PAST
When I was a very little boy, we lived in Horsham, Pennsylvania near an Air National Guard base. The drone of the large planes flying overhead was part of the soundtrack of my childhood. I assume that at least some of those planes were C-5 Super Galaxy transports. Monsters with two enormous engines on either side, they could carry heavy equipment and have brought the caskets of dead soldiers home to Dover, Delaware from many conflicts during and since the Vietnam War. In an odd twist of fate, it would turn out that my future father-in-law worked as a Flight Simulator Technician on C-5 flight trainers during his career in the Air Force and later as a civilian. The planes’ vibrations were so penetrating that there were resulting cracks in some of the storm windows on our porch.
It was around that time that my family went to an air show of the Blue Angels. This is a squadron of elite pilots who are ambassadors for the U.S. Navy and perform aeronautical maneuvers to impress the crowd. When I was barely four years old, they were still flying the F-4 Phantom. The show captivated my imagination, and I remember that a few years later I was building the model plane versions of the Blue Angels’ F-4 Phantom. (Between the model glue and the paints that I used, my little brain got a fair amount exposure to VOCs those days!) With my paper route money, I was a regular at the model store downtown.
As a teenager I was drawn into the plot line of movies such as “The Great Santini”with Robert Duvall. By that time I was well aware of the rivalry between the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marines, and living under the authoritarian thumb of a U.S. Navy Captain, my stepfather Em. His last reserve station was South Weymouth Naval Air Base in Massachusetts. Of course, I wanted to be a Marine. Most of the Santini storyline felt familiar and deeply personal, but especially the raw emotions of Lt. Col. Wilbur “Bull” Meechum’s son Ben as he sought to preserve his sense of self under the obliterating rules of his father. The plane which Duvall’s character flew was an F-4 Phantom. When you watch the aerial scenes, you’ll see plenty of black smoke, but only the occasional white vapor trail from the the jet engines.
When I later watched Duvall in Apocalypse now, I was enthralled. I swear it was an F-4 Phantom which delivered one of the napalm strikes, not an F-5 Freedom Fighter, but what does a kid know? Before the sounds of the fighter jet arrive, you could hear the radio call of a soldier on the ground: “I have a target for your fast-movers…Burn’em for me will ‘ya?” Later you see Duvall’s character, a surfing-obsessed Air Cavalry officer, bare-chested in his Union Cavalry hat proclaiming, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” It was F-5s that delivered the napalm that time, so that his guy could surf without pesky mortar fire. When we visited Myrtle Beach, SC for a family reunion in 1979, I found myself one of those cavalry hats, and would pretend to be Duvall’s character, “It smells like…victory.”
I aspired to become a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, and my grades were certainly good enough. An indication of my serious intentions was joining the U.S. Naval Sea Cadets in the Fall of 1983. If I were to pick a year where my sensibilities regarding war and a military career began to change, I would say it was 1984.
Three of the five major father figures in my life converged at that time. I went to live with my Nana and Pop pop, and Pop pop had been a Marine who fought in Okinawa during World War II. More than once, in frustration with my irascibility, he would say, “I wish we could get you to Camp Lejeune and the Marine boot camp would straighten you out.” I had wanted to be a Marine, but that didn’t sound so good. He was reflecting back to me a sense that I was too wily for military life. My freshman social studies teacher, Mr Roger Breidinger or Mr B, opened my eyes to the pretexts upon which every war is started, from the sinking of the USS Maine before the American invasion of Cuba, to the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam. I learned about the Kent State shootings where the Ohio National Guard killed four and wounded nine unarmed college students on the Kent State University campus as they peacefully protested the war in Vietnam. I came home with questions about who the good guys really were, and that would get my Pop pop upset.
Larry MacKenzie, father of my friend Larami, introduced me to Quakerism. Incredibly thoughtful, a soft-spoken professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia, Larry would gladly drive out of his way to pick me up and bring me to Quaker meeting on Sundays. He and his wife, Bonnie were the first adults I ever met who insisted that I called them by their first name, an early sign that their respect for my integrity and mind as a teenager was a notch above what I had experienced previously from any other adult.
