Biography

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The author served during many of the Cold War's most intense years, including 5 tours to Southeast Asia, but it was as a child that he fought his most courageous battles. For the past 3 decades he has lived in a remote solar powered home in the Sierra Nevada with his wife of 42 years, a painter and writer.

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Author NotesSaying thank you to those who have so generously, and sometimes with muchpersonal pain, supplied me with information is both a pleasure and a happy duty.Before I begin naming names or saluting this or that source, let me explain a bitabout the authenticity of this memoir.The events are true. They are especially true in the sense that something happenedwhich caused or influenced something else. I do not pretend to know whatcannot be known. For example in the chapter called The Drowning of Helen Lee Ihave told of a dream sequence involving fires. The fires really happened inroughly the times and places I describe. Something caused the one which lit uplate winter Tampa for several days in 1943, but wartime security kept it out ofthe papers and its ‘real story’ has been impossible for me to track down. To myknowledge no one has ever spoken or written of it, not even my father, who toldof many things unflattering to ‘authority’ in those turbulent days, almost any ofthem grounds to be jailed for ‘aiding the enemy’. Based upon my memories, thegeneral locations and activities of the time, I have created a plausible if unhappyscenario and characters to explain this fire. Another example is the person ofLieutenant Commander Yoo, who was invented in order to discuss some of themany ‘mysteries’ surrounding our failure in Viet Nam. There are others and Itrust the reader’s discernment to distinguish between them and strictly ‘factual’material.In other instances I have used composite characters and, in order to keep frommaking heroes or villains of real people, frequently changed the names of participants.In some cases I have left out some of the most awful events, but I havetried not to excuse the guilty or make too many concessions to the innocent.There is one notable case where I have consciously attempted to immortalize areal person, someone I served with in USS John R. Craig (DD-885). His namewas Ken Sargent and in 1969 he was a Chief Machinist. As routine had it, Radiomenseldom had the need or opportunity to associate with engineering types,and junior petty officers (as I was then) almost never were invited to the GoatLocker to hang around with CPOs. So I knew who he was—destroyer chiefs arenot celebrities exactly, but there are not many of them and they are very visible.versation about the ‘day’. He’d been living only sixty or so miles from me all ofthe years we had been retired and even though we went to the same CPO Club(before it closed for lack of patronage), Navy Exchange and Commissary, we hadnever run into each other. The talk inspired me to write the chapter called“… Don’t Drop the Load”, but before that we had promised to get together. Weset up a couple of meetings but neither of them worked out and then one personalcrisis followed on the heals of this or that diversion and the urgency got leftbehind. Months later I got an e-mail notifying me of his funeral (that very day).He had died in a freak motorcycle accident, alone on a desert highway. And soI’ve given him the only part I know for sure he had, the only wartime line I everheard him say and contrived to have him say it with his own name … “MainControl, aye.”But generally, I have tried not to ennoble anyone in these stories, includingthe animals which are central to more than one chapter. It is tempting to anthropomorphizeour pets, and although we loved them, we also consciously thoughtof ours as the first line of defense against danger. We used them and they used us.We try to call it friendship.In every instance the truth I’ve tried to involve the reader in is as much aboutclimate, culture and attitude as it is with who did “what, when, where, why andhow.” Finding factual or suspected errors in these stories, I urge you to thinkagain. Having had (or remembered) a similar experience differently, I ask thatyou reconsider. There is no good reason why any of us should have identical recollectionof adventures we shared only superficially. Being there, we know fromcourtroom ‘eye-witness accounts’, is no guarantee of truth or even useful observation.Nevertheless, your memories are as valid (if not factual) as mine and (I urgeyou to write an honest account of your experiences before you go) so in somecases I have required my characters to speak in opposition voices. Many times Ihave left unanswered those questions we still think so vital. Often I feel (and suspectthat my fellow veterans do, too) we were severely misused, but because weare so profoundly indoctrinated against questioning authority (by family, schooland church) that we dare not blame our obviously corrupted leaders. Instead wefind a scapegoat, a faux-Judas like Jane Fonda or some other protestor, to blame.Some of our actions, such as the current demonizing of those who served with us(or failed to) is so nasty that I wonder if we ever had such hatred of any enemy.And if we did, perhaps that rage so clouded our judgement and behavior that wehad no chance of winning. Self hatred, self-inflicted wounds and shame, forthirty-odd years, have only inflamed, not healed our wounds.The specter of Viet Nam is not behind us, except in the sense that we have putit in the ‘denial’ file. Like Satan smirking over Jesus’ shoulder, it is behind us,ignored but still virile, putrefying and very much in play as a puppet-master.My wife, embracing her Native American heritage, likes to tell me stories.Sometimes I understand them. Like the Old Indian who laments to his grandsonof the terrible creatures which gnaw his heart—”vengeance” and “forgiveness”.“But Grandfather,” cries the boy, “which one will win?”“… The one I feed,” the Old One says gravely.H. F. J. EstrupAugust 2004  

Excerpt
From "2002 The Greatest Generation Redux" ...
Military folk salute the rank and what it stands for, not the individual. So I was instructed more than fifty years ago. All citizens are required to salute the flag of our country. It is the image, the symbol, the promise we honor, not the government or its brutality or its fallen heroes, even though various officials wish us to believe that those in government have authority given by some entity other than We, The People.
Of the many salutes I have rendered, most of them for the wrong reasons, the one I sent this ancient couple was the most reflexive and heartfelt, the most meaningful. Living long and well, loving and being loved, those are worthy achievements no matter what the nationality, faith or station.
It is the only kind of salute I care to render, anymore.