Three years down the road from Raw Man and I find myself embraced by that constant companion, chronic back pain. “Does writing help?” I’m about to find out. 

Lately I have been extremely disappointed with Facebook. It seems to me that they knowingly took Russian money during the 2016 election to sow divide and spread discontent among the American electorate. Democrats and Republicans, left and right and true moderates on both sides of the isle fell prey to silence following the fact that all seventeen of our security agencies reported that Russia penetrated our cyber-security defense and hacked it’s way into our election system. This is an Attack on The United States! What has agent orange done? You guessed it, NOTHING! Congress passed some sanctions but the administration has refused to implement any of these. 

I decided to do a 2018 post to see who is still out there with me.      Times been tough dog but great things beyond my wildest imagination have happened as a result of the publication of Raw Man. I have been reunited with Herman who for 47 years I thought had died in my arms.

As I mentioned above, I see the invidiousness of political attacks carried to extreme conclusions on both sides. On Facebook I have run across an idiot insisting that there are no  photos of Michelle Obama as a youth and absolutely none of her two pregnancies. Apparently Joan Rivers in her comedy act suggested the Michelle was transgender or a “tranny” as his post was written. He went on to suggest that nobody could ever come forward and testify that they knew President Obama as a child, young man or college student. Such bullshit! The sad thing is that there are the 34% of the population that believe this crap! They watch Fox News.

I believe that the majority of the problem lies in the deep seated racism lingering after the experience of having our first African American President. Trump started his political career off with the infamous racially motivated “birther movement.” This “Make America Great Again” slogan was none other than what his grandfather, a member of the Ku Klux Klan used to cry out while burning a cross.

The fact that Dotard Donald called his “handler” Putin to congratulate him on his election victory today in a sham of a rigged election of a dictator after senior staff put in all capital letters instructions, DO NOT CONGRATULATE HIM! He never brought up Russian hacking of our election or the murder of Russian dissidents in our biggest ally Great Britain follows the same tract of his refusal to acknowledge the Russian attack thinking of it as a threat to his legitimacy as president. 

Let us not forget about the sexual liaisons with what has now climbed to more than 15 women. That was enough to ruin Gary Hart and this fucking moron (Rex Tillerson’s words) not mine has so debased the office of the presidency that nothing he does or tweets shocks anyone anymore. He is unstable, mentally unfit to lead our great nation. He is  petty. He is cruel with no amount of charity or compassion. He does not understand how our government works. To him it’s about THE DEAL. What a great negotiator  he thinks he is. When North Korea approached him through the South he agreed to meet with no thought, consultation with advisers and staff he really fucked up. There are three Americans in prison there and he should of asked for their freedom as a precondition to the talks.

I do not like Mike Pence. However I would rather have a person who has served his country all his life rather than a psychopathic megalomaniac who has no intention of uniting the country but rather pander to his 34% base with lies, racist statements and actions that embarrass us on the world stage. It’s time to move on from a want to be Third World Dictator and restore the office of the President of the United States as the leader of the free world. His nepotism, multiple conflicts of interest in his business dealings, his failure to put the security of our country above his personal ambitions make this, after only one year, the worst administration in modern American history.

I urge you to vote by mail in November. He has not protected us from Russian meddling in our election. This is a dereliction of duty. 

You will not believe what happened and what is happening. Five years ago three Iraq veterans started a closed facebook page titled, Veterans With PTSD. They felt that by communicating with others suffering from the horrors of war, they could start to heal themselves. In 2014 I joined and as I journaled, they found that they liked what I had to say being older and more experienced. They made me Administrator. One of the three is Sgt. John Marek and he and I developed a friendship that grew from facebook postings to phone calls. When Raw Man was released in 2015, he bought book #1 in the Author’s Limited Edition. He loved the book and our friendship grew. At the beginning of April, he wanted to send me a gift for the help he feels he has received from me. It was an etching of Herman’s name from The Wall but it was missing. John called me and we both went into shock. He is Military Police and asked me if I wanted him to find Herman. I said yes and he issued a BOLO for the Detroit area that came out with so many Herman Johnson’s that he decided to contact the Blackhorse Association and they had a HJ living in Warren MI. He sent a three-man team to the address and they reported signs of live with no occupant. He sent them out again three days later and received the same report. John asked me if we wanted to continue and I told him to shut the op down and give me the address.

I was in shock, emotionally topsy-turvy and wrote him a letter and carried it in my car for three weeks before having the courage to send it one day. Why so scared you may ask? I felt fraudulent. The most traumatic event ever to happen to me in the last 47 years was not real. Memories had twisted and turned into shapes so foreign to me that I could not accept them.

THEN HE CALLED.

