Tag: war

Good Morning Kosovo 2000

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In June of 2000 my son, Emerson Hart, and his band Tonic traveled to Kosovo and Bosnia to entertain our American troops. It would be first of many more war zone tours the boys would do in the ensuing years, including going in to Iraq, where Emerson almost was blown away by a mortar that landed near Saddam Hussein’s palace where the band was staying.

During the Kosovo tour our men and women soldiers there were tired, home sick, but always the best audience when any American came over to entertain and spend time with them. The boys always had such a warm greeting whenever they landed at the various camps along the way.

Emerson, whose father served in the Army during the Korean War, has always felt it was a privilege to be able to give back to our troops protecting our freedom. So when I recently discovered a diary post from the Tonic website from June 2000 of the days they spent during that Bosnia tour I thought I would share it with my readers and you Tonic fans. The sad reality is that Fourteen years later the Middle East is still at unrest.

Day 1
7 PM….Dinner at the venue

9 PM….Showtime! The show was great…. these men and women are the best audience ever considering the fact that they’re not allowed to leave the base unless on patrol…and it is a dry base-no alcohol at all. They really made us feel welcome.

11 PM….The deputy mayor of the base presented us with a certificate of appreciation. Then we met with a lot of the soldiers, signed autographs and took many pictures.

1 AM…… Sleep at last!!!

Day 2

8 AM…… Why are we up so early?

9 AM….Breakfast!

11:30 AM…… Flight to Skopje, Macedonia. They have to reroute our flight around Serbia since they will not let us fly in their airspace. The flight takes us over Italy and the Adriatic Sea. A one hour flight now takes three hours….the sites were very beautiful.

2:30 PM…… Arrive Skopje, Macedonia… Wait on the French military installation after the Chanuck helicopter to pick us up to take us to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo.

3:30 PM…… Helicopter arrives. We find out that the gear had been delayed coming over the border from Germany , so now our helicopter has to sling load the gear in a huge metal compartment. That compartment is then hanging from the bottom of the helicopter as we fly… 16,000 pounds!!!!

3:35 PM…… Flight briefing and Flak jacket and helmet fitting.

3:45 PM….Departure for Bondsteel. As we crossed the border between Macedonia and Kosovo, the escorts put on their Kevlar vests and lock and load their M-50 machine guns.
Emerson gets to ride shotgun next to the pilot and the flight engineer. Jeff rides next to the star board gunner. Dan rides next to the floor opening where there’s a soldier lying down keeping an eye on the cargo below us. Remy looks like he’s going to fall asleep.

4:30 PM….Arrive at camp Bondsteel.

5 PM…… Showers? I don’t think so..Dinner… Again… the food is really good.

6:30 PM…… Major Dillon presents us with coins from the base on behalf of the Brigadier General Sanchez. They even made a concrete star for us and they had us sign!

9 PM… Showtime once again!!!!

11 PM…… After the show we met more soldiers and signed a bunch of autographs. We had to be done by 11:20 so we could get on the chopper back to Skopje, Macedonia.

1120….Board the chopper… Jeff sits shotgun in the cockpit wearing night vision goggles. Emerson sits next to the gunner on the port side of the chopper and Dan sits next to the gunner on the starboard side. Remi has night vision goggles also, sitting in the rear of the chopper next to the open bay door. In flight we saw a house burning with all of the people standing outside watching it burn. Hard to watch.

12 AM…. Arrive Skopje.

12:30 AM….dinner at the Army base.

1:30 AM….Arrive hotel in downtown Skopje … SLEEP!!!!

3:00 AM… Emerson gets awoken by gunfire outside of the hotel. Needless to say, that was frightening!

Day 3

DAY OFF….Dan and some of the crew go into town to see the sights – – – Emerson, Jeff and Remi sleep most of the day – – that night we all go to town for a dinner that was great. The whole place is amazing… It’s weird to think that it was a communist country only nine years ago.

Day 4

10 AM…… Lobby call

11:30 AM…… On the chopper to camp to Montieth. On the flight we saw more destruction and empty houses than on the other flights… It was pretty surreal… Dan sat shotgun, Emerson rides with the gunner again, Remi hides in the middle and Jeff is in the back by the open bay door.

12:15 PM….arrive at camp Monteith. This camp has many more trees and we see locals working on the base, but it is much smaller than the other three camps we visited.

1 PM…… Lunch… Outdoor barbecue… Wow!!!

3 PM….Sound check

5 PM…… Resorting to sitting on the camp bus so we can be in air-conditioning… It’s 105°!!!!

6:30 PM…… Dinner with the crew in the commander of “Big Windy”, the flight crew that is been flying us all over Kosovo in the helicopters. Definitely some of the nicest people we’ve met!!!

8 PM…… Showtime… A lot of the soldiers that were at this particular show where about to leave for home the next day. They had been there for seven months. They were really rowdy and into the show. They were also REALLY ready to go home!!!!

11 PM…..Signing autographs and taking pictures with the soldiers….Are all such great men and women.

12:15 PM….Chopper back to Camp Able Sentry and Macedonia. Jeff gets to sit on the way back of the helicopter dangling his feet off the back. Emerson’s next to the Gunter again, Dan is in the middle and Remi is in the rear. This was the best flight. The pilot really pushed the helicopter to the max… Flew about 35 feet off the tree line. Like a roller coaster ride. Pretty unbelievable.

