Bomb Threat... and forgotten memories.

"Your vehicle insurance has expired, and we have tried to contact you multiple times.  This will be our third and final call to allow you to take advantage of our special offer," the recorded voice on my phone said to me.

"If you wish to speak to a customer service representative, press 1."

"1."

I hate these calls, and there is no reason that I should be receiving it on my government issued phone.  So Friday morning, I pressed "1" and snarled into the phone.  "You have called the US Federal Government, and I want to know why you are calling this phone."

A deeply accented male voice responded with a similar snarl.  "Who the f** are you?  What is YOUR name?"

"This is James Lawton with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and you have NO reason to call a government phone."

"Are you familiar with 9-11?  Osama bin Laden was one of us.  And the World Trade Center?  We did that.  Osama is my brother, and we are all coming for you.

"Your US Army is filled with sleeper cells, and we are going to rise up against you."

After quite a bit of vivid description of how I had engaged in fellatio with a number of folk, some of whom are related to me, the guy suggested some improbable physical acts, and then he left me with a statement.  "Tomorrow, we will be bombing a Marine Corps base in New Jersey."

And he hung up.

During the call, I walked out of my office into the hall, where a co-worker shushed me - there were meetings taking place in rooms all up and down the corridor.  But when she heard the tenor of the conversation, her eyes grew wide.

By the time the caller hung up, I was shaking, I was so mad.

Yeah, the call was not coming from a 601 number.

I talked it over, first with a couple of co-workers, and then with the security guy (who had done the exact same thing I did, and had an identical conversation, right down to the fellatio suggestion). He said that there was nothing in the message that identified it as a credible threat.  There was nothing specific mentioned, nothing that indicated that I had been chosen to communicate a genuine threat.  No declaration against projects of the Corps, no locations that meant anything to me.

The caller was, he explained, a member of a group in the Middle East who call up cell phones with the intent to harass.

All the same, all day Saturday, I was watching for something to happen in New Jersey.  It was no consolation that Saturday's attack happened in Pittsburgh, or that it was a white guy that did it.  All the same, I breathed a little easier when the day passed without 'my' incident happening.

There was a crazy thing, though.  For years, my sister Caroline and I have had recurring conversations about neural pathways, about how you form new memories and learn new things.  And specifically, how you can use existing neural pathways to access memories.

While I was relating the story to a co-worker on Friday, suddenly the hairs on my neck stood up.  I was suddenly reliving a memory of a previous call, received years ago, also made to my government cell phone.  The phone call in New Orleans had been almost exactly the same as the one Friday, except it closed with a non-credible threat against my wife rather than an unspecified military base.

My wife.

Once I remembered the incident, I remembered other pieces.  A memory of absolutely losing my mind.  I have a fragment of a memory of me screaming incoherently into the phone - in my office - about the actions that I was going to take to track the man down, to dismember his body, and to stomp individual pieces of his body to pieces of meat, indistinguishable from the dust with which his blood was going to mingle.  Another scrap of memory of spittle flying from my mouth as I turned purple with absolute rage.  A memory of trying to track down the source of the call, with no success.  (Cloning and spoofing cell phones was a pretty novel concept at that point.)

Before I started describing Friday's call, I HAD NO RECOLLECTION OF THE EARLIER CALL. My brain had tucked that particular bit of information down a disused neural pathway, and did not let me have access.  I have never understood how people could sublimate traumatic experiences, and what their brains would do to hide the memory of emotional and physical pain.  But my brain had done exactly that.  Only by relating Friday's experience did I get a chance to re-experience the fury and fear associated with a threat on my wife.

The threat against Kathe was no more credible than the threat against the Marine Base in Jersey.  And I knew that.  But it played on the same fear - the fear of an attack on something I hold dear.

Nobody can threaten me with things that I don't care about.  Threaten me with extra taxes on balut?  That might affect me once, if that.  Threaten to destroy old copies of Ranger Rick?  Huh.  I'm a little nostalgic on that one, but OK. 

But threaten my family, and the game changes entirely.

I hate the fact that this happens.  I hate that I lost control.  And I have no idea what we - as good people - are supposed to do to address the problems that result in such hate.

I wold love to think that this call is the modern equivalent of "Is your refrigerator running?  Well, you'd better run and catch it."  or "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?  Well, you better let him out!"

But it is not.  It is much deeper than that.  It is the result of extreme tribalism - where we humans (all of us!) break people into 'us' and 'them'.  And that dichotomy makes me sad.

I suspect that love is the only answer - loving my enemies, blessing them that curse me, doing good to them that hate me, and praying for them which despitefully use me. For if I love them which love me, what is my reward?  Everybody does that.

But it is a dilemma.  I also feel protective of my tribe.  My people. And my mind works overtime when I feel y'all are in danger.

Go love some people, y'all.  

Turn the Lights Out When You Leave

I'm home.

Still trying to figure out which end is up.  I arrived a little over a week ago, late on Thursday night, weary and shell-shocked.  Eight days later, I am just starting to get my feet under me.

