I understand the mindset of the El Paso shooter because I once wore his shoes

As with every other Baby Boomer in the United States, I grew up in fear of the savage invaders that were intent upon raping my mother and sister.

They drilled us in school – “DROP!”

We learned to hit the floor under our desks – instantly --because we believed that the "enemy," those communist killers, wanted us dead.

Our president, our parents and other officials demanded that we comply – for the sake of our own safety and the safety of our communities.

When I turned 18, as did hundreds of thousands of my peers, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on my own assault rifle and kill those invaders before they could get to my mother and sister.

Farewell to a Vietnam veteran who showed others how to live.

An update: Some corrections to yesterday's post -- plus a wonderful response from Maureen Gerwig, Mike's widow. Her response is at the bottom.

From the tidbits I had heard about Mike Gerwig from his wife, Maureen, it's clear that they were both determined to squeeze out every ounce of adventure life had to offer. During his memorial service today at the Riverside National Cemetery, a heavily-laden Air Force C-17 transport jet circled over again and again from March Air Reserve Base, just across the freeway, as young pilots practiced touch-and-go landings.

It reminded Maureen that they had first met, some four decades ago,  while skydiving out of nearby Perris Valley Airport. It's ironic that, back then, they could have looked down and seen the very spot where she would say "goodbye" to him for the last time. When they fell out of the sky alongside each other, you see, they also fell for each other.
They would travel the world together -- and not in any conventional way. Again, they thirsted for adventure.
She told a couple of Mike's skydiving buddies today about how she and Mike had biked through the Soviet mountains, had hiked across northern England and had fallen asleep gazing at the aurora borealis during a month-long camping trip -- a trip that required a four-hour dog sled journey (not by snowmobile as I incorrectly reported) through the wilderness just to get to the secluded lake in the northern Yukons.
Mike had fought in Vietnam. Maureen helped him fight at home -- fight to get him the treatment he needed for the damage that combat and Agent Orange had done to his body and his mind.
She fought -- for him and beside him -- right up to the end.
When time had run out for Mike -- when it was clear that he wouldn't get the transplant he so needed, Maureen drove him to the V.A. facility in La Jolla, near San Diego, so he could say goodbye to his dying brother. It was Memorial Day weekend.
 When they got back to their Woodland Hills home, Mike asked Maureen to take him to the emergency hospital. He was too weak to return home. He spent his final hours in a Veterans Administration hospice at the Sepulveda facility. When Maureen got the call that he had died, she drove there expecting to find a depressing place that smelled of urine and looked like a rest-home warehouse nightmare.
But she was wrong. Instead, she entered what seemed like a paradise of love and care. They had made up Mike's bed and draped him in an American flag. They encouraged her to spend as much time as she wanted with him. Afterwards, staff members and fellow veterans conducted a bedside ceremony for Mike. They even played Taps.
Today's memorial ceremony was equally beautiful. Mike's long-time skydiving buddies, John Bull and Tom Brown came to honor him, along with Tom's daughter, Elisa. She remembered admiring the deep friendship between her father and Mike. John and Tom talked about Mike's generosity and the encouragement he would give to beginning and experienced skydivers.
The Army Honor Guard members were the picture of respect and precision. They marched in with Mike's wicker urn and the American Flag that they later would unfold, ceremoniously refold and hand to Maureen. They fired volley of three rifle shots and then stood at "present arms" while the bugler played Taps.
It turns out that I had the privilege of representing Vietnam veterans at Mike's ceremony. I was hoping there would be others there, but knowing the life of being a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, I could only figure that, like me, Mike preferred to spend his time with his wife.
Solitude and isolation easily can become a way of life for combat veterans.
I meant to go straight home when I left, but something called out to me from across the 215 freeway. It had been more than 10 years since I last visited the War Dog Memorial at the March Air Force Base Museum. I had been there when they first unveiled the statue of an alert German shepherd and his handler. I hadn't noticed before that both of them are looking out in the direction of the Riverside National Cemetery -- and they were in direct view of Mike's final resting place. They'll be watching over him the way my dog Fritz watched over me in Vietnam.

