Author: John Morris Benson

Husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, brother, uncle, cousin, friend, veteran, retired, grow veggies-eat meat

Running or Not

When I see the candidate signs on nearly every corner, I think of the time I ran for public office. Some men already serving on the Kelso, WA, city council asked me to run, and I had the support of the local police union.
I’m sure of why I didn’t win but it was probably not from what I’m saying below.

My opponent could have said, “Candidate Benson was disciplined by the Army, associated with an American Nazi, and investigated by the FBI and CIA.”

Each of the above is true.

Several of us were late for morning formation at Ft. Devens. We were all punished under the Army’s Article-15 and restricted to base for the weekend.1But weekend passes were not allowed while we were in training.

I hired a clerk named John Patler. Later, during the FBI investigation of his shooting of Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi party leader, I learned that the clerk had been a captain in the American Nazi Party and the editor and cartoonist for the party’s magazine, Stormtrooper.2My store manager told me to hire him.

Every applicant for service in the Army Security Agency had a background investigation by the FBI as a requirement for a security clearance.3I served with a TS clearance plus several special riders.

I met a man in Frankfurt named Frank Baxter who told me to send him my resume when I was ready to leave the Army. He interviewed me at a Company called HRB Singer. I didn’t know until the interview that a background investigation had been completed by the CIA. I had a second interview with E.D. Echols, CIA director of personnel.4I still have the letter saying, “As we have not received any response to the letter which we sent you on 5 August, (1964) we assume that you are no longer interested in employment with this Agency. Accordingly, we have placed your file in an inactive status.”
Echols was the director’s real name; Frank Baxter was probably a cover name.

An opponent could find more events, but I’ve hopefully made my point about how I might be viewed if I chose to run for another public office.

PS: I’ve chosen to not run for anything except to run around a topic.

Remember and Honor

On this 25th day of May 2026, we remember and honor those who died in military service. This is for all who went to serve and didn’t survive. Any one of us who served could have been one of them, and any family could be related.

I know of only one relative who died while serving. Uncle Arne Gerhard Benson died at Ft. Lewis, WA, in 1943 while serving with the US Army. Some family letters talk about his service as a civilian in the Army Corps of Engineers before he enlisted.1 Whittier, Alaska, January 29, 1942, Dear Mother, … This is a Gov. Defense project, so I’ll be here until next year sometime. I hear that they are censuring the mail now so will not say anything about it. I can’t think of much to say except that we have plenty of ice and it’s cold. Give everyone my regards, and love to you. Arne

Jan. 16, 1943 Dearest Mother, … We had some pretty tough going up North, and also in the Orient so it seems quiet and peaceful here in comparison. I can’t tell you much about it now but hope to be able to soon. I have two months of intensive training left here and then the Lord only knows what next. If they have any more Hell and High water to dish out I guess I can take it.

Ft. Lewis Wash Jan. 16, 1943, Dear Dot, … I didn’t tell Mother as she would have worried. I transferred my Service Nov 3 when I got out of the Hosp. I was with the Army Eng. in Alaska water and also the Near East. I got broken up during a heavy Blow in the Bering Sea. My collar bone, three ribs, two vertebrae in my back and my left leg below the knee. It sounds like a lot but wasn’t so bad. 2Did the COE have fishing boats? There are pictures of Arne on one during that time period.

There may have been others, but Walter Trisko was the only high school classmate3Central High School, Alexandria, MN, class of 1955. I remember dying while serving Vietnam. Classmate Walt

So, remember and honor those who died but be aware that for many survivors absence from war is not the same as peace of the soul.

China, etc.

The niece of Pearl S. Buck went to my high school for a while in the 1950s and I read The Good Earth during my junior year.

FYI: I am not a Sinophile, a China scholar, nor do I have Sinophobia.

Reading Bill Lascher’s Eve of a Hundred Midnights, James Bradley’s The China Mirage Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby’s Thunder out of China, and Ilona Ralf Sues’ Shark’s Fins and Millet gave me better insight to why China and our relationship with it is the way it is today. I also learned more about the political, economic, and social environments that set up The Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War.
Reviews of these books is not my reason for this post. Except for Shark’s Fins and Milletthere are multiple reviews on line, so I want to say what about each author makes them valid.

Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth is fiction, but she grew up in China with her missionary parents.

Ted White and Annalee Jacoby were war correspondents with access to leaders of all factions in the region. Annalee’s husband Melville (Mel) a Time-Life magazine war correspondent was killed accompanying General Harold H. George on a trip to inspect air bases.

