Glibertarians.com 2019 Archive

Category: In Memoriam

  • Profiles in Toxic Masculinity VIII – Ernest Hemingway

    Young Hemingway.

    Profiles in Toxic Masculinity, Part 8

    Appearances Can Be Deceiving

    The young fellow to the right doesn’t look like anything special, does he?  A young man probably away from home for the first time, looking a little uncomfortable in his uniform, looking a little apprehensive about what lies ahead.

    I have a pretty good idea what that feels like, having been in much the same situation myself.

    But this young man, while he may well have felt the way I have described when he posed for this photo, ended up being something else entirely.  This is the young Ernest Hemingway, one of America’s greatest novelists, an adventurer, outdoorsman and bon vivant, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of my personal literary heroes and today’s Profile in Toxic Masculinity.

    His Maculate Origin

    Ernest Miller Hemingway was born to Clarence Edmonds and Grace Hall Hemingway in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899.  Named for his paternal grandfather, young Ernest attended school in Oak Park, excelling in boxing, track, football and water polo.  He also took a journalism class and worked with the newspaper of his school, the River Forest High School.

    As a youth, Hemingway spent summers with his family in their vacation home near Petoskey, Michigan.  The home was called Windemere, and it was located on Walloon Lake.  This setting was to have great influence on the young man and would become the location for many of his later works, especially the semi-autobiographical Nick Adams stories.  In this setting he grew to love fishing, camping and hunting, which avocations he would pursue throughout his life.

    I’ve been to Walloon Lake.  It’s a rather idyllic setting, even today; a quiet, medium-sized lake surrounded by the deep pine woods of the north.  I would have liked to have spent more time there; it reminded me of the Boundary Waters canoe area, where I spent some time myself as a young man.  On that same trip Mrs. Animal and I went up to Petoskey, where I drank a beer seated on a barstool that Hemingway reportedly occupied regularly as a young man.

    From such humble beginnings came one of America’s greatest writers.

    Hemingway wrote of those early days often, both literally and in his semi-autobiographical Nick Adams stories; in Fathers and Sons he describes an early encounter with an Indian girl named Trudy:

    “Could you say she did first what no one has ever done better and mention plump brown legs, flat belly, hard little breasts, well-holding arms, quick searching tongue, the flat eyes, the good taste of mouth, the uncomfortably, tightly, sweetly, moistly, lovely, tightly, achingly, fully, finally, unendingly, never-endingly, never-to-endingly, suddenly ended, the great bird flown like an owl in the twilight, only it daylight in the woods and hemlock needles stuck against your belly.”

    But Michigan wouldn’t contain the young Hemingway for long.  While the environs of Michigan had ample opportunities for hunting, fishing and screwing Indian girls, all things the young Hemingway enjoyed, there was a larger world out there for the exploring.

    His Adventurous Career

    After graduating high school, the young Hemingway went to work for the Kansas City Star.  That newspaper at the time had a brief style guide:

    • Use short sentences.
    • Use short paragraphs.
    • Use vigorous English.
    • Be positive.

    It was this writing style that would characterize his work for the rest of his life.

    Come 1918, with America’s entry into the Great War, young Ernest attempted to volunteer.  He went in turn to the Army, the Navy and the Marine Corps, but was turned down due to poor eyesight.

    Determined to get into action, in 1918 Hemingway answered an advertisement and ended up as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front.  He arrived in Paris as the city was under bombardment from German artillery and moved quickly on to Italy, where one of his first tasks was removing body parts of civilian workers after a Milan munitions factory explosion, which incident he later described in Death in the Afternoon.

    On July 8th, Hemingway was hit in the legs by mortar fragments.  Despite his wound he refused immediate evacuation, instead moving to assist injured Italian soldiers to safety, for which action he was given the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery.

    He was eighteen years old at the time.

    Later, Hemingway again used his avatar of Nick Adams to describe his own return home in one of the best outdoor stories ever written.  The Big Two-Hearted River, interestingly, does not take place on the Lower Peninsula’s Two-Hearted River but rather on the You-Pee’s Fox River north of the town of Seney; one of my bucket list items is to fish that same stretch of river.  In that story Hemingway describes Nick’s first night in camp:

    “Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blankets. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.”

    Reporter Hemingway.

    After the war Hemingway accepted a position with the Toronto Star Weekly, where he met and started a romance with his roommate’s cousin, Hadley Richardson.  In time, the two married and relocated to Paris, which this time wasn’t under fire from German artillery.  During the Paris years Hemingway hung around with several other well-known literary and artistic figures, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Pablo Picasso.  It was from this period that arose a famous and yet apocryphal exchange between Fitzgerald and Hemingway in which Fitzgerald observed, “…the very rich, they are different than you and I,” to which Hemingway supposedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.”  His first son Jack (nicknamed “Bumby,” because why not) was born in 1923 and became father to some of Hemingway’s most famous descendants, the actors and models Margot and Mariel Hemingway.

    It was during this time in Europe that Hemingway first visited Spain, where he became interested in bullfighting; he also published his first successful book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, and his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises.

    In 1927 Hemingway published his third work, Men Without Women, divorced his first wife Hadley, married his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer, and moved to Key West, Florida.  He announced that thereafter he would never again live in a big city, which he never did.

    For the next ten years Hemingway split his time between Key West in the winters and Wyoming in the summer.  He described in Wyoming “the most beautiful country I’ve seen in the American West,” and spent a considerable amount of time fishing and hunting deer, elk and bear.

    In this time, he wrote such works as A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon and The Green Hills of Africa, among others.  With his wife Pauline, he embarked on an extensive African safari in 1933, which yielded much of the background for that latter book.

    In 1937, Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance.  After that he sailed his yacht, the Pilar, to Cuba, where he lived for some time in the Hotel Ambos Mundos.  While in Cuba he was inspired (somehow) by a woman named Martha Gellhorn to write his most famous work, For Whom the Bell Tolls, of which book I have a first edition on my bookshelf.  This work, on publication, sold a half-million copies within the first year and resulted in Hemingway’s nomination for a Pulitzer prize.  His success did not translate into his personal life, however; in 1939 he divorced second wife Pauline and married Martha Gellhorn.

    But in 1941, events unfolded that would see Hemingway on some of his greatest adventures.

    His One-Man War

    In Wyoming.

    Hemingway had been fascinated by war and how men behave in war for most of his life.  When the Great War Part Two broke out, he seized the opportunity to see the raw face of war up close and personal.

    Traveling to London as a journalist, he flew several missions cross-Channel with the Royal Air Force.  His wife Martha was forced to seek passage on a munitions ship to join him, which apparently fazed Hemingway very little.  While in London he fell hard for an American correspondent for Time magazine, one Mary Welsh.  In 1945 he would finally divorce Martha Gellhorn and marry Mary Walsh, with whom he would spend the rest of his turbulent life.

    But before that:  In 1944, Hemingway wangled a spot on a ship bound for the Normandy landings.  He was not permitted to go ashore until the second day, although he was within sight of the landings for some time aboard the ship Dorothea Dix.

    When he finally was allowed ashore, Hemingway attached himself to the 22nd Infantry Regiment, commanded by Colonel Charles Lanham.  On the drive to Paris, Hemingway befriended a small band of French partisan fighters in the small village of Rambouillet; he acted, as some of the American infantry claimed later, as their de facto commander until the liberation of Paris.  One American infantryman, Paul Fussel, who would later become a well-known author himself, remarked that “…Hemingway got into considerable trouble playing infantry captain to a group of Resistance people that he gathered because a correspondent is not supposed to lead troops, even if he does it well.”

    Ernest Hemingway was present at the liberation of Paris.  He covered the vicious fighting in the Hürtgenwald where the U.S. First Army clashed with Walter Model’s 275th and 353rd infantry divisions.  He was present at the Battle of the Bulge until a bout of pneumonia forced his evacuation.

    His “leadership” of the French partisans in the summer of 1944 yielded unexpected fruit, as Hemingway was formally charged with a violation of the Geneva Convention for acting as a civilian partisan, but he was acquitted after insisting that he “only provided advice.”

    The professionals in the American Army recognized Hemingway for his courage and his knowledge of military matters, and in 1947 he was awarded the Bronze Star for his courage and willingness to come under fire to cover the movements of the troops.

    After the war, however, Hemingway’s life took a darker turn.

    His Golden Years

    Partying in Cuba.

    After the war Hemingway returned to Cuba.  In 1950 an unconsummated affair with the 19-year old Adriana Ivanovich led to Hemingway’s writing and publishing his novel Across the River and Into the Trees, which was not well received; in a fit of pique, Hemingway produced the novella The Old Man and the Sea, which finally netted him the Pulitzer Prize in 1952.

    In those post-war years, Hemingway’s life continued to deteriorate.  In 1954, during another African safari, he and wife Mary narrowly escaped death in two plane crashes in as many days; these left Hemingway with a severe concussion.  Later that year he suffered burns in a brush fire.  These injuries resulted in the author increasingly turning to alcohol.

    In October 1954 Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature, about which he remarked that “…Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.  Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness for I doubt they improve his writing.  He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates.  For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”

    This loneliness may have been one of the demons that plagued him in his final years.  He moved to his home in Ketchum, Idaho, where he compiled his observations of Paris into the novel A Moveable Feast.  He grew increasingly paranoid, thinking that the FBI was monitoring him (they were.)  In 1960 he underwent electroshock therapy in the Mayo Clinic, which did little good, and finally, in April of 1961, Hemingway took his favorite shotgun, a 12-gauge double (possibly a Browning Superposed, but that bit is unclear), from the safe and shot himself.

    In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway wrote:  The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

    Unfortunately, Hemingway was one of the ones the world killed.

    He was an interesting man; he faced German bullets with great courage and produced many works of literature that are still regarded as some of the best in American literature.  But his own life was a train wreck; he could find happiness neither in marriage nor in his work.  Success in a chosen field, obviously, is not a panacea.  If we learn nothing else from the life of Ernest Hemingway, we can learn that.

    His Bibliography

    On the cover of Life.

    Below are all of Hemingway’s works (some, obviously, were published posthumously.)  I’ve read most of them and enjoyed them all.

    Fiction Books

    • (1926) The Torrents of Spring
    • (1926) The Sun Also Rises
    • (1929) A Farewell to Arms
    • (1937) To Have and Have Not
    • (1940) For Whom the Bell Tolls
    • (1950) Across the River and into the Trees
    • (1952) The Old Man and the Sea
    • (1970) Islands in the Stream
    • (1986) The Garden of Eden
    • (1999) True at First Light

    Nonfiction Books

    • (1932) Death in the Afternoon
    • (1935) Green Hills of Africa
    • (1962) Hemingway, The Wild Years
    • (1964) A Moveable Feast
    • (1967) By-Line: Ernest Hemingway
    • (1970) Ernest Hemingway: Cub Reporter
    • (1985) The Dangerous Summer
    • (1985) Dateline: Toronto
    • (2005) Under Kilimanjaro

    Short Story Collections

    • (1923) Three Stories and Ten Poems
    • (1925) In Our Time
    • (1927) Men Without Women
    • (1933) Winner Take Nothing
    • (1938) The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories
    • (1947) The Essential Hemingway
    • (1961) The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
    • (1969) The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War
    • (1972) The Nick Adams Stories
    • (1979) 88 Poems
    • (1979) Complete Poems
    • (1984) The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
    • (1987) The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
    • (1995) The Collected Stories (Everyman’s Library)
    • (1999) Hemingway on Writing
    • (2000) Hemingway on Fishing
    • (2003) Hemingway on Hunting
    • (2003) Hemingway on War
    • (2008) Hemingway on Paris

  • Profiles in Toxic Masculinity VII: Mad Jack Churchill

    Profiles in Toxic Masculinity, Part 7

    Appearances Can Be Deceiving

    The fellow to the right is a respectable-looking chap, isn’t he?  Maybe a bit stern, but all in all, a good steady sort; the kind you’d find running a major business enterprise or maybe a bank; a solid, reliable type, not the kind of man who would attempt anything wild or risky.

    That assessment couldn’t be more off base.  Who that gentleman is, is no less than John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming “Mad Jack” Churchill, a man who went into battle with a sword, a revolver, a longbow and bagpipes.  He was one of the ballsiest men to ever draw breath, and thus richly deserving of this week’s Profile in Toxic Masculinity.

