Three Beautiful Things 07/26/18: High School and Vietnam, Reading Vietnam, Splendid Salad and a Superb Beer

1. Being a high school student in Kellogg, mostly concerned about friends, basketball, working my jobs, and listening to Cream and Creedence Clearwater Revival, I didn't know what to make of events like students being shot at Kent State and Jackson State, buildings being bombed across the country by members of groups like the Weathermen, the My Lai massacre, and other stories documenting the hellish realities in Vietnam and the divisiveness and violence here in the USA. The only way I had of thinking about the possibility of getting drafted was to think of basic training as a series of really hard basketball practices. I had no way of thinking about combat. This all came back to me today as the documentary series, The Vietnam War, moved into covering the years I was in high school. If I was too preoccupied with being a teenager back in 1969 and 1970 to be unnerved by the war and the violence in the USA, today was different.

2. This afternoon, I dove into The New Yorker's online archives and read the first installment of Frances Fitzgerald's 1972 four part series on Vietnam. These pieces in The New Yorker later became her book, Fire in the Lake. In her first installment, Fitzgerald works to help her readers understand the philosophical, spiritual, historical, economic, and political history of the country of Vietnam so that readers can understand how very foreign the ideas of Western countries like France and the USA were to the Vietnamese and how little the French and the Americans cared about how the Vietnamese see the world and understand living day to day life. It's hard for us in the USA to comprehend, but traditionally the Vietnamese have had little concern for individual freedom or individualism. It's a genuinely western concept.

I also read book review I'd read earlier in the year of Max Boot's book, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam. I also read Frances Fitzgerald's account of returning to Hanoi in 1975 and what she observed and learned as Vietnam was working to shape itself in the aftermath of the war. The last article I read was by Seymour Hersh and his return to My Lai in 2015.

3. The Deke made a splendid shrimp salad from lettuce from our raised bed along with cheese, avocado, apple, and a variety of vegetables and we topped it with the raspberry vinaigrette she made, using raspberries from our yard.

Before dinner we split a 22 oz bottle of Breakside Brewing's Imperial IPA aged in gin barrels that had once held Old Tom Gin at Ransom Distillery in McMinnville, OR.  This was a most unusual and enjoyable beer, very floral and aromatic. It gave me a thrill similar to what I experience with Uncle Val's Botanical Gin -- a burst of herbal and floral flavors that are preceded by the great pleasure Uncle Val's and this beer gives my nose.