chalmers wood | Burners.Me: Me, Burners and The Man

Bob Weir, back left; John Perry Barlow, front right

This is quite an incredible story, and I’d like to sincerely thank Chip for choosing my channel to break it on.

Please contribute to Chip’s GoFundMe, which will help him finish and publish his book.

Let us know what you think in the comments, and any questions you want me to ask Chip in the next interview. Diehard Deadheads may be outraged to learn their favorite band is a psyop, others who have followed the research of myself, Dave McGowan, Joe Atwill, Jan Irvin and many others before us may not find the material such a shock.

Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin – Manufacturing the Deadhead

Previous Coverage:

Burning Man Unofficial Founder Dies

My FOIA request to the CIA for John Perry Barlow – they asked me to confirm he was alive days before his death was announced, then denied my request once he was dead.

Previous show with Robert and Joe discussing John Perry Barlow and Timothy Leary:

Robert Forte’s obituary for John Perry Barlow, who passed away in 2018

Included in this post is some of Chip’s writing and photos. At the end I will add some more from my own research collection. I have purchased the Fountain Valley School yearbooks for 1963 and 1964 and can confirm that Barlow, Weir, and Chip Wood all appear together in the 1963 yearbook.

Chip’s publicizer profile is a good introduction:

Chalmers Benedict Wood II

Three months after “Chip” is created, when he is the size of a three inch banana and his “eye buds” are forming, his mother tries to commit suicide. The rest of his gestation is “distressed” and he is born premature with his left eye points up & to the extreme left. (strabismus)
His unpleasant mother is greatly disturbed, and cried that Chip is a spawn of Satan sent to ruin her comfortable and wealthy diplomatic life. But Chip’s father, a young super star diplomat in the Marshall Plan, gives Chip his love, and takes him to London for many dangerous eye operations. They play “Light & Dark” baby games together, and become very close with a near-psychic ability to communicate. His father tells him a million times: “You may have a bad eye, but your brain is just fine!” Chip believes his father, and soon teaches himself how to build flying model airplanes by self-education.

When leaving Brussels for Manila during the Hukbalahap Rebellion there, Chip’s father is afraid the Europeans will believe America will forget Europe and their great dream to change into a war-free European Union. To assuage their leaders of these fears at his farewell garden party, Chips father persuades him to play Mannequin Piss on a pedestal to everyone’s amusement. It is Chip’s diplomatic debut.

After contracting Polio in Manila, Chip’s family moves to McLean, Virginia, and live in a wonderful house surrounded rolling and beautifully forested hills west of Washington. It becomes Chip’s magic Garden of Eden. When he is nine, in August, 1957, he saves his father’s career by persuading a Vietnamese leader to return to a South East Treaty Organization party in their family home. The leader had become outraged, and demanded the conference immediately end. Nobody could bring the leader “back” to the gathering, and Chips father was faced with becoming “the man who lost Vietnam”, a career killer. Then Chip does a weird rotating left eye trick he had taught himself, and leads the leader back to the party. The next morning Eisenhower hears at his breakfast CIA briefing that “Foreign Service Officer Ben Wood’s retarded son saved the conference with his magic left eye.” Chips family moves to Vietnam where they eventually learn America will soon go to war, lose, and try to use nukes at the end. Chip decides to become a low-profile anthropologist, teacher, and private diplomat.

One day his first girlfriend suddenly tells him: “OMG, Chip, you are actually smart!” He believes her, and becomes smarter. In May, 1963, Chip creates the logos, name, business & artistic properties for what becomes the band “The Grateful Dead, and entrusts into the hands of Robert hall Weir who later, with Chip’s brother, totally betrays Chip’s interests. In 1966, Chip takes a Topology IQ test and scopes over 160. Chip’s father’s career, he had been Kennedy’s Vietnam adviser, is, after Dallas, destroyed by Johnson. Chip’s acceptance to U. Colorado vaporizes, and he must enter the Army for the war in Vietnam.

While training in Georgia, Chip meets Hamilton Jordan, and creates for him a plan to make his boss Jimmy president so he can start a Mid East Peace process, recognize China, and win a Nobel. Chip becomes an outstanding military leader, and a decorated combat veteran Green Beret “A” Team Commander. Just before leaving Vietnam, Chip creates a plan for a fellow Black Panther Green Beret from Chicago to go home, and create a champion black basketball player that speaks good English, then a champion black golfer that speaks better English then the golf commentators, and then America’s first black President. It works.