    His Maculate Origin

    Jack Churchill was born on September 16, 1906, in Colombo, British Ceylon, to Alec Fleming Churchill later of Hove, East Sussex and Elinor Elizabeth, daughter of John Alexander Bond Bell, of Kelnahard, County Cavan, Ireland, and of Dimbula, Ceylon.  There was no family connection to another famous example of toxic masculinity who shared the last name of Churchill, although the two men were contemporaries.  When young Jack was only four, the family moved to Hong Kong.  Seven years later, in the thick of the Great War, the Churchills returned to England, settling in Surrey.

    Determined to pursue his education in the most masculine setting possible, Jack Churchill determined he would attend university at King William’s College on the Isle of Man.

    That’s right – the Isle of Man.

    Jack went on to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and on his graduation in 1926, rode off to serve as an infantry officer in the Manchester Regiment in Burma.

    His Adventurous Career

    Being in an infantry regiment with a long and storied history wasn’t enough to keep the young Churchill entertained.  To remedy this, he bought a motorcycle and spent his spare hours careering around Burma, on main roads, side roads, dirt tracks, or wherever else struck his fancy.  He was already a crack shot with rifle and revolver as well as the English longbow, which was to serve him well in years to come.

    In between motorcycle trips and military maneuvers, he taught himself how to play bagpipes, because why not?

    Leaving the Army in 1936, Jack headed for Kenya, where he worked as a newspaper editor.  Because editing a colonial newspaper wasn’t enough, the young Churchill embarked on a brief film career.  He had already parlayed his archery and bagpipe proficiency into a small part in 1924’s The Thief of Bagdad, and he expanded on that by appearing in A Yank at Oxford in 1938.

    He also represented Britain in the 1939 World Archery Championships in Oslo.

    But events that unfolded in 1940 were to deliver to this stalwart combination of Rob Roy, Robin Hood and a Terminator the best opportunities yet to (figuratively) show off his enormous adamantine pair of cojones.

    His One-Man War

    Even when he’s seated at a desk, that glare increases pucker factor by 122.5%.

    When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Churchill rejoined his regiment.  The Manchester Regiment was assigned to the British Expeditionary Force in France, which was in the process of having its ass kicked all the way to the English Channel by the German blitzkrieg.  Churchill, of course, was having none of that “retreat” nonsense and resisted at every turn.  One on occasion Churchill led a small group of Brit soldiers into ambushing a German patrol near the French town of L’Épinette.

    After letting the Krauts get in good and close, Churchill gave the order to attack by brandishing his claymore, chucking a grenade and bellowing “CHARGE!”  The Brits charged, led by the possibly mad Churchill and his broadsword, and routed the German patrol.  When asked later by a higher-ranking officer why he insisted on carrying the Scottish sword, Churchill replied “In my opinion, sir, any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed.”

    Incidentally it was this action that began the rumor of Churchill’s having killed a German with a longbow, hence becoming the only Allied solider in WW2 to do so, but Churchill himself denied that claim, noting that his longbow had been crushed underneath a lorry some time before this incident.

    He went on going into battle properly dressed, leading his men on a series of rear-guard and guerilla actions against the Germans until the BEF was evacuated at Dunkirk.  He was wounded in the neck by a machine-gun bullet but refused evacuation and went on fighting.

    At this point he decided that the ongoing unpleasantness would offer more opportunities to kill Germans if he joined a unit even more elite than the Manchester Regiment, so he volunteered for the Commandos, eventually becoming second-in-command of No. 3 Commando.

    An exercise, not the real raid, but still a maniacal badass with a sword leading the way.

    In 1941 No. 3 Commando, including the now Lieutenant-Colonel Churchill, took part in Operation Archery.  In this action, on December 27, 1941, in a daytime amphibious landing, the No. 3 Commando raided a German garrison at Vågsøy, Norway.  Lieutenant-Colonel Churchill was on the first landing craft.  When the ramp dropped, he was the first off, and promptly scared the living bejeezus out of the Germans by standing in the surf playing March of the Cameron Men on his bagpipes as the rest of the Commando stormed ashore.  When all were present, Churchill chucked a grenade at the German positions, apparently his favorite way to begin an attack, and drew his sword, leading the Commando into battle.  After the action was awarded the Military Cross with Bar for conspicuous gallantry, and likely also because the British Army didn’t dare fail to award a man with Churchill’s combination of courage and insanity.

    1943 found Colonel Churchill in command of No. 2 Commando.  That unit landed and fought in Sicily and Salerno.  In that second action, Churchill was ordered to silence a mortar position and eliminate a German observation post that controlled a pass overlooking the Salerno beachhead.  Most officers would have assembled a patrol and moved on the positions with fire and maneuver in a traditional infantry operation, but not Jack Churchill.  He led No. 2 Commando to encircle the German observation post, then drew his sword, brandished it, bellowed “COMMANDO!” and charged the post, easily taking it and killing or capturing the German troops.  He then went on to take out the mortar post by capturing one guard, then moving on to the others in turn, shoving his Scottish sword in their faces and demanding their surrender.  He later commented:   “I maintain that, as long as you tell a German loudly and clearly what to do, if you are senior to him he will cry ‘jawohl’ (yes sir) and get on with it enthusiastically and efficiently whatever the situation.”

    In 1944, his luck ran out, but his courage didn’t fail him.  Churchill was leading Commandos in Yugoslavia in support of Marshall Tito’s partisans.  In May of 1944 he was ordered to raid the German-held island of Brač.  Despite having assembled a considerable force of 1500 partisans and 44 Brit Commandos, the attack was unsuccessful.  On the second morning of the mission, Churchill led a flanking attack on the German positions while the Partisans remained behind.  By the time the Commandos reached the objective only six were left alive, of which Churchill, still toting a rifle along with his sword and bagpipes, was one.  Mortar fire swept their positions, killing all remaining members but Churchill.  Out of grenades and ammo as the Germans closed in, he stood and began playing Will Ye No Come Again on his bagpipes until a grenade knocked him unconscious.

    The Germans, noting the name on this identity disk and incorrectly assuming a family connection to the British Prime Minister, sent him to Berlin.  There he was interrogated until, in frustration of having learned nothing from the stalwart officer, the Germans sent him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Oranienburg, Germany.

    By September 1944 Mad Jack had enough of a prisoner’s life.  Enlisting a Royal Air Force officer, Bertram James, to help in the attempt, he and James crawled under the wire around the camp and into an abandoned drainpipe.  Making their way away from the camp, they headed for the Baltic coast but were recaptured only a few miles from the sea.

    Mad Jack in Action.

    Probably because of his predilection for escaping and also probably because he intimidated the shit out his Wehrmacht guards, in April of 1945 Churchill was sent to an SS-run concentration camp near Tyrol.  After a delegation of Allied prisoners complained to a passing Wehrmacht officer, one Hauptmann (Captain) Wichard von Alvenslaben,  that they were worried about being murdered by the SS, the German captain (perhaps looking ahead to the consequences of Germany’s looming defeat) surrounded the camp and “advised” the SS to get the hell out.  They did so, and soon after the German regulars did as well.  Churchill and some others promptly decamped and walked 90 miles to Verona, Italy, where they found an American armor unit.  On rejoining Allied forces in this manner, Churchill was disappointed to find the Germans had surrendered, and so wasted no time demanding reassignment to Burma, where the Japanese were still kicking up their heels.

    The assignment was granted, but by the time Churchill made his triumphant return to Burma, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had both been wiped off the map.  The Japanese Emperor, realizing that the tide of battle had irreversibly turned against Japan now that Mad Jack Churchill was in the theater of operations, surrendered.

    Churchill was miffed, to say the least, complaining that “…. if it weren’t for those damn Yanks, we could have kept this war going another ten years!”

    After the war Churchill continued to demonstrate badassery of a kind not much seen in British men today.  He qualified as a paratrooper and was assigned to the Seaforth Highlanders in Palestine, where he performed such feats as assisting a medical convoy under attack by Arab partisans.

    In 1952 he resumed his film career, appearing alongside Robert Taylor in MGM’s production of Ivanhoe.

    Churchill retired from the British Army in 1959, but he wasn’t done yet; not by a long shot.

    His Golden Years

    On retirement, Churchill went home to Sussex with his wife, Rosamund Margaret Churchill nee Denny, and their children, Malcolm Leslie and Rodney Alistair.  He hung his Army awards up, and they made quite a list:

    • Distinguished Service Order with bar
    • Military Cross with bar
    • 1939-1945 Star
    • Italy Star
    • Burma Star
    • War Medal 1939-1945
    • General Service Medal with “Palestine 1945-1948” bar

    His eccentricity continued.  He went on bagpiping and longbowing his way through life. Even in retirement he maintained an office and, in the afternoons on his return home, startled train passengers by hurling his briefcase out of the train window some ways before his stop.  When someone finally worked up the nerve to ask why, he calmly explained that he was chucking the thing into his back garden so he wouldn’t have to carry it home from the station.

    John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill died on March 8th, 1996, at 89 years of age, in Sussex.  The Royal Norwegian Explorers Club named him as “one of the finest explorers and adventurers of all time,” and to this day, he has yet to be outmatched in that regard.  His legacy remains today as one of the toughest, most fearless, possibly craziest soldiers Britain has ever produced; a legacy that almost certainly would have pleased him.

  • Profiles in Toxic Masculinity VI: Roy Benavidez

    The young Raul Perez Benavidez.

    Profiles in Toxic Masculinity, Part 6

    Appearances Can Be Deceiving

    The young fellow to the right looks like nothing more than a young man from some time ago, a rash, devil-may-care young guy of a sort we’ve all encountered.  Probably a good kid to share a cold beer with; a young guy with little more on his mind than finding a job, buying a car, maybe finding a girl.

    What this young fellow became, though, is much more than that.  This is one of the few photos from the youth of Roy Benavidez, a great hero, a Medal of Honor awardee, and one of the Vietnam War’s most outstanding soldiers.  Say what you will about the Vietnam conflict, but any such scrap yields both villains and heroes; Roy Benavidez is absolutely one of the latter.

    His Maculate Origin

    Raul Perez “Roy” Benavidez was born on August 5th, 1935, near Cuero, Texas.  He was the son of Salvador Benavidez, a farmer, and Teresa Perez, a Yaqui Indian.  Young Roy’s life was not an easy one, as his father Salvador died when young Ro was only two; his mother remarried but also died five years later.  Benavidez lost both of his parents to a disease not often seen today:  Tuberculosis.  On the death of his mother, Benavidez and his younger brother moved to El Campo, Texas, to live with his grandfather and an aunt and uncle.

    The young Benavidez wasn’t one to shy away from work.  He did shy away from schooling, dropping out at age 15, but he was a worker; he shined shoes at the EL Campo bus station, worked on farms on the West Coast, and eventually returned to El Campo to work in a tire shop.  In 1952, he joined the Texas National Guard; in 1955, he joined the active Army as a medic.  It was this change that finally have the young man a career – and considerably more than that.

    His Adventurous Career

    PFC Benavidez.

    Not one to shy away from a challenge, the new soldier from El Campo volunteered for Airborne training and, on completing that, was assigned to the 82nd Airborne at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.

    In 1965, Sergeant Benavidez was sent to South Vietnam.  There he was assigned, as many Special Forces types were in those days, as an adviser to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam – working with, as U.S. Forces called them, “Marvin the ARVN.”  His luck was not good; one day on a patrol, SGT Benavidez stepped on a mine.

    His injuries were severe.  Benavidez was evacuated to the Army’s Brooke Army Medical Center at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas, where doctors assured him he would never walk again, and began processing his discharge papers.  Sergeant Benavidez decided “f**k that” and decided, in typically tough Special Forces fashion, that he would not only walk again but would resume his Army career; through sheer force of will, he did so.

