My Military Career
When I was a kid, one of the things I learned in the Boy Scouts was Morse Code. Once you learn Morse Code, it sticks in your head. A few years later, after finishing college, I was drafted into the United States Army. It was 1954, and hostilities were commencing in Korea, where the United States was providing troops for a “police action,” an involvement which resulted in 33,000 American deaths.
During Army basic training at
Fort Dix, we were taken into a room where we were given a battery of tests,
intended to determine if any of us possessed skills which the Army could make
use of, besides being an infantryman.
One of these tests involved Morse Code.
We were given headsets and were instructed to listen and write down
letters being sent in Morse Code. It was
first explained that in Morse Code, the letter “T” was a dash, the letter “I”
was two dots and the letter “N” was a dash followed by a dot. The entire test was composed of these three
letters, sent in random three letter groups more and more rapidly. The whole thing could not have taken more
than three or four minutes. Of course, I
aced the test, thanks to Boy Scout Troop 37, and that’s how I got into the Army
Security Agency’s code intercept school at Fort Devens, Massachusetts.
Army Morse Code Class
The object of the school was to get its
students to be able to type five letter groups, sent in Morse Code, at a speed
of at least 60 characters a minute.
Troop 37 had never taught me that so after three or four months of
school, my career as a Morse Code interceptor ended, and I was instead made
into a Non-Morse Code interceptor. In
any event, my Fort Devens duty didn’t involve any clean up details or KP
(kitchen work) and being just outside of Boston was not a bad deal.
I later found out that the
guys who mastered high speed Morse Code interception usually ended up where
such transmissions were taking place, which was where troops were in
action. In early 1955, that meant Korea
in a van parked in a snowy field somewhere north of Seoul. The Non-Morse interceptors, like me, ended up
in big hangars taping all kinds of radio signals from all over the world. Of course, today, all of that stuff is done
by satellite. Anyhow, the place I was
sent to was Herzo Base, about fifteen miles south of Nurnberg in Germany. It was a 24/7 operation with four crews
rotating, but that guaranteed us all a lot of time off. Of course, there were no “details” to work
on, and we chipped in $5 a month to have German civilians do the dirty work in
the kitchen and keep our barracks clean.
Everybody stationed there was able to get in a lot of European travel,
and by then, even though the Second World War's destruction was visible, European recovery
was well on its way.
The old Herzo Base where I served
Herzo Base had been a
Luftwaffe air base and the buildings were all solid and well built. There was a nice library and club, and the
antenna field (that’s how the radio signals were intercepted) doubled as a golf
course, where American soldiers from all over Germany came to compete in the
“Steel Trees Open” each year. Down the
hill from the Base was the quaint German town of Herzogenaurach, which had some
nice restaurants and medieval buildings and was the home of two small soccer
shoe manufacturing companies which had been there from before the war.
Herzogenaurach street scene
One of the buildings in the Adidas complex on the site of Herzo Base
So here I am, sixty years
later, living in a very active retirement community in South Florida. Even though there are only 600 families here,
there actually is one guy who was in Crypto-Analysis at Herzo Base, which was
in the next hangar down (remember it was once an air base) from the guys doing
Non-Morse Intercept, at about the same time I was there. Small world!
One day I was looking out the
French doors facing the pool from our clubhouse lobby, when a gentleman
standing next to me commented on something going on in the pool area: “dot dot
dot, dot dot dot dot, dot dot, daaash.”
Once learned, one never forgets Morse Code, so I quickly translated what
he was saying, and said to him, “Shit?”
“Where did ya learn Morse?” he asked.
“In the Army,” I said. “Devens?”
he asked. “Yup,” I said. Turns out he was one of the Morse Code
instructors there, about a year before I got to the place. Yes, it’s a small world indeed.
Jack Lippman
King of the Universe
(Here's a work in progress which will be submitted to the next session of a writers' group to which I belong. The suggested general topic for the session was to write something "questioning reality." )
Sometime in the not so near future, an astronaut was seated across from a Rabbi.
Sometime in the not so near future, an astronaut was seated across from a Rabbi.
“I
cannot believe the stuff you’ve been teaching, Rabbi. That God created everything in seven days.
That on the first day …”
“Stop,”
the Rabbi said. “Don’t take my word for
it, my boy. It says it right here in the
Torah!” The Rabbi read from a book
before him, although he knew it by heart.
