Heroes and Populists

Actually Cape Cod is a resort area not far from Boston, a most enjoyable place to live. Well, except maybe during hurricane season when we flight crews would evacuate the place, fly west leaving our wives back home in on-base housing to fend for themselves. Ann didn't much care for that caper the couple of times hurricanes came close. We moved from the Cape in 1964 -- had to as Ann kept having babies.

Anyway, Hal was an unmarried 2nd Lieutenant just out of pilot training. He arrived in the squadron not long before it closed and I never had the chance to know him well. Our unit, the 19th Aerial Refueling Squadron, was the last active duty Air Force outfit to fly the KC-97. After we delivered all our airplanes to the bone yard in Arizona, we crewmembers scattered to find new homes in different equipment. I moved to Oklahoma and lost track of Hal. Several years later I heard that he had been killed in Vietnam.

Then this week, I spied an online Air Force Magazine notice of the repatriation and identification of missing Air Force pilot Col. David H. Zook, Jr. Oops, wrong Zook, the H. stood for Hartzler. Intrigued I Googled up the Vietnam Wall, then Harold Zook -- and bingo, there was my man. Hal was shot down May 31, 1966, flying as a copilot in a C-130E up over North Vietnam. Wait, we didn't send cargo aircraft, or tankers for that matter (I did four trips north of the border) to North Vietnam! They had to have volunteered or possibly that was just the official line similar to the one about us not flying over neutral Laos.

According to the write-up of Hal's loss, his crew was on a mission to drop a specially designed weapon (military speak for "one huge bomb") on the Ham Rong Bridge located on the northeast edge of Thanh Hoa, North Vietnam. In the midst of large amounts of ground fire, witnesses reported a large explosion after which the C-130 crew no longer answered radio calls. Their aircraft never returned to friendly control and all crew were carried as missing in action. Hal's remains weren't recovered and identified until 1989 when finally returned to his family for burial. Another of my heroes gone!

Concerning the current financial fiasco I have noticed several commentators using the word "Populism," generally in a derisive manner. The word is little used in current language and so a trip to my desk top dictionary.

Little help there in that it referred to Populism, a political party by that name established in 1892 and pretty much died out since. That party was purportedly founded to represent the values common people, primarily farmers, of that day.

Today "populism" seems to be used to represent the opinions of common people living primarily in the center of the United States but also Alaska. The populist concept seems to be looked down on by more sophisticated thinkers, the enlightened elite, who live near the east and west coasts. Yet in retrospect it seems that the term applies to all our independent thinking neighbors in Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas -- in short, you and me.

During the short deliberations of both houses of Congress attempting to put together legislation to staunch the bleeding in the financial markets I read about the blizzard of e-mails and other communications from common folk asking to stop the bailout. Some reports stated 90 percent of the people were against any bailout for the fat cats on Wall Street. Yet our voice was ignored by a majority of Nebraska's senators and congressmen. No wonder populism gets a bad name; we obviously don't know what is good for us.

Time will tell how successful Congress is in spending our money to make things all better again. In less than a month, we get to vote and it will be an easy choice to vote NO for anyone who voted for the bailout. For years those same Senators and Congressmen sat idly by allowing social engineering chaos to cause the problem in the first place.

Hopefully we can elect representatives to go to Washington and better represent our interests.

That is the way I see it.