In Normandy: Bloody Omaha

Nick on Omaha Beach, Feb. 2014

            Everything went wrong on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.  For days, or perhaps months (unclear exactly what our guide said. Roel, pronounced “Rule,” is Dutch living in France and he could have learned English in Scotland, the way he expands his vowels, plus the winds was howling and we were all keeping our mouths tight to keep from swallowing too much sand), the allies had been bombing the coast of France to clear away all the mines and obstacles and guns and troops the Germans had deployed there anticipating just this attack. Or at least they thought they had been bombing the coast but because of cloud cover, they had been bombing inland, leaving the Nazi defenses and the medieval farms and villages in which they were hidden intact.

            34,250 Americans landed on the beach that day and the several days after. The clouds had lifted, enough for the first ashore to see they were walking, or floating, or sinking into a bloodbath. But the waves of men had to keep coming to make it ashore before the tide, which would cover up the mines and booby traps, spiders made of sharp steel that would rip tanks or boats to shreds right before the bombs on top blew those shreds, along with arms and legs and skulls and good luck charms and helmets and boots and blood, lots of blood, like confetti in a cold wind.

            Roel showed us a picture of a landing craft with men packed in like rush hour on the A train. One veteran told Roel that he stood for two days on a raft waiting for the tide to flow right. The only time he sat was when the slipped in the vomit covering the metal floor. When he finally got off, he jumped into the water over the opened-up back of a guy he had grown up with in Ohio.  Thousands died on or near that beach.

            Bloody Omaha, Roel kept saying, when he ran out of facts and pictures. Bloody Omaha.

            In Paris, everywhere we go, I feel like we are walking on the dead. The bodies of black plague victims topped by street-fighting revolutionaries, then kings and priests, and some more revolutionaries, plus all the perfectly normal casualties over thousands of years -- old age or murder, or getting mowed down by a taxi cab.  At home, in our big and young country, we spend far less time treading on spirits.  But even Paris didn’t prepare me for Bloody Omaha.

            The beach is so empty now, hard to see it as it was, even with Roel’s pictures, even with the images from Saving Private Ryan still floating around in my nightmares. The last of the veterans who survived D-Day are dying now, and all the space on Omaha Beach says to me that the ghosts of their comrades are leaving too, dying a second time on that damned beach, old men who never were.

            

My Cheap Reading Glasses go to Paris

The reading glasses are sitting on a rough table painted not too thoroughly in white. They are made of plastic, a cross between translucent turtle shell and tiger print of a type that Shaft might have chosen for his living room back in the 70’s. I imagine it backlit, so a brown-burnt-orange glow suffuses his beanbag chairs, shag rug, and black lacquer table.

These aren’t my favorite pair of glasses, and you can tell that I don’t wear them often because the ends of the arms don’t show bite marks. I don’t even like them as much as I like the glasses I am wearing to write this, their facade more of a stylized snakeskin.

I think both pairs came out of the same pack, a three-pack Nick picked up for me at the Rite-Aid in Staunton before we came to Paris.  The third from the set is sitting behind me, cheetah spots on a magenta background, also preferable. This is at least the fourth bunch of this brand Nick has brought me, their price stamped right into the black packaging. $2.99.

I used to have only a few pairs of reading glasses. I would go to this hippy store in the Boreum Hill section of Brooklyn every time I visited Viv, who is studying design across the borough in Bed-Stuy. The store is rainbow cheerful, scarves and crystals twirling on sparkly chains cheerful, but the owner is a pinched blonde who wears her tie-dye like prison orange and exudes uptight energy, as if she is pretty sure I am going to steal something, even though I am and look like a 52-year-old who knows my place. Despite her, I used to always buy glasses there. I don’t anymore now that I am flooded with the cheap drugstore ones.

Before them, I would ignore the laser glare of the shopkeeper who, I could tell, was watching to see I did not violate the posted warning to return glasses to their place, lest different intensities’ mingle. I would choose just one set (once green with white interior in a paisley pink and red case, another time rose and black swirls with fake diamonds on the outsides of either arm), and then these would become my special glasses that I did not lose. One set for the DC apartment, one for my good work purse, one for the office in Staunton.

But since the cheap drugstore glasses have come along, I have become more careless with the ones that mean something. I don’t think I have outright lost any of them, but they are mostly where they aren’t supposed to be. In the outside pocket of the small green roller bag I use for short trips, on top of the refrigerator at the cabin, under the bed. The cheap ones are more often at hand, which makes me dislike them even more, for being too eager.

The pair with the tiger skin sits on the white table with lenses pointed out to the cobble stone street below, and from its vantage point though not mine, the Abbesses métro stop, probably not the art nouveau entrance, one of only two in Paris, but certainly the lights on the enclosed carousel that sits next to it. Of course, even if the glasses did come with eyes to see that far, the correction, for reading things close, would make all the quaintness just a blur of stone buildings and the shadows they throw back at the rare afternoon sun.

That the glasses are blind to Paris’s charm doesn’t make me feel any less sorry I brought them.  The others deserved it more. They were already loaded with my memories of pretending to be the type of writer who works best in the bar of a boutique hotel in Brooklyn, looking up once in a while to contemplate ordering a drink made with bitters (I never do) or to watch the prison bus, its grilled windows and dented exterior painted the exact same white as my Paris table, pull into the garage of the courthouse holding area across the street. Imagine how well I could see, up close, if those same glasses also were part of pretending to be the type of writer who writes best in an apartment in Paris, working over the noise of the bells from Église Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre or the shouts of the barman across the street who cannot get along with deliverymen, his red face made absolutely devilish by the red neon light streaming off his awning.

