A query reached me on 12-8-25, seemingly having to do with whether or not I was still alive. I am indeed as far as I know but we older folk are never sure about our states of being from one day to the next, so take that with a grain of salt.
In any case, whatever I am, I have been off-line for Internet, Amazon (Kindle) and literary reasons.
As everyone knows, I read a lot, shifting, typically from one subject or interest to another. Since this sort of thing increased since Susan died I acquired some annoyances, among other things, when I decided to download a novel from Kindle (for example) I often discovered that I’d already downloaded it but apparently hadn’t read it all, sometimes I saw no evidence that I had read any of it. [as to why, I didn’t remember, I recently checked and am reading, an average of two books every three days.] So why didn’t I read this particular book? I would wonder and try to access it on my Kindle and thereby enter into a world that would (I often thought), qualify as one of Dante’s regions of Hell. Nevertheless, I persevered and finally learned how to see in a usable manner all the Kindle books I had purchased on Kindle.
Often, I would notice something about a novel, or series of novels and want to record some comments. Doing it in my main journal was cumbersome. Also, I couldn’t readily find what I had written in a reasonable amount of time, the journals being numerous and the writing voluminous as well as being hard to read.
So, I decided to create notebooks devoted just to book matters. Amazon sells “packs” of notebooks convenient to this purpose, hard-backs, 5.5 by 8 inches in size and in different colors. Since I typically read several hours a day, the using of one of these notebooks say on non-serious (meaning nonliterary and not the sort of novel that wins the Booker or Pulitzer or Nobel prizes, but very popular in the actual reading world – novels that Amazon rates very high in terms of popularity, e.g., detective, detective thriller, detective cozy.
And, since my background is in legitimate literature, the sort that does win literary prizes, the sort critics like to think will live on (be popular) for years, if not centuries, to come. I’ve another notebook for these (although I find that I usually enjoy the non-serious books more than the legitimate).
Then too I also read factual works. I recently read a vivid account of the largest battle during the Korean War, fought by Marines. It was mostly over when I was still in High School. But I didn’t know that, and it wasn’t officially over, because truce talks were going on. I tried to enlist when I was 16, but they found out how old I was and sent me home. My parents held me hostage from the Marine Corps until I graduated from High School; so that is what happened. I was 17. The war was still technically going on but this just meant that the U.S., the South Koreans, the North Koreans and the Chinese were conducting truce talks. We might exchange a few shots over the truce line, but that wasn’t combat in the proper sense. Even though I was entitled to two stars on my Koran ribbon. They just meant that I was in Korea when that war was technically active, and before the truce was actually signed. I was on Cheju Island when the truce was signed. An officer flew a corsair onto our air strip to officially notify us that the truce had been signed. There was a prison camp on Cheju Island and North Koreans were released during the truce talks in order to make their way back north if they chose to go back – at least that is what we were told, but I had never before read a history that provided the details of that war, and especially the Battle the Marines fought (Chosin Reservoir) in which the Chinese offered our General Smith the chance to surrender because the Chinese had his force surrounded. He responded with words like “surrender Hell, we’ve got you right where we want you, all around us; so any time we feel like shooting one of you we look up and there you are.” That might sound like bravado, but it was actually the case. according to On Desperate Ground, the epic story of Chosin Reservoir -- the greatest battle of the Korean War by Hampton Sides pretty much agrees with general Smith. The Marines were better trained, better shots, and had better equipment. The Army asked the Marines to come to their aid at one point, but, despite General Smith’s bravado, the Marines were being hard pressed their whole time adjacent to the Chosin Reservoir and couldn’t go to the Army’s aid. [The Army troops were on the other side of the Chosin Reservoir and did get some Army aid.] While the Marines didn’t get additional troops, they did get supply drops of additional ammunition, because they used a lot of it. The Chinese commanders believed that if they kept sending troops, wave after wave at us, that we would eventually be overwhelmed. Some of the Chinese sent in that fashion were not even issued guns. They were told to pick up the weapons of the Chinese soldiers we had killed and who lying in their path, dead, with loaded weapons.
The Battle of Chosin Reservoir took place between 27 November and 13 December 1950. I finally made it into the Marine Corps when I graduated in July 1952 at age 17. I did try to enlist after the eleventh grade, in 1951 when I would have been 16. The history book I read told me that even if I hurried my way to Korea, the battle of Chosin Reservoir would already have been over.
