huge difference. So, while I can see the need for some of the military-grade tools that local cops are getting and using today, I think a lot more discretion needs to be exercised in their use and a lot less use made of some if it.

When you declare war, what you get are soldiers, not cops

Many years ago, one of our Presidents, it might have been Johnson (actually, Jamie, it was Nixon, in 1971; sorry) declared a "War on Drugs." The dynamic of law enforcement was set on a new path -- or back on an old one reminiscent of the days of prohibition and anti-labor activities. In some places, it began even earlier. Not long after I was discharged from the Army, I was living in Greenwich Village, on MacDougal Street, sort of the Main Street of the Beat/Hippie/Folkie world at the time. I was managing a coffeehouse across the street that was, at that time, known as "The Cafe Feenjon" but had existed since the late '50s as "The Commons, "The Fat Black Pussycat" and perhaps other names now forgotten, at least by me.

Now all of this is to set the stage for a bit of history. In the late '60s -- I left the Army in September of '69 and moved to New York in early '70 to place it all in a chronological context -- the civil rights movement was taking a decidedly un-civil shift. There were the Black Panthers, The Black Liberation Army, The Symbionese Liberation Army and other, lesser-known Black radical groups and a lot of fringe folk with no real ties to any group, just a serious case of the mads with white people. In NYC, cops were being killed in larger numbers than anyone could remember. The Mafia pretty much had a rule that cops were off the table as targets because a cop-killing brought a lot of heat down in an area and often right into the middle of a healthy business operation. This was not a Good Thing. But the Black Militants had no such scruples. In one instance, in 1972, an undercover police officer was fatally shot at the #7 Mosque of the Black Muslims in Harlem. Two cops, one black and one white, were gunned down on the outskirts of the Polo Grounds Projects, a public Housing development on the site of the old NY Giant's baseball stadium -- and one-time polo field. The NYPD, fearing a continuation of what had been dubbed "The Long Hot Summer" re-energized the Tactical Patrol Force, originally created in 1959 to deal with a rise in crime rates.

By the time the unit was brought up to strength, staffed by young men, six feet tall and athletic in build, the City had cooled down and the incidents of the previous year seemed to be part of history. Once re-activated, however,  TPF had to be used and it was, including in several incidents where a situation was created by officers in the target precinct triggering the call-out of TPF. They were also used for "crowd control" including keeping weekend foot traffic in Greenwich Village moving. They were not popular with many of the locals. I had a friend who served, for a time, with TPF until their use in incidents provoked to justify the use of TPF finally got to him.

Not long after, even small towns began to get "tougher on crime" and the feds were right there with Vietnam War surplus equipment. Many were offered helicopters and those that could field a pilot and a place to tie the 'copter down took the government up on their offer. As I said, war had been declared on drugs and the federal government, long unable to really make much of a dent in the drug trade, enlisted local law enforcement in numerous task forces and gave them military-surplus equipment with which to fight that war.

LAPD created SWAT in 1967 in response to the rise in racial tension during the Watts riots in 1965. (http://www.policemag.com/Videos/Channel/SWAT/2010/04/LAPD-s-Chief-Gates-on-Creation-of-SWAT.aspx is a brief comment on the formation of SWAT by Retired Chief Daryl Gates.) SWAT is, in a very limited fashion, a useful tool when dealing with barricaded subjects, violent, armed offenders and the like. But, as was true of TPF, once you have the tool, the tendency of bureaucrats is to use the tool in order to justify the expense.

Much is made in the press and the blogosphere of police departments getting what they always seem to call "tanks" but are usually armored personnel carriers of some type. Armored vehicles can serve a very useful, even critical, function in law enforcement. When dealing with the situations described just above, having a mobile armored base from which to operate or with which to move on a subject who is armed can be critical. It can save lives, allowing the officers to shield emergency responders while they remove an injured person. However, using an armored vehicle to serve every warrant? Along with the full SWAT team? Nah, I don't think so. But, they do.

There were a couple of Facebook postings recently from a friend -- who I would say is a trifle to the left of me on many subjects -- about the recent bestowing of military equipment as freebies to local cops. One is this, http://www.businessinsider.com/program-1033-military-equipment-police-2011-12#ixzz1fhfo82jd. The other was http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/12/05/120511-news-militarized-police-1-6/

In the second story, one of the recipients of the federal largess, Chief of Police Bill Partridge, who heads a 50-officer department in Oxford, Ala., said “If you’re quick on the trigger on the Internet, usually you can get what you want,” Partridge said, noting his department visited the program’s website “weekly or daily” to check for gear. “My philosophy is that I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”

The problem here being that recent history has shown us that "having it" is almost a guarantee of "using it" sooner or later and not always in the most appropriate manner.