Then I realized that, in all likelihood, the dog and his handler be watching over me one day as well.

The trip to Riverside today took on even more meaning than I had anticipated. When I was driving home, I was regretting that Xiao Mei hadn't been able to come along. The day will come when she'll be coming to visit me there -- without me being able to give her directions.

Maureen Gerwig's response email:

Don,

 

Just read your blog.  Beautiful. 

 

After the funeral services I followed John Bull and Tom Brown over to the Perris skydiving complex where they were going to make a jump in honor of Mike and Elisa said she was going to make her first jump, in honor of Mike.  The place has certainly changed since I was last there in the early 1980s.  Because I didn’t want to get caught up in traffic on the way home, I did not stay for the jump.  However, I know Mike would have been overwhelmed and honored by it all. (Weather conditions prevented the others from being able to make a jump).

 

Yes, Mike’s skydiving buddies being there was such a gift to the occasion and brought the memory of Mike alive.

 

There were just a few things in the blog, though, one about falling asleep together after watching the  aurora borealis and driving in by a snow mobile.  I would never ride in a snow mobile except if maybe I was a rancher or someone who used it for work purposes. 

 

We spent the month of February living in a cabin out in the Yukon wilderness.  The cabin was owned by a dog musher, who also competed on a regular basis in the Yukon Quest.  His name was Blaine, and I can’t remember his last name, but I got his name by calling around beforehand when I was at home in Los Angeles, because I wanted to experience living in the wilderness in the middle of winter. 

 

The cabin we stayed in was Blaine’s original cabin, and he had just finished building himself a much larger new cabin just over the knoll.  We flew into Whitehorse and were driven to a place off the highway where we met Blaine and some of his dogs.  As soon as we were dropped off, Blaine had us immediately get the dogs harnessed to the two dog sleds because it was a four-hour trip to the cabin.  Blaine and I took one sled and Mike handled the other sled by himself.   As we started off, we quickly came to a sharp turn in the trail and Blaine was looking back at Mike, because he said most people don’t make that turn and wind up tipping over.   Mike took the turn in perfect form.   Mike was having the time of his life.  The temperature was minus 18, and at one point we had to stop and put booties on all the dogs to protect their feet.  

 

We stayed there for a little over three weeks living in Blaine’s old cabin, which was built half underground.   Blaine stayed over the knoll in his new, much larger cabin.  The dogs, about 18 of them, were spread out at their respective places outside.  The outdoor toilet was situated in between the two cabins.  There was no electricity, plumbing or telephone.  We were surrounded by the beautiful silence of nature. 

 

Each day Blaine would lead us out on little day trips.   For about a two-day period, Blaine made a dog sled trip and came back with more supplies.

 

The night we saw the aurora borealis, Blaine suggested we could take our sleeping bags with us and camp outside overnight.  We put on our snow shoes and traveled about a mile to an overlook with a somewhat forested area behind us where we set up our overhead tarp and sleeping bags.   Then the three of us walked over to the edge of the overlook and waited to see if the aurora borealis would show itself that night.  We were not disappointed.  For Blaine it was something he’s seen all his life; for us it was memorable.   Then we, all three of us, went and got in our sleeping bags.  That night the temperature dropped to somewhere around minus 27 degrees.  So, no, we weren’t laying there asleep in each other’s arms in the snow in the minus 27 degree temperatures.  And at no time was a snow mobile to be seen. 

 

I also have three beautiful blown-up photographs of Mike taken from that Yukon adventure. 

 

Also, we didn’t bicycle across Russia.  It was a mountain bike trek put together by REI, the outdoor store that’s based in Seattle.  They also offer outdoor adventure travel.  There nine people on the trip; it was a very eclectic group of people.  It was a month-long mountain bike trip through the Crimea during the period of Perestroika.  The trip was in late September/early October of 1990. 

