A Thanksgiving Holiday That Couldn't Be Beat

Everything’s put away now. The dishes are all washed. The extra chairs are back in the garage. The dining room table is round again instead of oval. But for a while all was noise and chaos and motion and it was a lovely way to spend a holiday.

We’ve been empty nesters now for real ever since we dropped Oliver off at his graduate school apartment in early August, but both he and Lauren were coming home for Thanksgiving. We spent some time getting the house ready – mostly making sure their beds had clean sheets and blankets – and figuring out what everyone’s plans were.

Lauren arrived Tuesday evening without any difficulties, but Oliver had a bit of an adventure getting back. The plan was for him to take a train from where he goes to school and then switch to a bus in Chicago that would take him to Our Little Town, and that would have been simple except that the train was late enough that there was a real chance he’d miss his bus – the last one until the morning – and then I’d have to drive down to Chicago to pick him up, and while that’s just what you do in those circumstances it was something I’d hoped to avoid as driving in Chicago is never a good idea even in the best of times. Fortunately Kim thought to call the bus company and they agreed to hold the bus for five or ten minutes. Oliver made it with moments to spare, and all I had to do was pick him up at our local bus station at 2am in a howling windstorm, which was much nicer than driving to Chicago.

Wednesday morning Lauren took my car and went down to O’Hare to pick up Shai, whom she met in Vietnam this past summer. Shai flew in from South Africa, where his family is, and once Lauren had picked him up she started his American education by driving to the nearest Culvers for some MURCAN food (seriously – if you want to know what the platonic ideal of a fast-food burger is you can skip the rest and go straight to your nearest Culvers and be enlightened) and then to various and sundry other places before returning back to Our Little Town. We enjoyed meeting him and getting to know him over the holiday weekend. 

One of the newer traditions – newer to me, anyway – surrounding Thanksgiving break is that when people come back to their home towns from wherever it is they’ve been they gather with their old high school friends for Blackout Wednesday, which is essentially a pub crawl. I volunteered to be one of the designated drivers for the evening and ended up having dinner with Lauren and her friends at one of the local Mexican restaurants, one chosen specifically because they also serve yard-high towers of margaritas (and, for the DD, horchata).

Someone told the waiter that it was Shai’s birthday and he was game to play along, though at some point in the process I suspect he may have had second thoughts about that.

We then went to another place that was more of a bar, where I rediscovered just how old I am, and then I dropped them off at another place downtown and let them have at it while I went home to recover my hearing. Apparently a good time was had, and the call to take people home came around 1am. After a short visit to the local Kwik Trip (a midwest staple) for snacks I took everyone back to their respective spots and we called it a night.

I slept in the next morning because it was Thanksgiving Day and holidays are meant for that sort of thing. Lauren and Shai met up with a good chunk of the squad for the annual Turkey Trot here in Our Little Town and three cheers to Shai for having the wherewithal to do that after a long travel day and a short night. It was a cold morning, but spirits were high and Turkeys were Trotted like nobody’s business.

After which there was much napping, because that’s how that goes.

We’ve been driving up to Rory and Amy’s for Thanksgiving for the last few years for a celebration of food and family, so after a morning spent making pies, biscuits and pizzelles to share we piled into the minivan and headed on over.

It’s always a good time seeing everyone, and there was plenty of good food and good company to be had. There’s a constant swirl of people to talk with and things to eat and eventually you get to everyone and roll away full.

Friday was kind of a relaxing day after all that activity. Lauren took Shai out to explore Our Little Town while Oliver got caught up on some work he had to do and then joined me in our daily assault on WhenTaken.  For those of you who haven’t found this, it’s a once-a-day game where you get five historical photographs from anywhere in the world – some as old as the 1870s, others as recent as 2024 – and you have to guess where and when the photos were taken. For history nerds such as me and Oliver, it is just the most wonderful thing ever and it’s probably not an accident that our highest scores ever came when we were working together. We’ve been doing this for about a month now, and so far there have been two photos of places that I recognized instantly because I’d been there and that is an odd kind of thrill.

