By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

I catch a trace of Father’s scent each year. He’s been dead since 1996, which makes his lingering essence kind of magical. I’ve smelled him in Dayton and Houston, in San Diego and Midland and Minneapolis… — and he was not a traveling salesman.

I smell Father just about whenever and wherever I find myself in the midst of a particular group of cane-wielding men and stalwart widows. They are the survivors of the World War II Army Air Corps’ 484th and 461st Bomb Groups. And, now, as I wait in the airport lounge to return from their most recent weekend reunion, a tradition in which I’m one of many second-generation interlopers, I try to hold on to the smell of him, of them.

And I watch a pair of beautiful young men holding hands. I am certain, pretty certain — no, absolutely confident — that, despite any discomfort any of the veterans might feel, they would still go to war to protect these young men’s freedom. At least that’s how I like to think of them.

Because they are special. Because I love them.

Oh, they’re as quick to criticize the nation — and the wildly diverse people in it — as anyone, and from all political persuasions. They flew to protect that right.

But somehow their two-cents’ worth is more valuable than that, these men who flew B-24 Liberators, these pilots and ball gunners, navigators and tail gunners, these engineers and bombardiers, nose gunners and co-pilots, waist gunners and radiomen — and their ground crews.

They offered up their lives for good old-fashioned freedom, not some contemporary convolution of capitalism and petroleum wrapped in a flag. They offered up their lives for an ideal, wisely or naively, but sure of purpose. I’m not sure that ideal has survived. Perhaps it disappeared like so many of the aviators, amid fiery explosions, in the depths of an ocean, beneath desert sands.

But these men survived the war, only to be attacked by time. Time is now their enemy, not as brutal as flak, but just as lethal.

So they tell their stories as best they can, heads nodding to each other’s memories.

Stories of ironic snafus. “I’m glad to see Gordon over there. I didn’t know him, but I saved his life. If I’d known how to use that gun, he would have been dead.”

Stories of flying in formation, seven planes mustered. “The first burst hit us, and two airplanes just kind of went. Another burst hit us, and three more airplanes went. That left two of us. The other one, he was under me. And then there was another burst. It was like when someone takes a flash photo in your face. There was the burst, and when I could see, it was just pieces. He did not float away. — You remember how the tents were? They were in rows and the doors of the tents faced each other. He was the one across from me. — Well, in that instant, all ten guys, gone. This is a memorial. But, but I can’t remember his name.”

Stories of an ornery MP, the one who hassled them every damn time they came into town for R&R — and how he got his comeuppance. “They sent him to the front. I didn’t feel bad for him then, and I don’t feel bad for him now.”

Stories of departed loved ones. “Lost my wife on January the fifth of this year, and the last word she said was, ‘You always told me we would never live forever. I didn’t doubt you, but I didn’t think I’d be the one to go first.’” …

I sit in the airport lounge and I have a Scotch on the rocks to honor them. Not because I’m particularly fond of Scotch, but because I’m fond of them and that’s their drink. I watch the beautiful young men holding hands and hope they’ll never find themselves at war. And I realize in a burst of awareness that we second — and third — generations are not interlopers. We are the receptacles for our veterans’ memories. We are the force that will keep our Liberators alive. We are the bells that will toll for them.

I swirl my drink. Their scents waft around me. I catch a trace of Father.

Love,
K-B

Please join us for a special reading on Wednesday 09 November at 6 p.m. for a Salute to Veterans with Sue Diaz, author of Minefields of the Heart, and Gulf Wars veterans from her writing workshops. The reading also features open mic for poetry and prose. Contact K-B for more information: kbgressitt@gmail.com or 760-522-1064.

Crossposted at San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.

San Diego’s Pride Parade was Saturday 16 July, and its images are telling.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

There are a couple in every crowd.

But these folks were much nicer.

Our first openly gay active duty military contingent joined the parade — yippee!

God is still love.

The parade had a bevy of beauties.

And the Human Rights Campaign billowed.

These folks celebrated on a roll.

And this fellow enjoyed the simple pleasures.

Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays are lifesavers.

The Green Party was there — not sure about the Republican Party.*

Jim and Dale were still celebrating their big day — that’s Pride.

And LGBT seniors were still leading the way.

Some folks tried to promote hate.

But this fellow would have none of it.

And the crowd cheered!

Now, it’s on to equality!

Love,
K-B
* Note! Gloria Johnson reports that the Democrats were also there, as was the Unitarian Universalist Church.