I knew the truce talks were going on, but a lot of us assumed the war would resume. Everyone in my graduating class knew I intended to enlist in the Marine Corps so many of them made such comments as “bullet-stopper” in my year books. Enlisting in the Marine Corps in July of 1952 seemed like a risky (foolish) thing to do (according to my fellow students in July of 1952), but in retrospect it wasn’t.
Nevertheless, one didn’t know that when I enlisted in July 1952. My first duty station was at the Marine air base at El Toro in Santa Ana, something like 16 miles from my home. When I found that out, I decided that was intolerable. I didn’t join the Marines to have easy duty 16 miles from home, so I went to my administration and asked if they could find a way to send me to Korea, and they did. There was a fellow who was being sent to Korea that didn’t want to go. He turned out to be happy to change places with me.
I don’t recall the precise date I got to Korea, but I was there for the (technically) last two battle seasons, but when I inquired about being sent to the line where we were shooting at each other, I was told that volunteers to go up there were no longer being accepted.
My reading answered some questions I had but I had never pursued reading about my time over there. Why should I, I thought at the time, I had been there. When my term was up, I met with a recruiting sergeant, who told me that if I would reenlist. I had only been made a buck (three stripe) sergeant a few months earlier so that sounded strange. They also offered me any duty station I wanted and suggested sea-duty.
As to the immediate rank increase, I worked (later, one the C17 program) with a retired Marine Corps captain who said that would have been a very good deal for me. The ranks had been depleted by all the Marines who had been killed at Chosin Reservoir so for a short time rank increases were offered to anyone who reenlisted.
I told the retired captain that I didn’t appreciate the “peace time” Marines and so gave up all thought of staying in based on my time served after the truce was signed. It wasn’t until I read the aforementioned history of the Chosin Reservoir battle that I seriously thought about the fact that I wouldn’t strictly have been joining the “peace-time Marines.” I would have been reenlisting in a Marine Corps training for their next war (which would have been in Vietnam, but I didn’t know that when I got out).
I did exceptionally well at my last duty, which was being a rifle coach. I was the only one of the young coaches who had been to Korea. Also, I didn’t drop any of my shooters. We coaches were assigned a group of shooters each couple of weeks, some of whom had previously qualified and some had not. Our job was to get them all qualified. Time after time I got all my shooters, even the ones that had never qualified, qualified. After a while, the old-time tech and master sergeants who ran the re-qualification situation, let me run things and spent their time in the slop chute.
I enjoyed all that quite a lot, plus I had a lot of things to say about shooting. Then too I had a unique coaching method which I was rather proud of, and none of the other coaches could (or even wanted to) do what I did. It amounted to hanging over the shoulder of each of my shooters and hypnotically, convince them that they just needed to listen to my voice as they acquired a sight picture and very gently always keeping the front sight in the black, as they squeezed the trigger. And if they listened, and believed what I was telling them, and did it, then they would become qualified if they had never been qualified or would improve their scores if they hadn’t. I was rather pleased with my approach and the senior coaches, concerned with results, were as well. I have told that story more than once. Susan, upon hearing it, objected. She asked, what happens when your shooters go into combat and you aren’t there to whisper in their ears?
I took the test for buck sergeant when I was a coach, so the approval of the tech-sergeants was important. Also, by the time I was getting ready to get out of the Marine Corps, I’m sure 1) the fact that I had volunteered to go to Korea during that war counted in the minds of those deciding whether to offer me as much as they could in hopes of getting me to stay in was concerned. And 2) the fact that I had been so successful as a rifle coach had to count for a lot. The senior sergeants I had freed up to spend their days at the slop chute had obviously been grateful and had given me a good report.
But frankly I had decided to go to college and not to reenlist; and while I enjoyed my life as a coach, the coaching days were limited. Once every one had been through re-qualification we had come from, we coaches were obligated to return to the duty stations we came from when we became coaches. In my case that was in the 2nd 90s at 29 Palms and I hated that place for various reasons.
And, I didn’t have a clear understanding of the training required of “peacetime Marines.” So, an increase in rank to Staff Sergeant and the choice of duty stations wasn’t a serious incentive for me.
In regard to what I was looking toward. My grandmother influenced my quite a lot. As a girl, she lost her hearing and couldn’t attend school for a while, during which she became convinced that a knowledge of and appreciation for books could more than compensate (in life) for the lack of a formal education. My military experience entitled me to a college education; so, I took classes for the joy of them and without respect to a particular job later on. [Rather foolish it seemed to many, including my stepfather who wanted me to get an engineering degree.]
