Given my contentious appearance on the Alabama-based Paul Finebaum show back in August—see previous post—I may have been obsessing about this season’s Pac-10/SEC crash course more than most.
But maybe no more than Kyle Sponseller, whose summer 2010 blog post (link also at bottom) I came across this week during my obsessive rounds for more Duck vs. Auburn info. I hope Sponseller had the wherewithal to plunk some Vegas futures money down on the Ducks back in August.
Sponseller’s predictions for the Duck season are uncanny. Check the date of the post (August 27, 2010) and behold his Nostredamian clairvoyance. Not only did he predict an undefeated season for Oregon, he forecast the season of blowouts that took everyone by surprise and predicted many scores with stunning nearness.
A few examples:
Sponseller’s August prediction: Ducks 63, New Mexico 3 Actual score: Ducks 72, New Mexico 0
Sponseller’s August prediction: Ducks 45, Tennessee 14 Actual score: Ducks 48, Tennessee 13
Sponseller’s August prediction: Ducks 48, Washington State 13 Actual score: Ducks 42, New Mexico 23
Sponseller’s August prediction: Ducks 38, Oregon State 21 Actual score: Ducks 37, Oregon State 20
The second-best part? He actually picked the Cal game to be the close one, picking the Ducks to win 24-21 (they won 15-13).
Yes, Sponseller missed a few details: he picked Nate Costa to win last summer’s quarterback battle, forecast a nail-biter against Arizona and figured Alabama to win the SEC.
Still, for a UO journalism student who hopes for a career in sports journalism (inasmuch as such a thing exists), he’s off to a crazy start.
Oh, yeah, the best part of his predictions? Oregon wins the national championship by beating the SEC champion 35-31 in Glendale, Arizona.
I’ll be on hand with the Duck crew to see it in-person this coming Monday.
First, a thank you for taking the time to drop me a note. I honestly appreciate the feedback.
Second, an apology. It’s usually my policy to respond personally to every email I receive, particularly when I go out of my way to solicit that email. After Tuesday’s interview on Paul Finebaum’s show, however, it’d take me days to reply individually to the many emails I’ve received. I simply don’t have the time.
Given that many of your emails touched on the same points, I hope you will not be too disappointed with this regrettably less personal form of reply.
There doesn’t seem much reason to belabor the points I made on Tuesday. I stand by everything I said on the show and respect that most of you disagree fairly strongly with me.
A direct appeal to 15 or 20 emailers: I do not hate the South. I spent nearly all of July traveling through Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. I had a great time, had many enlightening conversations, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I look forward to returning to Tennessee on September 11 and other parts of SEC territory after the Oregon vs. Tennessee game.
Thanks to those one in four or so emailers who wrote either in complete or partial support of my opinions.
A number of emailers brought up the screw job Auburn got in 2004—not getting a shot at the national title game despite going undefeated—as proof that the BCS does not favor the SEC. I sympathize with Auburn fans. I have similar feelings about the Oregon Ducks who were demonstrably the second-best team in the country in 2001, yet who were denied the 2002 national championship game so that “traditional power” Nebraska, a team that didn’t even win its own conference, could be awarded the chance to play Miami instead.
My sexual orientation is none of your business, but thanks to those of you who asked or speculated. And, no, I would not, as was suggested following my interview, enjoy being sodomized in Tennessee.
I did not come on Paul Finebaum’s show to sell books. My book isn’t coming out until 2012 and I’m pretty sure most of you will have forgotten my name by then. I came on the show to provoke opinion and listen to the views of SEC football fans. I got those. In that respect, the show was a success for me.
Finally, another thanks. Some of your emails were pretty nasty and some were just plain stupid, but a few of you displayed those famous Southern good manners even while disagreeing with me and many of you made excellent and articulate points that will inform my writing.
I wish you all best of luck with your teams this year and extend the hope that it’s an enjoyable and interesting season. From my perspective, it already is.