Crossposted at the Ocean Beach Rag.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

You know that thing we used to have to do at the end of summer, the thing that whopped you upside the head with the brutal inevitability that vacation was over, that tar-bubble popping adventures and rhubarb-sucking loll-abouts were done, done and gone with the finality of a bee between your naked foot and the clover that enticed the insect to its death and you, to your hopping pain? You know, that “What I did for summer vacation” short essay assignment that taunted you from the dusty cool of the blackboard and picked at the mosquito bites oozing down your leg, making them itch all over again — as though defining your youthful joys would pack them away and yank from more distant springtime memories some mythically compliant learning mode?

Yep, that. I really hated that. Yet that’s what I wish I had to do right now. Being over and done with my summer vacation would be far preferable to what I’m actually doing right in the middle of it — studying families and gender and theater and social taboos.

What the hell was I thinking!

Well, what I was thinking was that it would be really cool to cram a cacaload of courses into a five-week intensive session. What I was not thinking about were the emotional repercussions of such an academic extravagance.

I was not thinking about our national descent into the ignominious status of having the highest poverty rates in the Western industrialized world, until I read a chapter from Sharon Hays’ Flat Broke With Children about a punitive welfare system designed to avoid making welfare payments; a system eager to drop families from its rolls and into economic oblivion when mothers are too sick to work or have chronically-ill or disabled family members to care for or they can’t keep jobs in a heartless economy; a system rich in self-righteous moralizing that calls denying aid to the impoverished success.

And now California will add to the rosters of the economically disappeared as mothers and children try to make sense of the 8-percent cut to their welfare-to-work checks, passed by the state legislature in last week’s budget bill. What do you suppose these mothers and children will do to fill the gap between the whopping $700 per month they used to receive and the new rate for a family of three — $640?

Neither was I thinking about the intimate pain of The Laramie Projec, until the play unfolded the linens of the town where Matthew Shepard was beaten and left in the darkness of homophobia to die; or the ambivalence of Matt’s fellow college student who played a gay man in Angels In America, yet mimicked the script of his church and parents that “Homosexuality is wrong”; or the 10-years-later perspective of the same young man, still ambivalent.

And now San Diego has a beating victim of its own, but this victim is homeless and gay, not a middle-class college student and gay. Will anyone write a play about Jason “Cowboy” Huggins, bashed in the head with a rock and not expected to live?

Nor was I thinking about wartime rape, until Lynn Nottage’s Ruined played unrelenting scenes of battling Congolese factions making war between women’s legs — with penises, sticks, gun barrels, bayonets, broken bottles…

And now, despite the United Nations’ 2008 resolution declaring rape a weapon of war, the ruination continues in the Democratic Republic of Congo — and the United States of America, where 3,158 incidents of sexual assault in the military were reported in 2010.

And I think I’ll stop there.

Perhaps the season’s joys can be salvaged. Maybe not. Maybe they shouldn’t be. But I could sure use a little break, a wee respite to suck sun-warmed sour from the neighbor’s purloined rhubarb or pop roadside tar bubbles in the summer’s shimmering heat.

Love,
K-B

Crossposted by the Ocean Beach Rag and San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Buried deep in the bowels of my memorabilia, I keep a newspaper clipping with a photo of Charlie Finnessey and me in all our pimply glory at our junior prom. The photo is black and white, because that was the only option back then. But I remember Charlie’s tuxedo. It was baby-blue polyester, with clavicle-consuming lapels. It swamped his gangly frame, and he had topped it with one of those huge, mid-1970s bowties now donned only by clowns and thrift store aficionados.

Nonetheless, the blue tux served as a nice complement to my turquoise-and-blue Indian print, 100-percent cotton, hit-the-top-of-your-hiking-boots length dress. No scooped-back, breast-enhancing misogynistic fashions for my gang and me. We were iconoclasts. We questioned authority every chance we got. We occasionally got high. We ridiculed the football team and cheerleaders. We wrote darkly naval-contemplative poetry. We took art and music and theater. We didn’t hold back. We were free, man, free!

Or we were weirdos, if you were on the football or cheerleading teams. But they were still spiking their sodas at pre-prom parties, and we arts-and-music geeks were the only ones in the gym when the newspaper photographer arrived.

Thirty-six years later, I easily return to the moment of opening the next day’s paper and finding the photo of Charlie and me representing the West Morris Central High School junior prom. It was a stellar moment for all arts geeks everywhere, and it was one of the most deeply satisfying moments in my entire half-assed high school career.

What made it so satisfying was that Charlie was gay, a fact that, oddly, revealed how absolutely lacking in freedom we actually were — because we never talked about it, not once. We never talked about the tight little tushies on the jocks or the fabulous singer in the sophomore class for whom Charlie and I surely both lusted. We never discussed how Charlie might come out to his parents, as we did with my daughter’s friends. Charlie wasn’t even out to us!

