"CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (July 31) — Space shuttle Endeavour and its seven astronauts returned to Earth on Friday, completing a long but successful construction job that boosted the size and power of the international space station.

Endeavour's smooth and punctual arrival, after more than two weeks in orbit, set off a steady stream of congratulations and an ecstatic welcoming reception for Koichi Wakata, the first Japanese astronaut to return from a long space journey. His stay lasted 4½ months....Etc."

 

MENTIONED SAME to most of you just hour or so ago - heard the big BAM! BAM! as it passed overhead.  And now I know what the BAM! BAM! was: it was that Son of the Rising Sun astronaut opening the window and tossing his dirty underwear out just as they passed over the house!  

Nerve of that guy!  

Takes me back to those dim, dark days when we were being groomed as the first invasion troops slated to hit Nippon's shores, we were.  (Thanks be to Harry S. Truman - to whom I will always be indebted as also all my fellows: he dropped an atom bomb on them halfway through our "cycle" and so saved our asses for more important things!)  So nuts to any handwringers here over how the "...cruel US atom-bombed its enemies..." etc. in WWII!  And to any bleeding hearts here (and not many among my circle of correspondents anyhow, I got to admit...) but if any have crept under the wire - all I got to say is "If it hadn't been for Pearl Harbor in the first place - there never would have been a Hiroshima in the second place!"  

And with my idol, Forrest Gump, I will likewise conclude now: "And THAT'S all I got to say 'bout that!"  

Perhaps I should add, however, that I too, once wore my dirty underwear for a whole month (it was the winter of that same year) and trained as we had been to fight the Japanese - we were now sent by an all-knowing Government (and Obama wasn't even yet a gleam in his Kenyan Father's eye you betcha...) to Germany.  Arriving like the crows in that old country favorite of mine: the "Tennessee Birdwalk" (who all went South in "their dirty underwear" as I recall...),  we bedded down in a bunch of ruins somewhere once - Kasselruhe maybe? - I don't know.  But the (Corps of) Engineers had gone through a day or so earlier and had miraculously hooked up a Rube Goldberg affair that pumped hot water into the still-working shower heads of a onetime Kraut Barracks (a "Kasserne" they called them).  There was no electricity yet and this cavernous Kraut shower room stretched an unknown distance into the dark spaces under the street...  

But there were hot showers!  

It was Kraut-style: rows of hot shower heads in the ceiling poured out volumes of hot water on a continuous basis (thanks to the C of E).  There was no heat, of course, so volumes of dense steam rose in the gloom.  And no lights!  Wood "duckboards" were still in place, however.  Now, several guys in the preceding outfit had been "attacked" in the showers the night before by some shadowy band of misfits (these vermin swarmed through all the ruins in immediate post-war Germany)... creeps like runaway Kraut soldaten, Russian prisoners (and their jailers! LOL), "DP's" (Displaced Persons) - which latter were mostly Poles - but could include Frenchmen, Greeks, Czechs, just about anyone from anywhere in those mixed-up times...   So the Sgt. recommended the alert (and dirty) - like him! LOL! - best turn into their "fart sacks" (sleeping bags) showerless.  And if any boneheads like that fastidious Powell  there in the first squad, elected to shower down in the dark with who-knows-who-lurking nearby - well, then they got what they deserved if anything happened - and he better not hear any shit about naked guys running around down their in the showers and steam with pistols strapped around their waists and all that kind of thing - shooting at each other in the steam and dark and God Knows What All else a miserable draftee can dream up to disturb his (the Sgt's) repose upstairs...  

So I said to hell with that and as soon as I heard him snoring, I shucked out and sprinted into the showers. Ahhhh- such luxury you can't imagine after that cold troopship in North Atlantic in winter and the long ride through mud and rain across France and Belgium in a "40 & 8" (40 men or 8 horses - the French designation for their boxcars - which I think dates all the way back to World War I...).  But what was that?  Something, someone was moving nearby - in the steam!  I silently crouched and ran further into the shower room.  I soaped and I sudsed and I rinsed... Hark!  did you hear that now?  Low voices off to the left somewhere.  Poles, most likely... they the ones most likely to speak out loud when planning mischief:  "Stosh! (Stan...LOL)  here... you stand here, etc. etc."  I slipped silently off again.  Now most of these would-be phantoms were only other (errant) GI's taking advantage of their own showers (Sheesh!) and what we mostly heard was each other you see - but the way you took a shower that night I will never forget: you slithered around with trench knife in hand (or waterlogged pistol on your waist... in defiance of the Sgt)... and so soaped your way back to normalcy again...  

Fie upon these Japanese astronauts anyway!  What they know about dirty underwear anyhow!   

I wrote the book, I did!  

bernie