“In
the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness
was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the face of
the waters. And God said: ‘Let there be
light.’ And there was light. And God saw
the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the
darkness He called Night. And there was
evening and there was morning, one day.”
“That’s
the way it happened. Read on! And everything else was created over the next
five days.”
The
astronaut stared at him. “Do you expect
me to believe that stuff?” The Rabbi said nothing.
“Look,” he continued. “I’ve been there, to the moon first, then Mars, and three long trips out beyond our solar system. I’ve seen it all first hand and that ain’t the way it happened, believe me; I have my ideas on how it happened and no way is that the truth.”
“Look,” he continued. “I’ve been there, to the moon first, then Mars, and three long trips out beyond our solar system. I’ve seen it all first hand and that ain’t the way it happened, believe me; I have my ideas on how it happened and no way is that the truth.”
“Go
on. Please tell me more. It sounds fascinating,” the Rabbi said.
“When
you’re way out there in space, you see things from a different
perspective. You look back at the Earth
from wherever you are and you see it rotating on its axis so that only half of
it is ever facing the Sun at one time.
“You
know, what we call “time” only pertains on our planet. It should be called “local time.” It just happens to be the way we keep track
of the rotation of the earth on its axis, and its perpetual trips around the
Sun, and the Moon’s rotation about the Earth. Some other rock spinning on its
orbit around some other bigger rock, or sun, couldn’t care less about the
bookkeeping of rotations here on Earth we call “time” through the calendars and
clocks we have built to document it. “So, forget about time. There’s no such thing … except locally. This
planet has an ego problem, and that book in front of you only serves to
perpetuate it.” The astronaut pointed at the book and
continued.
“That
book starts with the words, ‘In the beginning.’ Well, here’s some news for you. There isn’t any beginning and there isn’t any
end. I’ve been there! It's like a circular fluorescent bulb. You keep going around and end up where you started. Hey,
there’s an awful lot of stuff out there, actually an infinite amount, rotating and moving, all because of a
gravitational or magnetic pull or some sort of attraction to some other bodies out
there, and our tiny little Earth is part of it.
It all takes place in space, and space, quite literally, is timeless. Nothing ages in space. Things may evolve but that's different. Space is endless.
It doesn’t begin anywhere and it
doesn’t end anywhere. It just ‘is.’ And I’ve seen it and traveled through it. Timeless, endless, nothingness!”
Hubble Telescope View of Who Knows What
"I wish I had my Ph.d. in astrophysics so I
would know a little more than I do. But I do know enough to know when something is
just not true, like … what is the Yiddish word ... bubbamaiiseh?.... like that story of what you
say happened on the first of those seven days of what you call Creation."
“Six,”
the rabbi, growing impatient, interrupted. “On the seventh day, the Lord
rested. Look, the Torah says God created
the heaven and the earth. Let’s forget
about the earth for a minute. That’s
just where we happen to be. But could
not the heaven God created be this all-encompassing, never-ending “space” you
speak of? And “time,” merely his gift to
us to enable us to exist in space?
The
astronaut smiled. “Rabbi, I am Jewish,
was bar mitzvah and you know I go to shul at least on the Holidays. I can see how some explanation of all of this
was necessary for the leaders to hold together the semi-literate tribesmen they
were shepherding across the barren wastelands of the Middle East millenniums
ago. They had to give them something to
believe in, something to explain what they were incapable of understanding on
their own. So they wrote that book you
have in front of you. It has held our people together for almost six thousand
years of what we call time. I have to
grant you that.”
The Rabbi spoke. “Scholars, Rabbis,
Talmudists have all wrestled with these questions throughout the ages. Some believe that the Torah existed, but had
not yet been given to our people, even before this thing you call space came
into being, even before that ‘beginning’ which is described in the first verse
of Genesis. After all, don’t many of our
prayers refer to God as ‘Melech HaOlam,’ which translates into English as
‘King of the Universe’? Would you like to make it ‘King of Space’ instead? Would that make you happy?”
“So
I should tell my gentile friends we Jews worship the “Space King,” the
astronaut snickered. "Sounds like a trimmed-down line of appliances made to fit into small kitchens."
