Washington Rebel

Black December

"Poor Bastards"

"Poor Bastards" was something my sisters and I heard a lot growing up.  Whenever there was combat footage from some skirmish or another around the world my Dad would get that look on his face and say, "Poor bastards.  They're just scared, too." 

It was the too that gave him away.  The week before he died, my Old Dad got up from a dream and complained, "I was dreaming about Kraut tanks."  56 years after the fact, 1944 was current news.  That's how our little psyches were shaped.  We could hear death whistlin' through the trees.

Bud Hanify 

16 December 1944 was a year my Dad couldn't forget.  Nor could we.  An anguished veil descended over his soul every December.  He sat in his chair, lost to us, away in Belgium '44.  It was that look in his eye that helped me read cops and soldiers.  I have a knack for it, thanks be to Christmas.  The old man taught me how.

He also taught us respect and affection for Germans.  He recalled hearing a large group of German prisoners singing Deutschland über alles one night from their fenced area, snow on the ground.  Said it brought tears to his eyes.  They'd all soldiered together, Kraut and Yank.  They didn't hate each other.  They wanted to go home.  There wasn't a Nazi to be found in that prison pen.  They were men just like my Dad, missing their folks, and wondering how it was that they were alive.  He sang and hummed lines from Deutschland über alles  as the years rolled by.  Something about that dark winter night, with German soldiers in a pen, stuck with him.  He was them.  He thought and felt as they did.

 
Dad talked about how those "daisy clippers" would come through and turn a wall of solid white into terrifying green.  Said they started the battle with six hand grenades and two extra clips and one blanket.  It was a sonofabitch.  Our Dad didn't pull any punches.  The Bulge was the darkest 6-week night of his life. It was a night that had a habit of coming back: a raven that croaked at the window till it woke up his nightmares.  There were a lot of whisky-soaked nights where Satan sang us kids lullabies as my Dad shivered into the past, lost to us.  I never heard him say one good thing about the snow.  He hated snow with every fiber of his being.

My Dad had only two psychic experiences in his life, both in 1944, and something he complained of frequently, as he was an avid student of Edgar Cayce and an ardent believer in reincarnation.  The first he had in England in February or so, as they were training for the invasion.  The second happened at the Battle of the Bulge.

Charlie! Charlie!  There was desperation in his mother's voice as she roused him from a deep sleep.  He woke in a Belgian barn where he and his wire crew were sleeping after a tough night stringin' line.  They heard a commotion in the woods outside and looked out the window.

"Kraut tanks everywhere."

The Bulge was on.  The Battle of the Ardennes, it's called.

The next 3-4 weeks was being surrounded, and unsurrounded, and surrounded again.  He was in the Bastogne area.  Can't tell you where exactly, but he said moving that wire truck at night was the scariest shit in the world.  You never knew who owned what real estate.  Krauts and Yanks strung piano wire across the roads, so riding atop a truck was pretty much not advisable.

Of course, the massacre at Malmedy the second day of the battle magnified the fear enormously.

Poor Bastard, my Old Dad would say.  You could hear the absolute sincerity in that refrain.  I say it now myself.  I was raised from the cradle on it.

I loved 'em more than you could ever know, and I thank all you moms and dads for the magic and love you gave us in those days, when World War II vets ran the country.

Wish we were like that now.  When I think of people like Michael Moore and Bill Ayers, I can only mourn what we had.

 

 

What I Learned From My Old Dad

 

Omaha Beach, 1944

Let's dispense with a myth: One of the things you'll hear often is that "real war vets don't talk about their experiences."  Is that so?  If that was true, Ollie North's War Stories would run maybe a half-hour, including commercials; Band of Brothers would  have been called "Dramatic Tales from FDR's Soup Lines."  Let's face it, there would be no military history of any kind if vets sat at the table and said nothing. Thank God our Vets talk. 

My Old Dad was at the Omaha Beach and the Battle of the Bulge and he talked about it, okay?  We never heard him say, "Yeah, and then I killed this guy", but he did talk about things, and I can honestly tell you he remained depressed the rest of his life because of World War II.  I'll explain more about that later.

Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

How baby boomers remember the sixties often determines how they view the world today. If they’re nostalgic over the fortieth anniversary of the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco’s Haight/Ashbury district and believe that changes in American culture resulting from the sixties have been largely positive, they probably consider themselves liberal and vote Democrat. If they have a generally negative view of those changes, they probably consider themselves conservative and vote Republican. When teaching the sixties in my 20th-century US History course, I’ve often started with this observation.  Tom McLaughlin on Whitewashed Textbooks.

I was a younger participant in the counterculture: 15-years-of age in 1972, so a lot of older hippies would Sack my Cred.  But I was devoted, damnit!  I shouldered my hair, raised my fist and got stoned whenever opportunity permitted!  Because my father was a Park Ranger, during the summers we were surrounded by upper class American youths from California and from the East who were, by my working class instincts, quite snobby.  They didn't have to work, for one -- my people were shanty Irish and came with rough hands and used backs.   These guys got to go to school where they wished, expected to become doctors, and smoked hashish in Afghanistan.  I wasn't sure I could graduate from Forks High School, let alone go to college.  They talked about flights to D.C. and Frisco and London like I would think of hitching a ride to town.  They always got the cute chicks.  The cute chicks thought I was there to serve meals and fluff the sheets.  No matter how peacey and lovey any of us acted, there was a clear, if unspoken, class distinction between us and them.

And then, there was the secret . . . . .

Spiritual Sanctuary: Growing Up in the Hoh Rain Forest

 

Hoh River Boy (r) and His Friend Gary "Makkor" Cox (l) in 1976 at the Hoh Ranger Station -- Photo by Mary Lou Hanify

Washington Rebel is lucky to have as one of its contributors Hoh River Boy, author of WR's first two articles, Remembering Bud Hanify and The Speech of the Grail -- as well as the bloke who interviewed me!  I was able to corner him at one of his favorite haunts the other day.  Over 20 or 30 cups of real black coffee, we had a leisurely conversation, the Pacific Northwest way.  I had lots of questions.

IC  What's your book about?

HRB  It's about being "born" in the Hoh Rain Forest in the 1970s.  A variety of forces conspired to drop my family into the center of rain-shrouded isolation, armed only with books, and an Irish love of conversation.  No television; very infrequent radio reception, and then only late at night, when the cloud cover was just right.  Something came alive inside me within the container of that isolation, that darkness, a something that has instructed me throughout my life.  It's about spiritual sanctuary, and how badly sanctuary is needed in our crazed modern environment.  It's also about my older self trying to make his way back to the "hearth."  I guess you could say the book is about locating that sanctuary in the topography of the soul.

IC  I know the "hearth" is at the center of the story.  But first, tell me about writing

HRB  Not much to tell.  I was always more a reader than a writer.  My mother was a writer; her grandfather Morehead bought and sold newspapers his entire professional life, from Colorado to Washington.  Writing was all I ever heard about from my mother, but it was a madness that has never fully possessed me, even now.  I worked on the school newspaper at Forks High School and took journalism courses in college, but I really didn't work very hard at writing.  It wasn't until 1979 that I wrote my first logging story.

Remembering Bud Hanify

   

Photo of "Ranger Bud" by Sam "What Ranch?" Nugent, aka the Mango Whisperer

Those were magic days, all right, when my Old Dad Charles B. "Bud" Hanify was the Hoh Ranger.  Although I've included considerable detail about me Da in my book manuscript, the following sketch is one of the nicest tributes I've ever seen (or heard) about my Dad.  Comes from childhood friend, Sue Tinney -- one of the major talents behind Gaia Consort.  This particular piece was included in the collaborative effort, Fast Moving Water.

Thanks, Susan.  And, uh, by the way . . . I remember you Tinney kids kiping money out of Taft Creek!  Heh.

The Speech of the Grail

 

Hoh Rain Forest

In 1972 we moved to the Hoh Ranger Station inside Olympic National Park.  I was 15-years-old. 

My father, Bud Hanify, started as a National Park Ranger in 1940; his father went to work for the Olympic National Park when it opened in 1938, building road.  My granddad's folks were from Ireland.  It always struck me as Providential -- ' kismetic' -- that he would be drawn to a place as green, or greener, than Ireland.