Some fairly serious shit has happened in the last sixty years. As fate would have it, I was fairly close to the central point of a lot of that shit - albeit in some cases only briefly; "shit" it seems, has a fairly long half life. As time has passed I have found it increasingly difficult -impossible really - to turn off a continued remembrance of the events and places and people that inhabited the story boards of all of that shit. They just won't leave me alone. So I have written it, and them, all down. One bookend of the story was my involvement in the "war effort", as we called the Vietnam debacle. The other was the near demise of IBM. Between those bookends there lurk a wide variety of people, experiences and events that always seemed, as they occurred, to be coherently additive to the total story.