Sometimes, You Can Go Home Again

This is actually just the commencement of post. Will add more and edit later.


My wife and I recently took a break from family deaths and illness to get away without much of an agenda. Saturday morning began with a visit to beautiful and historically interesting Fort Leavenworth, an hour or so away. This Army fort, founded in the 1820's or 30's, sits commandingly high above the mighty Missouri River on the Kansas side of the river and includes fascinating museums, well preserved and used buildings from the mid-1800s, a variety of memorials, and so on. It has been a tourist friendly facility during much of my life: When my children were little, for example, we would simply drive through the important stone gates with picnic baskets, bicycles, cameras, and leisure time to walk and look and lounge. We have some prized family photos from those forays.

Then 9/11 happened. Of course, access to this impressive facility has never been the same. Our most recent visit, unfortunately, commenced with our being stopped cold at the big entrance gate and promptly guided  back out - once our identifications were checked. The gate guard at first attributed our exclusion to the "terrorists" assembled across the road from the Fort. As we gulped loudly, he softened his choice of language from "terrorists" to "protesters". His change of description, frankly, seemed a little reluctant. As we hung around the town of Leavenworth for the next couple of hours, we realized that a small group of rag-tag almost unnoticeable protesters had assembled from around the country to voice an opinion about the imprisonment of ______________ Manning, the young soldier alleged to have passed information on to Wikileaks. He had just been moved to the maximum security military prison at Fort Leavenworth from Guantonomo. I have no idea what the subject of the protests may have been. But, of course, I understood that the Army does not want to confront such activity on its on post. And for all the guard could have been able to tell, we might have been a surreptitious group of the same intending to make our way onto the facility. But, it was a disappointment.