Been sending notes back and forth with Shanghai Bob and a few other friends about the unintentionally funny/bad ways baseball announcers fill time between pitches. Caught an all-time classic exchange last night between bored (and usually very good) Mariner TV play-by-play guy Dave Sims in full-on Bob Uecker “Juuuust a little outside” mode and the world’s most colorless color guy, Mike Blowers, whilst both struggled through another tepid Mariner performance. With game 2-0 in the fourth it went about like this:
Camera shot of waving fans in outfield in sombreros and cheap ponchos hoisting plastic margarita cups.
Sims: Cinco de Mayo here at the ballpark tonight and some fans having a good time out there in centerfield.
Blowers (absolutely more constipated than usual): Strike one on Wilson.
Silence while pitcher fidgets with ball, cap, groin, etc.
Sims: And celebrating the Mexican victory over the French in 1862.
Blowers (yet more monotone still): Ball and a strike now on Wilson.
Loooooong silence. Catcher asks ump for new ball. Batter cleans dirt out of his spikes with bat.
Sims: Battle of Puebla!
Blowers: And Wilson fouls that one behind the backstop.
As usual, Sims carries the show and the anemic Mariner bats only equaled this season by Blowers’ funereal delivery.
Shanghai Bob countered with an even better one between Harry Caray and Jimmy Piersall calling games for the old White Sox, but I'm saving that for my next book.
And the show turns out to be ... pretty lousy. Like most people I know, I stopped paying attention right around episode four.
The biggest problem, I think, is that in buying into the fashionable rehabilitation of the Imperial Japanese soldier as hapless victim of forces larger than himself (I think the Clint Eastwood WWII movies started this fiction), and by focusing almost solely on grunts in obscure jungle and island battle locations—Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Iwo—the writers needlessly deprived the audience of much of the epic human drama that consumed the entire namesake region between 1941 and 1945. Had the show interwoven stories from four or five locales—say, Nanjing, Singapore, Manila, Guam or Hiroshima—it could have realistically portrayed the way the war affected men, women and children of dozens of nationalities, and still found space for military strategy and the intense jungle firefights that clearly gave the producers such hard-ons.
That said, WWII was so enormous that it never stops revealing incredible stories. No doubt someone will take another crack at the thing and get it right.
Eight years ago, doing research for a book called The 25 Best World War II Sites: Pacific Theater, I relied on the works of a pair of U.S. Marine veterans named Robert Leckie and E.B. Sledge to guide me through some of the most horrific battlefields of the war—Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Okinawa.
It’s been particularly fascinating and slightly surreal to watch as the HBO series The Pacific has tracked the same men along the same historic path. I admit to following the series with more interest than most, anxious to see if the quotes, anecdotes, and locations that I drew from Leckie and Sledge to illuminate the war will show up in the HBO series.
Some already have, such as episode one’s climactic battle sequence at Alligator Creek on Guadalcanal.
Others are too good not to be repeated.
From his renowned memoir, With the Old Breed, here’s a bit of classic Sledge imagery describing the fighting between American and Japanese troops on Peleliu Island: “The opposing forces were like two scorpions in a bottle. One was annihilated, the other nearly so.”
In his single-volume account of the entire war, Delivered From Evil, Leckie described Peleliu—focal point of The Pacific episodes five, six, and seven—as “the fiercest, bloodiest battle in the Japanese war.”
On Peleliu, landings at White Beach One were led by legendary Marine officer Lewis “Chesty” Puller, portrayed in the series by actor William Sadler.
I visited White Beach One and wrote about it and Puller in my book. The beach today is overgrown with jungle. There’s little left from wartime to see. About 150 yards inland, however, is an interesting memorial erected after the war—a plaque attached to a rock honoring Marine Captain George P. Hunt, who later served as managing editor of Life magazine in the 1960s. Not the sort of thing you normally expect to find on far-flung rocks in the Pacific.
Finding WWII Sites in the Pacific
The idea behind my book was to introduce readers to the Pacific War by cataloging thousands of extant traces of the conflict that can still be found in the region, from those countless postwar plaques to forgotten invasion beaches to rusting Corsair fighter planes in the middle of the Palauan jungle to sunken Japanese transports in Truk Lagoon to the massive museums and memorials constructed in places like Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Nanjing.
