All I want for Christmas is a .45
Nope, not a lawn mower.
No thanks on the three-foot long chrome spatula, the chef's hat and white apron that comes with a gas-fired barbecue.
I'll pass on the fleece seat covers and the How-To Home Gardening library.
Thanks, Santa, but no thanks.
I want a gun for Christmas.
A 1911 type .45 caliber pistol.
The kind that fits easily into my hand because the grip is not too wide and not too thin.
I want a blue version, not those shiny, coated types that repel rust. They look too new. I want mine to at least resemble the side arms used by U.S. officers from the bombed streets of Sicily to the shores of Subic Bay.
Give it pearl handles, and you have something akin to the pistol General George Patton used when he stood misty eyed at Carthage where, two thousand years earlier, Hannibal had begun his campaign against the Legions of Rome.
It would be the same type that Ray LeFebvre of Bonners Ferry wore when he was riddled with enemy bullets in the Ia Drang Valley and similar to the sidearm strapped to a young major named Schwartzkopf as he led troops in the central highlands of Vietnam more than 40 years ago.
These men were, each in their quests, said to be upholding democracy: The right to make policy by casting a vote. The right to be heard at the ballot box.
Each risked their lives for a shining experiment in government; the least diluted form.
It consists of direct representation of the people's will in the echoing halls of Congress.
I don't think, Santa, that lawyers are supposed to be part of that equation.
But, there they are, and it, coming on Christmas.
Last week, our hallowed government sent a message to the people.
Your vote doesn't really matter, the message said.
And so, at voter's expense, the White House hired a limousine-fleet of attorneys to help sue firearms makers because Congress, at the request of the people, refused to hold gun manufacturers responsible for the actions of less than one percent of the population who annually do dumb things with firearms.
But, like I say, Santa, I just want a gun.
No thanks on the case of Scotch, or the box of Northwest wine nestled in wood wool. A new set of wheels? A Maserati? Nah.
I just want a gun.
A historical piece, Santa. Bring me a double action .45 that I can keep near my wrinkled and framed version of the Constitution.
Real relics, those. As are you, St. Nick.
As are you.
(2000)
Jewelry in the hen house
(run boy run)
Ruby and topaz lace, emerald frizzle, gold bars.
She collects chickens like other women take to jewelry.
It's not a bad thing, I think.
I bought an Auricana rooster for her birthday and will probably splurge during the Holidays. The hatchery catalog has been open to page 21 in a conspicuous manner for several weeks, so I'm saving for a clutch of Ancona eggs.
The breed is rare in the U.S. according to the catalog people and can fare well on scanty rations. They attack owls and feed on coyotes, so they should fit right in at our seven-acre poultry patch in predator holler.
Just for the heck of it - some say I'm just romantic - I dropped several dollars for a few Wyandottes. They are good, medium-weight fowl for small family flocks kept under rugged conditions, according to the official description in the poultry handlers guide - a small magazine the little woman keeps under her pillow.
Their combs do not freeze as easily as single combs and the hens make good mothers.
Sound nice? Read on.
Their good disposition, attractive curves and many color patterns make them a good choice for fanciers and farmers alike, the guide says.
"What was that breed again? Wyandottes, yeah that's it," I told the person in Georgia who raises the variety and ships chickens of all ages and in various stages of health to 4-H members and farmers throughout the U.S.
"How come you want these?" The chicken man asked. "Don't you already have enough chickens?"
The telephone line crackled like a boot on a pile of layer pellets.
I couldn't understand his interrogation until I learned he was an engineer who took to raising chickens at the behest of his wife who left her job as an account executive because of a blue Andalusian.
"Watch out," he said. "The passion for fowl can turn ugly."
His paranoia made me smile.
That was last year, well before our Auricanas laid hundreds of blue, pink and green eggs the color of pond water.
Before we got the barred rocks and the silver leghorns that guard the woodshed like yellow-eyed banshees.
And, come to think of it, before my daughters started waking up in the middle of the night and rising from their feather beds to pull on my fingers with the words, "Daddy can you go out and check the chickens, I think I heard Rudy (their favorite rooster) fuss."
