Red Tide

We've spent a lot of time worrying about the Chinese and what their economy and way of business is doing to our economy. While this obsession is in vogue currently, it was present in a different flavor years ago. I remember reports about the trade deficit with the Chinese going back to the days that they were still totally Communist and the pro-business policies had not been tried yet. Yet, the flavor of these worries seems to be escalating. Now, you are more likely to hear fears that this deficit is fueling the Chinese military, or that having the Chinese buying up U.S. government debt is a dangerous thing.

Back in the 90's there was a big movement toward "Free Trade". I can't remember whether this phrase cropped up before or after the public arguments about extending "most favored nation" status to the Chinese in trade arrangements. There was an announcement each year that they had once again extended this status to the Chinese, yet it always seemed to me that they were toying with holding the status back because of the way that the Chinese treated their people or would not allow information out of the country. Then there was a movement to formalize this arrangement into a more permanent status and you started hearing about Free Trade all the time. Those that tried to sell the public on Free Trade kept repeating standard arguments. Early on, there were concerns about losing American jobs to the Chinese. Advocates were saying that the jobs that would go away to China would be low wage jobs and would clear the way for Americans to do higher wage more skilled jobs. They said that the American public would benefit by having access to low priced goods.

This happened, to a degree. American manufacturing started to decline in fields like textiles and steelworking, but this higher wage higher skilled segment of manufacturing did not grow to a degree to outstrip the losses in the low skilled fields. There can be little debate that manufacturing in the U.S. has declined noticably in the last 15 years.

Many that advocated Free Trade talked also about how it would bring about Globalization and an equalization of wages. The problem with this is that they were not very honest about emphasizing what that meant. If you think about it, equalization of wages means a successful exporting country eventually has to deal with labor shortages and this results in wage inflation and rising prices. A country that imports more will eventually pay lower wages because the manufacturing base will decrease and the number of workers to fill the jobs will increase, making labor in oversupply. The result is a lowering of wages. This has in fact happened in the U.S.

The natural result in this is that laborers will tend to come together in their wages. The problem is that Americans expected that this meant that eventually other counties wages would rise to meet ours. They did not consider that equalization tends to be a lowering on one side and a rise on the other. When you average two numbers, the average is lower than one number and higher than the other. The only way to get to wage equity is if American wages drop. What we did not foresee was a rapid rise in Chinese inflation. Reports out this week show that the inflation rate in China is rising their wages much faster than our manufacturing decline is lowering our wages. The Chinese standard of living is leaping forward. People are buying cars in huge numbers, and wages are rising faster than expected. Couple this with energy prices and resource scarcities, and things rapidly start to tilt back in our favor.

In fact, the Energy markets are probably the thing that will turn around the discrepancy the quickest. World population continues to rise, and energy demand shows no sign of scaling back. Oil as a source of energy is finally reaching the end of its natural life, with environmental and geopolitical concerns making oil use less savory each year (not to mention the fluctuation nature of the price of petrochemical energy). Coal, too, is reaching a limit, this time from environmental pressures. Alternative energy sources will be needed to convert us over to our future energy needs, probably a combination of Nuclear, Wind, Solar, BioFuel, GeoThermal, and Tidal sources. No one of these forms will be enough, it will probably require a combination of all of them. Even if Fusion energy becomes feasible in the near future, all this means that there will be a huge need for jobs here in the U.S. to satisfy these needs. You can only make your energy at home, and while some things like wind turbines and solar panels, can be purchased from China, I suspect that the cost to ship them using fossil fuels will make it more feasible in the long run to make them at home. This means that many of the manufacturing jobs lost in the last few years will be coming home.

So I see in the upcoming economic climate the perfect storm: for advancing our economy and reversing the losses since Free Trade came into fashion.

Crunching Numbers

I listened to the 2/11/11 Science Podcast about a month ago where they interviewed the author of a paper about the World's technological capacity to handle information.

One of the co-authors of the paper, Martin Hilbert discussed how they were trying to determine how the world has changed in handling information, which he defines as storing, communicating, or computing the information. Communication of data is either one way, broadcasting, or two way, telecommunication. Computation is compiling information by computers or little controllers that are in everything.

