Sunday, February 28, 2010
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
You know this book will make you laugh from the first entry (not exactly a sentence): "For the desk of His Excellency Wen Jiabao; The Premier's Office; Beijing; Capital of the freedom-loving Nation of China." It comes from the India narrator, Balram, who describes his Horatio Alger-style rise from poverty to entrepreneurshiup for the edification of a Premier who needs to encourage similar rises in his own country. What's important about Belram, who often refers to the 21C as the "Age of the Yellow and Brown Men," is that you believe him. People in India and China are creating, manufacturing, using their heads to provide legitimately helpful services. Meanwhile, what's done in the US? Bankers, Wall St. manipulators (and all too often addicts), and politicians play weird little games with money, like creating derivatives, until they bring the country to its knees. Bill Gates is one of the few who stood between us and anihilation, and as the late Nien Cheng said, "He would have been Knighted in England." Here the government harrassed him for years with antitrust suits - our other big industry. But "White Tiger isn't polemic, so I shouldn't make it sound like it is. It's funny, exciting, and full of story - murder, sex, what have you. Many books are enjoyable reads, but this one truly is a MUST-read.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Excerpts from "I've Always Loved You"
In the Imperial Palace, Tokyo:
MOTHERS-IN-LAW and daughters-in-law sometimes don’t get along. Such
was the case in the emperor’s family, where his hawk wife pitted herself
against his dove mother. Though Japan allegedly teems with ten thou-
sand kami spirits who reside in the rocks, fields, and trees, their holy
presence could not save the emperor from the struggles of these two
strong women.
He feared his mother, adored his wife, Nagako, whose patriotic
haikus stiffened his resolve to fight with greater ferocity. However, his
mother, Teimei Kogo, Dowager Empress Sadako, took a resolute antiwar
stand. She dreaded the Americans and believed they would crush Dai
Nippon. When she wasn’t lecturing him, her thin, dry lips trembling, she
sent him haikus around themes of the traveler who seeks the seed of the
green tree of peace or a moment of peace as a bar of gold. Worse, she
called everything he did a “stupid mistake.”
He would point out that the pride of conquest united the Empire
of Japan, and added that Westerners did not learn the customs of oth-
ers, befriending only each other. Now Shinto priests migrate through
the empire teaching Dai Nippon’s ancient ways. Asia for Asians.
Instead of agreeing, she’d stare at him with hostile black smudge
eyes that unnerved him.
He called her the world’s “most ungrateful mother,” while she re-
ferred to him as “delusional.” They scowled at each other, he with his
thick eyebrows, she with her delicate arches.
Supposedly no insults existed in the Japanese language, only infi-
nite degrees of apology, but the dowager empress forgot this courtesy
when speaking to her son. When he replied, she crossed her arms to sig-
nify boredom. What an anomaly she was in a country where a tiny
breach of courtesy prompted the apology, "Moshi wake gazaimasen, if
you please, my transgression is unforgivable, and I wish I were dead.”
After encounters with his mother, the emperor rolled round crim-
son rubies in his hands like worry beads to calm himself. She thought of
herself as Japan’s true ruler, and schemed with her snickering sycophants,
which created yet another morass of problems.
55
Today, she paid him a rare visit, and he wanted to palliate her,
especially after the Midway news. He presented her with a magnificent
Burmese necklace of egg-sized emeralds and rubies. Did she thank him?
No, she said she would have one of her advisors sell the necklace for
money to spend on her peace efforts, and added she doubted that her son
obtained it in an honorable way.
He pictured the advisor selling the necklace, pocketing the proceeds,
and telling his hoax of a mother that every penny would go to printing
her haikus on fine paper, and offering them to worthy Japanese homes.
In Hirohito’s opinion, the sly American president, operating under
a “constitutional dictatorship in time of war,” actually had far more
power than the Emperor of Dai Nippon did.
After she left, dusk arrived. Bats flew in circles around the imperial
palace, and new guards arrived, bearing lanterns. Dark, sealed people,
they swerved in tandem. The emperor brooded within. The palace
seemed somber to him at this time of day. Its post and lintel construc-
tion made the interior quite dark, so large screens with burnished gold
backgrounds covered the walls.
Even the sumptuous sliding wood panels, carved and lacquered in
bright colors, seemed to absorb the scarce light. Still, he liked them, as
they illustrated myths and historical triumphs of the Yamato family.
Tonight, however, past glories couldn’t cheer him. The Americans had
avenged Pearl Harbor at Midway. He insisted that his people never hear
about Japan’s first significant defeat in more than three centuries. He
would have to camouflage it for propaganda purposes into a triumph
and issue an imperial rescript praising his Midway victors. Then he
would crush the barbarians before another summer replaced plum
blossoms with leaves.
Beginning with Midway, the imperial commanders tried to explain
Japan’s deteriorating military position to Hirohito, only to hear lectures
on botany by way of reply. As the war progressed – or regressed, from
Japan’s perspective – they became frantic, but the emperor refused to
discuss surrender. When it came to native intelligence, his commanders
reminded him of the nearly decerebrate shishigashira in the palace ponds.
56
In California:
At home, Mom seemed gloomier than ever. As time went by, she
missed Daddy more, not less. He was the powerful connection, and
being without him again took its toll. Confusion burrowed in and
marked a mood whose changing face kept her off balance.
She wrote in her diary:
“I think of my childhood as if trying to recall a book I read or a
movie I saw. But Frank – I remember him with such intensity it some-
times makes me nauseous. Lately I fight a need to be alone. The thought
of seeing anyone besides my family feels like staring into an overhead
light. I try to keep my hope, since without it, I’d be on the next train to
oblivion. I know that.”
She shut her diary, interrogated me, and then Aunt Lenore arrived
in a beige sweater set and skirt, plus pearls. After Mom poured some
coffee for her, she began whining (like she told me not to do). "Pooksie
just came home from playing jacks with the Grim Preacher’s staggeringly
spoiled Belinda, whom she now calls her best friend.”
Aunt Lenore stirred some cream into her coffee. “Is Belinda as bad
as the mother?”
“Need you ask? She looks like Shirley Temple – all dimples – but
bursts into floods of screaming tears if I ever say no to her. Pooksie gives
me these ‘see what a nice child I am by comparison?’ stares and tenderly
takes Belinda’s hand.”
It made me mad when Mom talked about me, especially right in
front of me.
124
Aunt Lenore laughed. “Little Miss Good Ship Lollipop. Pooksie
will get tired of her, in my opinion.”
No, I wouldn’t. She had a pet parrot who could say, “Hi, there,
Mama Kingfisher,” and, in her back yard, a pond as green as Lake Mer-
rit. More than that, we had fun playing together. Mom needed to learn
to have fun. It would be good for her.
A week later, Mom peeled a green apple in one continuous spiral
while Jeep curled up in a circle and dozed for a few seconds, moved a few
feet away and dozed a while longer, then repeated the procedure. They
waited for me to come home from school. I was late, and Mom began
to feel ill from stress, as she often displaced her anxiety about Daddy
onto Frankie and me. Finally, I injudiciously came in clutching a kitten,
gray with white paws.
Mom raised her paring knife. “What have you done?”
“Belinda’s mother gave it to me. Isn’t she nice?”
Mom eyed the kitten with loathing. “Belinda’s mother can take it
right back. It has a sneaky expression on its face and will kill the birds in
my garden if it has the chance. Cats are dreadful and the natural enemies
of babies.”
I said crushingly, “My brother’s not a baby anymore.”
“The cat’s glaring at him. Besides, it will run away. They all do.
Temporary shelter and food: that’s all they want.”
“It's just a kitten. And it likes me.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. It will soon grow into
a cat, and the cat will gain the upper hand with you. It would be un-
derfoot all day, pouncing on all of us, shredding the furniture. And adult
cats have bad breath, you know.”
“I thought you said it would run away." Then, to negotiate, I
added, "It can play outdoors with the two cats next door."
“It’s a kitten; they would kill it in no time. Besides, Jeep would
resent the intruder.”
Jeep wagged his tail and began licking the kitten’s fur. I smiled at
Mom.
“OK, Pooksie, I’m the one who resents the creature, and we’re
taking it straight back to Belinda and her mother. Naturally, the Grim
125
Preacher couldn’t consider tedious inconsequentials like my raising two
children and a dog by myself.”
“The kitten’s a present for me. And I don’t think you should call
Belinda’s mom the ‘Grim Preacher.’ ”
Mom scowled and put her hands on her hips. “I’m sure Belinda
and her mother will be enthusiastic about having it back. When your
father comes home, he will deal with this sort of thing, but right now I
have to do everything.”
“Daddy will buy me a cat.”
I began to cry, and the kitten began to tremble.
Mom wrapped it in a warm towel, spirited it with Frankie and me
into the car, and drove to Belinda’s. There, the maid approached the car,
and Mom explained her mission. We waited while the maid tried to
decide whether to take the kitten back or not. Then Mom got out of the
car, the kitten escaped the towel, and we departed with the maid still
chasing after it.
I glared at Mom. “I’ll talk about you at ‘share and tell’ tomorrow.”
Daddy on Luzon:
ON THE “BRIGHT ISLAND where the frangipani grows,” Daddy crossed
over into another experience. After an unopposed landing, the Americans
faced devastating bombardment, as Yamashita’s troops opened fire. Mor-
tar shells blew the tops off palm trees, ruined roads, filled the air with
steam and dust. The deafening sounds of weapons enlarged the grand
and terrible events.
The screams of the wounded combined with the “banzais” the
Japanese shrieked at the top of their considerable lungs, and sometimes
they shouted taunts: “Hello, hello. Where are your machine guns?” or
“Surrender, surrender. Everything is resistless.”
Daddy said, “Give me a moment, and I’ll think up a swift, incisive
reply.”
He tried to keep his friends alive with humor, joking that he’d seen
MacArthur at battlefields riding in a jeep with Eleanor Roosevelt by his
side. In his diary he wrote:
“Ammunition’s running low. Strikes in the ports hamper trans-
portation and unloading. Oxen-drawn carts loaded with pigs or chick-
ens help move weapons, and water buffalo tote signal equipment for our
field artillery units. A flu epidemic rages, but I won’t catch it. I never get
sick. Guns, blood, noise, and heat. Will I ever again be able to experience
a day without dread? In battle, men learn who they are and what they can
do. The chaos and exhaustion deranges some of them. Their teeth chat-
ter, they scamper around aimlessly. One burrowed into a cave and got
blown up. You figure they’ve gone beyond little lectures on the dream of
peace.”
Night fell, and he climbed into his foxhole with Jim. Feeling the
warmth of a good man next to him made it better. They rotated eating,
sleeping, and watch in four-hour shifts, saying nothing. One word, and
a Japanese might hear and toss a grenade or satchel charges, incinerating
them. Fires were forbidden, so they lit cigarettes with special black
lighters and ate cold K-rations: cheese, crackers, lemonade powder.
After breakfast, Daddy gave the men a pep talk to muster extra
enthusiasm. “Strength under siege,” he would say, “it’s important, and
you men have it.”
His words energized them but could not offset the sight of the
crosses that sprang up every day.
A week after landing, they moved west under heavy artillery and
mortar fire, crawling along, staying clear of each other as if contact
represented danger. Daddy prayed. He kept moving.
