Things in the News

It is time to take a break from my long series of autobiographical posts.  A lot has happened in the last six months, and there are many topics to examine.

 

Robin Williams’ suicide has sparked a very interesting debate about the role of mental illness in our lives.  It has given tangible shape to a debate that has been going on for a long time.  Are people responsible for their actions?  Some claim that his suicide “happened to him” as a result of his chronic depression, while others focus on the fact that each step, including the last one, is a conscious choice.  And people are responsible for the choices that they make?

Taking responsibility for one’s self and their actions is fundamental to having a free society, so it should be clear where my perspective falls.  If people are no longer responsible for the results of their own decisions, they are no longer free.  Among other reasons, this is why you can’t have socialized healthcare in a free country.  It automatically ceases to be free.  Once government controls your health, what else do they need to control you?  If they control you, where is the freedom?

 

In another government control related story, the Ferguson issue seems to be winding down, but got a lot of press over the last few weeks.  The lasting effects I am most interested in, are the impact that it has on the over arming of our police forces.  I have been concerned for a while about the fact that Homeland Security has been providing all sorts of high-end military weapons and armored vehicles to police forces across the country.  Hopefully the outrage over the recent misuse of that equipment will be strong enough to cause a review and change in those policies.  "When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."

 

It is fortunate that the conflict in Gaza seems to be calming down as well.  There was no clear winner, although all sides walk away unhappy, but claiming a limited victory.  The inhabitants of Gaza were killed by the thousands, while it cost Israel many resources and weapons, and the sense of security among its citizens.  Hamas lost hundreds of soldiers, but doesn't value human life, so that is openly of no consequence with them.  "We know this: without victory, there can be no peace."  Well since the world will not allow victory, there will be no peace there.  The only reason the fighting stopped was because of outside international pressure.  Neither side wanted to stop fighting, but at great cost to civilian life.  There is a reason for this.  "Israel uses its weapons to protect its people, while Hamas uses it people to protect its weapons."  It should be clear who is responsible for civilian deaths in Gaza, and also who benefits from them.

 

So that is not a pretty picture of what has been going on in the world over the last few months, and I haven’t even touched on the biggest issue, ISIS.

Christmas Break

I was only back in LA a few days before I was headed home for Christmas.  Being gone the last few weeks, I didn't do much Christmas shopping until I got home the day before Christmas Eve.  Not a good time for avoiding crowds and traffic.  Christmas went better than Thanksgiving, and we all did get together and have a big meal at the house.  We played a lot of board games, which had become a pretty solid family holiday tradition at that point.  That fact also provided a lot of good options for Christmas presents as well.

I had an interesting talk with my Mom one night that week, and she asked me a lot of questions about whether there were any girls that I was interested in or dating.  That was the first time I mentioned anything about P to her at all, downplaying it as usual, but answering her questions without lying about it.  Fortunately she didn't seem to retain much of that information for long.

I setup to visit a few friends, and do things like that while I was back.  The night before I was to have lunch with Sunshine, I got an unexpected call from Rockstar, asking for a ride home from the train station.  We had dinner on the way back, and had another pretty good talk.  Right before I dropped him off, I mentioned my plans for the next day, and was about to share that I was going to try to encourage her to see things his way (which I agreed with), when I was faced with an unexpected emotional explosion.  That must have just released something within him that had been bottled up over the last few months, and I was the unlucky recipient who he had the faintest excuse to make a target of.  Once I drove away, we didn't talk again for many years.  Ironically that talk the next day was cancelled for other reasons, and never happened until long after it was a moot point.  Although our relationship eventually resumed in a different form, it has definitely not been the same as it was before that conversation took place.  And we have never directly discussed that event either, although I have made reserved efforts to try.  I understand that people who have been deeply hurt have a tendency to lash out at those around them, but that doesn't excuse it when it happens, nor preclude the possibility of an apology.

