What's your Story? 

When you go for a tattoo in French Polynesia the artist will ask for your story.
They like to incorporate it into their design.
But do our lives have a single thread, or are we instead a collection of stories?
If so which are the ones we choose to tell?
For over 40 years I had a friend, Tony Gulisano, and in 2019 we started
working together at The One Club for Creativity in New York.
During Covid this involved a 10.00am zoom call every morning where we
would discuss various projects but mostly have a good laugh.
One morning, and hour after our usual chat I got a call to say my friend was
in hospital, brain dead.
The cause was a massive hemorrhage. The next morning they turned off the
life support.
There had been no warning signs, for Tony, or his family, his light was out,
just like that.
For those close to him the shock was difficult to deal with.
For my part it was a wake-up call to untie the lines from office life and set off
on a voyage to live to the max.
That is how my current sailing adventure began.
Asked why he kept racing around the world single-handed the French sailing
hero, Jean Le Cam, replied “It’s the extremes, it’s about things which are
unreachable in daily life.”
That’s my story, the voyaging part of it anyway, but it’s not for the skin.
So when the tattoo artist in Tahiti asked for my story I just used my graphic
design background to create a band around my ankle made from various
Polynesian symbols he showed me.
At the front is a symbol for warrior, on the sides, symbols for protection,
across the Achilles tendon just above my heel he chose a Tiki, a half God also
giving protection.
(The Greek, Achilles, was also a half God, but unfortunately he didn’t have
a Tiki on his heel.)
I like my tattoo. It’s intricate and graphically pleasing, and when I left the
studio I realized it did have a story.
I sailed my boat from Brooklyn to Tahiti, and got a Polynesian tattoo.

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WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

Send it to Bob@bobisherwood.com and I’ll post more here.

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Will Mackin’s story.
Utah Test and training Range

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I parked in front of the microwave antenna at the top of Craner Peak.
A cold wind blew from the east. The warm sun floated overhead. 
Reed dropped the tailgate. We pulled the hard cases from the bed of the
pickup. We shouldered our packs. We’d been home from Afghanistan
just two months and already the pack I’d worn there - the one that had
become an extension of me – now felt like somebody else’s. Puffy white
clouds dragged across the sky. Smooth rocks studded the domelike crest
of the mountain. Reed and I carried the equipment over that crest, toward
a footpath that wound down the mountain’s eastern face.
The snowcapped Wasatch Range came into view first, followed by Salt
Lake City and the Great Salt Lake. The bombing range was in the sand
between the western shore of the lake and the base of Craner Peak.
The observation point, or OP, from which we’d control the jets that would
drop the bombs, was a stone outcropping at the top of a steep draw.
Arriving at the OP, Reed and I lowered the hard cases. We slid out of our
backpacks. I stepped to the edge of the outcropping and looked down
upon the live impact zone. A thousand feet below, atop a smooth field of
sand, was a bright red fire truck. “That doesn’t look right,” I said.
Actually, it looked like the fire truck had been trying to reach the center of
the impact zone. As if, perhaps, there’d been a fire there, and in a haste to
save the day, the firemen had driven off the hardened access road and
gotten bogged down in the sand. They’d need a crane to lift it out. “Anybody
down there?” Reed asked. Through the binoculars, I saw a set of boot tracks
walking from the driver’s-side door back towards the access road.
“No,” I said. Reed stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled the way one
might to hail a passing cab, or to turn a wayward dog. It was a bright, clean
sound that seemed to penetrate everything and pull it slightly apart. Thus, the
shadowed crags in the rocky draw, the silver horns on the white roof of the
fire truck’s cab, the deep jade swirl at the center of the Great Salt Lake, all
seemed to waiver. I felt this instability in my heart, even, like it was foaming.
If anybody was down on the impact zone, they would have felt it, too
They would have emerged from wherever they were hiding and raised their
blank faces toward the OP.” Maybe we should call “Oasis,” Reed said.
“Worth a try,” I said. Oasis was the radio call sign of the Utah Test and
Training Range’s security force, whose primary responsibility was to protect
the top secret laboratory located somewhere in the vast desert west of Craner.
That lab was rumored to house extraterrestrials. Therefore, I imagined it to be
a town like any other, with parades, baseball games and fireworks on the
Fourth of July, where extraterrestrials and human beings lived as one.

