re: #90 Shiplord Kirel, Friend of Moose and Squirrel

By the time I was 10, I had only spent a little over 11 months in the US, between my father’s assignments in the UK and Japan respectively. We didn’t have a TV in Japan in those days because Armed Forces TV did not exist yet and Japanese TV, which was already fairly advanced, was naturally all in Japanese. There was an exception: One of the networks ran Highway Patrol with Broderick Crawford in English twice a week. On those nights, we would all traipse over to a neighbor’s house to watch the only English language TV we could see. From that, I got the idea that the States were a mostly desolate place where people spent most of their time fighting, roaring up and down the highway in monstrous tail-finned cars, and shooting at each other. I was apprehensive when we headed out to our next assignment, in Colorado Springs, but I was wonderfully surprised. This was before the fundy invasion, of course, when it was a beautiful, progressive, and fairly peaceful place. It is still beautiful but it is now run and inhabited by swarms of crazy people.

Heh. Our first tour was Seoul in ‘80. AFKN was sort of in business, with the famously high body count of b&w Gunsmoke.