 

I will share with you something Mike wrote about that trip.  It’s from something he wrote back in 2009, I think, when veterans who filed PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) claims used to have to write essays, I guess you might call them, about their war experiences.

 

Mike wrote:  "In 1990, my wife and I went on a mountain bike trip with REI Adventures to the former Soviet Union.  While on this trip I encountered Soviets vets from the Soviet war in Afghanistan.  I saw how these Russian Afghan war vets were treated the same way as Vietnam vets were and how they suffered the same feelings of anxiety and feelings of insignificance as Vietnam vets.  They were also into heavy drinking and drugs to numb their feelings of being watched and judged by the Russian people.  When these Russian Afghanistan vets learned I was a Vietnam vet, there was a sense of shared experience, that sense of knowing without even having to talk about it.” 

 

I witnessed this.  It happened when we were in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg.  One of the members of the support staff, who accompanied us throughout the trip, was walking with us.  We saw a shabby looking group of men in kind of a small courtyard squeezed between some run-down buildings.  Boris, the support guy, said, “They’re veterans from the Afghan war,” and he went over to them and told them Mike was a Vietnam vet. 

 

When these Russian Afghan war vets heard that, they rushed over and surrounded Mike.  And even though Mike didn’t speak Russian and they didn’t speak English, you could feel the intensity of emotions flowing between them.  They just swarmed around him, shaking his hand, hugging him, speaking to him in Russian.   One of them even gave Mike a Russian military belt, which I still have. 

 

I just felt I needed to go into more detail so that maybe you could correct it so it sounds closer to the real facts. 

 

Again, I so appreciated you being there yesterday.  Originally, I thought it would be me alone attending the service.  As I was driving home, I kept thinking as Mike was put to his final rest that he should be surrounded to such a loving group of friends who cared. 

 

Take good care.

 

Your friend, Maureen    

 

Courage and Tragedy Under Fire --- and what followed

There’s a code of silence at the PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) Clinic in East L.A. Whatever veterans say inside those walls stays there. But a fellow Vietnam veteran met me for lunch today on Whittier Blvd., and he felt like talking. I listened. When he finished telling me the story of that firefight back on February 8, 1967 — and how it would come back to haunt him decades later — I cautiously asked him if I could write about him — if I could share his story.

He agreed.

His name is Edward. I’d share his last name with you — he’s OK with that — but that code of silence I mentioned gnaws on me. He turned 69 last month. He works the graveyard shift as a security officer at a railroad yard. He feels safer in the dark — safer when he’s not around a lot of people. And it gives him more time to spend with his 14-year-old daughter during the day.

Bank in 1999, however, he was working the day shift as a quality control inspector in a factory. He had successfully buried the memories of that day in Vietnam — the day a medic named Keith Campbell saved his life. He had buried the memories of watching a bullet strike his rescuer in the neck. He had buried the memories of a burst of more AK-47 bullets that instantly killed Keith Campbell.

But in 1999, Edward was playing with his kids in a park when a woman he’d never known burst into his world. Medic Keith Campbell’s sister had finally fulfilled her dream of meeting the man whose life her brother had saved, moments before the medic, himself, fell to enemy bullets.

She wanted to look into the last pair of eyes her brother had seen.

A most astounding new friend --- the man who built the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Nguyen Dan built the Ho Chi Minh Trail.               -- Pierre Beauregard Photo

His name is Nguyen Dan (pronounced Wen Zan). He's 89 years old and he's blind. In 1941 he fought the Japanese when they invaded Vietnam. When the Japanese surrendered, the French returned and he fought them. When the United States stuck its head into Vietnam affairs, Dan fought them as well. In 1966, he was in charge of a project that many military historians believe made what was then called North Vietnam impossible to defeat --- he was in charge of building what would come to be known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Despite the fact that the Laos government had signed the 1962 Geneva Accords, the International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos and promised not to allow foreign armies to use its land, Dan says the Laos government gave a wink and a nod to North Vietnam. 