1:30 AM snack time at the mess hall at Camp Able Sentry.

3 AM….Hotel… Lights out… Sleep!!!

Day 5

Fly to Amsterdam and begin the rest of the European leg of the tour.

This whole trip was such an amazing experience for us. Everyone was so gracious and kind. Playing for the troops was truly amazing and fulfilling. Besides, when do you ever fly in a chopper into a war zone!!!!

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True Grit

If one lives long enough, change happens. That’s just the way life is. And each time I blog I wonder if I have anything else to say. But I write about my life, so if I really want to be honest, I also have to include the grit. It goes like this.

I find myself waking up in the morning a little bit depressed these days. How about you? Unless you live in a vacuum you must feel something. I have always considered myself a positive person always looking at the glass half full instead of half empty. Could be I’m getting older and recognizing that. Sure. Could be I am a realist. Maybe. Could be that I am inherently a sponge and can’t help myself to change. True. The honest to goodness fact is that I can’t take what is going on in the world anymore.

CNN, just give me some good news already! No more pictures of drunken Ukrainians and dead bodies, people running for their lives and starving children, missing airplanes. For heavens sake, my daughter is a flight attendant! Such an overload of bad news these days beyond my ‘glass half full’ ability.

I get it. The world is an unhappy place. The news is frightening. Everything seems to be falling apart out there. Missiles are flying and people are dying in flames in the Mideast, despots are coming out of the ground like weeds, gaining strength over their peoples and creating fear and conflict, choking the death out of goodness.

Just how much can an old woman take. I don’t ever remember the world being in such wide turmoil, do you? I don’t ever remember the United States being so weak in the minds of even our allies. God help us!

Right now, here at home, we have major economic problems that are affecting the younger generation, especially. Problems at our border. We don’t seem to have a strong American guidance, “rally around the flag” identity anymore. When did this happen? Where is Clint Eastwood when we need him! Or Roosevelt and his big stick!

Honestly, I don’t ever remember the world being in such wide turmoil. I don’t ever remember the United States being so weak in the minds of even our allies.

Am I tempted to turn into an ostrich? I wonder. The first thing I do in the morning to break the silence in my head is to turn on my favorite jazz station, then shuffle along to my Keurig that is waiting for me to pour that first cup of hot wake-up coffee to drink on the deck with a big fat ‘death to my arteries’ Napoleon to ease my anxiety. Privileged. Maybe. Worked for it. Dear God, yes. Take it for granted. Not! I vote, volunteer, work for charities, help others. But obviously it is not enough to clear my head.

It’s just that I want what we all want; my children and their children to have the same benefits my generation had – freedom of open doors as result of hard work. Pathways to a good life. Peace and prosperity.

I want my daughters and granddaughters to have the freedoms and opportunities equal to men. Respect as human beings. Choices of dress, beliefs, careers of their own respected and allowed.

Please. Wake up America before we are forced to sleep with the enemy!

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Memories Lost

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I have such vivid memories of my childhood that have remained with me throughout my life. I never thought it was unusual, pondering events of a life lived, and to be honest, as a writer, I have often found a certain degree of comfort reconciling my days here through those memories. Sometimes I think it is as though our lives have been a movie in which we are the spectator.

Washington D.C. 1943…..

The bed was so big my brother and I could stretch out our arms and only our fingertips would touch.  The lights were on, but I was scared. My parents were hurrying to pull down the long dark blinds to cover the high windows in our bedroom because the sirens started to blare outside breaking the silence of evening. The noise was deafening and was coming in waves, over and over again.  

Then, when I wanted the safety of the night lights, my mother shut the switch. We were swallowed up. Darkest of darkness. My brother and I lay there in that black hole, sheets over our heads, with the sirens wailing in waves and I shook. I shook in fear of what it could be.  I had seen those awful scary pictures of war in the movies about the bombs and broken houses like ours.

My brother and I knew this was an air raid because we had been through them before, but each time our fears were real. Maybe this time. Maybe this time real bombs were coming. 

To this day, I remember the fear. I can still hear those sirens. And I still remember my relief when after the sirens stopped nothing happened to us. We weren’t dead.

In conversations I have had with my older brother throughout the years about our childhood, he remembers very little. He, for some reason, has scant recall of our lives as children. Was it so unimportant  that he walked through our past without holding on to it as I did? Or is his mathematical mind wired differently than my creative one?  I have always been highly sensitive and aware of my surroundings. Sherman always seemed absent. So smart. There, but not.

Sherman’s one standout memory of our childhood in Washingon is of when the large cement urn at the top of our outside steps crumbled and fell, pinning his leg, the inner steel stake plunging through his calf. A traumatic incident that left a permanent scar and for some reason his recollections are only made of this one terrible event. Perhaps this is Sherman’s emotional event that allowed his short term childhood memory to transfer to his long term memory.

Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, co-author of Super Brain, tells us that within our hippocampus in our brain our short term memory attaches it to something emotional so that it will transfer to long term memory. But where all of these memories are stored we don’t know. The neuroscientists don’t know either. Not yet anyway.  On the other hand, Deepak Chopra, the author and holistic/New Age guru, takes the Eastern view that they are stored in the soul.

Whichever theory you want to believe, since we really don’t know, one truth we all can agree upon is that we each store memories that are our own. So when the sirens stopped and the war was over, my brother and I got our own beds and I traveled unknowingly alone with my memories.

Sandra Hart Copyright 2014. All rights reserved

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