I made lasagna for dinner, and after that Lauren and Shai headed up to her apartment to beat the snow that was scheduled for Saturday.

Kim and I were supposed to go to Madison Saturday for her birthday, as there was a concert that she wanted to see as her designated gift, but as the day drew nearer the weather forecast got grimmer and in the end they postponed the concert to February and we just stayed home. I cleared off the first 8 inches (20cm) of snow at some point – those who laugh at someone clearing 8 inches of snow in the middle of a storm have never cleared 14 inches (35cm) of snow at the end of a storm – and we had a quiet evening of Bake Off, hockey, and popcorn while the world slowly disappeared under a blanket of white.

I tried to clear the last 6 inches (15cm) of snow the next day but the snowblower was not really up to the task and at any rate it died about 5% of the way into that job so Oliver and I had to resort to shovels. Somewhere I have almost this exact picture of my brother and my dad. What goes around comes around.

The last big event of the holiday weekend was later that day when we hosted Friendsgiving. This is not an event that happened when I was younger, as far as I remember, and I have to say that I really like the idea of making Thanksgiving something that is shared with friends and not just family. We had the family Thanksgiving on the day, and then on Sunday a pile of Lauren’s and Oliver’s friends came over. We all squeezed into the dining room and shared a loud and joyful meal together and it was a lovely time all around. Sometimes, if you are very lucky in this world, you will realize that the good times are happening while they are happening and then you can just let them wash over you and enjoy them.

Even Midgie relaxed and got into the spirit of things.

Sunday was also Kim’s actual birthday, so there were two different cakes and a couple of pies and we all sang happy birthday.

Afterward there were games and activities.

This was Shai’s first real experience with snow and to celebrate he decided to dive face-first into it. When you live in Wisconsin you get kind of jaded to the snow after a while, and it is always good to be reminded of just how exciting it can be when it is new.

Eventually it was time to wind down. I ended up taking Lauren, Shai, and Anita back to their apartment by Main Campus University, while Oliver turned in early so he could sleep a bit before taking the 3:30am bus back to Chicago and his train back to school – a process that went much more smoothly than his trip out.

And now we’re back to normal, or as close to that as we get, with a nice pile of memories and stories to hold onto, and that is how holidays should go.

A Shipshape Thanksgiving

My dad spent a couple of unremarkable years in the US Navy in the late 1950s. The Eisenhower Recession was in full swing when he graduated high school in 1958 and he didn’t have any plans or money to go to college so his choices were to find some kind of menial job or enlist and he figured the Navy would be more interesting.

It probably was, though it wasn’t something he particularly talked about much afterward. It wasn’t traumatic, but it wasn’t all that big of a deal to him. He was a radioman on the USS Tutuila, a small-engine repair ship, and he served his time and then left when his enlistment was up. He had shore leave in Cuba before Castro took over, saw the Northern Lights out in the Atlantic, and never learned to swim because he figured if the ship went down in the middle of the ocean where would he go?

He spent Thanksgiving 1958 aboard ship, which probably didn’t sit quite right with him but so it goes. For a man who stood 6’2” and never weighed more than 190lbs in his life he had a healthy respect for Thanksgiving meals and before my parents were married he would routinely go to my mother’s family for a full dinner before returning home to another one with his mother. Having only one Thanksgiving meal – and US Navy chow at that – probably wasn’t his idea of the best way to spend the holiday.

But you have to be glad for what you have. That’s the point of the holiday, after all. And he saved the little program that the ship printed out for the day, so it must have been at least that good.

It’s been a long time since then. Both of my parents and all of my grandparents are gone now, and the USS Tutuila – sold to Taiwan in 1974 – was scrapped decades ago.

But it’s still Thanksgiving, and that has to count for something.

Thanksgiving has slowly become one of my favorite holidays as I have gotten older, mostly because it is one of the very few holidays on the American calendar that doesn’t want us to ask for more. It just asks that we be glad for what we have.

