Lori McKenna

New favorite artist, Lori McKenna, was on Oprah today with Faith Hill. Lori is an at home mother of five children, married at 19. She's been writing songs and playing her guitar for her family. Didn't want to give up her dream. Some how Faith Hill heard one of her songs or got a hold of her lyrics. Faith's album was about to be produced when she stopped the presses so to speak and changed the name of the CD to Fireflies, one of Lori's songs. There are three or four of Lori's songs on Faith's CD. Click on her website to hear some of her songs. She's right there. I love her sound. She lives in Massachusetts but hopefully we'll see her in Ohio one day.

Christmas 2005

Alex says: Aaaaarrrrrghhhh!

Skye says: May I get you some tea?

 
 

You'd come around if this angel face sang to you, too!

 
 

Skye's ALMOST First Sleepover

There was a meeting in Skye's kindergarten classroom at noon. Just for parents. I had to find a sitter and couldn't think of anyone until finally I remembered my 90-year old neighbor, Thelma. Skye has met her a few times when I've brought Thelma to the doctor or the grocery store. He tells her things like "I'd rather be a child than an old person because you have more friends." She is never offended by his comments and always answers honestly and from the heart. "Most of my friends are six feet under ground." That quieted him up for a few minutes while he mulled it over.

Thelma agreed to watch Skye. He sat perched on on the edge of her couch like a well trained poodle and watched cable. His lunch box that contained a soy yogurt and a spoon sat next to him. When I returned an hour later, both Skye and his lunchbox were in the exact position as when I'd left them.

He remembered that he didn't eat his soy yogurt and I brought him to the kitchen table where he gobbled it up in seconds. Then we returned to the living room and talked, with the TV off, about how it took Thelma an hour to do a ten-minute sewing job on her slacks, how Thelma's cat likes to sleep in the sun and as it moves
so does the cat.

Skye was reclined on Thelma's couch. He wanted me to walk four houses down the sidewalk to our house and get him another soy yogurt and his sleeping bag. He's been talking about wanting to do a sleep over and he thought Thelma's house was a good place to have one.

I tried to explain that Thelma probably had other things to do than to have an overnight guest and convinced him to get his sandals back on and walk home for another yogurt.

He ran the whole way, making sure he was always a few steps ahead of me. When we reached the driveway we stopped for a little bit and talked. Then before I could get to the door before him he ran ahead of me. I could see that he wanted to win the race he was having with me in his mind. I said "Skye, are you being competitive?" He opened the door wide and said "No. I'm not being competitive. I'm being a
jerk." When we got inside he asked what competitive means. "It just means you're trying to win...Sometimes it can be thought of as being a jerk." He looked very satisfied with himself.

The Time Alex Saved Skye's Life

Little Skye has a serious expression. He'd been through some serious stuff. When he was two weeks old he was admitted to the hospital for RSV. His lungs had filled up with fluid. He had a fever. He was limp. His oxygen saturation kept dropping even while he was on oxygen. After four or five days in the hospital he continued to go downhill. He stopped breastfeeding. He gave up.

On the fifth or sixth night at 8pm, Alex called the hospital to say goodnight. Big Skye took time off of work and stayed home with Alex so that I could stay at the hospital with the newborn. I slept in his metal crib up against an ice covered window until they finally gave us a bed. I got sick with him, and held him. I ignored the nurses' insistence that I couldn't sleep with him. When they came in to wake me up and force me to put him in his basinette I'd pretend I was awake. I learned the best defense is an offense and when they came in to make sure I wasn't holding him while I slept I'd ask the to change his diaper. When I started giving them work to do they stopped coming in to hassle me with their ridiculous hospital policy that was designed to protect them not my child.

I refused to leave Little Skye's side except to run down to the cafeteria to get food, and only if my favorite nurse was on duty. I'd ask her to hold him while I gathered up some food to hold me over until the next time she was on duty. There was no way I would leave Skye alone. I was afraid no one would hear him crying or hear his monitors go off. Moreover I was afraid he'd let go completely.

When I didn't recognize the cave woman in the mirror I asked my favorite nurse if she could hold him while I showered. It was a harrowing time. No way to spend your postpartum days -- in a hospital holding an infant who looks like he won't make it. But when Alex called to say goodnight, everything changed. I asked him if he would sing the ABC song to Little Skye while I held the phone to his little ear. His angelic voice traveled through the line on that cold, dark, winter's night. Skye listened. He opened his eyes, he rooted around for my breast and made a comeback. We retell the story as "The Time Alex Saved Skye's Life." They've been very close as brothers and it always seems to come back to this story when they talk about how close they are.

The ABC song reminded Skye of better days. Days when he was in the womb. Each night I would hold Alex by the ankles and do "the lymph flush" to two rounds of the ABC song and the count of 100. The familiar tune gave Skye the will to live and he pulled through the night. However the worst was not over. Skye was fine. It was the medical staff we had to worry about.

They wanted to do a spinal, insert a catheter in his little dippy, and put in an IV just to check his fluids and make sure he didn't have meningitis. I declined the spinal. I suggested a plastic bag instead of a catheter. And Big Skye argued down the IV, fearing that our son would get an infection at the hospital if he'd had one. There was a lot of pressure from the medical staff but we held strong and Little Skye seemed to know it. He held strong too for a little guy. It was great to have him home again.

