ANOTHER MAN DONE GONE

As I’ve mentioned, in the summers of 1978 and 1979, I worked as a counselor for an organization called The Fresh Air Fund. The Fund sent kids from low-income New York City neighborhoods to a wooded camp 70 miles north of the City. Watching over and relating to kids, 16 hours/day, six days/week, some of whom had special needs, required much focus. But doing so was often fun and sometimes even inspiring.

While the boys and girls, 7-13, did activities together in the camp’s central field, buildings, pool and surrounding forest, their respective cabins were on opposite sides of the camp, separated by a quarter-mile.

The twelve boys in my cabin were 10 or 11 years old. Nearly all of the kids in each summer’s three, 18-day sessions were being raised by single mothers. When I shaved in the morning, the boys would come to the bathroom door and watch, fascinatedly. Since few of them lived with fathers, most had never seen a male put foamy soap on his face and scrape a razor across it.

Groups of 12 and 13-year-olds lived in an adjacent cabin. Some of these kids, with then-appropriate names like Lonnie, Morris, Johnny, Troy, Russell, Tony and Juan, were bigger than small adults. Several of them, including the endearingly-named Teddy Beckles, were obstreperous, though often funny. They came from rough settings. Johnny was sent home a few days early when his 16-year-old brother was shot dead in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood.

These large, either Black or Puerto Rican, boys’ counselor was a short, stocky, twenty-year-old White guy named Wally, who often wore a camo t-shirt and military-logo-ed baseball-style hat. Wally was, during the school year, in the Air Force ROTC program at his commuter college.

Wally applied to these boys the skills and methods learned in military training and in his prior Fresh Air Fund camp summers. He used to bounce quarters on their beds after they made them in the morning. He taught them that derisive, rhyming “I don’t know but I’ve been told…” call-and-response training-run song/chant. If one of his boys showed some deficit of energy or gumption, he would deride them as soft, or words to that effect. He led them in morning calisthenics. When they misbehaved in some way or other, he made them do push-ups in front of their peers.

In those post-Vietnam years, those over 18 saw anything that signified military culture as anachronistic and dysfunctional. Manifestations of militarism were especially frowned upon in a camp where most of the women counselors were New York-Metro Area vegetarians and Child Development majors. If they had seen how Wally treated his kids near their cabin, these women would have cringed and demanded some sort of intervention.

I didn’t adopt Wally’s style. I couldn’t, I lacked the training. Instead, I took on a big-brother persona because I had experience being one. But I admired Wally’s approach. And it worked. The camp director gave him the biggest boyz because he knew Wally could handle them.

Wally’s kids liked him. After doing their pushups, they would stand up with smiles on their faces. This reaction was partly because they got to show they were becoming strong enough to handle what Wally was dishing out and partly because they appreciated that a grown male cared enough about them to call them by name and expect things of them. Wally’s crew also seemed to know that, when he wanted to, Wally could joke around and that there was an element of theater to the military thing. Ultimately, they could see that Wally had a heart for them.

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For a bunch of years after those summers, Wally sent me a Christmas card, with a short, handwritten note. Then we both got distracted by life.

Two decades later, I tracked Wally down via the internet. I found that he was an Air Force officer, living on Langley Air Force base in Eastern Virginia. On the drive back from a family vacation in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, I stopped on a Saturday afternoon, with Ellen and our three kids, to visit Wally, where he lived alone in a modest apartment. We shared three hours reminiscing and catching up. Wally told of doing much work-related travel and had continued to do volunteer work with at-risk boys. Ellen’s and my kids were characteristically chill and well-behaved. They take after Ellen. When he discussed the kids with whom he was still, in his forties, working, he noted, wryly, “These kids aren’t anything like your kids.”

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Last week, I was planning a trip to Virginia. Thus, I thought of Wally and of visiting him when I’m down that way. The following, jarring newspaper entry popped up as the first search hit:

Major Walter “Wally” Erck, age 63 years, of Williamsburg, VA, died suddenly on Thursday, May 13, 2021 at his home. He was an accountant and financial oversight auditor for the Department of the Air Force at the Pentagon. He was born in Joliet, IL and spent his formative years in Wilmington, IL and Bloomfield, NJ.

Wally gave a lifetime of service to his community and nation. His first career as a US Air Force officer in the Services career field serving at Norton AFB CA, Patrick AFB FL, Osan AB ROK, RAF Fairford UK, Langley AFB VA, Holloman AFB NM and Kirkland AFB NM. He retired from the Air Force in 1999 after 20 years.

As a civil servant, he led financial oversight of Nonappropriated Funds for the Department of the Air Force serving in positions at Langley AFB VA and Washington DC.

In addition, he served as a volunteer executive board member of local chapters for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Boy Scouts of America, American Red Cross, Big Brothers and Big Sisters, and numerous other youth-related organizations.

Scouting was a continual part of his life from a very early age when he earned the rank of Eagle Scout. Wally served as a Scoutmaster of units in Satellite Beach, FL, Osan AB ROK, RAF Fairford UK, Albuquerque, NM and Hampton, VA. Through his superior leadership, engaging communications and wonderful sense of humor, he motivated boys and transformed small groups into large, successful organizations.

As a world traveler, Wally traveled to over 35 countries, including all US states, Central America, South America, Europe, Middle East, and the Pacific enjoying pursuits like skiing, hiking, backpacking, whitewater canoeing and rafting, and cycling.

