NOTE June 13: I did the first draft of this post on June 10.  On occasion I do edits, additions and corrections on posts, and on this one, the most recent was on June 11.  This was before California U.S. Sen Alex Padilla was thrown out of a press event of DHS Commissioner Kristi Norm, which I learned about late yesterday afternoon.  This mornings Star Tribune front page featured my Governor Tim Walz, being grilled by the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee; the Norm/Padilla affair was relegated to page 7.  The feature letter in today’s STrib asks citizens to get directly involved in the direction of our country.  I concur.  These are critical times.  More at the end of this post (Postnote June 13).  There is more than adequate information on these topics from many sources.

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Dog Tags. U.S. Army 1962-63

When I first envisioned this post, my objective was simple: I wanted to try to describe military life from the vantage point of a single veteran, myself, who was in the Army 1962-63.

This was before Los Angeles and Ft. Bragg and who knows what else in coming days.  In my inadequate way, I’ll try to forge ahead.

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Saturday June 24 is the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the U.S. Army.  I’m an Army veteran, and the most recent American Legion magazine (I’m a member and I subscribe) had several pages about the Army which are linked here: American Legion Mag June 2025.  In addition, Heather Cox Richardson has recently recorded 10 one to two minute videos on the American revolution.  They are easily accessed and interesting and total about 20 minutes.  Here is the link.  The series is called “Ten Steps to Revolution.”  They all recall the time around 1775 in the colonies which became the United States.  Her June 13 column also is about the establishment of the U.S. Army.

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Most of this post is my recollections of 22 months active duty in the U.S. Army.  By preference, I’m anti-war; at the same time, I am never critical of the uniformed services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, National Guard).  More below.

The card below came to mind as I was contemplating this.  Also, the anti-war slogan from Vietnam days “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”.  We might keep this in mind that, as I speak, certain folks are itching for war within our own country….  (I hope there are lots of non-violenrt protests on June 14, and ongoing.)

1978 card from Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.  (Here is the same card in pdf format: WILPF card 1978.  (The original was blank inside.)

“I’m in the Army, now….”  Personal Memories.

Every veteran has his or her own story, of course.  I asked AI a couple of starter questions, which got instant response which seemed reasonable:  roughly one of eight adult American men are military veterans.  About 10% of the veterans have been in a combat situation.  Quibble with the specifics, but I think the generalizations are close to accurate, simply comparing against my own family constellation.

Of course, far fewer women have military service, for reasons we all know.  Probably one percent of women have been active military.

Less than one percent of the U.S. population are actually in the active military.

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I served 21 months of U.S. Army duty in an Infantry Company in 1962-63 (Co C 1st Battalion 61st Infantry 5th Infantry Division  (Mech).  I have a small internet appearance about my time here. Read the brief 1962-68 section if you wish.  The below photos are from those Army days, all at Ft Carson Colorado.

Dick Bernard third from left Basic Training Ft. Carson Colorado spring 1962

The photo reveals that we were not particularly happy campers.  Basic Training (about six weeeks) is that way.  Veterans will identify….  Our housing – old wooden barracks – is in the background.  We earned our $78 a month!

I graduated from college in December, 1961, not a particularly good time to start a career.  Like all colleague males, I had a draft card, which in those days left a pretty good chance of being drafted into the military at some point, so I decided, without a whole lot of thought, to volunteer for the draft.  (It was peacetime in a sort of tenuous sense, then.  The Vietnam era is considered to begin in the spring of 1961.)   In mid January, 1962, I was sworn in at Fargo and we were put on a bus with others similarly situated.  To my knowledge, none of us knew anyone else in the group.  We were all strangers.  I recall going to a movie with one of the others.  He was a kid who was native Norwegian, with a still very thick accent.

We went by bus from Fargo to Ft. Carson Colorado, near Colorado Springs.  I was designated in charge of the others – I suppose this was because I had a college degree, and was perhaps senior (at 21).  All that got me was responsibility to make sure everyone who got on the bus in Fargo got off the bus in Colorado.  I recall one ‘pit stop’ in the approximately 1,000 mile road trip, though there must have been others across South Dakota, Nebraska and Colorado.  This was not a recreational journey.

“You’re in the Army now…”

My time in military management ended the moment I stepped off the bus at Ft. Carson.  Any pretense of superiority (there was none) ended immediately.  My first job off-the-bus was washing pots and pans in the mess hall.  It was dismal duty that seemed endless.  Selection was tried and true: “you, you and you….”

