No MORE BLOGGER...so....

Blogger has decided to stop supporting FTP capability for bloggers to post columns to blogger scripts and directories residing locally at non-Blogger servers, i.e. http://www.corkgraham.com/. So, I will be starting a new blog to continue the Cork Blog, it just will be on wordpress locally at http://www.corkgraham.com/ .

If you've come to this page, which will be the last post on the Blogger script/FTP, just click on the following link to take you to the index page at http://www.corkgraham.com/ and then click on the "Cork Blog" link and you'll be taken to the latest in manifestation.

See you there!

Where Were You During Loma Prieta: Oct. 17, 1989?

The day had been warm and it was October, known as earthquake season. Other than that, there wasn’t much to think about than the sun was bright and I would be afforded a nice motorcycle ride on a pleasant day. There wasn’t anything to indicate this would be one of the worst afternoons in San Francisco history.

At 5:04 p.m. I was on my motorcycle having just left Bair Island Storage on the east side of 101 in Redwood City (a parking lot and defunct Century Park 12 are there now) when all hell broke loose. Only the day before I had adjusted the chain on my Yamaha 400 and thought I had done something wrong. Both wheels vibrated as though ready to fly off!

Pulling to the side, I leaned the motorcycle left and right to see what was loose. The wheels were solidly attached. If I wasn’t wearing a helmet (in those days you didn’t have to wear one) I’d probably have been scratching my head. That’s when I looked up to see the line of street lamps swinging back and forth like metronomes—I had just experienced an earthquake, and a big one at that!

To my left, all the cars that had been speeding along on HWY 101 were pulled to the side of the road. People were out of their cars and talking, stunned looks on their faces. I drove to Belmont to check on my parents and then headed up to San Francisco to check on my girlfriend. All was good, and then I got a call from my Emmy and Edward R. Murrow-winning camera buddy, Mark Eveslage.

His producer needed someone with a motorcycle to run tapes between the shooting locations and the KRON affiliate for NBC on Van Ness. I wasn’t too interested; I was only in San Francisco as a break from the war in Central America. But, then they told me how much I’d get paid.

In minutes I was on my Yamaha and lane-splitting through non-stop, stop-and-go traffic from Milbrae to San Francisco: people trying to get to San Francisco from work, trying to get past bridges that closed, like the Bay Bridge whose top section had dropped. I made it in record time and expected to start running tapes immediately.

Instead, the producer said, as I followed him through the darkened halls of KRON that yet had to be lit by the KRON generators, “Get out of the city and get us food: chips, sodas, anything you can get at a 7-11.” San Francisco was wrapped in an electrical blackout.

As I made my way carefully down dark halls, I noticed Jerry Graham. Before Doug McConnell hosted “Bay Area Backroads” for 15 years, there was Jerry Graham, a KSAN general manager who started the show by travelling the state with a cameraman capturing the fun places to visit in California. Never did my parents miss an episode…plus he was a fellow Graham, and you know how the Scots are about clan names.

So, even though I had as a photojournalist in Southeast Asia and Central America met kings, sultans, presidents and generals, seeing a family mainstay kind of hit me with awe…until I heard an NBC employee make a snide remark that made me chuckle with the others who had heard: “You better start looking for a job!”


A bit of morbid humor, more than a comment about Graham’s employability, I probably would have enjoyed it more if the comment wasn’t so illustrated by the day’s events on the monitors in the newsrooms. The San Francisco Bay and Monterey area had been pummeled. A gunshot sounded out toward the Tenderloin, punctuating the thought. With lights out in the city, the looting had started.

As I left, the electric generators started running and KRON looked more like a jungle firebase I’d have seen back in El Salvador, a lone white-walled fort illuminated in the night.

A quick drive down to San Bruno to fill up on food and gas and I was back in San Francisco. As I unloaded the goodies for the crew, I noticed an Asian man in his early 30s who introduced himself as Steve Sung. What caught my eye what I’d seen too many times in the war zones.

With a nod toward the long, indented scar up along his arm, I asked “Where’d you get that?”

“I was an audio tech at Jonestown,” he said.

I recalled the massacre, the Kool-Aid suicide, and the reporters hitting the deck as gunmen ambushed the US delegation and them at the airfield. One of those killed was SF Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, after whom a darkroom and scholarship would be named at our alma mater, San Francisco State University.