The first words out of his mouth were, “Fred, my nigger! It was the 20-year-old best friend that I lost in Vietnam. We talked for five hours that first day. He said that I was a crazy killing machine. That scared the shit out of me. I don’t remember being overly aggressive. He was adamant that I was “a crazy motherfucker.” Before I told him about the book, he talked about how we set up trip flares and claymores every night. Then he said “We even took acid!” I told him I wrote a whole chapter about it.  That’s when I told him about my book and how he died in my arms. He said “Fred, I did die in your arms. I was unconscious from taking shrapnel to my head and a head wound bleed like a stuffed pig. That’s why you thought it was the carotid. But I knew you were holding me. Real tight. I heard you screaming at the medics when they tried to pry me loose from your grasp. But Fred I did die! When I came to I saw blue skies and a tag on my toe.”

Within days, I was able to get a copy of his field treatment. The medic stated that he treated Johnson for a head wound, dressed it and returned him to the line to resume his duty as a machine gunner due to the intense enemy attack. I was able to locate the medic who is now an MD and he wrote an affidavit, I wrote one, and Sgt. Marek wrote one and I obtained the form to get Herman the Purple Heart that he never received. Herman signed me over as console and I contacted his Congressman, spoke to an aid who when I told him the story, was knocked out. It seems like just the day before he saw Herman walking in the parking lot of the aid’s apartment complex carrying an armful of photos. Seeing him struggling, the aid stopped and asked him if he needed help. Herman went on to tell him this bizarre story about finding his best friend from Vietnam who thought he was dead. The aid presented Herman with the same medallion that I have of the 50^th Commemoration of Vietnam. Can you imagine the look on the aid’s face when he went to work the next day and found my email in his inbox? This was too strange. There was something at work in the Universe beyond our comprehension.

Congressman Levi realized this and just this morning Herman met with him and took him all the paperwork that I had prepared to obtain the Purple Heart before July 9.

Wait a minute. What is July 9? Oh I forgot to tell you that in 1995 I was one of the first American veterans to visit Vietnam. I met a wonderful documentary filmmaker named Richard Chisolm from Baltimore. We have been friends since then. After speaking to Herman, we decided that we had to meet. We had to see and touch each other’s faces. Herman told me that the first words out of his mouth when he came to were “Where’s Fred?”

Richard agreed to film the reunion and Herman and I decided to meet at the Wall. We are raising money via GoFundMe an internet platform for raising money. My publisher and I are going to write a new book about our lives intertwining during the last 47 years.

Friends and family have been more than generous. One donated all round trip airfares for Lynda and me, Sgt. Marek, Herman, and my publisher Thornton Sully. Another has paid for 5 suites for 5 nights at the River Inn in DC. We have raised $2,000 on GoFundMe to cover the film crew. We still need a few more dollars to cover food, transportation, and incidentals. If you can afford $25 please help us to be financially secure on this once in a lifetime event.

Please visit:  https://www.gofundme.com/23zqxwyc

Friends, family, and followers. For 47 years I have believed that my best friend Herman  Johnson died in my arms on September 6, 1969. Somewhere in Texas a great MP named John Merek read Raw Man and we teamed up together to help Veterans With PTSD. John wanted to give me a gift for all of the good that has come out of my book but in the process, he discovered that Herman was not on the wall. Being a policeman, he looked in Detroit and with some help, he located Herman in Warren MI. We started talking and decided to meet in July at The Wall. I also discovered that Herman never received his Purple Heart. I contacted Herman’s Congressman, Sander Levin and he is helping to expedite this long overdue medal. Please help us raise money for our trip to DC

I recently received a strong endorsement from Richard Wallach the head of the Cormac McCarthy Society. This is an honor to be recognized by such a prestigious group of scholars.

I have been invited to speak at next years Cormac McCarthy Society convention in El Paso. Here is what Rick had to say,

I found out about this novel during the usual New Year’s correspondence with Society members about renewing their annual memberships. Fred mentioned in the course of renewing his that he’d written a novel, parts of which were influenced by elements of Blood Meridian. Several critics, notably Barclay Owen and John Beck, have related Blood Meridian to the Vietnam War because it was largely composed while it was going on, so I found the proposition doubly interesting and ordered a copy of Fred’s book.

Let me say first off that it’s a terrific read. I went through its roughly 250 pages in only a couple of sittings; the language is clean, sinuous and propulsive and the narrative just barrels along. It is structured loosely around Fred’s letters home to his family from the war, letters he discovered his mother had saved, literally every one of them, while he and his sister were sorting through her estate after she passed away. Those epistles were the collective mnemonic device Fred used to return himself to the battlefield. It couldn’t have been easy. As I mentioned to Fred earlier today, it turns the very difficult trick of feeling immediate and current, not retrospective. On the few occasions I put it down I felt wet, muddy and bug-bit, and often shaken up, as though I’d been in some of those hellish combat situations right along with the narrator. As a war novel, it’s as different from, say, Going After Cacciato as Johnny Got His Gun is from Gravity’s Rainbow. It has its humor, but it’s never cartoonish even if it is often nightmarishly surreal.

