“Crimson and clover, over and over” The song played over Fusner’s tactically stupid, but achingly home-calling radio. The lyrics just repeated. There was no real meaning, like the days and nights of my life in Vietnam.
Arch stared down at the little radio he held in his hand. A team player at the other end had asked for a communications check, apparently from Ringo. Arch was being given a chance to hold the enemy off or blow the whole thing completely…
Arch had never flown the particular model of Beechcraft they would be inside. He knew, whether he flew the plane or not, he was about to once again endanger the only three beings on the planet who seemed to give a damn whether he lived or died.
I had no idea how the attack into the tree line on the other side of the Agent Orange clearing would go down. Once more, as with each day’s move since I’d been in country, things just seemed to happen without a lot of..
Lihue was a small town, and the airport even smaller, so Arch presumed that everyone noticed almost everything, but nobody did much of anything. Doug was popular in his way, or he wouldn’t still be flying……
They climbed the steps to an area just below the third platform. The climb wasn’t a challenge for either of them, but looking beyond that platform they could see that the final stretch would be more difficult.
Arch knew that in order to get their small band of damaged souls on board the SS Independence, Doug needed to do exactly what he had said he might be able to do. So Arch and the pilot needed to head over to the dock to figure things out. Cyn wisely decided it would be best…..
The elevator went several floors down. Harpo and Arch got off where they’d gotten on. There was nothing to do but wait. Arch walked Harpo back out through the opening they’d driven the van into. His message to Doug had been unclear…..
Harpo heard the police car before Arch did. His ears perked up and his muzzle pointed toward the only place the car could enter the pier dock area. A very slight mewl came out of his throat, which surprised Arch. What do you know, in his way the dingo could speak. “Got it,” Arch assured him, patting Harpo’s side…..
Arch tore the tape from the German’s mouth. The entire affair, since finding the top secret supposedly by surprise, had been one of risk. Risk to people. Still Cyn, Atlantis, the pilot and even the dingo had gone along, and they’d been at high risk, all of them…..
Arch knew that their only hope for surviving getting into Maui, and possibly beyond, lay with the radio operator. They had to have a ‘front’ aboard the Independence, and then some sort of protection when getting off the ship at the port in Maui…..
Doug, the pilot, was wrong about one thing. Arch had traveled the islands very extensively but as a youngster, bumming along aboard his father’s Coast Guard cutter. Maui was an inhospitable island for beaches and for ports. …..
The first thing Arch noticed, while walking up the pier toward downtown Lahaina, was the clouds surrounding the very top of the mountain that was the center of the western lobe of the island. They were huge, slowly billowing, and beautiful in the morning light…..
Fusner whispered into my left ear before first light. I blinked rapidly, once again not aware of having slept, but nothing could explain the passage of time from one waking moment to the next. I shook my head. Maybe I was sleeping…
The first thing Arch noticed, again, were the clouds surrounding the very top of the mountain that was the center of the western lobe of the island. They were huge, slowly billowing, and beautiful in the morning light. Good signs for a rigorous hike………
Arch woke up wondering where he was. The cold was penetrating every pore of his body. He shivered awake, sitting up quickly, survival driving adrenalin into his system. And he couldn’t see anything except a thick grayness. He looked down…….
The rain came and the smell came with it, but it was no longer hot. The altitude had taken the steam heat and reduced it to an oily cloying mass of moving air, feeling like spider webs so intensely that I constantly brushed my hands across my face…..
Arch, Cyn and Harpo sat in the bushes by the side of Hwy. 30 on Maui. It was warm and dry, a welcome relief from the cold windy mountaintop on the Lahaina Pali Trail…
Only Harpo reacted, walking toward the police officer standing in front of them with a grocery bag in one arm. The officer reached down to stroke the only part of the dingo’s head that he allowed anyone to touch. Harpo first wagged his tail, and then sat down to enjoy some more attention.
For those of you considering leaving this great country because is may be in a bit of trouble. It may be in a lot of trouble.
Don’t leave. ..
The rolling artillery barrage I’d designed, and the battery had applied so effectively, was of exactly no use in doing anything to damage or disable booby traps that were not constructed with detonators or explosives subject to sympathetic detonation. The machine gun had caused significant casualties ……..
My scout team took apart my hooch and packed me out while I went forward to the perimeter to lay in the defensive fire up and down the area of our travel. The sun was fast rising over the jungle when I laid down on a poncho cover provided by one of the Marines on the line….
Today is the big day before the big day. Will civility, manners, and outrageous behavior be rewarded or will there be a return to cultural sanity of accepted social behavior on the morrow?
Peter Wilson, a local attorney and a friend of mine, died in his sleep last night. He had a magnificently bold but weak heart. He was also one of those very rare humans in that he thought I was a better person and much greater than I really am…..
The abomination of today’s media. The evidence for this abomination is staring us all right in the face every day and could, by next week, lead directly to the end of the great America dream of freedom and liberty….
Scum. How is America ever going back from scum owning the mass media. Absolutely lousy American companies like Disney, that used to be terrific companies, now owned by the most awful of people who don’t give a damn about the country or its people……
The Supreme Court. Why the House of Representatives, resisting efforts to appoint anyone to fill the vacant U.S. Supreme Court role, has little to do with partisan politics. Say what? Everything is the opposite of what they are saying…..
What I wanted it to be. The monument and museum of the World Trade Center. I wanted it to be quintessential American. I wanted it to be the best of what a Walt Disney might come up with or the Hollywood people who put on the Olympics that year……..
It’s overcast in New York but I am used to that. The pall that seems to hang over the city most of the time keeps the rest of the world from seeing what goes on here. At least, that’s the way my mind works upon waking and lolling about in the room…….
Went downstairs to the Plaza lobby and ate breakfast there. Do not ask the price. I put it on the room so I would not know. It was salmon and six minute eggs with all this greens stuff………..
Just how do you think the mass media is going to keep everyone on the edge of the their seats until the election? They’ve got to do it. It literally means billions to them, and so they go to work…..
Two weeks to go until the world won’t have Trump to kick around anymore. Women, for the most part, will be safer. Mexican’s will not be employed building a wall to nowhere…….
Black Mirror is out. The third season. The cutting edge ski-fi show so highly acclaimed from England……
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