David & Lost children, lost years, enduring quest - Part III
My mother, bored in her marriage to my step-father Jim O'Brien, decided to remedy herself of the marriage by insisting on a divorce to which Jim would not complacently accept.
My mother applied sweet reason: "You have to sleep sometime," she told him.
Jim agreed to the divorce.
[This tale I heard repeated on numerous occasions thereafter by my mother who exalted in her "cleverness".]
The divorce proceeded, my mother sold the Belmawr house and bought a newly built one in Cinnaminson, New Jersey, where we moved in the summer of 1971. It would prove to be the place I lived longest in my life until I was in my mid-20s.
Cinnaminson's schools also employed what later educational models vilified as "tracking", placing students in classes by ability. This led me -- as a burgeoning young geek -- to meet and befriend some equally bright kids.
During my "rolling stone" years as a military dependent, I had few sustaining friendships. Edwin Crespo was my only close friend in Panama. In Belmawr, Henry [later Hank] Cox and Savaltore "Murphy" Geraci constituted my "inseparables". However, the winds of war scattered my friendship with Edwin while Hank, Murph, and I drifted apart after high school with brief phone calls diminishing to oblivion.
A few of the friendships forged in those early days in Cinnaminson have endured my whole life.
There was Alan Reid, he of the unconventional POV. When once asked by a guidance counselor his career objective, he replied, "Gargoyle." I aided him in this because I could climb just anything and would often take to the roofs of buildings such as that of Cinnaminson Middle School. One day he appeared at my house with a rope and wooden-dowel rung ladder he had constructed, so he could join me to perch on the ledges atop the second-story high gym. We shared favorite SF novels.
Jeff Dubois and I would play "Bet Your Life" over any academic subject at the warble of a quibble. I think I still owe him about two-dozen lives. Dube was quiet and laid-back where I reflected the demeanor of a water-droplet on a hot skillet.
There were many friendships that also withered over time but which meant much to me: Paul Caza, Jim Natale, Dave Herman, Bruce Cohen, Joel Pecchioli, Stewart Konefsky, Bob Steele, Tony Preston, Phil Murray, Mike Jung, Dave Margolis, and the list goes on.
I always liked and found it easy to talk to girls. [Those well-acquainted with me would say with justification that I would find it easy to converse at rocks. One of the traits of Asperger's syndrome is a predisposition to monologue.]
I probably had as many if not more friendships with these girls as the boys in those first few years of classes: Pat Caza [Paul's twin], Cathy Busby, Belinda Quan, Leslie Burgess, Regina DeRoi, Anita Chang, Belinda Berr, Beth Farber, Linda Leslie, et alia. These too faded in the ensuing decades.
My first serious girlfriend as in "this is a smart, assured, accomplished, lovely young woman" managed to survive the full-tilt force of my monotonous Asperger's personality to remain my friend to the present was Diana Wolotkiewicz. What she saw in me initially I have to this day never unraveled. She and I shared a love of writing and literature. I would say, as a bookish person, that I could never have a great and lasting friendship with someone who didn't suffer a passionate love affair with books.
This brings me to the friend who introduced me to wargames: David Lawrence Bongard.
Besides science-fiction, David seemed to own and masterfully played every wargame commercially available in the early-70s. We played several variations of chess along with Avalon Hills' Feudal. He taught me Risk and Kriegspiel, all the while schooling me in the rudiments of tactics and strategy. While idling in dull lectures in English, David would recreate in the margins of his notes the force-dispositions of important battles in history.
He was the first kid my age I knew to have diabetes, injecting himself with insulin since he was ten. I often considered him one with the military genius of a Julius Caesar who was destined to never serve in any modern military because he would be rated 4-F.
David left toward the end of our freshman year when his father [who, IIRC, worked for the Mint or Treasury] was relocated closer to Washington, DC, with the family moving to Severna Park. Unlike Edwin or Hank, David maintained a correspondence and met a occasionally over the years.
David obtained his Master's and joined with Col. Trevor Dupuy to co-author/edit the Encyclopedia of Military Biography. David would also testify before the House Armed Services Committee on 13 Dec 1990 to urge authorization to repel the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait. He and his boss co-wrote the incisive If War Comes: How to Defeat Saddam Hussein.
http://www.amazon.com/If-War-Comes-Defeat-Hussein/dp/0915979276/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1301980674&sr=1-1
As an NCO member of a Reserve component [NJANG, 108th RMS], I was placed on 24-hour standby alert in August 1990 and as the newly custodial parent of my five-year-old son Math, with all the talk of "a new Vietnam", I called David that September who with his characteristic gently humorous, quiet calm, methodically reinforced my own tactical and strategic perception of the actual war footing with a degree of expertise and scholarship that only added to my esteem for my good friend. David reeled off every road, every wadi, every important element of terrain and logistical resources as if he grew up in those environs. He was a master of his craft. He frequently trained field and staff grade officers at Pentagon/DoD sessions on the intricacies and nuances of modern warfare. David would, could never wield a Marshal's baton, yet he would train men who might someday do so.
I took pride in saying to people, "I have the privilege of being a friend of David Bongard."
In recent years we often tried to mesh our schedules and David's finances to meet at my annual Balticon SF conference, which lay between my Newark, Delaware, and his Alexandria, Virginia, homes.
We never managed.
David died last Thursday day, victim of bureaucratic healthcare cost-cutting that denied him the type of insulin to which his body was accustomed, a few months shy of his 52nd birthday.