Wally is survived by his father and stepmother, his two brothers and sister-in-law, his niece, several aunts and uncles (whose names I’ve omitted) and many friends made around the world.

The dates and locations of the wake, the memorial service and the burial followed.

The obituary concluded:

Realizing that some people may not feel comfortable attending due to the current pandemic restrictions, as well as for those out of state and unable to travel, the funeral on Monday will be livestreamed beginning at 12:45 p.m. with the following link allowing you to be a part of the services virtually. Additionally, the graveside services will be livestreamed with the same link.

It is important to remember that given the current state of the pandemic, masks must be worn at all times on funeral home, church and cemetery grounds, and social distancing must be maintained. Please follow the instructions of the Wright & Ford Care Team Family Ambassadors upon arrival at each location.

I’ll never forget that awful element of Corona theater: families and friends gathering, in tightly-limited numbers, during times of loss—all or almost all these deaths from non-Covid causes—undignifiedly wearing masks that muffled their speech and concealed emotion. Instead of expressing warmth and consolation or sharing funny or laudatory stories about the departed, mourners viewed and treated each other as hazardous.

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Even before the Scamdemic, one could always read, between an obituary’s lines, much about a decedent’s life. What’s unsaid is often as important as what is said. So again here.

Aside from unspoken details about his life, presumably still-clean-living and physically-fit Wally’s sudden death, alone in his home, at the peak of VaxxFest, when military members were getting first dibs at shots—remember when that was a privilege?—seemed like more than a coincidence.

I doubt his next-of-kin, whom I also knew, would have would have considered that a Covid shot may have killed Wally. As Wally’s work history and his family-written obituary indicate, he and his family, as did many others, trusted their government.

And if they had seen a temporal link between the shot and Wally’s sudden death, I doubt Wally’s kin would have wanted to—or even have known that they could—report, online, such a death to VAERS. Relatively few Americans knew of this system, which is far from user-friendly. Thus, just as Covid deaths were wildly overstated, vaxx injuries and deaths have been much understated.

I suspect Wally’s—the former Boy Scout leader and military officer’s—decades of commitment to the military ethic of following orders may have done him in. Or maybe he believed the shots were “safe and effective” and wanted to take them. Either trust or obedience likely prompted him to jab.

Though I very much liked Wally, we not only had different counseling styles, we had different levels of trust in, and deference to, institutions and authority. If the Covid vaxx killed Wally, he made the ultimate sacrifice for a very unworthy cause.

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Given Wally’s Air Force officer status, during our 2002 Langley visit he drove us on a twilight tour along the periphery of the runways, taking us near smaller jets and big, roaring cargo planes, such as that pictured above, poised to take off.

I remembered this setting when, fast-forwarding nineteen years, I saw, while channel-surfing, an early 2021 TV news segment showing military freight planes, on runways, at twilight, being quickly loaded with purportedly precious pallets full of some supposedly miraculous vaccine.

The vaxx-hyping reporter excitedly noted that these stacked, crated vials were kept at some cryogenic temperature because they contained a cutting-edge medication. This magical liquid freight was going to deliver America from viral annihilation.

The reporter didn’t mention that nearly all Americans were fine and that so many had already been exposed to and naturally immunized against an unscary virus.

The televised twilight runway theater had various dramatic elements: the urgency of deafening jet engines, military men in motion, loading miraculous cargo around-the-clock, implicitly superimposed on the underlying technological mastery of medical researchers. It was an all-hands-on-deck, wartime-like effort to deliver these ostensibly sophisticated—but really talismanic—and purportedly life-saving shots to desperately fearful, endangered people in all corners of a nation whose citizens had, while the Viral Grim Reaper had ostensibly reigned for over a year, hidden in their dwellings and worn masks to shield themselves from the biologically inexplicable most vicious virus ever.

Finally, via the vaxxes, the Military/Pharmaceutical cavalry had arrived to rescue America! When the sun rose the next morning, needles would begin to go into arms all across this great nation and the apocalyptic Coronavirus would be crushed! All praise be to Science!

What a crock of shit it all was.

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At that time, many eagerly took the shots not only to protect themselves. They demanded others to inject because this revolutionary liquid was said to confer herd immunity. Oddly, the officials who said this, and the anti-militaristic citizens who became the foot soldiers for universal injection, were the same people who, in 2020, mocked herd immunity via human interaction. Some of these same injectors became those who died suddenly or were injured. Many of them got sick multiple times from a virus they were told the shots would bulletproof them against. So much for “stopping infection and spread.”

A recent study concluded that the shots saved over a million lives. Those ostensibly saved were over 65. Yet, while I directly knew no one said to have died from Covid, I knew a dozen vaxxers over 65 who’ve died of non-Covid causes: cancers, old age or cardiovascular events. I suspect you also know multiple deceased vaxxers whose shots failed to save their lives.

Despite all of its failures, many nonetheless pretend that the shots conquered The Virus. Most act as if Coronamania never happened.

Few allow themselves to confront the Scamdemic process and legacy: the mind-bending and ineffective isolation, the lost experiences, the bankrupting, massive, regressive upward transfer of wealth, the broken relationships, the legions made more—not less—prone to illness after injecting and the deaths of vital people who trusted their government and media, rolled up their sleeves and took one—or more—for the team.

Rest in peace, Wally.