Nature is awash in information, but we don't notice or capture most of it. Much of the information that we do capture has a tendency to be lost and little of the rest of it is actually compiled into a useful form.

My thought when I hear this was that the power of information goes up exponentially as it is stored, communicated, and then compiled. In fact, the biggest limitation in using information in the past was computational power. This is why individuals like Newton, who developed Calculus and found a way to reduce information into its simplified essence were responsible for great leaps in thinking.

Genius, or even a well trained mind, is the human equivalent of an efficient or effective compiler of information. Someone that has absorbed a lot of information and has a brain that is good at sorting it out and compacting it into core kernels, essential facts, and basic truths. Sometimes this happens with some insight because a person is in the zone or attuned to the phenomenon they are observing. Sometimes it happens because the person’s mind is a combination of a steel trap, but also a fine filter of the information, or a good discriminator of good information and bad information. This is where written history multiplies human capacity. The deeper the knowledge bed for a fertile mind to till, the more productive the output can be. When linked with the rapid access of information, even people with only average compilation skills can put together powerful constructs and conclusions.

This power of computation, of compiling information to its essence, is an idea whose time has come. Recently, a computer named Watson was put on the game show Jeopardy to compete against humans. He readily beat the humans, but the designers of Watson were frank about the machine’s limitations. It can compile huge amounts of data quickly, but it doesn't know what the information means, or which computations are more valuable than others. They gave an example of one possible application for Watson by saying that a computer with his capabilities could be designed and tasked to read all the medical journals available from this point back and then continuing into the future after it was put into service as new information is learned or collected. If provided with a medical case, the information and symptoms of a particular patient, the computer could spit out all cases that correlated with the data. Some of it would be gibberish, coincidentally related data that is not actually pertinent to the particular case. The power of the computer could be exploited by mating it with a skilled medical person, who could look at the possibilities that the computer suggested and determine which is most likely. The computer crunches vast amounts of information, but the person interprets what that information means.

I've often thought about this in my work, how the information, if compiled properly, could work to shortcut the amount of time spent fumbling around trying to figure out things. Can you imagine if your workload could be culled down to a small amount of more certain actions? The amount of time you could save just nailing down sure things would be tremendous. I’ve stopped listening to news fluff programs and have been getting a lot of my information from podcasts that I’ve vetted and culled until I have a small core that is a source of facts that I trust. I find it easier to compile the truth of the situation when you listen to just the pure sources that dig deep into core truths and try not to waste time shouting obscenities people as they try to walk by and mind their own business.

So the fascinating interview about the interesting paper left me with a lot of hope about the future, but I had to spoil it by thinking about how this truly translated into current reality. People now are awash in broadcast information. Much of it is advertising, a case of questionable information at best, as it is designed to try to persuade you to purchase something, whether you need it or not. Then there is political information, which is very much like advertising. It is designed to try to get you to buy a political ideology and to try to persuade others to join this ideology, and to contest those that do not believe your positions. This poisoning of information has corrupted news sources, as people with pre-conceived ideas are choosing their news sources based on whether these sources are putting out information that they already agree with, and ignoring any data source that conflicts with their dearly held beliefs. The information is “compiled” in a deliberately deceptive manner. This is fed to the public, complete with instructions to disregard or react with hostility to anyone that questions or contradicts the core ideology.

This is bad enough, but even more problematic is the dumbing down of the data. Compilations that amount to “bad man hurts animals” or “tragic tale is villain’s fault” are often the main thrust of news programs. It’s as if people attention spans are too short to absorb the full truth and nuances of actual events. They would rather be fed a pre-digested take on events, even if it lacks depth of understanding or even basic veracity. People sometimes turn away from the complicated dialog to fixate on the simple and easy to comprehend story about the iconic events that often dominate news cycles, yet really amount to nothing important. It’s noise. Just like when a signal is corrupted by static, our information stream sometimes gets clogged by rubbish. This makes it hard to hear the real truth when it is being drowned out by random loud annoying noise. Sometimes noise such as this can generate heat, as if the masses have listened to the lunatic scratching his nails on the chalkboard and screaming about the end of the world. You listen to such cacophony at your own risk.

