What do I have to say today? What on Earth inside or out
of me is worth repeating or revealing to you publicly for
the first time?
April 1965, I had barely turned eighteen years of age.
Six months earlier at seventeen, I had joined the Army.
This particular day I had set sail for Bremerhaven, Ger-
many with some 2000 other GIs on the troop carrier ship,
USNS Patch. Some 21-years earlier US soldiers including
my Uncle Ray were sailing perhaps on the same vessel
across the Atlantic to face combat in Europe during WWII.
Twenty-one years to me at eighteen seemed to be ancient
history. Although there was a war going on in Southeast
Asia at the time, I was fortunate to be headed the other way
to face a somewhat stalemate standoff with the Soviet Union.
Uncle Ray, a combat veteran with the 2nd Infantry Division
went through hell, and by the grace of his god survived The
Battle of the Bulge and other conflicts across the continent.
As far as I was concerned, I was off to see the world for the
first time in a far different light. I sailed out of New York
Harbor, past the Statue Of Liberty with the whole US
Army ahead of me and behind me.
Now today into my 75th year of life, after so many wars
world-wide, with millions of military and civilian deaths
and casualties, I think of my Uncle Ray who somehow
managed to survive, dying a peaceful death in his late
eighties a few years back.
What else have I learned? Well, twenty some years in a
lifetime is not a hell of a lot. For more than 250,000 years
wars have persisted throughout mankind’s history. The
Statue of Liberty stands for an ideal which has not yet
been fully realize.
And what I have to say today or any other day over the
previous decades of my life thus far on this planet won’t
change one blessed or a god damned thing. To date, and so
far as we know, being human scientifically and esoterically
speaking is an unusually random and weird happening.
-30-
Chris Hanch 12-6-2022
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