The Streets With No Names

Some time in 1989 or 1990, I was driving through Massachusetts on my way to visit Uncle Frank and Aunt Theresa Hebert on Cape Cod. When I was just outside of Springfield I came under sudden attack of impulse to find and explore the old Air Force Base I used to live on in 1972 – Westover Air Force Base. It had closed in ‘72, shortly after we left and I had no idea what I would find if I were to try to locate my old house, the old street, or the base itself.

I found the base. It had reopened. I didn't know if that was a good sign or a bad sign, as I figured they would never let me on base without an official ID card if it were an operating base once again. But if it were a neighborhood I would likely be able to drive where I wanted, find my old house, and maybe even go in it if the people living there would let me. ‘See my old bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, dining room. The layout is still fresh in my mind and each room still has its distinct and different memories that come flooding back as soon as I do a mental walk-through.

The laundry room is the first room you walk into. I remember walking into the laundry room with a bloody nose once. Leslie use to beat me up every day after school and my mother would never do anything about it. So I was glad that I came home with a bloody nose this time to prove that I was really being beaten up every day after shool. (Leslie is her real name. I didn't change it to protect the innocent. She was guilty as sin. I hope one day she reads this and she finds me so I can punch her in the nose. And don't wait until we're 90 and your on blood thinners, Leslie! Show yourself now!) Where was I? Yes, one particular day I marched into the laundry room with a bloody nose and a quote from a Bill Cosby album, “Mom, if you really love me you'll go out there and beat her up!"

She just laughed. But my brother loved me because he did go out there, find Leslie, pick her up by her ankles, shake her and tell her to leave his little sister alone! And she did. I didn’t have to walk home via the dirt road that took me past Spooky Trails anymore. I could show my face through the neighborhood sidewalks and not have to worry that mean Leslie was going to pop out of nowhere with her sidekicks. All because one day I called her a “shit-n’-fucker” to top the swear she had just yelled across the street to me. For no reason other than that I was there. One day I tried a delay tactic by engaging Leslie in pre-fight pander. I asked her “Leslie, why do you beat me up every day after school?” I thought she was going to say "Because that time you called me a shit-n-fucker!" But no. It was worse than that. It was worse because she couldn't remember why she went out of her way to track me down and harrass me and my sisters. She thought for a minute and finally said “I dunno.” I thought that would discontinue her daily ritual but it only distracted her. Sometimes she would find another kid to beat up and my sisters and I could slip by her but other times she continued to beat us up as well. Until the day I walked into that laundry room with the bloody nose.

The next room was the living room. The left wall had the Laffey’s house on the other side of it, an exact replica of ours but in reverse. I remember the little black and white television airing President Johnson’s funeral and my brother saying to me “You should watch this. This is historical.” He was glued to the TV and thought we should be too. No, what was historical was the secret that Johnson went to his grave with about Kennedy's assassination. THAT was historical but that wasn't on the news.

Off the living room was a little hallway that led to an even smaller bathroom. The hallway had two closets on each side. One closet held linens. The other was my brother’s “bedroom”. A mattress fit across one shelf and the shelf above it was removed so he wouldn’t bang his head when he sat up in the morning. He didn't seem to mind his unusual sleeping quarters.

Every base we have lived on there is the conversation piece: my brother’s bedroom. Living with six sisters in military housing that wasn’t designed for seven kids, the only boy always got the leftovers. The kitchen, the dining room, they all have memories that are different for each of us, at each of our homes, but the memories correlate when it comes to my brothers bedrooms. Everyone, including our friends from the old bases, remembers the exact same thing – how unusual! So unusual that it left indelable memories of great detail and some exageration in the minds of our friends and neighbors. Mrs. Bosley remembers that Mrs. Parish's son used to love to come over to our house to play with Steve in his "bedroom" (the laundry room off the kitchen) because they could reach the refrigerator from his bed.

That, I'm sure, was an exageration. His bed was a shelf above the washer and dryer with a mattress on it and the fridge was about three feet away. So unless they had Stretch Armstrong arms they were stretching the truth.

I pulled up to the security gate to ask the man in a military uniform if I could drive in and see my old school and my old house. I explained that I used to live on Westover Air Force Base and I wanted to go back and see my old house. He looked at me kind of funny when I asked him where Powell street was. I asked, even though I knew I'd be able to find it myself.
"Powell?"
"Yea, it's just off of Davis," I said, waving toward the left.
"Davis is over there," he said, waving toward the right.
"Are you sure? I remember it being over there to the left of Selser Elementary. I used to walk home from school every day and I went that way.”
"It's been over there as long as I've been here. How long ago did you live here?"
"1972. The last year before the base was closed."
"Oh. Well they took down all the signs after they closed the base. When they reopened the base they didn't put the sings in the old places."

I hadn't thought of doing such a thing but I'd guessed that it sounded possible. I imagined a shed in which all the signs had been stacked. They'd pull them out by the ones on top first and place those on the streets they were using. Since they didn't reopen the entire base, they didn't need all the signs and somewhere in that storage shed was a sign that said Powell Street.
I looked at him and hesitantly asked, "Would it be okay if I came in so I could check out my old school and street?"
"Sure."

