It’s been awhile, since I’ve sat down to record what’s going
on. “Things” have gotten in the way. From a celebration parade for a 100 year
young friend, to work, on. Truth be told, it’s hard to focus my mind on what to
write, though I know from experience, that once I sit down and start writing it
will pour out of me. But somehow, it’s different
right now. I try to find things I can
put in perspective, parallels I can use to what is going on around me, and what
I find seem jumbled, since there seems to be nothing to put this in
perspective, no parallels from my past to use.
I think about keeping track of days and times and how
difficult that is right now. Much easier when we have set schedules for what
day we do what and what time things routinely occur. When we lived in Korea, we worked 6 days a week
and I had trouble keeping track of the days, so Mike bought be a Seiko watch
with the day and date on it as well as the time. Now my FitBit watch tells me the
date and the time, but I have to open my phone to see what the day is. Saturday’s we would work a half day, then I
would go to the base beauty shop (we might have had less than a couple dozen
women on base, but we had a beauty shop), and for a few dollars, I would get my
hair done, a manicure, a facial and a massage once a week. Those days of pampering myself seem so far
away now.
Shortages of food and supplies? When Desert Shield and
Desert Storm were going on (Aug ’90 – Feb’91), I was living in Germany working in
the Kaiserslautern Military Community (at one point in time, Kaiserslautern had
a larger population of American citizens
living there then anywhere outside of the
CONTINENTAL United States – ie, more Americans than Alaska or Hawaii had.) When
the war started, there were shortages in the commissary, not of food as much as
cleaning supplies and the families left behind in Germany after the military
deployed to Desert Storm were told it was because the shipments had followed
the deploying troops. We honestly didn’t believe that they needed our family
size household cleaners in the Desert, but we did believe that the things that
would normally have been shipped to Germany were still sitting on the docks in
the US, while they prioritized sending other supplies to the troops in the Desert
first.
Then there was Korea – where just about everything was
rationed. If you wanted to buy coffee or
tea, those were rationed to prevent them from being sold on the blackmarket
downtown (I remember getting to the tiny shoppette we had once without a
current ration card and the gentleman behind me in line graciously using his
tea ration to help me out.) Shampoo and cosmetics however weren’t rationed and
I would often see a GI walking out of the Shoppette with a case of shampoo that
would have lasted me (with my waist length hair) for several months and he
would be back a day later to buy another case. Now if you can find soap, kleenix or toilet
paper at the grocery store, you are limited to one or two “packages” of it, so
you hope to find a “multipack” rather than a single pack when you go shopping.
When I was in Korea, we had an annual Team Spirit exerc ise
with a combined force of South Korean and American Troops close to 200,000 men
and women. I managed the largest food service operation in the Pacific at the
time, at Osan Air Base. We had an issue
one year with the supplies arriving in time for the exercise and a water
shortage, so I ended up using a wartime
priority to order the papergoods (plates, cups, flatware, etc) and other supplies
needed to feed the troops. What I used was a minor part of the system that is
being used now to try to get supplies manufactured and sent to the right areas
in a timely manner.
Stockpiled supplies.
I remember being at MIZZOU in the early 70’s in the ROTC program and the
NCO’s going through the stockpiled supplies of C-Rations in the basement of
Crowder Hall and pulling out the cigarettes and chocolate. The US Military has
always stockpiled resources. I worked for the Army’s 29th Area
Support Group in Germany after I got off active duty. Their primary job was to
maintain the stockpiles, than when Desert Shield and Desert Storm happened,
that transitioned into sending those supplies to the Desert. The stockpiled supplies, foods and medicines would
be inspected on a regular basis and while some would be rotated out and used
with the incoming supplies at the local bases, we typically wouldn’t be able to
tell the difference between the new and old items. Only antibiotics, hormones
and a very few other medications couldn’t be used years after their use by date. And foods, unless the package was bulging or
leaking or rusting, could almost always be used. Use by dates and best use by dates, don’t
mean a food is bad, just that it’s quality might not be the same level as when
it was originally packaged. No one
questioned using 5,000 masks found in a crypt in the National Cathedral that
have been stockpiled and forgotten for over 10 years.
