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The Author |
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So You Married a Conservative |
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A NEW BOOK BY Robert Haston |
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About the Author |
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Why this guy? That’s an easy question with an easy answer. This topic would be career suicide for an academic. So out of an intense curiosity about new topics and a love of writing, I figured I would broach the subject. The book is basically current evo-psychology under my theme, so it can stand on its own merits. You can see how I didn’t write it amongst the ivory towers of liberal academia, but amongst staunch conservatives.
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Here I am in In Helmand Province Afghanistan, 2011. It isn’t a good picture, but I look about as stressed out as I felt from sitting medevac alert for 5 months. The inset picture is my wingman from a BBC article which described one of the worst missions we launched on. I didn’t get any real research or writing done, but it was a nice lab to study stress. People think that the enemy is fear. Fear resides in the brief span after the threat is imminent and before you are lost in action and reaction. Anxiety wears upon you constantly as your conscious and subconscious frets about the myriad of errors you might make, like a ball player before the big game, and the big game is every day for months on end. I tip my hat to the real heroes, the soldiers I worked with out in the field and the ones I carried home. When people thank me for being in the service, I generally thank them for providing me with a great job and ask them to reserve their gratitude for the ones who haven’t been as lucky as I. I wrote a poem you might like below. |
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MEDEVAC
The wound tells the story. He was ducking for cover, or the sniper waited for him to move so he could get a bullet under his chest plate.
Physics meets biology. Life is reduced to random pinball luck and the ensuing wet red mechanics of plumbing and ventilation. The remaining length and breadth of a man’s life is quickly metered out.
It does you no good to think about it; how the paths of whole families are set by these lucky or tragic inches, at two thousand feet per second, eight thousand miles from home. One is pierced but walks aboard like Jesus. The next soul’s life closes as it had begun – a bloody portal and a single breath.
I fly in listening for bullets, the angry snapping of little supersonic dogs missing your cockpit. But the threat was gone before I drop, leaving the others to circle overhead in the heat. Despite the cipher-scrambled field radio, you can hear the human modulations of hope, fear, desperation, or resignation carried in the radioman’s voice. You can envision the entire scene in how he says: “He’s tanking”.
I remember from the hurricanes how a pane of cockpit glass and a cloud of noise hold you away from the sharp apex of tragedy, further than those I reflect on; like a brother looking east out of dark American windows. I won’t imagine their mothers, because mine has already lost one son. I flinch from the klaxon, she flinches from the phone.
What I will carry home inside isn’t what you or I would expect. I had seen far worse these months, and I heard the merciful details from the surgeon later. As our rescuemen hustled him headfirst towards us and his squad stood outside the rotors staring, his probably lifeless arm worked loose and lolled about.
It was as if he were waving goodbye. |
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TV Interview September ‘09
This video is from a documentary done by an Orlando Florida Television Station. They did interview me about my book, but that didn’t make the cut. I hope to get that video soon.
I do think that this would be a nice way to show that if I am a crank, I’m at least a very high functioning one. They let me teach pilots how to poke airplanes for gas and pluck people up with 200 foot cables. They even let me appear on TV! |
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My E-mail: robert at this domain name |