I usually rise then and lumber into the starless night with the back flap of my union suit open for air, and a 16-gauge single shot poking the misty night like a cow prod.
I check the pens and inhale the odoriferous stew of chicken dung, food and feathers before I come back in and flop into bed to dreams of drumsticks and gravy.
Twice there have been raccoons, but they were denied.
The guy from Georgia might have a point.
This passion for Minorcas and Orpingtons seems a bit colorful. But ugly?
I ponder that as I scrape the chicken dip from my Sunday shoes.
There's a good reason for preferring poultry to say, gowns and diamond earrings.
My neighbor said it:
"I don't like chickens," he mused. "Every time I walk into the coop, they tell me what I am.
"Cheap, cheap, cheap."
(2002)
Ted Turner and Werner: only their names sound alike
Werner Krautham was a socialist.
I met him one winter night in the university district in Munich where I was supposed to be going to college, but had discovered something better than college.
It came in frothy mugs in smoky rooms with low ceilings and was served by large mustachioed women who, despite doubling as bouncers, were dainty in the same way that truck transmissions are sweet.
Werner sat alone at one of the few tables in an establishment that had mostly wooden booths made when Napoleon was a boy.
I sat with him because there was no place else to sit since a lot of other university students in Munich at the time had discovered the same thing I fancied, and because he looked like a good fellow, and he had a small dog on a leash.
He and his dog were old.
Werner wore a beret.
His dog had a beard.
Werner, I later learned, drank one pint of beer each weekday afternoon while seated at the same table at about the same time, which depended mostly on the regularity of the dog.
He drank a glass of cognac on Saturday. Sunday, he abstained.
His one-day abstinence he attributed to his wife, who traded her socialism for church on Sundays and frowned upon his drinking on the Sabbath.
Werner respected his wife's wishes although she had died years ago.
They had been teachers during Hilter's putsch - and had been blacklisted because neither would serve in the Fuehrer's military, Werner told me.
I believed him. Still do.
After the overthrow of the German government, his picture had hung on a wall near the Odeon's Platz where Hitler had rallied the masses. His mug shot was one of hundreds on a placard: men and women labeled as enemies of the state. They weren't given work. They were outcasts.
More than 40 years later, he spoke of those days with no bitterness. He had dug potatoes, scraped bricks, swept floors, and gotten by, he said. It wasn't easy. Nothing ever is, he said. He and his wife had feared for their lives at times. Sometimes, while seated at home listening to the contraband radio, supping a bowl of cabbage soup, they thought they heard Hitler's black coats coming for them.
For safety reasons he and his wife separated during the war, but were later reunited. They had no children.
When I met Werner, he took me in, so to speak.
I would sometimes meet him at the same tavern and sit at his table because it was the only spot available and I would drink beer and he drank a beer very slowly.
Once, I walked with him through the streets and he pointed out landmarks, our breath trailed like the smoke from bismuth burners.
He lived in the same small apartment that he and his wife rented after the Allies freed Europe.
Just he and his terrier.
No yachts, which is unusual, perhaps, for a socialist. No million-acre ranches. No frivolities such as inbred buffalo.
Just himself, a bearded dog and those black and white photographs of him as a school teacher and his beautiful wife who had aged gracefully.
I wonder what Werner would have added to Ted Turner's recent attempt to ennoble himself to the socialist crowd.
I wonder if Werner heard it when Mr. Turner, one of the world's richest men, and a leading private land owner in the U.S., told a gathering at Shanghai that he is "a socialist at heart."
Mr. Turner said he was concerned that internet entrepreneurs were getting rich too fast.
Werner may have seen the report on a vast flickering screen beaming from above a bar, foyer or bathroom stall. The blue screens are becoming the scourge of this society as they send skittish light across the universe and make millions of dollars every day for people like Mr. Turner.
Werner probably wouldn't have shown ire or disbelief: the two most common reactions when faced with facades.
His routine of moderation wouldn't have been upset, I don't think.
True convictions are lifelong endeavors, after all, and not subject to frivolous whims of empire.
(2001)
Kevlar, K-bar and combat loss
The face of the Marine in the Kuwait airport was the color of nutmeg; a red tinge from the desert sun streaked his neck.