I believe that what happened in Egypt and is trying to happen in the Middle East and places like China is that the raw compilation power of the general public is having the wool stripped off of their eyes for the first time. When the raw truths emerge, populations turn to their governments and leaders that have been contradicting those truths and become enraged and intolerant toward them. Propaganda and misdirection break down when we are awash in information. This can be truly enlightening and empowering for those under the thumb of a repressive regime, but you can imagine that they can be terrifying for those powerful leaders who built their massive house of cards on a foundation of lies and misdirection. This is not only true for governments, but for personalities and pundits and for large corporations. The key here is that pure unadulterated information is available to the masses so that they can decide what is right, what is the compiled essence of that information.

This information revolution is on an exponential track. That is what is really scary about it. What is going to happen to us when our ability to understand starts to approach our desire to focus our attention to a subject. Verner Vinge is the author of a book called Beyond Realtime, where he speculated that people’s understanding will accelerate so rapidly that we will simply evolve to the next realm. In his fictional account, most people simply disappeared. They had been linked mind to mind through a vast internet of humans that could communicate directly with the network and each other by their thoughts. Eventually, this lead to a hive mind kind of mentality and speculation that humans graduated to beings that no longer required physical bodies. Ray Kurzweil is a futurist and author who has written a book called The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. His work contains much the same conclusion. You can feel this acceleration of information and looming growth of computation embedded in society. The only question is whether it’s more like the coming of great things or doom.

The End of Cash

I wonder if there is ever going to be a time when people stop using money. I don't mean that they would stop using paper money, or change from the dollar to some other means of exchange, I mean a future with no money whatsoever.

I was listening to a story about hydrogen fuel cells. These take hydrogen, and make water and electricity. They are currently made with platinum alloys, which are rare and make hydrogen fuel cells expensive. They talked about bringing the cost down by using something other than platinum, a cheaper and more abundant metal that might serve as well. It got me to thinking about how something has a value to it which is somewhat arbitrary, but usually based on scarcity.

What if money was scarce and we somehow evolved past it? This is a theme brought out in Star Trek, where there are a couple of scenes where a character expounds about how money is no longer used. This is supposed to be about 250 years in the future, in a time when energy is cheap and abundant and any food or material goods can be manufactured just by requesting it out of a replicator. Very few medical problems cannot be whisked away by waving some glowing or humming box over the effected area. So you wonder why you would even need money when all of your needs are met effortlessly.

Yet the Enterprise keeps running into races that still use money, such as the Ferengi and their obsession for Gold-Press-Latinum, whatever the hell that is.

I was wondering how this works in practice. How do they pay for their precious dilithium crystals? How does trade in general work, as there are mining colonies, and some are shown in relative poverty, others in wealth. You can't just fly in and take what you want, there would have to be some kind of exchange. It doesn't seem realistic that the miners would toil and stockpile minerals and then someone would just come and take them without given the miners anything at all.

I've always wondered why they still gamble. You see scenes where they are sitting around playing poker, yet there is no money, so they are not really gambling with anything. They are simply pushing chips around. If a player runs out of chips, can't he just get more since they don't cost anything? Maybe the chips are just for keeping score. Hell, that's the way some people today look at money.

If there was no money, how would you account for rarity? I've always thought that the Soviet model of Communist could never work, but why not. Of course people would not be motivated to produce an excess of anything if their hard work would just be given to those around them. Some people's efforts in life are simply valued more than others. It's hard to imagine a time when this would not be so. It's hard to imagine a time when the lowest producing segment of the society was doing virtually nothing and expecting others to provide for them. Imagine a world where everyone was working hard, striving to their limits. It just doesn't seem realistic. You will always have those that are content to sit back and do very little. Without money to provide a way of sorting the achievers from the lazy, what is the point of killing yourself working hard?

Of course, you can turn it around and see all the people that have lots of money that did very little mental or physically challenging work to attain their riches. And you also see those with lots of money and power not content unless they have an ever increasing larger amount of wealth. When this comes at the expense of others, or when the wealth of a few is paid for by the destruction of the environment that has to be shared by all, it is not hard to see why some dream of a day without money.

It's just not a very realistic dream.

