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I was just thinking

 …about not getting killed in Viet Nam.  I got to come home alive. I might have survived because I was so well trained; because I was always aware of my surroundings and never let my guard down.  Or maybe it’s not that I was especially good at not getting killed, it just kind of happened.  I’m thinking of a time in the Central Highlands; somewhere in the neighborhood of Kon Tum and Pleiku.  I looked the old neighborhood up on a map: Viet Nam Map Looking at Google Maps now, it seems like there are a lot of towns and roads there, but we weren’t visiting towns then.  We were in jungles and fields with a few villages.  It was like a campout; Boy Scouts, but for keeps.  The sergeant put us where we were supposed to be and told us to “dig in”.  That meant digging foxholes.  It was here I learned an important lesson about holes; one that would serve me well the rest of my tour.  “Never be the first one to dig your hole.” The problem with being done first is that you’re rarely truly done.  The sergeant tells you where to put your hole, so you do it.  Well, pretty soon, the second lieutenant is going to come around and tell everyone that their holes are in the wrong places; they should be over here. Okay, that’s two holes to dig and you’re still tired from the first.  But it doesn’t end there.  The Captain hasn’t been by yet.  When you get the order to dig in, it’s time to take a break.  Smoke a cigarette.  Get a drink of water.  Watch everyone else dig and say you’re waiting for a shovel.  You want your hole done before dark, but you definitely don’t want to be done first.  Better to only have to dig your hole once. So here we were, dug in for a long stay away from base camp, foxholes all around the perimeter.  Patrols going out and back every day, looking for firefights.  I was ammo resupply.  Every day fresh ammo came out on helicopters from base camp.  I helped unload it and get it to the line companies that were using it up.  At night we defended the perimeter in the dark, watching for movement, listening for sounds that didn’t belong.  We owned the days.  Viet Cong owned the nights. Two people per foxhole.  One person awake at all times.  A sleeping person next to a chest deep hole; an awake person in the hole.  That’s a long slow torture, by the way, one person awake at all times.  On the surface it sounds okay, but really it’s not like you’ve got half of a 24 hour period to sleep.  During the day you’re both going to be awake, working.  Altogether you’re going to get 8 or 10 hours to sleep.  That means for each person, 4 or 5 hours of sleep, and it’s going to be broken up into two-hour rotations; except after you’ve done this for a few days you get so rummy you can’t stay awake for two hours at a time, so you start rotating on one hour shifts.  Nights get very long.  Days get very blurry.  Maybe decision-making gets compromised.  Maybe sometimes decisions don’t even get made. Anyway, one day, nothing happening at the moment, mind wandering, surrounded by jungle, exploring the edges, I wandered off.  I was looking at all the plants.  Maybe I was watching for ripe bananas, maybe I was looking for carnivorous plants, I don’t remember.  I just wandered off.  I wasn’t thinking about where I was or why, I was just exploring.  I found a creek bed and followed it uphill.  I came to a ridgeline and followed it.  I sat on an overlook and admired the vista of uninhabited jungled hills.  It started getting dark.  I had an “oh shit” moment realizing I was away from camp, all by myself, no one knew where I was, and I didn’t even have my rifle. I headed back.  I was quite a ways out.  There wasn’t an actual trail to follow, but I’ve always been fine with sense-of-direction, so that wasn’t a problem, I knew which way to go, but I didn’t end up back at camp at exactly the point I had left it.  I was walking quietly so I wouldn’t draw any attention, but now I found myself in the gathering dark on the wrong side of our perimeter.  All the rifles in foxholes were “our” rifles, but they were all pointed out where I was.  That seemed like a problem.  I knew I was in the right neighborhood, but I knew for sure I was all the way back when I set off a trip flare.  There is nothing lethal about a trip flare, it is just something to illuminate any intruder so you can kill it; oh, and it makes a very loud POP when it goes off, just to make sure no-one misses that blazing bright light. “American!  It’s just me!  Don’t shoot!”   I shouted to avoid getting shot, standing as tall as I could, arms in the air.  It worked.  I got back through our lines to the side I belonged on.  I didn’t get killed, but I kind of had to surrender to survive.  
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It’s almost time

 For the Big Day. Every year I go on a Big Day with Jon McIntrye, to see how many species of birds we can identify in a single day.  This year is going to be different though.  We’re going to do a 24 hour Big Day, but not from midnight to midnight; more like a Big 24 Hours. Every previous Big Day, we start at midnight and identify what we can in the dark.  Then there is a lull before dawn.  About an hour before dawn it picks up again and it is a birding frenzy until dark.  Then we’re stuck.  We’ve still got hours to go but we’ve already gotten all the birds we can in the dark in the habitat we’re in.  We’ve got time to drive somewhere else; to different habitat, but it will still be dark when our Big Day expires at midnight.  Not the most efficient use of time. So this year we decided to be different.  We’re going to drive to Victoria, a good birding spot to the north, and wait until after dawn before we start birding; maybe 8:30am.  We’ll bird all day working our way south through the Corpus Christi area.  Then when it gets dark, we’ll drive 150 miles south to the Falcon Lake area, so when it gets light again we’ll be in completely different habitat with different birds to see and hear.  We’ll finish at exactly the same time we started the day before; 8:30am. Jon has been scouting the north section.  I’ve scouted the south a little.  We’ll scout a little more tomorrow morning.  The Big Day is set for Wednesday. I’ll report back. 
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I’ve been thinking about

 Self-determination. We in the United States are great champions of self-determination.  Nations are sovereign.  They have the right to freely choose their government with no outside interference.  We have institutionalized the concept.  It’s part of the Monroe Doctrine.  It’s part of the charter of the United Nations. Let the people of any country vote and do what they want.  We don’t want some foreign power dictating what we should do.  We don’t want an illegitimate government imposing its power over people that didn’t ask for it.  We take the moral high ground.  We support the rebels in Syria wanting to be freed from the dictator.  We supported the Contra rebels in Nicaragua wanting to escape the Sandinista government.  We root for the underdog, the people wanting to form their own union.  We broke away from Britain to form ours.  People have the right to choose their own government.  In fact, the U.S. supported the secession of Texas from Mexico, and once Texas became a state, fought a war with Mexico to defend it.  Then I wonder my way back to our Civil War.  An entire segment of the United States, eleven states, chose to secede from the Union and form their own alliance; the Confederacy.  That’s what the people of the South decided.  They didn’t like our form of federal government and wanted something different.  As a practical matter, it would have been inconvenient for the North to lose the agrarian economy of the South that balanced the manufacturing economy of the North, but it would have honored the principle of self-determination that we so strongly believe in.  If the South wanted to leave, why didn’t the North respect the right of self-determination, let them go, and wish them well? Why was there a Civil War; the War Between the States; the Southern War for Independence?  Sure, there was slavery.  Slavery became part of the civil war, but really, secession was a completely different issue.  The North didn’t go to war against the South because they suddenly discovered the South had slaves; some of the northern states had slaves too.  The North didn’t want the South to leave.  If the South hadn’t had any slaves, the North still wouldn’t have wanted them to leave. Slavery is a terrible institution.  I would never defend it.  I’m just trying to separate the issues.  We grew up in the west, thinking that the War Between the States was unavoidable, and Lincoln is the hero who kept our union together.  That might be true, I don’t know that it’s not, but I still have this wonder:  Why was it a given that the North had to force the South to stay in a club they didn’t want to be a part of?