He asked me if I wanted to throw my luggage on the cart that carried his seabags, a faded flak vest and his Kevlar helmet, its dust cover torn and the edges frayed.
He had been in Fallujah for seven months including the time in April when his unit suffered casualties at the hands of insurgents who made what at the time seemed a last ditch attack there, and he was headed home to Camp Pendleton, one of many Marines and soldiers looking forward to time in the rear.
I was leaving too and gingerly made my way toward the metal detectors where the Kuwaiti officials scanned my bags. They discovered a Victorinox pocketknife in my carry-on luggage.
My bad.
They asked me what I planned to do with this vile multi-bladed tool with a white cross on the handle, and considered among themselves if I was the kind of person who might take on, in the name of Allah, a planeload of service members with the shiny 3-inch blade, can opener and screwdriver set.
They dropped my utility knife in a box behind the counter and waved me on.
When I turned to the Marine he grimaced as Kuwaiti officials removed one at a time a half dozen M16 magazines from one of his bags and held them up accusingly.
"I'm in the Marine Corps," he told them through his teeth as if it wasn't already painfully obvious.
After the officials confiscated the same magazines the young man had carried with him for many months in the Al Anbar province - a few hunks of metal and springs that had become as dear to him, and as important, as the Camelbacks he had stuffed into his luggage - the young man, all of 22, turned to me and said, "chalk it off as a combat loss."
Then, with a grin, "at least they didn't find my Ka-bars," referring to the combat knives he hid in his luggage.
I wondered what kind of reception he would get in the refined world of the Amsterdam airport where so many nice Europeans in suits and non-wrinkle casual wear would espy this kid packing his carry-on luggage - a combat tested flak vest and Kevlar helmet dangling like so many chickens in an Iraqi market. And I realized he didn't give a sideways hoot what any of them thought.
The gear was a badge of his time served in a desert country hot as a fry pan, with a duty to restore a semblance of order to a people who, at least a few, seemed to thrive on disorder - or an order of their own making.
In Amsterdam, he shook my hand and said goodbye and I was left with a notion of gratitude to have been allowed to follow a tribe of men and women like this kid who held their service in arms above anything they might achieve in the material world.
People have asked me about the morale of the troops in Iraq.
"Is it low, as they say in the news?" they ask.
What comes to me is this.
"When Marines complain, it's normal. It's when they quit complaining that you have to worry."
A first sergeant with the eagle, globe and anchor on his digital cammy desert hat told me that. There was a slick of sweat on his face as we stood for a spell in the shade of a tree with leaves like leather while waiting for a helo to thump thump us across miles of sand to places where other armed men and women wearing globes and anchors waited for us with their heads high, but tucked low under the sand bags.
If what he said is true, then there is no need to worry about the mindset of the young Marines humping their gear, Kabars, Camelbacks, flak, helmet and rifle and the multitude of extra magazines, through the heat of the high sun.
There's plenty of grousing going on, usually followed by the standard line of grins. And there's dreaming too of homes and families and bass fishing on a lake somewhere far from the heat of Iraqi desert.
All of which means, according to the first sergeant at least, that the morale of the troops in Iraq is pretty much the same as anywhere else.
It's not much of a headline, but it's a good thing to take home.
(2004)
Tea with former officers
of the Saddam's Iraqi army
Officers of the former Iraqi army sit on their cots in a small adobe-like hut with heavy drapes on the windows and a television blinking in the corner of the single-room building.
Outside the other men, former soldiers in the Iraqi army, smile from under the shermaghs - colorful scarves wrapped around their heads - as they squat in the shade on the cement of what is their new barracks
It is a spartan place of bunks, dressers, darkness and little else.
Cigarette butts freckle the tile floor.
But, next door, these former officers sit on their beds in their separate quarters and look glum as if someone has thrown a bucket of dirty water on them.
Outside the hot wind gusts and stops, swirls dust and sets it back down.
The former officers are dejected sitting there. One wears an olive green camouflage uniform with two stars on the epaulets; the others are attired in civilian clothing, sandals, and pant legs rolled up to parry the heat.
Under Saddam, these men had been unit commanders. They may have lived in flourishing suburbs with porcelain and gold plates, were respected as men to be reckoned with.