But we knew. Some of us knew, maybe all of us. I wondered if Charlie knew that. But each of us remained in the dark about the others, because we also knew the unspoken rules, and for all our iconoclastic posing, we honored them.

Sadly, as fond as we were of each other and despite our prom date, I never got to know Charlie, not really; nor he, me. We were too busy dancing around the truth, determined not to engage it — to Charlie’s detriment and to mine. I can be a lot of fun, but how brutally lonely he must have been.

After high school, we danced off to distinct pursuits. Charlie delved into work and community theater, went to Texas for a while. I left town, and then another and another, hopscotching my way to California.

And as I witnessed the evolution of attitude and acceptance, the sometimes painful revelation of intimacies and rejections, the slow acquisition of rights and respect, I often thought of Charlie. With the advent of Google, I looked for him now and then, when a memory managed to speak his name, when he came up in retrospective conversation.

Then on Saturday, when the Senate voted to repeal the military Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy — 65 to 31 — I thought of Charlie again.

Back in high school, we did not need the legislature to hinder our relationships. Prejudice and precedent and cliques worked just fine. But oh, how fabulous it would have been if we could have repealed that prejudice, if we could have let the precedent sunset, if Charlie and I could have been lifelong intimates, short though that would have been, for I searched for him one more time, and I found him. Charlie died in Florida on December 28, 1995.

I searched further and learned that he had embraced himself, of course, and found a partner, sold antiques, had a fondness for gambling cruises, contracted AIDS, was as happy as anyone might be. And, as a friend told me, up until the end “he was the same old Charlie — wide open.”

Wide open, except for that critical part of him that he felt compelled to mute in his youth.

Today, I ache for all the Charlies who could not be themselves at school or in the military or at work or within their faiths or among their families. The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell places them one step closer to freedom, and I am grateful for us all — as I mourn that Charlie missed it.

Love,
K-B

Click here to sign a letter thanking those Senators who voted to repeal DADT.

Crossposted at The Progressive Post and San Diego Gay and Lesbian News.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Sometimes, if we are lucky, a gentle voice emerges from the monotonous babble to speak a truth, small or large, obvious or not. And as the political left and right wage mind-numbing word wars over U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, author Sue Diaz’ gentle voice rises above the fray and begs our attention — not with glennbeckian outrage, not with self-righteous bombast, not with armchair general postulating, but with the tender and sorrowfully sane tale she tells in Minefields of the Heart: a Mother’s Stories of a Son at War.

A collection of wartime essays, a mother and son memoir, a letter full of love and compassion, Minefields of the Heart is the result of Diaz’s unexpected march to war when her kind and meandering son, Roman, enlisted in the Army in 2002 and was subsequently deployed to Iraq in 2003. Indeed, despite Diaz’ opposition to the Iraq War, Roman’s deliberate decision to serve put mother and son on an irreversible path that damaged and enlightened them both. It was a path from which Diaz struggled to understand and support her son, as Roman replaced his youth with the mantle of a warrior, set to kill or be killed

As Diaz writes, when a son or daughter, a husband or wife, a brother or sister goes to war, their loved ones go with them.

“Every time an insurgent bomb blows apart a Humvee or a squad on foot patrol, the shock waves from the blast reverberate in small towns like Wheeler, Texas, and big cities like San Diego. A young private takes a bullet; back at home his father’s heart bleeds. A soldier loses a leg; his wife struggles in the days that follow to simply keep putting one foot in front of the other. A sergeant’s eardrum is perforated; his mother hears the explosion in her dreams, time and time again. Truth is, the casualties of war go far beyond the numbers from the Pentagon. Love leaves us no choice. … ‘We are there too, Sergeant Diaz. We are there, too.’”

At times, Diaz presents a disheartening recitation of the slow wearing away of morale of Roman’s unit, a unit caught in the horror of a war crime in the Triangle of Death south of Baghdad. Or she shares Roman’s words sent home electronically:

“I don’t know how many times we’ve been on raids, and we’ll be searching the house. One person pulling security on the men of the house, and one on the women and children. They’ll offer to make us tea, or ask for a picture (if they see a camera), and for a while we chill out in their house and play with the kids. It’s especially weird if we meet with resistance on the way in. I always bring candy in my pockets and bullets in my chamber.”

At other times, her imagination creates a sweet moment following the death of a comrade:

“‘Horton would have wanted you to have these,’ I hear the squad leader say as he hands a box of Marlboros to a private notorious for bumming smokes.”

