Election day was rather unique for me this Presidential cycle; for the first time I managed to vote for the person who actually won the election. Of course, I’ll admit that this was only the second time I voted for a major party candidate - in 2004 I cast an ultimately fruitless vote for Kerry, but prior to that it was two votes for Perot and one for Nader.

Beth and I took Alex with us to the polling place yesterday morning, showed him the ballots, answered his questions. This is something that I’ve been doing over the last several elections. I want Alex to see voting as a privilege and a responsibility; a way of making his voice heard even if it is in the very small minority. Our precinct votes with these giant optical scanned forms which you fill out in the ludicrously small tables with tiny partitions between you and the other voters, so I wasn’t able to bring him “in the poll” so to speak, but he seemed pretty happy to be part of an historic election.

Well, as happy as he could be while he obsessed over being late for school (which he wasn’t by a long shot).

I thought about elections on the way into work today - I don’t really remember having deep political discussions with my parents or ever being to the polls, although I suppose I must have at some point. The first time I remember even thinking about an election was in 1980 - I remember walking out from my room in Seven Hills and asking my mother who won the election and having her hold up the Cleveland Plain Dealer to show me a giant picture of Ronald Reagan. I didn’t like Reagan. I don’t think she did either. Twenty eight years later…well, I have to stay I’m sticking with that assessment today.

I don’t particularly care for politics, and I don’t particularly fit into the Republican/Democrat cookie-cutter mold - hence the third party candidate votes in my past - but the last two elections have been so contentious it has been difficult not to take a side. Forget agreeing to disagree; many discussion I had in the run-up to both this election and the 2004 election have been filled with the type of arguments, attacks, and insinuations that I had only found in internet flame wars in the past.

In 2004, Beth was interviewed - along with many other Ohioans - in this segment by a German Public Radio correspondent (I was in San Diego during this week) about the then-upcoming election which was ultimately won by George W. Bush. It’s interesting to listen to it with the perspective of 4 years. (Of course, it’s fun trying to pick out the english underneath the german voice-over, but that just makes it a bit more challenging).

Here in 2008 Obama has won the presidency despite the frantic calls of the GOP warning of the imminent collapse of our entire country and way of life. I’ve received emails telling me that Obama is going to shred the bill of rights; I’ve been told that our personal freedoms are at stake; I’ve been told that I’m going to be working to support all sorts of welfare queens, crack heads, and other social deviants who will just be getting a handout by the incoming socialist administration.

The question I keep posing to these frantic cries is, quite simply, how? There is only so much a president can do - even allowing for the fact that the powers of the executive branch have been greatly expanded in the last 8 years. Many of the same people who are warning me of the dangers of Obama were the same people laughing at my concerns over Bush’s shredding of personal liberties over the course of his presidency. Then there’s the fact that so many prominent republicans either only reluctantly supported McCain or endorsed Obama.

So I’ll ignore all the hyperbole and handwringing from my right-leaning friends and take what I would consider to the the “sane” course and just wait and see exactly what happens come January. It’s probably not going to be as bad as the naysayers think, and it’s probably not going to be as good as the idealists hope.

When Alex was in second grade, his class spent time learning about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In an effort to reinforce the lesson - and to instill the importance of these documents, the two of us went online to the National Archives to look at what the Archives refer to as the “Charters of Freedom”. The site is really quite excellent - you can view the text of these documents, you can view high quality scans of the document. You can read about the signers of the Declaration, the framers of the Constitution. You can read about the impact these documents had and continue to have, both in this country and around the world.

In short, the National Archives website is a fascinating place. Almost as good as seeing it in person.

I read the full text of the Declaration to Alex that day, explaining when he asked questions. Reading these documents is something that every American should do; these are, after all, the bedrock upon which our country was built. Read them and put yourself back in the time of our country’s founding. Read them and judge current events by what was written 200 years ago.

The words resonate across the centuries; Jefferson’s prose is stirring and majestic, not only documenting the case for American self-rule, but serving as a call to action for his fellow countrymen.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

I’ve read these words many times, yet they never fail to move me.

After I read Alex the Declaration, we followed a link on the site to “Join The Signers“. The link lead to a little flash application that allowed you to pick a pen and add your name to the 56 signatures on the Declaration. I explained to Alex about the very real risk taken by the signatories - men like John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, and Samuel Adams. They were committing treason against the crown, and would most likely have swung from the hangman’s noose if Britania had been victorious.