Recruits who’ve been there can tell the rest of the stories: “haircuts”, incessant lines, shots for most anything imaginable, tests, communal living in an open floor with perhaps 10 bunk beds on a side.  There was no privacy.

Being military means being part of a group, and subject to rules.  There is no “Army of One” as an old Army recruiting slogan went.  you may have been top of the class, or big shot in your family or town.  Basic Training with all of its indignities  melds endlessly diverse individuals into something of a unit.

Most of my 21 months service time was in a single Infantry Company, and most of that time I was Company Clerk, thus the rank and file GI who knew the most about the 140 or so men who lived together in three old wooden barracks near the south end of Fort Carson.  People in my position had to be able to type, and our greatest responsibility day to day was an accurate multi-carbon Morning Report on matters of the day including personnel comings and goings.  As the saying goes, we basically “knew all, but told only some”: who got busted, etc, etc.  Co C was like a little town.  Ask any veteran about this.  The stories will all be different, all the same.

Nobody in my North Dakota group ended up in the same unit as I.  From day one we started over.  I made a brief list of names I remembered from those 21 months.  I’m up to about 25 now – Larry Davis just popped into my head just now, from Indiana somewhere.

In this new collection of humanity was a Hungarian who’d been a freedom fighter there in the 1950s.  We became good friends; I was a witness when he became a citizen.  One fellow GI was Navajo from New Mexico, another Puerto Rico.  There were at least a couple from New York City – some years later I was in NYC and looked up James J Walker in the giant NYC phone book, and there were many pages of James J Walker….  There were a number of African-American GIs.  One of the Hispanics, I learned years later, was from a border city in Arizona, and had been elected as town mayor.  I could go on and on.  Imagine yourself being dumped into a collection of 140 strangers, living communally with 10 or more of them in a single open room, your only possession a foot locker, communal bathroom and no privacy. We may have had a standing single locker – I’m not sure of that.  To make phone calls you had to go to the PX (post exchange our “shopping center”.  On and on and on.

My younger brothers both became career Air Force officers.  At some early point – probably home on leave after basic – one of them asked me about being in the service.  “Anything but the Army”, I apparently said, or so he reminded me many years later.  I did make one conscious decision as a newbe.  Being a new college grad, my test scores were high and I had a chance to go for Officer Training.  I declined because I’d have to extend service time, and I wasn’t interested.  I knew how to type, and they needed a Company Clerk, and that became my career in a unit that like all the others was preparing for later deployment to Vietnam (at the time, we didn’t know this, of course.  I was long out of the Army when Vietnam met Company C in 1968).

Being Company Clerk gave me a small amount of status, for whatever that was worth.  My boss was the First Sergeant (a wonderful mentor and man), and we shared space with the Company Captain and at least one Lieutenant.  The Supply Sergeant was in the same facility we were.  When the Company went on maneuvers, we went as well, and lived in exactly the same dismal conditions in the field as the rest.  We were a combat infantry company.  While we didn’t know it, we were preparing for Vietnam.  It was not a vacation.

We had only one close call, which none of us realized at the time.  Half way into my first year, in mid-October 1962, President Kennedy addressed the nation about the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The company mess sergeant had a small screen television and a few of us watched the President address the nation in an Army barracks.

One of the possible targets for the Russian missiles in Cuba was the military facility in Cheyenne Mountain, a few  miles from us, and within Range of the missiles.  We saw Cheyenne Mountain every day – You can see the vicinity in the photo below.

The Cuban Missile Crisis came to an end within days, of course, and except for even more than usual regimentation, we escaped involvement in what was perhaps the closest call the U.S. has thus far had to a foreign invasion.  (If you look at a map of Cuba in context with the U.S., Cheyenne Mountain even then was in range of guided missiles

That single incident is the entire story of military service.  You don’t know or have control of what you might have to do.  Those who came after me to the same company had a horrendous time in Vietnam a few years later.  There were many casualties in Nam, I heard.

I doubt that any of us in the service back then could have even imagined the present day scenario in our own country.  We simply felt we were doing our duty as required by law.  I would suspect that most of us had only vague notions about Vietnam, even though we are all Vietnam era veterans.

Ft. Carson Colorado 1962, my barracks a couple of blocks from this end of the base; Cheyenne Mountain area in background.

