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David Mitchell

As I sit here waiting for midnight (and for Ohio State to make a comeback), another anecdote comes to mind. On this night in 1968, I had been "in country" one week and it was New Year's Eve.

Vinh Long airfield was surrounded by a somewhat secure perimeter that was a litttle over a mile around - enclosing a 3,000 foot long fixed-wing runway, about 60 or 80 helicopters parked on our "flight line" (something like six or eight seperate helicopter companies) and maybe 40 small plywood buildings - barracks, offices, maintenance buildings, an Officer's club, a small medical clinic, a Mess hall, and a few others.

Spaced around the "secure" perimeter were a series of short little guard towers or sandbag bunkers, linked together with a sort of perimeter wall of heavy rows of barbed wire. Each of the bunkers or towers had two or three infantrymen who would pull 24 hour shifts as guards in the bunkers and towers. (I can't think of a more boring duty assignment)

At precisely midnight, most of the bunkers and towers suddenly erupted with automatic weapins fire -striaght up into the air. The guys were celebrating New Years and all those rounds of bright orange "tracer" fire were their firewroks. I learned later that this was strictly forbidden, but they did it anyway.

It scared me at first, but it went on for several minutes and we just stood outside our hooches and enjoyed the "light show".

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

(Several bunkers and two of the small towers - middle right and far right)

James Hamilton, M. D.

As the years roll by...

To all our classmates I wish the best of health and happiness to you and your families as 2026 edges into our lives.

At times it seems like just yesterday we were in our WHS halls thinking of our last semester in high school and wondering what experiences would present themselves to us when we graduate.

This format has allowed us to share many of those experiences with our fellow classmates and we now are able to do the same as our aging bodies and minds can help support discussions germain to our "senior citizen" status. And that is great. I also suspect that we all have stories to tell that would be informative and interesting to our classmates - and not just political.

So, as a New Year's resolution let's see some of them here on the Forum before they are lost to a decaying shoebox in some relative's attic or basement.

Happy New Year,

Jim

Michael McLeod

I think I mentioned this before on this site but My granpa on my mother's side,ernest victor reutinger, lived in a totally cool red brick two story right next to a catholic church and grade school, holy rosary i think,  on east main street near downtown columbus. They were german. He was a doctor, His office and examining room was a single story bungalow that was connected to the front of the house. If you were in the living room you walked through an old school heavy oak door right next to the tv and bam you were in his office and examining room. I remember my mother telling me a story about how, when she was a young woman, he came out his office, into their home, and told her he wanted to show her something. It was a patient who had died. He wanted to show her what death looked like. I know this is a creepy story but my mother did not see it that way. She saw it as her father just being - pragmatic. Common sense.We live and we die and that's just the way of it.

I have a keepsake, an old school decorative knocker in the shape of an owl, that was on that door, the one that led from the living room of my mother's childhood home to her father's adjacent office, and the occasional jolt of reality.

Haven't been to columbus for years but i wonder if that house still looks about the same. I can remember sitting in his backyard as a kid,watching children from the holy rosary elementary school play in the playground behind the church,  Doctor Reutinger and his wife, Olga, whose maiden name was Witenmeir, often had priests from holy rosary over for dinner.

Anyway that's my story to the best of my memory and forgive me if I've mentioned it before, or, for that matter, if it creeps you out.

Joseph Gentilini

I also want to wish all my classmates a truly Happy New Year - may it be one of peace and kindness. I second Jim H's comments about what a great idea to have this type of communication with all of you - when I graduated I had no idea what I was going to do or where I would end up. Maybe many of you did also. Now, we can stay in touch in this way.  joe

Joseph Gentilini

David M - I am so glad you share your Vietnam experiences with us all. My draft number was very high so I didn't have to go to fight. Of course, the army told me they would not take me because of my asthma and the fact that my 'trigger' figure only has one digit and not two like most people. They told me that the navy would not want me either. In one sense I was fortunate - would probably have had a nervous breakdown if I had had to go. 

Anyway, thanks for sharing your adventures, David.

Monica Haban (Brown)

Happy New Year and Blessings to All!

As we approach our 60th reunion, and nearing our 80's, I reflect on the gifts of our class.  Not a time for boasting, Time person of the Year, Nobel Laureate, most rich and famous, but those who have brought Peace, Love, Joy, and made a difference in the lives of others.  To quote a recent comment from my grandson, as we were working on a project :  What we are doing is Christ Like!