And at yet others, she recounts the conflicted hope inherent in survival, the homecoming of one soldier, her soldier, shoulder-to-shoulder with the millions of others from wars past:

“‘Roman,’ I breathed.

“‘Mom,’ he answered.

“That was all.

“That was everything.”

Diaz’ book is not a grand or passionate characterization of a controversial war; it is so much more. Minefields of the Heart is wondrous and eloquent in its intimacy, in its simplicity, in the unquestionable stories of a mother and son entwined in a war that will be debated for generations.

Diaz said of Roman in a recent phone call:

“He’s doing well now. He’s in school. … He’s a full time student. He’s married. All things considered — considering the hell he’s been through — he’s doing well. But life is harder because of his experience. … War is a difficult thing, it’s a hellish thing, and it should not be entered into lightly, ever. It affects people not only in combat, but on the home front, the ripple effect. It’s not just a handful of people in a place far away; it really reaches all of us. I hope people will come to have a larger understanding of war’s impact on not just one soldier and his family, but on all of us — as a country. … It was quite something to live through. It was quite something to write about, and, now, I think it’s good to have the book finished and out there.”

Sometimes we are lucky. Because, in the wake of reading the book, the need to hear more of Roman, to hear his mother’s voice just a little more, the need to know that they continue to survive the war, to live and love, serves as the most compelling truth of Diaz’ book: as there is hope for her son, so is there hope for the nation.

Author’s website: www.suediaz.com
Publisher: Potomac Books 2010
Hardcover price: $17.96

Crossposted at the North County Times.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

In September 1995, they soared into Dayton, Ohio, from all points of the compass: from bucolic calm and frenetic cities, from sedentary retirement and the flush of newfound love. They were seventy or eighty veterans of the World War II Army Air Corps’ 484th Bomb Group, 49th Wing, 15th Air Force. No measly designation for these men, who reunited to pay annual homage to themselves and the war they fought for the world from their homely base at the Torretta Airfield near Cerignola, Italy.

Perhaps a motley crew, yet heroes since their youth, back then, in Dayton, they were in various stages of oldth, some sprightly, some hobbled by age and infirmity; some accompanied by wives, some represented by widows. All were ready to drink to their own and the world’s past, to boogie to the 1940s brass and reed voices of Joe Aceto and His Big Band, to make mirth of their foreshortened futures.

Ostensibly, they gathered to erect a memorial of black granite and brass: an investment in eternity, an edifice more solid than the fickle flesh bestowed them.

But in truth, they came to reclaim the intimacy that war had given them, an intimacy born in dark and frigid tents; in makeshift games of baseball; in pickup quartets of faithful, hopeful song; in the innovation of desperate necessity; in fleeting lust and, sometimes, life. Theirs was the camaraderie of those who have known the brutality, the fearful allure, the graphic imagery of war. An intimacy that peace took from them. Yet, as they reminisced, they began to regain it, recounting common moments that ultimately defined the men they would become after their fifty bombing missions were complete.

Back then, in Dayton, they juxtaposed stories of the war with tales of the day, merging black and white with brilliant color — the unique vision of a generation slowly fading. The last generation to know without question the righteousness of going to war for a just and worthy cause.

They neglected their chicken dinners, too engaged in one another to take time to chew.

The gunner, who fifty years before had served his nation so well, rhapsodized over strange and fantastic conspiracies his government was purportedly perpetrating. And while he was at it, he was certain that the same had gone on during the war, for sure.

Others spoke of Hungarian girls, orphans of the war, who had waved from their pockmarked window ledges to two downed airmen awaiting return to their Italian base.

“Come up,” the girls had said. “Tell us of America.”

On a piano that couldn’t carry a tune and with the meager utensils of a war refugee’s kitchen, the soldiers had found the chords and rhythm of Captain Glenn Miller, the Dorsey brothers, Les Brown. And later, when the more innocent had been plied with his first French kiss, he had stammered to the girl, “We don’t do that where I come from!”

It could have been the war cry of his squadron.

One reunion couple, retired from the short-reined demands of a Lutheran congregation, told of traveling a world the minister had known as his battlefield. On maps once sectioned into quadrants and marked with bomb targets and flak batteries, they plotted routes to beautiful vistas and quaint villages where the scars of war had been covered by the detritus of two more generations.

Some vets spoke of the Italians, who embraced the airmen, loving the romantic heroes as only the Italians could, teaching them their language. They used B-24 Liberators as blackboards, imparting to the bombers — crew and bird alike — the critical phrases of communication: Buon giorno. Good day. Come sta? How are you? Quanto casta? How much? And, most important to the young warriors: Volete venire a passeggio con me? Will you take a walk with me?