The camp staff reunion had been an annual affair for many years, a three day retreat shortly after New Years.  That year was the first time one wasn't planned in a long time, so I setup a reunion BBQ instead at my parent’s house instead.  About thirty people showed up, including the executive and program directors for the camp.  We had lots of good food, and played some card games afterwards.  Once the meal was mostly over, P showed up with another friend.  I had invited her to many events in the past, but that was the first time she had taken me up on the offer.  It also allowed her see where I grew up, and meet my parents, who were never out at camp.  I heard her introduce herself to my mom by name, which got my attention after our recent talk.  But my mom obviously didn't make the connection at all, otherwise her next line certainly would have been “Oh, it’s nice to meet you, Mike has told me so much about you.”  (Regardless of the fact that that wasn't really true, it’s just how she talks.)  It had happened before, in other situations where I was far less concerned about how my perspective was perceived, and it was still really awkward later.  Instead things went smoothly, and we all hung out as a group playing Apples-to-Apples.  A pretty good party all around, and then it was back to work in LA, to edit the footage we had just finished shooting in the South.

Finishing My Tour of the South

The mission the next evening was for a team of Marines to drop in from the air, cross a mile of forest, and capture an insurgent leader and get him back to the ship for interrogation.  My mission was to meet their V-22 at the LZ, and get a drive of footage from our crew member who was supposed to be onboard, shooting the extraction team in flight.  And I was supposed to give them some extra cards and batteries we had bought, since they were coming up short on the ship.

 

As I heard it overhead I was racing to try to get the truck to the right part of the clearing in the woods, and then hopped out to run the rest of the way, since they were usually only on the ground for a couple of minutes.  As I got closer all you could see was dust.  I hoped that the blades were fully upright or I was going to lose me head.  Finally I could make out the back of the aircraft, which was open, with a tail gunner standing on the ramp.  I could just see his NVGs reflecting at me as he made some emphatic hand motions to direct me, but I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to get me to do.  After a couple seconds I decided to interpret it as a wave off, and withdrew a ways back, which seemed to be accurate, since they took off a few seconds later.  I was a bit frustrated to have missed the hand off when Mike Svitak appeared out of the darkness.  He had offloaded with the Marines and was sticking with that team for the duration of the mission.  We opened our pelican cases, exchanged the items in question, and then separated into the darkness.  I drove the mile to the insurgent compound, but I didn’t get there soon enough, so the MPs stopped me at edge, and I waited as the mission took place, watching the Marines infiltrate in the darkness, and leave a half hour later with their captive in tow.  It was a faster paced scenario, so I didn’t get any other media from the crew until it was over.  But once I was back at the hotel, I had plenty of data from the second ship to keep me busy.

 

For the mission the next night, I was assigned to be a camera assistant, and help one of the main operators with lenses and batteries.  I don’t remember the full mission profile, since I was only involved with a narrow part of it, but we spent a while in the top of a building waiting, and ended up talking with one of the marine guards for a while.  It was a short enough mission that I didn’t need to start backing up data until it was nearly over.

 

Our last mission was back at Camp Lejeune, so we took a charter bus back to our original hotel in North Carolina.  That mission was a night vehicle raid.  They would land a convoy of humvees on the hovercrafts, and then proceed overland to a village a few miles inland.  When the crew arrived at the village, I ended up helping the electrical department setup power to imitation street lights to improve our camera shots.  The “buildings” were mostly old shipping containers, which I had to climb on to get the power cables run.  The actual mission wasn’t very interesting, and I hardly saw the vehicles.  The Marines drove to the edge of town, dismounted and interacted with some of the local extras, and did their thing and left.  I guess half the action was getting off and on the hovercrafts at the beach, but I didn’t get to see that.  When the mission was over I backed up the last set of data, and was happy to be headed home after two weeks of travel.  We flew back to LA the next day.  I don’t remember how I got my new cold weather wardrobe home, probably as “padding” in the equipment cases.

