Thursday, December 27, 2012

The Reluctant Pilgrim

The year of 1943 was not a great year to be born in Europe which was in the midst of a cataclysmic war. Three months before my birth, July 1943, the Americans, British and allied forces stormed ashore in Sicily, devastating the small Mediterranean Island like previous invading armies had done before, such as the the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Vandals, the Byzantines, the Muslims in the eighth century AD, the French in the 12th Century and the Spanish after them. During the American/British invasion, my mother and my entire home town, Geraci Siculo, had to be evacuated, fearing allied bombing runs.  My mother recalls the day when a riderless mule suddenly appeared in town.  It was learned later that the rider was blown off his mule and killed by an allied bomb while he was crossing a bridge along Highway SS 286, a twisting mountain road, near the town of Castelbuono, while returning home.
Piano Caterineci

As a youngster in Sicily, I was a totally happy child; the environment suited me.  My dad was a shepherd and as soon as I could walk, he took me with him while tending his flock (outside of school days of course). By this time I had developed an emotional attachment to the land. Even though we were very poor, along with all the townspeople, I never knew it and was totally happy in my environment.

In the summer months, all the animal farmers would move their herds to distant lands for grazing.  Since Sicily is a heaven for wheat farming, most farmers would lease wheat field lands after the harvest. The animals would feed on the stubs that were left.  My dad joined several other shepherds, moving their herds about 60 kilometers east of Geraci in an area called Chibbò; an area of rolling hills and home to wheat fields as far as the eye could see.  Driving the animals there would take about three days.  We would sleep in the open sky, using nothing but a blanket under us and one over us.  To me it was heaven on earth.  I loved it.

Around 1954, when I was 10 years old, I learned that my parents were planning on leaving Geraci and moving to America.  For a long time I denied that this was the case.  I did not want to leave.  When my dad finally sold all his sheep and his other property, the reality hit me like a hammer.   When we finally left and before boarding the cruise ship, the Saturnia, in the Port of Palermo Sicily, I asked my mom if she would leave me behind.  I told her I could stay with one of my uncles, Uncle Domenico. She declined out of hand.  We all boarded the ship and landed in New York Harbor on March 23, 1956 after a stormy Atlantic crossing in the dead of winter.  From the harbor, we went straight to the train station for the trip to Los Angeles, where my dad's sister, Maria Santa, was waiting for us.

We arrived at Union Station, Los Angeles, on an overcast day three days later.   I recall that I'd never seen an overcast day.  In Geraci, it was either sunny, foggy, or rainy; never overcast.  My aunt, her husband Joe and two other fellow Geraci immigrants, met us at the station and drove us to a rented one-bedroom house in the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles. My uncle had a beautiful 1947 De Soto.

What followed after our arrival could only be described as  a disaster for my parents.  My father's sister was a very hard and cold woman; very demanding and hyper critical.  The most unfriendly person I'd ever encountered. She despised my mother for reasons unknown to anyone.  In short, she made life miserable for them.  Despite all the personal travails that we experience, we were successful.  Our neighbors were very nice to us and we made friends quickly.  The school we kids attended, Angeles Mesa Elementary, was very welcoming and made our lives comfortable.  Both of my parents started work right away; my father at a cheese company in Compton and my mother as a seamstress in the Hyde Park area of Los Angeles.  Three years after arrival, my parents purchased their first house in Compton with 40% down.  Ours was an American immigrant success story.  Despite the odds we prevailed and advanced; we never retreated. The credit for this goes to my mom and dad.  They did the heavy lifting.  Both are my heroes.


Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Chasing the Wind: An Example of the Insanity of War

Whenever I visit my cousin Giovanni in Rome, Italy, we always discuss childhood stories from my home town of Geraci Siculo, Sicily.  Such stories are full of nostalgia, laughter and one of the best ways I know of having a great time.  One of the most poignant stories that Giovanni recalls is that of a young man ordered to war in 1940, at the start of World War II.  This young man, I'll call him Cesarè, has just been called into the Italian military and must leave Geraci, his family, his farm and his goat herd.  He  approaches Giovanni's father and ask him to take his herd while he leaves for war.  Not having the resources to take care of an additional herd of goats, Giovanni's father turns Cesarè down.  Unable to find anyone else, he knocks on Giovanni's father's door at 4:00 AM to beg him to take his heard, since he must leave that day.  Having pity on the young man Giovanni's father asks his 13 year-old son, Giovanni, if he would be willing to take on Cesarè's herd.  Giovanni says he can and the problem is solved.