One morning the firing subsided for a few minutes, and he wrote
home:
“Thank you for saying the shower will be all mine. I’m sick of not
being able to sing in one. When I return, I’m going to sing until the hot
water runs out, wait for it to reheat, and sing again. I plan to shower and
sing for a year. And hold you, my precious. How long it has been?
“We’re rolling right along. It’s amazing. There’s hardly a Nip stand-
ing around here.
“Today the gulf kicked up, and one LST (landing ship tank)
broached; we lost some pontoon bridge materials, and the rough surf
made unloading impossible. Do you think that slowed us down? Never.
“We secured the Manila railroad and the strategic Route 3 from
Bambam to Mabalcat, sealed off Bataan. Ready to slow down and take
a rest? Not us. We seized Calumpit, crossed the Pampanaga River twenty-
eight miles from Manila, and, to the west, secured Subic Bay. I don’t
mean my battalion did all these things at once. The Sixth Army does
have other battalions, but we’re the toughest.
“As the Seventh Fleet glided into Subic Bay, Filipinos planted Old
Glory on the shoreline, and a brass band played the Philippine and
American national anthems. Filipinos gave the GIs cowrie shells as tokens
of esteem. Remember when Montezuma gave them to Cortez, along
with some feathers? Cortez was so disappointed he arrested Montezuma
and kept him incarcerated until he came up with some gold. Sounds like
something Hirohito would do.
“You’re probably wondering if our K-rations have improved. No!
Tonight’s arrived in rain—drenched cartons that turned the ‘food’ into
soggy mush. Whoever devised them preferred a life of making mistakes
to a life of idleness. Maybe he was a spy. Some day I’ll die of overeating,
188
but not here.
“Speaking of, Jim Williams told me the food planners ‘noodle
around with ideas.’ Ideas? How to prevent weight gain ranks first. When
I get home, I’m going to eat like a starved elephant on a peanut farm.
“We’re winning, but revenge is not as sweet as advertised. It’s more
enemies wronging each other, leaving behind hatred. I keep my sense of
humanity by holding to my memories of home: the small beige owl in
our garden, poppies dancing on spring green hills, the pale color and
fine texture of your skin.
“The sky turns from blue to lavender to pink in the sunset. This
time of day always makes me homesick.”
The next day Daddy rode the Bambam River boat, a ride from hell
with Japanese bullets whizzing by the entire time, killing men right and
left, knocking them overboard until they turned the water red.
BIO
A student of Wallace Stegner at Stanford, I got lucky in journalism. Interviewed football's Jerry Rice and John Madden, $ players Chuck Schwab and Michael Boskin, Nobel Laureates Arthur Schawlow (physics) and Michael Bishop (medicine), and NASA SETI's chief Jill Tartar. Even, briefly on the phone, Pablo Picasso. Needless to say, I speed read while cramming for these encounters. Now I've written a story of ww2 in the Pacific. My publisher described it as "A true love story, an intimate, powerful portrait of a family at war. This narrative draws its strength from the contrast between the selfless sacrifice of war and the rosy self-interest of of youth. The contrast of two families in two different worlds comes into play in the form of Western society versus the Imperial East."
S. Robert Foley, USN (ret), former Commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fl;eet, called my story "historically accurate" and "Strongly recommended on a jacket blurb. Critic Amy Lignor wrote, "Every once in a while a book comes along that completely changes your perspective."
MOTHERS-IN-LAW and daughters-in-law sometimes don’t get along. Such
was the case in the emperor’s family, where his hawk wife pitted herself
against his dove mother. Though Japan allegedly teems with ten thou-
sand kami spirits who reside in the rocks, fields, and trees, their holy
presence could not save the emperor from the struggles of these two
strong women.
He feared his mother, adored his wife, Nagako, whose patriotic
haikus stiffened his resolve to fight with greater ferocity. However, his
mother, Teimei Kogo, Dowager Empress Sadako, took a resolute antiwar
stand. She dreaded the Americans and believed they would crush Dai
Nippon. When she wasn’t lecturing him, her thin, dry lips trembling, she
sent him haikus around themes of the traveler who seeks the seed of the
green tree of peace or a moment of peace as a bar of gold. Worse, she
called everything he did a “stupid mistake.”
He would point out that the pride of conquest united the Empire
of Japan, and added that Westerners did not learn the customs of oth-
ers, befriending only each other. Now Shinto priests migrate through
the empire teaching Dai Nippon’s ancient ways. Asia for Asians.
Instead of agreeing, she’d stare at him with hostile black smudge
eyes that unnerved him.
He called her the world’s “most ungrateful mother,” while she re-
ferred to him as “delusional.” They scowled at each other, he with his
thick eyebrows, she with her delicate arches.
Supposedly no insults existed in the Japanese language, only infi-
nite degrees of apology, but the dowager empress forgot this courtesy
when speaking to her son. When he replied, she crossed her arms to sig-
nify boredom. What an anomaly she was in a country where a tiny
breach of courtesy prompted the apology, "Moshi wake gazaimasen, if
you please, my transgression is unforgivable, and I wish I were dead.”
After encounters with his mother, the emperor rolled round crim-
son rubies in his hands like worry beads to calm himself. She thought of
herself as Japan’s true ruler, and schemed with her snickering sycophants,
which created yet another morass of problems.
55
Today, she paid him a rare visit, and he wanted to palliate her,
especially after the Midway news. He presented her with a magnificent
Burmese necklace of egg-sized emeralds and rubies. Did she thank him?
No, she said she would have one of her advisors sell the necklace for
money to spend on her peace efforts, and added she doubted that her son
obtained it in an honorable way.
He pictured the advisor selling the necklace, pocketing the proceeds,
and telling his hoax of a mother that every penny would go to printing
her haikus on fine paper, and offering them to worthy Japanese homes.
In Hirohito’s opinion, the sly American president, operating under
a “constitutional dictatorship in time of war,” actually had far more
power than the Emperor of Dai Nippon did.
After she left, dusk arrived. Bats flew in circles around the imperial
palace, and new guards arrived, bearing lanterns. Dark, sealed people,
they swerved in tandem. The emperor brooded within. The palace
seemed somber to him at this time of day. Its post and lintel construc-
tion made the interior quite dark, so large screens with burnished gold
backgrounds covered the walls.
Even the sumptuous sliding wood panels, carved and lacquered in
bright colors, seemed to absorb the scarce light. Still, he liked them, as
they illustrated myths and historical triumphs of the Yamato family.
Tonight, however, past glories couldn’t cheer him. The Americans had
avenged Pearl Harbor at Midway. He insisted that his people never hear
about Japan’s first significant defeat in more than three centuries. He
would have to camouflage it for propaganda purposes into a triumph
and issue an imperial rescript praising his Midway victors. Then he
would crush the barbarians before another summer replaced plum
blossoms with leaves.
Beginning with Midway, the imperial commanders tried to explain
Japan’s deteriorating military position to Hirohito, only to hear lectures
on botany by way of reply. As the war progressed – or regressed, from
Japan’s perspective – they became frantic, but the emperor refused to
discuss surrender. When it came to native intelligence, his commanders
reminded him of the nearly decerebrate shishigashira in the palace ponds.
56
In California:
At home, Mom seemed gloomier than ever. As time went by, she
missed Daddy more, not less. He was the powerful connection, and
being without him again took its toll. Confusion burrowed in and
marked a mood whose changing face kept her off balance.
She wrote in her diary:
“I think of my childhood as if trying to recall a book I read or a
movie I saw. But Frank – I remember him with such intensity it some-
times makes me nauseous. Lately I fight a need to be alone. The thought
of seeing anyone besides my family feels like staring into an overhead
light. I try to keep my hope, since without it, I’d be on the next train to
oblivion. I know that.”
She shut her diary, interrogated me, and then Aunt Lenore arrived
in a beige sweater set and skirt, plus pearls. After Mom poured some
coffee for her, she began whining (like she told me not to do). "Pooksie
just came home from playing jacks with the Grim Preacher’s staggeringly
spoiled Belinda, whom she now calls her best friend.”
Aunt Lenore stirred some cream into her coffee. “Is Belinda as bad
as the mother?”
“Need you ask? She looks like Shirley Temple – all dimples – but
bursts into floods of screaming tears if I ever say no to her. Pooksie gives
me these ‘see what a nice child I am by comparison?’ stares and tenderly
takes Belinda’s hand.”
It made me mad when Mom talked about me, especially right in
front of me.
124
Aunt Lenore laughed. “Little Miss Good Ship Lollipop. Pooksie
will get tired of her, in my opinion.”
No, I wouldn’t. She had a pet parrot who could say, “Hi, there,
Mama Kingfisher,” and, in her back yard, a pond as green as Lake Mer-
rit. More than that, we had fun playing together. Mom needed to learn
to have fun. It would be good for her.
A week later, Mom peeled a green apple in one continuous spiral
while Jeep curled up in a circle and dozed for a few seconds, moved a few
feet away and dozed a while longer, then repeated the procedure. They
waited for me to come home from school. I was late, and Mom began
to feel ill from stress, as she often displaced her anxiety about Daddy
onto Frankie and me. Finally, I injudiciously came in clutching a kitten,
gray with white paws.
Mom raised her paring knife. “What have you done?”
“Belinda’s mother gave it to me. Isn’t she nice?”
Mom eyed the kitten with loathing. “Belinda’s mother can take it
right back. It has a sneaky expression on its face and will kill the birds in
my garden if it has the chance. Cats are dreadful and the natural enemies
of babies.”
I said crushingly, “My brother’s not a baby anymore.”
“The cat’s glaring at him. Besides, it will run away. They all do.
Temporary shelter and food: that’s all they want.”
“It's just a kitten. And it likes me.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. It will soon grow into
a cat, and the cat will gain the upper hand with you. It would be un-
derfoot all day, pouncing on all of us, shredding the furniture. And adult
cats have bad breath, you know.”
“I thought you said it would run away." Then, to negotiate, I
added, "It can play outdoors with the two cats next door."
“It’s a kitten; they would kill it in no time. Besides, Jeep would
resent the intruder.”
Jeep wagged his tail and began licking the kitten’s fur. I smiled at
Mom.
“OK, Pooksie, I’m the one who resents the creature, and we’re
taking it straight back to Belinda and her mother. Naturally, the Grim
125
Preacher couldn’t consider tedious inconsequentials like my raising two
children and a dog by myself.”
“The kitten’s a present for me. And I don’t think you should call
Belinda’s mom the ‘Grim Preacher.’ ”
Mom scowled and put her hands on her hips. “I’m sure Belinda
and her mother will be enthusiastic about having it back. When your
father comes home, he will deal with this sort of thing, but right now I
have to do everything.”
“Daddy will buy me a cat.”
I began to cry, and the kitten began to tremble.
Mom wrapped it in a warm towel, spirited it with Frankie and me
into the car, and drove to Belinda’s. There, the maid approached the car,
and Mom explained her mission. We waited while the maid tried to
decide whether to take the kitten back or not. Then Mom got out of the
car, the kitten escaped the towel, and we departed with the maid still
chasing after it.
I glared at Mom. “I’ll talk about you at ‘share and tell’ tomorrow.”
Daddy on Luzon:
ON THE “BRIGHT ISLAND where the frangipani grows,” Daddy crossed
over into another experience. After an unopposed landing, the Americans
faced devastating bombardment, as Yamashita’s troops opened fire. Mor-
tar shells blew the tops off palm trees, ruined roads, filled the air with
steam and dust. The deafening sounds of weapons enlarged the grand
and terrible events.