While Sung and I traded stories about covering gunfire, first NBC reporter Bob Jamieson arrived, then Bob Dotson, and finally Tom Brokaw. It’s funny how world events suddenly seem to take on a whole new aura, an imagined stamp of greater importance, when national TV news reporters arrive.

Dotson is probably one of the nicest guys you’ll meet in the media; Jamieson had some interesting things to say about baseball, especially to the baby-faced kid I was then; and Brokaw didn’t look like he wanted to be there at all. Frankly, I, too, would have preferred to be in LA at a tennis match with family instead of joining in on what I would later learn was the “Media Zoo.”

Introductions passed around, the reporters moved on to their reporting, and I went onto shuffling producers, assistant producers and tapes back and forth between the Marina and KRON.

It was pretty easy work, actually one of the first duties I got paid for in El Salvador as I made extra cash as a translator and gofer for visiting networks in San Salvador. The producers in San Francisco, though, didn’t like the speed with which I flew along Franklin to get them to the Marina the first time. I was just back in Salvador mode where you didn’t stop at lights, red light nor not, else the banditos and FMLN guerrillas carjacked you.

One producer, who was only memorable for his blond flattop and constant scowl, really got on my nerves. I got a kick out making him squirm with my lead foot on the gas pedal. A little fun until I saw what has happening at the Marina. Night battles in Central America couldn’t have been more lit!

Water was everywhere. Flames were everywhere the water wasn’t. As if in a dance in the Infierno, were the shadows and silhouettes of firemen doing their best keep the fire at bay. When you see a city block ablaze in San Francisco it leaves an impression!

By morning the San Francisco Fire Department had pretty much conquered the fire, and I signed for a stack of $50 bills from NBC. On the way south on 101 I noticed the trailer for my previous employer in El Salvador, the Associated Press. I stopped in and was immediately reminded why I had gotten fed up with being a photojournalist. “I want fires, blood, bodies—if it bleeds it leads!” the AP bureau chief said, like so many other before him.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.” Even though I strung for them out of Bangkok and San Salvador, I couldn’t get a press card from them in time here in San Francisco.

So, what did I do? I made one—pretty official with the blaze orange tape and laminated. It was amazing what a laminated card could get you a pass to during the pre-1990s computerized, holographic identification card.


With camera bag across my chest, I rode my motorcycle to where most of the deaths had occurred. Tom Brokaw was already standing in front of a camera with mic in hand. And beyond him stretched a caravan of other networks. Dan Rather made his way across to the CBS motorhomes.

As the Oakland cop checked out the press credential—one thing you learn through having to use forged documents in foreign countries, in very dangerous places, is that it’s all about attitude. I’d been in enough successful events to act properly: a nod of thank you and pleasant smile as you pass.

That’s when it really hit me how much of a journalism zoo the Bay Area had become. Frankly it turned my stomach—almost as much as when I decided to stop covering the war in Central America because of the inaccuracy of reportage I was seeing, and how everyone went around on “media safaris” in their cute little white vans and the letters “TV” taped on the side.

Sure, I followed along on the guide tour setup by the Oakland Police Department. They didn’t want anyone climbing and getting up close to the crushed bodies that still had to be removed from the structure above. Plus, it was perilous enough standing under the overpass that still supported not only the crushed vehicles and bodies, but also the tons of upper-level structure.

After only a few shots, after nearly seven years in combat photography in Southeast Asia and Central America, I took a break and asked a man sitting on a pile of large rubble if I could share the bench. There’s a stat running around the journalism field that says the average life expectancy of a majority of journalists is age 30, and then it’s off to PR or advertising for some big corporation or city. That day as I sat there thinking, I realized I had beat that by seven years, having started as an 18-year-old in Thailand—I was truly done…

Introducing myself to the man who shared the rubble with me, I learned he was Dr. Williams from Colorado. His trade was psychology. A Vietnam veteran who not only worked with fellow veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), he had volunteered to assist first response emergency teams pulling the dead and wounded deal with the emotional and psychological impact of their experience.

As we talked about the symptoms of PTSD, I realized that while I had done the work needed to heal the traumatic childhood memories of living in Saigon during some of the worst events of the Vietnam War, later described in my 2004 Topseller, The Bamboo Chest, I had added new events during my years in Central America from 1985 to 1989 that had caused subconscious responses easily labeled PTSD. Leaving Oakland with exposed film I didn’t even take to the makeshift AP bureau office for developing, I went home.