Recently, a good friend asked me to read a book he had just read, The Red Horse, the tragic story of the Italian Army in Russia during World War II.  In 1941 the Italians committed 235,000 soldiers to the Russian campaign to aid the German invasion of Russia.  The Italians were joined by 200,000 Romanian and another 200,000 Hungarian troops.  This allied force protected the east flank for the Siege of Stalingrad.  All three armies were destroyed by vastly superior Russian forces, aided to a large extent, by the brutal Russian winter that killed more troops than did bullets.  Again, the Europeans failed to learn from history.  Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 with 500,000 troops and was defeated by the Russians, aided by the brutal Russian winter.  Only 5,000 of Napoleon's French troops survived. The same exact thing happened to the Germans, Italians, Romanians and Hungarians armies.  All of these men were basically condemned to death by incompetent and foolhardy despots at home who wanted personal glory at their expense. There never was any hope of military victory given the circumstances.

The Italian troops, and the Romanian and Hungarians were ill equipped, ill trained and ill led.  The Russians had tanks and Katyusha rockets.  The Italian and allied forces had nothing close to this.  They fought tanks with rifles and ineffective cannons.  The coup de grace was the Russian winter.  Italian and allied forces suffered from inadequate equipment such as vehicles, arms and fuel, with no hope of reinforcements.  The common soldier slept wherever he could in -26 C degree weather where your hands and feet would freeze if you exposed them to the weather.  Many battles took place at night where the Russian forces had the decided advantage.  If you were not killed by gunfire or by artillery, you were killed by starvation or the brutal winter weather. Wounded soldiers could not be aided and if they did not die from their wounds, they died from the immediate freezing of their bodies.  The Red Horse is a compelling story of men at war and men who were thrown into a war without any preparation, plans or the needed resources; in other words they were condemned to die as if you had lined them up against a wall and shot them.  Theirs was a hopeless cause.

This is the insanity and total futility of war. Here was a young farmer who just wanted to work his farm and feed his family.  All of the sudden, he's in Russia with people hunting him down as he were a rabid dog.  Additionally, he goes from a mild weather area, where the temperature never goes below 45 degrees to an area where the winters are the coldest in the world and where you not only have to worry about being killed by a bullet but also by the weather.  What were they fighting for?  Russia never attacked Italy.  They were sent there by the folly and insanity of their political leaders.  In the Italian case Benito Mussolini.  In the German case, the insanity of Adolf Hitler.

For those who feel like you want to praise soldiers or armies for their accomplishments, that is fine and fair, but to make jokes about an army that lost a war they could never win, no matter what?  That is a different matter.  Being Italian by birth, I was subjected to many ethnic jokes and especially jokes about the performance of the Italian Army in World War II. People I knew would tell me such sick jokes to my face.  If you are one of these naive people, I ask you to read The Red Horse and then see if the joke applies.  I expounded on this situation in my last post on this blog.

Monday, September 17, 2012

A Farewell to Arms

It was a hot, humid night in July 1968 in Nha Trang, South Vietnam.  Not far from my barracks was a huge U.S. Air Force Base, and a South Korean Army base.  Nha Trang was a seaside town that used to be a vacation spot during the French colonial period.  I was assigned to the First Field Force of II Corps. I had finally finished my 12 hour shift in the Personnel office and had gone to bed in my double bunk surrounded by my mosquito net.  Reading Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms had captured my intense attention.  No one ever wrote with such skill as Hemingway.  As I'm reading I could picture in my mind the horrors of war he was describing during World War I.  It all made sense.  I had now spent my first two months in a war zone.   I arrived in Vietnam  just after the Tet Offensive that started in February 1968.  As my Continental Airways passenger jet full of Army soldiers made its landing approach to Bien Hoa military airport, I first got a taste of the chaos of a war zone.  Looking to my right, I can seen the flash of artillery firing.  Upon landing we're loaded on a Isuzu bus and driven to the Cholon section of Saigon.  The sounds and noise of war was everywhere.

Upon arrival at the St. George Hotel in Saigon I could see that the front of the hotel was full of bullet holes.  I'm thinking that I had just landed in hell.  Helicopter gunships were circling the area, and the rat,tat, tat sounds of machine guns was everywhere. We were at the hotel awaiting our assignment in country.  After unloading my gear I see a fellow soldier holding out a recording device out of the window.  When I asked him what he was doing, he said that he was recording the sounds of the battle so he could send it home.  I asked him if he was kidding; he was not.  At the hotel bar I can see about six or seven Australian soldiers having a beer.  Before resting for the night I got the assignment of patrolling the perimeter of the hotel with my M-14 Rifle that I had trained with in Fort Ord, California.  I don't remember sleeping that night.  Having spent and entire year in a war zone, I think I can speak with experience that war is no party or no glory.  I will not spend any time defending the Vietnam war here; my purpose is a little different.

