Flashback 1998: Paralyzed veteran shows different kind of heroism

Cart with Wounded Soldiers, by Théodore Gericault
                  (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     The paper decided to run today's column tomorrow, so it appears on Veteran's Day, an occasion I've tried to mark when I could. This column stands out despite the years because I remember approaching the VA—I was looking for a veteran wounded in service whose injury affected his life today, and they offered up Maurice Valeriano.
     Then they tried to yank him back, as you will see, after discovering his injury wasn't combat-related. I said No, somehow that makes it even more apt. I hope you agree. I wish I could offer you an update, but I couldn't find anything recent on him. Perhaps a reader will.

   When children at the schools he visits ask Maurice Valeriano how he was wounded, the ex-Marine has no good battle story to tell. No shell fragment. No sniper's bullet. No land mine.
     Valeriano, a quadriplegic, wasn't wounded at all, in the technical sense. He was injured, his neck broken diving into the ocean in Okinawa.
     Which, if you think about it, for a soldier, is far worse than being wounded. Your body is just as damaged as it might have been in battle. But there is a pause; the respect automatically granted battle-injured vets, particularly at this time of year, with Veterans Day this Wednesday, gets yanked back, if only a bit. Talk about adding insult to injury.
     It's a fine distinction, but real. The Veterans Affairs official who referred me to Valeriano sang his praises over the telephone as a sterling individual, a grievously wounded Vietnam vet who overcame his injuries to go on to a career with Paralyzed Veterans of America.
     Then she called me back. Whoops. A mistake. It turned out he wasn't injured in battle at all. Never been to Vietnam. Perhaps, she said, I would like to be referred to somebody else.
     That second call said it all. I don't blame the VA official. She was only being sensitive to human nature. The public is stingy with its sympathy. A soldier injured at a depot in Kansas or, as in Valeriano's case, a diving tower in Japan, seems somehow fake, as if they were trying to pull a fast one.
     This is vastly unfair. No bullet gets fired in wartime that isn't loaded on a truck by one soldier and unloaded by another and inventoried by a third. The vast bulk of military personnel never see a battlefield.
     Yet the tales of sacrifice we think of—if we think of them at all—are all thrilling war stories, of smoky trenches and clattering helicopters. As if the guy who gets run over by a truck at Fort Bragg isn't serving his country, too. Aren't they casualties? Aren't they filling a role even more difficult than hero: the role of the uncelebrated fallen? Aren't their tales worth a passing thought?
     "I went into the Marine Corps when I was 17," said Valeriano, now 34. "I come from a family of Marines. My brother. My cousins. It's a family-type tradition to serve my country."
     Valeriano was a mechanic stationed in Okinawa. He was swimming with a bunch of buddies in the ocean. He dove off a diving tower.
     "I hit bottom, hitting my head," he said. "I became a quadriplegic. The funny thing about it is, I never passed out. The water was so crystal clear, I was laying face forward, looking at my arms and legs and wondering why I can't move them. There was no pain, no blackout."
     His buddies fished him out. He had fractured his C5/6 vertebrae. He was told he would never use his arms or legs again. He was 19.
     "You think your life's over," Valeriano said.
     He spent six months in the hospital, most of it at Hines, here in Chicago. It turned out he had some function in his arms—enough for him to battle his way into a manual wheelchair.
     "They wanted to stick me in an electric wheelchair," he said. "There was this World War II vet. He said, 'Whatever it is, don't let them put you in an electric wheelchair. Make the effort.' To this day I thank that man."
     It took him a while to re-enter life. "I stayed home for three years, watching soap operas, trying to deal with my disability," Valeriano said. An offer of a job from the Paralyzed Veterans of America got him working; he now counsels vets.
     Valeriano was married, now divorced, and has two twin sons, age 12. I had to ask: "Artificial insemination?"
     "It was natural," he said. "Most people think that if you're paralyzed you can't do that sort of thing. Everybody's disability is different, but I was blessed and fortunate not to lose that ability."
     Valeriano said not many fellow Marines give him trouble. "When a guy is having a bad day, he might say, 'What are you talking about? I was hurt in Vietnam. I stepped on a land mine. You were hurt in a diving accident.' "
     He agrees, in a way, calling his work with paralyzed veterans "a form of guilt" for being denied the chance to prove himself in war.
     "That's one of the main reasons I'm here," he said. "For me to make it here by 8:30 in the morning, I have to get up three hours early -- I can get up at 4, 5 o'clock in the morning. Why am I doing this when I can sit at home and collect $ 1,300 a month in Social Security? I wasn't injured in combat. The government is doing a good job taking care of me. I almost have to do it."
     It can take Valeriano an hour just to put his clothes on in the morning. He does it because he feels it's his duty. I find that heroic.
         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 8, 1998