And my life, as so many others, is poorer for his passing.
JJB
My mother applied sweet reason: "You have to sleep sometime," she told him.
Jim agreed to the divorce.
[This tale I heard repeated on numerous occasions thereafter by my mother who exalted in her "cleverness".]
The divorce proceeded, my mother sold the Belmawr house and bought a newly built one in Cinnaminson, New Jersey, where we moved in the summer of 1971. It would prove to be the place I lived longest in my life until I was in my mid-20s.
Cinnaminson's schools also employed what later educational models vilified as "tracking", placing students in classes by ability. This led me -- as a burgeoning young geek -- to meet and befriend some equally bright kids.
During my "rolling stone" years as a military dependent, I had few sustaining friendships. Edwin Crespo was my only close friend in Panama. In Belmawr, Henry [later Hank] Cox and Savaltore "Murphy" Geraci constituted my "inseparables". However, the winds of war scattered my friendship with Edwin while Hank, Murph, and I drifted apart after high school with brief phone calls diminishing to oblivion.
A few of the friendships forged in those early days in Cinnaminson have endured my whole life.
There was Alan Reid, he of the unconventional POV. When once asked by a guidance counselor his career objective, he replied, "Gargoyle." I aided him in this because I could climb just anything and would often take to the roofs of buildings such as that of Cinnaminson Middle School. One day he appeared at my house with a rope and wooden-dowel rung ladder he had constructed, so he could join me to perch on the ledges atop the second-story high gym. We shared favorite SF novels.
Jeff Dubois and I would play "Bet Your Life" over any academic subject at the warble of a quibble. I think I still owe him about two-dozen lives. Dube was quiet and laid-back where I reflected the demeanor of a water-droplet on a hot skillet.
There were many friendships that also withered over time but which meant much to me: Paul Caza, Jim Natale, Dave Herman, Bruce Cohen, Joel Pecchioli, Stewart Konefsky, Bob Steele, Tony Preston, Phil Murray, Mike Jung, Dave Margolis, and the list goes on.
I always liked and found it easy to talk to girls. [Those well-acquainted with me would say with justification that I would find it easy to converse at rocks. One of the traits of Asperger's syndrome is a predisposition to monologue.]
I probably had as many if not more friendships with these girls as the boys in those first few years of classes: Pat Caza [Paul's twin], Cathy Busby, Belinda Quan, Leslie Burgess, Regina DeRoi, Anita Chang, Belinda Berr, Beth Farber, Linda Leslie, et alia. These too faded in the ensuing decades.
My first serious girlfriend as in "this is a smart, assured, accomplished, lovely young woman" managed to survive the full-tilt force of my monotonous Asperger's personality to remain my friend to the present was Diana Wolotkiewicz. What she saw in me initially I have to this day never unraveled. She and I shared a love of writing and literature. I would say, as a bookish person, that I could never have a great and lasting friendship with someone who didn't suffer a passionate love affair with books.
This brings me to the friend who introduced me to wargames: David Lawrence Bongard.
Besides science-fiction, David seemed to own and masterfully played every wargame commercially available in the early-70s. We played several variations of chess along with Avalon Hills' Feudal. He taught me Risk and Kriegspiel, all the while schooling me in the rudiments of tactics and strategy. While idling in dull lectures in English, David would recreate in the margins of his notes the force-dispositions of important battles in history.
He was the first kid my age I knew to have diabetes, injecting himself with insulin since he was ten. I often considered him one with the military genius of a Julius Caesar who was destined to never serve in any modern military because he would be rated 4-F.
David left toward the end of our freshman year when his father [who, IIRC, worked for the Mint or Treasury] was relocated closer to Washington, DC, with the family moving to Severna Park. Unlike Edwin or Hank, David maintained a correspondence and met a occasionally over the years.
David obtained his Master's and joined with Col. Trevor Dupuy to co-author/edit the Encyclopedia of Military Biography. David would also testify before the House Armed Services Committee on 13 Dec 1990 to urge authorization to repel the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait. He and his boss co-wrote the incisive If War Comes: How to Defeat Saddam Hussein.
http://www.amazon.com/If-War-Comes-Defeat-Hussein/dp/0915979276/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1301980674&sr=1-1
As an NCO member of a Reserve component [NJANG, 108th RMS], I was placed on 24-hour standby alert in August 1990 and as the newly custodial parent of my five-year-old son Math, with all the talk of "a new Vietnam", I called David that September who with his characteristic gently humorous, quiet calm, methodically reinforced my own tactical and strategic perception of the actual war footing with a degree of expertise and scholarship that only added to my esteem for my good friend. David reeled off every road, every wadi, every important element of terrain and logistical resources as if he grew up in those environs. He was a master of his craft. He frequently trained field and staff grade officers at Pentagon/DoD sessions on the intricacies and nuances of modern warfare. David would, could never wield a Marshal's baton, yet he would train men who might someday do so.
I took pride in saying to people, "I have the privilege of being a friend of David Bongard."
In recent years we often tried to mesh our schedules and David's finances to meet at my annual Balticon SF conference, which lay between my Newark, Delaware, and his Alexandria, Virginia, homes.
We never managed.
David died last Thursday day, victim of bureaucratic healthcare cost-cutting that denied him the type of insulin to which his body was accustomed, a few months shy of his 52nd birthday.
And my life, as so many others, is poorer for his passing.
JJB