The screams of the wounded combined with the “banzais” the
Japanese shrieked at the top of their considerable lungs, and sometimes
they shouted taunts: “Hello, hello. Where are your machine guns?” or
“Surrender, surrender. Everything is resistless.”
Daddy said, “Give me a moment, and I’ll think up a swift, incisive
reply.”
He tried to keep his friends alive with humor, joking that he’d seen
MacArthur at battlefields riding in a jeep with Eleanor Roosevelt by his
side. In his diary he wrote:
“Ammunition’s running low. Strikes in the ports hamper trans-
portation and unloading. Oxen-drawn carts loaded with pigs or chick-
ens help move weapons, and water buffalo tote signal equipment for our
field artillery units. A flu epidemic rages, but I won’t catch it. I never get
sick. Guns, blood, noise, and heat. Will I ever again be able to experience
a day without dread? In battle, men learn who they are and what they can
do. The chaos and exhaustion deranges some of them. Their teeth chat-
ter, they scamper around aimlessly. One burrowed into a cave and got
blown up. You figure they’ve gone beyond little lectures on the dream of
peace.”
Night fell, and he climbed into his foxhole with Jim. Feeling the
warmth of a good man next to him made it better. They rotated eating,
sleeping, and watch in four-hour shifts, saying nothing. One word, and
a Japanese might hear and toss a grenade or satchel charges, incinerating
them. Fires were forbidden, so they lit cigarettes with special black
lighters and ate cold K-rations: cheese, crackers, lemonade powder.
After breakfast, Daddy gave the men a pep talk to muster extra
enthusiasm. “Strength under siege,” he would say, “it’s important, and
you men have it.”
His words energized them but could not offset the sight of the
crosses that sprang up every day.
A week after landing, they moved west under heavy artillery and
mortar fire, crawling along, staying clear of each other as if contact
represented danger. Daddy prayed. He kept moving.
One morning the firing subsided for a few minutes, and he wrote
home:
“Thank you for saying the shower will be all mine. I’m sick of not
being able to sing in one. When I return, I’m going to sing until the hot
water runs out, wait for it to reheat, and sing again. I plan to shower and
sing for a year. And hold you, my precious. How long it has been?
“We’re rolling right along. It’s amazing. There’s hardly a Nip stand-
ing around here.
“Today the gulf kicked up, and one LST (landing ship tank)
broached; we lost some pontoon bridge materials, and the rough surf
made unloading impossible. Do you think that slowed us down? Never.
“We secured the Manila railroad and the strategic Route 3 from
Bambam to Mabalcat, sealed off Bataan. Ready to slow down and take
a rest? Not us. We seized Calumpit, crossed the Pampanaga River twenty-
eight miles from Manila, and, to the west, secured Subic Bay. I don’t
mean my battalion did all these things at once. The Sixth Army does
have other battalions, but we’re the toughest.
“As the Seventh Fleet glided into Subic Bay, Filipinos planted Old
Glory on the shoreline, and a brass band played the Philippine and
American national anthems. Filipinos gave the GIs cowrie shells as tokens
of esteem. Remember when Montezuma gave them to Cortez, along
with some feathers? Cortez was so disappointed he arrested Montezuma
and kept him incarcerated until he came up with some gold. Sounds like
something Hirohito would do.
“You’re probably wondering if our K-rations have improved. No!
Tonight’s arrived in rain—drenched cartons that turned the ‘food’ into
soggy mush. Whoever devised them preferred a life of making mistakes
to a life of idleness. Maybe he was a spy. Some day I’ll die of overeating,
188
but not here.
“Speaking of, Jim Williams told me the food planners ‘noodle
around with ideas.’ Ideas? How to prevent weight gain ranks first. When
I get home, I’m going to eat like a starved elephant on a peanut farm.
“We’re winning, but revenge is not as sweet as advertised. It’s more
enemies wronging each other, leaving behind hatred. I keep my sense of
humanity by holding to my memories of home: the small beige owl in
our garden, poppies dancing on spring green hills, the pale color and
fine texture of your skin.
“The sky turns from blue to lavender to pink in the sunset. This
time of day always makes me homesick.”
The next day Daddy rode the Bambam River boat, a ride from hell
with Japanese bullets whizzing by the entire time, killing men right and
left, knocking them overboard until they turned the water red.
BIO
A student of Wallace Stegner at Stanford, I got lucky in journalism. Interviewed football's Jerry Rice and John Madden, $ players Chuck Schwab and Michael Boskin, Nobel Laureates Arthur Schawlow (physics) and Michael Bishop (medicine), and NASA SETI's chief Jill Tartar. Even, briefly on the phone, Pablo Picasso. Needless to say, I speed read while cramming for these encounters. Now I've written a story of ww2 in the Pacific. My publisher described it as "A true love story, an intimate, powerful portrait of a family at war. This narrative draws its strength from the contrast between the selfless sacrifice of war and the rosy self-interest of of youth. The contrast of two families in two different worlds comes into play in the form of Western society versus the Imperial East."
S. Robert Foley, USN (ret), former Commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fl;eet, called my story "historically accurate" and "Strongly recommended on a jacket blurb. Critic Amy Lignor wrote, "Every once in a while a book comes along that completely changes your perspective."
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Favorite quotes directly or inderectly related to my WW II story, "I've Always Loved You."
My true story of ww2 in the Pacific is now on Barnes & Noble. Here's the link: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=i%27ve+always+loved+you&r=1&box=i%27ve%20always%20loved%20you&pos=-1
I'd like to share the quotes that inspired me. Most relate directly to the war; others are more universal. Thanks for indulging me. The quotes:
To recollect is to reenter and be riven. - Harold Brodky **
I will pray for the emperor's long life and his prosperity forever.- General Yamashita’s last words before execution **
Ah! You are beginning to understand, beginning to see in darkness. My child, it is this simple: love will kill us all.- Thomas Sanchez, Mile Zero**
When I think of leaving my little family alone, I fear death for the first time. It is love on earth that makes us unwilling to give up this life.- Frank Ribbel diary**
`War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.- Erasmus**
Think of the Philippines as bright islands where yellow frangipani grows and the nights are navy blue.Frank Ribbel letter to Mary-HelenAfter it, follow it, follow the gleam- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Crossing the Bar**
The Sun Goddess Amaterasu’s descendants gave birth to earth, sea, heat, and light. The copper mirror had been used by a god to tempt Amaterasu out of her cave so the world would have light; the sword was plucked from a dragon’s tail, and the necklace belonged to the Sun Goddess. - Japanese myth**
Across the sea
Corpses in the water,
Across the mountain,Corpses heaped upon the field,
I shall die only for the EmperorI shall never look back.-
Umi Yakaba, Japanese battle song**
To call Hirohito’s reign ‘Showa’ is a dour irony unmatched in the Nation’s history from the time of our original Ainu inhabitants- Editorial in Mainichi, a Tokyo newspaper**
This, then, was the life I knew, where death sought me- William Manchester, Goodbye Darkness**
(The army’s) nobility and dignity comes from the way men live unselfishly and risk their lives to help each other. - Bill Maudlin, Up Front**
My dearest mother,
I am an empty dream
Like snow left on the mountain in summer.
I feel my warm blood moving inside of meAnd I am reminded that I am living.
My soul will have its home in the rising of the sun. If you feel sad, look at the dawn with all of its beauty.You will find me there. -A sixteen-year-old kamikaze’s farewell poem to his mother**
(Few of us) questioned the duty of boys to cross the seas and fight while girls wrote them cheerful letters from home, girls you knew were still pure because they had let you touch them here but not there, explaining that they were saving themselves for marriage . . all this and the certitude of victory ... led you into battle, and sustained you as you fought, and comforted you if you fell . . - William Manchester, Goodbye Darkness**
Here lie three Americans. What shall we say of them? Shall we say this is a fine thing, that they should give their lives for their country? Or shall we say this is too horrible to look at?- LIFE magazine**
I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the characteristic of all men in any way heroic.- Thomas Carlyle**
So many are dead.I cannot face the emperor.
No words for the families.
But I will drive deepInto the enemy camp.
Wait, young, dead soldiers,I will fight farewell
And follow you soon.- Admiral Yamamoto, last poem **
The painted veil that those who live call life- - W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil**
Hirohito . . and his brothers grew up enacting in play the Russo-Japanese war. As emperor-to-be, Hirohito - “little Michinomiya” - had to be respected in play and could never be the recipient of anger or ill treatment.- Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan**
Finally, we killed them all. There was not much jubilation. We just sat and stared at the sand, and most of us thought of those who were gone - those whom I shall remember as always young, smiling, and graceful, and I shall try to forget how they looked at the end, beyond all recognition. - Lt. Cord Meyer USMCR describing the Battle of Parry Island, the Marshalls, in the Atlantic Monthly**
Only one piece of jewelry ever surpassed rubies for (Hirohito), and that was a Mickey Mouse watch he brought home from a visit to Disneyland thirty years later. He wore it every day and, when he died, lay in his coffin with it still on his wrist.- Sterling and Peggy Seagrave,- The Yamato Dynasty**
Those who can stand - 30 days. Those who can sit up - three weeks.Those who can not sit up - one week. Those who have stopped speaking - two days. Those who have stopped blinking – tomorrow.-Japanese commander’s formula for predicting the non-combat mortality of his troops on Guadalcanal. **
Wisdom comes to us when we look the other way - Chief Smohall of the Perce Nez**
Each good-bye is a drama complete in itself.- LIFE magazine **
Hey, GI Joe, what are you doing out here? You should be home at the farm walking with your girl and getting your chores done, then sitting down to supper. - Tokyo Rose **
Sonno-foi: revere the emperor, drive out the Barbarians.- Yamato slogan**
We, by grace of heaven, Emperor of Japan, seated on the throne of a line unbroken for ages eternal- Emperor Hirohito**
How many times will you remember a certain afternoon, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it?- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky **
Courage is rightly esteemed as the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.- - Winston Churchill**
When man is fighting in a war, and his wife wants him to come back to her, hold her in his arms, she knows he has to be part of a grand story, one to tell again and again to fill the emptiness. ** no attribution
I'd like to share the quotes that inspired me. Most relate directly to the war; others are more universal. Thanks for indulging me. The quotes:
To recollect is to reenter and be riven. - Harold Brodky **
I will pray for the emperor's long life and his prosperity forever.- General Yamashita’s last words before execution **
Ah! You are beginning to understand, beginning to see in darkness. My child, it is this simple: love will kill us all.- Thomas Sanchez, Mile Zero**
When I think of leaving my little family alone, I fear death for the first time. It is love on earth that makes us unwilling to give up this life.- Frank Ribbel diary**
`War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.- Erasmus**
Think of the Philippines as bright islands where yellow frangipani grows and the nights are navy blue.Frank Ribbel letter to Mary-HelenAfter it, follow it, follow the gleam- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Crossing the Bar**
The Sun Goddess Amaterasu’s descendants gave birth to earth, sea, heat, and light. The copper mirror had been used by a god to tempt Amaterasu out of her cave so the world would have light; the sword was plucked from a dragon’s tail, and the necklace belonged to the Sun Goddess. - Japanese myth**
Across the sea
Corpses in the water,
Across the mountain,Corpses heaped upon the field,
I shall die only for the EmperorI shall never look back.-
Umi Yakaba, Japanese battle song**
To call Hirohito’s reign ‘Showa’ is a dour irony unmatched in the Nation’s history from the time of our original Ainu inhabitants- Editorial in Mainichi, a Tokyo newspaper**
This, then, was the life I knew, where death sought me- William Manchester, Goodbye Darkness**
(The army’s) nobility and dignity comes from the way men live unselfishly and risk their lives to help each other. - Bill Maudlin, Up Front**
My dearest mother,
I am an empty dream
Like snow left on the mountain in summer.