As an Italian immigrant to the United States,   I occasionally was asked were I was from, since I did not look like the typical blond, blue eyed Scandinavian looking fellow.  When I answered that I was from Sicily, Italy, I was often told idiotic Italian jokes about the Italian military (referring to World War II).  The most frequent quip was "what is the smallest book in the world?  A list of Italian military heroes."  Why a person would intentionally insult me to my face is beyond my understanding.  I suppose if I had been a tough hombre, I would have levelled the person with a left hook or  picked him up and tossed him into the freeway, or out of the building, but I did not.  I feigned a smile, unprepared for such idiocy. This did not happen once or twice but many, many times.  Happily I have not heard it in the last 10 or so years.

I've never been able to figure out the mentality of such insults.  Surely, people making these sick jokes have never been nor could they ever handle being in a war.   The intellectually challenged person making such jokes has never walked in another man's shoes.  The Vietnam veterans were betrayed by their own people when they returned home.  Here was a man who left home, left his parents, brothers and sisters, his girlfriend and all his friends to fight to the death in the Ia Drang Valley or Khe Sanh.  Or how about going to a war that you could not win because you were fighting with rules that put you in a box where you could not go out of.  A war that made no sense and the politicians refused to let you win.  If you survived and came home the people often spat at you and called you a killer.  The draft dodger that fled to Canada was considered the smart one, the brave soldier who died for his country was forgotten.

Where was the idiot who makes such jokes?  was he in the foxhole?  Was he thrown into a situation where it was hopeless to win or get out of?  As a history buff, I often watch military documentaries.  One of most poignant one is the documentary of the Siege of Leningrad during World War II where the entire German 6th Army, about 500,000 men, was condemned to die from war, cold or starvation because a lunatic such as Hitler had sent them there and then refused to let them withdraw when it was hopeless.  Would the idiot making such jokes have been to such a place?  I don't think so. 


Friday, February 24, 2012

A Very Brief History of U.S. Immigration Policy: Oh How Things Have Changed

Immigration today is almost a daily news issue.  It was not always so.  Although the problem is illegal immigration, the main stream media, and liberal supporters of illegal immigration, call it simply "immigration."  It is no accident that they leave the "illegal" out of it.  If you're against illegal immigration, you're branded as "anti-immigrant" or in some cases a "racist."  This is quite a stretch of the truth and, in my opinion, a blatant lie meant to smear, and an ad hominem attack of the worst kind. Watch this video of a debate about illegal immigration between Michelle Malkin and Geraldo Rivera to see what I mean.

Since I'm a legal immigrant, I find these issues quite interesting, to say the least.  Let's step back from any emotional reaction and look at the facts.  It was not until 1924 that the United States began to limit immigration to the United States.  Before that it was open borders.  My own grand-father first came to the United States in 1905 and then returned to Italy in 1911.  After the passing of the "Immigration Act of 1924" limits were instituted on how many immigrants from each country could enter the U.S.  This law discriminated against southern European countries and favored northern European countries.  Northern Europeans were considered more favorably than those "inferior southerners," such as Italians, Greeks or Spaniards.  Today, of course, all we hear is how we should favor immigration without consideration to whether it's legal or illegal.  I don't have a problem with this if we decided, by law, to make the United States an open border country again, but only if the people voted for such a law.

The problem is that those who favor immigration without limits, usually liberals and some Hispanics, want to ignore the existing law.  This a very bad slippery slope.  If we can pick and choose which law we follow, who is to say that any law should be followed?  This is not just a rhetorical question.  I have one simple question for those who favor unlimited immigration:  Why do you not propose to change the law and make it legal?  If there is such great support for open borders why be afraid to put this to the people?

Let me give a personal example.  My parents legally immigrated to Los Angeles in 1956 from Italy.  At that time there were quotas.  My family waited three years before getting permission to immigrate.  Before being approved for immigration the entire family had to go through a thorough medical  and legal exam.  Additionally, each family had to have a sponsor, and have a job waiting for them when they got here.  In 1956 there were no illegal immigrants waiting on street corners looking for work.  As a matter of fact, I don't remember seeing any illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area waiting on street corners well past the 1980s.  Now, I don't have a problem with how the law was structured when my family immigrated, even though I believe that it was discriminatory against Southern Europeans.  I believe that each country has the right to determine their own policies.  Who is to tell country "A" that they should have the law any other way? In most countries in the world, you're arrested if you enter the country illegally.  Try entering Iran, for instance, illegally, or Mexico, for that matter.

Today the left will proclaim that anyone who does not favor illegal immigration like they do is either a racist or anti-immigrant.  This is pure demagoguery of the worst kind.  Disagree but be intellectually honest about it!  This leftist view has even taken over the church.  Just ask Cardinal  Mahoney of Los Angeles or his replacement and they will be for unfettered illegal immigration, even though it is currently illegal.  As I recall, the scriptures say (Matthew 22:21) that you should give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.