After my little speech about treason, I asked Alex if he was still willing to sign. I doubt I will ever forget the determination in his moist eyes as he grabbed my hand and choked out a “yes, dad”.

In some small way the Declaration of Independence became a little more real for both Alex and I that day.

Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country.

– Noah Webster, On the Education of Youth in America, 1788

Every year on or around Memorial Day, a friend from an old mailling list sends out an email that talks about the holiday….a little essay that provides some perspective on what Memorial Day represents. I liked it so much I posted it last year; when I had a home office I had a copy of it hanging on my corkboard. It’s probably still there, underneath pictures of Alex and the detritus of my former life as a consultant.

Yesterday morning, on Memorial Day, Alex and I walked down to the parade at the end of the street - Beth was sleeping in since Alex wasn’t in the parade this year - and while we were walking we talked about Memorial Day. I was curious to get the 11 year old perspective on the holiday. Alex surprised me a little; I had thought I would get an answer heavy on “day off from school” and light on everything else. What I got instead was a brief few sentences about a day for “soldiers and sailors” followed by an anxious look, his unspoken way of asking “well, am I right?”.

I told him that he was right, and we talked a little about the tragedy and inhumanity of war. We talked about the awesome responsiblity of sending men and women into harm’s way, and how it should only be as a last resort.

Most importantly we talked about the personal loss caused by a war; the lost mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends. And we talked about the danger of it becoming too abstract, too removed from our comforable lives.

Alex asked a few questions, thought for a bit, then he squeezed my hand and we walked down to the parade and immersed ourselves in securing the candy thrown off the floats. That seemed right; it’s important to remember, but it’s equally important to live. Anything less would be disrespectful of the sacrifices made.

Recently, I read a piece written by the famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle; these words were found on his body after he was killed by sniper fire on the island of Ie Shima during the Okinawa campaign in April of 1945. In these, probably the last words he ever wrote, Ernie Pyle sums up a part of Memorial Day we all should think about. A part that most of us - thankfully - never have to experience, but a part that many Americans have to experience on our behalf.

But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.

Dead men by mass production . in one country after another . month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.

Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.

Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.

These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.

We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference…

During the second world war, the submarine Grenadier (SS-210) was scuttled by her crew off Penang following a severe air attack that left her incapable of returning to base. Echoing a theme that is all too common in history of the Pacific Theatre of WWII, the crew of the sub were tortured and mistreated by their Japanese captors.

I remember being horrified by these accounts when I first came across them at the age of 12 or 13. War was horrible enough, but at some very naive level I felt that as a prisoner there were certain rules that were followed - one of them was that when you were a prisoner you were treated in a certain way. Many of the books I read that were at the “young adult” level went to great pains to differentiate the way we (the Americans) treated our captives as opposed to the way the Japanese treated theirs.

I read the following paragraph last night in Silent Victory and it had me revisiting these thoughts on my drive to work:

The men on the Japanese merchant ship rescued Grenadier’s men and took them to Penang. For many weeks thereafter, Fitzgerald and his men were treated brutally by Japanese interrogators, who tried to elicit technical information. Fitzgerald was tied to a bench with his head hanging over the end. The Japanese elevated his feet and then poured water into his nostrils, holding his mouth shut so he was forced to swallow the water. When they judged him sufficiently full of water, they clubbed him repeatedly and denied him food for a week.

Part of what the author is describing in this passage is waterboarding; something that we have done to prisoners as part of our “War on Terror”. Something that - amazingly - many people are able to rationalize away as being “necessary”. I read a syndicated editorial in the Akron Beacon Journal late last year that tried to downplay this torture - somehow the author felt that the fact that there were no lasting effects (not sure if he was considering the likely psychological issues here) and since it (in his opinion) was generating useful intelligence that it was a fine tool to use.

The other components - clubbing and denial of food - are also behaviors that we, as Americans, have been accused of during the “War on Terror” and which are almost certainly true. The accounts of how prisoners have been treated in Cuba and Iraq are disturbing in the extreme.

So, when did it become acceptable for us to act in a manner that 60-some short years ago we viewed as an attrocity? Back then we were putting people on trial for war crimes, and for crimes against humanity. Now, it seems, we commit them and then clothe ourselves in rationalizations.

I’ve had a fascination with submarines since I was nine. I can even pinpoint the source - when my mother was in the hospital to give birth to Corey, I spent several days at my Grandmother Schmidt’s house. Back then - like now - I read quite a bit, and I had run out of books to read. Grandpa gave me a copy of a book on the WWII American Submarine war against Japan called Pig Boats; I managed to finish the book inside of a week, and by the time I was done I was hooked on submarines. As an aside, I recently bought online a used copy of that book (now out of print); it’s still as engrossing now as it was then.

