Day -5 : Peet's, A Publicist, DDay & Trailer Hitches

Well...only 5 days until the roadtrip begins and what a day it has been!

After a killer workout with personal fitness instructor Robert "All Smiles" Cruz (if you want an awesome personal fitness instructor, email him at rsfitness@sbcglobal.net ), I took Nick to Blach where he is TA'ing a computer class with the marvelous May Shelley and then headed to Peets for a quick cup of coffee. On the way to Peet's I received a call from a Ruderfinn Media Planned Television Arts publicist, a potential firm we will use to promote our daughter Natalie's book. For those of you who don't know, Natalie wrote a book based on her real life experience about getting head lice and how she/we dealt with it, what you can do to avoid it, and how to deal with the social issues that arise from it. The book will be published soon, and we are now working with a publicist to create awareness of it via various media channels, including online, magazines, newspapers and television. This was an exciting conversation and hopefully will turn into a full-fledged marketing plan soon. Our goal is to get this book into every classroom in America. What the heck, if you don't dream big life will be small!

At Peet's I noticed an older gentleman wearing a World War II "D-Day" baseball hat. I went outside and introduced myself to him and asked him if he was a WWII veteran, specifically was he a part of D-Day. He said his name was Chuck Ohman, a Los Altos resident, and that he was indeed a WWII veteran and was on Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6th 1944. I asked him if he would tell me his story, and he proceeded to tell me how he was a member of the 299th Combat Engineers but was assigned to the Navy as a member of their newly formed Underwater Demolition Teams. He said he landed in the beginning of the invasion on D-Day with the responsibility to help clear the way for the troops behind him. He got wistful when he said he was injured that first day and basically lost the use of both of his arms due to shrapnel. He said that as he was lying there in the sand not knowing what to do (he was used to taking orders, he said, and his CO was dead), a sargent from another unit came up to him, pointed a pistol at his chest and told him to move his butt or he would shoot him. Mr. Ohman quickly got up and ran "like heck" to the base of the cliffs at the back of the beach and sat there with a few other infantrymen who had made it across the beach. As he was sitting there, he said some sand started trickling down his neck so he looked up and saw the cliff all around them caving in! He stood up in time such that the sand only went up to his neck so he survived. Sadly, he could not save the guys around him as they were buried alive. Somehow he said that he wriggled out without the use of his arms, walked up to the top of the cliff, dug a shallow slit trench in the sand, and spent the night waiting for help. On June 7th someone found him, moved him to a hospital ship, and he was operated on on the ship on the way back to England. After he recovered from his wounds (he showed me where the shrapnel entered and exited his arms), he returned to action in the Battle of the Bulge as a radio operator in the 2nd Armored Division. When I asked him what he thought of Patton (General in charge of the 3rd Army that came in to help defeat the German Army at the Battle of the Bulge), he echoed what many soldiers have said about old "blood and guts": "it was his guts and MY blood!" Interesting to hear firsthand what I have read about for so many years. After the Germans had surrendered on May 7th, 1945, Mr. Ohman returned to the US and was preparing to go to the Pacific theater to fight. But when the US dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, and on Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945, he knew the war was over and that he would not be going to the Pacific (the Japanese subsequently surrendered on September 2nd, 1945). We finished our conversation with how he transitioned back into civilian life after life in the Army ("a difficult transition") and said he doesn't know what he would have done without the GI Bill, then termed the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, as it allowed him to attend college and pay his living expenses while doing so. He got angry when he thought of how the veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan were not getting the same treatment he was with regard to the GI Bill and said we need to "support those who risk their life to protect the life we have and love." With that, I stood up, saluted him, thanked him for his service to his country, and told him I was proud to be his neighbor. Mr. Ohman, you are truly one of America's Greatest Generation!

Well that's enough for now. Got to go pick up our Odyssey with its new trailer hitch on it (using a MAX Swingaway cargo carrier from Stowaway2 to carry all of the Lillie sports gear on our roadtrip) and then spend a few hours on the baseball field coaching Jake's allstar team.

BTW, I wrote this note from a great little coffee/smoothie shop in San Carlos waiting for our van to be finished. Check it out -- it's called Skinny Sippin' !

Peace,

Brian