Ship of State, Iceberg Ahead

I listen a podcast by Dan Carlin called Common Sense. He's got some good ideas, a good way of looking at things, and an interesting way to describe the situation as he sees it. His background is that he used to work for broadcast companies as a news man and later commentator/personality. He felt restricted by it and now podcasts and blogs to get his ideas out.

In his last Common Sense show, he re-emphasized an old analogy about how steering the ship of state is just like that, and there's a big iceberg out there. His point is that if you see the iceberg a long way out, you have plenty of time and it only requires small corrections to avoid the iceberg. He seems to think that we are right in front of the iceberg, bearing down on it and our two-party system is gridlocked and unable to respond.

I've had an old analogy that is something like that. In mine, the two parties are in a vehicle and each keeps grabbing the wheel and yanking it their way. The analogies are similar, because it has those governing us not paying attention to where the ship of state is headed. Unfortunately, those that are elected usually concentrate on the next election and no one thinks about the long solution and what direction we want to take the country in the long run.

Here's what I wrote on his forum message board:

"Your analogy about avoiding an iceberg is similar to an analogy of mine. I always thought our governing cycles that swing back and forth between the parties were like a car going down a ridgetop road with a steep drop off on either side. One side veers one way when they have control, and then the other side takes over and steers us back onto the road briefly, then on toward the other cliff. I suppose there are less perilous times when the terrain is flat, like the dry lake bed they land Shuttles on. Then it doesn't matter if we veer drunkenly around, at least we don't hit anything or fall over the side, but even then, it's a damned inefficient way to make it to your destination. The problem is that our elected leaders don't have a long term sustainable goal, and therefore don't tend to steer the ship of state in a straight line toward a safe harbor or rich trade port, or even a sexy vacation destination. We're out somewhere in the ocean dodging icebergs. Let's take the ship to a good place! Can't anybody appreciate visionaries?

"Today we need solutions that piss off everyone but harm no one. We need to roll the Bush tax cuts back by 50% and cut spending about 50% of what the last draconian proposal was. You don't diet by eating everything you want and exercising all day or by eating concentration camp rations and sitting still, you eat less and exercise more. We need to legalize marijuana and tax the hell out of it while scaling back DEA and foreign aid for drug interdiction. We need to cut all the wars off immediately and stop arming ourselves to the teeth. We need to raise the retirement age to the neutral point (the magical age where those paying in equal those taking out, plus about a year for slippage and inefficiency). We need to put everyone on Medicare on a program where they go in for annual checkups and if they stay healthy and loose weight, lower their cholesterol and blood pressure and stay off tobacco, we give them a check for $1,500 every year. I'm convinced that it's cheaper to bribe people to stay healthy than to pay for expensive and preventable diseases brought on by chronic unhealthy lifestyle choices. Don't promise people it will continue forever, tell them it stays in place until it stops showing a financial return. If we stopped subsidizing the incredibly profitable oil and gas industries and gave tax breaks or incentives to solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and other alternative energy producers, we could generate jobs here, cut our dependence on foreign oil that only funds states that support, harbor, or generate terrorists, and then sell the technology to the rest of the world.

"Each major problem has a common sense (and usually untried) solution that both sides in Washington reject. This has gone on entirely too long."

Bad Luck in Panama

It has been over 22 years since I left Panama. I was stationed there when I served 4 years in the U.S. Army. Three years of my time was in the 536th Engineer Battalion in Ft. Kobbe Panama. It was not a good time.

I recently got to talking about it with some friends and I realized it was mostly a tale of woe. I spent 3 years being moderately to severely unhappy, stressed out, and depressed. There were a few good times, but only a few with the time spaced out far between them.

I arrived in Panama in December of 1987. I was assigned to a unit with 23 other Lieutenants, and I was the youngest Lieutenant for almost a year, because there was a long gap between the time I arrived and the next Lieutenant arrived. There was a tradition of hazing the junior Lieutenant. This treatment usually only lasted a couple of months at the longest, so for me to have to deal with it for a year was unusual. The problem with this situation is that the hazing was by the other Lieutenants. For anyone not familiar with the military, you might not understand what it is like. There is a rank structure, and this is strictly enforced, and in reality, it is a caste structure. You do not associate with those in the ranks below you. It's called Fraternization, and the reason you do not do it is because they are supposed to obey your orders, and if they feel like they are your friend, they will feel like they may not have to do what you say. By the same token, you cannot suck up to or befriend those in the ranks above you. This means you have one group of people to befriend, those that are at your rank. This situation was destroyed for me because those people were effectively my enemies by virtue of the fact that they were hazing me. So I had no one in the military that I could count as my friend.