Within six months I had broken off an engagement from my girlfriend who had become my fiancé. Within two days of the final blows of separation, I was in a VW van, packed with books, rifle, shotgun and fishing rods and headed north along the AlCan. And within nine days of that I was moving into a cabin overlooking dramatic and healing beauty of Cook Inlet and Mount Redoubt in Alaska.

I arrived to write the first draft of my first memoir and work on the psychological effects from my combat experiences in Central America, soon to be captured in my next memoir my agent is preparing to take ‘round the publishing houses in New York.

"Memories of an Interesting Life" by Col. John H. Roush (RET)

If there’s one thing that I can delight in living the life I’ve lived is that I’ve had the opportunity to meeting some very interesting people, not the least of whom are those I consider friends, such Col. John H. Roush, Jr. (RET). A fellow outdoor writer with a past military life, Roush has lived and traveled in a number of countries and through a number of times that I have found most interesting and so read with great relish his much anticipated memoir: Memories of an Interesting Life.

Born in Oregon in 1923, he moved to San Francisco at the start of the Great Depression. To hear Roush talk about that time it’s as though a different world, more reflecting the San Francisco that had so pleased my father, when he was a communications instructor for the US Marine Corps at Treasure Island during the Korean War, that he would later move his family to the Bay Area after years overseas.

Memoirs of an Interesting Life not only recants those times of San Francisco's grand days, but also a life during WWII in Europe, fishing and hunting around the world, and in eloquent style sharing his love and admiration for his wife and family. And no less interesting the life of a professional soldier willing to talk openly about such subjects as death, ghosts and Divine intervention.

Roush describsd with great detail memories at such a young age, the days after the death of his grandmother, seeing her rocking in her chair in the living room, and a cousin saying that he saw her seated in church. For many this might seem bizarre in this modern world where death is not as impacting as it once was due to video games that lessen the emotional impact of loss due to death, and science that has done such a good job in prolonging the lives of those who only 20 or 30 years ago would have perished at birth.

But, for those of us who were in harms way, as Roush most definitely was during the Battle of the Bulge, noted by a statistic that 90 percent of platoon leaders were killed during WWII, being visited by the dead shortly after their can be a common occurrence. Is it the mind playing games? Or, a last chance for us all to say goodbye? Whichever it is, hard for me as a reader to say, no, it didn’t happen. And it sure makes for interesting reading!

As a combat veteran myself who has a pretty good understanding of the psychological impact of war (My first memories are of the Tet Offensive, I spent 4 years in the Central America War and worked for 10 years as counselor for those dealing with PTSD) I was especially intrigued by comments about post-traumatic stress disorder, something I don’t really consider a disorder, and actually a normal response to very traumatic events, but can be especially aggravated when tainted by stigma and cultural misunderstandings. Many deal with combat-related PTSD every day, and it affects their lives in no way other than to remind those affected of that place and time they were tempered.

In reading the chapter titled, “Crack Up!” (Roush’s thoughts on PTSD), I was reminded of the differences of those who fought in Europe in contrast to those in the Pacific Theater. Roush mentions that he never experienced such effects. He recalls taking the time to “have a talk” with a cousin who returned from fighting in New Guinea. The very journalistic manner in which it is told offers the reader a clear cultural and historical understanding of why his cousin was so profoundly affected by PTSD and Roush wasn’t.

This was the same argument put by Vietnam Veterans that the war in the Asia was so effecting in PTSD because of the lack of bonding and post-combat processing: that the important talking it out with those who were there (replicated later by VA counseling sessions), and also the cultural differences of fighting in Asia which seemed so foreign, as compared to Europe where a victorious Allied soldier more easily felt a liberating hero, moving along a countryside and language barriers not as different than those heard back home, as it was for many US combatants island-hopping through cultural and people so foreign on their way to Japan.

Perhaps as more government and military personnel learn PTSD isn’t a disorder or syndrome and really just a natural post-event response to traumatic events and very healthy when understood and worked with, free of stigma, calling it instead what I do--PTSR (Post-Traumatic Stress Response)--the more extreme symptoms and reactions will lessen and disappear for those returning home.