Back in America, chaos reigns. Chip races Motocross, then enters a yoga monastery. Chip’s father is murdered by interests controlling the revenues of the Grateful Dead Band, and Chip is threatened with murder by Phil Lesh. Chip moves to Nanjing to teach English, and improve Chinese/American relations, and becomes famous there. etc, Etc, ETC !

Chip’s father’s 1991 obituary in the New York Times:

July 2, 1991, Page 00018The New York Times Archives
Chalmers Benedict Wood, a retired Foreign Service officer who served as an adviser to the South Vietnamese Government, died on Thursday at the Medical Center of Princeton, N.J. He was 73 years old and lived in Princeton.
He died of a brain hemorrhage, the funeral home said.
Mr. Wood, a 1940 graduate of Harvard College, joined the Foreign Service in 1947 after serving in the Army Air Force from 1940 to 1945. He was stationed in Brussels and Manila before going to Washington to serve as the State Department’s officer for Greece.
In 1957, he was named second secretary at the United States Embassy in Saigon and from 1959 to 1963 was in charge of Vietnamese affairs at the State Department. From 1964 to 1966 he served as first secretary in London and the next year directed the Cyprus office at the State Department.
Mr. Wood was then senior adviser for Binh Dinh province in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969. He returned to the State Department in 1970 with the office of Philippine affairs and from 1971 to 1974 served in the American Embassy in Wellington, New Zealand, as deputy chief of mission and charge d’affaires. Then he became a consultant on energy research and development.
He is survived by his wife, Patricia; two sons, Ramsay and Chalmers, and two daughters, Felicity and Penelope.

Chip’s brother Ramsay was also connected to the Harvard Psychedelic Project in the days of Timothy Leary and Henry Murray (OSS), which was involved in several of the 149 different subprojects of the joint British-US MKULTRA operation. Ramsay lives in London and is a Sufi priest. It is interesting that his Wikipedia page talks quite a bit about Lawrence Lessig, who was a close friend of John Perry Barlow. They were involved in setting up Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Barlow talks about Lessig in his memoir, and even Chip gets a brief mention.

Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times by [Barlow, John Perry, Greenfield, Robert]

Chip Wood:

Included, “Ben’s Bacon” re how I got the GD gig later. After that SEATO gathering, all sorts of folks came down to my basement model airplane shop to talk “mutual” shops. One was Major General Edward G. Lansdale, my “Uncle ED”, life mentor from Manila in 1950, and later Director Eilliam Egan Colby, “Uncle Bill”, whom I met in Saigon in 1958.

Also included “Ed & Maya” re how I profiled the right Asian American virgin nerd-girl to design the wall. Ed found her, and she did very VERY GOOD. And with about 140,000,000 having visited and shed tears there, they might be interested in my yarn. We shall see. Thanks for your interest.

With daughters. The girls are all right!

PERSONAL BACKGROUND. 1947-1963:

Because my arguing gold-diggging Mom traumatically near-killed herself and me when I was three months insider her just as my eye-buds were forming, I was born walleyed, and thought retarded.

As an infant I went under the knife for deadly frightening eye operations in London during which I thought I was dying. Then I would wake up in post op blind with both eyes heavily bandaged, drugged to the nines, and Dad holding my hands gently singing old sea shanties: “In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone…” We became very close even though I couldn’t yet even talk.

After my operational frights, and I could see again, I became a silent, unhappy, and autistic. So clever Dad took me to a Marshall Plan funded classical music concert for wounded WWII vets.

We were just three rows back center, the orchestra almost in touching distance. The first two pieces were somber yet growing, and Dad showed me how to wave my arms about as was the conductor. I responded, the only child there. Dad must have made a donation or something beforehand because the conductor and orchestra would occasionally look at me, smile, and a few even waved baby style. I was mesmerized, standing in my seat, and happily became interactive with them. Near by folks were amused. The band was deeply involved emotionally with the entire audience, the wounded, halt, lame, dispirited, homeless, all, and were playing their hearts out for us. Then Dad, grinning very big, shook me like a rag doll me with a big “AH-HA!” gesture, and the orchestra launched into Beethoven’s Fifth.

I was thunder and lightning struck to the depth of my bones for life. Words fail: I was a pre-verbal child. But the adult phrase “exploding in a supernova of reborn from the dead by love of life” are reasonable. When we were all leaving after the last of many concert hall shaking encores, many were crying determined to rebuild worn torn Europe immediately, and make our world a better place. Me crying too, and Dad took me home to bed where I dreamed infant dreams of God only know what all. So is it any wonder what I first sketched when designing the logos for the band Dad gave me permission to create in May, 1963?

