.Friday Firesmith

Friday Firesmith – Gonzo, the God of Thunder!

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The one thing I never got used to in the Army was you could wake up one day and be living in the same room as a complete stranger. Okay, that was also one of the things that were cool, but I got stuck with a cigarette smoker once, and damn.

Some guys from another platoon got stuck with Gonzales. “Gonzo,” was his nickname quickly, and it was hard to pin down at first, I mean, other than his last name, but after a while, we realized Gonzo was doing a good job at hiding a few, uh, quirks.

Okay, here’s an interesting tidbit. The Army had this contest for “Soldier of the Year,” and to get there you had to get Soldier of the Month, Soldier of the Quarter, and Soldier of the Day After a Three Day Weekend and Not Be Hungover. Basically, Soldier Of Meant you wore your dress uniform well and could answer a lot of Army based trivia.

Gonzo missed Soldier of the Year by one slot. He came in second.

Hang onto that one, okay?

Stationed in South Georgia meant guys from other parts of the world, and Gonzo was from Salt Lake City, had never seen a thunderstorm like we have, with thunderbolts and lightning. Gonzo came unglued. Lightning freaked him out. His room dogs told the story of Gonzo yelling at God to stop it, and locking himself in the bathroom while screaming.

Then there was the Sergeant Murrey Incident. Murrey was one of those guys who was not only a lifer, but thought everyone else ought to be, too. You cut him, and Sgt. Murrey bled Olive Drab green. We were out in the field one night, and Murrey got us lost on tank trails, just Murrey and me, and he had no idea what to do next. Finally, I started marking intersections with cans to show him we were going around in circles.

But we got back to the perimeter late. The password had expired and yay! Gonzo was manning the gate. He wouldn’t let us in. Murrey “ordered” Gonzo to let us in. Gonzo refused. Murrey started to step over the Concertina Wire barrier and Gonzo flipped his M-16 around and was about to swing away at Murrey’s head.

With Murrey screaming at Gonzo, and Gonzo screaming back, half the battalion woke up, crawled out of their tents, and eventually, someone came over to me and asked what the problem was, and gave me the password. I yelled the password out to Gonzo and he grabbed the wire and let us in. Murrey wasn’t done. He wanted Gonzo written up. But the rules were rules and Gonzo had followed them. Murrey was scolded and he never got over it.

Gonzo went on to grab second place in Soldier of the Year, and he took a couple of weeks off to spend with his family in Utah. We never saw him again. He stripped down to his underwear in a shopping mall and ran screaming through the place until the cops came, ran him down, tackled him, and arrested him.

I never got used to living with some of the people the Army stuck me with, but I’ve never run out of writing material.

Take Care,

Mike

friday Firesmith – Let sleeping kids lie

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Back in the late 1900s, the house across the street from me sat vacant and unsold for years. It was empty when I arrived, and for a brief couple of months a family moved in and then they were gone. I never met them. Here in South Georgia, you mow once a week if you don’t want the grass to become sentient and hostile. The month of July means the grass grows so fast you can watch it seethe out of the ground. The realtor that was trying to sell the empty house had someone mow the grass once a week, and for reasons I cannot explain, the guy mowed it at ten at night. He had this huge ass mower and mounted a light on the front of it that looked like the rising sun. The next morning, it looked like zombies with blades on their feet had passed through. The mowing was rushed and even using the spotlight from a German Air Raid Defense Unit bolted to the mower, it looked like the guy was half blind, half drunk, or flat didn’t care. The neighbor who lived in the house behind mine wasn’t a big fan of the noise, the light, or the fact shoddy mowing made that house look like crack addicts lived in it. He came over one afternoon and asked me if there was anything legal we could do.Legal? Gosh, legal never really occurred to me, actually. But his wife went to speak to the realty company and told them the kids had to be in bed by nine, and having someone that sounded like a crop duster operating past ten at night was not something she, or anyone else, cared to endure. Two days later, the guy shows up at 10:30, and he leaves the music playing in his truck as he mows. Loud music. A friend of mine worked at a machine shop, and one of their more frequent work requests was shorting signposts manufactured out of steel pipe. They had quite the collection of round pieces of pipe that were two or three inches in diameter and four or five inches long. The next time Monster Mower showed up, at 10:30, my neighbor and I got a six pack and sat on his porch and listened to the sound of metal against metal as the guy hit one after another. Finally, he stopped, got off the mower and rode with the blades off, looking for the offending pieces. He found most of them and threw them into the back of his truck, and mowed on. We walked over and took them out of the back of the truck and tossed them into the back yard. He started hitting them again, hunted them down again, then as he was putting them into the truck, realized what had happened. He looked around and saw two men raising their beers to him. He loaded up and left, for good. The next day one of the local cops arrived to issue us a strongly worded scolding. He came back after hours to drink with us. But at nine o’clock, we called it a night. The kids were getting ready for bed.