    Against doctor’s orders, the determined NCO would crawl out of bed after lights out each night.  Dragging himself with his elbows and chin to a wall, he would leverage himself upright, a little further each night, pushing through pain that he admitted left him in tears but was preferable to not walking.  He eventually stood, then walked.  In July 1966, he walked out of the hospital and, despite continual pain from his barely healed wounds, volunteered to return to Vietnam.  Pain from old wounds notwithstanding, Sergeant Benavidez took his career to the next level and volunteered for Special Forces training, which he completed successfully; on his assignment to the 5th Special Operations Group, he sought and was granted assignment to the elite Studies and Observations Group.  In January 1968, his long sought-after orders came through, and he was back in-country.

    Roy Benavidez has already shown himself to have great big balls of solid titanium.  But his biggest test was yet to come.  On May 2, 1968, six hours of action would present (then) Staff Sergeant Benavidez with the necessity of putting his training and courage to the test.

    His One-Man War

    Benavidez in Action.

    On the day in question, a patrol of twelve soldiers, consisting of three U.S. Special Forces advisors and nine Montagnard tribesmen, stumbled into an entire battalion of North Vietnamese infantry, numbering around a thousand men.

    The patrol called for help.  The first attempt at rescue was not successful; several helicopters returned from the first effort with wounded crewmembers and severe damage.  Another effort was quickly assembled.  Among those at the Forward Operating Base at Loc Ninh who hurried to react was Staff Sergeant Roy Benavidez, who scrambled onto a helicopter with his medic’s aid bag and a combat knife – no other weapon, not even so much as a pistol.  He did have his dedication and his adamantine courage, which would prove to be enough.

    On arrival in the middle of a firefight, SSG Benavidez soon realized that all of the Special Forces team members were either KIA or too badly wounded to move to the extraction point.  Benavidez directed the pilot of the helicopter he was in to drop him in a small clearing; he then ran 75 meters under heavy fire to the besieged team’s positions.

    During the 75-meter run, Benavidez was hit three times, in the face, the head and in the right leg.  But that wasn’t about to stop him.  He took charge of the team, directing those still capable of firing to cover the landing of the dustoff helicopter.  He threw smoke grenades to cover the withdrawal and, under intense fire, dragged half of the team members to the helicopter.  When it proved impossible to move the remaining team members, Benavidez picked up a rifle and, shouting to the helicopter’s crew to move to the remaining team members, ran alongside the bird and directed suppressive fire at the North Vietnamese troops.

    Finally, the entire team was loaded aboard the slicks.  Benavidez wasn’t done; he completed one last sweep of the area, retrieving classified papers from the dead team leader’s body even as the enemy fire intensified.  At one point a North Vietnamese soldier rushed him, striking Benavidez with his bayonet; Benavidez killed the NV with his combat knife and continued the mission.

    Finally, suffering from thirty-seven wounds and severe blood loss, Staff Sergeant Benavidez allowed himself to be dragged into the last helicopter, finally allowing the extraction team to un-ass the area, still under heavy fire.  Sergeant Benavidez’s wounds included seven “major” gunshot wounds, twenty-eight fragment wounds, and slashes to both arms from the bayonet attack.  The fragment wounds were in his head, scalp, shoulder, buttocks, feel and legs; his right lung was collapsed, he had been struck in the back of the head with a rifle butt and a 7.62 round had hit him in the back and exited just under his heart.  His actions on that day were credited with saving the lives of eight members of the twelve-man Special Forces team.

    Back at Loc Ninh, a doctor, believing Benavidez dead, ordered him placed in a pile of body-bagged corpses, until Benavidez mustered the strength to spit in the doctor’s face.  Since dead men don’t spit, Sergeant Benavidez was once again evacuated to the States, where he spent a year recovering from his wounds.

    During his recovery, General William Westmoreland visited Sergeant Benavidez, presenting him with the Distinguished Service Cross.  The commander of the 5th, Special Forces, LTC Ralph Drake, had put Benavidez in for the Medal of Honor, but one of the requirements for that award is an eyewitness; all the eyewitnesses for many of Sergeant Benavidez’s heroism were dead.

    Years later, however, an eyewitness surfaced.  One Brian O’Connor, who had been a radioman on the Special Forces team, had been evacuated to the States and since moved to Fiji.  Benavidez had thought O’Connor killed in action, but after reading an account of Benavidez, O’Connor wrote a ten-page account of the events of May 2nd, 1968.

    Finally, on February 24th, 1981, Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, placed on him by President Ronald Reagan, who commented that “…if the story of his heroism was a move script, you would not believe it.”  You can read the full citation here.

    His Golden Years

    Roy Benavidez retired from the Army in 1976 and returned home to El Campo.  He spent his retirement wisely, traveling the country speaking to young people about the importance of staying in school and completing their education.  He was in wide demand as a speaker, but favored military audiences, where the example of his Medal of Honor was particularly inspiring; meeting an NCO whom generals salute first isn’t something that happens every day.

    Master Sergeant Benavidez, as I remember him.

    Side note:  This profile has some additional meaning to me, as I had the distinct honor of shaking Roy Benavidez’s hand once.  When I was attending Advance Individual Training at the old 91A school at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas, Master Sergeant (Retired) Benavidez had come to the post to speak to some of the classes.  He later toured the training area where my company was doing some hands-on training.  He spoke to every soldier and shook a lot of hands.  We had heard he would be on post, who he was and what he had done, so we were pretty excited; I remember shaking his hand, he looked at me very seriously and said, “Keep it up, we need medics.”

    It was a considerable thrill and a hell of an honor.  Men like MSG Benavidez don’t come around every day.

    Master Sergeant (Retired) Raul Perez Benavidez died on November 29, 1998, at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, and was buried with (well-deserved) full military honors at the Ft. Sam Houston National Cemetery.  I had just left my third stint on active duty in the Army not quite two years earlier and was saddened to learn of MSG Benavidez’s passing at the untimely age of 63.  The Army, like any other large institution, has many examples that young people can learn from, both good and bad; Roy Benavidez was certainly a good one.

  • Profiles in Toxic Masculinity V: Roy Chapman Andrews

    Profiles in Toxic Masculinity, Part 5

    Appearances Can Be Deceiving

    The fellow to the right looks like a banker, stockbroker, maybe a corporate executive of some type, doesn’t he?  A solid, stable, reliable, boring guy, one you’d never find pulling off anything dangerous or exciting.

    What he was, in fact, was something completely different.  This character is Roy Chapman Andrews, one of the most groundbreaking scientists of the early 20th century, a pioneer in dinosaur paleontology, possibly one of the inspirations for the character of Indiana Jones, and a considerable badass in several different ways.

    His Maculate Origin

    Roy Chapman Andrews was born to Charles and Cora Chapman Andrews in 1884 in an unassuming house on an unassuming street in the unassuming town of Beloit, Wisconsin.  He spent a good part of his youth wandering the hills and fields around Beloit, becoming a crack shot, a careful amateur naturalist and a taxidermist.  It was his skill at that latter avocation that leveraged him into Beloit College and in part paid for that education.

    He graduated that institution in the year of 1906, with a degree in English and classes in archaeology and evolution added to the mix.  He was determined to move into the larger world.  And so, on leaving Beloit College, the young Andrews made his way to New York City, where he determined that he would enter employment at The American Museum of Natural History.  To that end he arranged to speak to the Museum’s Director, one Dr. Bumpus, who in the course of the interview dashed the young Andrews’ hopes – almost, as Andrews himself describes in his autobiography Under A Lucky Star – A Lifetime of Adventure:

    At last he said, regretfully, that there wasn’t a position of any kind open in the Museum. My heart dropped into my shoes. Finally I blurted out, “I’m not asking for a position. I just want to work here. You have to have someone to clean the floors. Couldn’t I do that?” “But,” he said, “a man with a college education doesn’t want to clean floors!” “No,” I said, “not just any floors. But the Museum floors are different. I’ll clean them and love it, if you’ll let me.” [i]

    He did indeed end up starting his career mopping floors.  But young Andrews was destined for greater things, as his subsequent career proved beyond anyone’s capacity to doubt.

    His One-Man War Adventures

    For a man who is best remembered today for his adventures in various deserts pursuing dinosaur bones, it is surprising to some that Andrews first earned his adventuring stripes chasing snakes, lizards and whales.

    Scarcely had he entered his employment at the American Museum of Natural History than the young Andrews found himself packed off aboard the USS Albatross to the East Indies, where he collected various reptile specimens and watched marine mammals at play.  This led to an interest in whales, and soon Andrews was in British Columbia at a whaling station, where he went to sea on the schooner Adventuress to try to obtain a bowhead whale skeleton for the Museum.  In this Andrews was uncharacteristically unsuccessful, but he did obtain some sterling film footage of seals, the best that had ever been available to the American public at that point.

    But careering around the ocean in whaling vessels quickly grew boring for Andrews; something more exotic was in order.  In 1914 he had married Yvette Borup, and in 1916, with his new wife along for the adventure, Andrews led an expedition across China’s southern and western provinces, cataloging the flora and fauna of that area.

    It was in 1920, however, that the plans Andrews’ most well-known adventures began to take shape.

    Bear in mind that the automobile was still kind of a brand-new thing in the early 1920s.  But Andrews wasn’t afraid of breaking new ground in more than just looking for fossils, so her determined to take a fleet of Dodge automobiles west out of Peking and into the Mongolian deserts, there to seek fossils.  The automobiles and personnel were assembled, and in 1921 the group set out.

    Mongolia in those days wasn’t the most stable of places; armed bandits were everywhere, and so were corrupt provincial police, little better than bandits themselves.  But the fossil pickings were rich.  Andrews’ expedition uncovered fossils of indricotheres, a giant hornless rhino four times as heavy as an elephant, and the rhino-sized hoofed carnivore that was named after him, Andrewsarchus. 

    Human fossils were also a goal, as Andrews adhered to the then-popular “Out of Asia” theory of human origins, which posited that mankind’s ancient ancestors arose in Asia, but while fossils of the creature now known as Homo erectus were found in China in 1923 (then described as Pithecanthropus or “Peking Man”) Andrews’ group was not destined to find any early human remains.  In fact, in 1924, anthropologist Raymond Dart found the first fossil of an australopithecine in South Africa, the “Taung child” later classified as Australopithecus africanus.  It is not known whether this discover dissuaded Andrews from the “Out of Asia” theory.

    Andrews in Mongolia, on his horse Kublai Khan.

    Andrews’ adventures in Mongolia were not entirely peaceable.  On one occasion he and a partner were driving down a desert valley when they were ambushed by bandits.  The bandits fired several shots at Andrews’ automobile, but as befitting a man with a big brass pair, the heroic explorer from Beloit just wasn’t having any of it.  As Andrews himself described it, he and his partner drove into a canyon, grabbed rifles and set up to ambush their ambushers:

    Soon our potential murderers started to climb down the cliff, evidently bent on finishing off what they had begun. But we weren’t having any. Charlie picked one fellow silhouetted against the sky. I lined my sights on another in front. Bang, bang went our rifles. Charlie’s client sat down suddenly and rolled over. Mine did a magnificent swan dive right off the cliff. The other three ducked back among the rocks. It must have been a bit of a surprise to them. [ii]

    Apparently, Andrews was a fan of Savage rifles.  From the horseback photo here, it appears Andrews favored the 99 Savage lever guns, which gives me another reason to add one to my collection.  In another photo he appears with what looks like a Model 20 Savage lying on a rock nearby.  I have not yet found a photo that clearly shows the revolver he routinely carried, although he describes it as a .38.  That covers a lot of ground, six-gun wise.

    It was on July 23rd, 1923, that Andrews and his team made the discovery that he is best remembered for today.  On that fateful day, one of the party uncovered several oval objects in Cretaceous strata and went back to camp joking about having found dinosaur eggs.  Andrews returned to the site and determined that yes, these were indeed fossilized dinosaur eggs – the first ever found.  Initially thought to be from the common Cretaceous ceratopsian Protoceratops, the eggs were many years later found to belong to a species of oviraptor.  But dinosaur eggs they were, the very first; Andrews wrote about that day:

    Dino Eggs!