There was an additional tradition that was part of the hazing of the junior lieutenant. There was a travelling trophy, a model castle that the junior lieutenant was required to bring to all social functions. This model was required to be improved by each recipient prior to passing it on to the next new lieutenant. The damned thing was about 2 feet wide and a foot tall, a scale model of the castle each engineering officer wore on their lapels. The wooden base was a piece of plywood about 2 feet deep and 3 feet wide. The lieutenant before me encased the castle in a plexiglas cover, making the thing even more unwieldy and impossible to carry. My improvement, done before the second function I took it to was to remove it from the plexiglas. Everyone complained that this was not an improvement, but I only had to ask if they wanted to carry it around in the massive plexiglas dome to get them to shut up. Eventually, the hazing surrounding the object because so severe that I stopped bringing it to the functions and basically told anyone that complained to shove it up their ass. This worked so well that I took the castle out to the parking lot of my apartment building and destroyed it with a sledge hammer and tossed it into the dumpster. When I told my wife this story recently, she said it sounded like that scene from the movie Office Space where they destroy the copier. This was before rap music, though it did feel good to be a gangster.

I was newly married when I joined the Army and my wife had a little dog named Spunky that she loved. Panama was a three year accompanied tour, and the way it worked was that the service member went down first and when they had gotten a place to live, they could then send for their spouse. We thought this was going to be a short process. With pets, you travelled down with them but they put them in the pound under quarantine for 60 or 90 days, I can't remember how long. The temperature in Panama was 90 to 95 degrees in the shade, and the pound had open air kennels with concrete cages. It was miserable. The dog was freaked out and looked forward to having me visit as the only relief from this stressful and uncomfortable situation. Within the first week, my unit told me that I was going on a deployment to Chirique province of Panama where they were building a road in the mountains in a coffee growing region. I would be gone for two months. I could not bring my wife down until I got back from the deployment and I could not stay to help our dog deal with his captivity. Off I went.

Eventually, I back, got a house, and brought my wife down. She was miserable there. She was 19, had never been out of the country, could not speak the language, and could not get a job due to the U.S. Panama treaty that forbid it. She was immediately bored to death, and I was putting in 12 hour days and exhausted. I would come home and she would pounce on me (not in a good way), either wanting to complain about how bored she was, or wanting to go out on the town. I was way too tired to handle that.

I got sent out in the field again, this time for 3 months, and my wife did not handle the separation well. Eventually, I got back and the finances and the car were both not doing well by then. This was also during the era that the Panamanians started to rebel against their dictator, Manuel Noriega. It became more dangerous to get to and from work, and we were ordered to stay at home after duty hours. It just kept getting worst locally. They kept shortening the tours until eventually, they changed it to 1 year unaccompanied tours. This meant that people could not bring their families, but I still had my wife there, and they did not shorten my tour. However, some of the people that came down after me had their tours shortened and I started seeing people come and go in the time that I was there, while I still had months left on my tour. Finally, it became so dangerous and stressful that I decided to move my wife back to the U.S. at my own expense. While I was up in the States, relocating her, they changed the rules and finally sent all the remaining families home. If I had waited another week or two, they would have moved my wife at the Army's expense.

I was contacted by my unit about the situation. I was told that all I had to do was come back down and outprocess. The personnel officer asked me if I wanted to go to the upcoming Bolivian deployment, which was going to be about 4 months. I told him that sounded like a horrible idea, and if I had a choice, my decision would be no way. So I cut my leave (vacation) in the states short, and returned to Panama.