I like "big boy" toys. I have been a shooter most of my life, from about eight, when I went to the shooting galleries in Times Square and Coney Island to pop targets in the arcades with .22 Shorts fired from old rifles. I like things that go whir and clank and bang as much as the next guy, and when I got to shoot fully-automatic weapons on some one else's dime at a conference in Seattle, I was a happy camper. All that said, I find the militarization of our police, to the extent to which it has progressed since the late '50s, is just plain wrong and it is also counter-productive.  Cops have, as the articles mention, become pretty much an occupying army, distanced from the community they are supposed to serve. 

I wore the nearly ubiquitous black battle-dress uniform and high-top boots, carried a high-capacity semi-auto pistol in a large caliber -- .45 ACP -- and was trained on other weapons, as well. There was a riot helmet in my locker and a 36-inch riot baton as well. I always wore my vest, even when I worked plain-clothes. But I was available to talk to the people who worked on my beat at the county hospital or the mental health clinics or, prior to that in the housing projects and the county welfare offices. I didn't let down my guard, but I tried, consistent with that, to be open and available to the people with whom I dealt. I had learned the concept of "Community Oriented Policing" long before it became a buzzword for a federally-funded program from a beat cop who worked in the 6th Precinct and patrolled the streets of Greenwich Village in the late '60s. Jimmy was approachable, pleasant to deal with and alert to what was going on. He was in stark contrast to the TPF cops who lorded it over the citizens, bohemian and tourist alike, on those crowded summer streets.

There is a major fundamental difference between the police and soldiers, although both are armed and may use similar equipment. The police, ideally, keep the peace and arrest wrong-doers. Soldiers maintain peace by killing the enemy and occupying territory. There is a huge difference. So, while I can see the need for some of the military-grade tools that local cops are getting and using today, I think a lot more discretion needs to be exercised in their use and a lot less use made of some if it.

Eleven, Eleven, Eleven

It's Veterans Day, again. When I was working, it was one of the few holidays I took off. Of course, when I was a cop, holidays were too lucrative to take off. Under our old contract, we got paid for the day regardless if we took it off or worked. If we did work, we got paid at time-and-a-half, so the temptation to whore the overtime was great. I wasn't as bad as some, but I worked almost all the paid holidays, taking off only Veteran's Day and my birthday, which I took as a floating holiday. Today, I asked Ana, my wife, if I could sleep in. I prepped potatoes for home-fries last night and, except for fending off the ravenous cat at 5 AM, I got my wish. Of course, since I seldom sleep more than four or six hours these days, I'd been up at three something and was reading until nearly six, but I turned the light off and rolled over before Ana's alarm went off at seven.

What I was reading was the account of one soldier's experience in Iraq back in the early days of the Iraq War. John Crawford, a National Guard sergeant with prior service in the 101st Airborne, arrived in Iraq with the first invasion forces and ended up spending a year and a half in Baghdad. His stories, episodic and reading as if he was telling them over beers or a campfire, were oddly familiar. His experiences mirrored those of so many of my contemporaries who had served in Vietnam, complete with the crushing boredom, terrible living conditions, horrible weather and, if you substitute sand for the tropical muck of Southeast Asian, a familiar environment, hostile to people, especially those raised in the US of A.

The other feat similarity is that the command authority -- the Chain of Command -- has learned just about nothing about how to fight an unconventional enemy in the intervening years. His take on officers rings with a familiar tone to that which I heard from troops who spent far more time in Vietnam than I did. I was there briefly, up close to the DMZ, near Hue at a place called Phu Bai. The Army Security Agency had a forward listening post there to monitor the Lao Neutralist forces when they shifted too far East for our radio net in Thailand to reliably pick up. I was never actually in combat there -- the First Marine Division had it pretty well secured and we were in their area of operations when we were there, but many of the Marines with whom I spoke had.

Our library -- the one named for Tony Hillerman, our own Erna Ferguson Library being remodeled -- had a display of books about the military on a table. I picked up Crawford's The Last True Story I Will Ever Write and the story of the formation of Delta Force by Eric Haney, one of the founding members of Delta. I figured that I could forgo John Ringo's military Sci-Fi novels for a bit and read something real. Of course, Ringo, himself an Airborne veteran, he of the 82nd, writes stories that ring quite true, even if they are set in far off places in future times or in a former Soviet Georgia that is mostly created out of his imagination, but also rings true.

