Pardon
me, but the whole staff of Rovin' and Ravin' is still a little weak around
our e-knees after completing the three-part series on creating your own web-site.
So, this week, with Hallowe'en coming up fast, we're going to go out back
of the Peanut.org towers, where we have our big staff cookouts and play Frisbee
with the AOL disks that come in the mail. No playing today, though, because
we have a couple of ghost stories.
Of course, ghost stories are always fun, but these
have a serious purpose. During my years as a teacher in the classrooms of
Worth County, I often warned my students not to believe something just because
they saw it in print. Now, as a sort of teacher in the free-net of Worth
County, I even more strongly caution my readers not to believe something
just because they see it flickering on a web-page.
In fact, I would caution you even more strongly
about trusting the Internet than I would about trusting a book. Few books
are published without some sort of editing and review, just simply because
of the cost of physically creating a book. But, as we've seen recently, it
is so easy to find all the resources you need to create a web-page at no
cost, that there is a great deal of material out there that represents the
thoughts and opinions of just one person who has no financial commitment
to provide a sort of reality check.
Also, we usually use some sort of search engine
or directory to locate information on the Internet, and most such services
are created by software that may not present what is actually there. And
so, we find ourselves with ghosts on the Internet.
Having recently written about submitting a site to various search engines,
I went looking for myself on the Internet. One of the links that I got included
a reference to the Human Genome Project. I first thought that that must be
a reference to an article that I wrote about the company Human Genome
Sciences—
http://www.peanut.org/users/mike/text/Hgsi.htm
But, I noticed that the URL did not look
familiar—
http://www.cincypost.com/news/genes062800.html
So, when I followed
the link (as you can now), I discovered that the article was about remarks
made by the Reverend Michael Seger, a Roman Catholic priest in Ohio. By the
way, Tennessee has the Reverend Michael Segers, a Baptist minister, and let
us hope that St. Michael is cheered by such an ecumenical commemoration of
his name—
http://www.korrnet.org/ibchurch/staffkn.htm
That was a pleasant surprise, to find someone with
a similar name holding forth with similar ideas on a similar topic, and in
doing so to find a story just weird enough for Hallowe'en. But, my next story
is serious and sad, more appropriate for November 2, All Souls' Day, a time
for remembering those who have gone on before us.
As I continued to look for myself in cyberspace, I was startled to find that
someone named Michael Segers had been killed in the Vietnam War. What made
that discovery even stranger for me was that his full name, as returned by
the search engine, was Kenneth Michael Segers. My closest link to the Vietnam
War is my friend Kenneth, who has figured in some of these columns as the
“not so old warrior,” for whom I registered a domain name and built
a web-site to accompany his presentations on the Vietnam War in high schools.
To learn more about the young man who died thirty-three years ago, I looked
for his name at the “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall
Page”—
http://thewall-usa.com/index.html
To my surprise, he was not listed. I returned to
the search engine, which I am purposely not naming, and followed the link
to part of the site maintained by Country Joe McDonald, a singer popular
in the sixties who has a good bit of material about the Vietnam War at his
site—
http://www.countryjoe.com/solcas.htm
This took me to a listing of all those Americans who had died in the Vietnam
War on July 14, 1967—
Perhaps you have already noticed, on the next to the last line, what happened, and it makes this coincidence even stranger. There was no Kenneth Michael Segers. No, long ago, and far away, two young men died, and their names are listed in alphabetical order by last name: Schramel, Kenneth Michael and Segers, Roger Dale.
How many angels had to dance on the heads of how
many pins, how many demons had to dance on the tips of how many bullets,
to bring those two young men's names together in that manner? As I tap away
on my laptop, I'm trying to figure out some meaning, some lesson, but there
is none, just the sad loss of two young men from very different parts of
the country, drafted for that distant war and killed on the same day.
So, I leave you, with dry feet, heart full of noble
thoughts but also painful questions, and eyes perhaps not so dry, with these
memorials, taken from “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall Page”--
|
KENNETH
MICHAEL SCHRAMEL |
ROGER
DALE SEGERS CPL - E3 - Army - Selective Service 9th Infantry Division 22 year old Single, Caucasian, Male Born on Jul 22, 1944 From ALTHA, FLORIDA His tour of duty began on May 01, 1967 Casualty was on Jul 14, 1967 in PHUOC TUY, SOUTH VIETNAM Hostile, died while missing GROUND CASUALTY MULTIPLE FRAGMENTATION WOUNDS Body was recovered Religion METHODIST Panel 23E - - Line 71 |
Rovin' on the Internet: Online Adventures