I feel my warm blood moving inside of meAnd I am reminded that I am living.
My soul will have its home in the rising of the sun. If you feel sad, look at the dawn with all of its beauty.You will find me there. -A sixteen-year-old kamikaze’s farewell poem to his mother**
(Few of us) questioned the duty of boys to cross the seas and fight while girls wrote them cheerful letters from home, girls you knew were still pure because they had let you touch them here but not there, explaining that they were saving themselves for marriage . . all this and the certitude of victory ... led you into battle, and sustained you as you fought, and comforted you if you fell . . - William Manchester, Goodbye Darkness**
Here lie three Americans. What shall we say of them? Shall we say this is a fine thing, that they should give their lives for their country? Or shall we say this is too horrible to look at?- LIFE magazine**
I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the characteristic of all men in any way heroic.- Thomas Carlyle**
So many are dead.I cannot face the emperor.
No words for the families.
But I will drive deepInto the enemy camp.
Wait, young, dead soldiers,I will fight farewell
And follow you soon.- Admiral Yamamoto, last poem **
The painted veil that those who live call life- - W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil**
Hirohito . . and his brothers grew up enacting in play the Russo-Japanese war. As emperor-to-be, Hirohito - “little Michinomiya” - had to be respected in play and could never be the recipient of anger or ill treatment.- Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan**
Finally, we killed them all. There was not much jubilation. We just sat and stared at the sand, and most of us thought of those who were gone - those whom I shall remember as always young, smiling, and graceful, and I shall try to forget how they looked at the end, beyond all recognition. - Lt. Cord Meyer USMCR describing the Battle of Parry Island, the Marshalls, in the Atlantic Monthly**
Only one piece of jewelry ever surpassed rubies for (Hirohito), and that was a Mickey Mouse watch he brought home from a visit to Disneyland thirty years later. He wore it every day and, when he died, lay in his coffin with it still on his wrist.- Sterling and Peggy Seagrave,- The Yamato Dynasty**
Those who can stand - 30 days. Those who can sit up - three weeks.Those who can not sit up - one week. Those who have stopped speaking - two days. Those who have stopped blinking – tomorrow.-Japanese commander’s formula for predicting the non-combat mortality of his troops on Guadalcanal. **
Wisdom comes to us when we look the other way - Chief Smohall of the Perce Nez**
Each good-bye is a drama complete in itself.- LIFE magazine **
Hey, GI Joe, what are you doing out here? You should be home at the farm walking with your girl and getting your chores done, then sitting down to supper. - Tokyo Rose **
Sonno-foi: revere the emperor, drive out the Barbarians.- Yamato slogan**
We, by grace of heaven, Emperor of Japan, seated on the throne of a line unbroken for ages eternal- Emperor Hirohito**
How many times will you remember a certain afternoon, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it?- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky **
Courage is rightly esteemed as the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.- - Winston Churchill**
When man is fighting in a war, and his wife wants him to come back to her, hold her in his arms, she knows he has to be part of a grand story, one to tell again and again to fill the emptiness. ** no attribution
Monday, September 28, 2009
Notes on Art Stars
A portrait of supermodel Kate Moss painted by artist Lucien Freud fetched over $6.65 million at auction. Freud shot from the top tier to superstardom when he painted the official Jubilee portrait of QE II. Freud is a British subject but not a sycophant. Witness the dark, complex, rather threatening portrait he painted of his sovereign. She looked like someone you would not want to meet in a dark alley -- or tunnel. Moss, who learned that Freud wanted to paint her by reading it in a magazine, sat for the work in 2002 while she was pregnant with Lila Grace, her first child. A friend and I were discussing this over a lunch of grilled prawns and saffron rice, and she asked, "How do contemporary artists make it into the big money? And are the prices worth it?" Good questions. She then mentioned three other heavy-hitting artists who pull in the megabucks: Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, and Richard Serra.
Lucien Freud is the son of Sigmund, the father of psychoanalysis, which, as much as anything else, defined the twentieth century. He put new words like subconscious and superego into our vocabulary, and was a recognizable world figure. Naturally, Lucien had all the connections, but also the talent. He inherited his father's fascination with the human psyche, but rather than talking to prone patients on couches, he paints portraits. Once he labored six months to get his wife's eyes right in a sketch. You meet one of his portraits and you don't forget it.
What about aspiring artists whose fathers, unlike Sigmund Freud, were butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers? If these artists keep working, will someone discover them sipping a soda like the movie star Lana Turner? Not likely. Today one has an art career played like a game of chess. The kingmakers, of course, are the dealers and the museum directors, but it doesn't hurt to have a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant or a Guggenheim to join the faculty of a prominent art school or university with an exceptional department. Having a curator at a significant museum or art center like Detroit's DIA (www.dia.org) give you a show helps, too.
Not to say that breakaways don't exist. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the spectacularly talented African American who became famous through his lyrical and powerful graffiti, literally turned into an art star by roaming around Harlem with cans of spray paint, to say nothing of talent. Robert Rauschenberg, probably the dean of American artists, lived on the streets of New York for awhile, creating montages of found objects. One of Rauschenberg's first and most famous works, "Monogram" (1959), consisted of a stuffed angora goat, a tire, a police barrier, the heel of a shoe, a tennis ball, and paint. I remember talking to the abstract expressionist pioneer Clyfford Still, an admirer of Rauschenberg, who said, "He does it, he makes art, even with that bottle of Jack Daniels by his side, but most artists today are careerists and whores who chew the shoestrings of the downtown dealers. Money is their God, and that goes double for (the late) Mark Rothko. Great art ultimately comes from who you are. The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection."
At another party I chatted with the white-clad, soft spoken Tom Wolfe. A Southern gentleman with an almost shy manner, he seemed the opposite of his words. He said, "Today drugs and sex are so plentiful they don't work as tools to get ahead. You have to express the moment." I brought up Jung, who said great art expressed the collective unconscious of a civilization, and Wolfe agreed, adding that he didn't get into "because." "If you start to say 'because,' you get into art jargon," he added. Wolfe likes Cy Twombly, a particularly handsome painter and my favorite among the Twombly-Marden-Serra trio. Twombly could sketch brilliantly as a child, but he credits his life choice to a horror of having to work as a stockbroker or an accountant in an office. He wanted a free and creative life and calls the defining moment in his career as the day he met Robert Rauschenberg in New York. Robert said Cy had the talent and urged him to study at Black Mountain College near Ashville, North Carolina, the fertile crescent of artists at the time. Twombly's style began when he worked as an army cryptologist, which reinforced his love of linear pattern. After his military stint, he painted in New York, sculpted in Rome, moved toward a more literal use of text and numbers, and then developed a vocabulary of strokes and carvings inspired by mythology, poetry, and classic history. He plays out the contradictions he feels, the anxieties and dilemmas, in images that are often sexually charged, always beautiful, combining grace and intelligence. He made it to the big-time: solo exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Musee d'Arte Moderne, Paris, a prize at the Venice Biennale -- you get the idea. His prices zoomed. A great artist affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. Do I think Twombly is one of these? Yes, though his prices have little to do with it. They don't buy eternity. Take novelists. Two of them, Mary Higgins Clark and Margaret Atwood both make the big money, but only Atwood is likely to survive. It's the same with artists. The modern art world's getting a good shakeout at midlevel while prices of "masters" like Picasso soar.
Brice Marden's work has a specific vocabulary with its often joyful imagery, like a cat playing with a string. He paints feelings, forms, does not feel the job of an artist is to see things as they really are; if he did, he would cease to be an artist. He studied art at Boston University and then got a degree in architecture from Yale that influenced his painting, primarily his use of muted tones and preoccupation with geometric format. He had his first show at Bykart Gallery in New York, then became an assistant to -- guess who? Robert Rauschenberg. The great artist influenced the aspiring one, as he had so many others before. Rauschenberg had a unique track record of international stature, generous mentorship of the young, reaching out to help other artists better their situation. I don't know of any artist who's done that as much as he did. In time Marden exhibited at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, which shot him to international stardom. Since then, his work has evolved without losing touch with its roots. He feels he can't always reach the image in his mind, so even if the abstract rendition of it is not quite there, a work gets to the point where he can leave it.
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco, and one can immediately see he's legit as an artist and a person. His constructivist sculptures have great power and are madly in demand right now. However, whether he's considered a top tier artist in future generations is, in my opinion, problematic, because he lives in the shadow of David Smith, the giant of constructivist sculpture. But despite the overpowering presence of Smith, Serra's gotten more than his share of attention, especially when he created the perhaps overly massive outdoor steel sculpture for Manhattan titled Tilted Arc in 1981. After its installation, people hated it so much and launched such protests that it was removed, and in doing so, destroyed. However, Serra had his defenders, and the controversy, his prices quadrupled. He deserved his success, having trained at the highest levels-- literature graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, art at Yale, then in Paris and Florence on a Fulbright grant. As a young man, Richard Serra worked in steel mills to support himself, and much of the raw intensity of his work derives from that experience combined with his magnetic masculinity. While he works on a piece, he can feel when he begins to love it, and experiences a slow comprehension. What counts most to him is finding new ways to recreate ideas in sculpture on his own terms. He can say things with sculpture that he can't say any other way, things he has no words for. It is this direct emotional truth in his work that I believe accounts for his huge success.
All of the artists I've discussed are the real thing, but who am I to say? Andre Malraux described art critics this way: "The dogs bark but the caravan moves along." True, but in the twentieth century, the artists who made it had the full backing of the critics, people who had learned from their mistake at the Salon d'Autumne where they called Matisse and friends "fauves," wild beasts. Still, even the best "barking dogs" can't tell you for sure who will still be hot in 2099.
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Lucien Freud is the son of Sigmund, the father of psychoanalysis, which, as much as anything else, defined the twentieth century. He put new words like subconscious and superego into our vocabulary, and was a recognizable world figure. Naturally, Lucien had all the connections, but also the talent. He inherited his father's fascination with the human psyche, but rather than talking to prone patients on couches, he paints portraits. Once he labored six months to get his wife's eyes right in a sketch. You meet one of his portraits and you don't forget it.
What about aspiring artists whose fathers, unlike Sigmund Freud, were butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers? If these artists keep working, will someone discover them sipping a soda like the movie star Lana Turner? Not likely. Today one has an art career played like a game of chess. The kingmakers, of course, are the dealers and the museum directors, but it doesn't hurt to have a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant or a Guggenheim to join the faculty of a prominent art school or university with an exceptional department. Having a curator at a significant museum or art center like Detroit's DIA (www.dia.org) give you a show helps, too.