Back then, in Dayton, the airmen had pooled their funds — from slight and abundant sources — to send scholarships to the descendants of their Italian hosts, the grandchildren of the Torretta Airfield.

The grateful students wrote, “Our grandfathers remember what you did for them during the war and they are very proud of having known such courageous and generous men. Loyalty, courage, friendship: This is the message we get from you, and we want to continue.”

But back then, in Dayton, the bombardier turned actuary gave the 484th only another eight years or so to reconnect with one another, to share their stories, to recapture their youth, to enjoy the freedoms for which they flew so bravely.

No matter: He was wrong. The 484th’s numbers did dwindle, but they defied his gloomy projection.

Now, it is September 2010, a full fifteen years since Dayton, and seventeen veterans of the World War II Army Air Corps’ 484th Bomb Group, 49th Wing, 15th Air Force, are reunited in Houston, Texas.

Now, too precious to be motley, too extraordinary for their ordinary lives, these heroes have progressed further into their oldth. A few remain sprightly, but most are a bit more hobbled by age; a few more widows represent them; some bear second and third generations. And all are ready to drink to their own and the world’s past, to boogie to the digital sounds of DJ Ben Avery, himself, a Vietnam veteran, who brought home a Purple Heart and appreciation for the comforts of music.

Now, the airmen — having no more memorials to erect, no more plaques to remind the future that they existed — come knowingly to be together, to lend poignant voice to quiet pieces of themselves, to imprint their past on three generations of progeny, to prove they indeed survived the memories that stay with them, that are always with them.

They nibble their dinners and march tentatively into their tales.

A pilot talks of flying in formation and watching the plane barely to the left and below him disintegrate with the crew aboard. Just like that. Even now, sixty-six years later, he remembers the horrible wonder of it.

“I’m a jack of all trades,” says another, “and a master of none. Except flying an airplane. And I can’t do that anymore.”

They are begrudgingly distracted by “Say whats?” by dessert, by politics.

“Obama has ruined the country,” says one.

“Hey, he’s our commander-in-chief!” says another.

Which president has most abused his power, a grandson wonders.

“George W. Bush?” suggests one.

“LBJ,” says another without missing a beat. No matter that Texas is his host.

A gunner tells of a hospital nurse, tending to his wife just a few years ago. A Hungarian child of the war, she asked if he had stories of her battlefield, and she recounted her own — of awaking from a blast to find the woman whose hand she held was dead.

“The poor, helpless soul. Just ten or twelve then,” he says. “I created hell for her. I felt so bad, all I could do was hug her. All I could do was hug her.”

And the conversation curves back toward comfort, to things new and intriguing, to computers and space shuttles, Blackberries and that texting thing young people are doing.

“The iPad, my son got one,” says the engineer. “That’s an interesting device, but, no, I don’t have one.”

Some of them have taken to email. Others don’t bother. Why should they? That’s not the sort of thing that would have kept them alive over Germany or Austria, Hungary or Romania, Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, France or Italy. It took something more than technology. …

After the final meal, after a last tale or two, after naming those long and newly departed, they commit to one more reunion, at least one more — to again defy the actuary’s projection.

Then they head for home. Embraced in one another’s hearts. Some determinedly on their own. Some in the tow of their offspring. All soaring, nonetheless, all soaring.

And it is a beautiful day to be in the air.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Note: This is an update of a column originally published by the San Diego North County Times on September 25, 1995.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Many moons ago, I was the token feminist columnist for what was essentially a libertarian newspaper, and the boys were pretty accommodating. They let me serve on their editorial board, write their editorials, even edit their editorial page — sans title, of course, because I was, after all, a damn liberal. And a damn willful girl. Their fessing up to the job I was doing — despite its being only until they could find another nice boy who’d work for bad coffee and book review copies (Smoking, Drinking & Screwing was one of my favorite acquisitions) — wouldn’t have been good for the paper’s conservative image or for all the publisher’s boy-centric golf outings and cocktail hours in local sports team owners’ boxes.

Regardless, I had a hell of a good time: Some readers loved me, some hated me, some wanted me dead. Most interesting, though, of all the reactions I received was the rumor that wended its way to the newsroom one sizzling summer day as I was bemoaning a divorce — that I had left a “perfectly good little husband” to become a lesbian.

Not the stuff of front page news, but this tidbit did explain a lot at the time: the men who scurried away from my provocative path; the puffy-sleeved, calico-covered Bible-toting women who shrinkingly avoided eye contact, apparently for fear of exposure to the abject horror of pure female sexuality.

