For a while before I went on active duty, I was in the National Guard, assigned to Headquarters Company of an armored battalion of M1 tanks. My military job at the time was being part of a crew operating an armored personnel carrier with a 4.2 inch mortar mounted in it. That's the biggest mortar the Army has. It fires a round larger than 105 Howitzer. There is no trigger mechanism on a mortar. Instead, a firing pin is mounted at the bottom of a long tube. The ammunition bearer fixes an explosive charge to the bottom of the mortar shell. He hands it to the assistant gunner who fits the rear end of the shell into the mortar tube. When the gunner, who is responsible for using a telescopic sight to aim the weapon, gives him the go ahead, the assistant gunner releases the round. It slides down the tube until it hits the firing pin. This detonates the charge and the shell is launched with a range of about 4000 meters.

There are four types of shells that can be fired from a 4.2 inch mortar: high explosive, white phosphorus, smoke and chemical weapons. I fired all of those except the chemical rounds which, although manufactured by the hundreds of thousands, were never used. If the gun crew didn't keep the tube clean, the debris could interfere with the round sliding down the tube, resulting in what is known as a hang fire. While I was in this unit, another crew of mortar gunners firing from the same range where we trained had a hang fire while firing white phosphorus rounds. The resulting explosion killed everyone in the gun crew and badly burned members firing from nearby positions. It's dangerous work. You're dealing with stuff designed to be as lethal as possible, and there isn't a lot of room for error.

My section leader, a sergeant, was named Larry “Big Dog” Evans. His full-time civilian job was killing turkeys in a poultry processing plant in town. To my knowledge, I never saw him completely sober, ever, not once. He was funny and profane and didn't have a mean bone in his body. I wanted to kill him. He made live fire exercises a nightmare. All of his mortar training had been on the job. Whereas I had actually been through indirect fire school at Ft. Benning. Big Dog had been a specialist 5 clerk-typist who was converted into a sergeant and squad leader when the unit's mission and the Army rank structure was changed. He had never been to an NCO class. Such was life in the National Guard in the decade after the end of the Vietnam War.

This particular drill weekend, we were live firing high explosive and white phosphorus rounds at Ft. Bragg. Our platoon leader was a nervous second-lieutenant who ran a convenience store for his father-in-law. He was scared of enlisted men and was seldom seen. Big Dog was drunker than Cooter Brown and couldn't get the sights lined up with aiming stakes, no matter how hard he tried. It's important when firing big weapons that you know where you are aiming because of the whole thing about them killing everyone in the location where they land. I was having to do my job and his, a situation I loudly protested, even though I was just a PFC.

My situation wasn't made any better by the situation at home. I was 19, married, with a son already and a daughter on the way. My civilian job had just ended unexpectedly. It was one I'd uprooted my entire family to move several counties away from where we knew people. I had no idea what I was going to do about that, and now I had the stress of trying not to die at the hands of a drunk professional turkey killer. Finally, someone called the company First Sergeant on the radio and told him that he might want to come prevent Big Dog's death at my hands.

When he arrived at the training area in his jeep, he called a cease fire and training stopped. He summoned me to the vehicle and asked me to tell him what was going on. I could hardly talk, but I sputtered out the story of the dangerous incompetence I felt was endangering everyone. The First Sergeant promised to take Big Dog off the range and talk to him about drinking during training. Since this was a wholly normal situation because being inebriated was his normal state, the First Sergeant wanted to know why this particular instance had gotten me so wound up. I told him about losing my job and not knowing what to do. He immediately told me that he was a building superintendent for a commercial construction firm. He said that if I would come to his job site on Monday, he would hire me. All I had to do was promise to calm down and quit threatening to kill his NCOs. I told him I thought I could handle that.

The following Monday, I showed up where the company was building medical offices and went to work. I kept that job until I finally enlisted in the regular Army. I'll always be grateful for that man's leadership and guidance. He was old school and I learned a lot from him.

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Age 50 / Age 60

This is my last week in my 50s. Looking back over the past 10 years, I am grateful for a great many things, lots of travel, three additional grandchildren, the conclusion of a career and the continued health of everyone in my family.

Where I Went

I spent my 50th birthday in Charleston, SC, a great city even if it was one of the coldest weekends they'd ever had. Wonder Woman hired a photography teacher as a guide. The three of us spent a day walking all over the old part of town with our cameras. I learned a lot and managed to take some photos I still enjoy looking at.