Diagnosis with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and open heart surgery at the NIH in March of 1985 put the official kabash on my military aspirations. But there was still a lot to sort out in my mind, between my fascinations, my dreams, what was true, what was right, and what I was going to do about it.
RECENT PAST
In 2007 my friend Melanie recruited me to come work in the Emergency Department (ED). She had transferred there a year before from the medical surgical floor that we both worked on at a small community hospital here in Ithaca. Shari McDonald, the ED Nursing Director at the time, had a more evolved perspective on nurses and our role in delivering care. She saw a spark in me, which prompted her to invite me to travel with her and another nurse to a Studer (now Huron) conference in Pensacola, Florida. I learned some important things about helping patients to move through the ED more efficiently, and setting up a program for follow up phone calls, which caught clinical deterioration early. Although I didn’t catch sight of them while I was there, I was aware that Pensacola, Florida is the home base for the Blue Angels.
Because my wife and I had a no-car household for a decade and then a one-car household for an even longer period, I would use a combination of carpooling to work with my friend and fellow nurse, David, biking, or riding the bus. At the time there was a bus driver named Ray who I became pretty friendly with. Ray is a mountain of a man who runs a private hunting lodge and game farm, is a part-time lumberjack, bus driver, and former U.S. Navy Phantom F4 pilot. You can easily imagine that despite my Quakerly inclinations, I was fascinated to hear about his experiences as a pilot during Vietnam.
Ray is a tough guy. Having worked in the emergency setting for sixteen years, I think I have some solid ground up upon which to describe my observations of how different people handle pain. The first thing I’ll say is that women have the upper hand, without a doubt. Childbirth is the benchmark, but I think you can peg kidney stones above that. With men, it’s a crapshoot. But Ray was in a category by himself. He told me a story of lacerating the palm of his hand during a log splitting mishap. He went to the ED and when the suturing physician said he was going to use lidocaine to numb up the site, Ray told him that he didn’t need it. After some back-and-forth, the physician told Ray that if he truly didn’t need lidocaine during the entire process, he wouldn’t charge him. Ray’s hand was sutured and he was discharged home without a bill.
Most of the time we conversed at the front of the bus, I listened to Ray, because his daughter had developed MRSA and had a series of escalating healthcare events which ultimately led to her death. I have had plenty of encounters with MRSA, but this was the first time in my career that I had seen such a young person die as a result of complications from it. She was a single mother, and the daughter she left behind was four years old. Prior to that, I’m sure that Ray was looking forward to retiring from his job as a bus driver. Now he and his wife had a young granddaughter to raise and insurance to provide.
David and I worked together for seven years before I moved to the ED. There was a brief U.S. Navy connection for him. I’m vague on the details of how and why he left military service prematurely, but it makes perfect sense to me that such a brainiac would have been tracked to work in naval intelligence. It also makes perfect sense to me that he didn’t stay with the military, because he is one of the most peaceful-minded and out-of -the-box thinkers that I have known.
During our joint tenure at Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca (CMC), the center hired a motivational speaker who was a former Air Force fighter pilot. Images of the planes and references to his glory days were part of his schtick. Exiting one of these presentations together, I witnessed a rare demonstration of anger from David, as he succinctly, said,”I don’t think that a former highly trained murderer is in the best position to motivate the masses.” In that moment, I realized he had clarity, whereas I had wrestled with uncertainty during years of fascination with military fighter planes, and the people who pilot them. My inner voice told me that there is something debased about mass killing from a distance. It started with modern warfare and has only accelerated in scale since.
PRESENT
If you haven’t seen The Matrix film series by now, you should. The basic plot is this: The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world designed to keep humans under control. Humans are kept sedated, effectively living a virtual life, and their life force fuels The Matrix. If you haven’t see The Matrix, what follows may not make as much sense to you. Simply put, I think of The Matrix regularly, as we are living in such a dystopian world where black is white and upside down is right side up.