I could have cared less about the school. Although it was the first building I recognized and from there I knew I could find my way "home". I drove passed Selser Elementary where I can say without a doubt that that's where I got the worst education of my life. Miss. Roback, who we called Miss. Robot, didn't teach. She watched us fill in the blanks on papers all day, and put the papers in the bins she had lined up on the radiator while she thought about what TV dinner she was going to have that night. I imagined that when she went home she thawed out a frozen TV dinner and ate it on a TV tray in front of her TV that flickered until 10pm when she climbed into bed and started the next day all over again, same as the last, in the polyester pantsuit she laid out the night before. The first time I heard Eleanor Rigby, I thought of her.

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

I looked for Miss Roback on yahoo people search and I couldn’t find her. One Mrs. Roback, who wasn’t her, left a message on my machine, telling me she wasn’t the Mrs. Roback I was looking for but she hopes I find her. She sounded like a very sweet Mrs. Roback. I’d wished she was our teacher. Sometimes I wonder what ever happened to Mrs. Roback. Did she finally come out of the closet in the 80s? Did she come out of her shell ever? Become a skydiver, bungy jumper? Or did she just melt into the suburbs and disappear?

I passed Selser Elementary with narely a glance, took a left toward "Davis", and finally another left onto a street where a sign that said "Powell" used to be. There were no signs up for the housing part of the base since it was not being used. The streets looked as though they hadn't been driven down since the last family left. Powell Street was completely run down. The paint on all the yellow houses was peeling off, the windows and doors were boarded up and spray painted. They could have been sold as low income housing, but no. They just stood like tombstones. It was a ghost town. No signs of the lives that were there. No Major Kehoe, Major Laffey, Major Soto, Major Marshall over the doors, bicycles in the driveway, cars with metal bumpers and wood paneling on the sides driving by. It was hard to remember living there because it looked so dead. At least when I went back to Clinton Sherman there were people still using those homes and the energy they once contained seemed to carry on by the families inside who unknowingly kept them stoked.

I walked around the driveway, noticing the garage where Dewayne and Joe Laffey used to play the drums. I looked into our garage where our pinto used to park. I used to sit inside it at night while my parents were inside watching the news and think about "adult things" like how to drive the car and how much gas cost and one day when I would drive a car to work. I walked through the breezeways between the house and the garage where I had planted tulips. I walked into the backyard where I found my cat Tiger. I walked around the other side of the garage where we posed in front of the bright yellow forsythia on Easter Sunday in our Sunday best. My mother's bold red hair high up in a beehive hairdo. I walked along the dirt road that lead to Spookey Trails. The tall chain link fence was still there, hidden behind birches and sumac.

It didn't feel like going home. It felt like visiting a cemetary where the names have all been washed away by Mother Nature and Time.

2-B Powell Street, Westover AFB

This cartoon makes me laugh because it reminds me of "the naughty word story" that contains the slew of naughty words little Skye blurted out the first week of kindergarten. It didn't land him in the principal's office, thank God, but I could see him being just as digruntled as the two kids on the left if it had! Carmen sent it. "The" Carmen. Carmen Laffey from 1972. "The girl next door" (photo of Carmen and Kim) on the other side of our duplex on Powell Street, Westover AFB, Springfield, Massachusetts 01022. The Carmen who I completely lost track of until one day this summer (2005) I was home alone -- very, very rare occurence -- and I found myself at a search engine asking myself who would I love to find right now?

I thought of four people, who came to mind with equal enthusiasm -- four women I fondly remember from growing up in the Air Force: Karen Bosley, (Clinton Sherman AFB, Burns Flat, OK, 1967-1968); Beth Engle and Sevinc Odgers, (Izmir, Turkey, 1968 - 1971); and Carmen Laffey, (Westover AFB, Springfield, MA, 1971-1972). At the end of that week I had spoken to three out of the four women. It was a great week, indeed!

Karen Bosley, who's in Texas, same as Carmen, and, strangely both are private detectives, asked me "What's gotcha waxing the old nostalgia?" I couldn't answer her. But something was drawing me to find my past. Find the old people who could remind me of who I used to be.

Some people can go back to their hometown, drive by their old house, their old stomping grounds, their old friend's houses, knock on the door and talk old times with their parents. It's not that easy for someone whose childhood was spent moving from base to base. But don't feel sorry for us. It was the best of times. We got to meet great people, live in great places, and made instant friendships and community, that, I believe, are stronger than for those who never left their birthplace, simply because life was more surreal. Less taken for granted. There wasn't just a war over there in Vietnam. Our fathers were in it. Mine wasn't but many of the men on these bases were. To quote David Moorhouse in his book, Psychic Warrior: The True Story of America's Foremost Psychic Spy, "I spent my childhood in the army; I was a young nomad, traveling from post to post with my family. I knew nothing of life except what a soldier and a soldier's wife taught me, and I never consciously expected to be anything but a soldier. When I was young I played games with soldiers' children, and we always imitated our fathers. We were very proud of them even though we seldom saw them."