PDF of articles from the same Rocky Mountain News: Cuba002

Personal:  22 months of active duty, most of it at Ft. Carson, all of it in Army Infantry, is impossible to summarize in a few words.  Only a small percentage (less than 1%) of Americans are actually in the military service.  In my day, service could be mandatory (the Draft) and line troops were male only.  There has always been a National Guard.  It has only been in recent years where Guard Units have been engaged beyond traditional local kinds of actions.

There will always be a meed for military, and military service is in many ways good training for life in general.  But it is always subject to abuse, and we need to be wary of aberrant behaviors.

POSTNOTE June 13.  I won’t try to add to the abundant news around immigration and especially California.  What I did do, before the Padilla incident, was to try to access some reasonable articles on the recent history of immigration policy in the United States.  The two linked article, below, seem well worth your time to at least browse.  

Brookings Institution

Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force

George Washington, born 1732; 43 in 1775

I am inclined to believe that the summer of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, 2025, will be the time we, the people of the United States of America, decide on our future as a nation.   This is OUR decision, not “THEIR”….  What will YOU do this summer?

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In these parts, the time called “summer” basically starts with Memorial Day weekend (this year May 24-26), and ends with Labor Day (this year Sep 1), more or less 100 days.  Nowhere is this written in statutes, but I don’t think I’m off base when it comes to colleague citizens.

I’ve had this writing ‘hobby’ for over 20 years, and I’m not done yet.  What I am going to try to do in the coming 100 or so days is to just do my thing, but not send out reminders of new posts.  I will keep writing.

For me, life is normal.  If you’re wondering what’s on my mind any time, just check in and look at the archive for the time period in question, for instance, May, 2025.

If you go to the May archive, you’ll find four recent posts: May 23 (Federal Budget), May 25 (George Floyd & Gandhi Mahal), May 26 (Memorial Day), and May 31 (my Congresswoman Betty McCollum’s Town Hall, please read).  I’ve also added a few items at the beginning of my blog on the new Pope, May 8.

As for upcoming posts, I have no idea, except I doubt there’ll be much dead air.  There is a huge number of crucial issues, and credible sources of deeper information, especially Heather Cox Richardson (current and past history) and Joyce Vance (Law) and many others readily accessible (see below).

The temptation is to make predictions.  I won’t.  Every one of us needs to be “on the court”, in particular this summer.  There are countless options everywhere.  Everything is in play, it seems, and not for the ordinary citizens….

I find a wealth of reliable information on-line.  I emphasize “reliable” – information I can trust.  Top of my daily list is historian Heather Cox Richardson, and Law professor Joyce Vance.  Tim Snyder and Ruth ben-Ghat are sources on fascism, specifically.  (under their names is the link to their most recent post).  There are many others.  Most of my sources are part of Substack.  The ones I most rely on, I subscribe to, even if I can get them for free.  We take expertise for granted.

I keep up the subscription to the daily Minnesota Star Tribune (of which, I’ve been keeping the front section since Jan 20, 2025).  I also pay the minimal subscription rate to New York Times to keep occasional articles accessible.  Freedom is not free.

Below is my favorite tee-shirt piece of advice, seen at a demo at the Minnesota State Capitol on May 17.  Use this as your motto for the remainder of the 100 days of “summer” and on into the following months and years.

Have a good summer.

Political tee-shirt at MN State Capitol May 17, 2025

Looking back to November 5, 2024

I always observe Memorial Day, being a veteran myself, from a family full of military veteranss.

This year will be a bit unconventional since the normal time designated – later morning – will be occupied by a visit to a friend who recently had heart surgery.  So I’ll miss the Veterans for Peace observance at the Veterans Service Building at the State Capitol Mall (9:30 a.m.) and an alternative I planned also to possibly attend, at the Woodbury City Hall area about the same time.

I choose, this year, to remember two memorable Memorial Days, in 1946 and 2014.

Sykeston High School ca late winter or early Spring 1946, most likely photograph taken by my Dad, Henry Bernard.

At Memorial Day, 1946, I had just turned 6 years old: old enough to remember stuff; not old enough to attach significance to what I was witnessing.

The family had just moved to the tiny town of Sykeston ND, where my Dad had, the previous September, become the Superintendent of the public school.  He had moved earlier than the rest of us – Mom and four kids, me, the oldest, the youngest born in mid-November, 1945.  At Sykeston, we lived in a rented small house just to the left of the above photo of the school.