Lack of coordination? We moved from Hahn Air Base to
Ramstein Air Base right after USAFE Headquarters was bombed in 1981. While we
weren’t at Ramstein when the bombing occurred, we heard endless tales of the
missteps that occurred. The Terrorist Bombers hadn’t realized that the base was
so large, that the “operational side” of the base came to work at 7:30am, but
the “Headquarters side” of base didn’t come to work until 8 am. They timed the
bomb to go off right before 7:30 in the parking lot, figuring that they would
get mass casualties with everyone rushing to get to work on time. Instead, only
a few early birds were around. The Bombers,
left the base right away and the police later found evidence that they had gone
right outside the base gates and watched from the Mackenbach Woods next to the
base. Immediately after the bombing, as
shock and disbelief set in, NO ONE on the base took charge. Finally a Lt Col took over and started
directing operations. As a result, no one initially notified the German
authorities. Those precious few minutes
were enough for the bombers to get away. Is the lack of international coordination
allowing the virus to “get away” from the scientific community that is seeking
a vaccine and cure?
Attacking the most vulnerable? When we lived in Germany, the
Bader Meinhof Gang and the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction)-RAF, was very
prevalent. They bombed hospitals, schools, US military clubs, the October Fest and
were the ones responsible for the bombing of USAFE Headquarters. For the most
part, we did our best to ignore them. One
person (other than the poor guy who was murdered in order to get his uniform
and ID to get the terrorists on base and the really high ranking officers),
wasn’t their target. (We rolled our eyes
when told we weren’t supposed to hang uniforms on the outside laundry lines
because they might be stolen and used to enter the base.) The object of terrorism is to terrorize, and
how do you best terrorize? You attack
the defenseless and show the defenders that they can’t protect their most vulnerable
members. Isn’t that what COVID 19 is
doing to us? Attacking first our most vulnerable elderly population and showing
us we can’t protect them?
Shelter in Place? When I was a small child, I lived in
French Morocco during the Revolution as the Arabs fought to be free of European
control. We would watch the French
evacuate in one direction in their tiny little cars and the Arabs evacuate in the
other direction with their donkeys and carts and we were told there was a
mandatory curfew in place and we were to STAY INSIDE for our own protection.
Learning new computer programs and procedures. In the mid
1980’s, when personal computers were just starting to be used, I was
responsible for computerizing the Services Division, I worked in. No one had
any idea what they were doing, and the first instruction was to “format” the
harddrive in increments of 7, so we all formatted our brand new hard drives at
7, which was too small to hold anything and crashed all the computers. At which point they said increments of 7 at
or above a certain number base number.
Today, I work on learning ZOOM, MS Teams, how to do Virtual Open Houses
and showings and much more, each with its own blips and blurps and failure points.
Adapt our living environment? Anyone who has ever spent time around a military
person, especially one on a remote tour or long deployment to a third world
country, knows that US troops are inventive and able to adapt to whatever is
thrown at them and will adapt their environment to fit the situation, just as
we are adapting our homes for sheltering in place, working from home, home schooling
and family life right now (though having an entire room to quarantine things in
for 3-4 days - up to a week or two, when you bring them home from the grocery
store or they get delivered to your front door still seems a bit much to me,
but my California relatives swear by it.)
As I write this, I realize that I survived all of those times
and others, and I know that in a few years, I will joke about how I survived
COVID 19 and the many things we did to “protect” ourselves from the unknown,
some of which in hindsight will seem ridiculous (like putting pantyhose on over
our masks) and My husband keeps saying
every time he walks into a store or bank wearing a mask, he expects someone to
stop him.
As someone once told
me, the vacation trips that you take where everything is PERFECT, may be great,
but they don’t make for great stories afterward, while the times that tried us
and where we really wondered if we’d make it to the other side are the trips
that we are still talking about years later, when we can look back in hindsight
and laugh at the perils we stood up to and fell down against, but we survived through
them and have reached a point where we can laugh as we talk about them. It may take awhile, but we will find a
vaccine, develop herd immunity and come out on the other side of this stronger
for the lessons we’ve learned about what we can survive and how inventive we
can become.
