To My Fallen Brothers

                                                          Chris Clearwaters

                                                                       Joe Eubanks

                                                                         Carter Howell

                                                                       Rick Repole

We were classmates for four years. We were friends and brothers. We went to war together. You did not come home. Your sacrifices helped me come home. Even after forty years I still think about you often. You Wore The Ring.

Rest in Peace.

Re-Provisioning In Gunnison, Colorado

Well, I’m finally in a spot that I can access the internet. I arrived in Gunnison, Colorado this morning at about 9 am. Waste tanks were full, laundry needed doing and I was ready for a very limited shot of civilization.

The last week has been terrific. Wednesday I drove as far as the Great Sand Dunes National Park and spent the night in the park. I’m lovin’ the Senior Pass I got last month. With the pass I got into the park free and the campsite cost only $7.00.

The Great Sand Dunes is a magical place. A bit of the Sahara Desert in the high mountains of Colorado. I have been to the park before but it always amazes me. The picture at the top of the post was taken on Thursday morning as I was headed for Cortez and the Pecos Conference. The pictures just don’t come close to portraying the beauty of the place.

My trip from the Great Sand Dunes to Cortez required me to go over Wolf Creek Pass, a notoriously vehicle hating piece of road. I had to stop once on my way down the pass because I had overheated my brakes. When I got to Pagosa Springs at the base of the pass I discovered that I had a flat tire on one of the rear dual wheels. About two hours later and $200 poorer I was back on the road. By 6pm I had made my way to McPhee Reservoir and the camping site for the Pecos conference.

The Pecos Conference was a real experience. I really didn’t know what to expect as I had never participated in something like this before. It was part hippie, part academia and part archaeology….and I enjoyed it immensely. Over 700 people attended during the two day event and about half of them camped in the large open field that served as a campground.

The presentations were short 10 minute reviews of what the authors had accomplished on their projects. Sample titles of the presentations are;

Nancy Patterson Village:”A Golden Thread” in the Mesa Verde Heartland: Social and Political Implications through Architecture and Ethnography

and

Turkey, Dog & Cottontail – A Kiva Floor Animal Burial at the Greenlee Site

Some of the presentations were a bit over my head but I still enjoyed the majority of them and I learned a lot about the ancient people of the Southwest.

The highlight of the conference was a talk by the author Craig Childs. I had read his book “The House of Rain” about a year ago and was entranced by it. The book is very much like a travelogue of the author’s hiking and camping trips to most of the ancient Chacoan sites in the southwest. Because Craig is not an archaeologist he gets to say things that most professional archaeologists wouldn’t dare say.

In his talk, Craig urged the archaeologists in the audience to make sure they told their stories to the public. He said that to not tell the story and just write a report and file it away was a disservice to the profession and negated the importance of the information they discovered.

Sunday morning I headed back towards Gunnison but I stopped late in the afternoon to tour the Chimney Rock Archaeological Site. This is another fascinating place.  About 1000 years ago residents of Chaco Canyon travelled 90 miles north of their canyon and built a Great House on the top of a high ridge so that they could observe the lunar standstill through the two upright pillars of stone at Chimney Rock. These ancient people knew enough about astronomy to know that this event happened only every 18.5 years.

The stone work on the Great House is absolutely beautiful and most of it was done without mortar because the closest source of water was over 1000 feet below the structure in the valley below. Like Chaco Canyon itself what became of the people is a mystery. After all the work they went to in building this structure, they abandoned it and disappeared without a trace.

Sunday night I camped at a Forest Service campground about a mile from the site and spent the evening thinking about what might have happened to this ancient culture.

I spent last night at another Forest Service campground about 50 miles from Gunnison. While speaking with the campground host I learned about a very special memorial to those of all nations killed in the Vietnam war. This site is on Forest Service land but the Forest Service does not publicize the existence of the monument. The designer and inspiration for this monument was a former Special Forces officer and wanted the monument to be without fanfare and to remain unknown to the public. It’s my intention to come back to this area and locate the monument. When I do I will tell you the story. It’s located near the Continental Divide and over a mile from the nearest 4 wheel drive road.

I will leave this commercial campground tomorrow morning and head back into the mountains for my Passport In Time project. There won’t be any more posts until I return home on the 19th or 20th.

Thanks for visiting.

Remembering Joe Eubanks

I can't explain why, but I've thought about Joe Eubanks a number of times this past week. It's not unusual that I think about him, but it is unusual that I think about him several times in a week. I think this is what, in part, prompted me to post the lyrics to the James Taylor song, "The Secret 'O Life" the other day....let me tell you about Joe.

Joe was a friend, a college classmate, a fellow duckbutt. "Duckbutt" is a derogatory term referring to one's height....or actually lack thereof, that was used in the military college we both attended. We graduated in 1969 and both accepted commissions in the U.S. Army, he as an Armor officer and I as an Intelligence officer.

He and I saw each other at Fort Knox, KY when I was taking the Armor Officer Basic course and he was in a class ahead of me. I didn't see him again until one day in 1972 when I was stationed in Pleiku, Vietnam. One day in March of that year, a helicopter landed right next to my hooch. This was highly unusual as there wasn't a lot of room for a helicopter to land close to the building. The rotor vibrations caused a fluorescent light bulb to fall and explode directly on my desk in front of me! Instaneous panic was shortly overcome by the need to chew out some hot dog chopper pilot. I raced outside and up to the chopper swearing the absolute best oaths my vocabulary would allow. As I got to the pilot's door I saw the grinning face of Joe Eubanks! I was later to learn that Joe had attended and graduated from helicopter pilot school in 1971, and had recently been assigned to the 57th Assualt Helicopter Company which was garrisoned at Pleiku.

That night we celebrated friendship at the Officers Club. I saw Joe a couple of more times before I left Pleiku in April. I had at that time decided not to make the military a career and was given an "early out".

As an intelligence officer I saw most of the enemy movement reports for the area and during this time it was obvious that the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) was gearing up for something big. Little did I know how big it was and that it would cost Joe Eubanks his life. All of the details of one of the biggest and least known battles of the Vietnam war are available at the web site "The Battle of Kontum". Oh, by the way, during this time I drove a jeep (with a governor that limited top speed to 65 mph) several times a week from Pleiku, 30 some miles on unsecured roads to Kontum by myself or with one other guy armed only with an M-16 and .38 cal Navy Special! (**Comment Added 2/06/07--I forgot to mention that this road ran right beside the "Rockpile" which was where Joe was shot down.) I'm glad I was young and invincible then because after reading the background on the web site listed above I realize how lucky I was that my upcoming "early out" wasn't the perpetual kind.

I found out somewhere towards the end of 1972 that Joe had been shot down and killed during the battle less than 8 weeks after I saw him last. I still think about Joe because he was a friend but also I think, because of what is described as "survivors guilt". Why was it Joe? Why was I so lucky?

Last year Pat Conroy, the author of "The Great Santini", "Lords of Discipline", "Beach Music" and other novels released a non-fiction book entitled "My Losing Season". This is the story of Pat's basketball career at the same college that both Joe and I attended. Joe was a trainer for the team and is a figure in Pat's book. In a way it's partly my story as well, because I was there during that season and can count many of the people mentioned by Pat as friends too.

I said it's a story of Pat's basketball career but it's really much more than that. Basketball just happens to be the glue that holds the rest of the story together. It will tell you the rest of the story of Joe Eubanks, the hero....call sign "Gladiator" and he was both. If you have the time and inclination, read it.