Ilona Sues had personal contacts with leaders of all factions and commoners in China during the 1930s while on a League of Nations mission to help eradicate the flow of opium. She had intimate knowledge about meals of shark’s fins and millet and the societies who had those meals.

Bill Lasher had an advantage many writers do not —Mel and Annalee’s personal papers, films, and documents saved by their families to work with for Eve of a Hundred Midnights.

James Bradly, a historian, cited over 400 verifiable references for his work on The China Mirage.

The overlapping content of each book verifies the fidelity of the others and the experience or research by the authors added to my learning experience.

Urgent Need

About 100,000 people are waiting for a kidney transplant in the US. At least 13 people die every day waiting for a kidney. A Kidney from a living donor kidney can last 20 years or more. A deceased donor kidney lasts about 12 years. One kidney is all you need — donors live full, healthy lives.

Our grandson-in-law “Eli is entering the final stages of chronic kidney disease and is actively searching for a living donor. A single act of generosity will bless he and his family immensely and will keep a husband, dad, son, and friend present for every moment that matters.”

Read A Kidney for Eli to learn more.

4th Effort for Bulwer-Lytton

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenged entrants
to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels. I’d written Echoes of Nam: Absence from war is not the same peace of the soul and thought about a ‘how it came about’ story.I did a tongue-in-cheek for the contest.

Would you continue reading a novel that started with a one sentence paragraph like the one below?

I’m Maria Conception Aquino and being an omniscient, all-knowing in literature voice only, observer, in-the-right place, at-the right-time, I put forth this biography of Hacker Lee Goor including but not limited to the lives of Brandon Taylor Grame and Adam William Brax for your most earnest consideration, so believe me – facts I don’t know personally or for which I have no written or recorded oral testimony are not guessed or supposed in this document; however, some conversations based on verifiable evidence are put into my words and phrases to further the story, but if you were there and know differently, please forgive my assumptions, and if you were not a witness, it matters not to me because just like many things we did not observe, they reasonably could have been.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was founded in 1982 at San Jose State University.

None of my entries were published, and as explained in the post here none will ever be.

1 For reasons I cannot explain, I say, having repeated myself over and over again, I do therefore declare again: I am often random, so another post may interrupt the series I first intended to post in sequence.

Second Effort for Bulwer-Lytton

Founded in 1982 at San Jose State University in California,
the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenged entrants
to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels. None of my entries were published and as explained here none will ever be.
My somewhat random writing log tells me I sent this one, but it may not have been my second effort as it is titled.

Army veteran Clayton Manning dabbling in fiction hoping to hit the market as a modern Raymond Chandler adding to his Philip Marlowe series or Mickey Spillane doing another Mike Hammer book but never gets a word published and not having a Kate Becket like Richard Castle did, he decides to take his teacher’s advice, “Write what you know,” and opens his own PI agency above a deteriorating secondhand music store in a small Texas town near Dallas, but in solving his first case he uncovers a deeply covert national security issue he cannot and will not dare to expose to his prospective reading audience even as fiction or innuendo.

For reasons I cannot explain, I say, having repeated myself over and over again, I do therefore declare again: I am often random, so another post may interrupt the series I first intended to post in sequence.

Bulwer-Lytton: Effort One

Founded in 1982 at San Jose State University in California,
the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenged entrants
to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels. None of my entries were published and as explained here none will ever be.
One I wrote is posted below.

Cranston Paul Ryley lived by the philosophy that in the end, every person must account for him, herself, or they in that all motivation for actual actions related to accountability is irrelevant to the concept that any of the species humankind is the objective of non-prejudicial termination 1Pick, Apt, and Fitting, 1980 such that verifiable positive determination of any and/or all fiscal debt one should reimburse, deserves to recompense, or is able to remunerate will not be made until the fully integrated priority program necessitates that urgent consideration be applied to the issue of intended and unintended behavior as demonstrated by a supervised and un-perjured application of the thesis in question as cited by the previously referenced authors whose work may or may not be found by scholarly research at privately funded institutions, so his novel title protagonist Bogus would live by the same set of rubrics.

Having repeated myself over and over again, I do therefore declare again: I am often random, so another post may interrupt the series.

