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  • Seymour M. Hersh’in 4 Nisan 2014 tarihli “The Red Line and The Rat Line” isimli yazısının Türkçe Çevirisi
  • Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels (9 April 2014)
  • Naci Eriş: A Hero For These Times (15 November 2013)
  • MY APPEAL TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE by Admiral Türker Ertürk (Ret.)
  • The American Ambassador (20 June 2013
  • Alain Badiou--Türkiye: Gerçek Bir Tarihi İsyan Mı? (19 Haziran 2013)
  • Alain Badiou--Turkey: A Genuine Historical Riot? (19 June 2013)
  • Barricade Defense
  • Ayranı Fazla Çekince (Bekir Coşkun-30 Mayıs 2013)
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  • İYİ ŞEKER BAYRAMLAR!!!! AKP'DEN (19/8/2012)
  • Olympic Women (11/8/2012)
  • OBAMABALL: an open letter to the President of the United States (2 August 2012)
  • Sinatra Dedicates One to Ataturk (17 May 2012)
  • As He Lay Dying (14 May 2012)
  • Viva 19 Mayis! Haydi gel! Bizimle ol!
  • It's 19 May...Know Your Enemy! (11 May 2012)
  • I'm as mad as hell... (2 April 2012)
  • ARAB SPRING=AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
  • Happy World Women's Day in Turkey (8 March 2012)
  • My e-mail note from Barack Obama (12/19/11) and my response
  • Women's Volleyball Team-the only winners
  • MEDIA ALERT: ATATURK SOCIETIES OF THE USA AND THE UNITED KINGDOM (6 June 2011)
  • BASIN BILDIRISI: AMERİKA VE İNGİLTERE ATATÜRK DERNEKLERİ (6 Haziran 2011)
  • Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fascist
  • Ryan Interview: Kanal B, Bilmek Gerek, 28 March 2011
  • Ergenekon Headquarters (karargâh)
  • When the Nazis Came: 8 March 2011
  • Letter to President Obama: 20 Jan. 2009
  • (Türkçe) Letter to President Obama: 20 Jan. 2009
  • Letter to President Obama: 20 Oct. 2009
  • Letter to President Obama: 3 Jan. 2010
  • Letter to President Obama: 20 July 2010
  • (Türkçe) Letter to President Obama: 3 Jan. 2010
  • (Türkçe) Letter to President Obama: 20 Temmuz 2010
  • Follow-up Letter to Ambassador Francis J. Ricciardone: 12 March 2011
  • Letter to US Senator Mark Udall: 12 Feb. 2011
  • Islam, Secularism and the Battle for Turkey’s Future
  • WHAT PERCENTAGE OF US ARE STUPID? 5 October 2009
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  • Making Hash of Turkish Democracy-16 September 2005
  • Kidnapped (17/8/2012)
  • The Dead
    • AND SO PASSES A WOMAN’S LIFE IN TURKEY (21 October 2014)
    • Bury My Heart At Heartbreak
    • "Adil" means "just" in Arabic (18 July 2012)
    • THERE WILL BE NO ICE CREAM IN DAMASCUS THIS LOVELY EVENING (14 June 2013)
    • IN ISTANBUL A DOORMAN DIES (31 January 2014)
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    • TO THE IRANIAN KIDS BUSTED ON EXCESSIVE HAPPINESS CHARGE BY TEHRAN’S KORANIC KOPS (22 May 2014)
    • AMERICA
    • Joe the Biden Eats the Bison (21/01/2013)
    • A poem by Etheridge Knight
    • Apprehension in the Bronx Botanical Garden
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    • A SENSE OF WHERE YOU ARE by John McFee
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  • On Peace
    • A WAR ON WARMONGERS, A “JEFFERSONIAN” REBELLION (April 4, 2016)
    • WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A SOCIALIST by Chris Hedges (21 September 2015)
    • THE YOUNG EURO CLASSIC PEACE ORCHESTRA
