Thank you: Heidi May, Maura Lanahan, Lely Constantinople, Charles Previtire, Kirby Kim, Yuval Taylor, Mitch Bury of Adams, Mass.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Over the last few decades I have released many albums of music and spoken word and played concerts and done speaking dates all over the world. In 1983, I started a publishing company to release my own books and since have written and sent many to the printer. I have averaged about one hundred shows a year and am starting my fourth decade of that. I have been in a lot of films, television shows, and documentaries, and done voice-over work for everything from commercials and cartoons to public service announcements. For several years I have had a radio show in Southern California. I am a high school graduate from the minimum-wage working world, which instructs me to say yes to employment opportunitieshence the somewhat scattershot career path. I have no illusions as to where I should have ended up.
CAPTIONS
KYRGYZSTAN 2003
You can still see Stalins boot on the neck of Central Asia. Decades ago, he turned this region into several Soviet states: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, etc. This was to cause ethnic unrest and border disputes, which still plague the region. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstans capital, is in the north of the country, near the KyrgyzstanKazakhstan border. In the city market, you can see some beautiful blends of ethnicities in the faces of many people. This is in part due to Stalins deportation of Poles and other groups he saw as a threat to this region. They were the lucky ones. Those he didnt deport to Central Asia, he slaughtered by the thousands. I saw a lot of people who looked like they were from China but had light eyes and hair. It was amazing to be able to see the immediate history of a place on the faces of the people. I came back to Bishkek about a year later and was told that it was no longer safe to walk around in the market. There was a lot of improvised housing, people made dwellings out of storage containers, junked train carswhatever you can get your hands on, you use it.
AFGHANISTAN 2003
The country is littered with antitank and antipersonnel landminesapparently more than any other country in the world. A reminder of the Soviet-Afghan War. The mines are still causing death and injury decades later. On this trip, I visited a hospital where a young Afghan girl was recovering from losing a leg to a mine. The doctor told me she didnt speak much and just stared at the wall to her left, the position I saw her when I walked in the room. The look on her face was so fierce. She was so young and already having to deal with her countrys history.
AFGHANISTAN 2004
We had been out all day, visiting forward bases on the AfghanistanPakistan border. I was told that on the good days, the back of the Chinook is down all the way; on the not-so-good days, the back of the Chinook is partially up and there is a machine gunner posted. It must have been a good day because the back was down and I could see out as we went back to the Baghram base. The ground below was still littered with Soviet military junk. I saw some kids playing on what was left of a tank. The Afghans are the toughest people I have ever been around. Everything about their lives is extreme. For centuries, they have been invaded and have fought back until the invaders left. America will eventually leave; they just have to find a way to say they were victorious and save some face, like they tried to do in Vietnam.
KUWAIT 2004
Thats what is left after the Iraqis ran out of Kuwait and tried to make it back to Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991. American forces flew in and killed them all. The fleeing Iraqis must have known when they heard the choppers overhead that there was no way they were making it out alive. Now the carcasses of the vehicles rot silently in the desert. The rubber of the tires is slowly disintegrating. Theres no use in clearing the area, so all that metal will be there for centuries. The silence of the place was incredible.
IRAQ 2004
I was in Iraq in the summer on a USO tour. We traveled from base to base in a Blackhawk helicopter. I had never been in one before and it was one of the more amazing travel experiences I have ever had. On one trip, the pilot pulled up sharply and for a second or so, we were in what looked like zero gravity. All the dirt that was on the floor floated in front of me and then slammed back down again. Perhaps the pilot was trying to see if he could make me faint. The overall mood of the people I met there was intense and vigilant. Some of the bases I visited had lost one or more soldiers within twenty-four hours of my arrival.
The thing that kept going through my mind when I was in Baghdad was how much it was costing America to be there. When I saw all these helicopters, refueling stations, the housing, etc., the enormity of it all hit me hard. That was my lasting impression of my time therethe waste.
We were given access to Saddam Husseins Baghdad palaceone of them, at least. This was during the period of time when U.S. forces were using it for offices before the handover. It was hard to believe that someone actually lived here. Saddam had bad taste.
RUSSIA 2005
I was on the Trans-Siberian Railway going from Moscow to Vladivostok. I wanted to see what it would be like to live on the train and make the trip in the dead of winter, so I went in February. We stopped occasionally, and I always made a point to get out onto the platform and see what I could before we headed off again into the endless white sprawl. I got up on the train to get some elevation and took some photos. The woman selling dried fish in Slyudyanka apparently didnt want her photo taken and yelled at me. I had never been reprimanded by anyone holding a bag of dried fish.
OKINAWA 2005
Thousands of people were killed on Okinawa in 1945: Japanese, Okinawans, Americans. In the Japanese Naval Underground Headquarters, thousands of soldiers, under the command of admiral Minoru Ota, committed suicide by hand grenade rather than face capture. I thought the use of English on this placard was strangely poetic. This fortress is easily accessed, visited by people from all over the world, and, at this point, sanitized of its gruesome past. What made the experience poignant was something that happened right after leaving the room where men had packed inside and blew themselves to pieces: I encountered an elderly Japanese couple. The woman smiled politely, pointed into the room, and said in a gentle voice, My father died. I didnt know what to say, so I just nodded and stepped aside.