This can be a difficult task in these parlous times, as the future darkens and the past recedes into memory, but it is no less important even so.

I am glad for the life I have. I like my job, Kim likes hers, and between us those jobs provide for all that we need and a good chunk of what we want – the key, of course, being not to have wants that are too excessive. We have a snug house that is big enough for everything we want to do in it. We’re basically healthy, within the parameters for our age. And, most importantly, we have family and friends who make our world better.

Oliver and Lauren are home for the holiday, and the house is back to its full capacity. We’ll have Thanksgiving dinner at Rory and Amy’s house along with most of Kim’s side of the family. Lauren’s new boyfriend will be with us. Friday I’m going to make lasagna because I can. Saturday will depend on the weather, but Sunday will be Friendsgiving, when we’ll have another big Thanksgiving dinner and this one we’ll share with those of Lauren and Oliver’s friends who can join us.

I am thankful for the life I lead.

I am thankful for the people in it – for my family and my friends, both near and far.

And that is enough.

Thirty

I’ve been married for half my life now.

Thirty years ago today – what was then the Saturday after Thanksgiving, which has long been our default day to celebrate – Kim and I got married here in Our Little Town. We wrote most of the service ourselves, blending our different traditions together into something that said the things we thought it should say. There were family and friends there to witness, and afterward we had a very nice party to celebrate.

Since then we’ve lived our lives well.

We bought a house. We made careers and friends. We celebrated. We traveled. We watched a parade of animals pass through our lives. And most importantly we raised two strong, independent children who became good, interesting adults.

It’s been quite a run.

Through it all, at the center of it, there we were, two people making a life together.

We celebrate these things when we have time for them. Last night we went out to dinner. At some point we’ll plan some traveling. Not sure where, but we’ll go. And this week Oliver and Lauren will come home for the holiday. There will be good food and good company and if there is any better way to celebrate an anniversary I couldn’t tell you what it would be.

Here’s to the first thirty years, and may the next thirty be just as lovely.

Happy anniversary to us!

Let There Be Lights

We’ve lived much of the past few months as if our entire physical lives were covered by one big warranty that expired on Memorial Day.

I had to replace my Water-Pik, the tires on my car, and the blinds on multiple windows. We have a new water softener – a necessity in a place that gets its water filtered through a thousand feet of limestone bedrock – and all of the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom has been flushed out. I’ve put in four showerheads since the spring semester ended, though the latest one seems to be working just fine. I managed to fix the dehumidifier in the basement, much to my surprise, and Kim fixed both of the toilets we own. In October our microwave died a noisy but mercifully abrupt and self-contained death and now we have a new one that is deeper but about half as tall so we can cook things that are wide but not high. Last week the control panel on the oven decided not to let us turn the oven off for a while but we’ve known that it was possessed since we bought it – it would periodically emit loud beeping noises and briefly show 666 on the clock face before returning to the usual display and I’m genuinely not making that up – so it really didn’t surprise us much. The appliance guy is coming to fix that next week, though whether he brings screwdrivers or a crucifix will be interesting. Could be both! Why not both. A book I purchased turned out to have printing errors that repeated some paragraphs and deleted others and while Amazon (politely) told me to pound sand the publisher was more reasonable about it and I may have a replacement next week if all goes well.

The cat is still in good shape, as far as we know, and that has to count for something.

My goal when it comes to home repair projects is always to pay other people to fix things, as I have a difficult and unfriendly relationship with the physical world and I dislike those projects with a consuming and deeply immature passion. I know other people enjoy such things but to me they’re just dentistry – probably good for me in the long run, but unpleasant experiences nonetheless. Plus, if I pay someone with actual expertise there is always the possibility that they will be done correctly.

This is often more of an aspiration than a practical reality, though, so all too often I have to put on my Homeowner Hat and try to figure out what exactly the instructions for this project mean in real terms and how I can actually carry them out without injuring either myself, the people around me, or the thing I’m trying to fix. More and more these days I wish I were more of a drinking man, but so it goes.