A Night on the Beach

We headed to Virginia Beach the next day, and I was reassigned to drive a pickup truck with the audio team.  I knew them from filming the movie together, and we were friends, so that was a much lower stress vehicle to be in.  Plus I usually just followed car in front of me, which was easier.  It was the off season and very cold, but we were staying in a high rise hotel right on the water, with rooms overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.  Our next shoot was at Fort Point, overlooking the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.  This would be a full amphibious landing, with hovercraft and armored vehicles from the ship.  The landing was at night, and really cold.  I started with a camera unit on the beach, waiting for the first footage, to return to the vehicles to process it.  The USS Ashland was anchored a mile or two off shore, and we could hear what was coming long before we could see it.  The first units to hit the beach were AAVs, which drove out of the water, and appeared around us in the darkness.  They offloaded their passengers, who secured the beachhead, and moved inland.

None of these exercises were designed to be actual combat missions; they were just various unusual situations that could arise.  This one was planned to be a two part mission with the initial landing group discovering a cache of WMDs a few miles inland, and then the mission would shift to guarding and securing those items until a team could be brought in to deal with them properly.  The problem was that the initial landing team didn’t actually identify the WMDs, even though they made it to the correct building.  So the MPs that were overseeing the exercise had to help them out a little, which wasn’t as dramatic for our shooting purposes.

The challenge for us was that the mission took place across the wide swath of coast and several miles inland, over 36 hours.  The initial landing and discovery was finished by the morning, and we headed back to the hotel during the day, where I was able to collect media from the twelve camera operators who had been distributed throughout the exercise.  The next evening we went back to film the arrival of the WMD experts, which may have been the most anticlimactic moment in the history of the world.  The marines had been guarding that area for 36 hours by the time they left, after 12 hours preparing for the mission on the ship.  They would trade off who was on watch, but sleeping in the back of their armored vehicles can’t be that restful.  I spent most of that night logging footage in an SUV, trying to stay warm in the extreme cold.

We had the next day off, to catch up on sleep, and in my case catch up on footage logging as well.  We had gotten a drive of footage from the team on the Ashland, when one of them came ashore on an AAV, so I had a lot more to sort through.  We were halfway done with the project, so I was able to ship a drive full of data back to the office, which lowers the overall stress level once it arrives safely.  Our next two missions were in Fort Jackson, South Carolina.  So the production had chartered a flight to get the crew down there.  It was a pretty small plane, so I had a seat that was a window AND an aisle seat.  We landed and were given a new set of vehicles.  I got another truck, and we loaded up the sound gear, and headed off to get another set of base passes.

First Contact with the Marines

There was a long wait before anything happened.  We would occasionally be told that they were on their way, and get all the cameras turned on and ready.  And then 15 minutes later we would hear that was a false alarm and that they still hadn’t left the ship yet.  I eventually had to go down to the staging room to setup a battery charging station because of how much power we had expended on those false alarms.  But finally we heard the rotors in the distance.  The first group arrived on a V-22 Osprey, and circled once before tilting its wings and rotors upward, and landing vertically on the soccer field.  The first 40 marines jumped out and formed a perimeter around the LZ.  The V-22 took back off, and then nothing happened for about ten minutes.  I could see them talking and pointing at things, and a couple of marksmen clearly had their sights on me.  They probably took the approach that if I did anything aggressive they could take me out, minimizing that potential threat.

 

It turns out they were just waiting for reinforcements, and we soon heard a second V-22 approaching.  It landed in the same spot, and 40 more Marines got out as I got some great shots.  We were all pretty fixated on it as it took off again, when I looked around and realized that the first group had just disbursed into the town.  I was quick to point that out on the radio, and a couple of our operators had already noticed, but the rest hurried to catch up.  The next fifteen minutes were fairly interesting, as squads of marines moved through the streets and secured the town.  I pointed out when things were happening that we might be missing, and got a few overhead shots when I could.  The rest of the Marines landed in a CH-53E Super Stallion, and setup a casualty processing area near the field.