Steel's Treasure: Steel's Treasure: Sample Chapter

This week, Nick's blog features a sample chapter from Steel's Treasure. We're looking for feedback -- Tell us what you think #amreading #reviews #books

Steel's Treasure: Steel's Treasure: Sample Chapter: Read a free chapter from my treasure-hunting action novel, Steel’s Treasure .   Does this ring true to you vets and active duty service ...

STEEL'S TREASURE by Nick Auclair. Best. Book. Ever.

On The Fence Writers has published our first novel – Steel’s Treasure by Nick Auclair. Set in and around Clark Air base in the 1980s, it is the story of Air Force Captain William Steel on the hunt for the treasure hidden in the mountains of the Philippines by WWII’s infamous General Yamashita, the Tiger of Malay. It has kidnappings, and things blowing up, and scary creepy bad guys, and pygmies – who can resist a book with pygmies? Like Wizard of Oz with grenades and Marines! Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with North Korean agents and scantily clad bar girls!

You can buy the book on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) and on for Nook on the Barnes and Noble site. If I read the instructions correctly, there should be widgets or gadgets or whatsits floating around in the margins somewhere that will take you right to the site. If you read it and like it, please write us a review and let us know here. We will be having readings (with alcohol! The best kind!) anywhere they will have us and our trunkful of novels, and we want to know who our fans are so we can pour you a glass of the wine not-out-of-a-box we keep hidden under the spare tire.

And yes, I realize the book has been out for a bit, and we, the lowly publishers, haven’t mentioned it here, but we have been very busy on the farm on which our corporate mega-publisher headquarters are located, and the pollen is really getting to us, so we are not as perky as normal.

Finally, Nick, unable to restrain his mighty talent on the pages of this humble blog or our equally Facebook page has set up his own humble blog and Facebook page here: www.steelstreasure.blogspot.comwww.steelstreasure.blogspot.com and here www.facebook.com/SteelsTreasure.  Nick is pretty new to Facebook and could use a few more likes before he figures out that his current number is pretty measly (Yes, I told him, that WOULD be a lot for a dinner party, but….).

Buy this book

Loved this book and truly thought I wouldn’t. First person narratives put me off in general, and this one by an eleven-year-old pop star? I don’t even know why I bought it. But I know why I stayed with it: an authentic voice managing to convey an experience that is just about as foreign as I can image – dealing with the strains of being a teeny bopper (does anyone use that term anymore?) phenom. Everything was dead on, from the zonked out yet brutal stage mama to the mercenary crew to the bodyguard with the heart of gold. The prose is sophisticated without sacrificing the eleven-year-old voice; the New Yorker parody for example, is laugh-out-loud perfect. Even the redemptive and positive ending didn’t cloy, as it so easily could have. I woke up at three a.m. and stayed in bed until eight finishing this, and you will too if you give it a chance.

Active Voice is now On The Fence Writers

The fence in question.

Active Voice is changing its name. We felt it was time for a moniker more in keeping with our new focus on not being focused – that is on transitioning from a disciplined firm turning out policy and business documents and speeches for D.C. big shots to a writing, editing, and publishing house producing novels, short stories, essays, travelogues, textbooks, and the occasional policy or business document and speech for D.C. big shots.  So we are now:

On The Fence Writers

The Active Voice Facebook page has been similarly renamed, but if you "liked" it before, you should still be listed as a "liker."  And if you weren’t already a liker, well why the hell not? We are very likable. Go do it right now. We’ll wait.

Our old web address will still get you to our at-the-moment minimal site, but we now also have a new web address to go with the new name: www.onthefencewriters.com

As for our current writing projects:

Nick’s forthcoming novel, Steel’s Treasure, will soon have its own page on the website. He will also launch his own blog imminently (we are still trying to convince him “going live” isn’t the same as “hooking up the car battery backwards” and hitting that “publish” button won’t result in a big puff of smoke and his hair standing on end, as so many of our other projects do).   In the blog, he will talk about treasure hunting, the Philippines, Japanese swords, and all the other stuff he couldn’t find room to put in his book.  We’ll get you that link when it goes live (boom!).  We anticipate (hope and pray) that it will be out in e-book and paperback by this summer.

 The Active Voice blog, which lately has consisted mostly of my random writings, is now called On The Fence Writers and can be found at right here. The archives from the old blog are there, because I know you all want to read them again and again.

The Green Fence Farm blog, which always has consisted of my random writings with a smattering of mostly inaccurate agricultural information thrown in for variety, is still where it always has been, as is the Green Fence Farm Facebook page.

As for Twitter, personal, writing, and farm related tweets can now all be found @OnTheFenceWrite.

Serious stuff: speeches, policy writing, editing and the like:

I continue to write speeches for the FTC and other clients and will still happily write for you if you pay me enough and share my politics, or at least mostly. I and my team of talented and currently underemployed writers and editors also still write and edit proposals, resumes, capabilities statements, business plans, opeds, reports, marketing material, campaign literature or pretty much any other pen-to-paper sort of endeavor. For more information, email me at kssdc2001@aol.com (and stop laughing – someone has to keep AOL going. I think it is on the historic register).