A list might include:

Those in religious life: Sister Margie Davis, Fathers DeTemple and Hodges, Deacon Bill Reid

Social Workers: Joe Gentilini, Dan Coady

Physical Therapists, Physicians, Health Care Workers: Jim Hamilton, Beth Broadhurst, Sylvia DiSabato, Lynda Zelinski (paramedic) God knows we need them now!

Incredible voice: Mimi Kruse

Musicians ???

Master Wooodworker: Steve Freeman, Al Judy

Architect: Bill Lehner

Accountants: Can't file our taxes without them - Janie Albright, Bob Curtin, Brian McNamara, Henrietta Vassaux, Julie Carpenter, Tony Hawking, Joe Donahue

Veterans: Larry Foster, Brian McNamara, Mike McLeod, Dave Mitchell and Many Others

Diocesan Development: Ellen Swartz

Teachers (elementary, high school, college:  Jim Hamilton, Bob Berkemer, Clare Hummer, Theresa Zeyen, Vicki Della Maria, Mary Rabe, Mike Boulware, Sue Lally, Nina Osborn, Stephanie Malin, Jodelle Sims, Sheila McCarthy, Monica Haban

Public Employees of Integrity:  Fred Clem, Stan Kronenberger, Jeanine Eilers

My Apologies for omitting so many others out of my ignorance!!!

Feel free to add to the list!

Grateful for who you all have become.  

David Mitchell

Monica,

Two more Vetereans off the top of my head - Tim Lavelle and Jack Maxwell.

(and I think about a half dozen others)

--------------------

Meanwhile, who pooped on my parade - last night in Dallas?

David Mitchell

Thanks Joe and Mike. More to follow soon.

Hope you all enjoy a Happy New Year.

Monica Haban (Brown)

Thanks Dave.  And by the Grace of God, you all survived, especially those of you in harms way.  My dad survived WWII as a combat engineer and never understood why...

David Mitchell

Monica,

A bit off topic but:

Interesting about your dad. It would be interetsting to know how many of our parents served in WW2.

My dad was drafted at age 32 - with a wife and two baby girls - plus a full time medical practice with his older brother. The "Army Air Corps" (before it was separated into the "Air Force") was in serious need of more flight Surgeons.

He spent about 18 months in India, then China, and finally the island of Tinian (from where the "Enola Gay" took off.) 

A shot of 4 flight surgeons in Kharagpur India  (near Calcutta) - my dad on the right:

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

John Maxwell

Nina Osborn (Rossi)

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

Sorry for this political post, but in the defense of free spech and mainstream journalistic integrity, I find it most encouraging as we begin this New Year. Hats off to Bari Weiss.

Timothy Lavelle

Mary Margaret, I recall your post after Clare died and how you were sorry for politics dividing once upon a time close friends. 

Of course, within a few short weeks you were back to your old addiction. Your old bullshit.

Now you play the continual church lady telling us how we should believe and act with your postings while never even taking to heart the stuff you post.  Reread your last missile from the front pew...look at the fourth last and third last lines where you propose seeking to understand your friends causes. You have no clue to how your classmates are disturbed by your political crap but you make no ttempt to understand why your man is so sickening to most of us.

For those of us still able to form a sentence, you are like watching an old lady drive through a stop sign without even pausing. We clutch our pearls and worry for you. Except me, I don't worry for you....I just want you to surrender your  driving license 

"Believe what you want". I think if you read some of the shit you write and analyzed it you might wonder at your own thought process. Believe in facts. Believe in science. Believe in knowledge. Believe in any political writer, who is desperate for clicks, at your peril. 

I will happily donate to a go fund me page to pay you to go far far away and find your crowd of dictator lovers and write back and forth about how well Trump is taking care of us and how terribly evil those child stealing democrats are.

Mary Margaret, you are as full of shit as a Christmas Goose and I humbly ask you to leave the readership of once compatriats and friends behind as you exit this stage. Think of it as rehab. 

Lastly, hey class!...\\look at the list of classmates...there are a whole bunch of vets...every one of us is proud to have served. Don't need anyone's thanks. Personally, don't WANT anyone's thanks. For those that did not serve FOR ANY REASON, there is a wall with 50,000 plus names on it that supports your view. Not saying those 50K weren't proud to serve...saying they deserved to live like we all have.

