Veteran's Day 2013

I'm a vet!

I was part of the Cold War contingent, and while I'm counted as a "Vietnam Era" veteran, I was lucky to be separated from the Army before the major escalation in that mistaken war, in late 1964 (after LBJ's landslide election).

I was stationed in Turkey 1962-1963, which was the standard tour, since it was considered a "hardship post." I wrote a novel about my experience, but it's unavailable except for one printed manuscript copy I saved in our latest move. Unfortunately, none of my electronic files survived, since the technology has changed so much. I couldn’t find it in my small batch of large format floppy disks: I wrote it in the early 80's, a story incorporating my experiences in the early 60's--after my new wife and I returned to the scene: Sinop, on the Black Sea.

My role in the Cold War was minor. I was a Traffic Analyst in an Army Security Agency mission, in which we monitored the radio-control transmissions of the USSR's Tyuratam Missile Testing site in what is now Kazakhastan. We knew what they were developing as soon as they did. That included their failed attempt to develop Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABM's). Sinop may be nearly Turkey's northernmost point along the Black Sea: Sinop Burun (nose, or peninsula) sticks out from the coast on a high headland. Our base was on its highest point.

The city of Sinop (Sinope) goes back before the 4th century BC, when Diogenes walked its streets looking for an honest man. Not true Turks, one Turk told me when speaking about Sinopians: most were converted Greeks.

I never thought about it until recently, but we were engaged in what NSA has now developed globally: surveillance of nearly everyone. I was trained at NSA before embarking for Turkey. It was surveillance that was easily justifiable: by international treaty, anyone could gain all the (unencrypted) data from another nation's rocket tests--if they knew when a test was going to happen: that's where we came in.

Later, when I was teaching in a maximum security prison, I had a student who had been a Soviet helicopter gunner: he had been stationed in the mountains east of the Black Sea. His unit was involved in attempting to control the restive inhabitants north of Afghanistan. His former empire was crumbling when I taught his Soviet Politics course in prison.

I wish ours were crumbling, too. Instead, it seems as if the American Empire will survive shutdowns and more, while Americans at home go without, to maintain our expensive military in over 100 nations abroad. We will impoverish ourselves, as Rome and other empires did before us. We continue to attempt to extend greater US control over the rest of the globe, even though we can no longer afford an expensive empire