Ducks of a feather

     I would never accuse the Chicago Botanic Garden of being ordinary.
     However.
     When it comes to ducks, the choices usually run to mallards, mallards, or more mallards, with their standard dull brown mallard females and bottle-green headed mallard males. Oh, there might be a few American black ducks, which look very similar, thrown in for non-variety's sake. At least they aren't geese, who are in such plague-level abundance that the Garden has had to commission a company with the spot-on name of Wild Goose Chase to encourage them to head south, and quickly.
     But my wife and I were padding over the bridge to Evening Island Sunday afternoon and noticed a knot of people at the rail, so of course joined them, and were treated with a breed of duck I don't recall ever seeing up close before: a hooded merganser, boldly striped, with distinctive black, white and caramel color scheme and yellow eye with its pinprick, I'm-on-drugs pupil.

     The male merganser was accompanied, not by a female merganser, but a standard mallard, and the odd couple was harried by several bulked up carp, who hang out like a street gang under the bridge, waiting for visitors to feed them bread crumbs, which visitors really shouldn't do. It's gotten so bad that all you have to do is wiggle your fingers over the water and the carp will gather, expectantly. These carp kept nosing the ducks away and, since the fish weigh considerable more than the fowl, the ducks moved off, but kept circling back. The rarest of the mergansers, the hooded variety, as you surely know, are among the few ducks that specialize in eating fish. But this lone outnumbered, outweighed merganser certainly wasn't going to try to eat these fish. 

      I'm not sure the two ducks were a couple. The merganser never ruffled his famous crest, but then, they breed in the summer, so maybe, as often with star-crossed love, the timing was just wrong.
      So as not to put on airs, prior to looking into it, I assumed "merganser" was a tribute to some obscure 19th century birder, Henry Merganser or some such thing. Pure ignorance. The name is very old. Pliny the Elder identified a particular duck—we can't be sure which kind—as a mergus, or "diver," and these ducks do completely submerge themselves hunting for fish smaller than carp.

     This usage might seem unconnected to the verb "merge," as in what ambitious corporations do, but it's the same root, as the Oxford explains: "To be extinguished by absorption in a greater title, estate, etc. Hence gen. to sink and disappear, to be swallowed up and lost to view, lose character or identity by absorption into something else."  A definition that, for the first time, gave me a frisson of concern about the Sun-Times' pending marriage with WBEZ. Should it happen, I hope we're still recognizable afterward, as our own distinctive journalistic breed. 
     My wife and I pulled ourselves away, eventually, and strolled for a good 45 minutes before circling back just in time to catch a possibly significant moment in this anatine courtship, if that's what it was. We spied the happy—or should it be unhappy?—couple, far off in the middle of the lake. The female flew away first. And drab though his lost companion was, the merganser, after perhaps contemplating the situation and weighing his chances, took off after her, displaying the merganser's distinctive running-across-water style of liftoff. Wild ducks will cross breed, or at least try to.

Hooray for infrastructure!

     Unlike you, I’ve been down the Deep Tunnel. Twice. A system unique in the world, more than 100 miles of tunnels, some 33 feet across, a network holding 17 billion gallons of water. Drilled over decades through solid rock by enormous machines at a cost of billions of dollars, all to keep your basement dry.
     Being there made me think of the pyramids of Egypt. I don’t want to speak for the shaven-headed subjects of pharaoh. But I imagine they felt a similar swelling of pride, to belong to a people who can do this kind of thing, who can crack the whip of our intelligence and engineering, social cohesion and wealth to make physical reality itself do these tricks.
     Many of my favorite stories are infrastructure stories. I’ve stood on the floor of the Thornton Quarry before it was flooded and turned into the Thornton Composite Reservoir, and marveled at giant earth movers that look like gnats, lost in the vastness.
     I’ve been through the Jardine Water Purification Plant. It began operation in the mid-1960s and is still the largest water treatment plant in the world.
     I’ve ridden in a cement truck with Tim Ozinga. Been conveyed on the trolley of a tower crane, far too quickly, 600 feet above Michigan Avenue, and watched water pipes placed into a trough on Harrison Street.
     I know more about Chicago’s 37 moveable bridges than is proper to know, having read “Chicago’s Bridges” by Nathan Holth. I wish I could say I watched rapt while one of the trunnion bascule drawbridges was balanced, using foot square cubes of concrete. Alas, my pleas to the city over years have been in vain. But hope springs eternal, and I’m not giving up yet.
     So yes, maybe I’m more attuned to the inestimable value of pipes and roads and bridges and train tracks and electrical grids than most guys. But I can’t let Congress’s passage of the $1 trillion national infrastructure bill over the weekend pass without letting out a whoop of joy. Hooray! About time. Took you idiots long enough.