Stay alive.

David Mitchell

Tim, Mary Margaret, (and classmates),

I was just about to leave a post congratulating the Indiana Hoosiers, when I saw your (Tim's)  post.

I have been in agreement with most of your posts before, and strongly disagree with most of Mary Margaret's political posts. But I think your last post here crosses a line of personal insult that is way out of place here. I love a good argument as much as anyone, but I think this one went too far. 

Michael McLeod

Wow.

Gonna take me a bit to adjust to this news: The Atlanta Constitution-Journal will no longer exist as a newspaper. It will only exist on line.I can't help but assume that eventually other newspapers will follow, abandoning the print edition and just going on line.

Call me sentimental but just hard for me as a journalist to absorb this.

No more holding the day's news in one hand, grabbing your morning coffee in the other.

And Now that memory I have of trudging through the snow delivering newspapers to doorsteps, is just that, a memory from another time, as extinct as the edsel. And no more grabbing the sunday comics and reading them in your jammies on the living room floor..

That tactile experience of both delivering and reading the news will no doubt disappear form our culture, I guess, assuming other newspapers follow, in the future. It's just progress and practically speaking a good thing. But I gotta shed a sentimental tear. Bye bye tactile. Hello, sterile.

Timothy Lavelle

Dave,

I am charged with crossing the line.

I plead guilty to that. Also, I am mostly unlikable, cut my own hair and have to use the rest room more often than I think is right. I limp. My feet itch...sometimes in the middle of the night...what's up with that? I'm guilty of all that stuff and way, way more I'm sure. Possibly worst of all, I am not fond of ignorance being passed of as truth...or trying to make people believe bullshit by "doubling down". 

I really don't think that Magister Maggie is as full of shit as a Christmas Goose. Only because that's impossible so I'll back it off to one-third as full of shit...or would you prefer dumber than a box of rocks? You would suggest that we sit here and listen to someone ignorantly supporting an attack on Venezuela? Ignore international rule of law? Supporting the slaughter of Palestinians simply because we lack the nuts to tell Isreal to stop? Support continual lies from an administration that rules by chaos? Support obvious revenge politics. Support hiring women for government positions by bra size?

Let's play a little game here. Guess who sent me the following e-mail this morning? 

"I WILL NOT BE INTIMIDATED OR SILENCED"

Guess who in this world even talks like that? People who think they are heroes while they attempt to trample anyone who doesn't go right along with their revenge, their paranoia...yeah, their bullshit. I can see the whole crowd of them in brown shirts, proudly goose stepping to Trump while he sings the lyrics to "YMCA". 

So, yeah Dave, guilty. Completely. 

But you stay polite man. 

Michael McLeod

Points finger:

You better behave, Mister LAH-VELL! We will not be in -TIM -idated!!!

John Jackson

After watching MM’s video of brand-new CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil’s statement, it was all I could do to keep myself from vomiting.

A sad day - CBS News has abandoned all journalistic independence and is now totally in thrall to mega-billionaire Lary Ellison who owns Paramount-Skyedance, the corporate parent of CBS.  Elllison is yet another Silicon Valley tech bro/oligarch (he is the founder of software giant Oracle) and, after a swoon in Tesla stock, for a brief period in September he overtook Elon Musk as the world’s richest man.  

These tech bros have figured out that Trump is utterly corrupt and open to bribes and in order to get antitrust approval for the Paramount Skydance merger approval Ellison made it known to Trump that he would clean house at CBS and that is how Trump-friendly Bari Weiss (a right wing online opinion journalist with no experience running an actual  news organization) was chosen to head up CBS News.  The merger was approved in August.

In the last week, at the last minute Bari Weiss cancelled airing of a 60 Minutes segment on the deportation of 252 migrants (less than half of which had criminal records) to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador where they are routinely beaten, tortured and sexually molested (which DHS Secretary Christi Noem seems to be OK with).  Here is the link (from an outlet in Canada) - watch it and tell me if this makes you proud to be an American:

https://archive.org/details/cecot-60mins  

This gets even more complicated - Ellison now wants to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, parent of CNN, which requires government approval.  So another bribe to Trump is needed and part of it is the elevation of oh-too-anxious-to-please Tony Dokoupil to the anchor position at CBS once occupied by Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.  The other part of the bribe will be to emasculate CNN into yet another toothless media outlet unwilling to take on the over-the-top excesses of the Trump Administration.