When I was young I played games with soldier's children too. Relationships were instant and lasting. There was no pussy footing around to see if we had anything in common before we'd share our inner selves. It didn't take years to feel part of the community. We were a community at all times because we shared a place in our minds of something so frightening and potentially devestating for anyone of the "strangers" we met. I put strangers in quotes because there really weren't strangers on bases. They were all neighbors with whom we had a great deal in common, mostly the basics - housing, careers, survival, hopes and prayers. So people waved. People got to know each other. It was a community of great support, even though we didn't go back generations as in civilian communities where the house you've made mortgage payments on for eights years still is referred to as "the White's house" instead of your family's house. Some kind of time warp that never quite catches up. It isn't until you move away that the house then becomes "the Kehoe's house."

These bases are gone, for the most part. Sometimes the houses are gone. Or they're boarded up as was the yellow duplex we shared with the Laffeys. You can't go in and look around. Some old neighborhoods are in another country. To go back and visit the house I lived in in Turkey would mean getting my passport renewed, saving up some money to get there, taking the time away to fly across the ocean and finding a translator.

All we have in our immediate possession are what's in our memories. So when we come together on the phone, we time travel. It's no longer 2005 but suddenly 1968, 1972. And since traveling is what we did best we're real good at treking back. Carmen reminded me of Radar Hill where we used to go sledding. It was the bomb! I reminded her of Spooky trails, some woods with bike trails where we used to go but were scared to go, mostly because of the name we gave the woods. We reminded each other of the Marshall's across the street and the Soto's.

There were only four families on Powell Street. The Sotos had a VW bug. They used to live in Turkey too but not in the same place or at the same time as us. They always had croquet set up on their front lawn. We never played inside their house. We always played on their lawn. We liked playing croquet because Benny liked playing croquet. Carmen and I still remember Benny Soto as being "soooo cute!" We played croquet all summer. I tried to find Benny Soto but there are so many Benny Sotos. I doubt I'll find the one from Powell Street in 1972.

The Marshalls lived next door to the Sotos. They had a german shepard that let kittens climb and play all over it. Major Marshall flew helicopters, delivering first aid. Major Soto and my Dad were on base. And Major Laffey flew single engine planes in a job that had a life expectancy of a few weeks. He did several tours, flying "low and slow" as a human decoy so the North Vietnamese would shoot at him and our guys on the ground could know where they were so they could get 'em. I had no idea Major Laffey had such a dangerous job. No one told us kids what he did. Even the Laffey children didn't know. I just knew on an intuitive level that Mrs. Laffey worried and prayed and walked on eggshells every day. She had a McGovern bumper sticker on her stationwagon. I wanted him to win for her because I wanted to support her. When he lost I felt badly for her and all the military wives because I thought he would end the war. Nixon won and the war continued.

Major Laffey wrote home regularly so Mrs Laffey would know he was okay. There was one period of time on Powell Street that I remember as particularly stressful. I remember this from a nine-year old's perspective, 30 + years later, but it was so intense that I think I remember it well. Mrs. Laffey hadn't heard from her husband in a week. It had been a long time for her not to hear from him. She put a bumper sticker on her car next to her McGovern sticker that said MIA/POW. It was from that bumper sticker that I learned what those letters meant. The ugliness of war felt more real. Missing in Action. Prisoner of War. I had an active imagination when I read those words.

Whenever I saw Mrs Laffey back out of her garage and pull out onto Davis Street I'd see the bumper sticker and think of her husband and say to myself "I hope not." One of the twins had a nervous breakdown in school, I had heard, because he was so worried about his father. Having not heard word from him in a week, he was fearing the worst. If anyone wants to know what it's like for a child whose father is in a war zone, this is your Look In. The neighborhood and the many friends the Laffey's had on base were all thinking of the Laffeys, hoping and praying that he was okay and there was just a hold up with the mail.

To everyone's relief a week or so later, our prayers were answered. The mail had been held up in Germany or some place. Capt Laffey was alive and as well as could be expected in a job with a 90% mortality rate. The neighborhood was elated! To add to the excitement, Mrs. Marshall heard that her husband's tour was over and he was going to come home. No news could top homecoming news. Excitement was in the air. It was looking like there might be a light at the end of the tunnel. The war might be ending soon and the guys could all come home. But within a few days the energy on Powell street plummeted drastically. Major Marshall offered to do one last first aid supply delivery and his helicopter was shot down. He was killed.

The authorities on the base notified Mrs. Marshall of his death and in the same visit told her she had to vacate her house and leave the base. There was no grace period. There was no time for her to pull herself back up after receiving this horrible blow. The neighborhood was in shock, not only from the news but of the treatment she had been given. No one blamed her for what we saw on her front lawn the next morning. A pile the size of a minivan of all things military, khaki and camoflauge in a heap on the front lawn like a giant tombstone.

I hope when they delivered the news she howled. She swore. She threw things. She screamed. I hope she didn't wait until they left so that at night when they were alone with their thoughts her voice would seep in through any chinks in their armour. And in those moments of solitude they, too, could ask: "Why?", and imagine too, "If only" as Mrs. Marshall probably had in her moments alone with her thoughts. Was that war really necessary? Are any?

It's STUPID!!

Little Skye has an impish smile. He was born with it and a "just dare me" look in his eyes. Quite honestly it's what I love about him. The resemblance.

