EL CAJON VALLEY HOSTS LION’S NEWSLETTER
December 1, 2025, Members: _34___ Guests: __1_
Facebook: El Cajon Valley Host Lions Club
Volume 2026 _______________________________________Issue 20
CALL TO ORDER: __Ron Nevels____________________________________
Invocation: __Mark Clifton__Pledge of Allegiance:
Dolores _Galkowski_
Patriotic Song: ___Kat and Chris Song: __God Bless America___
HELEN KELLER QUOTE BY: _Van Wilsey_________________
“That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!”
GUESTS: Malone (Tom Normandie)________________
CALENDAR OF UPCOMING EVENTS:
Xmas Party December 9th
Next Board Meeting: DECEMBER 11, 2025, 6 PM, Elks Conference Room
Christmas Basket December 19th and 20th
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU
MARK CLIFTON (12-22-54) WARREN MCKENNA (12-15-51)
DICK NASIF (12-09-42) JEFF SMITH (12-30-57)
PENNY DUANE (12-08-61) DYNA JONES (12-25-71)
GOOD CHEER: _________________________________________________________
IF you know of any members who are in distress, sick, or in the hospital, PLEASE notify PP Yvonne so our good wishes can be conveyed to him/her. 619/838-4262
December EXEMPT BADGES:
| Mark Clifton | $100 |
| Van Wilsey | $100 |
| Grant Thiem | $100 |
| Grant Thiem III | $100 |
| Chris Bramwell | $100 |
Donate to the Christmas Baskets
______________________________________________________________________________
21 Pies were sold for Christmas Baskets. Pies will be distributed at the December 15th Meeting
VICE PRESIDENT REPORTS:
1st VP Penny Duane: No Progress
____________________________________________________________________________
2nd VP Grant Thiem III: __Call on Chris Bramwell (nothing to report)__________________
3rd VP Kat Zeman: Phil Smith Report, we have covered the Christmas party coming up the week from tomorrow night.
So, no meeting next Monday.
And the most important thing is to bring your kids and grandkids.
Bring those, grab your gifts.
Other than that, it’s going to be a lot of fun.
Wear your best Christmas sweaters and bring people and bring joy.
Mark Clifton asks for help, needs trucks to pick up the Christmas Basket Supplies on December 16th at 12:00 noon. 5 Members volunteer their Vehicles.
HAPPY DOLLARS/FINES: TT __PP Walt Simmons___________________________
| Mark Clifton | $1 | Birthday |
| Dick Nasif | $5 | Birthday |
| Warren McKenna | $5 | Birthday |
| Jeff Smith | $20 | Birthday |
| Dyna Jones | $10 | Birthday |
| Mike Raney | $5 | Gary Robinson’s new phone |
| Gary Sims | $5 | Giraffe Pictures |
| Grant Thiem III | $20 | Happy to be here |
| Don Anthony | $10 | Desert Trip |
| Carter Short | Donated Shoes | |
| Ron Nevels | $5 | Charger Win |
| Phil Smith | $25 | New Shoes |
Dick Nasif (Chief Security Agent)
We’re about six months into our Lion Year.
And our club is nearly 80 years old.
We have a lot of possessions, some of which have gone by the wayside over the last couple of years, and the emphasis on possession and maintaining possession of the gavel. (Has fallen off.)
Oh, no.
We keep getting people buying gavels and giving them to the president.
They don’t understand the meaning of ‘possession’ here.
The president has to pay a fine for losing those gavels.
Well, I found 3 gavels, so the President must pay a fine.
It was decided that President Ron Nevels will pay $100 fine
PROGRAM: PP Tom Normandie
As lions, we like to share our thoughts and ideas about who we are with our fellow lions.
Well, maybe every two or three months, you get a lion that comes up to tell us about themselves.
Now, what I’m going to talk about is that one moment, one moment in my life where everything changed, the full trajectory of my life, how I got here, and it happened in Vietnam in one simple moment.
So I’m just going
to start with a little background.
I grew up as a simple kid in Mission Beach, Pacific Beach.
I was let loose; we could go or do anything we wanted, at any time we wanted, and at five years old, I was running around Mission Beach.
And from there, I went to school at La Jolla and
Later, I got transferred to Mission Bay, not transferred, I moved out of La Jolla.
And from there, I made a series of incredibly bad decisions in life, so bad that basically, I was on my way to jail.
And as I was standing in front of the judge, about right there, 30 days on my life sentence, I just, out of nowhere, blurted out,
You know, your honor, if you do this to me, I won’t be able to make my enlistment date.
And he looked at me and said, Oh yes, really.
This is at the 10 o’clock session.
So bring me your papers.
Now I’m downtown.
I’m wandering around the streets thinking, what the hell am I going to do?
Walk down Broadway.
There’s a recruiting office.
Then I sort
of strolling in there, talk to the guy, and the next thing they know, date stamp sign up papers.
Went back to the court at the two o’clock session, handed the judge my papers.
He looked at him.
I never looked at him that closely.
I didn’t realize that there was a date
stamp on there.
And he just smiled at me.