See a head-link?

Ben’s Bacon

Ben’s Bacon DRAFT

In August, 1957, my childhood drew to a close. Dad was asked by Ike and both Dulles brothers, one running the Central Intelligence Agency, and the other the Department of State, to go to little Vietnam on the other side of our world and stop a looming war there. Dad was to try to avoid that potential fiasco because many nations and the Vatican feared such it could lead to a disastrous global thermonuclear conflict. He was to develop trusting liaisons with South Vietnam’s President Diem, and committed back channels communications with Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam as Roosevelt had during World War Two when “Uncle Ho” had fought with us against the Japanese, and saved our pilots shot down in the jungles.

Such was Dad’s bacon and eggs. He had become quietly loved throughout Europe during the Marshall Plan as a super star young diplomat able to charm birds off trees, slide fat envelopes of his own cash over or under a table in two shakes of a lamb tail, and solve a vexing Cold War problem to the East by the third shake. We as a family had all joined into the passion of that amazing era. We were enchanted as most everyone there was amid the shocking ashes of World War Two which still smelled of death, and the still reverberating echoes of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bomb episodes in Japan. All of us were determined “to make our world into a better and wiser place!”

Dad’s dream was to be appointed our American Ambassador to Paris, as had been his friend and mentor David K. Bruce*. That was Dad’s bacon. That he spoke fluent French was his eggs, and that he had majored in European History back in the old days at Harvard before serving in Europe in WWII, was his hot morning coffee. Dad was great.

Prior to his departure, a large delegation of powerful Vietnamese and their wives came to Washington for a crucial South East Asia Treaty Organization conference. But for two frustrating weeks it had become a difficult and unhappy gathering in the steaming summer Washington heat. So, for a little holiday, the delegates and their wives were invited by Dad out of their secret bolt hole hotels, and into our home to relax, refresh themselves in our cool and rolling forested hills west of Washington, and personally get to know “A Real American Family!” They were delighted.

After the Secret Service had inspected our home for dangers etc, and radioed to the police our home was “safe”, the Vietnamese delegates arrived in a long procession of black government sedans. It was my job to take the wives up to my room, and show them all the little things that made up the life of a real live American boy. That had long been my designated junior diplomatic family job: Charmer Chip.

The slender wives, the very cream of Vietnam’s womanhood, dressed in their long and colorful traditional diaphanously svelte Vietnam Ào Dài dresses, were for stunned ten year old me the most charming and beautiful creatures ever to walk this earth. So after all the introductions on our front porch, I lead them upstairs to my bedroom, sat them all on my bed, and made my best junior diplomatic welcoming speech: “Dear Ladies of Vietnam, welcome into my family home, and my American life. Please ask me ANY question you wish. Please! Do not be shy! I am here with you, and at your service! Those are my favorite pictures. There is Davey Crocket and his famous long rifle ‘Betsy’, that’s a B-52 taking off with JATO rocket assist, that’s a romantic castle in Scotland…” And so it went, the hidden switch on my reading light, my study desk and Potomac school books, my short wave radio for listening to anywhere in the world, through the clothes in my dresser and closet, and so on through everything, which they examined as if detective and scientists. They “Oood, Ahhed”, chattered among themselves, and the Leading Lady asked their questions, such as which was my favorite book, and could they please see my shoes? By the time I had shown them everything right down to the toothbrushs in my bathroom, and I had answered all their questions, we were never to be forgotten friends for life.

So I took them to our kitchen for their coup de grâce*: a just carefully made, perfectly salted, buttered, touch of sugar southern styled whipped to fluffy cream steaming bowl of mashed potatoes. Our very American made General Electric Triple Whip Maschine Oder Ehrfurcht Und Wunder was whipping the creamed potatoes threateningly as I quickly dipped my practiced finger in between the whirling blades for a hot dollop of deliciousness to my mouth, and motioned for them to do the same.

It was our calculated family kitchen-trick with guests: frighten them a little, then delight them. It would be a little memory they would take home to Vietnam, and tell friends about. The wives were genuinely frightened, shrinking back in alarm. They had never in their lives seen such a dangerous kitchen machine whipping away like a brazen gallon-sized dragon of unforgivingly hard white and chromium American steel. Naturally, I stepped boldly up to the menacing monster as Almighty God Zeus would to slay another lady-killing Dragon, reached up my manly United States arm, and switched it off.