Because the British are the world’s great historians, the WWII trail in Europe has long been carefully preserved. Beginning with a 1987 hike in Guam, when my brother and I tried in vain to locate a Japanese tank “graveyard” in the central mountains of Yona, I discovered that this hasn’t been the case in the Pacific. Remote island locations and postwar neglect left many of the Pacific’s most important battlefields virtually untouched. And undocumented.
Living in Japan in the 1980s and ’90s, and spending significant time in the Philippines and around region, I worked over fifteen years compiling my Pacific War book with the idea of helping like-minded history geeks locate these historic sites. I did so because no guide covering Pacific War sites existed at the time.
After watching The Pacific, if you want to get to Alligator Creek, Henderson Field, Bloody Nose Ridge, or any of the other locations covered in the series, The 25 Best World War II Sites: Pacific Theater remains a unique resource. My “Smile” and “Hellholes” book shave sold better, but I often think my two World War II books will have more lasting value.
The Pacific book also includes a bit on Shuri Castle, a critical Japanese defensive position on Okinawa. After a protracted battle, victorious U.S. First Marines raised a Confederate flag above the ruined castle in honor of campaign commander Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., whose father had been a Confederate general. I’ll be interested to see if Hanks and company include that nugget of Southern military heritage in their series.
It was a long war and it’s a relatively short series, but I’m still sorry that many major areas won’t be covered in The Pacific. The Marianas. The Philippines. The China-Burma-India theater or “CBI” as it was known, which produced George McDonald Fraser’s astonishing memoir Quartered Safe Out Here.
Fraser went on to fame as the author of the magnificent Flashman series of historical novels. As a smooth-faced Brit foot soldier in one of the most unforgiving environments of the war, however, he found material to fill what military historian John Keegan says ranks “among the classics of military autobiography.” Also one of my favorites.
Okinawa vs. Normandy D-Days
So, what do we have to look forward to in The Pacific? Blood, horror, atrocity, sickness, exhaustion—and plenty of it.
No jungle fighting in the Pacific was as savage as it was in New Guinea (episode four). The fetid, steaming jungles there were home to a variety of poisonous plants and tropical diseases. Logistical nightmares, equipment failures, and, above all, rain and mud, bedeviled both sides. The campaign generated one of the highest disease-related casualty rates in American military history.
With Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, Hanks and Spielberg have taught an entire generation about D-Day in Normandy, but with The Pacific I hope the vastly underappreciated amphibious assault on Okinawa finally gets the big-stage respect it deserves. This might happen because Leckie was there and reported on the unparalleled achievement: “Never before had there been an invasion armada the equal of the 1,600 seagoing ships carrying 545,000 American GIs and Marines that steamed across the Pacific. In firepower, troops, and tonnage it eclipsed even the more famous D day in Normandy.”
In Normandy, the Allies moved 155,000 men and equipment across about 100 miles of English Channel. The American force in Okinawa that Leckie called the “monster of consumption” had to be supplied 7,500 miles from the home country’s western shore. No amphibious operation in military history comes close to matching it on a scale of distance and enormity.
The producers of The Pacific say they haven’t glossed over the trauma and deep racist conviction that imbued the war from start to finish. It’s evident, however, that other than dropping a few carefully placed “J” bombs and hurried scenes of torture and dismemberment, American audiences, browbeaten by decades of politically correct training, won’t be given credit for having the stomach to deal with honest depictions of the living nightmares and racial evil that came to fruition on those distant islands.
Then again, how could that terror be recreated? After the unearthly horrors of Peleliu, in which both sides declined to take prisoners and both sides defiled corpses, Sledge wrote, “Something in me died.”
Even today, it’s impossible to walk the Pacific’s battlefields and not come away with an awful, visceral understanding of the devastation and waste of the war. No TV show can communicate that.
Still, it’s strange how from that all of that death, so many stories continue to take life. Leckie and Sledge’s. My own. Hanks and Spielberg’s. And soon enough, those of a new generation, itself already waist-deep in America’s inevitable arena.
I recently put together a TO HELLHOLES AND BACK playlist for Largeheartedboy.com, a great site that, among other things, asks writers to set their books to music. The following playlist is suitable for any occasion, but particularly applicable for a book about confronting traveler paranoia and places with crappy reputations.