Yesterday, Skye said "Mom, I know a naughty word that starts with an s".

The impish-smile extends from ear to ear. Just-dare-me eyes feed on the sudden alertness in my eyes as he's about to use the "s word" -- the one he used in kindergarten the very first week after correcting himself for letting the "f word" slip out. Eventually he recovered like a gymnast who wobbled a bit before sticking her landing, censoring himself down from "freakin'- shit-shoot-darn! Finally he steadied himself on "crud!" while looking around to see if the judges noticed his indiscretions. The teacher had. Some construction paper craft he was working on apparently was giving him trouble. Unfortunately he forgot he was in a crowded room, the way Mommy sometimes forgets little ears are listening when she drops something on her foot. EXPLICATIIIVE!!!! And then it's too late. It's out there. Magnetically drawn to the tape recorder in his mind that's stuck on "play and record".

His kindergarten teacher recounted this charming story for me with a knit brow the first week of school. I scanned the classroom in disbelief as if searching to see where he had learned such language. To my relief she told a similar story about her nephew, Cole, on his first week of kindergarten as well. Skye and Cole went to preschool together.

As the memory of his teacher recounting this charming story flashes into my frontal lobe along with my ridiculous attempt to scan the classroom aghast at what I'd just heard, I cringed when he said he knows a naughty word that starts with "s." I know he knows it. I want him to forget it.

"Want to hear me say it?" he says, anticipating my predictable response.
"NO!"
Too late. There was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't stop him. When more white than blue shines in my eyes, it sends him into Toying with Mommy Heaven.
"It rhymes with....." I'm imagining "it" words he's going to say as he eventually works his way to the cheese at the end of the string. To my great relief he said "Cupid!"

Shwew! "Get it? Stupid!!" I had to follow through with an overreaction: "We're not allowed to say that word!" rather than with relief that it was "the other 's' word" or clever boy would quickly realize he could take the whites in my eyes one degree wider, endlessly tease me with words that rhyme with "it" without ever coming to "shhhhhhh!".

Honoring Darrell Birt, Ohio Soldier and Hero

I saw this article about an Ohio soldier, now home from Iraq, in the Columbus Dispatch last year and I had to do something besides cut the article out and hang it on my fridge. I don't usually read the newspaper let alone collect newsclippings but this one called me into action. I pulled out the phone book and looked up Darrell Birt's number. I left a message, trying not to cry, because I get all emotional when it comes to our soldiers, having grown up on Air Force bases during the Vietnam war. I always wonder about a soldier when he returns from a tour. I want them to know someone out there noticed he'd come home. I wanted him to know I was glad he was home safely and that I support him 100%, I'm very proud of his ingenuity which lead to such heroic efforts to protect the troops in his unit, and I'm very sorry for all he went through just trying to do his job.

My phone rang. To my amazement, the voice on the other end of the line was that of Darrell Birt. I spoke to Darrell and to his wife and it moved me even more to want to help this family. I have been known to meet Senator's at the Statehouse when it's an issue I'm passionate about but this time I went straight to the phone. I called Senator Voinovich's office and they hadn't heard of Darrell Birt. I called Senator DeWine's office and his aid had heard of Darrell Birt, he could vaguely recall as I got him up-to-date on the details. This vaguery was not good enough for me. He told me they were working on it. It sounded like a line. I said "How long have you been working on it?" He said "Since we heard about it." Please, not so specific!. I said "Well, how far have you gotten on it? How far up the chain of command have you gone? Who have you spoken to seek clemency for this soldier?" He retorted with "Are you family of Darrell Birt?" I said "No. I'm just someone who cares." He said he couldn't discuss it with me anymore.

The next day it was all over the news: "Senator Mike DeWine Seeks Clemency for Ohio Soldier". I couldn't believe it. The news went as far as Japan. I checked in with Senator DeWine's office, with Darrell Birt and with television reporters regularly to keep this story in the news and find out the latest developments. The more coverage the story got, I hoped, the faster something would get done.

Senator DeWine only acted on this because a brave soldier the week before, in a press conference that was aired around the globe, told Rumsfeld that the soldiers didn't have adequate body armour and equipment. Rumsfeld made the famous reply "You go to war with the army you have not the army you wish you had." If our politicians had the courage that these soldiers had to speak up and make things right, and not just do it to get their name in the headlines.

Darrell Birt was caught in quagmire going with the army we had. He had to make do for the mission. It won him a bronze star and jail time in Kuwait in 120 degree tents for six months plus jail time in another military prison in Germany, I think he said.

I had the pleasure of meeting Darrell Birt shortly after I called him the first time. We met at a McDonalds. I shook his hand and I'll never forget it. In that handshake I could have been in Iraq shaking every soldier's hand. Solid. Strong. Proud. Brave. Dignified. It was a complete honor to be in this man's presence. How could this nightmare be happening to such a good man and his wife who voted for the very administration that was letting them down?

We talked about his military court proceedings and imprisonment (I don't know which was worse) over french fries. I try to avoid McDonald's as a rule but it was his suggestion and I would have met him at a sewage plant if he asked me. I wanted to pay for his meal. He wouldn't allow it. Instead he kept offering me more of his fries and I felt guilty eating them, thinking of the dehydrated meals he'd eaten when he was doing time in the desert, and because he was between jobs. The company he worked for before shipping out to Iraq fired him when he returned home because "he had stolen." Meanwhile in their company newsletter it said "We support our troops". His wife, an at-home-mother, had to return to work to make ends meet because the military cut the family off from all pay and benefits. This was the thanks they got.

