About that time I set out for Europe and accidentally ended up in Asia-Twice
Sometimes you get what you need
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Two, Issue 63
I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she would meet her connection
At her feet was her footloose man
No, you can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometime you'll find
Editor’s Note: For years I’ve joked that my autobiography was entitled Things I Did While Planning To Do Completely Different Things. Perhaps the joke is on me; About that time I got banned from the Pacific Rim turned out to be the most popular issue of Perfecting Equilibrium. The reader is always right! So…more chapters of Things I Did While Planning To Do Completely Different Things. I hope you enjoy them just as much!
The Sunday Reader, January 28, 2024
As the old saint said, “Feola makes plans. And God laughs.”
If I have a magic power – and I do – it’s serendipity. Things happen for me when I need them to happen. Just not in the way I dreamed. Or imagined. Or even wanted. I don’t mean to seem ungrateful; it’s just hard to handle the mental whiplash.
All my life parents, relatives, teachers – really, anyone with any sense – told me “Feola, that mouth of yours is going to get you into trouble.” They’re all right; I just cannot seem to help it. That’s how I ended up in the Army. I was mailing off Kodachrome for processing at the Post Office, walked by the Army recruiting station, and impulsively walked in. “Hey you!” I said to the guy with stripes and chevrons of every sort, “Can you get me to Stars & Stripes?” He offered me a guaranteed contract to be an Army journalist paying twice as much as that little paper.
Which was annoying, since I now had to consider it. Also, much later I realized I’d said “Hey you!” to a Sergeant Major and was only still alive because he’d chosen not to kill me on the spot. I wasn’t worth the paperwork.
So off I went to Basic Training at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, and then to the Defense Information School at Ft. Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis.
Basic Training was…well, basic training. It included fun lessons like Never Take Off Your Gas Mask. Wearing a gas mask is unpleasant at best and suffocating all too often; soldiers kept dying during World War I when they tore off the masks that made them feel like they were suffocating, but were actually protecting them from poison gas.
How do you convince someone not to take off the suffocating mask that is protecting them from poison gas they cannot see? The Army found out they could counter that instinct with another. So they had us mask up and enter a concrete bunker, stand in formation, pull off our masks, then sound off – name and rank from each soldier – before leaving the bunker. Easy right?
Except the chamber was flooded with riot gas. Which is basically tear gas, plus vomiting. So that was fun. But it absolutely ended any urge to remove the mask.
Basic is thing you just get through. Eventually, it ends.
So then it was off to the Defense Information School, which in those days was in Indianapolis. And that’s where we learned how the military really operates.
The Army was giving out guaranteed contracts: You signed up for four years; you get guaranteed training and a job in your chosen field.*
*The fine print: unless you fail training, in which case the Army will send you wherever it likes to do whatever it needs.
So here was our introduction to how the Army really works: Four years wandering the world as an Army photojournalist sounds amazing! All you had to do was pass DINFOS.
Where the failure/washout rate was just under 80 percent. By the second week you were expected to take some “research” they handed you and churn out a short news story every day. On a typewriter. With no spell check. Spell a few things wrong? Fail. Dangle your participles? Fail. Cite a source wrong? Fail.
For 18-year-old privates fresh out of high school, it was a war few could win. Half-way through, and more than three-quarters of them had been shipped off to drive trucks in Panama and other equally non-amazing ways to spend four years.
Fortunately for me, I was a ringer. I’d dropped out of college and spent a few years banging out stories on Royal upright typewriters for weekly newspapers. The last job I had before DINFOS was at a weekly where I produced all the stories for 5 editions - that was 10 to 15 stories a week. We’d spend three days reporting each week, then two days in the newsroom cranking out all the stories. One particularly busy week I spent four days reporting, then pounded out 15 stories in one day.
Carpal tunnel was not a problem because you don’t so much type on an upright Royal as you bludgeon it. It took me years to get more than three months out of a computer keyboard before I’d smashed the keys into inoperability.
So everyone else’s nightmare story-a-day grind was basically time off for me. Oh, and you’ll hand me the research so I don’t have to do any reporting? And let me type on an IBM Selectronic with the totally amazeballs Correction Key that let you back up and erase typos? Outstanding! I can knock that out in 30 minutes, then head out to the bar!
Which I did.
So I breezed through DINFOS, and the Army sent me to Ft. Stewart, Georgia and the 24th Infantry Division to work on the Patriot base newspaper. Which ended up being amazing, actually. I got to cover war games in the Mojave Desert, a space shuttle launch, went to the field with Rangers, covered the invasion of Grenada, and even accidentally ended up as the Division parade master.
The Army runs on its non-commissioned officers. Like management anywhere, they tend to appreciate people who are happy to plug in and work wherever needed. I’m easily bored, so I was always up for new assignments.
Unlike civilian management, the Army does actually run on the type of shenanigans portrayed by Corporal Radar O’Reilly in the MASH TV series. Especially in those pre-computer days, assignments were heavily dependent on these NCO-to-NCO backchannels. Annoy your NCOs, and end up in Panama.
Make your NCOs happy, and end up at Stripes!
So my NCO calls me in one day to say he’d been chatting with one of his old corporals who now worked in the Pentagon handling journalist assignments, and asks me if I want to go to Stripes. Ummmm…OF COURSE! I’d largely forgotten that conversation that got me into the Army, but it all came rushing back. I floated all the way to the bookstore, where I bought guidebooks for Germany. And Italy. And France. And Spain. And England.
And then my orders came. For Tokyo.
Turns out there were two Stripes. In those pre-Internet days you couldn’t just casually search for unusual things like “US military newspapers on other continents.” I’d only heard about The Stars & Stripes in Germany. I was going to Pacific Stars & Stripes in Tokyo.
As soon as I was done being confused I was thrilled! One of my all time favorite movies is The Year of Living Dangerously, about a foreign correspondent in Asia. And now I was headed to Asia to be a foreign correspondent. It was going to be amazing!
And…it was. I spent years wandering the Pacific Rim with a Domke bag full of Pentax camera gear and reporter’s notebooks. All over Japan, of course, and Okinawa, and the Philippines, and South Korea, and even a few minutes over the line into North Korea. I sailed on the USS Midway aircraft carrier, and the battleship USS New Jersey.
It was amazing, right up until the point I got banned from the Pacific Rim. So I went back Stateside.
A decade later I was running The Media Center at the American Press Institute in Reston, Virginia, and got a call from the World Association of Newspapers. Would I be interested in keynoting their annual conference?
Ummmm…OF COURSE! The list of WAN annual conference cities was a litany of the great cities of Europe: Athens. Amsterdam. London. Paris. Rome. So I agreed immediately, and they sent me the details.
For the first time in its history, the WAN conference would be held in…wait for it…Japan. Kobe, to be specific.
I’d have been more annoyed, but hey! It was a free trip to Japan! A place I loved and hadn’t visited for a decade. So I went, and spent almost a month wandering Asia. It was amazing all over again.
I’m still planning to go to Europe someday. I’m taking a GPS next time, though. But to be honest, I wouldn’t be all that bummed to end up in Japan again.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Tuesday January 30th - The PE Vlog: We’re taking a couple of weeks developing marketing graphics for Feola Factory as an exercise to understand how and when AI tools are useful. This week we’re continuing to Photoshop the steampunk camera we built in Adobe Firefly. Fourth in a series.
Thursday February 1st - The PE Digest: The Week in Review and Easter Egg roundup
Friday February 2nd - Foto.Feola.Friday