Where aliens taught us how to conquer entropy, and we taught them how
to love. Such a place would require the strictest protection, which didn’t
leave Oasis much time to manage the bombing ranges. Reed removed the
radio from his pack, powered it up, and tuned to the proper frequency.
“Oasis this is Bulldog,” Reed broadcast. Ten watts emanated off the radios’
omnidirectional antenna. Some of that energy descended into the draw,
tumbled off the rocks, and spilled out over the lake. Some of it shot up into
the sky, wormed its way through the ozone, and forged a path to infinity.
Still more hopped Craner Peak, behind us, carrying Reed’s transmission
over fields of warm sagebrush to a cinder-block waystation, where, enroute
to the range earlier that day, Reed and I had stopped to register with Oasis.
A counter spanned the linoleum width of the waystation. A Guard wearing
a stiff combover rested his elbows on it. Behind the guard were racks of
shotguns, computers, radios, and closed-circuit televisions. Though the guard
hadn’t looked busy, Reed and I had waited behind the sign that said,
WAIT HERE. The guard had watched us as if through a one- way mirror.
Having received no reply to his first transmission, Reed keyed the mike again.
His voice must’ve emanated from one of the radios behind the waystation
guard. “Oasis, this is Bulldog. How do you hear?” “Go ahead Bulldog,”
the guard replied. “I’m standing on the OP, looking down on at a fire truck
on the impact zone. I’m wondering if it’s supposed to be there.”
“If it’s on the impact zone, then it’s a target,” the guard said. “This doesn’t
look like a target, is all. It’s got it’s windshield, still, and hoses. And it looks
like it drove out there under its own power.” The guard must’ve looked over
his shoulder at the closed-circuit TV labeled CRANER. He must’ve seen the
wave of sand piled up in front of the fire truck’s chrome bumper.
“Let me make a phone call.” Radio static hissed as a tall white cloud passed by.
Fossils cast in the stone outcropping resembled harpsichords and brains.
“They’re telling me that the fire truck is a target,” the guard said.
“Who’s telling you that?” Reed said. “My supervisor, Bill.” Maybe Bill was the
type to understand how at any given moment a thing could be both a target
and a nontarget. How the more you tried to nail it down one way or the other,
the less known it would become. But chances were slim. “I can have Bill call
you if you want,” the guard offered. “That’s okay,” Reed said. “All right, then.”
Reed and I went through our setup routine. Opening the hard cases released
the smell of ozone. We removed each piece of equipment from its foam
rubber bed. We warmed the lasers, synced the clocks. We stabilized the
coordinate generators. Ready, the equipment clicked and whirred. The radios
whispered, Hush. Down on the sand, the fire truck shone in the sun.
We waited for the jets. I lay back on the outcropping. The stone was warm,
the breeze refreshing. Sunshine penetrated my eyelids, soaking through my
retinas and into my mind, where it turned all my memories blue.
The voice of the lead pilot over the radio snapped me out of it: “Bulldog,
Widow One Five.” The air base from which the jets launched was north