Making Do in Iraq

Soldier praised and prosecuted for scrounging parts to aid unit

Monday, December 13, 2004

Robert Vitale

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

GARRETT HUBBARD | DISPATCH

Darrell Birt holds Ty Thompson, the son of a family friend, at a church Christmas dinner.

What Darrell Birt did in Iraq earned him the Bronze Star.

What Darrell Birt did in Iraq also got him six months in military prison.

The 45-year-old Army reservist from the Far West Side knows of the situations faced by the soldiers who recently complained to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about having to scrounge through Kuwaiti landfills to equip themselves for duty in Iraq.

Birt, who served as a maintenance technician with the 656 th Transportation Company based in Springfield, used abandoned U.S. military vehicles and parts to better protect his own unit as it headed into Iraq on fuel-delivery missions.

For that, he was cited in May 2003 for "leadership, unwavering commitment to mission accomplishment and technical expertise . . . above and beyond the call of duty." A year later, he was among six unit members court-martialed, convicted of theft and destruction of Army property, and sentenced to six months’ confinement.

Birt pleaded guilty, he said, "because I’m a Christian, and I did do it."

But his unit didn’t have enough vehicles to carry its equipment, he said. The two tractortrailers and a 5-ton truck from which he helped remove parts had been abandoned in Kuwait by other units that already had moved into Iraq.

He said he’s "kind of but not totally surprised" by the news that troops still must improvise to ensure their own protection.

"The higher-ups are either not telling him the whole story or he doesn’t want to hear the whole story," Birt said of Rumsfeld.

Lt. Col. Christopher Wicker, the former battalion commander in charge of the 656 th and other units, said Birt and others should have returned the vehicles after they completed their mission. Instead, he said, they erased identity marks before "dumping them" at military bases.

Birt said no one in the unit personally profited from their actions. But they ended up paying.

He was released in October and returned to his wife and two children in Columbus. He has so far unsuccessfully appealed his discharge from the Army — he does get to keep his Bronze Star — and he said he also lost his job.

Unlike 23 reservists from another Army unit who in October refused to carry out a mission transporting fuel in poorly protected vehicles, Birt said he and his colleagues "did what was necessary." The Army has said that the other unit’s members won’t be court-martialed.

A former Marine who enlisted at age 19 and served 10½ years, Birt joined the Army Reserve in 1991 and had been with the 656 th since 1992.

He said the 656 th arrived in the Persian Gulf with Humvees equipped with soft vinyl doors and didn’t have enough vehicles for vital equipment.

A fellow soldier wrote on his behalf that Birt’s actions helped save lives in his 160-member unit. The 656 th suffered just four injuries and no battlefield deaths during its year in the Persian Gulf. It did take fire from Iraqi insurgents.

The couple’s pastor, the Rev. Randy Barr of Grove City Church of God, said the ordeal has been "very emotionally draining for his wife (Janet) and kids."

Barr said the church has supported the family, though. Through letters home, Birt also encouraged his children, Amanda and Jacob, to stay firm in their faith and "have fun growing up."

"The positive in this is God is gracious," Birt said.

"My family and I are back together. I didn’t lose anything."

Information from the Associated Press was included in this story .

rvitale@dispatch.com

Yes, you CAN go back home! As long as it's still standing and someone's there to let you in.....

It was about this time last year that we packed the minivan with Christmas presents and made the 33+ hour drive to Tucson, Arizona, staying one day ahead of a storm that blanketed the trail behind us in ice and snow, right down to the beaches of Corpus Christi, Texas the morning we passed through eerily republican Bush country. Skye took the John Kerry bumper sticker off our car before driving through the red states and I thought it was a breach in our marriage until we set foot in Texas, and I realized it was a matter of survival. There's a lot of nothing from one end of Texas to the other and no one to witness "nothing" happen to that family of four in the minivan with the out-of-state plates and the Kerry bumper sticker.

On the way home we did a lot of sightseeing in Arizona and New Mexico, but as you can imagine by the time we got to Oklahoma we were barn sick horses just making a b-line for home. Well, actually for the St. Louis Arch and then home. Half way through Oklahoma on the second day of the trip back from Granny’s 70 degree desert oasis, it was time to switch drivers. Only I didn’t want to switch. I was behind the wheel and I'd finished my book the day before. But finally two exits after Skye made his desperate plea to switch I succumbed and pulled over at an exit for Burns Flat.

I couldn’t believe it! I used to live in Burns Flat in 1968! We pulled into a gas station and right away I got on my cell phone to call my Dad.

“Guess where I am!” I announced, flying past any propers when my father answered the phone.
He laughed and went for the bait. “I don’t know. Where?”
“Burns Flat!!”
“You’re kidding me!”
“Nope! We pulled off an exit to switch drivers and the sign said Burns Flat! You think our old house is still there?”
“I don’t know. They could have leveled all the homes or sold them as low income housing. Go inside the gas station and ask someone who looks older than you if they know what happened to the base?”

