All posts by Steve Stern

Nadia Popova R.I.P.

Current Affairs

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Nadia Popova is name you have probably never heard of unless you are Russian, were crazy about WWII airplanes as a kid, or are a woman military pilot (or, maybe, Peter Kuhlman). It is not a name that I remember although I read alot about World War II airplanes as a kid. What I do remember reading about were what the Germans called Nachthexen, or Night Witches. They were a group of Russian women pilots who terrorized the Germans.

We like to think that we won the war against the Germans, but the Russians did the heavy lifting. Three quarters of the German Army was on the Eastern Front, the first time the German Army was stopped was at Stalingrad, and most historians consider that the turning point of WW II in Europe. That was in late 1942. The Soviets had no material to speak of, just people to throw at the Germans – Stalin famously said Quantity has a quality all it’s own –  taking 1,150,000 causalities at Stalingrad alone. They had so few assault rifles, that, in the big push across the Volga, they attacked with two men for each assault rifle, when the guy with the rifle was shot, the other picked it up.

The Night Witches were equipped about as poorly. They flew at night in open, wooden, bi-planes with a top speed of 94 miles per hour against the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe – think about that for a second – in Belorussia, Poland and, finally, Germany. The women didn’t wear parachutes because they were too heavy. In four years, the Night Witches flew over 30,000 missions . The Atlantic points out that They were loathed. And they were feared. Any German pilot who downed a “witch” was automatically awarded an Iron Cross.

They were also amazing.

The most amazing was Nadia Popova. She was a girly-girl who loved to dance and wanted to be a teacher, and she flew 852 missions as a night bomber pilot. (The average crew of a B26, our most used medium bomber during WWII, flew just over 20 missions during their entire career.) After one mission, she returned with 42 bullet holes in her plane. In Poland, she reached her personal record of 18 sorties in one night. That means that she took off – in an open plane, in the dark, often in sub-zero weather – flew over German lines to dropped her bomb load, and returned to her base in the dark. Eighteen times in one night.

After all that, Nadia lived through the war, got married and had kids and grandkids. She died at 91 on July 8th of this year.

(If you are interested, more here and here)

 

The last of my pictures from Japan in the early 60’s – mostly people

Photography

Japan-0017The things that I remember the most from my one and only trip to Japan are the thoroughly weird stuff – weird being defined as being different from back home – people stripping down to their skivvies on the train to Kyoto, ice parlors that served scotch, a temple to penises – peni? – in the village of Komaki, fishhead soup for breakfast, fake pirate boats, hosing off before getting in a hot-tub to bathe, torii gates going nowhere or standing in the middle of the water, and an unbelievable number of people standing on the top of Fujisan. I would like to say that the people were the most memorable but that is not true (for example, I have no memory of the guy I am posing with, above, or where we were).

There were three very memorable groups of people, however, all women which should not be too surprising considering that we were two men in our early twenties with no access to datable women. We did see American Red Cross women who came by our Tac Site on the first Tuesday of each month to give us donuts, but they only dated officers and, really, only officers stationed in Seoul which is code for staff officers (which is code for officers with connections).

In our travels around Japan, at some point, we crossed Lake Biwa, the largest freshwater lake in Japan, on what looked like a pirate boat. I don’t remember where we were going, how we got there or what we did at the other side, but the ferry was bizare. On the way to the departure port, we passed a torii gate and like every sight, like every anything, there were Japanese taking souvenir pictures. Everywhere we went, there were Japanese tourists and all the tourists were either taking pictures or having their pictures taken.

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While we were waiting to get on the pirate boat to cross the lake, we saw two women waiting to get on. One was wearing shorts that would be short, even today; they were very short then. I am not going to say that we were hyper-ventilating but Terry did manage to get me to stand next to her to get my picture taken.

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At some point, I think when we were near Osaka, we ended up going on a pearl diving boat. I guess that they were not really pearl divers, they were oyster divers and the pearls were in the oysters. Either way, they were diving for what my mother then called cultivated pearls because the oysters were raised in a farm (I think the grain of sand to start the pearl was also planted in the shell). Much later when I showed her the pictures, my mother was rather dismissive saying Cultivated pearls were not as good as real  pearls. When I asked her how somebody could tell the difference, she didn’t know and I am convinced that nobody can.

Either way, why we went there or how we got on the boat is in the mists of the past. What isn’t a mystery is that all the divers were women.