These days, when some dogs are barking loudly for “boots on the ground” in Syria and Iraq, this novel is, among many other things, a tonic reminder of the ugliness and futility of war.

I’m recommending the book to everyone who wants to see the judge’s philosophy in action. I expect that Fred will be along soon enough to talk about how McCarthy’s work helped him organize and structure some of the most powerful scenes in his novel.

Since the beginning of July, I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to put Raw Man into an audiobook like format on 949thebridge.com. My friend and former staion  owner of KRTM in Temecula bought a radio station in Oregon with his lovely wife Micky. When they owned KRTM in Temecula, I had the Nightcrawler Blues Show every Sunday from 6-8 PM.

Now I am proud to say that the Raw Man Blues Show has entered it’s seventh month on The Bridge. Please listen on the internet on your computer, phone, or other listening device. Simply go to http://www.949thebridge.com and press play any Sunday from 6-8 PM. I now have a direct link on this page to the show. Remember,

“It’s The Blues Baby!

Join me on the Bridge. Here is a sample:

In 1968 I took an oath to protect the Constitution and the United States from enemies both Foreign and Domestic. As far as I know, there is no expiration date. My fellow citizens seem to be crippled by fear that Fox news, Social Media, CNN, and all the other parts of big voice help spread. The fear generated by the opportunist, self centered millionaire Donald Trump is drowning out the voice of reason. His inane rhetoric has polarized the American people with Islamophobia pitting Christians against the 1.6 Billion Muslims in the world. He is an ignorant racist who would have us believe that closing the borders to all Muslims and building a wall to keep out Mexican rapists is not only the answer, it is illegal, non Christian, and the beginning of the backlash that will sweep him from the stage that he has never had the credentials to occupy. It is not only the thoughts of a man with a psychiatric disorder in which the patient experiences delusions of great power and importance but highly Unconstitutional. He has not only never governed, but doesn’t understand such basic facts as: “He who doesn’t understand history is doomed to repeat it.”

One must remember that the struggle of organized religions has been raging for centuries. At most, there are 70,000 idiots called Isil spreading terror against the Western Christian nations. The joke is that they all believe in the same God and don’t realize it.
It seems that in 638 Muslim armies conquered the Holy City of Jerusalem. The Christians did not like this and the resentment in Europe and grew and festered over centuries of fear. This presented a threat to the Papacy and the control of money, power, and World Domination.
In 1096 it exploded into what Historians call the First Crusade. Pope Urban of France called on a Holy war to recapture the Holy City. Does this sound familiar? He formed a Christian Caliphate and promised that if you went and fought in the Holy Land you would be forgiven of past sins and guaranteed a spot in Heaven if you killed Non-Believers. The only thing missing was the 72 Virgins.

Every week on the Raw Man Blues Show broadcast on 94.9 thebridge broadcast in the Pacific Northwest and heard world wide on the internet as a podcast, young Alexander Nagle reads a portion or Raw Man at the top of the second hour. The show can be heard live from 6-8 PCT every Sunday. Come on in and join the fun. There are Tee-Shirt giveaways and a chance to win an autographed copy of Raw Man.

This week we will be featured at Beach Books in Seaside, Oregon. Make sure that you tune in to the show this Sunday evening and enjoy the Blues. It is what saved my life in Vietnam.

rm

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

Helen Keller

With the success of Raw Man exceeding my wildest expectations, I thought I was written out. I never studied writing and what I wrote was from the heart. Then the great songwriter Peter Himmelman said this:

“I’m thirty pages from the end of this thing and I’ve got to say, it’s one hell of a piece of writing. Not only is the story incredible, I knew it would be. But the gift Fred Rivera has for words was. …well, it was a bit of a shock. It’s beyond rare to find someone who’s never toiled in the world of letters, taking endless writing courses and so on, to be this naturally gifted. My sense is that Fred’s musicianship, his ability to hear and to give over what he’s heard, is at the root of it all. There’s a rhythm to all good music – as we know – and the same thing goes with good writing. Fred’s the Buddy Rich of the printed page. Raw Man The Book will hypnotize you and put you in the places Fred’s been. Prepare yourselves. He’s seen a lot. Maybe too much. My blessings to him and his family.

After the thrill and the shot of adrenaline I felt after winning the two important awards in San Francisco, I met a successful author at the San Francisco airport. I asked him when I should start writing my next novel. He said, “You write it, promote it for a year, and then start your next book. No sooner and certainly no later.”

Well it has been a year.

This and the reviews on Amazon, and of course the constant encouragement of my publisher Thornton Sully, have given me the confidence to start my new novel. Working title: The Road to Que. Experience has taught me that this will by a Working Title only. Raw Man war written over eight years with the title of Youth In Asia I have started writing and I have every one of you to thank for setting me on this course in this stage of my life. Namaste

rm