And in 1967, if you were really going to the army, and they just thought that was better than sending me to jail.
So bingo, I’m in the army.
From the army, I got married in 1967, and then from there, spent a little time doing my thing, and then in August 1968, I got sent to Vietnam.
August is important, as everyone said, because it’s my birthday month.
Now it doesn’t make a genius to know if you have a one-year tour in Vietnam and you arrive there on your birthday, you’re going to spend your full 21st birthday in Vietnam.
It’s not an exciting moment in your life.
So that’s where I was the first time I celebrated my birthday completely alone, other than a bunch of others in a holding company.
How many people have been in the service?
I know what a holding company So, a holding company is where you go just to be hanging around until they figure out what they want to do with you.
In this particular case, I was in the holding company.
It was my 21st birthday.
I went to a bar, as lonely as I could be with a bunch of guys, like had two beers, went back to my unit, which was a various put a sheet over my head and a sheet over my toes and stretched it out so that the mosquitoes were not biting me.
Needless to say, the next morning, that mosquito bites on my head and mosquito bites on my toes.
With that, they said, Well, here’s your orders, hop on this plane, you’re going to the train.
And I was in Cameroon time.
I arrived on the train, and that night nobody picked me up.
I was there with two other guys, and there was an M30, I mean, not an M30, but a C-130 running around, spinning up on the ground.
If anyone knows what I’m talking about, it was a mini gun, and they were in the back.
I looked out there, and I went, Where am I and what’s going on?
I have no idea what’s going on, scared it’s going to be a little bit.
That next morning, a cheap go-up, 44th Civil Affairs, hop on in, hop on in.
Go over to the 41st Civil Affairs, and when I got there, the first sergeant said, You can be here, and then another, excuse me, an hour goes by, another officer of the unit came to me and said, You know, you’re not supposed to be here.
You’ve got a unit, you’ve got a unit, 20th transportation, and they just lay claim.
We’ve got you.
This is what I love about 40 groups of little parents.
They said, if you don’t want to go, we can arrange And at that moment, that one moment, from a totally distant, unilinear direction in my life, everything changed.
Everything.
I was no longer the 19-year-old punk who was going to jail.
I now had to make a decision.
The decision was, yeah, I’ll stay.
That changed my life forever.
That one moment where coincidence and decision merged right at that moment, because I had no idea what the 41st Civil Affairs.
And at that moment was about ready
to change everything.
So, who are the 41st Civil Affairs?
Well,
We’ve been called a lot of things, Peace Corps of Vietnam.
One of the things they used to call us was a speedy gun.
Peace Corps with rifles or battle without bullets.
There’s an incongruous statement there to figure out.
I’ve never figured it out.
But what was our mission?
Our mission was to reach most of the rural population in the RNB, the Republican Vietnam government, by helping win the hearts and minds of the rural population through construction agriculture, medical, economic, and educational programs.
In addition to that, we were also spies.
I’ll explain that in one minute.
I got some notes here.
hard to remember all of yourself.
But who were we?
Well, we were 16 to 20 teams, depending on what time of year it was.
And each team was comprised of a medic, an interpreter, and one or two officers.
Some of the list of personnel and, on occasion, a real doctor.
And you would think that Peace Corps members would be prize personnel, but no, they didn’t give a rat’s tail what you did as a civilian.
We had two Peace Corps guys in my unit, a whole office.
One was the mailman, and the other was a company. Two years, each one of them in the Peace Corps, totally not used at all.
So I always thought that was kind of interesting.
Well, where were we?
We were located normally when I was there, which is known as two cores.
That’s the core before the DMZ.
They told you, but next to the core, I core was DMZ.
We were the next commonly called the Central Highlands.
That’s what we were.
And then we spread out in a couple of other areas, primarily, that’s what we were.
Originally, we were located in very, very rural areas.
and we were attached to embedded combat teams, whether the 173rd Airborne or the 4th Division or somebody like that.
Later, we got assigned to the 1st Field Force and MACD, MACD being under the 1st Field Force.
1st Field Force was a core unit.
It was similar to, if you’re dealing with the Civil War, the way with Patton, these guys commanded corps.
First Field was a core, Back B was underneath them.
Back B was assisting; they were assisting the first field force, mostly in Intel.
And so let’s take a look at some of the projects that did.
I’m going to share a couple of stories about these guys.
You’re
going to find some contradictions here.
You’re going to find some late hypocrisy, but that’s either here or there.
As a unit, when we arrived in Vietnam in 1965, they really had no plan for what we were supposed to do.
So as a unit, we just made it up.
By the time I got there, we were in full makeup mode.
If you wanted to make up, we’d just make crap . It was just amazing.
What should we do over here?
Well, let’s get these people some agricultural help.
Agriculture happened to be one of them.
Let’s dig them well.
Construction was another one.
Education and training would like to take the older folks in the group and train them how to integrate with the war, Vietnam, how to stay away from the North Vietnamese, not be killed, which didn’t work out well right now, and some other nice units of training.
in sanitation because people we were dealing with were not very sanitary, and explain that a more.