    Then our indifference suddenly evaporated. It was certain they really were eggs. Three of them were exposed and evidently had broken out of the sandstone ledge beside which they lay. Other shell fragments were partially embedded in the rock and just under the shelf we could see the ends of two more eggs. [iii]

    In 1927, the first rounds of the Chinese Civil War began, wherein the Kuomintang-led government was battling for control of the country against Chinese communists.  We all know now how that turned out, but at the time it was beginning to be very dicey indeed for a band of American dinosaur hunters.  After some wrangling with bureaucrats and much difficulty in getting specimens released for export – and after one incident wherein Andrews and colleagues fled down a gravel road in their automobile with machine-gun bullets cracking past their ears, escaping only after a Chinese officer directed them to drive down the ditch to escape the worst of the fire.  After this even Andrews had had enough.  He described the aftermath of their narrow escape thusly:

    It was a difficult job to navigate over the plowed ground, but somehow we got to the gate of Peking and into the city. The experience affected each of us differently. I had been so busy driving that there was no time to be scared; or at least not to give in to the feeling. I had got the other fellows into the jam and had to get them out. But once back in Peking I felt awfully weak and sick. One of the other men who was staying with me had been perfectly cool throughout the entire performance and afterward. At two o’clock the next morning he went into violent hysterics. I had a beautiful time getting him back to normal.  [iv]

    His Golden Years

    Andrews, with his habitual holstered revolver.

    Andrews returned to the United States in 1930.  In 1934, he ascended to the Director’s chair in the Museum of Natural History, where he had begun his employment mopping floors.  He had chronicled many of his adventures prior to this, but on his retirement to California (which was not nearly as nutty a place then as it is today) in 1942, he began writing in earnest, churning out memoirs and tales of adventure which were all the more gripping because he really lived them.  His published works include:

    • Monographs of the Pacific Cetacea (1914–16)
    • Whale Hunting With Gun and Camera (1916)
    • Camps and Trails in China (1918)
    • Across Mongolian Plains (1921)
    • On The Trail of Ancient Man (1926)
    • Ends of the Earth (1929)
    • The New Conquest of Central Asia (1932)
    • This Business of Exploring (1935)
    • Exploring with Andrews (1938)
    • This Amazing Planet (1939)
    • Under a Lucky Star (1943)
    • Meet your Ancestors, A Biography of Primitive Man (1945)
    • An Explorer Comes Home (1947)
    • My Favorite Stories of the Great Outdoors Editor (1950)
    • Quest in the Desert (1950)
    • Heart of Asia: True Tales of the Far East (1951)
    • Nature’s Way: How Nature Takes Care of Her Own (1951)
    • All About Dinosaurs (1953)
    • All About Whales (1954)
    • Beyond Adventure: The Lives of Three Explorers (1954)
    • Quest of the Snow Leopard (1955)
    • All About Strange Beasts of the Past (1956)
    • In the Days of the Dinosaurs (1959)

    If time allows you to read only one, make it his Under A Lucky Star. 

    Roy Chapman Andrews passed away on March 11, 1960 and was buried in his hometown of Beloit, Wisconsin.  He left behind him a legacy of adventure that few could match.  Today’s batch of scientists seem poor stuff by comparison to the gun-toting, hellraising, fearless Roy Chapman Andrews.

    [i] Andrews, Roy Chapman. Under a Lucky Star – A Lifetime of Adventure. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

    [ii] ibid

    [iii] ibid

    [iv] ibid

  • Profiles in Toxic Masculinity IV: Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis

    Appearances Can Be Deceiving

    To the right you can see just another bronze bust of just another old dead white guy.  No big deal, right?  Museums the world over have millions of ‘em.

    This isn’t just any old dead white guy immortalized in bronze.  This is Cato the Younger or, as his contemporaries knew him, Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, a Stoic, scion of the late Roman Republic, a famously incorruptible statesman, advocate for liberty (or at least what passed for it in those days) and the latest in our examples of Toxic Masculinity.

    His Maculate Origin

    Born in 95BC in the city of Rome, Cato quickly grew into a stubborn, willful child.  The Greek-became-Roman-citizen Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (Plutarch) chronicled several events from the young Cato’s life, including his refusal to support the Marsi in the Social War – in spite of having been dangled out a window by his ankles, said dangle having been carried out by the leader of the Marsi, one Quintus Poppaedius Silo.  This was Cato’s first public display of ballsiness and, while it is not our place to question Plutarch’s chronicling of these events, it’s important to note that Cato would have been around four years old at this time.

    During the dictatorship of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the dictator often sought out the then-fourteen-year-old Cato and his brother Caepio for conversation, despite Cato’s outspoken opposition to the dictator.  Cato’s tutor Sarpedon cautioned Cato about his opposition, noting that Sulla had taken a free hand in executing Roman nobles that opposed him; Cato replied by asking for a sword, after which Sarpedon somehow managed to curtail the boy’s public excursions.

    Cato had quite a few notable relations.  Among them:  His half-sister, Servilia Major, was the long-standing mistress of Julius Caesar and the mother of Marcus Junius Brutus.  At age 21 he married a woman about whom little is known but her name, Atilia; with her he had two children, his son Marcus Porcius Cato and his daughter Porcia, who would later marry the same Marcus Junius Brutus.  This connection would have significant meaning in the civil war that was to come.

    His Adventurous Career

    Not really Cato.

    On reaching majority and receiving his inheritance, Cato left the house of the uncle where he had spent his childhood.  While his inherited wealth would have allowed him a life of luxury, Plutarch tells us that the young Cato eschewed unnecessary comforts and instead dove deep into Stoic philosophy, living modestly, eating no more than necessary, drinking only (apparently a great deal of) cheap wine, wearing plain, undyed robes and even doing without shoes.  He cultivated physical endurance, exposing himself to all conditions of heat, cold and damp to better enable himself to withstand discomfort.

    Cato was 23 when the Third Punic War began in 72 BC.  (Honestly, I always thought I would have taken Spartacus’s side on that one, but still…)  He quickly volunteered to join his brother Caepio in the field.  The brothers didn’t have much impact in that war, but five years later, in 67 BC, Cato was given command of a legion in Macedon.  There he impressed his troops by sharing their food, drink and living conditions.  Cato, true to his Stoic philosophy, chose to forgo the luxuries afforded other commanders and slept among his men.  He led their marches from the front, and only left his legion when he received word of his brother, wounded and dying in Thrace.

    The death of his brother hit Cato hard.  After burying his sibling, Cato embarked on an extensive walkabout of Rome’s eastern provinces and did not return to Rome until 65 BC.

    On his return to Rome, Cato was elected quaestor, a position that put the Stoic in the position of being able to audit and, to some extent control, the state Treasury.  His strict rectitude and incorruptibility made him somewhat unpopular in this position, as he quickly moved to prosecute several nobles – including some of former dictator Sulla’s inner circle – for illegal appropriation of funds and for filing fraudulent documents.  Cato made himself plenty of enemies in this role, about which he appeared to not give even one single ounce of crap.

    In 63 BC, Cato was elected Tribune of Plebs, in which role he assisted the sitting Consul, Marcus Tullius Cicero (a good choice for another Profile in Toxic Masculinity) in squashing the Cataline Rebellion.  Once the rebellion was put down, Cato, in a display of his usual inflexibility, wanted the conspirators executed, but a Roman general named Gaius Julius Caesar insisted instead on exiling the malefactors, spreading them among several far-flung Roman settlements for “safekeeping.”

    The animosity between Cato and Caesar appears to date from this point.

    Around this time Caesar, General Gnaeus Pompey Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus formed a triumvirate, and began slowly consolidating power between the three of them.  Cato opposed the triumvirate at every turn.  In 61 BC, Pompey returned from a campaign in Asia and demanded both a Triumph and that the Senate postpone elections to allow him to run for Consul; Cato opposed the measure, convincing the Senate to allow Pompey only one of the two options.  Pompey chose the Consul’s chair over the Triumph, but faced with the same demand from Caesar, Cato was forced to resort to a filibuster.  Unlike today’s proceedings in our own Senate, Cato actually had to hold the floor and speak, which he did so until sunset brought an end to the proceedings.

    In time Caesar became Consul, and immediately proposed to award his veteran troops with rich farmlands in Campania.  As this province and its agriculture provided almost a fourth of the Republic’s tax revenue, Cato again took to the rostrum to oppose the measure – upon which Caesar had the Consul’s Lictors forcibly remove Cato from the Senate, an insult which Cato was not to forget.  Still not giving even one tiny little crap, Cato resolved to oppose Caesar’s ambitions at every turn.

    But the Triumvirate was on shaky ground at this point.  Caesar’s ambitions were about to bring him into conflict with his fellow triumvirs.  It turns out that Cato’s inflexibility and zeal in prosecuting Sullan nobles had brought him in conflict with a famous general, the aforementioned Gnaeus Pompey Magnus, who had been known as The Teenage Butcher for his zeal in persecuting Sulla’s enemies.  It is ironic, then, that this very general would come to be an ally of Cato’s in the coming unpleasantness.

    The solidity of Cato’s big brass pair was about to be tested.

    His One-Man War

    The Senate.

    Matters came to a head in 49 BC.  Cato was then in the Senate, a key member of a group of republican Senators known as the Optimates.  In that fateful year, Caesar was winding up his campaigns in Gaul, having defeated and taken prisoner the Celtic king/warlord Vercingetorix.  Before the Senate, Cato insisted that Caesar’s term as proconsul had ended, and with it his proconsular immunity; he demanded Caesar return to Rome as an ordinary citizen, there to face charges.

    Cato’s now-ally, Pompey, was willing to let Caesar accept continuation of his immunity along with giving up all but one of his legions and accepting governorship of one province, but Cato refused the compromise, and managed to ram through a resolution recalling Caesar.

    The conqueror of Gaul didn’t take this well.  He crossed the Rubicon with one legion and marched on Rome.  Marcus Anneus Lucanus chronicled that moment:

    Caesar crossed the flood and reached the opposite bank. From Hisparie’s Forbidden Fields he took his standards said, “Here I abandoned peace and desecrated law; fortune it is you I follow. Farewell to treaties. From now on war is our judge!”

    Caesar had indeed decided to follow Fortune, and Fortune had evidently taken him as a pet, for with one legion he drove Pompey and the Optimates out of Rome and into Greece, where at Pharsalus the outnumbered Caesar seized victory from the jaws of defeat and sent Pompey and the remnants of the Optimates fleeing.  Pompey went to Egypt, where he met execution at the hand of Ptolemey’s minions seeking to curry favor with Rome.  Cato and Quintus Metellus Scipio fled to Utica in north Africa, determined to fight to the end for the Republic.

    Utica, or what’s left of it.

    Caesar followed.

    The final battle was fought at Thapsus, where Caesar was again victorious, and against the normal custom, Caesar ordered the execution of all of Scipio’s men.  Cato was not present at the battle, having remained within Utica.  At this point even the adamant Stoic had to concede defeat.

    His Defiant Ending

    Cato, sadly, wasn’t to enjoy any happy golden years.

    Refusing a pardon from Caesar, Cato took up a sword and plunged it into his stomach.  Plutarch wrote:

    Cato did not immediately die of the wound; but struggling, fell off the bed, and throwing down a little mathematical table that stood by, made such a noise that the servants, hearing it, cried out. And immediately his son and all his friends came into the chamber, where, seeing him lie weltering in his own blood, great part of his bowels out of his body, but himself still alive and able to look at them, they all stood in horror. The physician went to him, and would have put in his bowels, which were not pierced, and sewed up the wound; but Cato, recovering himself, and understanding the intention, thrust away the physician, plucked out his own bowels, and tearing open the wound, immediately expired.

    Thus, perished the man who has been described as “The Last Citizen of Rome.”  He opposed Caesar with all of his breath, standing for the founding principles of the Republic.  Personally, he was reputed to be a prickly, difficult man, and very likely a high-functioning alcoholic (hardly a novelty in those times.)  But he was a man of principle and, unlike most pols today, was willing to stick to his principles even unto death.

    Caesar, now, his story has been told, by Plutarch, Lucanus, Livy, Shakespeare and many more.  He won his war, was assassinated by a man who had been one of his closest friends, but his adopted son Octavian seized control and became, effectively, Rome’s first Emperor.

    You could very well argue that when Cato died, the Republic died with him.

    And where is our Cato today?

  • Allamakee County Chonicles V – The Goat Tree

    Note:  A preview from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)

    The Goat Tree

    Goats have a sort of, well, aura.

    Some folks refer to it as a stench.  Personally, I don’t think that word quite covers it.  Goats are worse than skunks by almost any measure.