Their present job, as security forces on a small outlying coalition base in the desert, doesn't bestow them with the kind of prestige they once knew.
Working for the coalition has put their families in jeopardy, they say. It has made them targets of insurgents.
They hail from a city north of Baghdad and regularly travel the many hours between this outpost and home to care for their families.
Their words come second-hand through an interpreter, a young man with a beard whose father was a prominent minister during the Hussein regime, but he isn't a reliable go-to guy.
A Marine - call him Dan - dressed in a T-shirt and khaki cargo pants with a Beretta strapped to his leg, explains this about the interpreter.
Dan speaks Arabic like people in the Midwest speak Louisiana swamp dialect. He understands some and can reply, but his forte is Russian, so conversational Arabic is a little beyond his grasp.
The interpreter, Arthur, was born in Britain and has come to Iraq for a piece of the pie, Dan says.
Arthur would like to raise a militia and grab some power in the Al Anbar Province.
The man is full of spin, says Dan, whose job requires him to interview, with his rudimentary language skills, Iraqis by the thousands.
He uses interpreters as he gathers information on insurgents and tests the waters of popular opinion. It's how he finds reliable workers among the myriads of former Iraqi soldiers and civilians who are jobless since the fall of the Hussein regime.
Arthur's way of interpreting is a source of contention, Dan says.
So some of what a Marine major seated quietly among the former Iraqi officers asks, or tells them, is sifted through Arthur's own world view and who knows how it comes out at the other end.
When we arrived here with a small convoy loaded with boxes of accoutrements (everything from soccer balls and sunscreen, to towels, shoes and plastic toys) sent by American families for the wives and children of these former soldiers and officers as tidings of friendship, the former regular Iraqi army men greeted us with cigarettes.
"Miami," an older gentleman in a baggy battle dress uniform and a face as tanned as saddle leather, said.
It is a brand of smokes.
From a baby-blue packet he slowly handed the cigarettes one at a time, gesturing lazily, almost graciously to the grunts. He lit each end meticulously with a plastic, butane lighter, and the Marines, many of them whose lips were packed with snoose, took puffs as the man watched the gift he gave disappear slowly at the end of the Marines' fingers.
"It's kind of traditional," said a corporal, who prefers a pipe and a special blend of tobacco sent from his wife in Missouri. He puffed and blew the cigarette smoke that billowed off in a gust of dusty wind.
The former regular Iraqi army soldiers crowded around making conversation and the Marines answered and asked, not expecting a glimmer of recognition either way.
Inside the cool room of the officer quarters, sweet tea in small, cylindrical cups is passed around on saucers.
The former-Iraqi officers want weapons. They want more money. They want to have power returned to them.
The Marine Corps major, a burly man with a face like a sweet pea, has heard this story before.
Dan is seated on one of the beds and listens.
The former Iraqi officers concede that things are better now than in the months after the regime fell. They are being paid as much working for a security company called Ramadan as they had been under Saddam, but prices have gone up, they say. They aren't given the extra allowances of food they were accustomed to and there is the matter of keeping their families safe.
"With Saddam we used to have security," they say, through Arthur, who sits between the major and the officers. "Our families were safe.
"Now there is no security."
They are solemn. Their brows furrowed.
Put the army back to work, the former officers say, and we will restore security.
One of the Marines tells them that thousands of former Iraqi army officers have been given jobs as policemen, and as soldiers in the new army, but it will take more than the military to restore order here.
"It will take everybody," the Marine major says.
As if the statement is the annoying buzz of a fly in the sullen air of the dark room where a silenced television blinks, the former officers swat the air and shake their heads.
In the old system, at least 1,500 officers were stationed in each province to provide security and quell unrest, says a former officer with the two stars on his epaulets. That system has been dismantled; that's why there is chaos.
The Marine major explains that there must be a balance between the military and the civilian population, between officers, soldiers and small business people. There must be more opportunity for Iraqis than a career as a warrior.
For two hours, as tea and cigarettes are passed around again, the conversation repeats itself.
The major explains that if the former officers want a better paying job they should seek it out, or use what they know to help rebuild Iraq.
