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Hello Snow Bunny and all,

I hope those in Blue will forgive all this Army talk, but I wanted to explain my absence.

On the 29th of August I left for a long weekend to visit my #2 son at Ft. Benning, Georgia. He was finishing his second week of the three-week Jump School. In other words, he had not yet made his five jumps. I didn’t want to hang around for all that. However, after a minor sprain in one ankle and some other bruises, he earned his jump wings the week after I left and is now back in school in Tacoma, WA.

Two things happened during and after my 2500 mile journey that need explanation. First, I didn’t expect it to be an emotional trip back in time and, second, I had not planned to be gone from FreeRepublic for more than four or five days. I’m not ashamed. I missed it and I missed some good cyber-friends..

The absence from FR is the easiest to explain. While I was gone a bolt of lightning, or something, killed my computer. I am now reconnected with my new Dell that my #1 son picked out and bought for me. Thanks son. I owe you - - big time!

Back to Benning. We did a lot of father/son bonding and guy stuff. He left for the Army after High School in 92 and has delivered the pizzas in all the Clinton Wag-the-Dog hot spots and then some: Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and, Korea and Germany as regular tours. Now he is in a two-year ROTC program and, if all goes well, will be a 28-year-old 2LT in May. He has been through the Air Assault Course, is a mechanic by training and still wants to go to Ranger School when he graduates from college in the spring. It all adds up to me not seeing much of him since he left home at 17. We saw the beautiful Providence Canyon and Kolomoki Indian Mounds south of the post and we went to Plains to buy some peanuts. Almost ran into Jimmy. He had just been in the store in the center of town. I can tell you the town folks are proud of their favorite son but SE Georgia is not Clinton country. In fact, they have plenty of anti-clinton material in some of the gift shops.

We went to Atlanta for the Zoo, the Underground, the Cyclorama (Battle of Atlanta) and, of course, Stone Mountain. If you haven’t been to Stone Mountain in the last ten years, it is completely ‘disneyfied’, but in a nice sort of way.

Now for the trip back in time. A third of a century ago I left Ft Rucker, Alabama for my second tour in Nam. I had been there as part of flight school in 66 (WORWAC 66-11) and as an instructor pilot in 68-69. We drove the 150 miles so I could see what the place looked like and tell my son war stories. The Army Aviation Museum and all the new buildings made the place look so different. The post seemed deserted for the holiday weekend except for a WOC class involved in a car wash. Wow, did they ever look like kids. It looks like they still use the same parade field for ceremonies like our monthly graduation fly-bys of yesteryear. It was also the same field where my dad and sister pinned on my Aviator Wings and WO Bars. I found the BOQ where I lived between tours and where there had been a keg party almost every weekend. I think we had permanent MPs assigned to the place. As we were about to leave the post via the Ozark exit I saw a sign marked Hanchey Army Heliport. During the heighth of Nam it is where I worked and there must have been 150 to 200 TH-13T instrument training helicopters based there. (It’s a beefed up version of what you see on the MASH series.) As we drove up to the security gate the memories came rushing over me. Now there are other helicopters but it still looked the same. If you were a helicopter pilot back then you most likely had to endure Hanchey and then, if you were lucky, you got to inflict the pain on others when you came back for a Rucker tour of duty.

Son, when you read this post, you’ll know how much it meant to me when we went to Ft. Rucker together. Though I think I’ve already told you that.

An aside: This past Sunday my #3 son and I took the train from DC to NYC for the day. He wants to get hooked up in the movie industry and we were checking out some of the "how to" schools. We accomplished that mission after we did a little sightseeing. On top of the Empire State Building I actually had two very distinct emotions. Being around other Americans and many understanding foreign tourists I at once felt an almost embarrassing patriotism and a flash of anger at what ‘those fanatical bastards’ tried to do to us. I’ve felt this anger many times over the last year but it meant something more as I considered how that first WTC missile probably flew right by the observation deck of that beautiful old symbol of New York. Down below we went to Rockefeller Center to see the Faces of Ground Zero exhibit. We even got to meet Joe McNally who created the images with his giant camera and who had been on the Imus program earlier in the week. We ended our 12 hour NYC visit by going to Ground Zero. I’m glad it was raining. It’s how I felt.