    The really unique thing about goats is that, unlike skunks, have a predilection to spread their aura across the countryside, on the wings of the breeze.  They do this by climbing – barns, trees, fence posts, rocks, almost anything higher than their natural stance.  The purpose of this is to spread the cloying smell of goat as far as possible across the countryside.

    In the Beginning…

    When I was a small and innocent boy, the route my parents took to get to town passed by a small farm that was home to several goats, including one old Billy known locally as “Old Stinky.”  That any goat, of all goats, was sufficiently rank to gain such an appellation as “Old Stinky” speaks volumes; in fact, there was muttering around the neighborhood about the owner of said farm, old man Andresen, conducting chemical warfare to drive down property values.  The fact that old man Andresen bought up a couple neighboring farms at bargain-basement prices seemed to bear that view out; at least that gave him room to run a few more goats, over which Old Stinky presided as uncontested patriarch.  Old Stinky took an inordinate amount of pride in his ability to drive away all manner of animals, insects, trespassers, and to turn green plants brown for twenty yards downwind.  He sure seemed to enjoy himself; nobody was certain how old man Andresen was able to take it.  Perhaps having the only fly and mosquito-free farm in northern Iowa was some compensation; flying insects of all sorts steered well clear of the Andresen place.  Not even horseflies braved Old Stinky’s presence.

    The road to town, as it passed the Andresen place, first dropped into the Canoe Creek valley and then made a sharp turn right at the driveway to the farm house.  At the end of the driveway, right next to the road, was the Goat Tree.  It was in this giant old oak tree that Old Stinky preferred to climb to announce his odiferous presence to the land.  To get past the Andresen place to town, you had to drive down into the valley, slow down to make the sharp turn, cross the bridge and then race up the steep hill on the other side of Canoe Creek to get away from Old Stinky’s presence.  The speed required to negotiate this obstacle was determined by how long the individual driver could hold his/her breath.

    The actual Canoe Creek, taken from that actual bridge. Really.

    Odoriferous things.

    Anyone who was blessed in having a rural upbringing gets pretty used to some nasty smells.  Some of my friends had parents who kept hogs, for example, and the domestic swine can make eyes water for several hundred yards downwind, even in the cleanest and best-kept of farms.  There are also skunks, the stuff of legend as far and nasty smells; skunks of course combine one of Nature’s foulest odors with the capacity to project that odor in a form that sticks with you for weeks.

    On one memorable occasion, my father found an injured turkey vulture.  The bird had a broken wing, and we determined that the right thing to do would be to catch it in Dad’s jacket, wrap it up and transport it some 40 miles to Elkader, where the Iowa Department of Natural Resources ran a rehab facility.

    The capture went fairly smoothly, and we were relieved when the bird didn’t smell too badly.  We placed him, wrapped tightly in Dad’s jacket to prevent injury (to him and us) placed him in the back of Dad’s station wagon, and set off southward.

    It seems incredible that a bird, accustomed to riding wind currents so gracefully hundreds of feet above the ground as turkey vultures do, would be subject to carsickness.

    We hadn’t covered one mile of the journey when our rescued vulture began to vomit.  And, dear reader, I ask you to contemplate the items that constitute fine dining to a vulture; throw in a few hours of digestion, and you still couldn’t possibly imagine the havoc this resulted in.  Prodigious quantities of partially processed vulture foodstuff were quickly deposited in the back of the car, until it seemed that surely there was more of it than bird.

    Tempting as it was to abandon car, bird and all, we stuck it out; Dad driving with his head out the window, eyes squinted against the wind, Mom hanging out the passenger side window, gulping in fresh air; and myself, gagging in the back seat, threatening to join the bird at any moment.

    Turkey Vulture. They stink, too.

    It seemed things couldn’t possibly get any worse, but then we turned the bend and began the descent into the Canoe Creek valley.

    As we approached the Goat Tree, Dad let out a yelp and pulled his head in.  Mom did likewise; even in a car filled with vulture vomit, the presence of Old Stinky pervaded the auto, seeping in even as we frantically rolled up the windows. Old Stinky was in place; sensing a challenge, he had climbed out on a stout limb overhanging the road where he stood proudly, head thrown back in a victorious bleat.

    On a hunch, I risked a look over the back of my seat.  The vulture was trying to get his head stuck under a wing, and his normally red head was showing a distinct green tinge.  Somehow I don’t think the ride was responsible.  Old Stinky had written another chapter in his legend; no other animal could make even a vulture gag.

    His Greatest Coup

    Old Stinky lived for many a year, and it was not until I had reached the age of 17 that the final episode in his legend took place.  Old Stinky went out in style, though; his demise involved a pretty brunette from town, a halter-top, a convertible, and a steep ditch.

    The story began a few weeks before my 17th birthday, when I took to keeping company with a cute little dark-haired girl from town.  Rhonda had a trim figure, long legs, dark hair, dark eyes, and parts that protruded and curved in all the right places, in all the right ways.

    Rhonda’s father, Mr. Walters, (“but you best call me ‘Sir,’ boy”) was less than enchanted with the liaison; Rhonda came from a town family with money, and her Dad wasn’t too pleased with his baby girl taking up with a long-haired, slightly bedraggled woods bum who earned extra money by trapping muskrats, ate with his Buck knife and dressed up for company by putting on a clean black t-shirt and knocking the dirt off his steel-toed engineer boots.  I never did figure out why Mr. Walters could never seem to remember my name, and made up for his memory lapse by referring to me as “Worthless.”

    Still, Rhonda and I went out for several weeks, and enjoyed each other’s company a great deal.  Things had progressed to the point of exchanging smooches in the front seat of my ancient Ford when Rhonda’s Dad presented her with the gift of a nicely restored 1966 Mustang convertible.  This was too good to be believed; on the great day that Rhonda took delivery of the Mustang, she called me to announce the great news, and offer me a spin around the countryside.

    Early October in Northeast Iowa brings some of the most beautiful Indian summer days you’ll see anywhere.  The day that saw Rhonda pull into my folk’s driveway in her new Mustang, the sun was shining, the thermometer was in the eighties, the Mustang’s top was down, and Rhonda was enchantingly dressed in cut-off shorts and a white halter top.  I was decked out in my finest; jeans that still had knees, a black t-shirt with no holes, and I even stopped to knock the mud off my engineer boots before vaulting over the door into the passenger seat.  And away we went!

    The day was indeed wondrous; occasional stops for a bit of cuddling made it more wondrous still.

    Not Rhonda, but much the same.

    I guess it was the halter-top that was to blame.  For those of you who don’t remember, halter-tops in the late Seventies generally consisted of a small triangle of cloth with four strings; the cloth was just large enough to cover the strategic portions of a girl’s chest, and two ties at the nape of the neck and two at the mid-back secured the whole thing in place.  It was probably due to Rhonda’s halter-top commanding my entire attention (to be honest, it was the bow-knotted string ties I found particularly intriguing) that I didn’t notice her taking the turn down into the Canoe Creek valley.

    The nose of the Mustang dipped as the road took the first turn down towards the Andresen place, and I noticed the aura…  ever so faintly, the aura, of…

    Old Stinky.

    Rhonda seemed oblivious as we rounded the last bend, chatting happily away, one arm on the top of the door, one on the steering wheel, her left knee raised in a manner to take the breath away from a young man.

    But it wasn’t the sight of Rhonda’s thigh that was taking my breath away.  It was the sight of Old Stinky, out on his favored limb on the Goat Tree, casting his evil gaze at the oncoming Mustang.

    Old Stinky was wise in the ways of cars.  Old Stinky knew that, in a convertible with the top down, there was no escape.  Old Stinky was ready.  Out on the end of his favored limb, right over the road, Old Stinky threw back his head and bleated his triumph once more to the world.  His miasma descended to cover the road to our immediate front.

    “Say,” Rhonda asked, “Do you smell something?”

    “HIT THE GAS!”  I shouted.  Rhonda turned to me, a concerned look on her face, and then we both looked upwards.  As we passed under the Goat Tree, we heard the sound; the awful sound, the horrifying sound.  The sound of Old Stinky’s limb breaking.

    It seems Old Stinky had been putting on some weight as he got on in years.  The limb that safely supported him in his prime was dangerously fragile now.  I was told some time later by a saddened old man Andresen that Old Stinky hadn’t been out on his perch in a year or more.  It was only the irresistible sight of an oncoming convertible that drove Stinky, in spite of his advanced age, to one last feat of stenching.

    With a loud crack, the limb gave way, pitching Old Stinky into the Mustang’s back seat.

    Rhonda let out a screech that would have made a wildcat green with envy.  She yanked the Mustang to the left, then to the right.  Old Stinky staggered to his feet on the back seat, and fighting to keep his balance, grabbed in his long, snaggled teeth the only thing that presented itself, that being the top ties to Rhonda’s halter.

    Rhonda screeched louder still.  In what I imagined to be a chivalrous move, I started hammering Old Stinky’s head with my left fist; it was then I learned that an aged Billy goat’s skull is the approximate hardness of marble.  The only result was a badly bruised fist.  I had to some up with another course of action, fast; my vision was starting to get blurry, and Rhonda was starting the dry heaves.  A plan came to mind, and I shouted it at her.

    “STOP THE CAR!”

    Rhonda’s right foot came down hard on the brake pedal, and the Mustang’s wheels locked, sending the car careening into the steep ditch on the opposite side of the road.  The Mustang slammed hard against the side of the ditch; Rhonda’s seat belt held, and she only bounced off the steering wheel enough to give her a slight bruise on her forehead.  As for myself, in a display of teenage machismo I hadn’t fastened my seat belt, and so was slammed against the dashboard with rib-cracking force.

    Old Stinky, though, fared least well of all.  Still gripping the top ties to Rhonda’s halter, he was catapulted upwards, over Rhonda’s head, over the windshield, and a good fifty feet into the cornfield just ahead.  A trail of stench followed Old Stinky overhead, much like the wake of a boat; as he passed, he kept his grip on Rhonda’s halter ties.  The top ties held, but the bottom ties gave way; my last sight of Old Stinky was of his airborne figure, trailing Rhonda’s detached halter top, sailing into the rows of golden cornstalks.

    Not Old Stinky, but much the same.

    I’m saddened to report that Old Stinky didn’t survive his first experience with unassisted flight.  After all his malign intent, after all his evil smell, Old Stinky was a local institution, and it’s always sad to see a legend pass on.

    I’m still more saddened to report that, while we didn’t dare follow Old Stinky into the corn in search of Rhonda’s halter, she did have a blanket in the trunk of the Mustang, in which she wrapped herself up tightly and drove me in silence back to my parent’s house.  The thoughts of what the original intent Rhonda had in placing a blanket in the back of her car frustrated me for years afterwards.

    I didn’t see Rhonda again after that.  I guess the initial attraction was overcome by the association with the trauma of her banged-up Mustang and the odoriferous presence of Old Stinky, which never did come out of the upholstery.  Rhonda instead took up with a boy from town, a boy from a family with money.  I’m told that Mr. Walters (“I always told you he was worthless”) was pleased with the way things turned out.

    And Then…

    It turned out that Old Stinky left a legacy, after all.  A genetic legacy, one that curses the Canoe Creek valley to this day.  It was many years later, on a visit to my parents at my childhood home with my own family, that I learned that Old Stinky’s name is not forgotten.  During the course of a pleasant vacation at my Mom and Dad’s home, with my wife and two little girls, we decided one afternoon to take a drive to town.  As we turned our truck into the Canoe Creek valley, my wife turned to me.

    “Honey,” she asked, “Do you smell something?”

    “It stinks, Daddy!” our little girls chirped from the back seat.

    I looked up, and there, on the Goat Tree, stood a younger version of Old Stinky, on another limb overhanging the road, head thrown back, a victorious bleat ringing forth from a young and healthy set of lungs.

    A strange feeling came over me, and not just because of the smell.  It was a feeling that combined nausea, nostalgia, and an overall warm, fuzzy feeling that some things, some legends, can never die.

    My wife didn’t understand my expression, even as we drove through the clinging cloud of stench Young Stinky let loose to waft down onto the road, even as we all were gagging and our eyes watering…

    I was smiling.