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Botanic Garden repartee

     My wife and I never have to worry about what to do at the end of the day. If the weather is nice, we head over to the Chicago Botanic Garden to walk for an hour. Sometimes we walk in silence for quite a while. Other times we talk. The usual married couple conversation. Sometimes practical matters. Sometimes wit creeps in. I don't want to suggest we're Nick and Nora Charles in the "The Thin Man." But we have our moments.

     "Let's go look at those," my wife said as we walked in and noticed the enormous flowers set up for the pending light show.
     "They're not real," I said, dryly, slipping into my wisenheimer default mode.
     "Thanks for ruining it for me," she parried, a rejoinder I so admired that it made me wonder if I were now outgunned. It made me humble, and reflective.
     "Maybe I tease too much," I ventured. "Maybe I should dial it back a bit."
      There were standard lines that have been repeated for years, if not decades. My wife will say, "I'm cold," and I'll answer, "I like to think of you as 'aloof.'" And in case anyone detects a note of hostility in that, should she say, "I'm hot," the immediate response is an enthusiastic, "I'll say!" So it balances out.
     "No," she said. "That's how it is. You make the same old joke. I roll my eyes."
     Why tamper with success? Besides, you have to be the person you are. For good and ill. 

Ravenswood notes: Radio, radio

     Many folks who drive a lot learn to love the companionship of radio, and Ravenswood bureau chief Caren Jeskey is no exception. Her Saturday report: 

     MIT educated and rough around the edges, Tom and Ray Magliozzi are better known as Click and Clack, The Tappet Brothers. For many years until they retired in 2012, I religiously tuned into WBEZ radio on Saturday mornings and counted the minutes until their radio show Car Talk began. I can hear their thick East Cambridge accents now, snorting and laughing and razzing each other in between giving astute advice to their callers. Click and Clack were trustworthy, warm, and the kind of guys who make you feel as though all the world’s a fun puzzle to solve.
      The best calls were those from people who lived in far out places and had special cars that I knew nothing about, but Tom and Ray would light up like kids on Christmas with the opportunity to talk about the models. They doled out marital advice when callers mentioned that their partners or spouses disagreed with their choice of a car, or the root of a problem. If a young woman called in, afraid of what she’d done to the family car, Click and Clack would somehow reassure her. 
     For over a decade I tuned into Car Talk. Did I mention that I did not even own a car? It didn’t matter. I wanted to hear them ease the minds of folks with rattles and clangs and rodent infestations under their hoods. Their presence was comforting.
     I miss them as a pair. Sadly, Tom died in 2014 after complications with Alzheimer’s disease. Ray still has an advice column, and you can find the old shows on their website.
     Over the years I’ve found other favorite shows on 91.5 WBEZ Chicago and 90.5 KUT Austin. At the top are This American Life, The Moth Radio Hour, and Re:sound, with Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, the NPR current events quiz show as number one. I don’t love everything about it, but I’m able to look past the sometimes (but rarely) insensitive humor and enjoy the wittiness of it all. The show has survived since 1998, which is really saying something.
     Callers play the quiz show while a panel of comedians delivers the questions in clever and hilarious ways. It doesn’t hurt that the caramel voice of Bill Kurtis has played a key role as the MC since his predecessor Carl Kasell retired in 2014.
     One of the strangest things about COVID was hearing host Peter Sagal start each show with the statement that they were taping in front of an “audience of no one.” Ouch. Lucky for us they resumed live tapings in August, with their first stop in Philadelphia. When I heard they were coming to the Harris Theatre I flew across the room to my laptop and snapped up prime seats.
     The show was this past Thursday. A friend who lives right across the street from Harris joined me and was as excited as I was. Folks in line were exuberant. Vaccines or negative COVID tests were required, as was masking throughout the whole event. Still, it was a bit disquieting to be out there. It’s impossible to ignore the risk involved. Yesterday I learned of two people in their 50s like me, both vaccinated, both now dead from the virus. I have decided to hope and trust the precautions kept us safe.
     The applause was thunderous (at appropriate times) throughout the whole two hour taping. Chance the Rapper was the guest and charmed us with his calm demeanor and wise words. He has created a program called SocialWorks to help young Chicagoans thrive creatively. He is on a mission to help bring light to the fact that Illinois is one of only 16 states in the country that does not offer parole. He told us stories about incarcerated people who have achieved medical, law, and other degrees while being incarcerated since their teen years. Despite the fact that they can now become valuable contributing members of society after decades of rehabilitation, they have no chance of release. As you can imagine they live in situations so deplorable that Chance teared up as he described what he has seen in places like Stateville.
     The panelists included Bobcat Goldthwait, Negin Farsad and Brian Babylon aka The Prince of Bronzeville. They bounced their brilliance and wit around. We laughed until our faces hurt, and slapped our thighs. We needed this.
     When it was over I walked my friend home, got my car out of her garage, and headed north down Michigan Avenue. I was saddened but not surprised by a cavalry of police SUVs peppering the Magnificent Mile. One or more were stationed on each block, right in the middle of the road, blindingly bright blue lights flashing and blinking. The officers were there to try to protect the stores full of thousand dollar purses and other haute couture. I felt sick. I realized that the cops may or may not even have the power or the will to prevent looters, from what we have seen.
     I found myself wondering if a car might bump me from behind and then take my own little blue Civic away from me. I have already taken valuables and my vaccination card out of my glove compartment in case it does happen. Which meant I was in a real sense expecting it. I don’t want to live in fear, but I also don't want to ignore the real perils of the city where some move along on their path of destruction without any care for who is hurt along the way. Thank goodness I have the panacea of radio humor.

