Cold...brrr

“The temperature was below zero when I returned home a few nights ago.  My apartment building was surrounded by emergency vehicles with lights flashing.  The reason, l soon learned, was a broken water pipe.  Three apartments close to mine had been flooded and were uninhabitable.  As I walked down the hall toward my apartment I wondered if mine would be the fourth.  Would I have to move elsewhere to get in out of the cold?  Fortunately, my apartment was warm and dry.  I was indeed grateful.”

“What’s going on, Curmudge?  Is this a personal or educational blog?  In Kaizen Curmudgeon we are supposed to teach something to our readers.”

“This is a historical look-back, Julie.  Most people these days—unless they are homeless—have little appreciation of how bad it is to really feel cold.  Even within my lifetime, cold weather has been a critical factor in history.  Personally, I have been spared.  When my sons were in Boy Scouts they (and some fathers) went  camping in the winter.  If they spent a night in a tent in the snow, they became a member of the Polar Bear Club (Doc Mack did this many times).  Of course, they had the option of moving into a nearby warm cabin.”

“I understand that you Polar Bear’ed once, Old Guy.  You said you used three sleeping bags.”

“In wartime, the warm shelter option often did not exist.  The plight of Washington’s soldiers at Valley Forge has faded into the distant past, but I do know that my great-grandfather froze his feet digging saltpeter (potassium nitrate) to make gunpowder for the Confederate Army in the Civil War.  He and his unmarried daughter (Aunt Molly) subsequently raised my mother after my grandmother’s early death and my grandfather’s remarriage.  Too bad that my mother didn’t tell me more about him.”

“It’s really unfortunate, Curmudge, that we tend not to share enough oral history with our children.”

“In contrast, the winter wars of the 20^th Century are imbedded in my memory.  I was too young to participate, but in one case only by a few years.  Here at home we learned of these actions in the nightly radio news, and the details came out later.”

“For us youngsters and non-history buffs, tell us about the events that are frozen in your memory.”

“This is from the history books, not my personal memory.  The Battle of Stalingrad was fought in the winter of 1942-3 by the Germans and Russians with a million men on each side.  This quote from a German soldier’s letter clearly depicts his suffering from the cold: ‘The little finger of my left hand is gone and the three middle fingers of my right one are frozen.’ “

“There were also people whom you knew personally who fought the weather as well as the enemy in that war (WWII).”  

“My cousin’s husband, now deceased, was an officer in the Army and was captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944.  It’s hard to imagine choosing between staying above ground in the snow or jumping into a wet foxhole.  I was ten years old then, and I still shiver at the thought.”

“You missed the Korean War by only a few years.  Right, Curmudge?”

“I was 16 in late 1950 when the U.N. forces were retreating from the Chosin Reservoir.  A personal friend, also deceased, was there as a Marine officer.  The Communist Chinese entered the war with about 200,000 men against 20,000 U.N. forces.  The 1^st Marine Division lost 12,000 wounded, most of which were frostbite injuries inflicted by the severe cold.”

“Let’s end on a less serious note with a vignette from a much more recent war.“

“When Doc Mack arrived in Afghanistan with the 101^st Airborne, his unit was sent to forward operating base Howz-E-Madad.  (To read a personal account of the war in Afghanistan, go to the Curmudgeon’s Wastebasket blog starting at the 8/11/10 posting.)  Mack’s gear was delayed, and he arrived before his sleeping bag.  The nights were chilly, so Mack spent the nights sleeping in a body bag.  He noted with interest that body bags don’t have zippers that will allow them to be opened from the inside.”

“That figures.  So what’s the bottom line of our historic look-back, Curmudge?”

“There are several, Julie.  First, war is horrible, and waging war in the winter can make it intolerable.  Second, we should share our oral histories—most of which are unique—with our children and grandchildren.  And finally, I need to note that I don’t mind the cold, I just hate being cold.  So much so that at the end of my days I want to be like Sam McGee in the Robert W. Service poem…cremated.”

Kaizen Curmudgeon

Link to posting from blog archives: Mistakes—mnemonics, sleep deprivation—4/01/10 http://kaizencurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2010/04/mistakes.html