Last weekend I ended up doing not one but actually two of these home repair projects, both of which involved putting in new light fixtures. Getting this done was, as always in these cases, problematic, but so far nothing has burned down and I’m going to call that a win on points.

On Saturday I replaced the light fixture on the outside of the garage.

We’d had a friend install one when he put in the garage door openers a quarter century ago, and it served us well for a long time. But the plastic housings had gotten so old and brittle that when I went to put up the usual string of overhead lights that we do every summer – tying one end to the side of the garage, running it over to the awning over the back door and then back to that light fixture – one of the two swiveling light housings just snapped off. The other one still worked, so I figured I’d get to it after I took the overhead lights down, and that finally happened a few weeks ago.

The new fixture is actually pretty nice. It’s got two LED paddles that never need to be replaced and which you can rotate to point pretty much any direction you want, which is all I was looking for, and it installed with only the standard minimum amount of confusion and profanity. It works pretty well and it’s really bright.

What I didn’t realize was there is also an LED ring around the base – a strip about half an inch wide running around a circular base that has a diameter of about eight inches – that lights up at dusk and then stays on the entire night until the sun is well and truly risen. It’s a low, warm light so it’s not like we’re landing planes here, but I’m still not convinced it’s something I want.

Unfortunately, this is the default setting and the only way to change that is to download an app onto my phone, set up an account, and then use that to control the light. I need to log into my garage light, in other words. This is not the future I wanted.

I haven’t decided whether I want to go through that or just live with the nightlight feature. We’ll see.

On Sunday I replaced the ceiling fan fixture in our bedroom.

The old one had been there for long enough that it was starting to thump and whinge whenever we turned it on, and we could never quite be bothered to find matching light bulbs for it so it had four differently-shaped bulbs in it as well as one empty socket that pointed directly at our heads in bed and gave us too much glare so we took the bulb out. Plus the paddles were very long, and every time I forgot they were there and tried to put on a shirt I’d end up punching one. The new fixture looks like a roomba. It’s got an LED ring around it that's maybe three fingers wide, and in the center it has some short but high-velocity fan blades that put out a fair amount of wind.

This project took slightly more than the standard amount of confusion and profanity to install, as well as an emergency trip to the hardware store to deal with the fact that the ceiling box was half an inch too small for the fixture so I needed to get an adapter.

The light has a lot of different settings. You can vary the brightness, from Expensive Restaurant Dim to Airport Runway Bright. You can also shade it from cool to warm. And, it turns out, it has a Disco Night setting where the light will cycle through colors ranging from blood red to deep blue to vibrantly green, with occasional stops at white light just long enough to keep your eyes from adjusting to the darker colors.

We found out about the Disco Night setting by accident – there’s a button on the little remote that came with the light and Kim was playing around with it to see what would happen – and now we’re stuck with it. We cannot turn it off. The remote will no longer talk to the light for some reason, and there are no controls whatsoever on the light itself. The only way you can control it, other than turning it off completely with the wall switch, is through the remote.

I suppose I should be grateful that it’s not an app.

So right now that is unusable and we’re waiting to find a time where their service center is open and we are not actually at work.

At some point we will just get oil lanterns and be done with it.

The Further Adventures of Lauren - Coming Home

All good things must come to an end, and as the summer started to turn toward autumn and graduate classes loomed on the horizon, so too did Lauren’s grand tour wind down.

This took a bit, since the temptation to stay in Southeast Asia was strong and the intransigence of the travel company that she’d been working with made rebooking her flight home inordinately more complicated than it needed to be. They eventually refunded about half of her money for a flight that didn’t work out – a long and hard-fought battle that ended sometime in October – and Lauren found another flight to Chicago that would arrive from the west on August 26, more than ten weeks after she’d left O’Hare headed east.