I hung up and walked inside. I asked the cashier who was clearly older than me, “Are you older than me?”
She looked at me funny. I said “Are you older than me? Because if you are than you probably remember Clinton Sherman Air Force Base and you might be able to tell me where Swanea Street is. I used to live there in 1968.”
She said “Sure I know where it is. My father built all those houses.”
We talked old times for a bit until we realized that there was a line forming of customers waiting to check out. When the tank was filled and the kids’ bladders were emptied we headed over the hill into town. The formal entry into the base was gone but the buildings were still there. They were sold as low income housing after the base closed in 1968. In fact, my father told me, ours was the last family to leave the base because we were on our way to Izmir, Turkey next and we were held back for a bit.

We found Sawnea street and I called home again. This time my mother answered. I said, “I think I found our house. Do you remember what number it was?”
“It had three digits. That’s all I remember.”
“Was it 315?”
“That rings a bell.”
I described all the houses and she thought I was in the right place so I hung up and rang the bell.
A lovely woman named Dolores Peacock and her great grand daughter, Elizabeth, were home. I explained to her why I was at her door, how far we had come, and with a desperate, pleading expression asked if it would be possible to look around outside and maybe just see the kitchen.

She hesitantly escorted us into the kitchen, apologizing about the mess. What mess? I was too busy in my time warp to notice. The rock garden off the front porch was as I remembered it, but without all the cool rocks my mother had in it. The doorknob, the hallway, the kitchen were exactly the same. At first I barely recognized the place but the longer I stood there and moved about in different spots in the kitchen memories came back, as if by standing in specific locations they beamed down.

I pointed to her copper jello molds on the wall and shouted “My mother hung her copper jello molds there too!” I pointed to the drawer on the right of the oven and said, “This was our junk drawer.” She opened it up to show me that it was her junk drawer too. I pointed to the counter above it, “This is where I learned to make toast.” She waved toward her toaster, which was on the left of her oven, and joked that she would have to move it to the right side. I stood in front of the sink and looked out the window toward the Bosley’s house and imagined my mother standing there watching all the kids play in the driveways between the two houses. Then I went to the far corner of the kitchen and there was the laundry room, large enough to fit a washer and dryer. I gasped and squealed as if my brother’s bed was still there and he was in it. But it wasn’t. I said “Would you believe that that used to be my brother’s bedroom?!!” The great granddaughter was amazed. The great grandmother was incredulous. I said “My father hung a board over the washer and dryer. He mounted it to the wall,” I said, indicating with my hands where it had attached. “He put a mattress on it and called it a bed.”

I looked at the great granddaughter, who was enjoying the company that bounded into her house that day and interrupted her homeschooling. “I don’t know where he put his clothes,” I told her. The great granddaughter smiled and ran outside with my two boys, the youngest being the age I was when I lived there.

The more the stories began flowing as I looked around the yard the more Dolores Peacock began to grow uncomfortable. What sort of demon had she let into her home! I pointed to the place on the side of the garage where I used to eat dirt; the place on the sidewalk where I tricked Karen Bosley into eating mud by telling her it was brownie mix; I stood in the driveway where I'd bit Nora Schmidt's finger for playing with my dollhouse while I was in time-out and the bedroom window I climbed out of to get to Nora. I pointed to the curb where I’d learned to ride my first bike, which I’d stolen from a few lawns down. My father paid for the bike when the owner of it recognized it on our front lawn and offered to sell it. But still, even after the cash exchanged hands and the turquoise Schwinn was no longer “borrowed”, I knew it was ill-gotten, and I did feel a tad guilty about it. For a little while. Then I went on to the next story of how I used to ride my Schwinn around and around and around the block every morning in my pajamas.

Dolores Peacock wanted to cover her great granddaughter’s ears. I could tell. But she continued to be polite and wave as we climbed back into our minivan and pulled away from the curb, not before taking oodles of photos of our house, the Conlon’s, the Bosley’s, the Schmidt’s, and the Parish’s.

Skye's Almost First Sleepover

There was a meeting in Skye's kindergarten classroom at noon. Just for parents. I had to find a sitter
and couldn't think of anyone until finally I remembered my 90-year old neighbor, Thelma. Skye has met her a
few times when I've brought Thelma to the doctor or the grocery store. He tells her things like "I'd rather be a
child than an old person because you have more friends." She is never offended by his comments and always
answers honestly and from the heart. "Most of my friends are six feet under ground." That quieted him up for a
few minutes while he mulled it over.

Thelma agreed to watch Skye. He sat perched on on the edge of her couch like a well trained poodle and
watched cable. His lunch box that contained a soy yogurt and a spoon sat next to him. When I returned an
hour later, both Skye and his lunchbox were in the exact position as when I'd left them.

He remembered that he didn't eat his soy yogurt and I brought him to the kitchen table where he gobbled it
up in seconds. Then we returned to the living room and talked, with the TV off, about how it took Thelma an
hour to do a ten-minute sewing job on her slacks, how Thelma's cat likes to sleep in the sun and as it moves
so does the cat.

Skye was reclined on Thelma's couch. He wanted me to walk four houses down the sidewalk to our house and
get him another soy yogurt and his sleeping bag. He's been talking about wanting to do a sleep over and he
thought Thelma's house was a good place to have one.