Nam Vets Day 2026

Remember:

Many went – Many came back – None were the same
This is for all who went
Any one of us who served
Could have been one of them
And any family could be related1Echoes of Nam: Absence from war is not the same as peace of the soul by John Morris Benson

On this date, fifty-three years ago: “U.S. troops withdraw from Vietnam,” was the headline.2ref

Flip of a Coin:

I don’t remember the date or time, but it was an event in the late spring of 1958 I’ll never forget. SSG Harry Harkness took Jackie E. West and me aside, saying something like, “I need one of you to lead a team to install new equipment and update some existing equipment at the embassy in Saigon. The job will also require some activity in other places in the area. Both of you are due for separation in less than 90 days so you’ll have to extend for a year. Are you willing?”

We were both willing to be extended, so who went to Vietnam was decided by the flip of a quarter.

I fully believe it was God’s plan for the coin to land as it did. With the one-year extension, I would never have gone to Edison Tech in Seattle to take the night class where I met my future wife.
April 3, 2026 is our 67th anniversary.

Jackie E West, my counterpart, is in the history books for some of the special operations in which he was later involved. As someone said, and others often repeat, “There but for the Grace of God go I.”

PS: Like Colonel Flagg from MASH, we were not there then! The Army Security Agency I mean, but written and oral history tells us there were advisors for many activities related to North v. South issues.

Ray LePoidevin – Combat vet and Author of Alternate Route
“Let’s see what you do if you get back from Nam alive.”

The Real Sign

As I said in previous posts, here have been many signs of early spring in the Pacific Northwest. Now it is regular spring time and there of signs that tell me so.

Now the traditional signs of spring are upon us.

The weather folks have reminded us of the spring equinox, that daytime is increasing most quickly, etc. A few weeks ago, at least one of the TV talking heads said we would get more daylight when we set the clocks ahead. Every intelligent person knows we don’t get more daylight; it is just shifted by law. Of course there are the natural signs of spring, buds on trees, dandelions showing their faces, etc.

Ski resorts are lamenting about having to end the season early. Schools are on spring break and spring break venues advertise special rates, but some increase their regular rates before giving specials.

I remember when the time of spring break changed every year. It could start as early as the Saturday before March 22 and as late as the Saturday before April 25. We called Easter vacation and many schools ended at noon for Good Friday.

Lawn service has started and flyers in the mail or hooked on doorknobs are trying to convince those who do not have lawn service that they need it. Friends of a certain age talk about wishing they could hire a teenager to do their lawn mowing like when they hired out as kid.1Oh the discussions that leads to.

I’ve seen the real sign of spring.

People are pulling their trailer or RV to the driveway, washing the winter grime away, and packing to leave for their first outing of the season.

P D T to P S T

Most of you know I wonder as I wander, and wander as I wander, so here I go again on signs of spring.

Another sign of spring is springing forward to save time.

Or did we fall back to save time some time ago?

Benjamin Franklin said, “Time is money,” in 1748.1Might not be an original thought, but he printed it.

“A penny saved is a penny earned,” is also attributed to Benjamin Franklin.2Never in exactly those words, and he wasn’t the originator of the saying either.

So what are we going to do with all that time we saved since last fall? Will we get interest on the savings? If so, what percentage?

Mankind with its considerable God given skill cannot possibly capture daylight, put it in a vault, and release it for later use.

Or is there a multi-nation, both friend and foe, working on a way to slow the rotation of the earth to gain more daylight.

But wait! If I remember a little about ratios, we would also get more hours of darkness.

Mankind has, however, been given paced skill improvement and access to the raw materials to develop compensations for times of shortened daylight. i.e. Fire in the very old days to LEDs in these days.

To be accurate, daylight has never been shortened, we just adjust the time when we use the compensations.

I haven’t studied the issue well enough to know or at least have an opinion that national ‘daylight saving’ is a continuing political issue, or just something that seemed to be a good idea sometime in the past.

My grandfather said that the cows don’t know about daylight saving. They want milked at the same earth time every day. My observation was that they came in from the pasture on standard time no matter what the clock said. It also amazed me how they could find their way to the barn in the dark.

Clocks on our microwave, coffee maker, and kitchen range are not connected to the internet and require the twice annual walk-around with hopes of getting them set somewhere within a minute of the actual time as specified by regulation and time zone. We left our old car on standard time gut our new car is connected to the internet, so it auto sets to the legislated time and our ‘devices’ are auto set. That is handy for the walkaround that includes two non-digital non-connected wall clocks.

Please don’t think I’m whining about this issue. As a retired nearly nonagenarian, I have the time to set the time on all the devices not connected to Wi-Fi.

So why then did I bring up the issue? I just wanted to, so there!

I wonder if I should wander about the house and move the non connected clocks before bed tonight or in the morning.

If you’ve read this content before, thanks for remembering. If not, I hope you found it interesting.