Nonetheless, I considered that homosexuality might become me, and I wrote about the rumor in a column, rolling this new persona around my mind’s tongue and relishing the unique flavors it might lend my life.

No longer would my social flirtations be perceived as platonic banter with the strong women who intrigued me. Instead, they would be known as the front they were for my lust for female flesh. I could graduate from the Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays contingent to join the Dykes on Bikes at the next Gay Pride Parade.

I wrote of the supposed need to pin a warning to my chest when visiting my daughter’s elementary school — Mind Your Children — because hearsay dictated my primary purpose in life would be to convert them all to the homosexual lifestyle, my own daughter, the first protégé on my list.

Of course those readers who had previously informed me of the vigils they held, praying to their loving God to forgive me the error of my liberal ways and redirect me to a heavenly path, would instead shun me for the abomination I surely had become in the eyes of that very same God. (Amazing how a little shift in orientation can affect the Almighty. Kind of fickle for a deity though, eh?)

Despite my pending condemnation to Hell’s fires for the sexually perverse, this new role did bear with it some unexpected pleasures, not the least of which was the power to cast fear in the hearts of entrenched conservative homophobes. I anticipated the delicious moment when I would lean in just a little too close to tell my tight-sphinctered Assemblymember that I thought I might like to put my lips on women’s lips, if you know what I mean. Thank you for that image, Sweet Baby Jeeeesus!

All told, I was pleased with the possibilities this intended slur brought me, although I refused to declare affiliation with any orientation. Still, I embraced the suggestion proudly and lovingly — along with all the guys and gals it included as targets of its assault. Because, as my mother taught me, it’s better to be looked over than overlooked — no matter if it’s with loathing. But even more interesting than the rumor itself was that the topic of my sexual orientation didn’t end there, oh no.

It’s human nature, I suppose. People hear what they want to hear, read what they want to read, and when the writer offers ambiguity — for the sake of a lesson, in hope of enlightenment emerging from confusion — many a reader is adamant in his or her certainty that a thing is, in fact, so or not so.

And, so, it turns out there were those who read my column and celebrated my coming out as though that made me more of a sister to them. There were those who demanded clarification of my ambiguity, praying for affirmation of the worst so they could put stamps on their appropriately outraged letters to the editor. And there were those who jumped right in and reviled me for revealing such a despicable, profane intimacy in a “family” newspaper, from which, by the way, I should be promptly fired — for being openly gay.

It was quite an array of interpretations, yet I was adamant that one’s sexual orientation didn’t matter, at least until foreplay reared its head. But lo those many moons ago, the message that reverberated back to me was that it still did: They asked, I refused to tell, and they were pissed. They wanted to know, straights and gays alike. It was a good lesson, for me at least.

Today, the reaction would likely be different; actually, I suspect the rumor would never get started. And that’s progress, albeit inadequate progress, because still we allow sexual orientation to define and divide us, and I wonder when we will live in a world in which parents of gays and lesbians do not have to group together for support or offer that support to young people whose own parents have rejected them. I wonder when we will live in a world where mothers and fathers are regarded for their ability to nurture, no matter their sexuality. A world where homosexuals approach the altar just as straight couples, still gnashing their teeth over seating charts and with legal marriage licenses in figurative hand. A world where politicians accept and salute the gays in our military — serving with honor, distinction and dedication — and acknowledge they have the right to do so honestly.

As for me, though, I’m still not telling — and I won’t until we’ve learned to stop asking. I’m willful like that.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Writers

Want to submit your work to Excuse Me, I’m Writing for the sheer joy of having an audience? Email your original fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry — 2,000 words maximum — in an MS Word document or in RTF to kbgressitt@gmail.com. If we publish your work, you hold all rights, including bragging.

The Wisdom of Staff Officers

Recently resurrected by the local USMC humor circuit. … Not that Marines understand humor.

At this Command, we have written in large, black letters: DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) on the back of our security badges.     – MAJ (CENTCOM)

“Leaning forward” is really just the first phase of “falling on your ass.”     – MARINE COL (MARFOREUR)

I am so far down the food chain that I’ve got plankton bites on my butt.     – LTC (ARCENT)

None of us is as dumb as all of us.     – Excerpted from a brief (EUCOM)

We’re from the nuke shop, sir. We’re the crazy aunt in the closet that nobody likes to talk about.     – LTC (EUCOM)

Things are looking up for us here. In fact, Papua-New Guinea is thinking of offering two platoons: one of Infantry (headhunters) and one of engineers (hut builders). They want to eat any Iraqis they kill. We’ve got no issues with that, but State is being anal about it.      – LTC (JS) on OIF coalition building

