His Mama Said Okay

His mama said it’s okay that I put this photo of Jackson in this particular blog post. 

Bless her for not minding that the kid shill for his granddaddy’s new book. I think it’s the single raised eyebrow and the dark solemn eyes.  Even if he's too young to read it, the boy just knows this is a fine story. After all, there is a cannon on the cover.

He’s holding the proof copy of my just-finished second book in the Captain McBee trilogy.  This one takes the war, Faith and John’s dicey romance, and the complexities of Levi’s servitude, through 1863, including the game-changer battle at Gettysburg. 

The story also sweeps in a couple of historical figures, Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederacy’s enigmatic Secretary of State, and Captain Champ Ferguson, a murderous stinker who led a band of partisan rangers on the Tennessee-Kentucky border.

Jumping with a purpose: For ten years now, during one weekend in October, I’ve stood by the tombstone of a different Confederate veteran buried in our city cemetery and as each man's spirit, given a first-person account of his life, including his war story. It’s called “Speaking With the Dead,” and it’s a popular fund-raising event put on by our county historical commission. 

Here’s a photo of me from a couple of spirits back when I was telling how my guy searched for buried barrels of whiskey while in Louisiana. 

He was among a group of thirsty Texas soldiers who used their musket ramrods to probe the ground in the barn of a guy known to distill spirits. They soon “knocked on wood.” They dug up the barrels and replanted them in their camp where the creative soldiers took turns during the night laying on the ground and sipping the distilled spirits through cut hollow reeds. Amazing what young soldiers remembered when they got home and talked about the war.

Earlier this week, I was asked to help promote the tour by giving one of the spirit speeches from years past to a group of about thirty local ladies at the library.

During the Q and A session after the program, a writer friend in the audience mentioned that I have a new book, Redeeming Honor. Then another lady asked the title of the first book in the trilogy. 

I had a very embarrassing senior moment when the word “Tangled” in Tangled Honor hid behind a big rock somewhere in my brain. The best I could do was “Something” Honor, until my friend remembered and shouted out “Tangled!”  Not the best sales pitch I’ve ever made, for sure.

Maybe Jackson will do better than his granddad. Here’s the link to the Amazon page where Redeeming Honor and my other two Civil War novels can be bought. 

http://www.amazon.com/Redeeming-Honor-1863-Philip-McBride-ebook/dp/B0150ECJJA

I do hope you’ll consider buying a paperback copy or the Kindle ebook version. Thanks.

Indisputable Honor and Questionable Honor

I chose the short 5-letter term “honor” as the common denominator in the titles of all three of my Captain McBee novels. From what I’ve read, all wars seethe with honor, as brave soldiers cast aside actions that would preserve their lives, to instead do things that hasten their deaths.

 Last Friday was 9-11, America’s 21^st century Pearl Harbor. Flags flew at half-mast all over the country. On this fourteenth anniversary, I only read one article about the day, but it was a story of absolutely indisputable honor. 

 The short version: Like Pearl Harbor, our military was caught with our pants down on 9-11. There were NO Air Force jets armed and ready to take off from any air field around Washington, DC. to defend our national capital from a surprise air attack. We had lots of radar, but no planes on the runaway, "locked and loaded," ready for a fast take-off to meet an unexpected threat.

 There were two F-16’s with fuel to fly, but with no ammunition or missiles loaded. That would take time, and word came in that a fourth high-jacked jet airliner was headed towards Washington. The pilots of the two F-16’s already knew of the attacks on the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon.

 These two unarmed jet fighters would be our only on-the-spot first-responders. An Air Force National Guard colonel and a young Lieutenant who were the pilots of the two F-16’s quickly put on their flying gear. Before they climbed into their respective jets, knowing their planes' only weapons were the planes themselves, the colonel said to the lieutenant, “I’ll take the cockpit.” She replied, “I’ll take the tail.” 

 That’s it. They took off with the indisputably honorable intent to kamikaze into a jet airliner full of innocents to prevent it from crashing into a target in Washington, DC.

 I hope you caught that I wrote that the lieutenant pilot was a “she.” A petite young blonde in her early twenties fresh out of Air Force flight school, one of America's first generation of female fighter pilots, coolly telling her CO, “I got the tail.”

 To the credit of the American spirit and in their own act of indisputable honor, the civilian passengers on the last high-jacked plane solved their own problem, hastening their own deaths by doing so, by crashing the plane into the Pennsylvania countryside. The lieutenant and colonel didn’t have to give what President Lincoln dubbed in his Gettysburg address, “their last full measure” of honor. A handful of other patriots beat them to it. 