Take Care,Mike

Friday Firesmith – 4th of July

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As we celebrate the 4th of July, I consider the origin of the war that brought this nation into being. The “shot heard around the world” was fired on 19 April,1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence.

The British considered the colonies as part of England and subject to rule by King George III, and most colonists did as well. But in two small villages in Massachusetts, Lexington and Concord, locals had begun to build up a supply of rifles and gunpowder. The British heard about this, and decided a show of strength was in order to seize the weapons and put an end to any thoughts of rebellion.

As soon as the British began their advance, five riders were sent out, Paul Revere, Samuel Prescott, Israel Bissell, William Dawes, and Sybil Ludington.The countryside was raised against the Redcoats, yet they were not fully aware of what was happening.

Just before dawn on 19 April, 1775, seven hundred British troops arrive at the village of Lexington, and sweep past the local resistance and kill seven or eight men, including the local militia leader. Emboldened by their success, they march on Concord, pass through but then discover close to five hundred “Minute Men” have taken positions all around them.

The Brits retreat, while the Minute Men advance, and the “shot heard around the world” is fired.

From that point, the British are in an orderly retreat in as much as they can be, and the locals are firing from behind trees and from higher ground.  The British suffer horribly on their way back to Boston and the first battle is an American victory.

The idea that a group of ill-trained rebels can take on the best army in the world and beat them should have told the British military something of the nature of warfare against the colonists, but no one thought the war would last very long and there was no doubt the regular British Army would do anything but crush the rebellion.

The war would grind on for eight more years. The British were bled white by the Colonial Army as increasingly, George Washington realized he did not have to win the war, but only not lose it.

In 1781, the British suffered a major defeat at Cowpens, South Carolina, and many on both sides, saw this as the beginning of the end. The French Fleet destroyed the British in September of 1783. British forces trapped by Washington at Yorktown Virginiaand by October of 1783, the British had nothing they could do but surrender.

The Fourth of July, 1776 was not the end of British rule but rather the beginning of the fight against it. Yet during the seven years between those two dates, Americans from thirteen different colonies came together as one to throw off the yoke of the most powerful country on earth.

This brief and very condensed version of events, should in no way diminish the idea that unity of a people, not force of arms, is what made the most difference in a nation who would be free.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Summer of 2025

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It’s with great difficulty I come to terms this summer is less than a week old. My plants

are dying from the heat. That’s the bad news. The good news is the water from the previous two

years is finally drying up. The pond is going with it. That would be the body of water that for the

last twenty-five years has been a body of weeds.

All over America the heat is rising. Roads are buckling under the heat, and Interstates are

closing due. They’ll have to do the repairs at night I imagine. I spent twenty-seven years doing

bridge and highway work, and it’s brutal in this sort of weather to try to work.

In 1997, we hit a spell where it was brutally hot but this was in August. They sent a

nineteen-year-old new hire out to learn a few things from me, and the first thing he learned was

we were not going to sit in the truck. We had shit to do.

This guy had poked fun at me for a while for being “old.”

He bragged he could put up with the heat much longer than I could, and when I got out of

the truck, and took the keys with me, he wasn’t daunted. After about an hour he had drank all the

water he brought with him. He was sweating, but still not giving in. About an hour later, he

wanted to sit in the truck and cool off. I told him he had to do ten pushups for every minute he

spent sitting in the AC. I did fifty. I told him I was going to check on a few things and I would be

back soon. I walked away. He freaked out.

An hour later he was in full panic mode. Three hours in direct sunlight next to an asphalt

operation and he was wilting. He wanted to call someone in the office to come get him but cell

phones hadn’t taken over the world yet. He tried to get the contractor to let him sit in his truck

and no.

Red faced and not sweating anymore, I was getting worried about him. He told me he

quit and wanted me to take him in. I dropped him off at a pay phone and waited until I was sure

someone was on the way. He looked bad.

When I got back the asphalt crew had quit. Not finished for the day, but mutinied. Out of

twelve men, ten of them had gotten into the work van and left. It was three in the afternoon. I

stopped by a bridge project and got into the water with my work clothes on. Spring Creek is cold

and clear and I soaked for a while.