At times, I think the U.S. has become a banana republic with a crazy over the top leader (Fidel Castro of the right?) that the rest of the world would laugh at if they weren’t so worried about how powerful we are and how a capricious and vindictive leader like Trump can screw them. 

But another good analogy is Putin’s Russia where the rich oligarchs (think of our mega-billionaires like Musk, Ellison, Zuckerberg and Bezos) cozy up to and bribe the leader to get what they want.

Take your pick.

PS:  And aren't we all glad that the U.S. is running Venezuela now?  What could possibly go wrong?

David Mitchell

Easy to say I am happy for my Venezuelan friends!

Maduro had it comming.

But very difficult to agree with how this was done.

Worrysome to see where this may end.

Is this a "Bull in a China Shop"? 

How do we "run" another country?

Where does this end? 

Lookout Columbia and Cuba???

What's ahead for Taiwan and Ukraine?

David Mitchell

meanwhile......

Remembering a Strange Christmas - continued

Two mornings after my O-club "toast" and one-day "grounding", I got a jeep ride out to the flight line and walked up the tail ramp of a C-123, sat on the cargo floor with a bunch of other guys, and was flown the 40 minute flight up to Long Binh Air Force Base (north of Saigon). 

I have no memory of anything before boarding a commercial airlines flight to the states, with a refueling stop in Guam, then on to Travis Air Force Base, north of San Francisco. As we touched down at Travis you should have heard the roar of cheering and applause that went up in the plane! 

I arrived back in Columbus on December 23rd and rode home from Port Columbus with my parents. After dinner, my parents and oldest sister (still living at home) and I went into the living room and knelt around the furnitue to say our usual "family rosary". 

As was my dad's custom, he named each decade with a special intention. When we got to the last decade, he said this would be for a special intention -"for the Viet Cong, so that they would know that God is on their side also".  

I flinched in a silent reaction. But it only lasted for a moment. I realized it was just my Dad, the most conservative, anti-communist person I ever knew, just being himself. 

The 24th passed with me running errands for my mom (mostly groceries) and then Midnight Mass ot Our Lady of Peace. But it was Christmas Day when the fun came to our house in the persons of all my aunts and uncles and most of the younger cousins.

But as we gathered around the dining table, and my Dad spoke a very long grace, I had what I would later understand was my first (of many to follow) panic attacks. As I looked at the gathered family, I started having a sense of rising above the group (of 15 or 18) and seeing through the diining room window, two guys in black pajamas (VC) setting up a mortar tube behind our neighbors bushes. I felt faint, but it passed in a few moments.

I passed the rest of the night with the awkward sense that noone really wanted to to have an actual conversation. After "Hello" and "How Are You", and the hugs, there was nothing more. It felt like I had a contageous disease. 

David Mitchell

different topic;

I often wonder about some classmates that are not on our Forum

Has anyone got any recent contact with Carolyn or Dennis Winchester?

Michael Boulware

Tim, I don't need to tell you how much I treasure our friendship, or tell the world how I identify with your beliefs. I must remind you what we stand for. We believe deeply in everyone being able to express themselves. The Right attempts to control what we read and what we hear through book bannings and control of the media. We MUST permit everyone to speak their minds. I am apologizing for you to Masry Margaret .

After a devastating , one point loss to Newark our junior year, Kevin Ryan, Crick Schultheis, and I put our hands and hearts together. We promised never to get beat again. We called ourselves unofficial "cousins" from that point on. Whenever I saw Crick after that , we called each other "Cousin" and the same for Kevin. We never lost after that, but we gained a bond that was partially broken when Kev and I lost Jim. Since Crick married Mary Margaret she became our unofficial cousin. Like it or not, Mary Margaret, you are tied up with a Leftie.

Mary Margaret and I are at different ends of the political spectrum; but she has a right to publicize her beliefs as much as we have a right to publicize ours. We can't question her goodness and the fact that she was a good wife to my cousin. 

Tim, our bond will never be broken. I will never forget belly laughing with you while riding to school with Bill McCray and Janis Flory, listening to you sing and tell jokes, and being everyones pal. It is out of character for you to tell someone to dismiss their right to state their thoughts. I love you anyway.

Michael McLeod

Is it just me or do they not make potato chips like they used to? Man am I ever the grumpy grouch these days.