“Look,”
the rabbi continued. “You believe what
you want … but consider for a moment that you have the ability to think about
things like this. You have
consciousness. Unlike insects or lower
creatures which behave entirely on reflexes and instincts, humans are conscious
of their actions, have brains capable of great achievements, know wrong from
right, can make choices and can have discussions like we are having right now. No other creature, at least on Earth, has
that ability. Think about that for a
moment when you doubt the role of God.
Look what he has given us.”
Meanwhile,
very, very, very, very, very far out in space, an entity with a level of
consciousness far, far, far beyond that which human beings on Earth possess,
and using technologies that would not be developed on Earth until the
equivalent of millions of years of our planet’s time passed, if ever, was aware
of the conversation between the Rabbi and the astronaut. It was pleased with what it was hearing, and then, turned to devote itself to other matters.
JL
Some Post-Election Comments
The Democratic Party worked very hard to gain the support of women,
blacks, Latinos, gay and lesbians, gun control people, immigrants, those
without health care and those who cannot afford college. They felt that these groups, taken together,
would be stronger. And indeed they were!
But that was not good enough.
Their “togetherness” excluded white, straight males who really didn’t care
much about health care or college, but who were scared stiff, overwhelmingly
so, about the continuing disappearance of the jobs that they and their fathers
before them had had all across America. And there are many of them.
What programs either party had to address this problem were
immaterial. What counted was recognizing
that their campaign had to address this issue, disappearing jobs, to those
voters to whom it meant a lot, the right voters. Donald Trump did this better than Hillary
Clinton did. And that was the
election. What gets done to address this
problem is another problem entirely.
So far nobody, Democrat or Republican, has faced up to the fact that we
will never again have enough jobs in this country to put everyone to work on a
fulltime basis. Lower labor costs
overseas, but more importantly, advances in technology at home, will see to
that. In the past, when one could not
get a job, they moved on to another part of the country where jobs were
plentiful. But that is no longer
possible.
So we must, as I have stated many times, ration jobs. Early retirement and a limited hour work week
should be mandatory. A four day work week
might be a solution. And since such
limited employment will result in reduced paychecks, someone must step in to
fill the gap. It could be
government. It could be the employer’s
business. It could be a combination of
the two. Either way, the public will pay for subsidizing the smaller paychecks
“job rationing” will bring along with funding earlier retirement benefits, via
higher taxes and/or higher prices.
Somehow, and here’s where a solution might be found, an increased Gross
Domestic Product, perhaps going up four or five percent each year, might
provide the nation with the financial resources to successfully institute job
rationing and early retirement. Wouldn’t
that be nice.
*
* * *
But getting back to the election results. I liken our political parties to football teams with lousy offenses, but tremendous defensive units.
When one of them stops the other team and get the ball, their offense is ineffective and they have to punt after three downs. Brute force works well for a team's defense but a successful offense requires much more skill. So the only chance one team with a weak offense has of winning is
if their powerful defense intercepts a pass or recovers a fumble and turns it
into a touchdown!
If Hillary Clinton had won the election, there would have been four
years of incessant criticism, investigations, accusations and innuendo which
would have prevented her from accomplishing anything. She would have been like a quarterback who is constantly being sacked. Bannon and company would sink their fangs
into her Presidency and never let go.
But now the shoe is on the other foot. The Republicans have the ball and now they must attempt to come through on the promises Donald Trump made. Not all of them agree with him either. Will they repeatedly be forced to punt after three downs? Or will the Democrats intercept a pass or recover a fumble. And what good would turning it over to their offense do? Only time will tell.
But now the shoe is on the other foot. The Republicans have the ball and now they must attempt to come through on the promises Donald Trump made. Not all of them agree with him either. Will they repeatedly be forced to punt after three downs? Or will the Democrats intercept a pass or recover a fumble. And what good would turning it over to their offense do? Only time will tell.
JL
My Big Mouth
Here’s a letter I’ve sent to our two local newspapers:
Now that the election campaigning is over and the country has
elected Donald Trump to be our next President, the news I’m reading in the
papers and seeing on TV is a little different from what was in the news before
Election Day. We’re seeing the President
we elected and those around him whom he is bringing to positions of power from
a different perspective. I suspect that
if the Republican primaries and the General election were held today, based on
what’s in the news today, their results might be different.
I'll let you know if the Sun Sentinel and/or the Palm Beach Post publish it.
JL
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