The wives hands darted up to cover their mouths, hiding their gasps of relief. So I turned it on again, took the Leading wife’s dainty hand, guided it up to the switch, and made her turn it off. Pink rushed to her cheeks, always a good sign with females, and she tittered like a Nightingale in moonlight.

After much chatter, we all dipped in for a mutual nibble, looked all around at each other, raised our dolloping fingers to our mouths, and tasted together as one. Their eyes grew large, squeals of delight blossomed all-round, and our mutual amities were forever thereafter engraved upon the Harmonies of Heaven’s Mandate. Then they rushed out to drag in strict order their husbands, and school them about their next family American made acquisition. [Vietnamese wives have more in-family power than most Westerners realize. For example, the legend of Cinderella’s Magic Fairy God Mother came from Vietnam to the West via night time fireside travel stories along China’s Silk Road. Centuries later during our foolish war there, I was always peculiarly lucky as if by the Magic of a secret Fairy Godmother.]

Ahhh, Diplomacy when it is right and good! A while later everyone was gathered on our north porch overlooking the majestic Potomac River far below. Cocktails, drinks, refreshments, or snacks were in all hands. The mood shifted, became more optimistic, and the possibility the conference could succeed seemed in reach. Everyone was smiling, a few laughing lightly, the clink of glasses touching steady, Dad was pleased, and I so proud of him. Up in the forest around our home a breeze stirred the leaves in the treetops as murmurings and whisperings in the blue sky’s sunshine.

Suddenly, the large Vietnamese political “Great Leader” became outraged because of a misunderstanding, and demanded the whole conference come to an end immediately. He stalked out to the edge of our lawn, turned his back on everyone, and folder up his arms in anger. This was a diplomatic disaster for Dad because he would be blamed for “loosing Vietnam” for the rest of his diplomatic career! Dad and several others went out to ask the leader to please return to the conference, but he refused. Dad and I were very close, and I could see he was worried, and even frightened. I had never seen that before!

It shocked me deeply! Dad was my greatest hero. I couldn’t understand it. So I went to him. He was walking hurriedly back and forth in our living room inside from our porch where everyone was standing in rigid silence. He was looking as I had never seen before. I stood in trembling alarm waiting for him to recognize me. Surprisingly quickly, he suddenly stopped, and looked at me. “Yes Chip?” he asked. “May I try?” He looked at me as if I was an alien just blasted in from the Alpha Centauri star system. Then he suddenly laughed, threw up his arms, and said, “Well, EVERYTHING else has failed! So why not? Certainly Chip. You go try!”

And thus I embarked upon my first solo international diplomatic escapade! I knew I had three diplomatic weapons no one else there had. (1.) I was ten years old, and I knew from long family experience it is foolish, and even politically dangerous for any big leader to abuse a charming child in front of wives and witnesses. (2.) I had heard stories about the prisoners of war in Asia recounting: if you sang, and acted crazy doing interesting and weird things with your body, an Asian might wonder whether you were possessed by The Divine, and treat you well. And (3.) quite secret, I could do a trick with my eyes that shocked adults, and made my friends roll on the floor with laughter. I had become frustrated with my birth-defective left eye. When tired, my left eye would wander up and away to my left, and I would be teased mercilessly: “Hey wall-eyed retard!” So after weeks of practice in front of a mirror, I had taught myself to keep my right eye still while moving my left eye in circles. Like the Devil’s evil magic, I could look into your eyes with my right eye, and at the same time make my left eye go around and around in big circles! I had once played the trick to a mean old aunt of a primitive religion, and she had jumped back, and squeaked in horror: “Get thee away from me Satan!” Then she had run away. It was so cool!

So I ran down to my basement workshop, got my best model airplane glider, ran out to him with it, and launched it so it floated by right in front of him. He glanced at me, grunted, and looked away embarrassed. He had never been buttonholed by an American kid when angry, and he knew danger when he saw it. I attacked again, launching my airplane right by him. “Wouldn’t you like to fly my airplane with me?” I persisted in my most charming and musical voice.

He looked at me, so as quick as I could in order to hold his attention, I started explained the rudiment of aviation. “You see Sir, I made this glider myself from Balsa wood and glue. This tail-plane area is twenty three percent of the wing area, the wing has a nine to one span-to-cord ratio with eight degrees of dihedral for stability, and the plane’s balance point is forty percent back from the leading edge, which I can adjust with play-clay here on the nose”. I pointed at it. “Because balance is a key to controlled flight, just like Confucius said: balance is very important! Isn’t it just SO interesting!?”