Introduction: The Four Horsemen of My Apocalypse
“Are You Man Enough” — The Four Tops
I never tire of this song — I still have the seven-incher I stole from a store in Palm Springs, California in 1973 during my short-lived juvie shoplifting period. Originally a blaxspolitation-era ode to ghetto grit, in the context of “To Hellholes and Back” it functions as a summation of the worry and note of challenge I tried to strike in the intro.
Chapter 1: The Funniest Joke in Africa
“Ndozvamaida” — Thomas Mapfumo
My favorite African pop track of all time. The lyrics are indecipherable to me — tradebit.com says the narrative takes the side of a woman unjustly wronged by her husband — but the propulsive beat and cheerful melody reflect my decision to search for the lighter parts of the Congo, rather than embark on the timeworn quest for the “Heart of Darkness.” This song never fails to put me in a good mood — I hope the woman in it got her revenge.
Chapter 2: In This Way Children Are Fed and Girlfriends Kept Happy
“Picture Me Rollin’” — Tupac Shakur
“Liar’s Bar” — The Beautiful South
My encounter with a 2Pac doppelgänger in Botswana actually occurs in chapter three, but this piece of machismo urban bravado — “Picture Me Rollin’” goes in and out of the top spot in my list of Pac favorites — reflects the attitude one quickly acquires in the Congo as a means for coping with the never-ending series of bribes and confrontations with soldiers and cops.
This is also the chapter in which my slippery Euro fixer Henri really hits his stride, so I also mention “Liar’s Bar,” from the outrageously undervalued catalog of The Beautiful South, whose defiantly British founders Paul Heaton and Dave Rotheray are the best pop songwriters of the last 25 years.
Chapter 3: The Most Beautiful City in the Congo
“Kupanda” — Madilu System
This is from a CD I bought just after a couple of teenagers tried to rob me in the streets of Matadi. In an effort to re-establish some good vibes and keep Matadi off my shit list, I found a CD seller on a nearby street and began chatting him up about local music. Madilu System — a heavyset Congolese dude — was among his recommendations.
I buy a lot of local music wherever I go and this one turned out to be my favorite from Africa. It’s from a CD called “La Bonne Humeur.” Madilu System is associated with “soukous,” the genial dance music of Congolese origin sometimes called “African rumba.”
Chapter 4: We Have a Winner
“A Change is Gonna Come” — Sam Cooke
History comes into clear and unsettling focus when you come face to face with people whose ancestors we know primarily as terrible statistics from history texts and cinematic recreations of the slave trade. All across the continent, I was consistently moved by the unexpected familiarity of the African people and the instant “American” kinship we shared. In a weird way, this often made me feel at home in a very foreign place.
“Talk to Me” — the Don Cheadle biopic about Washington, D.C. deejay Petey Greene — showed on my Delta flight home from Johannesburg. This Sam Cooke song was used to great effect during scenes of the DC riots after MLK’s assasination — it was also used in the movies “Malcolm X” and “Ali” — and provided a surprisingly emotional airplane moment for me on the flight home. The whole difficult trip kind of came flooding back at me during this scene. Outstanding movie, by the way.
Chapter 5: Heretics in the Temple
“Milan” — Karsh Kale
India intimidates in a lot of ways — terrorism, rampant GI viruses, fried curd balls — but guys like Karsh Kale keep alive the wanderer’s dream of hypnotic Indian wonder. This swirling, orchestral instrumental runs 8 minutes and 54 seconds, yet every time I hear it I think it ends too soon.
Chapter 6: The Unyielding Indian Workforce
“In the Wild” — Hoodoo Gurus
Crossing the Thar Desert in the dead of summer with the windows of your Tata hatchback rolled down is pretty much like sitting in a rolling pizza oven while someone blasts your face with a hair dryer. The only thing worse than making this journey with a Hindu fatalist behind the wheel cranking the Best of Bollywood Duets for seventeen straight hours is making this journey with a Hindu fatalist behind the wheel cranking the Best of Bollywood Duets for seventeen straight hours while your wife is in the backseat starting her period.
