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Romney's Rambler legacy [View all]
Memories of a junky car cause one vet to ponder whether George Romney's son, Mitt, would do any better serving the nation's poorer classes.
By Jeff Danziger
February 23, 2012
Jeff Danziger's editorial cartoons appear in The Times and other newspapers.
I was stationed at Ft. Bliss, Texas, in 1968 for a year at an Army language school learning Vietnamese. During the breaks in the endless memorization of the endless monosyllabic vocabulary, we would escape over the border to Juarez, Mexico, or out into the wasteland of west Texas to reclaim a bit of sanity. I met a family through a church group that invited me to their ranch on weekends. And I still bless them for their thoughtfulness.
The grand dame of the family was a wonderful Texas horsewoman who always needed work done around the place. I recruited one or two fellow soldiers, and we spent the weekends building hay shelters and fixing the barns and exercising her quarter horses. She had a garden where fresh chili peppers grew in abundance the year around, and she made the best chili rellenos on the planet.
I was fairly good at the language school, but many of the other troops were not. Vietnamese is a tonal language, spoken in a sing-song, up-and-down sort of way. One wrong tone and you've changed the meaning completely. It's a hard language for Americans. For draftees, hoping to forestall reassignment to the infantry, it was a struggle. I helped some of the other soldiers, not always for charitable reasons. One hopeless fellow turned out to be passable barber; another had family in El Paso that would feed us dinner; a third had the best of all trading materials: a car.
More: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-danziger-rambler-20120223,0,4469233.story
By Jeff Danziger
February 23, 2012
Jeff Danziger's editorial cartoons appear in The Times and other newspapers.
I was stationed at Ft. Bliss, Texas, in 1968 for a year at an Army language school learning Vietnamese. During the breaks in the endless memorization of the endless monosyllabic vocabulary, we would escape over the border to Juarez, Mexico, or out into the wasteland of west Texas to reclaim a bit of sanity. I met a family through a church group that invited me to their ranch on weekends. And I still bless them for their thoughtfulness.
The grand dame of the family was a wonderful Texas horsewoman who always needed work done around the place. I recruited one or two fellow soldiers, and we spent the weekends building hay shelters and fixing the barns and exercising her quarter horses. She had a garden where fresh chili peppers grew in abundance the year around, and she made the best chili rellenos on the planet.
I was fairly good at the language school, but many of the other troops were not. Vietnamese is a tonal language, spoken in a sing-song, up-and-down sort of way. One wrong tone and you've changed the meaning completely. It's a hard language for Americans. For draftees, hoping to forestall reassignment to the infantry, it was a struggle. I helped some of the other soldiers, not always for charitable reasons. One hopeless fellow turned out to be passable barber; another had family in El Paso that would feed us dinner; a third had the best of all trading materials: a car.
More: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-danziger-rambler-20120223,0,4469233.story
Good read on the Mittens family legacy!
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