The young man went back to the office and told them I was horrible and had tortured

him. When I got back, clothes already drying, I told them he had quit, and refused to work. They

didn’t so much as slap his wrist. Later, I found out the actual temperature was over 100 degrees

and the heat index over 110.

They don’t make teenagers like they used to. But the heat is getting worse every summer.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – The Destination is not the journey

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We were on the road a little past dawn, headed straight into my past.

I spent the first part of my life in Sowega, and you’d have to be from there to know what it means. Southwest Georgia. So now you’re a native. I also spent a great deal of time working on roads and bridges, so I know places no one else does. Sikes Mill was a quiet place, the Orange Spider Massacre happened there. Wolf Creek was nearby, and I spent a day there once, preparing for an in-house exam.

The turn on County Line Road in Thomas County was where I took to go to a friend’s house, and I’ve never been to Whigham’s main attraction.

I have reached Climax, which is nearby, and sang an Elton John song on Alice Street in Bainbridge.

Heading north from Bainbridge, I saw the house, once a nice house in a nice yard, and now the house is abandoned and the yard a sea of weeds. I met a woman who wanted a ride home so I took her there, we spent some time together, and then none. I remember a lot of weird things in Colquitt, like the man who got a DUI on a riding mower right in front of our paving crew. We had seen him riding past before, and once he turned it over in a ditch so we helped him out. He didn’t spill any of his beer.

A man had a mountain in his yard there, and someone offered to move it and couldn’t.

Steve, a guy I worked with, lost a sheet of paper by the road one day, work related paperwork, and asked me to help him look for it a week later. We went out, stopped, and he walked three feet and found it.

The cypress stump, seven feet across that guarded a well is gone now, the new road ate it.

The guy that lived in a trailer near the road was killed with his brother and three other people in a car wreck in 1980. The trailer is gone now. The hotel I took a woman to in 1982 is still there, and I remember how nervous she was to be in a hotel. She and I were both young, and she had never had sex except in the back of a car or two.

The golf course is a hay field again, and the country club closed, apparently.

New road work done long after I was gone confused the landscape, got rid of a lot of dirt roads, and obliterated landmarks, like the old building where a hamburger place stood. We went there when I was a little kid.

There’s a bypass, and I don’t have to drive through Blakely, where ghosts line up like roadkill on every corner. I don’t have to drive by the house I always thought of as a prison. I don’t have to travel this road but once or twice more in my life, and eventually, I, too, will be forgotten.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – From Russia with love

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Back a few years ago, one of my sister’s friends paid a woman from Russia to move to South Georgia and marry him. He knew what he was getting into, but the woman was drop dead gorgeous. Six feet tall, natural blonde hair, well built, and perfectly willing to give the man what he paid for, she stayed until she got her green card then away she went. The guy said it was the best six months of his life. He’s still living in a single wide trailer behind his parents’ house.She’s running an Only Fans site at fifty bucks per month.

There for years I would get messages from very pretty, and very young, Russian women looking for an American husband. Having a small bank account and an even smaller set of social skills, none of these blue eyed beauties ever gained much ground with me. The older I got the less I was interested in blowing my life’s savings to rent a wife until the paperwork cleared.

Then suddenly, AI appeared on the scene.

Now, I’m getting well crafted messages from women who are perfect in every possible way. Articulate and graceful, they are clearly not from Russia ( or any other country for that matter) and they seem to be totally immersed in all the things I like.

One really strange thing about AI women is their distance between their belly buttons and their nether regions seems to be disproportional. Their arms seem to be too long sometimes, too. Their faces are perfect. Perfectly perfect in such a way that the uncanny valley effect kicks in.

When they ask, “How are you today?” I usually respond with, “A shark bit my leg off.”

There is a pause, and they say, “I hope you are well.”

The mail order brides that were once so common are still there, to be sure. But the thing now seems to be getting a guy talking to a computer with good visuals, and luring him into a sexual relationship that can only be described as handy. And it is working. “Build your own girlfriend”  sites allow you to adjust the woman you want to any specifications. Some allow you to upload a photo so you can get your ex back. I don’t even want to speculate on that one.

I did connect with a woman from Russia, and she was blonde, blue eyed, and she was looking for a way out of that country. But she realized I wasn’t going to marry her, so we had a years long conversation about life here versus life there.

She told me she went out to eastern Russia, where a cave existed with petroglyphs carved into the stone. As she took photos and made sketches of the markings, a bear walked out of the woods and watched her. She knew better than to run, so she kept working and eventually the bear walked away.