The chance of success in these talks is the same as the number of R’s in “fat chance.”      – GS-15 (SHAPE)

His knowledge on that topic is only power point deep.     – MAJ (JS)

Ya’ll know, in this Command, if the world were supposed to end tomorrow, the sh** would still happen behind schedule.      – CWO4 (EUCOM)

We are condemned men who are chained and will row in place until we rot.     – LTC (CENTCOM)

Right now we’re pretty much the ham in a bad ham sandwich.     – GO/FO (EUCOM)

If we wait until the last minute to do it, it’ll only take a minute.     – MAJ (EUCOM)

The only reason that anything ever gets done is because there are pockets of competence in every command. The key is to find them … and then exploit the hell out of ‘em.     – CDR (CENTCOM)

I may be slow, but I do poor work.     – MAJ (USAREUR)

Cynicism is the smoke that rises from the ashes of burned out dreams.     – MAJ (CENTCOM)

We are the reason that Rumsfeld hates us.     – LTC (EUCOM)

Working with Hungary is like watching a bad comedy set on auto

repeat.     – LCDR (EUCOM)

I finally figured out that when a Turkish officer tells you, It’s no

problem, he means, for him.     – MAJ (EUCOM)

Never in the history of the US Armed Forces have so many done so much for so few.     – MAJ on the Free Iraqi Forces (FIF) Training Program

Our days are spent trying to get some poor, unsuspecting third world country to pony up to spending a year in a sweltering desert, full of pissed off Arabs who would rather shave the back of their legs with a cheese grater than submit to foreign occupation by a country for whom they have nothing but contempt.     – LTC (JS)

I guess the next thing they’ll ask for is 300 US citizens with Hungarian last names to send to Iraq.     – MAJ (JS) on Phase IV of Iraqi coalition building

Between us girls, would it help to clarify the issue if you knew that Hungary is land-locked?     – CDR to MAJ (EUCOM) on why a deployment from Hungary is likely to proceed by air vice sea

I’ll be right back. I have to go pound my nuts flat.     – LTC (EUCOM)

I guess this is the wrong power cord for the computer, huh?     – LTC USMC

(EUCOM) after the smoke cleared from plugging his 110V computer into a

220V outlet

OK, this is too stupid for words.     – LTC (JS)

When you get right up to the line that you’re not supposed to cross, the only person in front of you will be me!     – CDR (CENTCOM) on political correctness in the military

There’s nothing wrong with crossing that line a little bit, it’s jumping over it buck naked that will probably get you in trouble.     – LTC (EUCOM) responding to the above

Never pet a burning dog.     – LTC

Ah, the joys of Paris: a unique chance to swill warm wine and be mesmerized by the dank ambrosia of unkempt armpits.     – LCDR (NAVEUR)

We are now past the good idea cutoff point.     – MAJ (JS)

Nobody ever said you had to be smart to make 0-6.     – COL (EUCOM)

I seem to be rapidly approaching the apex of my mediocre career.     – MAJ (JS)

It’s not a lot of work unless you have to do it.     – LTC (EUCOM)

Creating smoking holes (with bombs) gives our lives meaning and enhances our manliness.     – LTC (EUCOM)

Once you accept that a dog is a dog, you can’t get upset when it barks.     – LTC (USSOCOM)

That guy just won’t take “yes” for an answer.     – MAJ (EUCOM)

Let’s just call Lessons Learned what they really are: institutionalized scab picking.     – LTGEN (9th AF)

I can describe what it feels like being a Staff Officer in two words: distilled pain.     – CDR (NAVEUR)

When all else fails, simply revel in the absurdity of it all.     – LCDR (CENTCOM)

Fallbrook marital relations

To: Sgt. Goodmarine
From: Steve Husband
CC: K-B Gressitt

Sgt Goodmarine,

I left my check for the Marine Corps Birthday Ball with the LtCol.

I would like a prime rib meal; and my wife would like a veg meal.

My wife’s name is K-B Gressitt — I know — the feminist thing.

Thanks for taking care of us. We’ll see you at the ball. SF, Steve

From: K-B Gressitt
To: Steve Husband

Ah, that commentary were unnecessary.

Love, K-B

At the Café des Artistes

Patron 1: I was in charge of six toilets at OCS, at Quantico (Marine Corps Officer Candidate School).
Patron 2: Busy toothbrush, huh?
Patron 1: Hey, I took care of them. I named them!

