Late in the summer, I took the boys to an old stomping ground.

In the course of all our camping, we got accosted by this guy. The wind was blowing the scent of our picnic right toward him and you could really see his nose dissecting the air as he approached us. He wasn't one bit afraid but I think the dogs barking finally sent him in the other direction.

Later in the summer of last year, we bought a small fishing boat and spent some time in it. We never caught any fish with it though and this year we hardly used it because it just didn’t seem to work with our trips.

Right after we got it, we took it for a spin on our pond

So we loaded it up and headed out....

And then we took the new boat out on Fallen Leaf Lake

But after we didn't catch any fish we just hung out with the family.

Play hard, play hard. You know how it is...

Here are just a couple of experiences from the Spring of 2008 that I didn’t write about:

Colin shot a bullseye on the archery range at cub scout camp.

I don't know why I wore my uniform home. I must have been running late and wanted to come straight home without taking the time to change. When the kids saw me, you would have thought they never saw the uniform before. So we all took a picture together. They were wearing boxers because they were getting ready for bed.

Colin and his buddy William riding bikes in the Sly Park campground

It was little league night at the River Cats.... about 105 degrees and we were all dying!

We were studying "botany" and we called this meal the feast of the angiosperms because everything we ate came from an angiosperm.

I took Colin and CJ skiing yesterday. Since I am way too tight to pay for lessons when they cost about $100 each, I resolved to teach them myself. So we went skiing a week ago and then we went again yesterday, with me acting as instructor. The first time was a little rough, trying to teach two at one time, but we managed and it was good enough that they were dying to go again.

Yesterday, I set low goals. I told myself if CJ made it all the way down the mountain one time without falling, and Colin even dared to ski a little ways without me holding onto his harness, it would be a successful day. 

CJ made it down without falling on the second run of the day and Colin was skiing completely alone all the way down by himself before lunch. He even made it all the way down a few times without falling.

I don’t think I would have been nearly as successful at teaching them if I wasn’t in such good shape from running. By being in shape, I was able stay on top of the game, keep it positive, and this made it go great.The only problem is now I have to figure out how to factor about one day per week of skiing into my American River 50 Mile Endurance Run training plan!

I figured out a few small “tricks” along the way that seemed to help a lot. If your teaching little kids to ski, let me know and I’ll send you my thoughts.

Back in the day, when I was a young twenty-something with no one but myself to spend money on, I took my vacations in the winter and went skiing somewhere in the world every year. With no idea of what parenthood would be like, I looked forward to skiing with my kids someday. Yesterday, as I stood at the top of the hill and watched them ski all the way down by themselves, I thought that I had arrived.

The plan had come together. It was my best fatherhood day ever.

Here is one:

That’s lake Tahoe in the background. We are on the porch at the lodge at the top of Sierra Ski Resort.

Here is another:

Getting these guys ready for skiing usually takes me about 30 minutes in the parking lot. But what is the trade-off? Them being old enough to get all that stuff on themselves? When that happens, they probably won’t want to ski with me anymore!

Here are a couple more photos from the new camera. I liked these a little larger so I couldn’t bring them into the blog without screwing up the whole page. You have to click to see them separately:

Pict 1

Pict 2  (This was the coldest day these two guys have ever seen….)

Pict 3

I plucked the boys out of school at 11AM and we were in the lift line by 12:30. Luckily, there really wasn’t any lift line. We zipped right on. My goal was to get down the mountain three times. The first trip down, it kinda looked like I may not achieve my goal since it was two on one, me trying to teach them both to ski. It wasn’t going well.

Then I finally took their poles away and it went WAY better from there. Skis and poles were just too much for them to worry about. Once the poles were out of the equation we only had to worry about skis. I ditched the poles by the lodge and we all three skied without. The first few trips down they both clung to me and I skied while they got the feel of it. It’s kinda hard to ski with a 53 pound weight on your right leg and a 63 pound weight on your left leg! This is what it looked like:

After awhile CJ got a little more confident and stopped clinging to me. He didn’t make it down the hill ever without a few good falls but he made some wonderful progress. I think we got about 9 runs in. I quit counting at 7 and I think we had two more after that. Colin hung on to me all day and that was fine. He says he isn’t going to try to ski by himself until he is six, but I have a feeling I will be skiing with just my own weight to worry about by the time we finish our next day… which is likely to be next Sunday.

As we ran, I noticed one of them was wearing socks with a USMC logo, so I asked him about them. He told me he got them at the Marine Corps Marathon and since I had just run that marathon a few weeks before, the conversation took off. He turned out to be Ken Crouse, husband of Ellen Crouse. (Ellen was the race director for the 2007 Run On The Sly.)

It turned out both Ken and I were Marines about a decade apart, him during Vietnam and me during peace. Since his experience was much more exciting than mine, I was interested to hear about it. I have said before that I think trail runners tend to have unusual depth of character. Over the course of a couple miles I learned that this trail runner was actually one of the very last Marines out of Vietnam when Saigon fell on April 29th of 1975. He explained how a small group of Marines provided cover for the helicopter landing area.