Did you (who have seen The Matrix) ever wonder what happened on earth which led to the scenario of The Matrix? I did, and so did many others. The Animatrix is a 2003 American-Japanese adult animated science-fiction anthology film produced by the Lana and Lily Wachowski. The anime compiles nine animated short films, detailing the backstory of The Matrix , in addition to providing side stories that expand the universe and tie into the film series.
From The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance II –
The humans scorched the sky DURING the war.
Operation Dark Storm was done to cut off the machines’ primary energy source (solar power) using high-altitude bombers WHILE humans simultaneously launched attacks against them. The plan was to give humans the upper hand for a short period of time, while the machines didn’t have an alternate energy source yet.
This advantage didn’t last long since most of the humans’ weapons also depended on the sun, and their fragile bodies were no match for the machines’ resilient shells.
I’ve been an enthusiastic reader of science fiction for many years. In part, it is because science fiction writers have foreshadowed events occurring decades later. Yet these days, it seems that the time and distance between science fiction and current reality is rapidly shrinking.
I’ll tell you that four years into this pandemic, which many think is over, it’s a slog climbing up the hill to my office and settling into a day filled with patients still struggling with post-acute sequelae of COVID (PASC) and vaccine injury. What makes it possible to carry on, aside from the fact that I’m a persistent son-of-a-gun, is the fact that sooner or later, more or less, our patients are getting better. There is indeed an upward trend.
What consistently takes the wind out of my sails and challenges my spirits, is a glance to the sky as I leave our home each morning. What starts off as a clear blue sky, takes a sinister turn as the jets appear and begin laying down their vapor trails. It has happened so many days now, that the pattern is predicable as, well, the weather, and I’m astounded that I don’t hear more people talking about it. I’m adept at pattern recognition; it is an important quality which makes me an effective clinician.
I see patterns to the vapor trails. I have paid attention to military planes my whole life. These jets are not commercial airliners taking off from the Tompkins County Airport. These are military planes, or drones; there are often four, or five, and they systematically criss-cross the sky, laying down their trails. They don’t take off for holidays or weekends. They fly at all times of the day and night. What then happens is the sky becomes covered with a haze, the sun and the blue blocked out. What often happens in the day or days to follow, is that it gets colder, and we have rain and wind.
Before I went on my recent road trip, I only knew what I have been seeing in Ithaca for at least the last year. As I headed to Long Island, dipping south near Pennsylvania, crossing through Connecticut, to Long Island and back to Ithaca, I saw vapor trails everywhere along the way. The scale of these operations boggles my mind. The money, the human resources, the fuel expended, and sheer number of jets in the sky, everywhere…is deeply disturbing. This is new, it is not normal, and it is not good.
The ongoing daily theft of the common good, blue skies and sunshine is by itself a crime against humanity. As a reader of prescient science fiction, knowing that there are arrogant humans who think that they can outmaneuver nature and manipulate the seasons and weather in order to counter perceived global climate changes, well, the vapor trails are ominous. As a healer, attempting to treat thousands of people who have been and continue to be poisoned in an ongoing campaign of collusion between Big Pharma and captured governments, I’m suspicious of what these vapor trails really signify. I know that we have already been betrayed, but would the evildoers be so bold as to carry out further poisoning by light of day, in the very skies above our heads? Why not?
I wonder if these jets have humans in them, or if they are drones piloted from central locations such as Hancock Air Force Base in Syracuse, NY. I wonder if these jets are in the skies all over the world; a colleague in the UK has sent me pictures of the same images in skies above her home. I wonder if the men and women who pilot these jets know what the true mission is, or are being told lies. I wonder if they are courageous enough to uphold the U.S. Constitution, and protect fellow citizens from all enemies foreign and domestic. I wonder…if they are people just like my friend Ray, who was once young and enthusiastic, very technically skilled at carrying out orders which meant death for those on the ground.
I don’t know what these vapor trails contain, but my own eyes and mind have observed that they obscure the sun, steal the blue skies, and bring cold and rainy days. I have a patient who draws a clear temporal association between the day a sky was filled with vapor trails, and the demarcation of her chronic chronic illness. I know that this is not what has been, and it feels very, very wrong. I’m curious who else has noticed, what is known, and what might be done.
