Close Meditations of a Visual Kind

This may not matter to everyone who reads me, which is why most of it is a link. I may come back later and post behind a cut the text of the article, because it does mean something to me. I'm an amateur historian, in the truest sense of the word. I study history because I love it, and I indulge myself in primarily reading those aspects to which I feel the greatest attraction.

And a bit of history now becomes even more history rather than living.

That link should open a new window or tab, depending on your browser.

I read the book, and I've now read a few other things about this episode in history. In this instance, I read the book after seeing the movie, so I can agree that there is a great deal of dramatic license in the cinematic production. It's hard for me to determine which I think is the more powerful, book or cinema, because both of them present the story well. Still, I hear, and understand, what someone who survived the actual event says about the cinema.

There's always that issue, when converting/creating something real or imagined, first into words on paper, then into images on film, which parts to include. Which parts to keep, because they make a great story, which parts to leave behind because they don't contribute to art.

And now, one more connection to the reality passes beyond the pale. One more step closer to the written word, the moving image, being the only representation of reality.

And so it goes.

Today is June 6. Sixty-four years ago two large groups of men representing different countries got together and participated in a very, very big argument. This sounds flippant, but I figure something involving 155,000 troops, 6,900 vessels, including 4,100 landing craft and a total of 12,000 aircraft (just on the Allied side); four divisions of German infantry were directly involved, as they were stationed on the Normandy Peninsula. This doesn't count reserves nearby for either side of the belligerants, nor their armoured divisions involved, and I figure this constitutes a pretty big argument.

Quite a few words have been written about, and miles of film developed about the Normandy invasion. The most recent and possibly most widely known is Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. I'm referencing it primarily because it told the story, probably fictional, of some of the people who landed at Omaha Beach. These days, though, I usually think about one person. Contrary to my usual practices here I will mention his name because you can find him by doing a 'google' for his profession and other public information. Dr. Hal Bingham, Plastic Reconstructive Surgery was 18 years old when he set foot on Omaha Beach the morning of June 6, 1944.

I always enjoyed working with Dr. Bingham; one of the things he told me at one point is that he was an intern under Dr. Bookwalter, who invented a self-retaining retractor used in abdominala surgery. I also got to meet Dr. Bookwalter recently, and he remembered Dr. Bingham. Dr. B frequently told stories about 'being in the big one, Dubbayou Dubbayou Two' during longer surgeries. Some of them were frequently re-told. One, I heard only once when it came up in conversation that I'd been a Navy Corpsman during Vietnam. It concerned an event which took place a couple days after June 6 but still on the Normandy Peninsula. Even though I've mentioned him by name, it's not my story to tell here. We'll suffice it to say it involved white phosporous, an element, and its effects, with which he was previously unacquainted. Later, the residents present told me they'd never heard that particular story before.

'And you never will again. He just told you why he became a plastic-reconstructive surgeon specialising in burn injury treatment. And he told it to someone else who'd seen the Elephant, by the way. You just got to listen.'

Because Dr. Hal Bingham is the reason there's a Burn Trauma Intensive Care Unit here at Hospital and University of Baja Jorja.

Waitangi Day!

I don't think there are any Kiwi's reading my meanderings, though there are Kiwi's on Flists of Friends. There's a couple two-three or more Ozzies (which is properly spelled Aussies, but pronounced the way I spelled it, eh?) but they've got a different day to celebrate.

Why do I mention Waitangi Day if I'm not a Kiwi? Here's where I'm supposed to day, 'It's a long story, and...' and then bore you with the long story. Thing is, it's not a long story. We spent a month there some years back, and I came away from that experience profoundly moved by Kiwi's friendliness and hospitality, and by the beauty of what we did see which really comprises South Island. That's the start.

The other thing I observed (this for the benefit of my Aussie readers... pronounce that correctly now, you Yanks), I clued in to because of where I grew up. Namely, along the shores of Lake Huron, which is Yank on one side and Canadian (Canuck) on the other. My mother's family came to the States through Canada from Ireland, and I've still cousins living in Ontario. Because of the way my ear and brain are connected, I'll start sounding like locals fairly quickly; toward the end of my stay in NZ, the Kiwis were asking what part of Canada I came from. But that's not what I clued in to.

Canadians and Yanks have a sort of love/hate relationship, much like siblings in a nuclear family. We can gripe and jump on each other, but nobody else better try it. Aussies and Kiwis exhibit very similar traits towards each other. And that just rather brought me to like the both of them even more.

It's 01:00 9/12 in Dunedin, New Zealand. Do you know where your memories are?

Tuesday 11 Sept. 2001 dawned clear and bright in Dunedin. We'd arrived the evening before on our first stop of our driving tour of South Island, a place called Castlewood on the hill above Dunedin. We ate breakfast and chatted a bit with our host, Peter, then set out to walk down hill and find the train station. There we boarded a tour going up the Taieri Gorge. Shot quite a bit of film that day; a bit of it's scanned, but I don't have the pictures immediately avaiable. Dinner that evening at a marvelous place, A Cow Called Berta. Highly recommended. Then off to bed about 22:00 or so.

That is how I spent my 9/11, but note the time on this posting. It's 09:00 here in the Eastern Time Zone, and we were fast asleep at the time, on 12 Sept. 2001. I've mentioned before about waking up, rather relaxed, photographing the sunrise, and then learning the news...

Behind the cut for bandwidth...
( Women's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial )

Imagine (if you will) waking up before your alarm radio goes off, and puttering about doing some very pleasant things for a bit. Then your alarm radio wakes up too, filled with news of a terrible, terrible happening in one of the biggest cities in your country. Only, you're not in your country. You are literally halfway around the world, not simply on the other side but also in the other hemisphere. You are a stranger in a strange land, a place wonderful and welcoming, awesome and friendly. Just... not home.

It is a place so far from home that, due to a convention reached in years past by whatever the powers that be were then, today is tomorrow back home, where and when the terrible thing is happening.


I don't need to imagine. This is a memory, a part of my reality. For me, because my wife and I were in Dunedin, New Zealand, those nearly 4,000 people lost their lives today, when today was September 12, 2001.


May they rest in peace.