That Memorial Day, I remember as a pleasant spring day.  I was standing more or less where the above photograph was taken.  There were people on the lawn, but mostly I remember the few men who simultaneously shot rifles into the air a few times.  It was a somber time – even a kid could feel that.

The experience stuck in my mind.  It was not until years later that I connected the dots of that day immediately after WWII.

Dad’s brother had died on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, one of the first American casualties of WWII.  One of Dad’s colleague teachers was his brother-in-law George Busch, who had spent three full years as a Naval officer on the destroyer USS Woodworth (DD 460) in the Pacific Theatre.  George’s wife, Jean, filled in for him the first months of the school year, as his tour of duty didn’t end until late October when the Woodworth, which docked at Tokyo in mid-September, 1945, docked at Portland, Oregon.  Doubtless Uncle George and Dad had something to do with the observance I was witnessing.  Doubtless some residents of the town had been casualties.  Likely there were a few crosses on the lawn, which I don’t remember.

More than 50 years after 1946 – it was 1998 in San Francisco – I learned about another family story of the horrors of war.  I had a cousin, Marie-Josephine, two months younger than me, who was born in the Philippines.  She was the namesake of Dad’s mother and my grandma Josephine.  On a summer day in San Francisco in 1998, her brother, a couple of years older, told the story of the liberation of Manila in the late winter of 1945.  The family, mother and three children, took refuge in a churchyard, and in the ensuing chaos, shrapnel from somebodies shell hit Marie-Josephine, killing her instantly.  She was in her mother’s arms.  Her brother, Alfred, was also there, and he broke down as he told the story of his sisters death.  Such is how it is with memory.  (Their Dad had spent most of the war imprisoned in Santo Tomas POW camp in Manila.)

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Fast forward to Memorial Day, 2014, at the Veterans for Peace observance on the State Capitol grounds in St. Paul.

On that day I was with two Pakistani men who were Fulbright scholars through the Human Rights Center of the University of Minnesota Law School.  One of them had decided on a final project that involved interviewing at least 10 persons involved in peace-making, and I was asked to be the supervisor of the project, which went very well.

On Memorial Day they joined me at the observance and had the opportunity to interview the guest speaker for the day, Jim Northrop, noted Ojibway author.  Their film of that observance, including Northrops comments, remains available online.  Be sure to read the preliminary paragraph, then scroll down to Veterans for Peace.

Peace is complicated, as is obvious particularly now, Without peace there is no future, and hats off to all of those who labor on,.

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A moving story: Heather Cox Richardson May 25, 2025.

I cannot recall a more crucial national decision than the resolution of the Federal Budget now being debated, the first round being adopted by the House of Representatives by a single vote: 215-214.

We all need to be involved in this through our elected representatives at the Federal Level (House and Senate members).  Obviously the President is the third leg of this stool.

Essential summary information is in the links below.  When the time comes for vote, your representatives have essentially four options:

1. YES.
2. NO.
3. Not Voting (which can be for any reason, from critical illness, to simply not voting).
4. PRESENT (available, but choosing not to vote).

This process can drag out for a long while.  The only absolute action you can take is to be on record with YOUR respresentatives as an individual.

There are also collective options available, such as “Indivisible”, etc.  The more personal, the better.  Best if your representative actually knows you.

Don’t waste your right to speak up.  Take time now to get well informed.

Heather Cox Richardson May 22, 2025. (Summary of May 22 action by the U.S. House of Representatives); see also May 23, 2025.  [Also May 24, 2025.]

Suggestions from the national group Indivisible:  Here and Here.  (These links are within this past week).

Political tee-shirt at MN State Capitol May 17, 2025

“EXTRA CREDIT:”  Chuck passed along this 20 minute YouTube with wellness advice for seniors.  This is non-political.   I watched it all.  It has some good ideas to consider.

Chuck’s summary of the video:

Key tips:

Each week of inactivity equals six months of aging.  90-year-olds can double their strength in 12 weeks.

Instead of avoiding challenges, seek them.  #4 is the social isolation time bomb!

Social isolation is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.  Doubles the risk of dementia, kills brain cells, weakens immunity, and accelerates physical decline

Research discovered that seniors with strong social connections live 22 percent longer and have 50% less cognitive decline

Mistake #5:  The memory myth massacre:  The brain can grow new cells at any age. It’s neural plasticity – the ability to rewire itself – Does not stop at 60. 70 or even 90.