Honestly, listening to her talk about that drew me in closer than anything else she ever did.

Take Care,

Mike

friday firesmith – Russia’s burning bombers

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We may never know how many bombers Russia actually lost but from the video footage the answer is certainly, “Plenty.”

Putin has to punish someone inside his security system for this and will. He also must wonder how in the name of Stalin were the drones delivered to the target site, and how long was this planned.

Who, Putin must wonder, planned this?  NATO? The Ukrainians?

Why,Putin must wonder, why did they plan this? One war or the next war?

First Strike Capability is wounded, severely, and retaliatory strikes will be weaker.

Surely, Putin must think, NATO would not invade now, just because Russian defensive capability is diminished.

The Germans and Poles line up on the west, the Finns are a long car drive from Moscow, and NATO comes in from the Ukraine.

Know what’s more difficult than beating American intel being used by Ukraine? How about an American armor division heading to the Crimea backed up by the US Navy using that same species of intel.

And if Putin is as smart as he thinks he is, now, at this very moment, he cannot afford to worry about what he thinks NATO might do, oh no, for now he has to worry about what they are capable of doing.

If they can, is that something Putin will ignore?

Meanwhile, Ukrainian Intelligence seems to be flawless. Perfectly flawless, in fact.

And the Russian military has no way of replacing the bombers for quite some time.

The world of Vladamir Putin just got rattled, hard. Now, he must think of a way to save face, to make sure his security people are punished, make sure there isn’t another box of yellow jackets waiting near his oil fields, and oh by the way, he’s in a war with Ukraine.

President Putin might be on the way out. I could see that happening. What he must do as opposed to what he’s going to do might not look exactly similar.

But I think if there’s more attacks deep, very deep, in Russian territory, Putin is done.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – the raccoon apocalypse tree

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When a raccoon hid in the hollow of a tree in 2016, Marco and Greyson, my sister’s dogs, lost their damn minds. Having a great deal of Black Lab in them, they were hunting dogs and as such, wanted to hunt the raccoon. The raccoon was not amusedand not coming out to play. I dragged the dogs away and the raccoon slipped out and was gone.

The Cousins dogs were returned to my sister back in 2019. The rain came in 2023 and flooded the back of the property.That tree sat in water for nearly two years and finally died.

Yesterday, the 27th of May, I finally took the tree down with a chainsaw, and as always, using a chainsaw can be an adventure.

Dead and hollow, like my dreams of finding romance at my age, the tree offered me an opportunity to watch the trunk splinter and crack, possibly falling apart, and maybe even falling in a direction I could not predict. Videos of this sort of thing are terrifying for those of us who use chainsaws.

I cut the notch and was happy. The notch did not get into the hollow yet looked deep enough to guide the fall in the right direction. As I began the main cut into the truck, opposite the notch, the cutting was easy, too easy, as the hollow offered no resistance. I stopped and drove in two wedges, to keep the tree from settling back on the saw, and to ease it in the direction I wanted it to fall. I cut a few inches more and the wedges began to vibrate. This meant they were loose and the tree was leaning in the right direction. I started cutting again and as soon as the wedges fell out, away I went, saw in hand. The tree began a perfect fall.

And perfect was this all. Then the falling tree caught on the limbs of another tree that had died. For a brief moment in time I looked on and thought to myself, yeah, it can just stay there. I aimed for the woods, the woods I hit, and… then the tree branches holding the felled tree all started snapping. The fell tree began falling again, but the branches that held it up also changed its momentum. The tree kicked back, about ten feet, and had I been standing where I had been cutting this would be a much more interesting story, or last week really would have been the last week. Back ten feet, over three, and it almost got my metal wagon.

When you cut a tree, and it starts falling, you better be moving. Move as far away as you think you should and add ten feet.

Imagine the butt end of that tree hitting you.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Fred and Rose West

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If you’ve never heard of Fred and Rose West, they’re the British couple who murdered at least a dozen people in England back in the late 1900s. There’s an interesting Netflix series on it, three episodes, and you have to wonder how they managed to kill for so long without getting caught.

Couples who are serial killers are rare. Sexual depravity among serial killers is not only common but almost universal. Ted Bundy was the first American serial killer to be loved by the press, and therefore the public, but Bundy’s behavior was sanitized by the press. Even as news stories talked about his soaring intelligence (which wasn’t true) and his ability to charm women (which was overplayed) they left out the necrophilia and cannibalism. Bundy’s undoing may have been an odd form of suicide for he wandered down to Florida and murdered a twelve year old girl. Florida will execute someone for that sort of thing, and Bundy knew it.