His eyes widened slightly, and he looked at me with sufficient surprise to forget his anger. We looked deep into each other’s eyes for two heartbeats, and before he could remember his anger and look away, I stepped closer, looked harder into his eyes, and said:

“Dear Sir, won’t you PLEASE come back to my father’s party? It’s for you!” I put a worried look on my face. “If you don’t come back Sir, my father will lose his job, and then we won’t be able to afford the expensive surgical operation I need…” And, keeping my right eye glued between his eyes, I started making my left eye go around in the biggest circles I could. “…and then I won’t be able to go to a good school, and get the education I need to be a great diplomat like you and my father! Please Sir?”

He instantly drew in his breath with an “Oh!” of shock as he stepped back from me. Quick as I could, I stepped forward again, grabbed him politely by his wrist like a policeman slapping cuffs on a perp, and pulled. “Please?!!” And he came! So I took his big hand in mine, and lead him back up to our porch as a wayward lamb, back where eyes swelled, mouths fell agape, his giggling twinkling-eyed wife tittered anew, whispered wagers on my gambit were won and lost, and Dad rushed forward to receive him.

I hurried away as if busy with other family chores. I knew that would create the best diplomatic impression because it would give everyone the freedom to say all sorts of wonderful things about me they wouldn’t say if I stayed for their praise. And, it made it impossible for the Great Leader to get angry when it to dawned on him he had been bamboozled by a ten year old retard.

That evening Dad admitted I had “…done good”, and winked at me. Saving Ben’s Bacon had been fun, and that night I dreamed of him our Ambassador in Paris. I later heard, though it was probably just another amusing Washington DC cocktail story, that the next morning, just as President Eisenhower was sipping his steaming hot breakfast coffee, his morning CIA briefing officer told him, timing his words carefully, exactly how the conference had been saved, and a possible global thermonuclear war averted by the spin of “Foreign Service Officer Ben Wood’s son Chip, and His Magic Left Eyeball”, and the President of the United States of America, the most powerful man in the world, spilled hot coffee all over his lap.

***

“Maschine Oder Ehrfurcht Und Wunder“

~ Machine of Awe and Wonder

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_K._E._Bruce

* coup de grâce (ko͞o′ də gräs′) French n. pl.

1. A deathblow delivered to end the misery of a mortally wounded soldier.

2. A finishing stroke, or decisive event.

Uncle Ed & The Girl at Yale

by Chalmers Wood 3/18

It started when I was a kid reading Confucius. His thinking seemed more advanced in the long term than our zero sum Roman Empire based stuff. Rome had fallen. The English Empire was teetering. Dad and I discussed it at length. We were extremely close, our mutual love and trust beyond doubt. Dad introduced me to Edward G. Lansdale about ‘51 in Manila when I was five. Before Ed came to our home for dinner, Dad said he was unhappy because someone back in Washington had made trouble for him. I was the family charmer. Dad asked me: “Chip, can you please make Ed feel good again about America?”

It went well. Ed was a genuine American hero. Soon he was bouncing me on his knee, blowing great harmonica, and telling fantastic stories about Jap Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda up in the hills still fighting WWII. Ed was a great subtle win/win Confucian Christian American guy with music. “Uncle Ed”! He’d squelched the Hukbalahap Rebellion two days before its getgo because he spent a lot of time out humping the bush making real friends among all comers while not abusing their young women etc. So the locals had told him what was going down.

Then some wannabee back in Washington boasted about Ed’s secret Huk exploits with names, and they were soon murdered back out in the Philippine’s bush. I could feel he’d been somehow wronged when we first met. Something bad. Later when I heard all, it cautioned me about American field service, and going private became a thought. We are a culturally young & mixed nation, with only about 11% the time learning by directly experience re national cultural developments compared to old China. It tells. To my thinking: learning by direct experience often beats book learning, and both is best.

While in Vietnam (’68-’69) as a Special Forces Lieutenant, my de facto job was (a.) planning with both Vietnams their obvious eventual

unification, their developmental future entry into world trade, creating domestic and foreign reserves, and the so on get rich stuff. That went with extreme subtly, while (b.) I went about more openly under the cover and security of Uncle Bill Colby’s killer Phoenix Program while (c.) appearing to be a normal psyops guy, Ed’s specialty. [I had met “Uncle Bill” William E. Colby in old Saigon in ’58] That sounds unusual, but I’d known the Viets for a decade, and they knew me from childhood, especially the elite wives, and they had more direct power in their families than any American ever knew. In fact, the Cinderella and her Fairy God Mother folk tale came from Vietnam to Europe by fireside stories carried along China’s bygone Silk Road.