Because Vietnam had helped Laos in it's fight against France, Laos agreed to look the other way and allow Dan's Engineer Regiment to build the now famous, hidden highway through the mountainous jungles of eastern Laos. Even though the U.S. dropped more bombs on that part of Laos than they had dropped on Europe in World War II, nothing could stop the North Vietnamese from sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers, trucks, tanks, guns and munitions through Laos and Cambodia and into South Vietnam. Dan described for us how U.S. aircraft poured Agent Orange over the trail. They were soaking wet in the deadly goo. Then the rains came, he said, and washed the Agent Orange into the streams --- streams they used for bathing, cooking and even drinking.

It was the Agent Orange, the doctors told him, that robbed him of his vision.

He welcomed us into his home. We met his childhood bride --- the woman who also helped him build the trail. He told us that he holds no animosity toward the United States. He believes in peace. He asked me to tell the American people that we should all live in peace. He told us that we are all residents of the earth and that we are one. He called me his brother. He shook my hand a dozen times and welcomed me in his Hanoi home whenever I wanted to visit. I hope I can visit him again. After all, he's family. We're all family.

The Sitting Duck Syndrome --- calculated fear and terror.

The Sitting Duck Syndrome — the terrorist’s real objective

If you’ve ever dined with a seasoned police officers, combat veterans or anyone who had once been the victim of “surprise violence,” you know the routine. They will insist on picking the right table and sitting in the seat with the best view — and maybe the best access to an exit. If they’ll even go into a movie theater, they’ll probably pick the back row. They never want anyone behind them. They don’t want surprises.

When they were on duty, they were prepared for violence. “Surprise violence” is what haunts them when they’re off duty.

And it can haunt them for the rest of their lives.

The people that a terrorists kill when they set off a bomb or open fire in a school, theater or shopping mall are really the secondary victims. The intended victims are the people who watch the news and experience the repeated coverage of the deadly attack. The goal is to inflict the fear of surprise violence on everyone else. The goal is to terrorize an entire population.

And it’s frighteningly effective.

On July 17, 1984, I had been back from Vietnam for more than 15 years and was busy advancing a career in journalism. But on that day, “surprise violence” enveloped my world and my psyche. Nothing had happened to me directly. But on that day, a troubled man named James Oliver Huberty walked into a crowded McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California, armed with enough firepower to execute 21 customers and employees and injure 19 others.

A near-death experience with a remarkable update.

 

Meet Fred Gallegos.

I first encountered him some 42 years ago. This is what he looks like today.

 Here’s the story of our previous encounter:

The headlights from the cars going the other direction on the Ventura Freeway were filtered by the chain link fence that divided the freeways back on June 5, 1969 --- all except one set of headlights that were distinctly brighter.

I was in the fast lane heading east. The car with the way-too-bright lights was heading west in our direction. I couldn’t say for sure, but there was a chance he was on our side of the freeway --- in the same lane.

I was home on leave following my time in Vietnam. My friend John Stiles and I had been checking out the Bob’s Big Boy restaurants in Toluca Lake and then Van Nuys. We were looking for another guy we used to run with. It was past midnight and we were heading back to Bob’s T.L. just in case he might be there now.

But now, all I could think of was to get the hell off the freeway – just in case it was a wrong-way driver --- and let him have all of the lanes to himself. John didn’t know what was going on when I darted to the right from lane #1 to lane #4 and then onto the shoulder of the freeway just past the Cahuenga Blvd. on-ramp.

As John was asking me what the heck I was doing, the wrong-war driver failed to come out of the gentle curve and was barreling directly toward us. There was nowhere to go and nothing else we could do.

We both braced for the crash. But less than a second before the unavoidable impact, a little Mercedes Benz drove past us in the slow lane to our left and smashed head-on into the wrong-way driver.