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    • THE NOBEL OBAMA (2 September 2013)
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  • On West Point
    • West Point Slimed By Trump Visit
    • OBAMA VISITS WEST POINT THEN LIES, CHEATS AND STEALS (6 June 2014)
    • West Point Graduates Organize Against The War - 21 April 2006
    • Good Neighbor Senator Sessions Walls Out Mexico . . . and Robert Frost - 19 May 2006
    • Now Is The Time - 12 May 2006
    • Cadet Bush at West Point: Screw that chin in, beanhead! - 1 June 2006
    • Guantánamo: The Subject Was Linens- 15 June 2006
    • Impeach the President of the United States - 7 October 2006
    • Election Eve Daze--Hanging in There Together - 6 November 2006
    • Peace Award Remarks - 12 November 2006 - Syracuse, New York
    • George W. MacBush–Serial Murderer - 15 December 2006
    • Abolish It! - 9 Feb 2007
    • WEST POINT TO HONOR DISHONORABLE GEORGE W. BUSH >
      • On West Point, War and Pizza - 6 May 2006
  • On America
    • George Floyd opens the floodgates
    • BRONX GIRL OUSTS 10-TERM DEMOCRAT POLITICAL BOSS!
    • The United States of America: Land of internment camps
    • THIS IS AMERICA!
    • MY DISGUST AND DESPAIR ABOUT TRUMP'S SCHEME TO DESTROY THE V.A.
    • MY LETTER TO SENATOR CHARLES SCHUMER , 3 February 2017
    • DONALD DEMENTIA
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    • Service Academy Graduates Against the War
    • U.S. Service Academy Graduates Oppose Bombing Syria (5 September 2013)
    • NO WAY OUT YOU NO GOOD PSEUDO-AMERICAN NEOCON NUDNIK APPARATCHIKS! CATCH ME IF YOU DARE!
    • WILLIE MAYS FOR PRESIDENT! (SEPTEMBER 24, 2016)
    • COUNT ME OUT, BERNIE! NO MORE $3 CONTRIBUTIONS! March 2, 2016
    • The atrocities of ISIS and the US wars of sociocide (26 August 2015)
    • WHAT I'VE LEARNED ABOUT U.S. FOREIGN POLICY (25 August 2015)
    • KILLING RAGHEADS FOR JESUS (By Chris Hedges) (26 January 2015)
    • The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro by Frederick Douglass
    • THOMAS PAINE, OUR CONTEMPORARY (27 May 2014)
    • JAMES SALTER
    • BEFORE A SUMMER SUN >
      • Prologue
      • 4. Teaching Bloody Instructions
      • 8. The Doctrine of Discovery
      • 11. Crazed from the Cradle
      • 15. The Necessary Ending of the American Indian
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    • The End Of Democracy As We Knew It (Bernd Hamm)
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    • Mrs. Ramsay's Wedge: A View of Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"
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    • Boğaziçi University-Symposium
  • THE ISRAELI-AMERICAN KILLING MACHINE (19 July 2014)
  • I-THE FRAME-UP (Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on Trial) 8 January 2009
  • II-THE ARRAIGNMENT (Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on Trial) 9 January 2009
  • III-ATATÜRK APPEARS (Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on Trial) 26 January 2009
  • How Old Are You? 4 May 2009
  • On Living
    • "Art, Truth & Politics" by Harold Pinter (1930-2008)
    • The Power of Imagination (Chris Hedges-13 May 2014)
    • WE ARE ALL ONE
    • The Story of Stuff-What Needs To Be Done (10 May 2012)
    • An Arab Springtime? by Samir Amin
    • From Resistance to Revolution
  • Photographs
    • Istanbul
    • Tarlabaşı, Istanbul 2013
  • Kidnapped (17/8/2012)