 

They eventually started interacting with the actors around the blast site that had been setup.  Their Navy corpsmen began treating the wounded, and the officers began conversing with the actors, who were playing local leaders and witnesses, and a Navy EOD team went in to deal with the second suicide vest.  They dragged it halfway down the street and then proceeded to “disarm” it.  But this all took another hour, and was actually a very slow process to observe.  Eventually as the action slowed down, there started to be discussion on the radio about conserving camera batteries and card space.  Once the Marines withdrew back toward the soccer field, I headed down and began processing the first batch of cards that the camera department had collected.

 

We eventually learned that it had become too windy to operate the V-22s, so they were waiting for the helicopter to ferry them all back in three trips.  That ended up taking a few hours, long waits, punctuated by a few minutes of action when a helicopter landed and took off.  I was pretty much caught up with the data backups by the time the last group left, well after dark.  I had the last of the cards copied by the time the crew was finished breaking down our gear.  On the drive back to the hotel, I got to listen to the discussion of changes to be made before the next operation.  We weren’t the Marines in training, who were supposed to be ready for anything.  We needed to know exactly when the assault was expected to arrive, so we weren’t wasting resources during every false start.  And we needed to know what we were expecting to actually happen, in order to be prepared to properly record it.  I ended up getting a call from McCoy at like 4am that night, looking for keys to get something out of the car, which was quite a way to end a very long day.

Welcome to Winter

I flew out of LA in early December, and on descent into my layover at ATL, I was startled to hear “We’ll be landing on time in Atlanta, where the outside temperature is 17 degrees.”  Oh yeah, it’s winter in the rest of the country!  After months of shooting in the humid swamps and hot deserts, I hardly had long pants with me, let alone a decent jacket.  So the walk across the tarmac to my puddle jumper to Wilmington was REAL cold.  And it was strange for it to be that cold without any snow on the ground.  Hana was coordinating the production, and picked me up from the airport that night.  My first priority the next morning was a trip to Dick’s Sporting Goods, to buy warmer clothes.  I bought what I anticipated to be two full sets of cold weather gear to alternate between.  In reality I usually ended up wearing all of them layered on top of each other, since it was usually about twenty degrees out with a stiff wind coming off the ocean.  The first day was just prep at the hotel, and distributing gear to the crews that were going to spend the next two weeks on ships sitting off the coast.  I was informed I was going to be one of the drivers, and all of us were sent to the base to get permits and clearances.

 

The next day I was handed a radio and the keys to a Suburban, and I led the caravan of fifteen production vehicles to Camp Lejeune.  I was driving McCoy, who was directing the production, as well as Jeff the executive producer.  Once we got on base, we followed the military liaison around in circles as he tried to figure out where we were supposed to be.  During this time, the Marines were using our caravan for targeting practice for their attack helicopters.  It is a bit unsettling to look in the mirror and see a Cobra helicopter tracking you.  We finally got to the correct training area, which was quite amusing to see.  It was clearly designed to be an Eastern European village, constructed during the cold war.  But as times had changed, it had all been painted sand brown and had Arabic writing everywhere.  We piled out of the vehicles and began setting up.  I put my laptop and hard drives in one of the buildings we were staging in, and helped unpack the camera gear.  Shortly after that, a large group of people arrived, who were locals hired by the military to be extra civilians.  Some of them were actors, who actually had roles to play in the unfolding scenario.  The scenario had not been made clear to the crew ahead of time, but involved surveying the aftermath of a suicide bomber, and disposing of a second explosive device found in the village.  There would be a full company of marines dropping in from the ship off the coast.

 

After scouting around with McCoy a bit, I pointed out that our guys could get lost in the streets, and miss some of the action, since the place was so big.  I recommended putting someone in the top of the church steeple to keep an eye on things, and direct camera crews to the action.  He pointed out that if someone was there, they should also have a camera to get shots, and requested a 600mm lens be sent up there on a camera.  Then I was unexpectedly given that role.  Usually I received data cards from the camera crews during the shoot, to be offloaded and reused.  So being located at the top of a six story stair case didn’t seem ideal for that role.  But they decided that the shoot should be short enough that they wouldn’t copy the footage until it was all over.  So I had my first role as a camera operator.