Cops shoot selves in foot over shot

CPD cadets asked to describe themselves 
versus others in a training exercise. 

     On Sunday mornings, for more years than I care to contemplate, I wake before dawn and write a column for the Monday paper. Which is odd, from a contractual point of view, since I do not officially work on Sundays. My actual schedule ... checking ... says I am on the clock Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
     So should I decide, some sleepy Sunday morning, that I just don’t feel like writing a column, I would be within my contractual rights simply not to. When my editor inevitably sends a puzzled where-the-heck-is-it? message, I could explain that this is a union scheduling issue.
     Except I would never do that. First, because it would make me a jerk and a bad employee. Second, it would burden my colleagues and undercut the institution that I love. Third, I would be shirking my life’s work, something I still enjoy doing. And fourth, my boss could just say, “So why didn’t you write it Friday? You were working then, in theory ...”
     Truth is, given that much of my job involves noticing things and thinking about stuff, plus fretting over what I’ve just written and cooking up something to write next, I don’t know how you could possibly divide between time spent working and time off. “Sooner or later,” as Bruce Springsteen sings, “it just becomes your life.”
     Which is why I’m so unsympathetic to the Fraternal Order of Police and its endless battle against vaccine mandates. In strictly union terms, just as I could sit on my hands next Sunday morning, FOP President John Catanzara is also technically correct: The city is asking police officers to do something that isn’t in their formal union contract. Requiring a vaccine is definitely a change in work conditions.
     You know what else isn’t in any contract? A requirement that community residents talk to police after they witness a crime. Indeed, it is in their immediate best interests not to step onto their front stoop and finger the gangbanger down the street. Yet there are the police, knocking on doors, asking for the public’s help, without compensation beyond serving justice and living in a better community. Values the police seem to shrug off easily.

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A word from Scut Farkus and friends

Scott Farkus

     Wednesday's column, "The past plays out in Virginia," was written Tuesday morning, before results of the election were known, long before Trump stalking horse Glenn Youngkin was elected governor. Once his victory became official, late in the day, I jiggered a sentence to reflect that. But the column had already been online for hours.
     The outcome wasn't a surprise mind you, and the general grim tone of the column was written in anticipation of what would probably happen. We're at the top of a roller coaster hill, preparing for an even deeper plunge into Trumpism than before. Strap in. Keep your hands in the car.
     The column was met by the expected crowds of gleeful residents of Fox Nation ululating their victory. No big surprise there either. As Trump demonstrates, being a bigot is, at rock bottom, about having an ego so small you must alternate between flights of grandiosity and abuse of anybody you can find to ridicule in your frantic efforts to pump yourself up by putting them down. It hardly matters who: immigrants, Muslims, Blacks, libs, the media, whomever. The win gave Trumpers the all-important permission to trumpet their scorn, oblivious to the idea that an adult considers the source of any particular opinion, or tries to. Thus being held in contempt by dupes half a decade into their swooning thrall to a liar, bully, fraud and traitor well, let's just say the sting of their disapproval is not what they seem to imagine it will be. 