Not to say that breakaways don't exist. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the spectacularly talented African American who became famous through his lyrical and powerful graffiti, literally turned into an art star by roaming around Harlem with cans of spray paint, to say nothing of talent. Robert Rauschenberg, probably the dean of American artists, lived on the streets of New York for awhile, creating montages of found objects. One of Rauschenberg's first and most famous works, "Monogram" (1959), consisted of a stuffed angora goat, a tire, a police barrier, the heel of a shoe, a tennis ball, and paint. I remember talking to the abstract expressionist pioneer Clyfford Still, an admirer of Rauschenberg, who said, "He does it, he makes art, even with that bottle of Jack Daniels by his side, but most artists today are careerists and whores who chew the shoestrings of the downtown dealers. Money is their God, and that goes double for (the late) Mark Rothko. Great art ultimately comes from who you are. The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection."
At another party I chatted with the white-clad, soft spoken Tom Wolfe. A Southern gentleman with an almost shy manner, he seemed the opposite of his words. He said, "Today drugs and sex are so plentiful they don't work as tools to get ahead. You have to express the moment." I brought up Jung, who said great art expressed the collective unconscious of a civilization, and Wolfe agreed, adding that he didn't get into "because." "If you start to say 'because,' you get into art jargon," he added. Wolfe likes Cy Twombly, a particularly handsome painter and my favorite among the Twombly-Marden-Serra trio. Twombly could sketch brilliantly as a child, but he credits his life choice to a horror of having to work as a stockbroker or an accountant in an office. He wanted a free and creative life and calls the defining moment in his career as the day he met Robert Rauschenberg in New York. Robert said Cy had the talent and urged him to study at Black Mountain College near Ashville, North Carolina, the fertile crescent of artists at the time. Twombly's style began when he worked as an army cryptologist, which reinforced his love of linear pattern. After his military stint, he painted in New York, sculpted in Rome, moved toward a more literal use of text and numbers, and then developed a vocabulary of strokes and carvings inspired by mythology, poetry, and classic history. He plays out the contradictions he feels, the anxieties and dilemmas, in images that are often sexually charged, always beautiful, combining grace and intelligence. He made it to the big-time: solo exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Musee d'Arte Moderne, Paris, a prize at the Venice Biennale -- you get the idea. His prices zoomed. A great artist affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. Do I think Twombly is one of these? Yes, though his prices have little to do with it. They don't buy eternity. Take novelists. Two of them, Mary Higgins Clark and Margaret Atwood both make the big money, but only Atwood is likely to survive. It's the same with artists. The modern art world's getting a good shakeout at midlevel while prices of "masters" like Picasso soar.
Brice Marden's work has a specific vocabulary with its often joyful imagery, like a cat playing with a string. He paints feelings, forms, does not feel the job of an artist is to see things as they really are; if he did, he would cease to be an artist. He studied art at Boston University and then got a degree in architecture from Yale that influenced his painting, primarily his use of muted tones and preoccupation with geometric format. He had his first show at Bykart Gallery in New York, then became an assistant to -- guess who? Robert Rauschenberg. The great artist influenced the aspiring one, as he had so many others before. Rauschenberg had a unique track record of international stature, generous mentorship of the young, reaching out to help other artists better their situation. I don't know of any artist who's done that as much as he did. In time Marden exhibited at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, which shot him to international stardom. Since then, his work has evolved without losing touch with its roots. He feels he can't always reach the image in his mind, so even if the abstract rendition of it is not quite there, a work gets to the point where he can leave it.
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco, and one can immediately see he's legit as an artist and a person. His constructivist sculptures have great power and are madly in demand right now. However, whether he's considered a top tier artist in future generations is, in my opinion, problematic, because he lives in the shadow of David Smith, the giant of constructivist sculpture. But despite the overpowering presence of Smith, Serra's gotten more than his share of attention, especially when he created the perhaps overly massive outdoor steel sculpture for Manhattan titled Tilted Arc in 1981. After its installation, people hated it so much and launched such protests that it was removed, and in doing so, destroyed. However, Serra had his defenders, and the controversy, his prices quadrupled. He deserved his success, having trained at the highest levels-- literature graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, art at Yale, then in Paris and Florence on a Fulbright grant. As a young man, Richard Serra worked in steel mills to support himself, and much of the raw intensity of his work derives from that experience combined with his magnetic masculinity. While he works on a piece, he can feel when he begins to love it, and experiences a slow comprehension. What counts most to him is finding new ways to recreate ideas in sculpture on his own terms. He can say things with sculpture that he can't say any other way, things he has no words for. It is this direct emotional truth in his work that I believe accounts for his huge success.
All of the artists I've discussed are the real thing, but who am I to say? Andre Malraux described art critics this way: "The dogs bark but the caravan moves along." True, but in the twentieth century, the artists who made it had the full backing of the critics, people who had learned from their mistake at the Salon d'Autumne where they called Matisse and friends "fauves," wild beasts. Still, even the best "barking dogs" can't tell you for sure who will still be hot in 2099.
window.google_render_ad();
I've Always Loved You, a True Story of ww2 in the Pacifix
Here are excerpts from my true ww2 story coming out in November:
I didn’t understand. I was only four.
Unaware that my life was reversing, like the tide before me, I played on the beach. The sun brightened the cloudless sky, turning it a silvered winter blue, perfect for Sunday, Daddy’s day off. As he and Mom raced to the sea, the foam slapped against the shore. One strap of her bathing suit slipped. In the water, she wrapped her arms around him, her neck pliant, her back limber. Despite the water’s chill, they rode the waves together.
Dripping and sleek, Daddy waded out of the water. His black hair shone with a blue iridescence. He dropped a few steps behind Mom, and watched her hips sway as she walked. Slowly they crossed across the sand, their white stucco house perched on the succulent-covered bluff ahead of them.
Relaxing on our picnic blanket, Mom examined her red fingernails for chips in the polish, and then turned over, the seawater glistening on her shoulders. With combs and hairpins, she tried in vain to tame her wild auburn hair. Untamed, her hair excited Daddy; it reminded him of women dancing in Old West cafes while patrons drank their whiskey. Her eyes were gray, pure gray - no little leopard spots of brown or hazel.
I sat next to the blanket and began digging. Deliberate as a fern unfurling, Daddy smoothed oil on Mom’s slim back and khaki-freckled shoulders.
“More on the right,” she said in her indolent voice. “That’s it . . . Up a little. To the left . . . Yes. I’ve got you pretty well trained.”
“That’s because you reward me.” The tones of a warm youth flowed through his voice, and, moving his hand to the small of her back, he began to sing, “Mary—Helen, Mary—Helen, my own Mary—Helen,” to the tune of the UC Berkeley fight song.
Daddy kneaded Mom’s shoulders, and then rolled over on his back. He winked at me. I knew what that wink meant: he loved me best.
“Nap time,” Mom said, so I ran away from her, heading toward the sea.
“Ann, come here this minute.” She caught up with me and grabbed my wrist. I had almost made it to the water. As we turned, an army officer appeared on the bluff. To me then that bluff rose immensely high, and the uniformed man seemed to tower up to the sky, looking down like a god in the corner of an old map, one who determined destinies at his pleasure. Actually, the bluff was quite small, but I had the perspective of the very young.
“Captain Ribbel, the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor. Report for duty immediately!”
Daddy quickly got to his feet, stood at attention in his bathing suit, and saluted the officer.
* * *
Mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law sometimes don’t get along. Such was the case in the emperor’s family, where his hawk wife pitted herself against his dove mother. Though Japan allegedly teems with ten thousand kami spirits who reside in the rocks, fields, and trees, their holy presence could not save the emperor from the struggles of these two strong women.
He feared his mother, adored his wife, Nagako, whose patriotic haikus stiffened his resolve to fight with greater ferocity. However, his mother, Teimei Kogo, Dowager Empress Sadako, took a resolute antiwar stand. She dreaded the Americans and believed they would crush Dai Nippon. When she wasn’t lecturing him, her thin, dry lips trembling, she sent him haikus around themes of the traveler who seeks the seed of the green tree of peace or a moment of peace being a bar of gold. Worse, she called everything he did a “stupid mistake.”
He would point out that the pride of conquest united the Empire of Japan, and added that Westerners did not learn the customs of others, befriending only each other. Now Shinto priests migrate through the empire teaching Dai Nippon’s ancient ways. Asia for Asians. Instead of agreeing, she’d stare at him with hostile black smudge eyes that unnerved him.
He called her the world’s “most ungrateful mother,” while she referred to him as “delusional.” They scowled at each other, he with his thick eyebrows, she with her delicate arches.
Today Emperor Hirohito stood near a golden screen painted with a field of iris and summoned one of his most trusted kuramakus. He preferred kuramakus to ministers and commanders, because they could think. Today’s visitor recommended the emperor organize an asset-stripping plan for occupied countries, rather than letting the commanders continue to randomly loot and pocket the spoils. The Japanese had financial needs _ didn’t all conquerors?
The emperor smiled for the first time in too long. At last a superior concept. He would call his glamorous brother, Chichibu. The emperor trusted his Chichibu-san, unlike his other brothers.
This particular Yamato already realized the vanquished countries teemed with gold and treasure, so he delighted in taking charge of an operation codenamed Golden Lily. He pretended to need medical leave from the army owing to tuberculosis, and claimed he’d gone to a sanitarium near Mt. Fuji. His people prayed for his recovery, bowing before flickering candles and bowls of billowing incense.
Instead, in the dust of ancient roads, he walked through occupied China and Southeast Asia, his piglet hands clutching at goodies. His men took a dozen solid gold Buddhas, each weighing over a ton. He collected fine Asian art and appreciated jewelry, though not as much as his brother the emperor.
Once Chichibu gathered up a country’s bounty, he sent it off on fake hospital ships to various locations. With his cultivated taste and love of souvenirs, he did save some pretty jewels for his wife and daughters, not to mention a few objects to freshen up his palace.
His belief in the sacred also motivated him to collect religious artifacts for the emperor. Hirohito responded to esthetics, especially objects fabricated from gold or jade and encrusted with precious gems. He favored Shakyamunis, (Buddha, the lion of the Shakya tribe), Padmapanis, (queens of heaven), Tao-tieh (tiger-god) masks, and dragons.
In time Chichibu seized so much treasure, it became physically impossible to move it to Japan, so he conscientiously stashed it in the Philippines, hiding it in over two hundred church vaults, bunkers, and underground tunnels. The hills came to life with the sound of coins clinking. In Ipoh, Malaysia, he melted gold and created bars of bullion bearing the stamp of the Golden Lily logo he helped design.
The bounty still lurks in caves, and every so often, someone discovers a bit of it. A recently unearthed solid gold Philippine Buddha weighing close to a ton reportedly resides in a Zurich vault.
* * *
Daddy was to ship out to the bloody Pacific again. He and Mom acted uneasy, as if fear contaminated the air they breathed, the water they drank. His orders came: report for departure in forty-eight hours. I felt a thump of terror inside. Smiling, he tickled my cheek. Then he put on his army hat at an angle, speared a package of cigarettes with a knife, and thrust the knife in his mouth. “My corncob pipe,” he said, “just like MacArthur’s.” Then he shouted, his arms flailing, "I shall return!"