I left the Army in the fall of 1969, before my 25th birthday. I was angry at the great green machine for a variety of reasons and had determined not to re-enlist, although they dangled some nice incentives, including a shot at Warrant Officer's school in six months after a promotion to staff sergeant. I actually had to think about that for a few minutes before turning it down. I'd had enough of Army life and was under the misapprehension that civilian life would be vastly different. When I was drafted, in '65, I had only had a small taste of adult life. I turned 21 in basic training at Fort Dix and most of the time between graduating high school had been spent in activities I had chosen more for pleasure than for gain. I went to classes at Columbia, not fully enrolled, but auditing classes with the intention of doing so,. I'd been accepted, but wasn't sure what I wanted to do. While I pondered, the local draft board was deciding to make my choice for me.

Basic training did a decent job of scraping the civilian veneer off me and re-plating me with Army green, at least a surface coat. Inside I was still me, but I could pass for a soldier. With some they did a better job, getting to the marrow of some of my generation and really making them GIs through and through. From what I have read, the military has been far better -- perhaps since Roman times -- at creating soldiers from civilians than they have been at turning them back into civilians when their time of service -- be it two years, a three-year-hitch, four years like mine or a career of twenty years -- was up. We now have a nice, neat medical term for the results called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD for short. It manifests differently in people and some are only mildly affected by it. But, in the worst cases, it can lead to suicide, homicide, alcoholism, drug-dependence, homelessness and a host of other ills.

I lost track of the number of homeless wrecks with whom I dealt as a cop at the Hospital who were genuine veterans with PTSD. There were some poseurs for sure, but far more with stories that rang true and with that look in their eye and tone in their voice that spoke of having seen things they couldn't unsee but wished they could.

Recently, Ana's office hired a new person to handle billing, mostly dealing with the insurance carriers, including Medicare, that pays for the most of their client's treatment for a variety of mental ills. He is a young man, in his late twenties, a disabled and medically retired veteran of the Iraq war. He, like so many of his contemporaries -- and like John Crawford -- entered the military mostly to have a shot at a better education after their hitch was up. The commercials on TV and the print ads speak loudly and grandly of all the benefits that are there for only a few years of your time. It's an All-Volunteer military, unlike the mixed-bag when I served. Inducements are needed. But, almost like the case that led to the Bonus Army after WW I, many of these promises have not been kept or have been kept at greatly reduced rates. This young man had his stipend reduced and had to find a full-time job and reduce his college time drastically. So much for the promises. 

The news is quick to pick up stories of the worst cases, the junkies, still wearing parts of their issue uniforms when they are found OD'd in some dark place. Or when they can't deal with the very different pace and stress of civilian life and act, as they had been trained, with quick violence, often against a loved one. But these are the worst cases and perhaps nothing could have been done for them. In my opinion, the military, the VA didn't really try as hard as they could. The government has been quick to cut benefits to veterans in tight economic times. Even Bush, who was himself sort of a veteran, did it and our current community-organizer-in- chief, with no experience of the military, has done even more. He gives lip-service in thanking our troops, but has kept them at the sharp end far longer than he promised and has done little to improve the lot of those returning, after innumerable stop-loss extensions, to civilian life.

So, on this day we remember those who served -- and I remember, vaguely, when it was still Armistice Day, celebrated on this day to commemorate the end of World War One at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. I know the significance of the poppies handed out for a donation to a veteran's organization, symbols of all of those fallen in the poppy fields in Flanders.

I ask you to write to your congress critter and ask them what they are doing for veterans beside mouthing noble words. And I ask you to remember someone you knew who isn't there because they fell in service to their country.

"Absent Friends!"

Serendipitously 5:16 AM

     My sleep rhythm is all over the place these days and I find myself at the keyboard at 4:10 in the morning, listening to Charlie Hunter playing solo about two years ago in Oakland. Hunter is a guitar player who mostly plays a seven-string guitar/bass hybrid. It is amazing to watch him play, running bass lines, lead arpeggios and rhythm backing simultaneously.

     He's played as a leader, sideman and accompanist. Some of this band work was with Garage a Trois with Skerik, a sax player that has to be heard -- and seen -- to fully appreciate. This clip is of them taking on Jimi Hendrick's If 6 Was 9 which I think Jimi would have approved of.

     I don't listen to a lot of music these days, except in the wee hours when I stumble across something I like and then wander along the serendipitous trails following where the muse leads me. Yeah, muse. I'm not much of a musician, but I do feel the pull of a muse that guides me to music to listen to. And, once I am a ways down that trail, I often forget where the point of entry was. Like, how I found Charlie Hunter. I was re-reading an email that mentioned Charlie Mingus and his introduction to Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the late multi-instrumentalist jazz player. But, how I got from Kirk to . . . oh, yeah, Charlie Hunter used to play with a group called T.J. Kirk that fused elements of the music of Thelonious Monk, James Brown and Kirk. They originally called the group James T. Kirk, honoring not only the musicians who inspired them but the iconic Star Trek commander. When they signed with Warmer Brothers, the name became an issue, since Kirk's name was copyright to another entity, so they shuffled it around to T.J. Kirk. This clip is from 1995 at the SF Wine Festival on the Embarcadero.