The only danger for me came from American Army officers trying to use me in some hopeless WWII based scheme, which were countless in that utterly different war. Late in my tour I chatted with a Black Panther Special Forces NCO from Chicago, and persuaded him America needed a Black President. For amusements I scootered around up in the hills on a trusty little Honda 90 in black pajamas: to light to pop road mines, and to local looking to worry about getting shot the Viet Cong. A few of my Special Forces buddies were outraged, but I just didn’t care. We would soon lose in Vietnam, at which point it could go thermonuclear worldwide. I met with friendly Viets all about, we usually had tea together, and I always promised to return when all was over. “Would you like your children to go to American Universities?” Piece of cake with the Viets back then.

A decade later I was in NYC when quietly slipped a train ticket to Washington to meet a taxi. The taxi drove me to the Viet Vet Memorial design competition where I was received as a VIP without explanation, and ushered through a look see. Then to McLean, Virginia, told to go in a home’s front door, and there sat Uncle Ed in his easy chair apologizing about “The girl.” “What girl?” “The girl in Phu Tuc, the one you turned down.” “That girl?!” “Yes. The next guy disappeared, and spent four years a POW. We got him home with ruined feet. Sorry ‘bout that. Teaches down at NC State now” “Oh.”

The plan had been for me to be the White King of the Radé and Jaré Montagnard mountain tribes with the village chief’s exquisitely eager fourteen year old darkmoon-eyed butterscotch-skinned daughter my Princess, and I was to lead them all out to defeating dastardly evil communizzm worldwide. Ed had been screwed into it by higher ups in the Johnson administration. [Johnson had destroyed Dad’s diplomatic career for briefing Ike and Jack we could not win in Vietnam, studiously ignored Ed’s sage advice, my University Colo acceptance and hoped for career had vanished, and into the Army to war I was ushered.] We chatted for a while about old times. Charming Ole Uncle Ed! He was The Man. Then to business!

“What did you think of the entries?” “They are all horrible, bitter, blaming, self-centered, even hateful. They will all only just rub more salt in the wound, every last one of them.” long silence “What do you think we should do?” I was shocked. That was a huge national question of global political import. I subsided back in my chair, and stared up at the blank ceiling, dazed and abstracted… Slowly it came…

…“Well, we are not able to heal the wound… we are just too immature a culture to understand how to do it… It must come from an older and more experienced culture… Not quite Europe… Too many foolish wars… Asia… China… Yes China… The wiser birthings of new dynasties after catastrophic failures… An educated Chinese family that has experienced utter defeat, and recovered well… A Chinese American family that lost everything in the ’49 revolution, came here, and has done well… With a daughter that became their new dream of hope for their family future… A girl of pure heart, a virgin who naturally knows she is the new hope of family, and IS that quite happily… naturally, deeply, instinctively… who studies Art, Architecture, Symbolism, Legends, History, Philosophy… An undistractedly kind female nerd… Not West Coast.. Not central… East Coast… Highly educated… Not Harvard, to big, rich, corrupt… No… Yale… Yes Yale… Architecture school, The Yale Architecture School Ed… Look There!… You find her Ed!” Suddenly I was angry. “Just get her down on site like a normal class assignment, no fuss no muss… like turning loose a young deer into a park… Then leave her alone… Wait till she comes back on her own… And she will!… Help her Ed, maybe without her even knowing it”… I stood up exhausted and irate. We stared into each other’s eyes. His jaw loosened slightly, eyes widening. We understood each other. We were Old Hands, and I was HOT: “She’ll know what to do Ed, Because We Sure As Hell Don’t!”

We lost 58,000 American, and 3,000,000 Vietnamese friends in that unwise war. It could have exploded into a global thermonuclear war as the Cuban Missile Crisis almost had save exactly one (1) Russian submariner. We looked at each other silently. Old Hands. I went out the door to the waiting taxi, back to NYC, and that was that.

They Did The Job

Uncle Ed & Maya Lin!

Dad & Uncle Bill Attending

And Thank You Commander Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov!

Old Hands Ed died in ’78, Dad in ‘91, Bill in ’96, and Vasili in ‘98

Rest in Peace Old Friends. We Well Remember You

~R I P~

[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov ]

Be sure to view this page, bottom of para #1 to see why above game was played behind POTUS’ back. My 501C3 will commission a statue of Vasili, maybe by ML. ;-D