The next day, the morning sky shone pearl gray, turning the neighborhood walls creamy. Mom went downstairs and cooked bacon and eggs for us, unable to control her weeping. I started crying, too. “Please, Daddy, I don’t want you to leave me. When will you come home?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart, but everything will be OK.” His usual appetite for life’s richness had waned, and a sadness shone in his summer blue eyes.
Mom got a pair of scissors and snipped off a lock of his hair that she put in a pink porcelain box. Then we caught the ferry to Ft. Mason as seagulls wheeled overhead.
“Flying goats,” Daddy said. “They’ll eat anything.”
Mom tried to smile. My chilling dread deepened.
At Fort Mason, Daddy hugged us and turned toward the troopship, moving with his usual grace. Even among all the other men, he looked incandescent. I squinted to see him better. He paused at the gangplank, and, outlined in a soft light, raised his hand in farewell. Then he boarded.
Panicked, I screamed, “No!” But the ship glided slowly away. Puffs of smoke rose from its stack while it headed through the Golden Gate into the hell that lay thousands of miles away. The ship became a speck, and the speck disappeared.
* * ** * *
Daddy’s troopship moved through the South China Sea and Central Philippine Islands, but this time he experienced time as racing by, unlike before; it raced with increasing speed, never halting or allowing for a glance behind. He wrote in his diary:
I sit for hours, while the nights become mornings and the miles fall away. Water, oblivion, sky, and water. Time seems more abstract now, the past more distant when I look back. Luzon. How much will blind me? Evade me? I’ve fought in combat patrols, but training’s not a promise.
The sea, the sky enlarge with time, and I shrink. My buddies and I are passengers on the same ferry, bracing for a ride, knowing we will fall off at different points. I see Mary-Helen hovering near me. Her image looks bright to me as a desert noon, and I want to reach for it.
A kamikaze hit a ship right next to Daddy’s, and flames seared the night with bright red and gold. The scene assumed a monster configuration as men tried to survive, their bodies specks of black against the maddening glow. The smell of smoke and metal filled his nostrils, and the odd idea came to him that even Mom’s perfume would never rid him of it.
He kept silent, feeling a sudden oppression; death could touch him soon. He would try to elude it, to fight, to fulfill whatever promise he had, but he could never have imagined anything like the sight of Luzon when it appeared on the horizon.
The island lay at the northernmost tip of the Philippine archipelago, and the island stretched about 450 miles north to south. Birds wheeled and hung above its hamlets, inlets, and deep green rivers, or called out from trees. The flowers, the leaves, and the sparkling waters caught the full light of the sun, as natives guided boats through gorges hacked out of the forests or tended rice paddies. At least half of the men stood ready to join the Allied troops.
“Strike Day,” January 9, 1945, dawned with a light but broken overcast sky and regular, gentle swells whose great beds of foam broke against the white sands of Luzon’s coastline. The guns of Allied naval fire support vessels bombarded the landing beaches, and then the lead troops waded through the swirling waters to the shores _ among them, Daddy.
They seized the Lingayan Airfield, and General Krueger descended the gangplank of the flagship USS Wasatch to take command of the Sixth Army ashore. Immediately reporters infested the region, but Krueger brushed their questions aside, “I would much prefer you drop the matter.”
At sundown, Daddy, a euphoric man, wrote Mom:
Well, my pet, it’s the end of the first day. Strike Day began with the thunder of naval bombardment - harrowing and beautiful to watch. I saw the whole show from the bridge of our ship.
I waded ashore about noon. Since then, the battle has been like a map plan at Leavenworth, but with sound effects and real ammunition. The Japanese apparently decided to withdraw and live to fight another day. Wonder what happened to their ‘invincible spirit?’
The Filipinos acted overjoyed to see us, and very hungry. Guerillas come out of the hills and fight with a strength and fury born of living under Japanese domination. They’re a ragged band, some arriving unarmed and barefoot, their teeth stained with betel nut. Among them are well-trained soldiers with names like ‘shooting squid’ or ‘blood angel.’
All of them help and will dig a foxhole for a GI in return for a cigarette; the GI just sits and enjoys it.
MacArthur smuggled arms to the guerillas right along, but the Nips purloined half of them. No matter. It won’t do them any good. They’re beat, and they know it.
Never saw so many kids in all my life, cute and happy little tykes. It’s been interesting to watch the natives returning to their simple homes. They fled to the hills when the battle started, taking the few possessions they could carry on their backs. The large families return, loaded in the carts. It’s a pitiful sight; in most cases, their simple thatched houses have been reduced to ashes.
Late in the afternoon, during an air raid, a shell fragment fell about ten feet from my hole. My friend Jim Williams worried a lot more than I did over that.
Well, my precious, I’m happy and busy. Writing will be spotty for some time, but I’ll do the best I can. Working about eighteen hours a day, but it’s fun.
* * *
On the “bright island where the frangipani grows,” Daddy crossed over into another experience. After the unopposed landing, the Americans faced devastating bombardment, as Yamashita’s troops opened fire. Mortar shells blew the tops off palm trees, ruined roads, filled the air with steam and dust. The deafening sounds of weapons enlarged the grand and terrible events.
The screams of the wounded combined with the “banzais” the Japanese shrieked at the top of their considerable lungs, and sometimes they shouted taunts: “Hello, hello. Where are your machine guns?” or “Surrender, surrender. Everything is resistless.”
Daddy said, “Give me a moment, and I’ll think of a swift, incisive reply.”
He tried to keep his friends alive with humor, joked that MacArthur appeared at battlefields riding in a jeep, Eleanor Roosevelt by his side. In his diary he wrote:
Ammunition’s running low. Strikes in the ports hamper transportation and unloading. Oxen-drawn carts loaded with pigs or chickens help move weapons, and water buffalo tote signal equipment for us field artillery units. A flu epidemic rages, but I won’t catch it. I never get sick. Guns, blood, noise, and heat. Will I ever again be able to experience a day without dread? In battle, men learn who they are and what they can do. The chaos and exhaustion deranges some of them. Their teeth chatter, they scamper around aimlessly. One burrowed into a cave and got blown up. You figure they’ve gone beyond little lectures on the dream of peace.
Night fell, and he climbed into his foxhole with Jim. Feeling the warmth of a good man next to him made it better. They rotated eating, sleeping, and watch in four-hour shifts, saying nothing. One word, and a Japanese might hear and toss a grenade or satchel charges, incinerating them. Fires were forbidden, so they lit cigarettes with special black lighters and ate cold K-rations: cheese, crackers, lemonade powder.
After breakfast, Daddy gave the men a pep talk to muster enthusiasm. “Strength under siege,” he would say, “it’s important, and you men have it.”
His words energized them but could not offset the sight of the crosses that sprang up every day.
A week after landing, they moved west under heavy artillery and mortar fire, crawling along, staying clear of each other as if contact represented danger. Daddy prayed. He kept moving.
One morning the firing subsided for a few minutes, and he wrote home:
Thank you for saying the shower will be all mine at home. I’m sick of not being able to sing in it, and when I return, I’m going to sing until the hot water runs out, wait for it to reheat, and sing again. I plan to shower and sing for a year. And hold you, my precious. How long it has been.
We’re rolling right along. It’s amazing. There’s hardly a Nip standing around here.
Today the gulf kicked up, and one LST (landing ship tank) broached; we lost some pontoon bridge materials, and the rough surf made unloading impossible. Do you think that slowed us down? Never.
We secured the Manila railroad and the strategic Route 3 from Bambam to Mabalcat, sealed off Bataan. Ready to slow down and take a rest? Not us. We seized Calumpit, crossed the Pampanaga River twenty-eight miles from Manila, and, to the west, secured Subic Bay. I don’t mean my battalion did all these things at once. The Sixth Army has others, but we’re the toughest.
As the Seventh Fleet glided into Subic Bay, Filipinos planted Old Glory on the shoreline, and a brass band played the Philippine and American national anthems. Filipinos gave the GIs cowrie shells as tokens of esteem. Remember when Montezuma gave them to Cortez, along with some feathers? Cortez was so disappointed he arrested Montezuma and kept him incarcerated until he came up with some gold. Sounds like something Hirohito would do.
You’re probably wondering if our K-rations have improved. No! Tonight’s arrived in rain—drenched cartons that turned the ‘food’ into soggy mush. Whoever devised them preferred a life of making mistakes to a life of idleness. Maybe he was a spy. Some day I’ll die of overeating, but not here.
Speaking of, Jim Williams told me the food planners ‘noodle around with ideas.’ Ideas? How to prevent weight gain ranks first. When I get home, I’m going to eat like a starved elephant on a peanut farm.
We’re winning, but revenge is not as sweet as advertised. It’s more enemies wronging each other, leaving behind hatred. I keep my humanity by holding my memories of home: the small beige owl in our garden, poppies dancing on spring green hills, the pale color and fine texture of your skin.
The sky turns from blue to lavender to pink in the sunset. This time of day always makes me homesick.
The next day Daddy rode the Bambam River boat, a ride from hell with Japanese bullets whizzing by the entire time, killing men right and left, knocking them overboard until they turned the water red.
* * *
Aboard the Nashville, MacArthur waved his corncob pipe at General Krueger and famously hollered, “Go around the Nips, bounce off the Nips, but go to Manila!”
Krueger told him that Yamashita wanted a mad dash to Manila. It was premature and could unnecessarily cost lives. He explained the logistical problems: the need for support troops, improvement of communication facilities, railroad and bridge construction, supplies, and reinforcements.
“Nonsense,” MacArthur replied. He demanded Krueger divide his artillery battalions between Clark Field and Manila with no further argument. Most, of course, would head for Manila for MacArthur’s birthday celebration. Krueger insisted the insufficient Clark Field troops would outrun their supplies, since the enemy destroyed all the relevant bridges. Outnumbered and surrounded, they would die from pulverizing enemy artillery fire.
Later, in “From Down Under to Dai Nippon,” Krueger wrote that MacArthur "did not seem very impressed by my arguments . . . He did not take seriously the danger of our troops’ overextension."
MacArthur pulled rank and commanded Krueger to obey him. With sadness and foreboding, Krueger sent a large group in two “flying columns” on the road to Manila, and, on January 24, he ordered a few battalions, including Daddy’s 143rd, to change the axis of their attack ninety degrees and advance toward Clark Field.
Here the wide, patterned farmland fell away; mountains, inflexible in their demands, continued for miles. Their rocky crags remained constant and yet never the same, and their jagged peaks surrounded Clark Field. The dangers Krueger feared proved all too real. Imperial General Tsukada, a devious tactician with an onion-shaped head, arranged the Kenbu defense along the ridges, some a thousand feet high. His machine guns, mortars, and heavy artillery lurked in caves on the high ground. The pillboxes, some three stories high, contained within their concrete walls 150-millimeter mortars, 20-millimeter, 40-millimeter, and 90-millimeter cannon. The Japanese could look down at the Americans struggling along and open fire.
Stranded, outnumbered, our men fought against overwhelming odds. From above, the Kenbu group pinned down Daddy’s battalion. Heavy artillery fire from the far side of the Zambales Mountains slaughtered our men in the rear lines. Roaring masses hit them, and they felt agonizing bolts of pain run through them, saw blood, their blood _ everywhere _ their bodies ripped like pieces of cloth, and they writhed, begging God to stop the pain. Some kept feeling it as they cried out, kept feeling their pain and their heartbeat and their breath, and the metal and the fire, and then nothing.