We took several other trips, flying to New York City, Colorado Springs, Anchorage, Santa Fe, Austin and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Wonder Woman started running competitively again when she turned 50 in 2017. We spent many weekends at races and places where she likes to train. She ran a lot in the Francis Marion National Forest in the South Carolina low country and in the Uwharrie National Forest in central North Carolina. We spent a lot of time in southwest Virginia, an area we fell in love with when he hiked through there on the Appalachian Trail.

Three New Babies

On my 50th birthday, I already had 10 grandchildren. I wasn't sure if any of our kids planned to have anymore. Our youngest daughter, Jennifer, surprised us first, and she had Tristen, a wee little man who vacillates between being earnest and very silly whenever it suits him. Anna really surprised us, since her only child was already nine before she decided to have another baby. She had James, a blue-eyed, blonde headed handful of a little boy who brings me nothing but joy. Finally, Elizabeth, who has three boys and also waited a long time before having another baby, announced to us that she was expecting. To everyone's delight, she had a little girl, our Evie, who already dances, plays the piano, does gymnastics and martial arts. She is amazing.

Work

I wrapped up a 27-year career as a civil servant in 2020. I'd spent seven years as a correctional officer in a state prison and twenty years working in IT for the county school system. I opted for the security and benefits (a pension and health insurance for life) over chasing higher paying jobs in the private sector. I spent a couple of restless years being retired and then went back to work in 2022 at the small private university where Wonder Woman Works. I'm only a few days away from retiring from there too, this time with a better plan to make use of the time.

Family

This was the decade when I suddenly realized that everyone was aging right along with me. All the big movie stars I'd enjoyed for most of my life are now relegated to playing old people in their films because, well, they all got old. Our kids are either in their 40s or getting ready to hit that milestone. Our two oldest grandchildren have graduated from high school. My ageless mother managed to not only walk across Scotland in her early 70s, she went to Spain and hiked the 500-mile Camino de Santiago a couple of years later. My Dad had a more difficult decade. He's now the caretaker for my step-mother, who has memory related issues and needs a lot of attention. My siblings continue to make me proud. One of my brothers, Todd, lives and works in Marin County, California giving nature tours at Pt. Reyes National Seashore. My other brother, Matt, a physician assistant for the State Department, did a tour in Athens with his family and is starting a tour in London this year. My only sister, Mitzi, a Methodist pastor, continues her ministry as the type of Christian who believes in loving all people, feeding the poor and helping the immigrant — you know, the stuff Jesus preached about.

I don't know what the next decade holds in store for Wonder Woman and I. In a few years we will be able to be retired together, and I can only imagine the places she will want to wander to. She's already talking about visiting the Alps and making the long flight to New Zealand. Her running career continues. She intends to run twelve 5Ks in one day just next month. We will probably become great-grandparents at some point in the next ten years. I'm going to keep writing and helping where I can in the struggle against fascism. Life is good, if challenging.

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Most of my working life has been spent working in education, mostly for a K-12 school system in a large, mostly rural county but also for a small, private university. The goal of both organizations was conveying knowledge to build an educated citizenry. There's a certain amount of bureaucracy involved and by their very nature, bureaucracies sometimes lose sight of their intended purpose in their struggle to be self-perpetuating. Mostly, though, the people I've worked with have put the focus on doing what it takes to help students learn.

School systems more moving parts than you might imagine. The biggest group of employees is the faculty, the people who have to get up in front of the students and teach them. I've known so many good teachers. The one characteristic they all shared was a palpable sense of excitement when they were preparing to teach a lesson they thought their students would get into. A lot of thought goes into lesson planning. People usually teach subjects they enjoy. When they think they have a good strategy to really get their point across, they act like athletes before a big game. I always tried to be patient and listen to them share when I could tell they were fired up.

There are support staff in multiple categories required to operate a school system. When I went to work at my first school, my county was in the process of connecting to the Internet, so I got to usher man, many people into the information age in my IT role. I always made a point to get in tight with several workers at each school: the school secretary because they know everything, the lunch ladies because if you take care of them, they will take care of you and finally, the custodians, because I always needed their help a lot more than they needed mine. There are also other areas to support at the county level, like the huge maintenance department, a bus garage, HR and finance and all the administrators. There were many specialized systems I had to master for those different departments.