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However, fifty years later the thing that I am happiest for having done in Japan, the thing that I remember the most, is hiking up Mt. Fuji. The Japanese call it Fujisan, san being an honorific. There are several different classic ways up Fujisan and I have no idea which one we took. What I do remember is that we took the bus to the base of the trail where there was a huge crowd.  Once there, we had no idea what to do and nobody seemed to know English. Happily, among the people in the crowd, were a group of young, international students, mostly girls, one of whom spoke English. They had come to watch some other students start their hikes but they were not making the climb themselves.

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The English speaker was a Thai woman named Xæppeil (which means apple and it pronounced just like apple with a very heavy Thai accent).  Xæppeil, the woman in the orange and pink dress, also spoke French and Chinese as well as, presumably, Thai. Both Terry and I feel in love immediately. We would ask Xæppeil a question which she would then ask the Chinese  student – the woman with her head hardly showing – who would then ask the Japanese woman (obviously the woman in the white dress with pink polka dots). The Chinese woman would frequently have to write the question for the Japanese woman to understand. Then the answer would come back in the other direction. It was sort of like the game telephone using three different languages.

Our plan was to spend the day hiking Fuji, however we soon found out that the usual method was to hike at night to see the sunrise from the top. We had no choice but to spend much of the day hanging out with the students. We started late in the afternoon and the trail was wall to wall people. Climbing Fuji is more like going to a huge event and parking way too far away than hiking, say, the John Muir Trail. There were thousands and thousands of people on the trail, many of them helping their old parents. I remember it being some sort of special ceremonial ancestors day, but I can’t find anything like that on the web, so I am probably wrong. There were however lots of climbers in white, ceremonial, dress carrying special climbing sticks – kongotsue – which we also carried.

Mt. Fuji is 12,388 feet high with all the trailheads being above 6,500 making the climb much easier than it might, at first, seem. Every so often on the trail – I don’t remember the interval, maybe every 250 vertical meters – an old man would be sitting by a habachi and we could get a cup of hot tea and get our kongotsue stamped with the altitude. Higher up there were mountain huts where we could stop for the night. How far one hikes before stopping at a rest hut is determined by when you want to start rehiking in the morning to get to the top by sunrise. I recall that we chose a hut at about 300 meters below the summit and paid something like a day’s budget for the night and a cup of tea.

We got up at 4 AM and made it to the top for sunrise. On top it was like a county fair with the crowds overwhelming us. This is, after all, the most climbed mountain on earth. Today, I would welcome the crowds. I would realize that the crowds were a big part of the experience but, then, we wanted it to be like summiting Whitney or  Mont Blanc. We did find an empty spot and I stood on a high mound while Terry took my picture.

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Three days later we were back in Korea and fifty years later I still have the picture and the memory it evokes.

 

Some more pictures from Japan in the early 60’s

Photography, Travel

Japan-0012Our first trip out of Tokyo was to the old Imperial Capital of Kyoto. It was an eight-hour trip by train (Japan didn’t yet have bullet trains, but they did already had very fast, air-conditioned trains, however they were expensive). We had the brilliant idea of taking the midnight train which we would sleep on, thereby getting to Kyoto at 8 AM rested and ready to go. I don’t remember when we got to the train station, but what ever time it was, it was too late. The train was standing room only.

Japan was in a heat wave and the temperature was over 35°C outside, at the Tokyo station, it was hotter inside the train. Most, or at least many, of the people on the train had stripped down to their underwear, hanging their clothes up on hangers so they would look nice and neat when we all got to Kyoto. This was before I read about the Japanese ability to compartmentalize behavior, still being in a stifling hot railroad car with a group of people in their underwear was not as weird as it sounds here. Part of it was that underwear in those days, in conservative Japan, was modest in the extreme and part of it was that we were naive in the same way that gullible people are naive, anything seemed possible and, even, normal.

Terry and I slept sitting on the floor, leaning against the closest seat. Being young and in the Army, I was more or less able to sleep anywhere, or so I thought. In this case, we didn’t get much sleep and arrived in Kyoto ready for bed. The fact that Kyoto was even hotter and muggier than Tokyo didn’t help either. Of course, checking into a place to stay at 8:00AM was out of the question (we found out when we tried). So we spent the morning of our first day wandering through some magnificent buildings, zombie-like. Kyoto was the largest city in Japan and the Imperial capital for many years and it is full of treasures like the Imperial Palace, Nijo Castle, Daitokuji Temple, Heian Shrine, and the list goes on and on, we zombied many of them.