And what does a warrior think of more than getting back when the war is over: wife, family, good things in life! No wonder the return from WWII for those who survived was one of the wealthiest moments in US. A real swords to plowshares moment!

…But the Army wasn’t done with Lt. Roush—they put him in Austria.

Though his depictions of fighting in WWII are short, already having been described in critically acclaimed World War II Reminiscences, 1996, more recanting of what life was like in Austria right after the war are delivered in more detail in “Memories of an Interesting Life”. Of course there’s more hunting, often just to cut the boredom and meager offerings of army food, but it’s also telling information about a country bringing itself out of its prior furor as Hitler’s birth nation.

Finally, Roush gets to come home and get married and build a family. Two sons carry his name and the same love of hunting and fishing. There’s the fishing for mega-sized Mackinaw trout that used to swim in great numbers in Lake Tahoe. Nimrod adventures in New Zealand, Africa. Angling for a sharks, salmon, and tarpon. In all there’s a feeling of appreciation for having been able to come back and enjoy, though only through reading, what his generation had as the opportunity to have experienced…

The books are priced at $30 for soft cover and $40 for hardcover, autographed, postage and mailing included. Please send checks to Col. John Roush at 600 Deer Valley Road, # 2E, San Rafael, CA 94903, or FAX 415-499-5112

It can also be ordered through Amazon.com, but without a signature, of course:

Cork's Crash Course in Foreign Languages (Part I)

I'm going to let you in on a secret....I speak six languages, well enough to get by in a professional environment. I'm fluent in three of them...and with a little work, I can add a fourth to the same level of fluency (when I use the word fluency, I take the meaning a little further...all the way up to having no foreign accent when speaking). One of them is Spanish of course, and since I was spending the last year in Korea, you can rightly assume, Korean...

How do I do it?

Well, that's what I'm going to share with you in three installments. This is because language learning involves an understanding of three components: personal makeup/attitude, understanding of how languages came to be, and language groupings. After all this, I'll give you a cheat sheet to use in your language learning that will skyrocket your learning speed!

Let's first start with personal makeup. What I'm talking about here is what you believe you can do. If you think learning languages is hard, then it'll be hard. If you think it's not fun, and just boring, or an aside to what you'd prefer to be doing, then you'll fail miserably. If your thinking feeds speed, then you think that language learning is fun, exciting, a great way to increase your financial quotient, and most of all...easy...then you're right, too!

Language learning and improvement is an all day experience! You use words when you think to yourself. You use words to philosophize and plan. You use words when you play games and goof off. So why do most language learners think that learning languages is done only during a 30 minute or one hour study or class event?

When you take the time to assess what you can incorporate into your day-to-day toward your language learning, you halve and quarter your learning time. And it makes it 'REAL', and much more fun!

Take for example the news. You can watch the ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News or the BBC, or you could get a cable/satellite subscription to a channel that provides the news in the language of your interest. Now with online access to many channels and foreign language periodicals you can improve your vocabulary and grammar by reading foreign language newspapers online!

When you rent a DVD for the evening's entertainment, do you just get the latest from Hollywood, or do you search out a film produced in the language of your choice? Because of independent film production and the advent of so many new technologies to shoot movies of near-film quality on digital video there are a multitude of films in Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Malaysian, Thai, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, Bengali, Vietnamese and of course, German, French and Russian to name just but a few...

As for food, do you go to Burger King, or the nearest restaurant in your town with cuisine of your target language? And it's pretty cool when you've made a new friend with the owner as a result of interest in their native language. Ron Kinney, a friend of mine in Honduras, who was a photograher for Reuters in Tegucigalpa, told me he learned how to speak Spanish through his years working in a restaurant before leaving to cover the war in Central America.

Remember it's all about making it fun and interesting...and most of all remember that language came about as the result of experience. Words came to being as a way to describe what the habitat, food, culture, politics, and all the other day-to-day events in a human being's life were like and for us to navigate through society. More about this in PART II, which will help you in your language learning adventure!

What's in a bowl?

So what's so important about a bowl of Pho? Well, this bowl, properly pronounced, "fuh" is what drove me mad almost every time I tried to get a ration of it in Korea. Why, because in Korea, all food is Korean: Italian, Thai, Vietnam...it's all a Korean version of it's real self.