In keeping with Marine Corps custom, some of those courageous Marines were rewarded for their bravery by being thrust into an even worse situation. They were actually left “stranded” in Vietnam. The helicopters performing the evacuations were getting pounded by so much enemy fire, they eventually didn’t come back at all.

An American reporter named Roy Rowan was one of the people evacuated that day so long ago. In 2000 he returned to Vietnam to retrace his steps. In an article that appeared in Fortune Magazine, Rowan described what he saw that day by writing:

For the next 15 hours on that sweltering April 29, 1975, lumbering Sikorsky helicopters packed with evacuees shuttled back and forth from the embassy roof and the parking lot at Tan Son Nhut air base to a U.S. Navy flotilla cruising off the coast.

When I finally reached the air base on the western edge of the city, pillars of black rose from the hangars. Seconds later, a tremendous explosion shook the ground as a North Vietnamese shell hit the terminal building where we were supposed to await our turn to fly out.

Hundreds of U.S. flak-jacketed Marines, lying prone on the ground, ringed the helicopter pad. They were hard to see because their camouflaged uniforms blended with the tropical greenery. I almost tripped on a rifle barrel poking out from under a bush as I raced for one of the Sikorsky Sea Stallions, its ramp down and its rotors slashing the air impatiently.

Young Ken Crouse was amongst those Marines performing similar duties at the American Embassy. You can read his own words here. He was evacuated aboard one of the very last helicopters. He told me it probably wasn’t the last helicopter to lift off from Vietnam, but it was definitely one of the last three.

When the helicopters quit returning, a small group of Marines from the Can Tho Detachment was stranded. They worked their way to the coast, got boats, and transported themselves out to the fleet. I had never heard about this before, which is kind of unusual among Marines. Usually stories like this become legend in the Corps. Maybe it has just taken this long for the story to be told.

The last two casualties of the Vietnam War were both Marines assigned to the embassy security detachment who had been detailed to provide security at the Tan Son Nhut air base. At about 4 AM, a rocket landed between Lance Corporal Darwin L. Judge and Corporal Charles McMahon. Their bodies were not recovered from Vietnam until 1976. Lance Corporal Judge was a classmate with Crouse at Marine Security Guard School in Virginia.

Nowadays, Crouse resides in Northern California. He has run the Western States 100 Mile Endurance run, and he occasionally provides comments to online running forums, usually signing on under some variation of the screen name “Saigon 1975”. 

Fast-forward almost a full year… to last week when I attended the funeral of a 37 year old Sheriff’s Deputy who was killed in Sacramento on December 19th. The Sheriff’s deputy had something in common with Crouse. He was there in Saigon on April 29th, 1975. At five years old, Vu Nguyen was loaded on an American helicopter by US Marines and evacuated out of the country to a ship off the coast along with his seven brothers and sisters.

There were a lot of people evacuated that day. The thing that caused me to think about Nguyen and Crouse in such a connected way was this: During the funeral, several of the speakers made a point to mention that the helicopter that evacuated young Vu Nguyen did not return to Saigon again after it landed aboard the ship. It had taken so much incoming fire as it left Saigon that it could not return, leaving those Marines Crouse told me about to fend for themselves.

In the years that followed, Nguyen lived his life in a way that honored the courageous sacrifices made by those Marines on April 29th, 1975. He graduated from California State University with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. Then he graduated from the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Academy, with the distinction of being the most outstanding recruit in his class.

There are traditionally four awards given at the police academy graduation. They are Best Overall Academic Score, Best Overall Range Score, Most Inspirational Cadet, and Outstanding Cadet. Nguyen received three of the four, including Best Overall Academic Score, Most Inspirational Cadet, and Outstanding Cadet. In Marine-speak, Nguyen was the “Honor Man”.

On December 19th, 2007, Nguyen made a vehicle stop on a gangster he recognized. The driver fled on foot and Nguyen gave chase. During the foot pursuit, Nguyen was shot in the neck. He died from that wound.
 
At the funeral, Sacramento County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Mark Iwasa said this about him: “Honor… For some, it is something you do… For others, it is something you say… For Detective Vu Nguyen, it was simply who he was.”

Sheriff John McGinness said this: “In an instant, his valor cost him his life.”

By the grace of God and a few United States Marines Vu Nguyen escaped from Vietnam with his life. And then he willingly gave that life in service to the citizens of the United States.

Every man dies. Not every man truly lives.

It all struck me hard.

Slideshow Tribute 

Ken Crouse’s Story

Video from Saigon 

If you cared enough to read all that, read this.

At least Colin loved it. I asked him to smile at me so I could take his picture and he snapped angrily back that he was DRIVING!

I wonder where he got that from?

Anyway, the best part to me is the last minute. It was the minute that mattered the most!

Video Link Here