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On five dollars a day – our approximate budget was actually six bucks a day – we had to sleep in cheap hotels and cheap hotels in Japan are ryokan, a kind of Japanese inn almost like an old boardinghouse. That meant we slept on mats on the floor in rooms with sliding soji screen doors. The bathroom was a squat toilet down the hall or down some stairs and the shower was a communal hot tub in the basement that we couldn’t use until we washed off – usually – with a garden hose. They did come with breakfast which was a money saver except that breakfast was fishhead soup with some very rubbery, chewy, things we called Dunlaps (after the tire). Looking back on it, they were more charming than this sounds and, at the time, some were less charming. Never the less,  they were cheap.

After our afternoon rest, we hit the town. One of the highlights that night was a strip club where the strippers were dressed in about the same fashion as the women in their underwear the night before on the train. At the strip club, the Japanese patrons went crazy. Really crazy, running at the stage crazy. It was a shock and we kept asking ourselves Why don’t they just take a night train ride.

The next day, we started sightseeing in earnest.

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One of the Kyoto sights that was high on my list was  a  famous – even then – Zen rock garden of Ryoanji-Sekitei. My mother thought of herself as somewhat of a Japanophile, and – in addition to exposing me to Japanese food – she taught me an appreciation of Japanese art starting with the art of the Zen garden. Our hotel was near the train station and the rock garden was at a  Zen temple across town, strangely near the strip joint, and it was a long walk (in the muggy, smoggy, air). But, when got there, it was worth it.

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Close by is the Zen Golden Temple of Kinkaku-ji and it was even more worth it.

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Kinkaku-ji was not the only temple with water a water garden, we ran into several others in other cities, but this was our first.

Japan-0051Just up the road from Kyoto was an even older capital of Japan, Nara. About the only thing I remember about Nara was that it had a very urban park full of tame, miniature deer.

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And just down the road was Osaka and Osaka Castle. As I remember it, Osaka was a pretty dismal, industrial city, but the castle was terrific. Years later, while reading Shōgun by James Clavell, I came across a section in which a feudal lord and a samurai are standing on the parapets of Osaka Castle, pledging allegiance while thinking about how they are going to double cross each other. I said to myself, I’ve been there.

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To be continued (and finished).

 

ADD, ADHD…whatever

Family, Psychological Musings

Steve-0546I am not sure of the terminology here but I have been diagnosed with ADD (or ADHD, I am not entirely sure what the difference is or if there even is a difference). For awhile, I was more or less in denial driven by shame.

To start at the beginning, I was listening to a woman complain about her husband who, she said was ADHD and I thought, That’s me. So I went online to take a short test and I aced it.  Now the problem with ADD tests is that they are like Enneagram tests in that they are about self-identified behavior making it pretty easy to influence the answer in the direction you feel is right. Typical questions are Do you have an unusually acute sense of smell and sensitivity to touch? or Do you go off on tangents easily? Michele said Those tests mean nothing, if you really think you are ADD, you should talk to an expert.

I went to a Neurologist who has ADD and is an expert and he tested me. The expert also gave me a book about ADHD to read. One of the things the book said, in the preface and then the first chapter, or so, is something like, If you are ADHD, you probably won’t finish this book but you should read Chapter 11 and take the test in Chapter 4. Humm, the not finishing the book did sound like me and the stories even more so. After not finishing the book, I went back to the expert.

He prescribed Bupropion. Now I am not entirely sure that I even believe in ADD just like I am not entirely sure I believe in the Enneagram. But, I am sure that I am a Nine on the Enneagram, that I am not sure I believe in, and I am sure that my behavior is ADDesque.  But, when the expert prescribed Bupropion, I really went into denial. I have seen too many movies when somebody says Watch out, he is off his meds, and the whole thing sort of reminded me of Ann Hathaway just getting out of rehab in Rachel Getting Married or Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook. To say that there is a high level of shame involved, is an understatement.

According to the expert and the book, some of the symptoms of ADD are “zoning out” without realizing it, even in the middle of a conversation and struggling to complete tasks, even ones that seem simple. Over the years, I like to think that I have been good at covering up these symptoms, but I know they are there. Another symptom is a tendency to overlook details, leading to errors or incomplete work and I know that is the reason I had failed the so-called Louisiana literacy test. Both the expert and the book said that these symptoms could be alleviated by the Bupropion and hope and curiosity have led me to give it a try.

I figured, while I am at it, I might as well quit all intoxicants, none of which are supposed to help. So, here I am, a clean and sober, out of the closet, ADDer on  Bupropion.

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