BURY MY HEART AT HEARTBREAK

Joseph J. Wojcik
January 27, 1941-July 31, 2012


I found him. He was not so far away after all. He once told me that he felt he had peaked at the age of seventeen. So I knew where to look. In the parks, the schoolyards, the ball fields, the elementary and high schools, his home, all those places that gave joy to his youth. And that’s where I found him. 

He’s from Chicago, the southwest side. As a kid he lived in Brighton Park between what had once been the largest railroad yard in the world and the Union Stockyards two miles away. It was the Chicago of Carl Sandburg, “Hog Butcher for the World” the “Stormy, husky, brawling, city of the Big Shoulders” and of Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle. Joe could tell you about this.

He lived in a three storey frame house on 40th Place with a storefront on the ground floor. His mother ran a candy store there. No wonder Joe had so many friends. The house suited him. I see light in the top floor window late into the night. Everyone knew that he worked his lessons hard and well. Everyone knew that he would later work his life in like manner. As a boy he likes to work with puzzles and games. That, too, prepared him well. 

It’s a nice, tidy, welcoming neighborhood, Brighton Park. Go out Joe’s front door, look to the left and there’s St. Pancratius Church diagonally across South Sacramento Avenue. That’s where he served mass. The elementary school’s a bit farther down. The good Franciscan sisters loved the quiet, quick-minded boy with the nice manners. “Ah, yes,” one of them once told his parents, “young Joseph is a fine boy. He will make you proud indeed.” At Holy Trinity High School, or perhaps at St Pancratius, one of the nuns had the class memorize the Edwin Arlington Robinson poem, Richard Corey. To read the poem now is to realize how profound a teacher was that nun, and why Joe thrived in Brighton Park, and thereafter.

In the false, early spring at Kelly Park, just three blocks from home, I can see him. The snow has gone. It’s time for baseball. Spikes polished, he carves neat cuts in the damp infield dirt, making long throw after long throw from deep in the hole. The fresh breeze off the lake, grass greening with envy, the smell of linseed oil, the hope of it all.

In the quiet winter dawn he runs across Sacramento into the sacristy to serve the 6 am mass. How profound to cross Sacramento every day.  

His father takes him to ballgames and to the races at Arlington Park. And bowling, his father loved bowling. Joe still has his dad’s shirt with ‘WOJCIK’ on the back. Joe saves everything. He even writes down his memories.

I first met him at West Point, “Hi, I’m Joe Wojcik,” he said. And that was enough for me. I see him there still, a serious young man, sincere, motivated, but thankfully open to subversive thoughts, and friendly, and funny. He bore his glittering military achievements well and with incredible lightness, the lightness of humanity.

I see him at LaGuardia Airport. His father has just died. Joe is flying back from the funeral in Chicago and the Lockheed Electras are regularly falling from the sky. My mother is praying for Joe at home. It must be 1960. I know it was March for we were on Spring Leave. It was a Friday. My father and I drove out to the airport to meet Joe’s flight. He will stay with us in the Bronx that weekend. I see him walking briskly down the corridor in the terminal. He is in uniform and carries his B-4 bag, the cadet valise. We wave and smile. My father shakes his hand, says his regrets, perhaps thinking of his own mortality, and of ours. I remember being so proud to know Joe then, a feeling that has never waned, though we have been separated by years and continents. He stayed that weekend and my parents drove us back to West Point on Sunday. But I can remember nothing else, no other details. And now I wonder, did Joe write any of this in his diary? 

I see him in Am’s, a Puerto Rican bar we loved near the old Madison Square Garden on 8th Avenue. It’s the spring of 1961 and we are on a weekend leave from West Point. There is a Miller High Life Beer clock on the shelf beside the row of Scotch bottles. We are discussing whether there is a pattern to the clock’s flashing colored lights. It is very late. We are also discussing the historical sequence of Boston Red Sox third basemen. Someone else is there, my roommate, another Jim. And Bill is there, too. I don’t remember the result of our research. Perhaps Joe recorded that too?