I could have gotten a master’s degree and indeed took half of the classes necessary for one, but by that time I was rather firmly ensconced at Douglas Aircraft company, doing well (and paying my bills) in an arena I had never planned to enter, engineering.
What I have done undoubtedly sounds strange to some, and entering into engineering with any sort of Liberal Arts degree put a lot of the college graduates hired during that time (when the Air Force complained about the shoddy incomprehensible documentation and communication sent to them by Douglas engineers) in engineering. Engineers were not going to get better at it; so, Douglas needed Liberal Arts-type graduates who were smart enough to understand engineering matters and persuasive enough to get cooperation from salty old-time engineers. My Marine Corps experience helped me with the latter. There was not an engineer so salty or forbidding enough to cow a Marine Corps sergeant.
And, bringing things forward into the era of my retirement, over the years I knew many legitimate (meaning they had engineering degrees) engineers who were not equipped to retire. They had no legitimate or useful skills or plans for spending time during retirement. A friend who was the senior engineer over the interior designs of DC10 aircraft, retired. His big plan, full of interior design experience, was to build himself a perfect house. And he indeed work away at that, happily as far as I could tell, but before he finished, he had a heart attack and died.
Another engineer was held up to the rest of us as the perfect engineering employee. Anything management wanted us to do; someone would find occasion to point at this guy and tell us how wonderful he was. Back in those days everyone had to retire at age 65. The week after this guy retired, he was in a coffee shop, had a heart attack, keeled over and died.
Since I became an engineer under false pretenses, that is, I could do the work and was qualified in that sense, but deep down I felt I was largely a fraud because I didn’t have an engineering degree and while no one ever criticized me during my 39 years in engineering, someone could have challenged me in some respect for not having an engineering degree. I was once offered the job as head of Advance Design and turned it down. I was a program engineer at the time working on the KC-10 program, but I also delivered the last two DC-10s, one to Nigeria and the other to Pakistan. I also handled some activity for Advance Design and so was qualified (in terms of being able to do the work). But I knew a lot of those engineers, stuck up for some of them during some difficult times and maybe they wouldn’t have minded that I was their boss, but they didn’t know I didn’t have an engineering degree. Beyond that I didn’t have respect for the higher-level director who offered me the job.
12-10-25, 11:00. I got only that far in regard to answering someone who asked what I had been up to in the last several weeks in as much as I had not posted any general note to that effect. Well (in my defense), I thought about it but it, but never stopped doing the above in order to write about it. Besides, what I was doing to organize what I was reading didn’t seem very interesting, and I wasn’t sure how consistent I would be in doing what I set out to do
In regard to watching things on TV etc., I don’t have a TV I watch but I have been watching on Youtube videos on the discoveries being made in regard to DNA analyses of older skeletons, revising many of the theories about our ancestral histories. I did actually have my DNA checked and found that my mother’s belief that she (and consequently her kids) was part Indian. Her reasoning was that she saw her great grandmother squatting down in the back yard smoking a corn-cob pipe, “and who would do that other than an Indian.” It’s been a while since I looked at the results from Ancestry.com, but I thought at the time her great-grandmother was a German. She had no Indian in her ancestry.
BTW, her mistake did influence my time in the Marine Corps. I’d only been on the Marine base in Kunsan a short time when a full-blooded Indian, Emhoolah, stopped me and asked me if I was part Indian. I said that I was, and he said that since he was the only full-blooded Indian on the base and he is ordering me to show up at the slop chute every day after work and drink beer with the rest of the Indians. So that’s where I learned to drink beer and do all the other things that “drunken Indians” did, one of which was to be body guard for Bill Salois, one-quarter Blackfoot, who liked to fight every time he was drunk, and he wasn’t very good at it, so my job was to make sure he wasn’t hurt very badly; so I would stop the fights as soon as he was getting a beating, declare them a draw and haul him off. Bill was good at holding a grudge. Once, when everyone was off doing something else, he went into the barracks took the M1 rifle of someone he hated and fired 8 rounds through the overhead figuring to get this guy in trouble, but it turned out no one noticed, to his disappointment.
I did like being an Indian. Bill tried to talk me into joining him in Montana once we got out. He said we could start a ranch together. I objected, "we don't have any money." He said, "that's no big deal. We can earn all we need at the rodeo." Doing what, I asked? Riding horses and bulls, that sort of thing. I told him I had never done that sort of thing. He said, "no big deal. It's easy." In a couple of novels, I've read recently the author describing the dangerousness of something as being equivalent to riding bucking horses and bulls. Well, as much as I liked Bill, I was never inspired by his plan.
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