 It would be nice to think that all soldiers acted with indisputable honor, but we're all human, so that doesn't always happen. To offset the valor of the two F-16 pilots and the passengers of the fourth airliner on 9-11, here’s a Civil War story I first read this past weekend.

Below is a report of an interview printed in the Houston Post newspaper in 1909, forty-seven years after the Second Battle of Manassas,  which was fought just outside Washington, DC. My thanks to Joe Owen for posting a piece of the article  on Facebook, then sending me the a transcript of the entire thing.

 Private Lawrence Daffan (1845-1907) of the Fourth Texas Infantry was interviewed by his daughter Katie Daffan some 40 years after the battle of Second Manassas (Bull Run) that was fought on August 30, 1862.

 She prefaces her record of the interview with this paragraph, which as a Civil War addict and novelist always looking for the personal perspective, makes me drool wishing I could have been there.

 “I have heard my father and his comrades, in our home, many times renew the record of Hood’s Texas brigade, when animated, spirited discussions would ensue.  Though each was present, in the flesh, upon the battlefield, each an ardent participant, there were sometimes as many opinions as there were voices.”

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in that home during one of those discussions among the veterans.

 Here’s an excerpt of Lawrence Daffan’s recollections of the great battle which he experienced as a 17-year-old teenage private.

 "We rallied at Young’s branch. I looked up the hill which we had descended and the hill was red with uniforms of the Zouaves. They were from New York.

We ascended the hill out of Young’s branch, charged a battery of six guns, supported by a line of Pennsylvania infantry. This battery was near enough to use on us grape shot and canister.

 As we came near to it one of the guns was pointed directly at my company and lanyard strung. Our captain commanded company G to right and left oblique from it. I was on the right and with a few others went into Company H. Company H received a load of canister which killed four or five men.

I was immediately with Lieutenants Jones and Ransom of that company who were both killed right at my feet. I stepped over both of them. Capt Hunter, now living, was also shot down at that time. Most of the company were my schoolmates.

This last shot threw smoke and dust all over me, and the shot whizzed on both sides of me. Lieutenant Jones was shot in the head and feet, but I was not touched. When the smoke cleared away we had their guns, and they were so hot I couldn’t bear my hands on them. I then fired one shot at this retreating infantry which the rest of the brigade had been engaged with.

This wound up that day’s engagement for us, except the Fifth Texas. As their regiment and their colors were carried about five miles after the retreating enemy.”

 Sounds pretty brave and honorable, doesn’t it. But…

 Private Daffan flat out said that his captain saw just one cannon aimed right at his company and they were close enough for the cannon to be firing the highly dreaded grapeshot or canister -- both being cannon-sized loads of buckshot or golf ball-sized steel balls. Extremely deadly and greatly feared by infantry on the attack.

 So the company captain ordered his men to march at a diagonal (oblique) which would put his men behind the soldiers in the companies to either side of his company. He made the order for his men to essentially use the soldiers in the companies marching next to his in the regiment’s battleline as human shields. He could have had his company lie down or kneel to lessen the size of his men as targets, or he could have just ignored the deadly incoming cannon fire.

 Daffan went on to tell his daughter that five men in the company that shielded him died from the single cannon blast, including two lieutenants, who would have been in the rear of their company formation to keep faltering men going forward, but in front of Daffan, since he says he stepped over their bodies.

 In my way of thinking the unnamed captain of Company G hardly chose an honorable action for his men. Instead, he reeacted to the threat with very questionable honor. Quite a contrast to the 9-11 pilots.

In fact, if the commanders of the companies next to Co. G were aware of what happened, I’m surprised the Co. G captain was not called out to a duel or maybe even a court-marshal for the order he gave his men to move behind the companies to either side of them.Not all soldiers are heroes, not all officers give honorable commands in the heat of battle. Not all patriots wear military uniforms, as the firemen and EMS first responders at the Twin Towers demonstrated. Many patriots were no uniform at all, as the passengers on the fourth high-jacked airliner showed the world. Yet, we are indeed all God’s children, usually doing the best we can.  And on this Monday morning a few days past the anniversary of the tragedies and sacrifices of 9-11, it’s still a good day to say, “God Bless America.”

 

She had me at "Can I have a hug?"