She and Shai traveled from Siem Reap back to Phnom Penh and said their goodbyes, and then Lauren flew off to Taiwan where she had a fairly lengthy layover before her connecting flight. This, it turned out, was not the problem it might have been in most airports around the world as the good people of Taipei understood the assignment when it came to airports.

“Taipei airport has lapped Stockholm Arlanda” Lauren reported from the scene. “Each gate is themed, bathrooms are immaculate (heated seats, multiple kinds of bidets); food is amazing and cheap; food court is themed like a Chinese village.” On top of that the wifi was free and faster than at home and – perhaps the greatest thing of all – there were outlets pretty much everywhere. You can’t ask for much more than that out of an airport.

Also, for some reason, sarsaparilla is very popular in Taiwan and sold pretty much everywhere in the Taipei airport. I don’t remember the last time I saw it here in the US, but if you’ve got a hankerin’ for some, partner, the place to go for a cold, refreshing sarsaparilla is not some sepia-toned Old West saloon but a vending machine in the Departures area of Taiwan’s biggest airport. It’s a strange old world, it is.

So hats off to the Taiwanese for sticking the landing (and takeoff) here.

One of the wonders of the modern age is the fact that with a simple app on your phone you can track pretty much any flight in the world. This never fails to amaze me, particularly as a historian who spends a fair amount of time in my classes emphasizing how slowly everything moved prior to about the early 1800s. For most of human history we lived in a three mile per hour world, where nothing – not people, not goods, and not information – moved faster than that over any appreciable distance. That’s the walking speed of the average adult. That’s how fast a horse moves over long distances. That’s the speed of a sailing ship. 3mph. 5kph. That’s how it was from the first time our species evolved out of whatever preceded it right up to the invention of the steam locomotive in the early 1800s.

Now? I can pull out the tiny little computer in my pocket that masquerades as a phone even though nobody uses it as one, tap on an even tinier icon on the screen, squint a bit, and follow a traveler flying high above the Pacific Ocean at hundreds of miles per hour, and I can do it in real time.

Amazing.

If you have never picked someone up at O’Hare, it’s an experience. They do the best they can to make it work, but a) it’s one of the busiest airports in the world and there is no arrival time you can choose that will not have you grinding your way through traffic to get where you want to go, and b) everything within an hour of the airport is under construction and has been since they rebuilt the city after the Great Fire.

Nevertheless, I successfully found my way to the cell phone lot and settled in. Lauren’s flight landed. Customs were cleared and bags picked up and eventually I found her waiting outside of the Arrivals area and we headed back to Wisconsin, stopping only to get some direly unhealthy American roadside food along the way because welcome home, weary traveler! 

There are a few postscripts to this story.

For one, when we asked Lauren what she wanted for her first dinner after arriving back home she immediately replied “Mexican!” and this is absolutely correct. The rest of the world beyond Mexico and its neighbors, for all of its culinary marvels, is sorely lacking in quality Mexican food whereas we here in Our Little Town have not only all of the finest chain restaurants in America but also some surprisingly good real Mexican food.

For another, now that she was back in the Land of In-Network Insurance Coverage – a uniquely and disturbingly American concept – Lauren went to the local Urgent Care to have her fingers looked at. Apparently she became the star of the Urgent Care as people there were fascinated by the story of how she ended up in this condition. It’s probably not a story they’ve heard much here in Our Little Town in Wisconsin. Her fingers continue to heal.

She also got reacquainted with the cat, who was glad to see her. Midgie is always glad to see her people.

Lauren’s flight landed almost exactly a week before her classes were scheduled to start and I sort of expected her to sleep for most of that week before heading up to campus, but it is easy to forget the recuperative powers of the young when you are no longer part of that demographic and she went back to campus after only a couple of days. Not long after that Arden came to visit and they had a good time together rattling around Main Campus University. They also came down to see us and share a meal and we got to hear more of the stories that way. It was a lovely evening.