Joe and I stand together in full dress cadet uniforms. We are singing in Latin. No, it is not a nightmare. We are in the Cadet Catholic Choir. We get extra weekend leave for singing at gigs in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and other first-class religious venues. With ample time for holy water, other spiritual essences and games of leisure, we fully, yet discreetly, indulge the arts and culture of our faith.  

I see him in Germany, he in the air force, I, the army. We are stationed near each other. These were hectic, uncertain days, tumultuous days of new marriages, new children, new responsibilities. We helped each other survive.

I see him in New Jersey, working at Johnson & Johnson. Band-Aids abounded. Every time we visited we departed with boxes of them, fully able to handle any laceration that life would deal us…almost. “Mr. Wojcik makes them,” I told my kids. “All of them?” they asked. “Yes, all of them. He has very quick hands.” 

And then I didn’t see him. Opportunity had moved him west to Las Vegas. He prospered there and ran, ran, ran. I remember he had told me that he was afraid of dying young like his father. Then he joked about being a moving target. Moving indeed. For forty years he was a fulltime athlete, in addition to his normal life. Running every day. Training every day. Running in countless  marathons, in countless places, but his favorite seemed to be to run in Boston. 
 
It must have been 1997, our thirty-fifth year out of West Point. There was a reunion at a nearby hotel. I was in the bar waiting for him. I hadn’t seen Joe in ages. I heard a yell, “Where’s Ryan?” And I saw Joe. He had become a genuine runner in my prolonged absence. And in that manner everything began again. Soon thereafter we enlisted the services of cyber space and became the e-mail equivalent of pen-pals. We exchanged ideas, some crackpot, some sane, but all important, for fifteen years. I cherished this correspondence. He was indeed my daily wake-up call. In June my computer inhaled a virus and I lost all my e-mail messages, including Joe’s. And two weeks later I lost Joe. 

Six years ago, fed up with all the lying and dying caused by the Bush cabal, I started an anti-war group for equally fed up West Pointers. I simply thought that West Point’s motto of “duty, honor, country” and the related honor code were being dangerously abused by reckless politicians. But more importantly, because of the war’s dubious legality, there was a risk of our military being charged with war crimes. So I made my case and designed a website. I knew it would be controversial. But the rampant lying was so opposed to what West Point had taught that I didn’t care. The group then had but one member, me. I sent the material to Joe, asked him what he thought. And I waited. I got his reply within minutes. “Count me in,” he said. Such was the essence of Joe. Honor and integrity trumped everything.  

He visited me in Turkey. I still see him in Istanbul, by the gate that leads to the azure waters of the Bosphorus. I see him in the flower gardens of Topkapı Palace
and at the New Galata Restaurant under the bridge by the Golden Horn—I know the table. And I see where he ran those early mornings in Istiklal Avenue along the trolley tracks, thus keeping his 35-year daily running streak intact. 

He was a true marathon man and particularly loved the one in Boston. He told me of his unfailing exhilaration during the uphill finish at so-called Heartbreak Hill. But it was never a heartbreak for him. He hated clichés like this. He lived his life by burying them. 

I will not describe his absence. I will not describe his silence or my inability to ever write to him again, to ever receive another message from my beloved “Perati.” I will not describe it except in one word. It is merely excruciating. And Joe would know well the Latin roots of my pain, excruciare.

Joe loved sports and good sportswriters, particularly their one-liners. Here’s one for Joe, and indeed for us all, from Red Smith, a long ago sportswriter for the New York Times and the Herald Tribune. “Dying is no big deal,” he said, “the least of us will manage that. Living is the trick.”

My dear Joe had mastered that trick. His full, energetic life speaks for itself, shouting out loud to us all how precious are these days.

 
James Ryan
18 September 2012
Istanbul, Turkey
Picture
JOSEPH WOJCIK, Flower Garden, Topkapı Palace, Istanbul 2007