And, yes, I know, the brilliance of Bollywood, but spend all day in a car where the only CD is the above-mentioned collection of screechy “classics” and I promise the tune you’ll be singing when it’s over won’t be “When the Mango Harvest Comes and the British Twats Are Dead, I’ll Ululate For Thee.” The Aussie guitar blitzkrieg on this Hoodoo’s road-trip narrative comes as close as I can find to a sonic tribute to the Thar Desert epic recounted in chapter six.
Chapter 7: Sex, Rain and 100 Percent Cotton
“Bhangra Fever” — MIDIval PunditZ
I thought about Robbie Williams’ “Monsoon” here because I think he’s unfairly maligned in the states. And everywhere else, for that matter. But, great as “Monsoon” is, it really has nothing to do with the swampy downpour I endured alongside the trusty Baiju, one of the coolest guys I met in India.
Almost as cool is this classical-Indian-raga-meets-electronica track from New Delhi-based MIDIval PunditZ. I was sent a review copy of this CD in 2002 and it’s never fallen completely out of my rotation. I wasn’t ever able to interest any publication in a review of the disk, but I’ve since included this song on a dozen or so mixed CDs I’ve made for friends. No complaints yet.
Chapter 8: Red Fighters, White Tequila and Cruz Azul
“A Matter of Time” — Los Lobos
“Nogales” — Climax Blues Band
About the plight of Mexicans crossing the border to look for work in the United States, “A Matter of Time” offers gut-wrenching Mexican underclass perspective on the immigration debate. It’s one of the most heartbreaking songs I know. Included here to reflect the outrage surrounding America’s border policies that fuel a lot of the fear and paranoia many Americans harbor about Mexico.
Honorable mention to “Nogales” by the Climax Blues Band. Not by any stretch CBB’s best work, but a funny song about gringos getting tossed in a Mexican prison, another classic fear for traveling yanquis.
Chapter 9: The Electric Shanghai Bob Margarita Acid Test
“Gringo Honeymoon” — Robert Earl Keen
From my all-time favorite Texas songwriter (maybe tied with Willie), “Gringo Honeymoon” works because chapter nine is dominated by the dauntless Shanghai Bob — Blackguard of the Orient, Man of Indiscreet Solutions — who, in addition to sharing my enthusiasm for Keen, appeared at least momentarily headed for his own gringo honeymoon.
At Plaza Garibaldi, while mariachi bands blared and dollar beers popped, an exceptionally good-looking, twenty’ish Mexican woman in low-cut, pube-teaser jeans and tight green top leaped into Shanghai Bob’s arms with a feral take-me-now shriek. He spent a couple hours squiring her around the plaza before revealing an unappreciated side of himself — returning her with courtly decency to her nervous parents’ arms.
Chapter 10: To Sneer or Not to Sneer
“Dreams I’ll Never See” — Molly Hatchet
A lyrically dark, Floridian three-guitar rumble to stand as counterpoint to the “Make Your Dreams Come True” sloganeering invoked like a Profession of Faith so ceaselessly across Disney’s Sunshine State dominion that its recipients no longer seem able to distinguish between crude salesmanship and old-fashioned greed. If “following your dream” or “reaching for the stars” involves a payoff, financial or otherwise, that’s called ambition, not cockeyed optimism. The desire to become a rock star or a millionaire is not a dream. It’s an economic aspiration.
Epilogue
“Still Wishing To Course” — Camper Van Beethoven
A quasi-psychedelic number as tricky to describe as the places in this book. If I’d have thought of it when I was writing, I might have cribbed some of the lyrics:
Wishing in the nightmare, thought’s a possibility
Realizing action, courting all the difficulty
What a band. Off the top of my head, my mini-Camper Van mix would go something like: “Good Guys and Bad Guys,” “She Divines Water,” “Sweethearts,” “We Saw Jerry’s Daughter,” “Change Your Mind,” “Still Wishing To Course,” “One of These Days,” “Where the Hell is Bill?” “The History of Utah,” “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” “Life is Grand” and a couple Cracker tracks like “Teen Angst” and “Get Off This.” Hmmm, next time maybe a whole soundtrack employing only CVB songs?