And finally, not long after Lauren went back to her apartment near campus, I went up as well and we did a major Costco resupply run since groceries were probably not something that she’d had much time to acquire in those intervening days. On the way back to her apartment we decided to stop for lunch at a Thai restaurant, and it turns out that the owners are from Chang Mai so they had a good time talking with Lauren and hearing her experiences in their hometown. It was really good food, too.

The world is a big and exciting place but it can be very small and welcoming as well.

It is good to travel, to see and experience new things. It is good to come home. It will be good to travel again.

Welcome home, Lauren.

The Further Adventures of Lauren - Cambodia

Cambodia wasn’t on Lauren’s original plan for this trip, but it ended up being one of her favorite countries. This is particularly noteworthy given how her time there started.

She and Shai took a bus from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh, beating her Vietnamese visa’s expiration by mere hours, and their first day there passed pretty uneventfully. They had another hostel friend with them, and they went out a bit and explored the city and the surrounding area. She ate a lot of fish amok and lok lak beef while she was in Cambodia, both of which she reported as being very good. I tried to make lok lak beef in September and I have to say that even though it wasn’t what you’d get in Cambodia it was really tasty, and when I sent a photo of it to Lauren she said it looked like it was at least within hailing distance of the real thing, so now I have a project.

Not all of the food in Cambodia was a hit, though. Toward the end of Lauren’s time in that country she and Shai made their way to Siem Reap and were cruising through a market looking for something to eat when they found what appeared to be hard boiled eggs for sale. Lauren bought one and quickly discovered that looks were deceiving and there was a fully-formed duck embryo inside. This probably would not have come as a surprise to a native Cambodian, but it did for Lauren.

At some point even the most adventurous soul will discover their limits, and this turned out to be one of Lauren’s. I asked her what she did once she made this discovery and she said, “Looked sad, then disposed.” And you know, I get that.

Lauren’s second day in Phnom Penh was something of a challenge.

The first thing you need to know about this challenge is that while she was in Vietnam Lauren took the opportunity to get her nails done, and it has to be said that they did a very good job of it. Probably too good, as events would prove. But they looked nice and that has to count for something.

The second thing that you need to know is that Lauren, Shai, and their other hostel friend went to a small playground in Phnom Penh and were having fun on the equipment when Lauren fell and got her hand caught in something on the way down, the end result of that being that she mostly ripped off two of the new nails from her right hand. And because the nails she had done in Vietnam were glued on there good and tight they ended up taking her real nails and a good chunk of the nail bed with them.

Fortunately Shai managed to procure a tuk-tuk ambulance to take them to a nearby clinic, where Lauren got to experience Cambodian medicine firsthand.

The first thing the doctor asked her was whether she was up to date on her tetanus shots, as he couldn’t really vouch for the safety of any of the equipment that way. A quick look at MyChart proved unproductive as it didn’t really want to work in Cambodia, so Lauren checked with Kim – Cambodia is 12 hours ahead of Wisconsin and the timing worked out well that way – who reported that yes, she was. She was thus cleared to have the doctor use his finest medical equipment (a pair of pliers) to remove the nails completely.

There were two issues with this.

First, one of Lauren’s inheritances from my side of the family is a fairly strong resistance to anesthesia. If you’re going to numb us up or knock us out you need to give us about half again the dose and wait about twice as long for it to kick in, otherwise you might as well not bother. This is not a concept that Lauren was able to get across to the doctor in that moment, and that meant that Lauren essentially went through the procedure raw. “I understand why they use this as a torture method,” she told us later. 

After it was all over and she was telling us the full story – always the safest time to pass along stories like this – she said, “I miss American medicine; I woulda been put down like a damn dog and given opiods. All I got was a bill and Tylenol.” Fortunately Shai stayed with her the whole time and was a comfort in time of need, which is a very good thing to say about someone. He also helped her change the bandages for the rest of their time in Cambodia – a delicate procedure, and a further sign of good character.