Our men on the front lines took more blasts from interlocking fields of fire anchored in pillboxes and connected by trenches to well-placed machine gun nests. The barrage raged twenty-four hours a day. Heavy Kenbu artillery blazed over the terrain, shredding men with shrapnel. Tracers blazed arcs of flame that illuminated the mud and blood of the mountains, and their fire bound itself to soldiers, consuming them. Glitters from flamethrowers burst against the blue sky of day or the black of night, gold arcs streaking and blossoming into more yellows and vermilions.
General Rapp Brush called frequent staff meetings to debrief and revise tactics. He, Daddy, and the others met in a secured headquarters area behind Allied lines. On February 12, Rapp said, “We’ve got to find the artillery positions on the reverse side of Sacobia Ridge; the heavy, concentrated fire there’s raising hell with our troops, but you know that first hand. Chewing up our armored vehicles. We need to send Jim Williams up on a reconnaissance flight with a spotter.”
He paused, studying faces, then nodded at Daddy. “Assign the job to someone in your unit.”
“I’ll go, myself,” Daddy said. “I think I know where the heavy artillery is.”
“No. Send one of your men.”
Daddy stood up. “It’s not a kamikaze mission. Jim can really maneuver planes; they dance with him.”
“I want you to delegate this. There’s a lot of anti-aircraft fire in the target area.”
“Is that an order, sir?”
Rapp hesitated.
“Then Jim and I will go.” The decision made, Daddy wrote in his notebook: “Feb. 14, 5:30 p.m., Hangar K.”
I didn’t understand. I was only four.
Unaware that my life was reversing, like the tide before me, I played on the beach. The sun brightened the cloudless sky, turning it a silvered winter blue, perfect for Sunday, Daddy’s day off. As he and Mom raced to the sea, the foam slapped against the shore. One strap of her bathing suit slipped. In the water, she wrapped her arms around him, her neck pliant, her back limber. Despite the water’s chill, they rode the waves together.
Dripping and sleek, Daddy waded out of the water. His black hair shone with a blue iridescence. He dropped a few steps behind Mom, and watched her hips sway as she walked. Slowly they crossed across the sand, their white stucco house perched on the succulent-covered bluff ahead of them.
Relaxing on our picnic blanket, Mom examined her red fingernails for chips in the polish, and then turned over, the seawater glistening on her shoulders. With combs and hairpins, she tried in vain to tame her wild auburn hair. Untamed, her hair excited Daddy; it reminded him of women dancing in Old West cafes while patrons drank their whiskey. Her eyes were gray, pure gray - no little leopard spots of brown or hazel.
I sat next to the blanket and began digging. Deliberate as a fern unfurling, Daddy smoothed oil on Mom’s slim back and khaki-freckled shoulders.
“More on the right,” she said in her indolent voice. “That’s it . . . Up a little. To the left . . . Yes. I’ve got you pretty well trained.”
“That’s because you reward me.” The tones of a warm youth flowed through his voice, and, moving his hand to the small of her back, he began to sing, “Mary—Helen, Mary—Helen, my own Mary—Helen,” to the tune of the UC Berkeley fight song.
Daddy kneaded Mom’s shoulders, and then rolled over on his back. He winked at me. I knew what that wink meant: he loved me best.
“Nap time,” Mom said, so I ran away from her, heading toward the sea.
“Ann, come here this minute.” She caught up with me and grabbed my wrist. I had almost made it to the water. As we turned, an army officer appeared on the bluff. To me then that bluff rose immensely high, and the uniformed man seemed to tower up to the sky, looking down like a god in the corner of an old map, one who determined destinies at his pleasure. Actually, the bluff was quite small, but I had the perspective of the very young.
“Captain Ribbel, the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor. Report for duty immediately!”
Daddy quickly got to his feet, stood at attention in his bathing suit, and saluted the officer.
* * *
Mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law sometimes don’t get along. Such was the case in the emperor’s family, where his hawk wife pitted herself against his dove mother. Though Japan allegedly teems with ten thousand kami spirits who reside in the rocks, fields, and trees, their holy presence could not save the emperor from the struggles of these two strong women.
He feared his mother, adored his wife, Nagako, whose patriotic haikus stiffened his resolve to fight with greater ferocity. However, his mother, Teimei Kogo, Dowager Empress Sadako, took a resolute antiwar stand. She dreaded the Americans and believed they would crush Dai Nippon. When she wasn’t lecturing him, her thin, dry lips trembling, she sent him haikus around themes of the traveler who seeks the seed of the green tree of peace or a moment of peace being a bar of gold. Worse, she called everything he did a “stupid mistake.”
He would point out that the pride of conquest united the Empire of Japan, and added that Westerners did not learn the customs of others, befriending only each other. Now Shinto priests migrate through the empire teaching Dai Nippon’s ancient ways. Asia for Asians. Instead of agreeing, she’d stare at him with hostile black smudge eyes that unnerved him.
He called her the world’s “most ungrateful mother,” while she referred to him as “delusional.” They scowled at each other, he with his thick eyebrows, she with her delicate arches.
Today Emperor Hirohito stood near a golden screen painted with a field of iris and summoned one of his most trusted kuramakus. He preferred kuramakus to ministers and commanders, because they could think. Today’s visitor recommended the emperor organize an asset-stripping plan for occupied countries, rather than letting the commanders continue to randomly loot and pocket the spoils. The Japanese had financial needs _ didn’t all conquerors?
The emperor smiled for the first time in too long. At last a superior concept. He would call his glamorous brother, Chichibu. The emperor trusted his Chichibu-san, unlike his other brothers.
This particular Yamato already realized the vanquished countries teemed with gold and treasure, so he delighted in taking charge of an operation codenamed Golden Lily. He pretended to need medical leave from the army owing to tuberculosis, and claimed he’d gone to a sanitarium near Mt. Fuji. His people prayed for his recovery, bowing before flickering candles and bowls of billowing incense.
Instead, in the dust of ancient roads, he walked through occupied China and Southeast Asia, his piglet hands clutching at goodies. His men took a dozen solid gold Buddhas, each weighing over a ton. He collected fine Asian art and appreciated jewelry, though not as much as his brother the emperor.
Once Chichibu gathered up a country’s bounty, he sent it off on fake hospital ships to various locations. With his cultivated taste and love of souvenirs, he did save some pretty jewels for his wife and daughters, not to mention a few objects to freshen up his palace.
His belief in the sacred also motivated him to collect religious artifacts for the emperor. Hirohito responded to esthetics, especially objects fabricated from gold or jade and encrusted with precious gems. He favored Shakyamunis, (Buddha, the lion of the Shakya tribe), Padmapanis, (queens of heaven), Tao-tieh (tiger-god) masks, and dragons.
In time Chichibu seized so much treasure, it became physically impossible to move it to Japan, so he conscientiously stashed it in the Philippines, hiding it in over two hundred church vaults, bunkers, and underground tunnels. The hills came to life with the sound of coins clinking. In Ipoh, Malaysia, he melted gold and created bars of bullion bearing the stamp of the Golden Lily logo he helped design.
The bounty still lurks in caves, and every so often, someone discovers a bit of it. A recently unearthed solid gold Philippine Buddha weighing close to a ton reportedly resides in a Zurich vault.
* * *
Daddy was to ship out to the bloody Pacific again. He and Mom acted uneasy, as if fear contaminated the air they breathed, the water they drank. His orders came: report for departure in forty-eight hours. I felt a thump of terror inside. Smiling, he tickled my cheek. Then he put on his army hat at an angle, speared a package of cigarettes with a knife, and thrust the knife in his mouth. “My corncob pipe,” he said, “just like MacArthur’s.” Then he shouted, his arms flailing, "I shall return!"
The next day, the morning sky shone pearl gray, turning the neighborhood walls creamy. Mom went downstairs and cooked bacon and eggs for us, unable to control her weeping. I started crying, too. “Please, Daddy, I don’t want you to leave me. When will you come home?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart, but everything will be OK.” His usual appetite for life’s richness had waned, and a sadness shone in his summer blue eyes.
Mom got a pair of scissors and snipped off a lock of his hair that she put in a pink porcelain box. Then we caught the ferry to Ft. Mason as seagulls wheeled overhead.
“Flying goats,” Daddy said. “They’ll eat anything.”
Mom tried to smile. My chilling dread deepened.
At Fort Mason, Daddy hugged us and turned toward the troopship, moving with his usual grace. Even among all the other men, he looked incandescent. I squinted to see him better. He paused at the gangplank, and, outlined in a soft light, raised his hand in farewell. Then he boarded.
Panicked, I screamed, “No!” But the ship glided slowly away. Puffs of smoke rose from its stack while it headed through the Golden Gate into the hell that lay thousands of miles away. The ship became a speck, and the speck disappeared.
* * ** * *
Daddy’s troopship moved through the South China Sea and Central Philippine Islands, but this time he experienced time as racing by, unlike before; it raced with increasing speed, never halting or allowing for a glance behind. He wrote in his diary:
I sit for hours, while the nights become mornings and the miles fall away. Water, oblivion, sky, and water. Time seems more abstract now, the past more distant when I look back. Luzon. How much will blind me? Evade me? I’ve fought in combat patrols, but training’s not a promise.
The sea, the sky enlarge with time, and I shrink. My buddies and I are passengers on the same ferry, bracing for a ride, knowing we will fall off at different points. I see Mary-Helen hovering near me. Her image looks bright to me as a desert noon, and I want to reach for it.
A kamikaze hit a ship right next to Daddy’s, and flames seared the night with bright red and gold. The scene assumed a monster configuration as men tried to survive, their bodies specks of black against the maddening glow. The smell of smoke and metal filled his nostrils, and the odd idea came to him that even Mom’s perfume would never rid him of it.
He kept silent, feeling a sudden oppression; death could touch him soon. He would try to elude it, to fight, to fulfill whatever promise he had, but he could never have imagined anything like the sight of Luzon when it appeared on the horizon.
The island lay at the northernmost tip of the Philippine archipelago, and the island stretched about 450 miles north to south. Birds wheeled and hung above its hamlets, inlets, and deep green rivers, or called out from trees. The flowers, the leaves, and the sparkling waters caught the full light of the sun, as natives guided boats through gorges hacked out of the forests or tended rice paddies. At least half of the men stood ready to join the Allied troops.
“Strike Day,” January 9, 1945, dawned with a light but broken overcast sky and regular, gentle swells whose great beds of foam broke against the white sands of Luzon’s coastline. The guns of Allied naval fire support vessels bombarded the landing beaches, and then the lead troops waded through the swirling waters to the shores _ among them, Daddy.
They seized the Lingayan Airfield, and General Krueger descended the gangplank of the flagship USS Wasatch to take command of the Sixth Army ashore. Immediately reporters infested the region, but Krueger brushed their questions aside, “I would much prefer you drop the matter.”
At sundown, Daddy, a euphoric man, wrote Mom:
Well, my pet, it’s the end of the first day. Strike Day began with the thunder of naval bombardment - harrowing and beautiful to watch. I saw the whole show from the bridge of our ship.
I waded ashore about noon. Since then, the battle has been like a map plan at Leavenworth, but with sound effects and real ammunition. The Japanese apparently decided to withdraw and live to fight another day. Wonder what happened to their ‘invincible spirit?’