I tried to explain that Thelma probably had other things to do than to have an overnight guest and
convinced him to get his sandals back on and walk home for another yogurt.

He ran the whole way, making sure he was always a few steps ahead of me. When we reached
the driveway we stopped for a little bit and talked. Then before I could get to the door before him he ran
ahead of me. I could see that he wanted to win the race he was having with me in his mind. I said "Skye,
are you being competitive?" He opened the door wide and said "No. I'm not being competitive. I'm being a
jerk." When we got inside he asked what competitive means. "It just means you're trying to win...Sometimes
it can be thought of as being a jerk." He looked very satisfied with himself.

Deja View: My nine-year old on the Reptilian Brain

Alex said "Mom, did you ever know of a drawer in your mind that's closed and locked up permanently? It's like deja view." I said "Can you repeat that?" I loved the way it sounded. Plus I was on the edge of my seat wondering if he suddenly had a very clear a grasp of his learning differences? Is he talking about that part of his brain involved with executive function? Is he going to one day be the one who cracks the code?

While quickly grabbing a pen to take notes I paused instead of asking him if he meant deja vu, giving him a chance to either explain "deja view" or correct himself when he interrupted my stream of thoughts, as if reading them, with: "I'm not talking about deja vu. Deja vu is connecting two thoughts together. I'm not connecting two thoughts. I'm talking about deja view, like looking through a port window in a ship. I'm connecting a thought to something on the other side of a drawer that you can't get to."

(Flipping over the scrap paper to get the rest of his thoughts before I miss them...)

"It's the reptilian brain. There's a ton more thoughts in the reptilian brain than in the regular brain. The reptilian brain holds a gazillion more thoughts than the other two left and right brains combined. Thoughts from a long time ago. History. If the brain allowed the reptilian brain to override the body we would probably learn a lot of information without rupturing, destroying or fracturing the space time continuum, which I have to say, I don't even know where that is located."

Okay? This child is NINE!

Independence Day 2005: Alex's Three-Wheeler Adventure

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When I went camping in New York at our annual 4th of July family reunion, my sisters passed on some parental guidelines for camping, one being that when their children were my childrens’ ages their kids had to ask permission to explore the campground by themselves, and in most cases could only venture out of sight accompanied by an adult. I was glad for the guidelines they offered because my passion for exploring and thrill-seeking constantly blurred my ability to see and set sensible boundaries. shoe shop hiking Omega motherhood New York State Parks and Recreation

Within the first hour after the ten-hour drive from Ohio to the campsite in the Catskill mountains, Alex, my nine-year old, had set off on his three-wheeler. At first he was just flying wildly down the slope that connected our familys’ four campsites. Next thing I knew, maybe an hour later, one of my sisters asked me where Alex was. Suddenly it hit me that I hadn’t kept better track of the background noise of his three-wheeler while I was setting up my tent and birthing the entire contents of my impregnated minivan. Another sister shouted out “I last heard him saying he was going to the lake.” I didn’t know he knew the way to the lake. Maybe someone told him where it was or someone would chime in with a clue as to whom he had gone there with. All that was offered was “He said he was going to take all the roads that went downhill because he had trouble riding his three-wheeler up the hills.”

I didn’t think that sounded good. I hastily uploaded and scanned the soundtrack of the last hour including noises I’d been filtering out so I could focus on the task of setting up camp, and I couldn’t remember when it was that I last heard or tried not to hear the noisy three wheeler. I comandeered my sister Janet to drive me around in her minivan because mine was blocked by my brother-in-law’s truck. Janet and I headed in the direction of the lake with a bit of panic in my heart that increased with each passing downhill path that lead to no Alex in tears at the bottom of it. I imagined him winding his way through the unfamiliar campground. Knowing how easily frustrated he gets, I was thinking of combinations of conditions that could drive him to tears, such as not knowing his way combined with the aggravation of spinning treadless plastic wheels up a gravel road. As I looked down each passing lane seeing no Alex in tears at the bottom spinning his wheels I was both relieved and worried until finally we came upon a state park employee.

Interestingly, the instinctive deduction that the downhill roads must lead to the lake, took Alex in the right direction. The park employee who radioed over to the lifeguard to see if she saw a blonde boy in a tie dye t-shirt with a peace sign on the back gave us the thumbs up.

A huge sigh of relief came over us as well as a wave of curiosity. How did he get there?? We pulled into the crowded beach parking lot and the first thing we saw was Alex’s three wheeler parked in a parking space at an angle with his helmet carefully placed in the bucket seat. I broke out laughing so hard, in such relief that he was okay but also at how cleverly he had left his bike.

When I found him on the beach I asked him why he did that? He said “Well, I thought about it. If I left it on the grass soemone would steal it. But if I parked it in the parking lot," he said touching the tip of his index fingers to his thumbs and sweeping his hands out to the sides as if smoothing out the wrinkles on a bedspread, "they would respect it.” Yes indeed it got a lot of respect. Everyone who saw it commented on it. No one laughed. No one tried to take it. They just looked at it with interest. The trust Alex had placed in mankind on that day was admired by everyone who walked by his bike or drove by it looking for a place to park.