The second issue was that the process of removing the two nails was sufficiently heinous that the doctor actually fainted halfway through and Lauren got to see the nurses drag him out, feet scraping the floor, into the hallway until he revived. It all worked out in the end, but at the time that cannot have been reassuring.

But she got through it all sufficiently well that she was able to negotiate the bill down by about 50% before leaving. The whole thing – which in the US probably would have cost more than my car – ended up being about $200 all told, and pretty soon they were back in a tuk-tuk heading toward the hostel. She spent the rest of the trip giving little “V for Victory!” signs to everyone, and that’s just how it goes.

They didn’t stay too long in Phnom Penh after that. Their main goal in Cambodia was to get up to Siem Reap, a little over 300km away, where the temples of Angkor Wat are located. 

Angkor Wat basically translates as “City of Temples,” and it is one of the most astonishing places on earth. The temple complex dates back to the 12th century CE, and at one time it had a population of about 800,000 people – bigger than London and Rome combined at the time. Everywhere you look there are temples, all set in an impossibly gorgeous location. Lauren and Shai bought a three-day pass to the place knowing full well that this wouldn’t nearly be enough time to explore it all, but they gave it their best shot.

You’re allowed to get pretty much right up onto many of the temples, apparently, and they’re amazing to see up close.

And if you’re lucky, there will be rainbows.

It took me a bit to figure out the trick to this photo, though in hindsight it probably shouldn’t have. Pay attention to the carved figure to the left of Lauren and suddenly it all makes sense. History is supposed to be fun, after all.

It has to be said that no matter where you go in this world, however many oceans and time zones you put between here and there, you cannot escape Wisconsin. Not fully. We’re everywhere.

There’s more to do in Siem Reap than the temples, though, and Lauren and Shai spent some time at the APOPO Visitor Center.

One of the things that most Americans forget these days is that the American war in Southeast Asia was not confined to Vietnam. It spilled over into neutral Laos, for example, and it very much encompassed Cambodia – a country that was also not officially part of the war but on which the US dropped millions of bombs anyway. The 1970 protest at Kent State that ended with the Ohio National Guard panicking and randomly shooting four people to death was a response to US attacks in Cambodia, not Vietnam. 

When I teach the Vietnam War in my classes I make a point of discussing this and it always comes as news to my students, most of whom honestly don’t know about the war in Vietnam either since it ended more than thirty years before they were born and was something that their grandparents’ generation did. Spreading the war into Cambodia was a deliberate policy formulated by the Nixon administration – particularly by his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger – to try to pressure North Vietnam into ending the war, and it worked about as well as you’d think such a bizarre idea would work, which is to say not at all.

The bombings, overt actions by American troops and covert operations carried out by the United States were so intense and excessive that they destabilized Cambodia enough to lead to the Khmer Rouge taking over in 1975 and if you’ve ever seen the old movie The Killing Fields you know what a bunch of raging sociopaths the Khmer Rouge were. Fully a third of the Cambodian population were slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge and the responsibility for that ultimately rests with the United States. This is something that Americans should know, but don’t. The ones who do know understand what it means to be incandescent with rage at the actions of one’s own government even decades after the fact, or at least they should be. Ultimately it took an invasion by Vietnam in 1979 to get rid of them.

One of the consequences of all of this is that Cambodia is littered with old land mines and unexploded munitions that continue to kill people even today. The folks at APOPO train African pouched rats to detect landmines and other unexploded ordinance in ways that are safer, faster, more efficient and more effective than having human beings do that job, and they’ve since expanded their operations around the world. They’re also expanding into training the rats to help detect tuberculosis in human patients. They’re a worthwhile group, in other words, and their Visitor Center is just a quick ride from downtown Siem Reap. If you go they’ll let you pet the retired rats they have on site.

Lauren sent us a lot of photos on her travels and I enjoyed seeing every single one of them. It’s hard to choose a favorite out of all of them, but I think this one might be it. It was taken somewhere near Siem Reap, and I think it captures something about both Lauren and the trip as a whole that I really love.