Continuing that theme a quarter of a century later, I’m listening to a book about the loss of the USS Scorpion on my iPod. The book - Scorpion Down - advances the theory that the submarine was sunk by the Soviet Navy, with the sinking being covered up by the Navy. The author is fairly persuasive, and the story he tells - happening during the paranoia of the Cold War - is entirely plausible.

Of particular interest to me is one part of the book that describes the SOSUS network of underwater hydrophones. This system was used to track Soviet submarine and ship traffic throughout the Cold War. The SOSUS network evolved out of the work of Dr. Maurice Ewing, a physicist who (family tie-in here) did research on the USCS Joseph Henry, a ship that my Grandfather was a mate on, during the final year of the war.

Grandpa always called the project “Big Ear”, although it appears that the actual name of the project was “SOFAR SHADOW”. The project involved dropping special charges into a layer of the ocean known as the SOFAR channel. There is a mention of this project on this web page by the Jo Henry’s Battery Captain:

PS; an Interesting footnote:

During the last few months of my Command, the JO HENRY receive an assignment to the US Navy, “I’m not making this up ! ”

The Navy had some special work for which they had “no suitable” vessel! In early 1945, a delegation of Officers from the Bureau of Ships came to Boston to investigate our capability to install cable and hydrophones in a deep water sound ranging project being developed with Oceanographic people from Woods Hole, Mass. The War Department had said “OK” since we had completed all new cable work for the CAC.

It was decided that we could do the job, and the JO HENRY left Boston on 6 April bound for Norfolk, Va. and then on to an operating base in Miami. From 23 April until 2 August, our work was like a summer (cruise) in the Bahamas. The forward base being in Nassau and the cable area being off the East Coast of Eleuthra Island. The JO HENRY returned to Boston on 11 August.

This project, if successful, had important application to future wartime operation in the Pacific Theater as the war with Japan progressed. Operation SOFAR SHADOW offered lifesaving by sound

The detailed Navy article on the SOSUS system (available here) confirms this:

On the basis of these experiments, Ewing proposed in 1943 that the Navy develop a system for communicating over long ranges by detonating time-coded explosive charges in the sound channel itself. Accordingly, during the spring of 1944, he supervised a major sea test in which USS Buckley (DE-51) steamed outward from a stationary receiving ship, periodically dropping small explosive charges fused for various depths. These explosions were still clearly discernible until Buckley had to break off the trial at a distance of 900 miles. By the end of the war, the Buckley experiments had led to a subsequent effort to develop an air-sea rescue system known as SOFAR – for Sound Fixing and Ranging. In the SOFAR concept, downed pilots would drop small explosive charges to the depth of the deep sound channel, where their sound output could be expected to travel for thousands of miles to deep, bottom-mounted hydrophones and triangulated to locate the survivors. At the time, however, exploiting the SOFAR channel for submarine detection at long range seems not to have been suggested, although by mid-war, the U.S. Navy was already using ray-tracing methods tactically for sonar performance prediction.

I can’t find mention of the ship employed for the SOSUS tests in 1949/1950 but I see mention of an Army Cable Ship which would tie in with my Grandfather saying that he knew the Jo Henry had gone down to Bermuda a second time years after he left the service. Also, the place where they tested (Grand Bahamas) also ties in where the SOSUS tests were done (Eletehura in the Bahamas) and is also where the first SOSUS nets were deployed later in the 50’s. Somewhere, rolled up in a tube, I have the charts of the Grand Bahamas that my Grandfather plotted the course the Jo Henry took while working at the direction of Dr. Ewing.

Frank never referred to the operation as SOFAR SHADOW - he always called it BIG EAR (at least when he talked to me about it). I wonder if - despite the official military report above - that they were starting to view this an anti-submarine asset more than a B-29 lifeguard asset even at that point? If you think about it, by the first 3 months of 1945 Iwo Jima had been taken; this allowed US Bombers to have P51 coverage on missions into Japan. Also, the Japanese Navy had been more or less wiped off the ocean so the submarines could loiter around the home islands to provide lifeguard support. Of course, this is all just conjecture on my part and probably wrong. The interesting thing for me is that my Grandfather was involved at a very early stage with a system that helped keep the uneasy peace during the Cold War.