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

We’re tootling down the 15 Freeway to Coronado, my husband and I, and I’m subjecting him once again to public radio. It goes something like this:

A reporter announces that President Obama has declared the H1N1 influenza outbreak a national emergency, which should improve treatment and prevention of the flu.

Me: Finally!

He: Hmmm.

Me: I wrote about that months ago — caught flak for being a Biden.

He: Hmmm?

Me: For over-reacting. Apparently, the VP and I were fear mongering — in contrast to stating the obvious, which the president has now done.

He: Hmmm.

Then there’s a report on a Saudi female journalist who was sentenced to 60 lashes for her involvement in a Lebanese TV show, “Bold Red Line.” The show featured men discussing their sex lives, a taboo in Saudi Arabia. One of the men was sentenced to five years and 1,000 lashes; two others received two years and 300 lashes each.

Me: Saudi Arabia, now there’s a great ally for the United States, because we abhor cruel and unusual punishment — except when we don’t like the culprit.

He: Hmmm.

Me: Or when the culprit’s Muslim.

He: Hmmm.

Me: Or African-American.

He: Hmmm.

Me: This is nuts!

He: Hmmm!

We listen to a story about the search for Everett Ruess, a beloved 20-year-old poet wanderer who disappeared in 1934. Earlier this year, his remains were erroneously reported as having been discovered — based on inaccurate DNA testing.

Me: Bad DNA testing, jeez! That’ll show up on CSI.

He: Hmmm.

Me: And in plenty of appeals courts. Yet another hit on the taxpayers.

He: Hmmm.

As we approach our destination, we listen to one last story. It’s about the 350.org International Day of Climate Action events that are occurring around the world this weekend. They are intended to remind folks about climate change and the need to work together to decrease the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to 350 parts per million (ppm).

According to the story, though, public interest in climate change is shrinking a lot faster than the carbon dioxide ppm. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found a “very sharp drop” since April 2008 in the percentage of Americans who believe there is “solid evidence the world is warming.”

Me: No evidence? What additional evidence does the public need? How many more polar bears have to starve to death for lack of habitat before they get it? How many more times do scientists have to report increasing temperatures and shrinking glaciers? Can’t they understand it doesn’t have to happen in their backyards to make it real?

He: Hmmm.

Me: Are you listening to me?

He: Turn right on Orange and left on First. Then show your ID at the sentry gate.

We’re there, and I see the telltale double take when the Navy sentries notice the “Don’t Be Gaycist” sticker on my windshield. Then we pull into a parking lot at Naval Air Station North Island, for the commissioning of the USS Makin Island LHD 8, the Navy’s newest amphibious assault ship.

A few thousand of us make our way to the shuttles or stumble over crane tracks, and find our color-coded seating sections. Along the way, we stop to shake hands with all the uniforms my husband knows, but we make it to our seats without my doing anything else overtly liberal.

But then I flip through the program. The cover image appears to be a Photoshopped model ship imposed on a crested sea stock photo. Even the military is cutting costs, which is both reassuring and disconcerting. The ship’s motto, “Gung Ho,” is emblazoned across the image — working together, it means. Inside, color photographs of senior military and government leadership smile at us formidably, starting with the Commander in Chief, President Barack Obama.

Me: Look, Honey. They’re all men. President Obama’s a man. And then there’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a man. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, another man. Naval Operations Chief Admiral Gary Roughead, a man. General James Conway, Commandant of the Marines Corps, definitely a man. Commander, Fleet Forces Command Admiral John Harvey Jr., a man. Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet Admiral Robert Willard, a man. And look, keep turning the pages and it’s man, man, man, man, man, man, idiot actor man — our governor — man, man, man. Where are the women in senior leadership?

He: Hmmm?

Me: The women, where are the women?

He: Hmmm.

The ceremony starts, saving him, and the speechifying begins, although most of the folks keep it thoughtfully short. Congresswoman Susan Davis (D-San Diego) offers a quickie, touting the jobs the newly commissioned ship has brought to San Diego and enthusiastically welcoming the Navy’s first green ship, with it’s way-cool hybrid electric-drive propulsion system.

Me: The Navy invested $2.5 billion in a hybrid amphibious assault ship? That’s pretty damn Gung Ho! What more evidence of global warning could the public possibly need?

He: Hmmm?

The audio system fails, so the band kicks in, to calm the restless natives. And, at last, the flag is raised aboard the ship.

Me: Good marching band, Honey.

He: Yes, that’s the Marine Drum and Bugle Corps. They’re out of D.C., called The Commandant’s Own. There’s none better.

Me: Hmmm.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Survey results chart courtesy of Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

USS Makin Island photos by Kit-Bacon Gressitt.