T.J. Kirk, San Francisco, 1995

     So, this is the way I whiled away some time at o'dark-thirty on a Sunday morning. When I was younger and in another city, I was often up at this hour, listening to music either live, in the clubs and coffee houses in NYC's Greenwich Village, on the radio or on my hi-fi system -- an odd combination of devices that spun a vinyl disc under a sharp object and took the tiny electrical current thus produced and sent it to a couple of tube preamplifiers and amplifiers. Tubes are those things that light up in an amp that aren't LEDs. So, yeah, I'm an old guy, sue me.

     Music happened all the time back in those days. I imagine in some circles it still does, but I fell out of that orbit some time ago and haven't found my way back to it, except at odd hours sitting at my laptop keyboard, with my Sony earbuds in place.

     So, to return to this odd odyssey, one of the places I was sent to hear Charlie Hunter's music was NPR. Now, I don't listen to NPR all that often, since I don't share the political views expressed there. But they have some damn good music, so I end up there fairly often for sounds. While there this morning, I noticed a listing for someone named Rachael Yamagata. How could I not investigate a female vocalist with a name like that? I'm a sucker for female vocalists, fascinated by exotic-looking women and attracted, if only in a rather vague, platonic way, to dark women with blue eyes. Ms. Yamagata hits on all points. So I listened to an hour of her from the World Cafe in Philadelphia. I like her. I don't buy CDs any more, but I will ad her to my play list on Pandora, for sure. You can listen to her at http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=140821897&m=140954599 I also found some videos of her on YouTube like this one.

     So, at something like 5:13 -- real close to the magic hour of 5:16 AM from the poem of the same name by my friend Shepard Sherbell from back in the day when many of us only saw sunrise from the back side -- I'm going to try and see if I can find some sleep.

Potential Passing of Prince Street Pizzaria - Reminiscence

     I got an email from my old guidance counselor from Rhodes Prep with whom I have been in contact for some time. He always has interesting stuff to share. This one triggered memories. I'll quote a bit of it, and for the rest, there is a link to the NY Times article:

It did not call itself the flagship Ray’s Pizza because it never really had a fleet. It was not Original Ray’s or Famous Ray’s or Original Famous Ray’s or Real Ray’s or Ray’s on Ice or any of the other cloned shops sprinkled like shredded mozzarella all over town. It was simply Ray’s Pizza, and in the great pizza wars of New York City, it was respected as having been the first, standing more or less above the fray at 27 Prince Street in Little Italy, with tree limbs holding up the basement ceiling and an owner whose name wasn’t even Ray. 

And now, it seems, barring any surprises, Ray’s Pizza — the original that was so original it did not have the word “original” in its name — appears doomed to close at the end of the month. 

This is not a popular topic at Ray’s right now. 

“I don’t want you to put that this is the end,” said Helen Mistretta, the manager who, seven months before her 80th birthday, is in no mood for weepy nostalgia. “It’s the end of 27 Prince, not the end of Ray’s of Prince Street.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/nyregion/rays-pizza-the-first-of-many-counts-down-to-last-slice.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

      My first pizza experience was a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint in my old neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens in NYC. It was on 77th Street, just up from 37th Avenue, on the east side of the street. I don't know if it had an official name, but we all called it "Ritchie's Place" because the owner and pizza maker was named Ritchie. He was a Jewish guy from the Bronx, in his mid twenties or early thirties. He wanted a small business and this one was available. Ritchie was open from lunch time until early evening and later in the summer. In his white t-shirt and baker's pants, with a dusting of flour he certainly looked the part.

     For a quarter, you could have a slice of cheese pizza and a small Coke, a good deal for the kids at P.S. 69, half a block away on the south side of 37th Avenue. I worked with Ritchie for a bit, learning how to make pizza. I was just entering junior high, so I couldn't have been more than 13. The pizza dough was made in a bakery in Brooklyn, as I recall and was delivered daily as rounds wrapped in plastic film. Ritchie used a big grinder -- what's called a "Buffalo Chopper" I came to learn -- to make the shredded mozzarella and the sauce came out of a large #10 can from Italy. To my taste, with no frame of reference, it tasted perfectly fine. On a whole pie, Ritchie could add ingredients, like pepperoni or sausage. At some point, he added heroes to the menu, with the meatballs and sausage sourced from a supplier in Little Italy. I developed a taste for sausage heroes there that remains to this day.

