Every Veterans Day, I listen to the rhetoric. Metaphorically, I look around at the crowd and wonder about the distinction between those who died in war and those who came home.

I wonder especially about those of us who came home with everything intact and working.

If we were honest about it, many of us would admit that luck and providence has a lot to do with that dividing line.

The thing about coming back alive is that you are given an opportunity to accomplish something. Karl Marlantes has done that with the sustained effort it took to bring his book Matterhorn to print.

Marlantes described that struggle of more than 30 years in a talk to Columbia Forum last week. He said that a succession of women had rescued the book, by endorsing the manuscript and moving it down the line toward publication.

The author added that independent booksellers were key to his book’s progress. Stores such as Portland’s Annie Bloom and the Cannon Beach Book Co. hosted readings and talked up the book. By contrast, the chains are willing to host a best-seller, but they are not in it for the long haul.

The truest thing that Marlantes told the Columbia Forum audience was his description of the military’s reliance on 19-year-olds with too much testosterone. All armies in all nations have relied upon that weapon. The other true warning he gave was about America’s reliance on volunteer soldiers. It is important for a broader spectrum of Americans to serve in the military, so they learn what the military is and what it is not. The most profound statement of skepticism about the military was given by a five-star general, President Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address.

The anti-government fervor of tea party members in these parts is ironic, because our region is a creature of the federal government. From the Lewis & Clark Expedition to the Army Corps of Engineers to the U.S. Coast Guard, the federal presence has marked the mouth of the Columbia River and laid the foundation for navigation and commerce. The Navy’s presence and its minesweeper construction during World War II in Astoria and the Army’s continued presence at Camp Rilea are other elements of this story.

The economy of Oregon, Washington and Idaho was agrarian until the federal dam building, beginning in the 1930s, and creation of the federal interstate highway system after World War II.

Matt Love wrote an insightful observation of the late Ed Westerdahl in The Sunday Oregonian. Love described the bold stroke by which Westerdahl – Gov. Tom McCall’s executive assistant – created the state-sponsored Vortex rock concert.

I got to know Westerdahl a bit after he had been McCall’s assistant. McCall made Westerdahl executive director of the Port of Portland, just after it had been created in a consolidation involving the old Portland Docks Commission. I wrote a piece for Oregon Times magazine about a runway that the Port of Portland wanted to create by filling a portion of the Columbia River and dredging one island away. As a way out of that controversy, the Port’s new executive director, Westerdahl, called for an environmental impact statement, and he gave the contract to Portland State University, his alma mater.

I gained a job from that EIS, which was run out of the PSU Urban Studies Center. I was charged with editing the copy of the various academicians who wrote portions of the EIS. It was quite a challenge to prune and sharpen the prose of economists, historians, scientists and geographers. Today I would probably throw up my hands at such a task, but for a guy in his 20s, it was a great training exercise.

– S.A.F.