  • Allamakee County Chronicles IV – Dad’s Guns

    Note:  A preview from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)

    Dad

    Dad, 1950

    How to begin to describe my father?

    I could summarize by saying he was the finest man I ever knew.  But there was a lot more to him than that.  You can tell a lot about a man by his possessions:  The kind of car or truck he drives, the way he dresses, and so on.  But I’ve always said that, in the case of my father, you could tell quite a lot about his intensely practical, personally and financially conservative lifestyle by his guns – not only which guns he owned, but also by the fact that three guns served him for almost his entire ninety-four years of life.

    This is the story of my Dad’s guns.

    Early On…

    Like most of Dad’s generation, he was a World War II veteran, having served from early 1943 to early 1946.  He was a second lieutenant in the US Army Air Corps and trained as a navigator.  When the war ended the Army wasn’t quite ready to let Dad go yet.  He had shipped to Victorville, CA to learn the new art of radar navigation, but on VJ Day there was suddenly much less need for qualified B-29 crew, so Dad was at odds until someone asked him if he’d like to help run the post skeet range.

    In those days as in the rest of his life, Dad hated having nothing to do, so he said “sure,” and ended up working with the first lieutenant who ran the ranges.  The skeet range, part of the overall qualification and training range complex, existed as a recreational opportunity for troops rotating back from the Pacific, but (perhaps understandably) most of those guys had done enough shooting to suit them for a while.

    So, Dad and the other officer shot.  A lot.  As in, hundreds of rounds a day.  Not just shotguns, either, as whenever the range received a shipment of ammo, the OICs were required to test a certain number of rounds from each shipment.  So, in addition to hundreds of rounds on the skeet range, Dad and his partner shot M1 carbines and, to test the shipments of .45ACP, M1 Thompsons and M3 Grease Guns, because why would you shoot a pistol if you have submachine guns that use the same round?

    Despite how much fun Dad was having shooting guns all day, when the Army finally got around to letting him go home, he grabbed the chance.  Part of the deal was that the Army would ship, gratis, one issue wooden Army footlocker with whatever Dad chose to put in it.

    Dad took a footlocker out to the range and filled it to the brim with 12-gauge shells.  He took that in to be shipped, stuck his extra uniforms in a suitcase, and boarded a train for Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where my grandfather was waiting for him.

    It so happened that, up in the town of Independence, Dad also had a girl waiting for him.  In March of 1947 that girl became his wife and, some years later, my Mom, but that’s a story for another time.

    The Guns

    Before the war Dad had been in the habit of borrowing his older brother’s ’97 Winchester when he wanted to go hunting, but with a footlocker full of 12-gauge shells and his demobilization pay in his pocket, he decided he needed his own shotgun, and so went forthwith into the pages of the Sears-Roebuck catalog where he ordered a Sears store-brand “J.C. Higgins 102.25” 12-gauge pump, which was a Stevens 520A in Sears trim.  At some point, Dad sent the gun off to the original Waseca, Minnesota Herter’s shop for a Herter’s brand collet-type poly-choke, making the old gun even more versatile.

    The 520A is a good, solid pump-gun.  As are so many American sporting arms, this one was the product of the mind of John Browning, the DaVinci of firearms, and bears the characteristic Browning “humpback” on the steel receiver.  During the war the Army bought quite a few of them in riot trim for MPs and such, and after that unpleasantness both Sears and Montgomery Wards sold them in store-brand trim. Dad now had a tool with which to put all his skeet-range experience to good use with, and when he took up a small farm near Independence in the fall of 1946, he put that skill to work bringing in rabbits and pheasants for the table.

    As I’ve noted in a couple of previous articles, if you can have only one gun, a 12-gauge pump is the gun to have.  Now you all know where I picked up that attitude originally, although I still adhere to that thinking after forty-plus years of shooting and collecting.

    Dad married my Mom in March of 1947.  For their third anniversary, Mom wanted to find Dad something enjoyable and practical for an anniversary present – and what could be more enjoyable and practical than a .22 rifle?  Mom enjoyed plinking with a .22 rifle herself and figured that a good .22 would increase Dad’s efficiency at producing the prime ingredient of rabbit stews as well as dealing with the vermin that inevitably become a problem on a farm.

    Mom knew as much about guns as your average 22-year old girl who had grown up on a farm during the Depression, which was more than most 22-year old girls today would.  She figured that the Coast-to-Coast in Oelwein would have what she was looking for.

    By this time the folks had moved to a larger farm near Fairbank, Iowa.  Neither Fairbank nor the nearby town of Readlyn boasted a hardware store in those days, so Mom went off to Oelwein, a larger town about fifteen miles east of the farm.  (As it happened, in 1961, Oelwein became the birthplace of one of eastern Iowa’s more notable former residents – me.)

    In that year of 1950, Mossberg had introduced yet another variation of their standard .22LR semi-auto.  These old guns fed via a tubular magazine not under the barrel but through the stock.  The latest version in that year featured a long 24” barrel and an unadorned black walnut stock with a Schnabel fore-end.  Mom kicked in the extra shekels for a long, skinny, steel-tubed 4X Mossberg scope and presented the rifle to Dad on the day of their third anniversary.

    Recently I advocated for the use of a bolt gun for a homestead’s .22 rifle, but the semi-auto from Mossberg proved accurate and reliable, although limited to .22 LR ammo.  On one winter afternoon, when a flock of geese landed in a plowed field to glean corn, the Mossberg proved accurate enough to hit one squarely in the head at a bit over 100 yards, which was as close as Dad could get working his way down the fencerow.  Corn-fed roast goose makes a pretty fair Sunday dinner.

    The last piece was the only one purchased purely for recreation.  Neither Mom nor Dad remembered later exactly what the year was, but at some point, in the early Sixties they decided it would be fun to have a handgun for a little recreational plinking.

    As it happens, a few years earlier Bill Ruger had introduced his rugged, reliable little Standard Auto in .22LR.  And this being in the pre-1968 GCA world, the folks were able to mail-order their new 6” barreled Standard and have it sent to the house.  Amazingly, nobody died – imagine that.

    My Mom was quite fond of plinking with Ruger’s little pistol and got to be quite an accomplished shot.  I remember her shooting bottle caps at 10-15 yards, and she would regularly shoot spent shotgun shells off the tops of fenceposts.  Dad was a pretty fair shot, but when it came to the handgun, I honestly think Mom had him beat.

    These were the three guns my Dad used through his career – these, and no others.  Consider the three pieces described:  There are prettier guns, fancier guns, with nicer wood and shinier finishes.  But the three guns here were all solid, utilitarian pieces, utterly dependable – like Dad.

    As I Grew

    Dad started teaching me to shoot when I was five or six years old.

    I started out with a simple BB gun borrowed from an uncle, probably a Daisy lever-action; at this distance in time, I really can’t remember.  When I was about ten, I was gifted my first in a series of Crosman pump-up Model 760 bb/pellet guns, of which I wore out several between the ages of about ten and sixteen.

    Dad and me, 1964

    At twelve or so I had moved on to shooting Dad’s .22 rifle and pistol, at first under his direct supervision until he was satisfied I could handle them safely.  Around that time, I received a Mossberg 20-gauge pump as a birthday present, the handling and maintenance of which Dad also instructed me in.

    No Army drill sergeant ever hammered anyone harder on gun safety.  I was drilled on muzzle control, on keeping my finger off the trigger until actually ready to shoot, on opening the action and clearing the chamber every time I picked up the gun even if I had just set it down moments before.  Dad always pointed out that a gun, like so many other tools found around a country place, were potentially dangerous instruments, and that a moment’s inattention could cause a serious injury or death.  He taught me how to shoot his guns and guns I later got for myself, how to maintain them, how to hit what I was aiming at and to do so responsibly.  When hunting, he taught me the importance of sportsmanship, of showing respect for the game, of being mindful that the birds and animals weren’t just targets, but that I was taking a life – and how that life and mine fit in with the greater scheme of things.

    His lessons are still with me today.  It is because of those lessons that I am still extremely discriminating on who I will go hunting or shooting with.

    But more than that, Dad taught me what the guns were to be used for.  We hunted pheasants and grouse, squirrels, rabbits, ducks, all the small game Iowa had to offer.  Dad had more or less quit hunting deer by the time I was big enough to give that a go but was always pleased at my proficiency in bringing big corn-fed Iowa whitetails to bag.

    Over the years I increasingly went on solo adventures, or out with my friends.  But I never got tired of watching Dad shoot a shotgun.  He had an uncanny knack for knowing where an evasive ruffed grouse might dodge through our timber and was adept at arranging for an ounce of # 7 ½ shot to be placed at a predetermined location that coincided with the bird’s arrival.

    His Legacy

    I see a little bit of Dad whenever I look in the mirror.  And not just because I share the characteristic Clark nose and Dad’s shaggy eyebrows.

    I can hear Dad’s precautionary voice every time I pick up a firearm.  Sometimes I take his old Stevens out to shoot a round of trap, and I usually draw a comment or two from our gun club regulars who are used to seeing me with my Citori or one of my Model 12s; but when I explain that this was my Dad’s gun, they almost always nod knowingly.  They get it.

    His old Mossberg .22 is still a tack-driver.  I killed a small mountain of squirrels and rabbits with it back in the day, and it still shoots as well as it did then.  Ditto for the .22 Ruger; only a year or so back I killed a dinner’s worth of Colorado mountain grouse with it.

    And as time went by, I taught my own kids and now my grandkids how to safely and responsibly handle firearms.  The lessons Dad passed on to me have been repeated, over and over.  They are as important now as they were then.  And now, today, Dad’s guns stand in my own gun rack, still cleaned, lightly oiled and ready.

    How It Stands Today

    Mom and Dad – 1947, 2017

    Dad’s been gone about a year and a half now.  He was 94, and my four siblings and I are in our fifties (only me, now) sixties and seventies.  When Dad left us, it was like a light went out in Mom.  After losing her husband of seventy-one years, she clearly had little interest in going on alone and followed him after only eight months.  Now my siblings and I look at each other and realize that now we’re the seniors; we are the Grandmas and Grandpas.

    We go through life knowing that one day our parents will be gone.  We had ours for a good long time, and they had each other for a good long time.  I miss them both still.  I miss my Dad, every single day.  It took me a while to get used to that empty place in my life where a giant once strode.  But everything I am, everything I know about being a man, a husband, a father and a grandfather is because of him, and one tangible reminder I have of that I have described here:  His guns.  Nothing fancy or ostentatious, just good solid utility, scrupulously maintained, practical and tough, always standing ready for whatever might happen.

    Not a bad way to be remembered.

  • Profiles in Toxic Masculinity III: Joshua Chamberlain

    Profiles in Toxic Masculinity, Part 3

    I thought that I’d profile someone a little more palatable – indeed, admirable – this time.

    Appearances Can Be Deceiving

    The fellow in this photo to the right looks a distinguished figure; a bank president, perhaps, or a judge, a governor, maybe a college professor.  He is a figure of great dignity and gravitas, indeed.

    Well, he was a college professor and a Governor (of Maine), in fact, but that’s the least of his story.  The old man here is Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain, hero of Gettysburg, one of America’s premiere military heroes, a man who may have single-handedly saved the Union on a fateful day in 1863.

    His Maculate Origin

    Lawrence Joshua Chamberlain (for unknown reasons he is best known by his middle name) was born on September 8, 1828, in Brewer, Maine, to Joshua and Sarah DuPree Brastow Chamberlain.  A studious and deeply religious child – his mother raised him in a strict Congregationalist household – he was shy and spoke with a pronounced stammer.  His father instilled in the young Lawrence an understanding of the importance of educating one’s self, as well as an abiding interest in military matters.  This was to lead to one of the most remarkable feats of American arms in our history.

    As a young man he pursued various occupations including lumberjack (hardly a novelty in Maine) and bricklayer, meanwhile studying Greek and Latin, because lumberjacking and bricklaying are both occupations that give you plenty of spare time for studying Greek and Latin.  At age twenty he entered Bowdoin College, graduating in four years.  Then, perhaps remembering his mother’s insistence on rigid Calvinism, Chamberlain entered the Bangor Theological Seminary.  On his graduation from that institution, however, he declined the ministry and returned to Bowdoin, where he was hired as a professor, teaching Rhetoric and Natural and Revealed Religions.  In 1855, he married his childhood sweetheart Frances “Fanny” Adams, and no, I will not speculate as to the source of her nickname.