This is what happens in a country that has such a strong history and reputation for xenophobia. At first it's kind of entertaining when you get some serious looks from the locals, but then you notice that you're not being singled out for being American...just not Korean. And even when you are Korean as I noticed with most of my closest friends in Korea, you're just not part of the close inner-circle of the person across the way from you. Now, don't let history and present situation of Korea hoodwink you into thinking that Korea is the most anti-outsider nation in the world.

Other countries top that list: Russia, Iraq, China, Japan. China and Japan are just much more polite in how they reveal it...And, like all those countries, once you let them know you're really interested in them and their country, and not just for the money that can be made...like you actually learn to enjoy the food and put in an honest effort to learn the language and understand the culture, any country can be very inviting: like I say most of my closest friends in Korea are Korean where I was introduced to family and made part of many.

...then there was this need for a bowl. "Oh, all you have to do is ask for cilantro," some friends would say. But, there's more to a bowl of Pho, and other dishes like bun thit nuong and others, that mean more than cilantro. There's cilantro, basil and mint. There's the manner in which the broth for the soup is prepared with special little spices my Vietnamese friends have yet to tell me, and the way you don't marinate the thin slices of onion--the way it's done for Korean galbi.

--NO! NO! NO!

And that's why I prayed that when I got back to San Fransisco, after almost year in Korea that Vietnam II Seafood Restaurant would still be at 701 Larkin in Little Saigon. It was and I was elated! Don't get me wrong. Korean food is great...and I'm already getting the pangs for the hot decadence that offers an endorphine high to fight the ill effects of Korean winters and summers...but four years living in Saigon as a kid, and one year in a Vietnamese prison helps a person appreciate the finer things in life...

"If you're going to San Francisco...remember to put a flower in your hair..."

Well, it's late. I just had dinner with my buddy, Joe McPherson of http://www.zenkimchi.com/ fame and new visitor from the New York Times, travel writer and culinary adventurer, Matt Gross...I'll let you get the full gist of that story in the installment to be done by him for the NYT.

As for me, I'm on a plane to San Francisco on Wednesday. It has been almost a year. Many thought I'd be back in the US by summer, and at one point, so did I. But, I've found the re-education of life purpose to be truly exhilerating. I came to write a movie script (I've written, two), met and learned a lot for five months from the Steven Spielberg of Korea, Kang Woo Seok (Silmido/Hanbando: Cinema Service/CJ), trained a number of ROKAR officers from second lieutenants to Colonels, and finally got a new business going: http://www.flyingdragonsaviation.com/... and after returning to San Francisco will by the next month make it down to LA and the world called "Hollywood" with a renewed sense of confidence in the words "success engineering".

Has it been worthwhile? Well, I can't help but wonder if this what my return from Vietnam would have been like had I had the maturity and wisdom only 43 years of life can give (I just had my B-day on Thursday)....no matter having, what many told me when I returned from that prison in Vietnam at the age of 19, lived the life of a man of 60.

I'm still processing everything, but I'm not losing any sleep on it the way I did when I finally came back from the war in Central America for the last time in 1989. No, this is much better!

Yes, Asia is no longer the Asia I remember from 1983 and '84, where we were still much into the adventure, tripping and trekking that "Vietnam" created during the 1960s and 1970s...the kind that led to the likes of Sean Flynn, Dana Stone, Tim Page, and Michael Herr: men who would be my heroes for nearly a decade of adventure, romance and writing, some who I would later be honored in calling friend (Joe Galloway, John Everingham, Zalin Grant)...an Asia that is at one point, sadly lost, and another that is thankfully almost forgotten....except for the need of human beings to try that which is new and exciting...a lost image that fills trekker catalogs and the mind of the brit author who penned Leonardo Dicaprio's filming flagship shot near Phuket: "The Beach".

Yes, my mind's in a spin and I know that my renewed interest in posting will be inspired by those thoughts in the months to come....Peace.

A Lesson in Hangul!

Well, here I am in South Korea, otherwise known as the ROK, learning the language and the culture. Let me tell you it has been a real eye-0pener into many things, least of which is using Blogger.com/Google.com. Did you know that if you have an Internet connection here, eventhough you're set for English, you get Hangul, or Korean script?

So what am I doing here?

Getting my film writing and directing career going...and teaching at the Korean Army MIL INTEL Language School for a one year business visa, of course!