People want to know how the trip was.  Whether it was fun.  How I liked it. Where my suntan is.

Fun?

I'll sum it up, just to make it clear.

My deployment was brutal, but important.  Given the different permutations available, I will take that combination, every single time.  Gimme important battles to fight with real consequences, and let me see how I can help.  The work was hard, and the reasons were complex, and there were battles raging on all sides.  Some of them were overblown (including an honest-do-goodness "fake news" story - see below).  Some of them were unnecessary.  And then some of them were

The Last Mile

Where do we stop?

As a representative of the US Federal Government, I find it to be a significant question.

In my agency, we answer the question - in some form - every day.  The feds have nothing to do with paving your street.  The feds don't get into the business of trimming the trees on the railway lines, or throwing away garbage.  They don't make sure that your boat's slip is deep enough for your boat, or that your carport's roof doesn't leak.  For our day-to-day decisions, we have a concept of what comprises Federal Interest - what makes an investment to be one of national importance.  If it does not rise to that level, it might be nice to do, but it is not in the purview of the Federal Gummint.  (Unless Congress tells us that it is, which happens from time to time: see New Orleans' SELA project for an example.)

In times of disaster, however, those lines get blurred a lot.  We tend to do things in the wake of a disaster that we don't normally do, just to make it so people can get their lives re-started.  Things like blue roofs.  And debris cleanup.

And like my work - power restoration.  (Not usually a Corps mission)

But how far do we go to complete the mission?  Do we deliver electricity to the substation?  To the last transformer in the neighborhood?  To the power pole next to your house?  To your house?  Inside your house?

The Beauty of Recovery

When I arrived in Puerto Rico, just a few days before Thanksgiving, almost two full months has passed since Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico.  And I don't know what I expected to find.  But even then, there were indications that recovery was going to be fast and slow.

Amazing food, everywhere - the kitchens were open.  Lots of hustle and bustle.  Grocery stores, stocked with food.  A few shelves were a little threadbare, but there was nothing that I needed that I couldn't get.  Well, except for a hotel room....

I came in to my office on day, and on the way I saw some beautiful flowers, and almost immediately fell in love with the tropical paradise.  It was as if I was hearing half of the song from West Side Story:

Always the pineapples growing, 
Always the coffee blossoms blowing . . . 

Yes.  It is still a disaster zone.  There were piles of debris.  There were downed trees and power lines.  There were buildings with broken windows.

And then, there were some trees that had just started to put on leaves, despite the hit.

Plumeria with a few remaining leaves.

All the leaves that remained were tattered, and most were ripped off.  But there was, at least, a little evidence of what could come back.

Turn! Turn! (Too late).

All I wanted to do was get to the other side of the interstate.

This week, we got moved to a different office across town, and in this new space, I don't know my way around.  There is an center with a few shops right across the highway, and I decided on the first day that I wanted to stop by there on my way home.  The road that I use to get back onto the highway is not well marked.  The brilliant traffic engineers responsible for this masterpiece created a series of access tunnels under the highway that would make a hobbit proud.  It is a warren of unmarked burrows, and each one takes you to a different magical place.

My first entry took me on an epic, and completely unexpected, journey along the highway to the west.  I honestly have no idea how.

A half hour, three illegal left hand turns later, and a few near misses with massive buses and trucks, and I am back where I started.  Second try at the intersection:  OK, the left road took me the wrong way, so I will try the middle road, which will surely take me across.

O. B. E.

My agency is civilian military, which means we civilians keep our hair long, we don't have daily PT, and our 'uniform' is 'don't wear offensive clothes'.  We do, however, have a certain amount of military in our organization: we answer to a hierarchy, culminating at the Commander in Chief (with several Generals in between), we get deployed, we get issued travel orders, and we work to 'execute our mission'.  It is an odd blend of a very few green suiters and a bunch of civilians.

But the acronyms define us as military more than any other element.

We have HSDRRS ('hisdoctors'), BUDMAT, PDT, MOA, MOU, IEPR, WBV, LPV, NOV/NFL, CAP, LGM, HNC, SELA, CG, ASA(CW).... we use acronyms more than we use verbs.  One of my goals as a federal burrocrat is to complete an entire sentence, un-self-consciously, without using real words.

One of the lesser used acronyms that I have gotten some mileage out of recently is OBE. Many know the phrase, but for those who don't, it stands for Overcome By Events.  It means that the task (or mission) that you were assigned to do has become unnecessary because of external events.

Example:
A friend of mine, a branch chief, had been instructed to move the offices of all of his people to a different space.  The move was in full swing, but he had not spent much time preparing for the move of his personal office.  That kind of inaction would not be unusual for me; I love waiting until the deadline and then jamming everything into boxes, and slamming them into the new space.  My friend, however, is usually more methodical in his approach.

It got to where people were starting to be concerned about whether he would be able to do it on the timeline.

Two days before the deadline, the office brass announced that my friend had been selected as the candidate for a major promotion.  He was going to be moving.  But to a different office.

His original move was O.B.E.