    Then, in 1862, Chamberlain was to embark on his military career, and it is possible that no other American Army officer has ever led a more distinguished career with so little preparation.

    His Adventurous Career

    Chamberlain in Uniform.

    On the outbreak of the war, Chamberlain lectured his students on the necessity of preserving the Union and, being one to put his money where his mouth was, then wrote to the Governor of Maine, one Israel Washburn Jr., “I fear, this war, so costly of blood and treasure, will not cease until the men of the North are willing to leave good positions, and sacrifice the dearest personal interests, to rescue our country from desolation, and defend the national existence against treachery.”  Chamberlain then proceeded to do just that, declining the command of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry until, as he put it, he could “start a little lower and learn the business first.”  He didn’t start that much lower, serving first as Lieutenant Colonel of the regiment under Colonel Adelbert Ames.  The 20th was assigned to the 3rd Brigade, 1st Division, V Corps of the Army of the Potomac under the command of Brigadier General Dan Butterfield.  With these men Joshua Chamberlain went to war.

    The 20th saw first action at Fredericksburg, where the inept General Burnside ordered repeated attacks against the Confederates entrenched on Marye’s Heights.  The entire mess could have been avoided had Burnside, who despite his impressive facial hair and his invention of a successful breech-loading carbine was only a fair general, allowed one of his subordinates, Winfield Hancock, to cross the river the day before.  Had they done so, Hancock’s men could have occupied the heights before Lee’s men arrived; but that was not to be the case, and so the 20th Maine charged the heights.

    The charge of the 20th came late in the day, and like the units before them, they failed to take the heights.  They were still on the long, deadly slope when night fell and the men of the 20th, with Chamberlain in their midst, spent a cold and uncomfortable night using the bodies of slain soldiers as shields from the Confederate bullets that kept probing their lines throughout.  Come morning, they withdrew.

    A faulty smallpox vaccine that made much of the regiment ill spared them from the debacle at Chancellorsville, but about this time Colonel Ames was promoted away from the 20th, and Chamberlain ascended to Colonel and command of the regiment.

    The next July, Lee invaded Pennsylvania, and the 20th Maine marched towards a little Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg.

    His One-Man War

    To call what happened on July 2nd, 1863 as a one-man war is perhaps a bit of a misnomer.  The entire 20th Maine fought that action, after all, and their commander, Colonel Chamberlain, thereafter, always insisted that credit for their victory on that day properly went not to him but to the regiment.  But the command was his, the responsibility was his, and the decisions were his.  On that day, Chamberlain prevented another Chancellorsville-style disaster and may have saved the Union.

    On that fateful morning the 20th Maine was ordered to secure a hill called Little Round Top, which formed the extreme far left of the Federal line.  “You may not withdraw under any circumstances,” Colonel Chamberlain was ordered by his Brigade commander, Colonel Strong Vincent.  Realizing that if his men faltered and lost Little Round Top, the entire Union line could be flanked out and rolled up like a cheap carpet, Chamberlain spoke to his men, ordering them to prepare positions, to pile up rocks, to be ready for a stubborn fight.

    The attack was not long in coming.  The 15th Alabama attacked in force, charging up the steep hill several times.  The 20th suffered losses, but for the most part the men fared well in their defensive positions.  As the Alabama men probed for the 20th Maine’s flank, Chamberlain reportedly ordered his left flank to refuse the line, forming a new line at a 90-degree angle to the old.

    “Bayonets Forward!”  Gettysburg, PA, July 2, 1863 – Little Round Top – Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, his 20th Maine almost out of ammunition, orders a bayonet charge against a superior force of attacking Confederates.
    Original Commissioned by the U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, PA.

     

    During the fighting, Chamberlain was hit twice, both minor injuries; a bullet struck his sword scabbard, leaving a large bruise on his leg, and a spent bullet hit his boot.

    After several charges by the Alabama men convinced Chamberlain that the Confederates didn’t intend to give up, he decided to change tactics.  The Maine men were running low on ammo, and Chamberlain reckoned that charging down a hill beat the daylights out of charging up it, so he ordered his men to fix bayonets.

    The 20th fixed bayonets and charged.  As they charged, the left flank wheeled forward like a slamming door, hitting the 15th Alabama’s flank.  In the charge the 20th took over a hundred prisoners, including an Alabama captain captured personally by Chamberlain.

    Thus, ended the Battle of Little Round Top and the threat to the Federal left flank.  But while the battle ended that day, the history has stayed with us; when I was a U.S. Army officer candidate in the mid-Eighties, we studied this battle as an example of what thoughtful, courageous and committed leadership can achieve on the battlefield.

    The 20th Maine went on to fight at Cold Harbor, Second Petersburg, White Oak Road, Five Forks and Appomattox.  Chamberlain was badly wounded at Second Petersburg, taking a bullet through the hip.  The brigade surgeon predicted he would die, but he survived and, after an extended leave, during which he was promoted to Brigadier General – an honor that was intended to be posthumous – returned to duty.

    Because of his well-known bravery and gallantry, General Grant personally named General Chamberlain to accept the surrender of the arms of the Army of Northern Virginia.  Chamberlain, seeing the defeated Confederates lining up to surrender their muskets, raised some eyebrows when he ordered his men to attention, showing respect for a valiant foe.

    Thirty years after the Battle of Little Round Top, Chamberlain was belatedly presented with the Medal of Honor for his defense of the Federal flank; the citation described his “extraordinary heroism,” and “daring heroism and great tenacity.”  Fewer citations were delivered with such accuracy.  By war’s end, Chamberlain had served in twenty battles, been cited for courage four times, had six horses shot from under them and was wounded six times.  His biography, The Passing of the Armies, details all these things with much more detail that I could present here.

    His Golden Years

    Professor Chamberlain

    After the war, Chamberlain returned to Maine, where he won four one-year terms as Governor, in 1866, 1867, 1868 and 1869.  He eventually tired of political service and, in 1871, returned to Bowdoin College as President of the institution, a position he held until 1883, when complications of his Civil War wounds forced his resignation.

    But a few old wounds weren’t enough to keep Chamberlain at home.  He served as the Surveyor of the Port of Portland, Maine, dabbled in real estate, and even traveled to the West Coast to supervise the building of a railroad.  In 1898, he volunteered for service in the Spanish-American War, figuring that even a seventy-year-old man could serve in some way, but was rejected due to his age and the wounds from which he never fully recovered.

    Chamberlain died in 1914, not long before the explosion of the Great War in Europe.

    This is a particularly interesting piece for me to write.  The first two men portrayed in this series were remarkable in many ways; W.D.M. Bell was a man of iron courage and endless lust for adventure and possessor of an enormous set of brass balls, while John Johnston was an unsavory, drunken lout who nevertheless was tough, resolute and fearless.

    But unlike them, Joshua Chamberlain is one of my personal heroes, and has been since I first read an account of the battle of Little Round Top.  He possessed many admirable qualities, not least among them iron courage.  His is an example that young men today would do well to emulate.

  • Profiles in Toxic Masculinity II: John Jeremiah Garrison Johnston

    Appearances Can Be Deceiving

    See that handsome, rugged fellow to the right?  Looks like the very picture of an old-time mountain man, doesn’t he?  Hirsute and tough, yet still ruggedly good-looking; no doubt a wilderness gentleman, a man of good breeding and manners.

    Of course, he’s nothing of the sort.  That is, of course, Robert Redford, in his role as Jeremiah Johnson, from the movie of the same name.  His character was based on a man who was none of the things described above, save perhaps hirsute and tough.  He was John Jeremiah Garrison “Liver-Eating” Johnston, and his story is quite different than the movie version – and a lot more interesting.  Johnston was no heroic figure; in today’s world he probably would have landed in prison.  But it’s an interesting contrast, between Redford’s noble character and the unsavory, drunken, violent lout on whom Redford’s character was based.

    His Maculate Origin

    Johnston was born John Jeremiah Garrison.  He emerged into the world in Little York, New Jersey, in 1824, and if anyone could be said to be living proof of the maxim “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”, it is the young Johnston.  His father, one Isaac Garrison, was a violent, abusive alcoholic who sent his young sons to neighboring farms to labor to pay off his drinking and gambling debts.

    It didn’t take long for the young John Jeremiah to tire of this treatment.  At age twelve or thirteen – the record is unclear – he signed up to be a crewman aboard a whaler, which occupation he followed until the outbreak of the Mexican War, when he signed up with the U.S. Navy.

    It was during this tenure that the course of young John Jeremiah’s life changed.  He had matured into a massive, intimidating figure; six foot two inches tall, heavily bearded, two hundred and sixty pounds of solid muscle.  His Navy service ended when an officer reprimanded a friend of John Jeremiah’s with the flat of his sword; Garrison knocked the lieutenant ass over teakettle and, facing court-martial, fled ashore.

    Now he faced a crossroads.  Twenty-two years old, with his only skills being sailing and fighting, he decided to head inland, making the obvious choice for a youth in his position:  To make a living in the Rockies.  He adopted the surname “Johnston,” because why not, and struck out for the West.

    His Adventurous Career

    The Real Deal.

    Johnston surfaced in 1846 in Alder Gulch, Montana Territory, working as a woodcutter supplying the steamboats on that Missouri River port.  One story of Johnston from around this period describes him lounging on the Missouri River dock with a partner.  Johston was wearing only mule-ear trooper boots and “a filthy red woolen union suit that he had apparently been living and sleeping in for several years.”  While he was thus occupied, a riverboat arrived bearing wealthy tourists from St. Louis who were taking in the sights, of which Johnston and his partner were not the least.  Several prominent ladies of that city found Johnston and his unnamed partner fascinating, and invited him into the steamboat’s parlor for luncheon, with the understanding that he put on some trousers first.

    Johnston and his partner were nonplussed by the luxurious dining salon, and their confusion was heightened at the end of the meal, when dishes of ice cream were passed out.

    “John, what is this stuff?” the partner asked.

    “Don’t look ignorant,” Johnston told him.  “It comes in cans.”

    1863 found him signing up with the Second Colorado Cavalry, to serve as a scout.  He was with the cavalry for only a few days before going AWOL to spend his enlistment bonus on a drinking binge, but eventually returned to the regiment in time to ride east, where he took part in the battles of Westport and Newtonia.  Johnston was shot in the leg but recovered and continued to ride with the Second until his discharge in September 1965.

    Set at liberty again, Johnston returned to the Montana Territory, where he worked at almost any occupation that would make money:  Trapper, fur trader, woodcutter, carpenter, whiskey trader.  He viewed the law as only a set of mild suggestions, engaging in running liquor to the various Indian tribes and selling Indian skulls to tourists.  In 1868 Johnston formed a partnership with one J.X. Biedler to run liquor to the Indians in an extremely hostile area known as the Whoop Up Territory, which had the reputation of being extremely dangerous for white men; that information bothered Johnston not a jot, and he continued in the illegal whiskey trade until 1873, when he executed an adroit 180-degree turn and got himself appointed as Sheriff in Coulson (now Billings) Montana.  Johnston worked as a lawman more or less consistently – again, the record is not complete – until he retired in 1894 at age 70.

    Incidentally there is no record of Johnston’s preferring the Hawken rifle.  The movie not only got that wrong, they got it badly wrong; a “.30 caliber Hawken gun,” as referenced in the film, would be suitable only for rabbits and squirrels.  The only armed photos of Johnston I have found shows him with what appears to be a Sharps rifle and, later, an 1876 Winchester.

    As to the source of those Indian skulls, that is the part of Johnston’s legend that is best known.

    His One-Man War

    Legend has it that, in 1847, Johnston took a woman of the Flathead tribe to wife, only to have her killed by a man of the Crow nation; in this respect, the story is much like the one in that movie.  But Johnston’s revenge on the Crow was far more brutal than Hollywood’s imaginings.

    According to the book Crow Killer: the Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson, taken from the accounts of people who knew Johnston, this one-man vendetta claimed the lives of over three hundred Crow Indians over the course of twenty-five years.