     When I started hanging out in the Village a few years later -- call it '62 or '63 until I got drafted in -65 --  I tried a number of places, but my favorite -- and I liked their Sicilian slices the best -- was on the NE corner of Bleecker Street at Thompson. It was pretty large and had tables, but I can't remember ever eating at one. We usually got a slice and a Coke and either ate at the counter, standing, or took the slice and soda and walked. (Checking Google Earth, it is now a place called "The Red Lion" which offers live music and such. Times change.)

     We walked a lot, back then. When Cathy and I -- she was the love of my life at that time, winter of '63 through the following summer --  lived on E6th and Ave. D, we would walk to the Village Where we lived was still considered the Lower East Side; the real estate people hadn't gotten around to renamed it the "East Village" yet. (It wasn't far, in fact, from the infamous "Alphabet City" which had, especially in the crack era of the mid-'80s, a truly horrific reputation. Even when I lived there, my aunt, who edited The Villager, the neighborhood alternative to The Village Voice and far more of a typical small town paper, was appalled that I was living, with my girlfriend, in such a dangerous neighborhood. We never saw it that way. It was, for a time, home.)  

     We called our journey "Westering" since that is generally the direction we were going. We'd usually cut over to 3rd or 4th Street to make the journey, since 6th didn't go through, ending at the Bowery or 3rd Ave. whichever you called it. I think on maps it was 3rd Ave. at that point, but we tended to think of it as the Bowery until the Astor Place/St. Mark's Place junction.

     Our destination was one or another of the coffeehouses we frequented or where we knew a friend was playing a gig. Our "official" gathering place was the back room of what was then Café Rienzi. At other times it had been The Commons and The Fat Black Pussycat and it would become Café Feenjon in the early '70s. (I was night manager, working from 7 until sun-up. At the time, I lived across the street at 107 MacDougal, above the Gaslight and the Kettle of Fish. No long walks, then.)

     At Rienzi's, we often had the large round table and the entire back room to ourselves, as long as we kept it clean and didn't pull the waitress back there when it was busy. We were regulars and comfortable enough there to get our own drinks and food from the counter and bus our own mess. If we wandered over on weekend afternoons, we often sat in the front room, often at window-seat tables as a draw for the tourist trade. One of our number came up with the idea, based on that, of renting us out to would-be hipsters for their parties, often at addresses well out of the Village. It as said of some of us that we would get nosebleeds above 14th Street, but we got over them. We were getting about 20 bucks for an evening as local color at a party. We pretty much considered ourselves Bohemians or, as some of us said, "Baby Beatniks" since were a decade or two younger than the real beats like Kerouac, Ginsberg and that crew. Back then, "Hippie" was an insult. Some of us still think it is, but that's a topic for a whole other posting.

     Now, after that meander down memory lane, or as Dylan called it, "my back pages," let us return to pizza. I contend that there is no decent "New York-style" pizza outside NYC, and that is because pizza is just flour -- which is pretty much the same anywhere, made from heartland wheat -- water, olive oil, salt, packaged yeast and whatever airborne yeast (what the French call le sauvage, wild yeast) gets into it. The only stuff that is specific to a place is the water and the wild yeast. At one time, a pizza maker in Berkeley actually trucked in NYC tap water to make a "true" New York pizza, but the cost versus price was just too lopsided and they stopped. I like pizza from elsewhere -- the California Pizza Kitchen pizzas are good, and I've had other pizza that was fine -- but it ain't real NY pizza if is isn't made in NYC!

     I mourn the passing of Ray's of Prince Street, even if I can't remember ever eating there. It is part of the history of Little Italy, a place that is being subsumed by Chinatown and the real estate market below Houston Street. The same thing is happening in San Francisco. Only a few of the old places still exist in what was once a thriving and vital Italian neighborhood. You hardly ever see an old noni with a basket for her marketing and the accents on the air are not Italian. 

     One of the last of the old places, DiMaggio's Steak House has closed. It used to be Fior d'Italia  and re-opened under the new name after a kitchen fire in 2005.  Fior d'Itlaia is the oldest Italian restaurant in SF -- they say in the country, but I have my doubts --  and has been in six locations since opening in 1886. It is still open on Mason Street, in the historic San Remo hotel in North Beach, not far from Bay Street.  (As DiMaggio's, it was owned by a Lebanese businessman with a fairly fat wallet. So at the end, it wasn't really part of the old Italian tradition except in name and menu.)