     Some were so over-the-top, I truly had to admire the result.
     "Awww, lefty’s didn’t get their way," writes Kevin Kibler, stumbling over his grammar, but perfectly capturing the bullying tone of the Scut Farkus character from "A Christmas Story." "Go back home and cry Neil."

     Conjuring up liberal tears, and then laughing at the imaginary tableau, is a go-to move for Trumpies. Why bother with reality? Why look up and see the pitying gaze of solid, grounded, fact-based, patriotic Americans contemplating their fellow citizens, souls lost in malice and folly? Far easier to cackle like Bond villains, and work themselves into faux hysterics at the confounding of their enemies.

      "LMAO, like I said before you leftwing liberal socialist communists have no ideas or solutions just lies, thievery and whining when you don’t get your way," Ed Perchess writes, as if a $1 trillion infrastructure bill weren't stalled in the Senate without a single Republican vote. "What, no mention of your bromance Trump, LMAO! No morals, no brains, go get a refund for your education."

      Oh that I could. 

      Some, like the above, rambled on. A number of readers were quite pithy, which I appreciated.

    "Keep fanning the flames of racism," was all Ed Case has to say.

    Though brief, that sounds a common theme that will no doubt be a major Trump World talking point, assuming it isn't already: racism in America is a fiction invented and sustained by liberals and disgruntled Black Lives Matter activists. Otherwise, it would be only a fading memory.

     "I was disappointed in the tone of your 11/2 column, bringing up the tired old trope of racism," writes Howard Tanzman, as if I had invoked some fusty old fixation, like Free Silver. 
     "I think the American people are wising up to the hate from CRT and BLM etc." someone calling himself Jerry Jobe writes. "I will continue to pray. We are all equal. And now, we need to get on with educating or Black and Brown youth."
     I wish he had elaborated on that last thought: maybe the problem, in his mind, is that nobody has told Black people that racism is no longer an issue. Except to libs, of course.
     "What is it with your (and those of like-minded Liberals) obsession with race?" Dennis Bracco writes. "News flash: it's NOT 1959 now, and we've come a long way."
     As proof of the long way we have come, Bracco and many others served up the new lieutenant governor, Winsome Sears, who is Black, a twist on the some-of-my-best-friends gambit. It's like arguing that Trump can't be stoking anti-Semitism, since Stephen Miller is Jewish. I wanted to write back, "One swallow does not a summer make." But that would be quoting Aristotle, and imagine how they'd howl at that.
     There can't be racism in Virginia. Because they elected a Black lieutenant governor. This pairing of inequivalent  situations is continuous. The Jan. 6 insurrection is cancelled out by the post George Floyd protests. 

     "The Jan 6th insurrection was a toga party as much as the riots/burning/looting for a year were 'mostly peaceful" protests,' Dave Bohec writes. "People are seeing what it means to be 'woke' and are voting accordingly."

     It isn't the racism, which doesn't exist, but it's the reaction to the non-existent racism that's the problem.

     Racism, in their view, is a historical relic, and if we go back in the past, it was a sin of the Democrats, which means that Democrats today, who believe diametrically opposite things and have for decades, are thoroughly undercut. 
     "When you discussed bigotry from the 50's, keep in mind the southern states at that time were governed and managed by Democrats," Terrence Hagen writes. "Ever hear of the "DixieCrats"? Maybe your history didn't teach that the Dem party has its own history of bigotry. Ever hear of Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the Grand Wizard of the Klan? He was at one time the Senate Majority leader. Don't attribute bigotry to Republicans alone."   
     Don't miss the slip of that final "alone." We may be bigots, but so are you. Everybody is bigoted. And there is truth there, in that we all harbor prejudice, to a degree. Though for some it is a problem to be recognized and fought, and others don't even see it, either because they won't or they can't, the way fish supposedly don't perceive the water they are swimming in.  It would almost be funny—it is funny, a little—if it weren't also so sad.