of Salt Lake City. Searching the sky in that direction, I detected a slip of
vertical motion. Then the jet came out of afterburner, leaving a column
of black smoke. I watched the jet climb up and over the city. The sun
flashed off its canopy as it rolled inverted and pulled toward the range.
A second jet rose from the shimmering air base, then a third.
Each jet carried four five-hundred pound laser-guided bombs.
I manned the laser designator. Searching through the scope, I found the
levers of the fire truck’s pump control station, and the dials above the
levers with their needles all at zero. I found an axe, hanging below a pike,
hanging below a section of hard hose. I saw Craner’s rocky base reflected
in the fire truck’s windshield before I found the three silver horns on the
roof of the cab. Reed manned the radio: “Say when ready for talk-on,”
Reed transmitted. “Go ahead,” the pilot answered. A talk-on orientated
pilot to target environment. It began identifying something large and
obvious, then proceeded in a narrowing line toward the target. The pilot
would follow along either by looking outside, with the naked eye, or by
looking through a camera that was mounted to a targeting pod that hung
on a wing. Reed began his talk-on with the Great Salt Lake and its dark
green center. Next, he described a spot along the lake’s western shore
where sand and water twisted into a ying-yang. “What’s a ying-yang?”
the pilot asked. From there, Reed moved west again, focusing the pilot’s
attention onto the sand at the bottom of the draw, where shadows of two
clouds combined to form what looked like a devil’s head. “Got it,” the
pilot said. Reed asked, “What do you see between the Devil’s horns?”
“A fire truck,” the pilot answered. “That’s your target,” Reed said.
Reed stacked the jets in a counterclockwise orbit out over the lake.
The first jet rolled wings level and dove toward the target. Reed cleared
him to drop. I triggered the laser. The air horns created a nice refraction,
which the bomb steered toward by means of adjustable fins. The fins
banged up and down against their stops, causing the bomb to fall through
the air like a shuttle through a loom, also causing it to chatter. Looking
through the designator’s scope at the silver horns, I listened to the falling
bomb. I watched the fireball silently blossom, right over the horns.
The bang rolled up the drawer to reach me with torn edges. The heat
warmed my face. The fire truck steamed as if it had been broiled.
A blue halo of shattered glass surrounded it. Levers on the pump control
station that had been up were down, and vice versa. Otherwise it looked
fine. More jets arrived to circle high in the stack, as others corkscrewed
down into the chute. There was a long period of direct hits in which
nothing seemed to change. Where some core things held together, blast
after blast. Which made me wonder if I should stop the bombing,
call in a crane, and tow the fire truck to the laboratory, and down Main
Street to the center of town, where the fire station would’ve been had
they still needed one. Meaning, had the aliens not yet taught the humans

how to inoculate themselves against pyromania, or other acts of god.
I thought maybe the aliens and the humans could work together to restore
the fire truck back to its original condition, so they could drive it down the
street during their parade. Then something vital broke open down on the
live impact zone. Oily smoke poured from a deep fissure in the fire truck’s
hull. The cab tore open, the doors blew off, the seats ejected, the front axle
collapsed. Chrome broiled and the red finish melted. I shone the laser on
whatever I could find through the billowing smoke: intake cowling, engine
block, drive train. It wasn’t long before all that remained was the pump.
The iron pump looked like two elbows locked together. I shot the laser into
one open flange, and the refraction bloomed out another. The pump gonged
under the weight of two, three, and four bombs. It cracked under the weight
of a fifth. The impellor’s blades separated in midair, sailing off to leave deep
maroon scars in the sand. Coming off target, the jet flew right over Reed and
me on the OP. It was such a strange sight: the jet, knife-edged, maybe thirty
feet off the ground. It was so close I saw every panel in the fuselage, and every
rivet in every panel. The pilot looked right at me. It was like she stood on one
side of a bottomless crevasse, and I on the other. But she was weightless.
I saw her eyes behind her dark visor. I saw her pencil, dummy-corded to her
kneeboard, floating in mid-cockpit. I saw her French braid rising off her
shoulder toward her canopy. Then she was gone, and the mountain shook in
her wake.

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Will is a 23-year US Navy Veteran and bronze medal recipient
who served alongside Navy SEALS in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He calls me a pal and kindly gave me this piece from his book
“Bring out the Dog.”

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Tony Gulisano