The school based professional staff also had various requirements. I worked with physical and occupational therapists to set up computers for students with special needs, including blind students, students in wheelchairs and other impairments. I helped the medical and mental health folks with securing sensitive information and configuring software for testing and medical devices. During the tension - filled weeks of high-stakes online testing, I had to be on standby in case any network issues affected connectivity.

Certain departments had the needs for software that pertained just to their roles. There are music programs for the band director and scoring programs for the coaches. We even had an AS-400, an IBM computer that contained all the district's financial data.

While my job in public school didn't often involve interacting with the students, my higher ed job did. As much as the "get off my lawn" types like to grouse about how horrible young people are these days, that has not been my experience. I've found that most students are polite, good listeners, and they just want to be able to use the tech they need to complete their assignments. Sure, some of the more inquisitive ones have tried mightily, and occasionally succeeded in getting around security safeguards, but then so have I, right?

I like knowing that a good chuck of my life has been in the service of helping people learn. I've done IT work in the medical field, banking and manufacturing too, and none of it was as rewarding as helping teachers and students. After spending the first decade of my adult life in the infantry and as a prison guard, being the helpful computer guy brought me a lot more joy. It really does take a village to produce well-rounded and educated citizens. I was glad to be a part of a good one.

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I'm sharing tonight a repost of a piece I originally wrote last summer about the very real attack by the KKK and Nazis on leftist labor organizers in Greensboro, NC, resulting in five deaths and 10 wounded. Maybe you think that all the recent talk of Fascism and Nazis and white supremacy is a bit overblown. It is not. There are people organizing for change right now who have weathered gunfire and violence from what used to be the extreme right wing. Today, those people are closer to the mainstream.

In November 1979 I was a junior high student in Jacksonville, NC when I heard on the news about what the media initially called a shootout between the Ku Klux Klan, a group of Neo-Nazis and Communist labor organizers in Greensboro, three hours away. I remember being confused that the Klan and Nazis, who in my mind were relics of a dark but distant past, were still active and engaged in violence. And, I'd never even heard of Communists on American soil. It was a tumultuous time in America that month. It was when Iran took more than 50 Americans hostage. Inflation was over 10% and rising. President Carter was not the revered statesman he is today, but a beleaguered man presiding over a country that felt lost.

As it turns out, on that day in Greensboro, there was no shootout. Instead, there was a massacre planned with an active police informant that involved carloads of Klansmen and Nazis, who the police knew were on the way to what turned into a killing ground in a public housing project. With television cameras rolling but no law enforcement present, the forefathers of today's alt-right movement gunned down the labor organizers from the Worker's Viewpoint Organization, who were graduates from Duke and Harvard and in a couple of cases, medical doctors. Having previously faced down the Klan at a China Grove, NC rally. The left-wing activists underestimated the willingness of the fascists to engage in violence and paid for it with their lives. Aside from the five who were killed, 10 more were wounded.

The state and federal government both tried to convict the planners and shooters involved in the massacre. There were numerous eyewitnesses. The Klan was infiltrated with informants. There was ample videotape. In both trials, however, all white juries refused to convict those responsible for the violence and death on the streets of Greensboro. We aren't talking about 1960s Mississippi Burning times. One of these trials happened when Michael Jordan was in college in NC.

Two decades later, when I became involved in activism in North Carolina, some of the same people who had naively been involved in the Greensboro anti-Klan organizing were still committed to trying to do things like establish a death penalty moratorium, ensure affordable housing, ending the nuclear arms race, ensuring same-sex marriage and stopping the US led war in Iraq. My mentor was a Ph.D. economist from Temple University who had worked for 10 years as a lathe operator in a mill while trying to organize workers. His wife was a leading neurosurgeon who had taken a break from medical school to work on a textile mill to organize the people on the looms. Their lives had been upended by the events of 1979 and Kim, the wife, never quite recovered the fire in her belly to organize, Chip, her husband, remained actively working with low wage workers and community activists until his death in 2014.

I was horrified when the Unite the Right rally happened in Charlottesville in 2017. I know what these people are capable of doing. They've shown us. Hopefully, those who oppose them won't fall into the same trap as the anti-fascists did in 1979. This stuff isn't from the distant past. It's from the here and now.

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