Shortly after moving to Vicksburg, I came across another example of OBE that pleased me, and is on the grandest scale possible.

View of Vicksburg from the water.

In the War between the States, the Mississippi River traveled a path that led right by Vicksburg.  Vicksburg is built on a 125-foot bluff overlooking the river - and its strategic value for the war cannot be overstated*.  At the top of the bluff is a great place to put a cannon or twenty, and the cannons made passage of Union boats through the riverbend challenging. Maj. General US Grant, after a certain amount of time, decided that enough was enough.

And he set about to change it.

In a move that mirrored the labors of Hercules, Grant decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to divert the river.  

Map of Vicksburg, modified to show Grant's Canal
in red. Image stolen from Civil War website.

The Mississippi River.

Unlike Hercules, he did not make the cut himself.  But he did instruct his troops to start the process, with the intention of cutting off the loop to the north that made the river cross in front of Vicksburg.  And allow his steamboats to pass through unmolested.

He also laid siege to the city from the other side.  There is a huge military park that lays out the 90-day siege, where the different companies from the different states were located for the full time.  Each state has its own monument, and it is a lovely place, if ever you are in town.

The siege (May 18 – July 4, 1863) was a success, eventually, and Vicksburg was surrendered to the Union army.  

Once the city fell, there was no need to redirect the river, and the effort to make the cut was abandoned.

Grant's cut was O.B.E.  It was overcome by events.

The cut is there, with a small bronze plaque describing the event, immediately across the river, visible from I-20.  


postscript:

In memoirs, Grant suggested that much of his reason for undertaking the effort was to keep his men busy; he was not convinced that his engineers were right.  For what it is worth, a few years later, the Mississippi River did naturally what Grant had decided to engineer.  IN the flood of 1876, the flooding river forced a new passageway, carving a new channel just south of the city.  The oxbow lake that remained was called Centennial Lake, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the US.  

Fascinating article on Grant's cut here. Worth it for the images alone.
Grant's memoirs available online here.


*President Lincoln quotes, re: Vicksburg
"See what a lot of land these fellows hold, of which Vicksburg is the key. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket." 
"We can take all the northern ports of the Confederacy, and they can defy us from Vicksburg. It means hog and hominy without limit, fresh troops from all the states of the far South, and a cotton country where they can raise the staple without interference." 
"I am acquainted with that region and know what I am talking about, and, as valuable as New Orleans will be to us, Vicksburg will be more so."

LMJ Word of the week - voussoir

Continuing my storytelling through looking for le mot juste....

We all know about the keystone, and how important it is.  The top stone in the arch, the piece that holds everything together, it is even (inexplicably) translated as "cornerstone" in some ancient texts.

The keystone is important - I agree.  The fascinating element of the arch is the piece that is under the most pressure to perform.  Pressure from both sides, equally distributed, the keystone brings to my mind the image of Samson pushing at the columns of the Philistine temples. 

Furthermore, our eyes naturally gravitate upwards (OK, maybe gravity is not the best word...), seeing the sweeping line of the opening, focusing on the symmetrical piece that pushes the two walls apart.  The beautiful keystone, perfectly cut, perfectly fitted, perfectly symmetrical.

And yet, the image is a little bit wrong.  An arch, after all, is more than just two vertical pieces and a horizontal piece.  The other side pieces lean in, pushing on the keystone.  What is happening is more like a reverse tug-of-war, with each piece multiplying the force of the one behind, adding pressure that will keep the keystone up.

The foundation blocks at the bottom of the arch - the springers - are important.   The keystone is of critical importance.



My rendition of an arch.  Voussoirs in yellow.

But the voussoir - each of the trapezoidal stones that form the transition between the two, those are the most often forgotten pieces in the arch.  These blocks make the dangerous move of leaning out of plumb, taking the chance of failure.  While the keystone is held on the sidelines until the critical moment, the voussoir take all of the risk.

And in the end, everyone marvels at the beauty of the whole arch, and look at that keystone!



My job - my career - is that of voussoir.  Yours is very likely the same.  We support the ones who get the glory.  We push, and take risks, and run a real chance of going SPLAT.  We step on the ledge, pushing the center of gravity over the edge, trusting that eventually the other side will support us; hoping that the other side is being built in the same way as we are.

And like the second level in a cheerleading pyramid, we take the risks without getting to fly.

Interestingly, the keystone is a specific voussoir.  Just one more wedge-shaped stone, carefully made to fit together with other equally carefully made stones. 

Yes. I am carefully made.



The corbeled vault is simply not as cool.
 Nothing but flat blocks everywhere.
 

And my function is important. 

My job, then, is important - to keep pushing out.  Keep stepping on the ledge.  Keep reaching for the other side. 

Today's definition: Voussoir - (n; pl. voussoirs - ) one of any wedge-shaped blocks used in forming an arch.  

The verb form (intransitive) is voussoired.... Or at least, it should be.

Let's go voussoir the hell out of life. Together.   Holding each other up.  Supporting each other.  Leaning in.