I wrote this post three weeks ago and couldn’t decide if it was too personal or too whiny to publish on my blog. The scale tipped when our pastor preached about the boundaries. When I was young, compartmentalizing the different facets of my life and setting boundaries wasn’t all that hard. I kept work stuff at work, family stuff at home. As an educator, tough love was the rule of the day. Thirty years later, things have blurred, and I think this post is about how aging tends to muddle up boundaries.  Here it is:

I’m a grandfather, a recent change of status which I admit I’ve been unabashedly milking in my blog posts. And I’m a southern man who’s mastered the art of the a-sexual side-hug. It’s a handy tool for one’s social toolkit, at least in my part of the country, where hugs often substitute for handshakes.

I wrote a blog post a couple of months ago about my volunteer work with the local Salvation Army chapter-“service unit” it’s called officially. In a nutshell, we give away locally donated money to local folks who are in need of financial assistance to pay their bills. It’s more complicated than that, but not too much.

For the past several years, I’ve been one of the volunteers who staff our Salvation Army “office hours” each month. It’s a time when anyone can walk in off the street and ask for $100 to help with their basic everyday needs. Needs like paying their electric bill or rent, buying food, gas, or baby supplies.  We have some practical safeguards to prevent abuse and over-dependency on our charity. Nonetheless, I often hold my proverbial nose as I write an assistance check for some of our “regulars” who in their own way game our system.

But don’t we all game our personal finances as much as our integrity and the hidden rules we live by allow for? So I try to cut people some slack.

Last week, a young woman wearing a McDonald’s employee’s uniform walked in. It was 11:15 and her first words were that her boss told her to be back by noon. She was new to the job. Like many first-timers she apologized for seeking financial assistance, and like some folks, before she had been seated at the table for more than a few seconds, she gushed - not crying, but simply telling me in a rush of words of the particulars of her hard life as it stood that day.

I get impatient with whiners. I have to bite my tongue when young women with three or four young children from three or four fathers tell me they’re not getting any child support, but need help. You can imagine how that tune goes.

The difference with this gal was she had only one child, a two-year old daughter, and after about every third sentence, she paused from speaking of the hard road she traveled, and said, “But I’m strong. I’m a good person. A good mother. I’m going to make it.” Then she’d tell me about another brick in the wall that was keeping her from financial independence. Her manner and emotions were bouncing up and down like a paddle ball on a rubber band.

I was a high school principal for fourteen years, and I’ve heard my share of sob stories. I think I can usually read a con, recognize a gamer. I can be a hard-nosed SOB, but I also confess to having a soft heart, sometimes a push-over heart. Also, Nita and I raised two sons, no little girls. I believe those men who say, “You can’t scare me, I raised two daughters.” I know I can be had by doe eyes and a trembling voice. So I keep my own wall up between us during such interviews.

This young woman interrupted her own story at about the point of telling me her husband was in prison in Mississippi for murder, but he says he didn’t do it, and her mother is …not so helpful, and her grandmother in Iowa has sent her all the money she can afford, and her roommate is doing something or the other that’s bad.

Then, without warning, sitting primly across the table from me and my half-written Salvation Army assistance check, in the middle of her litany of woes, she just blurted out, “Can I have a hug? I could really use a hug.” Well, hell. She had me.

I swallowed. I looked at her. I decided in a flash this was her way of asking an old gray-haired bespectacled man to pray for her, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask in those words. I also figured she probably did indeed need a real bear hug from someone who would just affirm by a big squeeze that she was OK.

So, l said, “Sure,” got up and gave her my best socially-correct sideways hug, no bear hug. And I gave her a Salvation Army check to help pay her overdue electric bill, and a grocery store gift card to buy a birthday present and diapers for her daughter. Maybe she used the card for beer and cigarettes. There’s no way for me to know, but my intuition says she didn’t.

There’s no Civil War point to this post. No writer’s “Ah Hah” instant of revelation. This one is just me including you in my wondering if she had me in a good way at “Can I have a hug?” or if she conned me and will be back again for another hit of charity the next time we open the door, telling me of another lost job or lost apartment or messed-up roommate.

The young lady is certainly one of the countless bouncing pebbles in the river of single moms who are willing minimum-wage slaves in America’s cold-blooded fast-food industry. One side of me suspects she’ll cope by moving along to a new tattooed boyfriend, new empty promises of affection, other shabby house trailers piled high with litter.

But she told me, “I need a hug.” I really wish she hadn’t done that. Maybe I would not still be worrying about her and her little daughter a week later. Maybe she is strong, resilient and a good mother like she self-proclaimed. Maybe she will keep on keeping on making things a little better month by month for herself and her daughter. Maybe she will pull herself up. I sure hope so.