The Filipinos acted overjoyed to see us, and very hungry. Guerillas come out of the hills and fight with a strength and fury born of living under Japanese domination. They’re a ragged band, some arriving unarmed and barefoot, their teeth stained with betel nut. Among them are well-trained soldiers with names like ‘shooting squid’ or ‘blood angel.’
All of them help and will dig a foxhole for a GI in return for a cigarette; the GI just sits and enjoys it.
MacArthur smuggled arms to the guerillas right along, but the Nips purloined half of them. No matter. It won’t do them any good. They’re beat, and they know it.
Never saw so many kids in all my life, cute and happy little tykes. It’s been interesting to watch the natives returning to their simple homes. They fled to the hills when the battle started, taking the few possessions they could carry on their backs. The large families return, loaded in the carts. It’s a pitiful sight; in most cases, their simple thatched houses have been reduced to ashes.
Late in the afternoon, during an air raid, a shell fragment fell about ten feet from my hole. My friend Jim Williams worried a lot more than I did over that.
Well, my precious, I’m happy and busy. Writing will be spotty for some time, but I’ll do the best I can. Working about eighteen hours a day, but it’s fun.
* * *
On the “bright island where the frangipani grows,” Daddy crossed over into another experience. After the unopposed landing, the Americans faced devastating bombardment, as Yamashita’s troops opened fire. Mortar shells blew the tops off palm trees, ruined roads, filled the air with steam and dust. The deafening sounds of weapons enlarged the grand and terrible events.
The screams of the wounded combined with the “banzais” the Japanese shrieked at the top of their considerable lungs, and sometimes they shouted taunts: “Hello, hello. Where are your machine guns?” or “Surrender, surrender. Everything is resistless.”
Daddy said, “Give me a moment, and I’ll think of a swift, incisive reply.”
He tried to keep his friends alive with humor, joked that MacArthur appeared at battlefields riding in a jeep, Eleanor Roosevelt by his side. In his diary he wrote:
Ammunition’s running low. Strikes in the ports hamper transportation and unloading. Oxen-drawn carts loaded with pigs or chickens help move weapons, and water buffalo tote signal equipment for us field artillery units. A flu epidemic rages, but I won’t catch it. I never get sick. Guns, blood, noise, and heat. Will I ever again be able to experience a day without dread? In battle, men learn who they are and what they can do. The chaos and exhaustion deranges some of them. Their teeth chatter, they scamper around aimlessly. One burrowed into a cave and got blown up. You figure they’ve gone beyond little lectures on the dream of peace.
Night fell, and he climbed into his foxhole with Jim. Feeling the warmth of a good man next to him made it better. They rotated eating, sleeping, and watch in four-hour shifts, saying nothing. One word, and a Japanese might hear and toss a grenade or satchel charges, incinerating them. Fires were forbidden, so they lit cigarettes with special black lighters and ate cold K-rations: cheese, crackers, lemonade powder.
After breakfast, Daddy gave the men a pep talk to muster enthusiasm. “Strength under siege,” he would say, “it’s important, and you men have it.”
His words energized them but could not offset the sight of the crosses that sprang up every day.
A week after landing, they moved west under heavy artillery and mortar fire, crawling along, staying clear of each other as if contact represented danger. Daddy prayed. He kept moving.
One morning the firing subsided for a few minutes, and he wrote home:
Thank you for saying the shower will be all mine at home. I’m sick of not being able to sing in it, and when I return, I’m going to sing until the hot water runs out, wait for it to reheat, and sing again. I plan to shower and sing for a year. And hold you, my precious. How long it has been.
We’re rolling right along. It’s amazing. There’s hardly a Nip standing around here.
Today the gulf kicked up, and one LST (landing ship tank) broached; we lost some pontoon bridge materials, and the rough surf made unloading impossible. Do you think that slowed us down? Never.
We secured the Manila railroad and the strategic Route 3 from Bambam to Mabalcat, sealed off Bataan. Ready to slow down and take a rest? Not us. We seized Calumpit, crossed the Pampanaga River twenty-eight miles from Manila, and, to the west, secured Subic Bay. I don’t mean my battalion did all these things at once. The Sixth Army has others, but we’re the toughest.
As the Seventh Fleet glided into Subic Bay, Filipinos planted Old Glory on the shoreline, and a brass band played the Philippine and American national anthems. Filipinos gave the GIs cowrie shells as tokens of esteem. Remember when Montezuma gave them to Cortez, along with some feathers? Cortez was so disappointed he arrested Montezuma and kept him incarcerated until he came up with some gold. Sounds like something Hirohito would do.
You’re probably wondering if our K-rations have improved. No! Tonight’s arrived in rain—drenched cartons that turned the ‘food’ into soggy mush. Whoever devised them preferred a life of making mistakes to a life of idleness. Maybe he was a spy. Some day I’ll die of overeating, but not here.
Speaking of, Jim Williams told me the food planners ‘noodle around with ideas.’ Ideas? How to prevent weight gain ranks first. When I get home, I’m going to eat like a starved elephant on a peanut farm.
We’re winning, but revenge is not as sweet as advertised. It’s more enemies wronging each other, leaving behind hatred. I keep my humanity by holding my memories of home: the small beige owl in our garden, poppies dancing on spring green hills, the pale color and fine texture of your skin.
The sky turns from blue to lavender to pink in the sunset. This time of day always makes me homesick.
The next day Daddy rode the Bambam River boat, a ride from hell with Japanese bullets whizzing by the entire time, killing men right and left, knocking them overboard until they turned the water red.
* * *
Aboard the Nashville, MacArthur waved his corncob pipe at General Krueger and famously hollered, “Go around the Nips, bounce off the Nips, but go to Manila!”
Krueger told him that Yamashita wanted a mad dash to Manila. It was premature and could unnecessarily cost lives. He explained the logistical problems: the need for support troops, improvement of communication facilities, railroad and bridge construction, supplies, and reinforcements.
“Nonsense,” MacArthur replied. He demanded Krueger divide his artillery battalions between Clark Field and Manila with no further argument. Most, of course, would head for Manila for MacArthur’s birthday celebration. Krueger insisted the insufficient Clark Field troops would outrun their supplies, since the enemy destroyed all the relevant bridges. Outnumbered and surrounded, they would die from pulverizing enemy artillery fire.
Later, in “From Down Under to Dai Nippon,” Krueger wrote that MacArthur "did not seem very impressed by my arguments . . . He did not take seriously the danger of our troops’ overextension."
MacArthur pulled rank and commanded Krueger to obey him. With sadness and foreboding, Krueger sent a large group in two “flying columns” on the road to Manila, and, on January 24, he ordered a few battalions, including Daddy’s 143rd, to change the axis of their attack ninety degrees and advance toward Clark Field.
Here the wide, patterned farmland fell away; mountains, inflexible in their demands, continued for miles. Their rocky crags remained constant and yet never the same, and their jagged peaks surrounded Clark Field. The dangers Krueger feared proved all too real. Imperial General Tsukada, a devious tactician with an onion-shaped head, arranged the Kenbu defense along the ridges, some a thousand feet high. His machine guns, mortars, and heavy artillery lurked in caves on the high ground. The pillboxes, some three stories high, contained within their concrete walls 150-millimeter mortars, 20-millimeter, 40-millimeter, and 90-millimeter cannon. The Japanese could look down at the Americans struggling along and open fire.
Stranded, outnumbered, our men fought against overwhelming odds. From above, the Kenbu group pinned down Daddy’s battalion. Heavy artillery fire from the far side of the Zambales Mountains slaughtered our men in the rear lines. Roaring masses hit them, and they felt agonizing bolts of pain run through them, saw blood, their blood _ everywhere _ their bodies ripped like pieces of cloth, and they writhed, begging God to stop the pain. Some kept feeling it as they cried out, kept feeling their pain and their heartbeat and their breath, and the metal and the fire, and then nothing.
Our men on the front lines took more blasts from interlocking fields of fire anchored in pillboxes and connected by trenches to well-placed machine gun nests. The barrage raged twenty-four hours a day. Heavy Kenbu artillery blazed over the terrain, shredding men with shrapnel. Tracers blazed arcs of flame that illuminated the mud and blood of the mountains, and their fire bound itself to soldiers, consuming them. Glitters from flamethrowers burst against the blue sky of day or the black of night, gold arcs streaking and blossoming into more yellows and vermilions.
General Rapp Brush called frequent staff meetings to debrief and revise tactics. He, Daddy, and the others met in a secured headquarters area behind Allied lines. On February 12, Rapp said, “We’ve got to find the artillery positions on the reverse side of Sacobia Ridge; the heavy, concentrated fire there’s raising hell with our troops, but you know that first hand. Chewing up our armored vehicles. We need to send Jim Williams up on a reconnaissance flight with a spotter.”
He paused, studying faces, then nodded at Daddy. “Assign the job to someone in your unit.”
“I’ll go, myself,” Daddy said. “I think I know where the heavy artillery is.”
“No. Send one of your men.”
Daddy stood up. “It’s not a kamikaze mission. Jim can really maneuver planes; they dance with him.”
“I want you to delegate this. There’s a lot of anti-aircraft fire in the target area.”
“Is that an order, sir?”
Rapp hesitated.
“Then Jim and I will go.” The decision made, Daddy wrote in his notebook: “Feb. 14, 5:30 p.m., Hangar K.”
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
AT;+T
AT+T home phone service has been overcharging us for 5 years. I complained - fine, if you like talking to mechanical devices. Then I contacted the Calif. PUC, and finally a human "customer service" rep from AT+T celled me to say that since we'd been paying for 5 years, that meant they weren't overcharging. Back to the PUC, and they're demanding AT+T's reconrd. Anyone interested in updates as they come in? Ann Seymour"
Monday, April 6, 2009
cartel
diamond cartel ideas. For ages it reigned as the world’s last true empire, she reflected, though now it shatters more every day. Still, despite the publicity “blood diamonds” have received, de Beers provides some control over the market. It may well be easier to find a "clean" diamond than it is to find a "clean" colored stone. Of course, the control’s slipped bigtime.
She thought of a story Fiona’s uncle told her that showed how much international clout the cartel once had and decided to include it. She began to write:
In the heyday of the De Beers diamond cartel, around four dozen top jewelry dealers would meet at headquarters in London - 17 Charterhouse St. They would receive boxes of uncut diamonds, each of which cost eight million dollars, and the dealers had to take whatever cookies they were passed. Young Harry Winston decided he could go around the cartel, refused his box, and set up a partnership in Angloa when the Portuguese had it. Next thing he knew, the Portuguese government advised his partners that the British government would regard conducting business with Harry Winston as ‘an unfriendly act.’ From then on, he politely accepted the packages the cartel sold him.
She thought of a story Fiona’s uncle told her that showed how much international clout the cartel once had and decided to include it. She began to write:
In the heyday of the De Beers diamond cartel, around four dozen top jewelry dealers would meet at headquarters in London - 17 Charterhouse St. They would receive boxes of uncut diamonds, each of which cost eight million dollars, and the dealers had to take whatever cookies they were passed. Young Harry Winston decided he could go around the cartel, refused his box, and set up a partnership in Angloa when the Portuguese had it. Next thing he knew, the Portuguese government advised his partners that the British government would regard conducting business with Harry Winston as ‘an unfriendly act.’ From then on, he politely accepted the packages the cartel sold him.
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