Fred West denied his wife, Rose, had anything to do with the murders, and for years they both said he was the sole murderer. She was a prostitute operating out of their home, and Fred liked watching.

While Fred was in prison for a short while, his daughter from a previous marriage was murdered but the body was not found for over twenty years. Fred led them to where the body was hidden, and this is where the story gets even stranger than ever before.

The ten or so women who were murdered, and Fred West confessed to all of the murders, was one thing. But the murder of the eight year old daughter of Fred West and his ex-wife, was pinned on Rose.

No confession, no murder weapon, no cause of death, no witnesses, and no evidence of time of death, yet Rose West was convicted of this murder and nine others. Fred had conveniently committed suicide in prison before the trial.

Do I think Rose was involved in the murders? At the very minimum she had to know about them. The one victim who escaped claimed Rose was a willing partner to rape and attempted murder. Yet that is one witness who did not come forward for over twenty years. No other evidence exists. The bodies buried in their cellar and under their patio speaks to at least one person in the house knowing what happened, and Fred West confessed to all the murders. Both he and Rose said she had nothing to do with it.

In an American court of law, Rose either walks free or gets out on appeal. In a jury box, if given the lack of evidence against her, and also given that Fred defended her until the trial began, you’d find one, maybe more, jurors unable to pull the trigger on Rose.

I think she was 100% guilty. But I also think they didn’t prove it. The members of the jury simply refused to believe a woman lived in the same house with a killer who buried bodies in their basement yet never knew what was going on. I refuse to believe it, too.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Seventeen Dog Years

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“Are you Mike Firesmith?” the woman asks at the event, and I wonder if she’s looking for the guy in dog rescue, the writer, the political activist, snake ID, or the guy who loans out the cat trap.

“Yes, and you would be?”

“Tammi. I was friends with your wife. We met once at the art gallery.”

Wow. Now this story ended, I thought, back in 2002, when the divorce was final and my brand new ex left the state.

“That was a long time ago, Tammi. I do not remember you, sorry,” I reply, hoping this ends well and soon.

“No, I didn’t think you would. You’re wearing the same style hat you wore back then.” Tammi hesitates. “That’s not the same hat is it”

“No, different. Three or four hats ago, at least.”

“She owed me some money and never paid me back. I didn’t care about the money but she just left and never told anybody where she was going. What happened to her? Do you know?” Tammi seems concerned rather than vengeful. She’s a bit older than I, with soulful eyes and I bet she’s got a cat that just showed up one day.

“No idea.”

“Okay. Thanks.” And Tammi wanders off.

I’ve lived long enough now that things pop up from the past that are old enough to legally drink alcohol. This doesn’t mean they should, but they do anyway, like some sort of sexually transmitted disease that randomly reappears. Personal History Herpes. I can go months without remembering I was married for 989 days, or as I refer to it, “Seventeen Dog Years.”

Yes, I did know she left owing money and she took artwork from artists who had no idea she was skipping town. Or at least that was what I was told by the artists. I suspect she stiffed her divorce attorney.

Tammi wanders over again, curious, like those people who slow down to take a photo of a car wreck. I worked in traffic and learned to hate those people. I still do.

“Mind if I ask you a question, Mike?” she asks.

“Shoot.”

“Did you think she had enough to survive when she moved out? I mean, I know there were a lot of issues, but honestly, what was she left with?” Tammi is serious. She isn’t taking a shot at me, I don’t think, and she seems to be trying to understand what caused the wreck, not just stare at it.

“I signed the agreement she and her lawyer drew up, Tammie, what else was I supposed to do?”  I can feel the anger rising from the grave again.

“I’m sorry, it’s just, I don’t know. This is none of my business,” and Tammi flees.

I sit and eat a third doughnut, wash it down with more coffee than I truly need, and I remember Rachel Louise Snyder’s memoir, where she says, “I want to be more gracious in my writing here. I want to say my parents did the best they could under the circumstances and with the resources they had. But I don’t think this is true. I don’t think they did their best.”

We both went where the lawyers led us. But the money and property were in my name, and her lawyer fumbled the ball. She wound up with nothing.

I’d like to be more generous with my writing here, and say I did the best I could ending my marriage, but now, looking back, I don’t think I did. I don’t think I did my best.

Take Care,

Mike