During my time away, the Battalion Commander, LTC Evans, changed command with a new commander. I had not met him yet. I can't remember his name, now. When I returned to the unit, I was taken in to his office. By this time, I had been passed over for promotion. For many years since the draw down after the end of the Viet Nam War, promotion from Lieutenant to Captain was virtually automatic. Only about 3% did not make it, and you had to screw up spectacularly to be in that group. In my year group, it was the first time they changed the rules. They were drawing down the forces again, and 1/3 of my year group was not promoted. I never expected to stay in the Army, I always intended to serve my 4 years and get out. As a result, I did not do any of the things people did that were trying to make a stellar career out of the Army. I did not max out my PT (physical training) tests, I even turned down some awards when I was told that I could not submit my troops for the awards. My evaluations were done the old fashioned way, which was to give low ratings to new lieutenants, and raise them up slowly, showing that you were improving. This old method preserved the Senior Rater's Profile, which was supposed to show a bell curve of rating scores given out. The only way that could occur was if some people got low scores, and these were reserved for the junior lieutenants. I never fought this system, because I felt it didn't matter and it didn't apply to me. By the time I returned to Panama to outprocess, I had already been passed over for Captain.

The new commander immediately told me that I was declared mission essential for the Bolivian deployment and my tour was involuntarily extended back out to the original 3 years. I fought with him, earning me his disrespect and animosity, but not changing his position any. He never did satisfactorily answer my question about how I could be passed over for promotion, but indispensable to the military at the same time. I was soon on a plane to Bolivia.

Bolivia was a shit hole. We stayed in an impoverished and remote region, a high plains desert. Our camp was at about 12,500 feet altitude, and we took some kind of experimental drug to relieve the effects of altitude. You had to drive or take a train from the capitol to the area we were, which took 12 or 24 hours. There were no flights in or out of the area, the altitude was too high. The mail took about 4 weeks to get back to the states. We had moral calls home. This was pre-internet days, so this consisted of a satellite link back to a ham radio operator in the states. He would connect you with your family via regular telephone lines. You had to say "over" after each sentence, or they didn't flip the switch and you couldn't hear the other person. Each night, everyone got in line for the phone, first come first served, and we had about 4 hours before they shut it down. By the time dinner was over, the line was 4 hours long. If you got in to talk to your wife, everyone in line close to you got to hear the conversation, which was usually shouted. I only tried a couple of times, and my wife was never there when I called (this was pre-cell phones, too). I did not receive any mail from my wife while I was there.

I took up smoking, just as a way to say Fuck You to everyone and the military in general. I never enjoyed it, and no one really cared, so it wasn't as if my gesture of defiance hurt anyone but myself. The task force commander was Major Cain, and to be honest, I really liked him. It was hard to stay mad at him for probably being instrumental in getting me extended. Finally, the Battalion Commander came down for a visit. At some point, he was meeting with me, and he told me that he heard that I was doing a good job and was not slacking off due to my situation. He promised me that when I got back to Panama, he would shorten my tour to that point in time and let me leave. This was sort of like prison where your sentence is reduced to time served.

However, when Bolivia was finally over and I got back to Panama, I was again involuntarily extended at the unit. This time it was because there was some new motor pool maintenance software that had to be started up and I was supposed to be perfect for the job.

So I finally got to a real phone line back to the States and made my first call back to my wife in four months. She was not happy to hear from me. During the short phone conversation, she told me that something had happened and that I would probably want a divorce. Then she refused to go any further. She said she would not discuss it over the phone. This was worse than actually being told something concrete that I could deal with. I had no idea what the problem was, which meant I was free to imagine all sorts of things.

Things were bad in Panama by this time. No one lived in houses or apartments off base any more. They moved all the soldiers into former family quarters. I had two roommates, two younger lieutenants that I really liked, but I just wanted out of there.

After a few days back at work, I visited the personnel office. I had served as the personnel officer for the Bolivian deployment, so by then, I knew all about the paperwork. I found out that the colonel was going to try to extend me out to my release date from the Army in order to hold on to my longer. That would have made my tour the longest in theater for years, eight months beyond the standard tour. After determining that I was in a strange state of official limbo, I realized I had to take action myself. I filled out all my transfer forms myself. I took them to the Personnel Sergeant myself. He knew my situation, and we got along pretty good. I asked him to slip the papers into the colonel's morning stack of papers to sign, and not to say anything about it. The next day, I picked up my signed paperwork and took it over to the base Personnel Office myself. Orders came down from the Department of the Army in a couple of weeks and my date was set for a couple more weeks out. As far as I knew, no one at the unit realized I was leaving. I quietly outprocessed, and since I was supposed to be down in the Motor Pool all the time (out of sight and out of mind), I was not missed while I outprocessed.