Only about eight feet from the front of our car, the two vehicles rose up in the air and crashed down in front of us.

Then there was silence --- the most eerie silence I’ve ever not heard in my life. If there were other cars, I didn’t hear them. We both got out and, through the steam and dust, we ran up to the driver of the Mercedes. He was crushed up against the steering wheel, unconscious.

But he was still breathing. John immediately pried open the hood of the car and somehow ripped the battery cables from their terminals. At the same time, the driver of the other car, a huge Chrysler convertible with the top down, staggered out and started wandering around the scene.

Quite drunk.

The next thing I remember was seeing a guy walking quickly in our direction from a car about an eighth of a mile in front of the scene. He was lighting highway flares and laying them down. I ran toward him to give him a hand. When I got close to him, I realized that this was the friend we had been looking for all evening.

I had to leave a day or two later for my next duty station in Michigan, so I never got a chance to find out what happened after that --- until today, that is.

I had an appointment with my favorite dental hygienist in the morning at the V.A. clinic in Downtown L.A. Afterwards, I walked to the main L.A. Library to look up a bunch of stuff in the L.A. Times Index they have online there. I used the search terms “head-on,” “wrong-way” and “Ventura” for the months of May and June of 1969.

 

Back at my office, I dug into the public records indices to find a Fred Callegos (the middle initial was blotched out, as you can see) who was born in 1941 or 1942. The only match was Fred P. Gallegos who has a business in the Agoura Hills area.

So I called the number on the website. Even though it was after hours, a woman answered. I said I was looking for the Fred Gallegos who was in an accident on the Ventura Freeway in 1969. She knew all about it and put him on the phone.

To say that it was a strange conversation for both of us would be an understatement. Probably more for him than for me. I always seem to be doing these kinds of things. To make a long story shorter, he was eager to hear about the accident. All he remembered was waking up in traction in the hospital --- and the year it took him to recuperate.

He was a construction worker at the time, which is probably why he’s alive today.

“The doctors told me that anybody else would have died from that accident,” he said. “I was in great shape --- almost at the peak age of 28.”

But he was still a mess. Broken femurs, broken jaw, teeth crushed and rearranged. But for all of the damage, there were some amazing things that seemed have happened through fate or karma or something.

He used to hang out in a bar in Glendale,he told me. One of his drinking pals was an insurance agent who had pestered him to sign up for a $300 disability insurance package. Finally, Fred had given in, he says.

“Then, a little while later, the guy tells me I should increase it to $500,” Fred said, “so I did.” It was only a short later that he got hit on the freeway. And, it turns out, the drunk in the other car had no insurance whatsoever. If it hadn’t been for that disability policy, Fred says, he’d have been screwed.

And also, right before the accident occurred, Fred’s dentist had taken impressions of his mouth for some dental work. When the dentist heard about the accident, he made up a cast of Fred’s mouth and took it to the hospital.

“He came in an moved all of my teeth back to where they had been!”

Over the years, Fred has had more than 40 surgical procedures for everything from throat cancer to fused vertebrae to a heart attack to gall bladder surgery and four knee surgeries. Then there was his right eye that got hit with something and another six surgeries because of that. But he never once complained to me or murmured a bit of regret. Instead, he wanted to talk about his wife, Paula, and how well the kids have done. 

We talked for more than an hour, and I got to know a man whose life is filled with spirit --- positive spirit --- and a man who has never stopped living each day with gusto.

We’re going to get together in the next week or two.

It’s strange how we hook up with people, isn’t it?

I'm excited to receive some pix of my Vietnam dog

More than 40 years after I was a "puppy pusher" (as we called ourselves) at Soc Trang in the Mekong Delta, one of my buddies send me some photos I'd never seen before. They're of me and my first (and best) Vietnam dog, Fritz. They bring back some fond memories.


















My sincere "thank you" to Martin Maier.