POSTNOTE MAY 20: If you are wondering what you can do, I’d recommend reading this from the national group Indivisible, received yesterday.   And read the slogan on the red tee-shirt in the below picture: “Stand Up, Speak Up, Show Up“.  The solution is you, and all of us.

The real world we’ve chosen to live in is, unfortunately, rife with division – always someone else’s fault.  We see this play out every day.  The Minnesota legislature is almost equally divided, by constitution had to complete its work by last night, didn’t, so now a special session looms.  What is maddening is that ultimately, regardless of the passion on either or both sides, settlement has to be reached, and will be.  We know how this works, because this is common.

Who’s fault is it?  In my opinion, all of us, collectively, everywhere.  We are still a democracy where every vote (including not voting at all) matters.  As the saying goes, we “need to wake up and smell the coffee”.  Get engaged.  “Show Up”!

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Saturday, on spur of the moment, I decided to go to a demonstration at the Minnesota State Capitol, about a half hour from where I’m typing this post.  The snapshot below is my interpretation of the event, which I found most worthwhile.

Actions like this demo are not intended to be ends.  Their intention is to increase awareness and later and greater action by a much larger constituency.  The lesson from this action, and any other, is what happens later, when the participants are back home..

may 17, 2025 at the MN State Capitol St. Paul MN photo by Dick Bernard

This demo was specifically about teacher pensions, which might make one who knows me wonder: “he’s been retired 25 years, he’s not on a teacher retirement pension, why bother to come to such an event?”

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If you’re reading this, you know we’re at an intensely divided time in our countries history, with boatloads of very serious issues.  If you look at the back of the red tee-shirt you’ll see the reasons the people were there on Saturday: ‘Stand Up, Speak Up, Show Up”.  Regardless of your own personal issues, these words have never been more important.

As my life moves along incessantly, I’ve come to grips with the fact that I am one person among an immense number of persons – the proverbial grain of sand.

I once had the audacious notion that if each one of us could reach two others, and they repeated the action with two more, there could be dramatic results in a short time.

I did the experiment.  It didn’t work, for all sorts of reasons.

So I modified my strategy to “each one reach one“.  That is more doable, but not a slam dunk, and it takes effort to find the one to reach, and then repeat and continue.

So, when I do these posts I am always in argument with myself.  Am I making sense to me, personally, in these words?  This requires some self-reflection – arguing with oneself – and acknowledging that there are legitimate differences of opinion on almost anything, and this ratchets up dramatically in a complex society such as ours is.

What doesn’t work is to get mired within a cell of persons who subscribe to the certainty of the rightness of their position, at all costs.  A win at any cost is a guaranteed loss in the long term….  But we have a society that is accustomed to that.

What led to the demo yesterday was the fact that the Minnesota legislature is almost exactly evenly divided, and negotiations and compromise are a required certainty, including the specific items at issue which led to several hundred showing up at the state Capitol on Saturday.  Likely they all agreed on the general issue which brought them together.  Certainly, there are lots of differences of opinion even amongst ‘birds of a feather’ on other issues of personal concern.

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So, again, “why come to such an event?”, as I did, yesterday.

First, I was a teacher for nine years, I represented teachers for 27 more, my parents were career public school teachers, two of my children are educators, all of our nine grandkids have gone to school….

But I had no particular reason to go to this demo.  Because I’m a life member of Education Minnesota, the sponsoring entity, I received its mailer, brief and very effective, that alerted me to the essential details: “Our state legislative leadership and governor will be in final negotiations on the state budget before the Legislature must adjourn on May 19.  This is a critical time to make our voices heard loudly to advance strong schools and strong pension reform!“.

Even with the flier, I probably wouldn’t have attended, but  I was at a meeting a few days ago where a teacher was simply announcing to the group she was with that she was going to attend this rally.  Saturday, I decided to show up.  I didn’t have a sign, but I did stand up and show up.

On publishing this post, perhaps one or two or three or more folks will want to learn more.

I’m not sure, of course, how the organizers will assess their effort; nor do I know much about the specific issue, nor what is on the table for the legislature whose session is supposed to conclude this week, though may end up in a special session.  I don’t know.

Personally, I think the rally was very effective.  Organizers know you don’t need tens of thousands at a demo.  What they’re looking for are the people who will attend and then go back to their fellow citizens and make sure the message is shared much more broadly.

In the end analysis, politics is people, period.  If you wish to make a difference on anything you have to Stand Up, Speak Up, Show Up.

Thanks to everyone I saw at the rally on Saturday.