The major, a Marine Corps reservist, says he uses his military training in the civilian world to raise a family that includes four children.
"We know about democracy," one of the former officers says with a stiff jaw. "We are different."
Outside, the NCOs have unpacked some of the gifts, handing out soccer balls to a dozen former regular Iraqi soldiers who eye the checked balls and grin.
A Marine Corps staff sergeant kicks one of the balls across a road to a former regular soldier, but it is a high kick and the wind grabs the ball careening it into the dusty desert and making it tumble out past the adobe houses toward the concertina wire.
The sun is blistering and high in a watery sky.
The ball rolls and zigs back and forth.
The soldier scrambles after it.
Dogs like fine wine
I'm near the beginning of a story. It's Charley Waterman and he's hunting wood ducks in a Florida swamp.
He walks quietly through the half-light of Spanish moss and cypress. His boots make rings in the inches-deep water. Squinting ahead, he tries to locate the birds responsible for the singsong conversation and soft gabbling. He hopes to espy the silver ripples that tell the wood ducks' location.
I imagine Waterman with a dog at his heels, its ears perked, the two almost invisible in the shadowy murk.
Then there is a scream.
Turning I see my daughter's claw-hold on the face of her younger sibling. The other's cheeks puff angrily like an adder.
She clenches a fist under the cushioned bar of the car seat that keeps her in place.
She's waiting for a chance with a hook.
We're on the straight stretch west of Dusty, Washington and I drop my book, lean back from the front passenger seat to lay a paw in the air between the fist and its target as middle sister lets go, leaving only blue dents where her fingernails had been.
My wife is at the wheel.
It's all for a good reason.
We're headed to the Yakima Valley's annual barrel tasting, a family affair that heralds spring in the warming valleys of central Washington.
That means wine in a variety of flavors, in bottles or boxes.
Mostly bottles.
And food, from Tabasco splat oysters floating in gritty half shells to long strands of asparagus like boiled chords of nylon rope.
Music too.
Traditionally, the weather holds, although today, the four-door-family vehicle churns through rainwater ruts that riddle the pavement of highway 272.
"Things are shaping up," I tell the woman behind the wheel as fog swirls across the road. "It could sunshine."
It's 6 a.m. and we have three hours left to drive.
Charley Waterman, the veteran writer for a gad-awful-lot of outdoor publications, did a book on hunting guns and dogs once and it was a pretty good account.
From chasing sage grouse to the story about swamp woodies, the book is no tearjerker. He pretty much got it right.
Down to the smell.
And the odor of dog vomit is best left to the imagination. The family and I though, whiff it through bites of our cold-cut sandwiches and oranges as our dog, a small pointer that prefers motoring on her own four-legs instead of the round rubber ones of the SUV that speeds us west, lies in the back cubby sick as a sailor on shore leave.
Long drives are always nice. Long drives with dogs and children are extra special.
With the windows open, rain funneling monsoon-like into the backseat, the children buttoned up in outerwear as our fingers dexterously plug our nose holes, we are flying to Zanzibar.
The Yakima Valley is agreeable this time of year, the weather always seems to break along the Columbia, the sun pops out, and the festival, with its limousines, newly waxed cars and lines of people waiting for a sip of the latest grape is especially sheik.
Thanks to the Waterman reader, I can't get my mind off the quail. They are the little guys of the California variety that flit across roads and between the hanging grape stocks practicing evasion techniques.
I want to take my dog out for some air, but she drools in her kennel dreaming of a baking soda concoction.
After a morning spent - somewhat - with Charley Waterman, I have birds and recovering bird dogs on my mind.
I settle for a wine with a dog on the label.
It isn't a Washington wine though.
At one stop, as a group of quail scamper between the glistening wheels of roadsters and coups, I eloquently explain the virtues of Idaho to a man from the coast. He drove to the tasting in a little convertible with what looked like a silver peace sign on the curve of the hood, but he wasn't convinced.
Then the Hells Canyon Retriever Red mad a fan of him and he tottered after me asking for a story from the Gem state.
Where the heck's Hell's Canyon.
Chukar country, I said.
He took a sip of the Retriever Red and I could see it increase his appreciation of fine hunting dogs.
Ralph Bartholdt photo