The day of my departure, the acting S1 (Personnel Officer) a First Lieutenant (Promotable) Ron Condon called me in to his office. That office is supposed to be for a Captain, and the (P) for promotable at the end of his rank meant that he was told he was going to be promoted, but the date was still out a month or two in the future. He hoped and expected that we would start saluting him and calling him sir early, which we did not, because he was a joke. Up to this point in time, each time a lieutenant left, the other lieutenants got him this commemorative plate. It was a nice wood plate that was hand carved and painted by local Cuna indians with our unit crest on it. They cost about $60 or $80 each, and the tradition was that everyone chipped in for the outgoing lieutenant's plate. So for the last 3 years, I had managed to pay for almost 30 other lieutenant's plates. Ron announced to me that the tradition had changed and that now I had to buy my own plate, which he had ordered, but was not there yet. I told him to shove the plate up his ass. He also announced to me that my leaving had taken everyone by surprise and that they had not had time to put together a going away party for me. So he wanted me back up to the Headquarters at noon for some cake and punch and a meeting with all the officers. My plane left at 1:30 and you had to be there an hour early to board, so I had no intention of showing up. I immediately got a ride over to the airfield and nervously waited for the flight to board, fully expecting someone to come in and order me out of the airport and back to the unit. I can't remember who showed up, but it was a friend who knew the score, and he came over to have a laugh with me and tell me that everyone was over at Headquarters waiting for me to show up. I didn't fully believe that I would be leaving until the plane lifted off the runway and I could see the base shrinking away behind me.

I got home and met my wife and parents at the airport. I politely asked my parents to go home and told them I would catch up to them in a few days. I went to Manhattan Kansas with my wife, where she checked us in to a hotel. We sat down to have our long awaited discussion. She admitted to me that she had been cheating multiple times. I told her I expected it would be something like that. I told her that I forgave her, and that we could blame the whole experience on Panama and the U.S. Military. I told her that we should wipe the slate clean and make a new start from this moment on. She told me she still wanted a divorce. I always wondered why she confessed if she never intended to stay in the marriage. I told her I thought we should work it out, and she told me that she would not ask for alimony or any kind of support if I would just let her go without a fight. So I agreed.

This did not stop her from calling back a couple of days later and telling me that she had been talking to her friends, who told her that she was entitled and she should ask for alimony. I informed her that I would fight the divorce if she insisted on payments from me. She dropped it.

I showed up at Fort Leonard Wood on the coldest week of the year. The temperature got to about ten below, and the wind got the wind chill down to about 25 below. I did not have sufficient cold weather gear and was freezing my ass off. I managed to freeze the brakes on my car shut when I tried to blast through some drifts in order to make it easier to leave at the end of the day. The last day before Christmas break, I was out there in the freezing wind on my back in the snow with a propane torch, trying to loosen up the frozen brake calipers.

On the way home that night, I heard on the radio that the U.S. had invaded Panama. I finally felt like it was over and I was at home.

Quitting Smoking Can Kill You

A friend of mine, Kurt, was a heavy smoker. I spoke to him recently, and he mentioned that he was quitting smoking, and that it sucked. He's using the patch, but he loved to smoke.

In trying to be helpful, I related what I did 16 years ago when I quit chewing. I told him that exercise is good, that it helped me. He told me that was not a great option for him, as he was in such terrible shape. I was trying to convince him that even walking would be a good enough form of exercise.

He told me he didn't really give a shit about much of anything right now, but thanks for the suggestion.

I suggested he walk in some of the worst neighborhoods of East St. Louis. I said it sounded as if he didn't care much if he lived or died. People would probably sense that and stay out of the way. I told him it would be a good way to gage his recovery from his nicotine connection. When you realize you're starting to care again, you're over the nicotine, and it's time to stop walking in the danger zone.

I'm very helpful.