    One account has it that Johnston was captured by the Crow.  Held prisoner in winter in the norther Rockies, stripped to the waist, tied with thongs and left in a tepee with a single guard, Johnston managed to work himself free of his bonds.  He knocked his guard senseless with a kick, took the brave’s knife, scalped him, then proceeded to cut off one of his legs.  Taking the guard’s leg with him, he fled shirtless into the winter wilderness with only the Indian’s leg for provisions; he lived by this act of cannibalism to reach his partner Del Gue’s cabin, some two hundred miles away.

    The appellation “Liver-Eating Johnston” derives from this vendetta, during which Johnston was said to have eaten the livers of the Crow he killed.  He may have fostered this reputation, as to the Crow it was a deadly insult, as they could not go to the afterlife without their livers; but reportedly the incident dates to the early days of the quarter-century conflict when Johnston and several other men fought a Crow war party.  Johnston later claimed to have shot an Indian, and then ran his knife into the brave to finish him.  When he withdrew the knife, there was a bit of the Indian’s liver stuck to the blade; Johnston noticed a young tenderfoot watching, so he pretended to nibble at the liver, then extended it to the young man, asking if he wanted a bite.  The tenderfoot, as Johnston put it, proceeded to “sick up his guts,” to the amusement of the other members of the party.  However, other than this account, there is no actual record of any acts of liver-eating.

    Johnston’s taste for revenge (and human legs) ran out in the early 1870s, when he formally made peace with the Crow, referring to them thereafter as his brothers.  After that he limited his killing to members of the Sioux and Blackfoot nations.

    His Golden Years

    The Older Johnston.

    Johnston’s health declined after his retirement.  His former great strength was eroded by alcoholism and the several wounds he had received in the Civil War and his years of fighting Indians.  He moved into a veteran’s hospital in Los Angeles in 1899, at age 74, and died a year later.

    John Jeremiah Garrison Johnston was a much more interesting sort than Redford’s far less colorful depiction.  He was a product of his times, as are we all, but even for his times, he was a violent, profane man.  A thoroughly unsavory character, he did nevertheless possess determination and great tenacity, traits of which we should all study up on.  And again, even for his times, his career of adventuring seems like one big caper across the most dangerous areas of the West, where he fearlessly engaged in the most dangerous occupations around.

    We should not overlook the contemptible parts of Johnston’s personality.  He was not a man to be respected or held up as a role model.  But we shouldn’t overlook his courage and tenacity, either.  Maybe, one day, some Hollywood producer will make a movie that more accurately depicts Johnston as he was, one of the toughest, roughest, shootin’est, most colorful characters our nation has ever produced.

  • Grandpa’s Watch

    An Old Watch

    On a small wooden stand in my office, there is an old watch.  It’s nothing special and has no value to anyone but me.  It’s an old Westclox Pocket Ben, which probably cost a couple of bucks back in the 1930s; an old windup tin case watch with a little second hand and a fob hand-braided out of nylon string.  The crystal is cracked, and the watch will run when wound but only for an hour or so.

    It’s an old, cheap, busted watch, with a market value of zero.  But Bill Gates couldn’t buy that watch from me.  It was my grandfather’s watch, and aside from a few old letters and postcards my mother saved, it’s the only tangible thing I have from him.

    Back in The Day…

    When I was a little tad, there were several figures that loomed large in my young life.  My Dad, of course, and his father, my Grandpa Clark; our neighbor, who had the farmstead down the road, Brownie, a WW1 veteran who was a great surrogate grandfather.  But my Grandpa Baty figured very high among that lot.

    Grandpa in 1915.

    It is no understatement to say that Grandpa was, as they put it in those days, “a bit of a character.”  Born in 1896, he had attended college and obtained a degree (exactly at what level, I never have known) in business, and worked in a bank in Waterloo for a few months around the time of the Great War.  But he found he hated being indoors all day, and so went back to the family farm and ended up taking it over from his father; he was a farmer and carpenter for the rest of his life.  He was widely known around northern Lynn County for his dry wit, his skill at shoring up old barns, and his uncanny ability to pull harvests of corn and soybeans out of the dry, sandy soil of the old farm.

    The Baty family farm was a century farm, having been homesteaded by my great-great-great-grandfather, one William Baty, in the 1830s.  It was passed on in turn to his son Thomas Jefferson Baty, who served in the Civil War; then to my great-grandfather, Andrew Jackson Baty, and thence to Grandpa.  My mother was fond of pointing out that when she was growing up during the Depression, that farm families may not have had much money but they always had enough to eat; she was also fond of paraphrasing a Patrick McManus quote, pointing out that her family was among “…the landed gentry of eastern Iowa during the Depression; we owned the wall we had our backs to.”  During those hard years Grandpa kept a bunch of laying hens, a milk cow and a few pigs, and they got along just fine.

    The farm was fifty acres of sandy bottomland along the Wapsipinicon River in northern Lynn County, Iowa.  I spent a good part of my youth wandering around that old farmstead.

    When I was a little kid, I remember watching Grandpa shave, which he did every day, even if he was just choring around the farm.  I’d watched my Dad shave with a safety razor, but Grandpa used shaving soap with a badger-hair brush and a straight razor, which he touched up on a leather strop before each use.  I thought that was pretty cool.  Grandpa always wore his old hickory Key bib overalls, and he always had his old pocket watch stuck in the bib pocket, secured with a fob he had tied up out of coarse nylon string.  Whenever I remember my Grandpa, I remember the smell of his shaving soap and the sound of that watch ticking.

    The Great Outdoors

    A string of Minnesoda fish, 1968.  Grandpa, Mom, Dad and me.

    Like most of my family, Grandpa didn’t care much for hanging around the house.  With a good fishing river only a ten-minute walk from the house, there just wasn’t any reason not to go try to catch a mess of smallmouths for supper.

    Not content with his friendly little stretch of the Wapsi, Grandpa accompanied my Mom, Dad and I on adventures fishing in Minnesota and Wisconsin.  A family friend had a cabin on the edge of the Red Lake Indian reservation, and it was a favorite destination.  While he was a better-than-average angler, Grandpa always opined that the best part of fishing was just being outdoors, along the river, on a nice day, with his family.

    Grandpa taught me how to roll cornmeal and strawberry jam doughballs for carp bait.  He taught me that those same doughballs made decent snacks.  He taught me how to cook up corn dodgers to pack along for solid fare in a cold camp.  He taught me how to start a fire with two sticks, as long as both were matches.  He taught me the importance of dry socks before even the Army did.  He taught me more outdoor lore than anyone except my Dad, and I’m happy to say that the most important lesson, just how great it was to be outdoors and not mucking about inside, has stuck with me better than all the others combined.

    Spinning a Yarn or Two

    Ever heard of flying snakes?  Grandpa had them on his farm, or so he told me when I was seven or eight years old.  One summer day we spent the better part of the afternoon tramping around the place looking for flying snakes, which he had convinced me really existed.  We didn’t find any.  When we returned to the house, my Mom called me away for a moment, explaining, “Grandma wants to talk to Grandpa for a minute.”  I remember not being quite able to make out words, but I had the distinct impression that Grandma, a tough old farm wife, was giving Grandpa a damn good piece of her mind.

    But his wife’s disapproval would never stand in the way of a good yarn.

    On one visit Grandpa handed me a badly worn chunk of what appeared to be hard black rubber.  “I was out working on the tractor,” he explained, “and this fell out of the sky and hit me on the head.  I saw on the news last night that one of the Apollo spaceships flew over yesterday.  I think this fell off its steering wheel when they went by.”  This was a stretch too far for me to quite believe, even coming from my Grandpa to the eight-year-old me, especially when I noticed later that Grandpa’s ancient John Deere was missing a chunk of the hard rubber coating for its steering wheel that was suspiciously the same size as the chunk off “the Apollo spaceship.”

    Endless were the tales of Grandpa’s adventures.  Fish would poke their heads out of the river and talk to him.  Once a raccoon woke him up and warned him that the neighbor’s cows were in his cornfield.  He was on a first-name basis with every squirrel on the farm and conversed with them all regularly.  In that case I suspect he may have been telling some sort of truth, as after I started hunting in earnest, he reminded me of the rule that all my cousins and I had to follow, namely that no squirrels were to be harmed on his place.

    A Work Ethic

    But most of all, Grandpa was a man who couldn’t abide other people butting into his business, whether those people carried a government-issued title or not.  He was an old-fashioned sort of man who minded his yard, his farm and his family, and didn’t bother anyone if they just left him alone.

    Watching Grandpa fish, 1970

    My first paying job came along when I was about ten years old.  I had a brand-new pellet gun and took it along when we were down at the farm visiting the grandparents for the weekend.  Grandpa eyed the pellet gun and asked me if I was a good shot.

    “Pretty good,” I bragged, full of ten-year-old bravado.

    “Good,” Grandpa grinned at me.  “Come on.”

    We walked across the barnyard to where Grandpa’s corncrib sat, full of the recent harvest.  “I’ve got some problems with rats,” he told me.  “Sit quiet here on this old tractor tire and watch for a while, and you’ll see them.  I’ll give you, oh, a dime for every dead rat you can pile up.”

    “OK,” I said, “I’ll get a bunch.”

    I made five dollars that weekend, my first foray into the gig economy.  This would have been around 1971, when five dollars would keep a kid in pop and candy bars for quite a spell.  I was happy to have the cash, Grandpa was pleased with the pile of dead rats (although not so pleased that he didn’t leave it to me to bury them out in the cornfield) and my folks were pleased that I had learned a lesson in exchange of value.

    A few years later, I was about thirteen, and Grandpa offered to buy me a bottle of pop in town if I’d help him rig up the galvanized metal chutes in that same corncrib; the corncrib had two sides, and Grandpa’s little PTO-driven elevator would dump the corn in through a hatch in the roof, through the chutes to one side or the other for storage.  We spent about an hour rigging the Rube Goldberg contraption up; when we finished, Grandpa flashed his characteristic grin at me and said, “those cobs will go through that like shit through a tin horn.”

    I realized then and there that I must be growing up, as Grandpa would never swear in front of a woman or a child.

    Grandpa put in his last corn crop the year before he died at 78.  He worked, always, well past the age that people nowadays think of retirement; but I honestly don’t think the idea ever occurred to him.  He gave up carpentry for hire about the time he turned 70, but he honestly loved farming and saw no reason to quit; he loved muddling around the place, plotting next year’s allocation of land to field corn and popcorn for the popcorn works at Vinton.  He enjoyed fiddling with his ancient John Deere Model A, patching up the fences and occasionally sneaking down to the Wapsi for a spot of fishing.  He had a simple life but a great life.  He taught me more than I have time to tell you here, but all of that is paying off now that I’m the Grandpa.

    And Then…

    Grandpa’s Watch

    The summer I was fourteen, in 1975, Grandpa died, of complications of diabetes.  It’s useless to think about how these days, improvements in treatment may have resulted in a longer life for this man I loved and admired; that was then, he died, and that was that.

    But for the fourteen-year-old me, it was a hell of a bad time.  It was the first time I lost anyone I loved.  Since then, that instance has come along more often, but that was the first time.

    A few months after the funeral, Dad and I were out fishing.  We walked down a favorite northeast Iowa trout stream, fishing as we went, until we came across a spot Grandpa had called a favorite.  It made me feel bad, and I said so.  But Dad, with wisdom typical of him, said I shouldn’t feel bad.  He had, after all, loved and admired his father-in-law, as so many people did, but he also knew the way to see things.  “We should feel glad,” he said, “that your Grandpa was here to enjoy these days with us.  He’d want us to keep doing that.”

    So, we did.

    That’s how Grandpa left us.  Last year, after my Dad passed, Mom dug out Grandpa’s old pocket watch, which she had put away all those years for this moment.  “I want you to have Daddy’s watch,” she told me.  “Take care of it.”  I promised her I would; now Mom is gone too, but my promise to her holds.

    Now, once in a while, I take the old Pocket Ben off the stand, wind it up, put it to my ear and listen to it ticking for a few minutes…  And suddenly, I’m a little kid again, sitting on my Grandpa’s lap at the kitchen table, hearing his watch, smelling his shaving soap, and listening to one of his tall tales.

    That’s a great feeling.