We did immunizations, and we did dentistry and standard medical like infections, colds, things like that.
And then we also conducted and helped with refugee centers.
And refugee centers were kind of scary because everybody there was misplaced, and you always knew that
you really
that part.
And then, of course, we were spies.
I’m going to go back to MacD for just one second.
MacD was an intelligence operating unit, working under the first field force.
And when I was in Quignan, I grouped with three MacD Intel specialists.
And when I was there, I’d always tell these guys, I should come out of the field
with
me because I was working alone.
Come out to the field with me.
It’s so much fun.
Actually, I really wanted some more protection.
My biggest fear in Vietnam, and I’m being blunt about this.
did not want to die alone.
I knew I was going to get killed.
I think we all knew we were going to get killed.
I just didn’t want to die alone.
So I wanted these bad guys to come out.
Would they come out?
No.
You know why?
They were in intelligence.
They weren’t that stupid.
I was.
Oh, and PS, by the way, if you have any questions, just raise your hand.
I’ll take him as I go off.
But imagine you guys would, one guy came out one time and spoiled you’d never go back. So that’s what we did.
We did agriculture, construction, education, medical, revenue centers, and spies.
The guys I was working with would quiz me every day about what happened in the field.
And didn’t even know what to tell them.
but they knew what was going to go away before it did.
So, now, how did we accomplish all these cool objectives?
when we first started off, we had complete TO and E, that’s tables of operations.
If you’re in the equipment of operations, if you’re in the service, you’ll know that it prescribes everything your company is supposed to have, except that we had 16 teams in the field and they were all over.
And I have a handout, you can look at the handout. Those are where our teams were, on the back page of the handouts.
So
I’ll tell you where all
our teams were in two cores.
And teams in two core areas were in so many different weird environments, some on the coast, some in the highlands, some in more jungle-ish sort of areas.
No.
When we first got there and later, even when I was there, we had no access to supplies.
So we stole.
We just flat out stole.
My colonel, lieutenant colonel, dollar, was a Green Beret, very upset.
He got hung with us.
We were special ops, yes, we were, and we were psychological ops, but he was a Green Beret guy.
He loved the green beret.
So, do you think we stole from first?
Green Beret.
Our unit.
Our unit, all the enlisted men, who weren’t very many in the headquarters company.
We had a three-quarter-ton vehicle.
We could drive anywhere we want with a four-quarter-ton vehicle.
It was a green-gray, three-quarter-ton truck.
We also had a lieutenant who was from the Navy.
And where we were on the train, there was a little army farmer.
The Navy would bring things in.
He was in the Navy, took advantage of the OCS program, became an officer, and then he would go down and bargain and steal with them.
In addition to that, we had a staff sergeant for food distribution, but we didn’t have any; we didn’t have vessels.
So we attached him to Fort McDermott, and he started stealing immediately.
And he would take cases of lobster and cases of steaks, stick them in there, wait for the date to expire, and then call us up and go, Hey, we got some expired lobster steak.
So we ate pretty well when we were on the track.
The rest of us were out of teams, 16 teams.
No, that didn’t work out.
We’re seven people.
We were stationed mostly with mountain yards, and mountain yards are an indigenous group of people in Vietnam.
They’re not considered Vietnamese in terms of ethnicity, you are in terms of living in , but they were kind of like the Irish to the British.
You know, very well,
you were present,
but not very well liked and looked down actually.
And they lived in basically St. Katz, too much at that time.
So, we wanted to help now, and so we created things, but because we were not anthropologically aware, we were just creating things that we thought made sense.
We did a good example.
We decided this one was a great program.
And listen, I’m going to rag on these guys a little bit, but at the same time, we did good work.
We did.
But when you’re just improvising in life, things don’t always work out.
So this was one of our great schemes.
One of our guys, known as the mountain guards, and the women were carrying straw out of the hand sticks over their backs to sell for firewood.
And they would walk
because
They really didn’t have any transportation.
These people are very, very, very
warm.
And so we decided, you know, we can help these women out.
And we can help the village make more money just did we get them some transportation.
So that they can move these sticks and sell fire within the town.
And
When I say towns, more like villages.
And make a profit, and everyone would be happy.
Oh, that’s a good idea, I thought.
Everyone
else thought that was a great idea, too.
So they got a bunch of boroughs.
They took them out to the chief.
People were chiefs, their chiefs.
And they’re not quite selfless, but they’ve got a selfless former government vessel, not a head.
They did have a chief.
So we introduced them, told them about how we could do all this stuff, the girls.
We thought this was really cool.
We hit these things.
We get this wood in town.
can make a lot of money and improve their life.
Came back two months later.
There’s the woman.
Lots of stuff on the back.
There’s the cheap.
There’s a big crowd.
We had a couple of donkeys in We had to ask them what the donkeys were all about.
We gave them to you.
We thought of using them to haul the wood.
Does anyone know why they didn’t do that?
The mountaineer, why did they not use the burrow to haul the wood?
Does anyone know? Can anyone guess?
Well, it’s an old joke, but why would you use a burrow when you’ve got perfectly good women to
haul the
stuff?
Just dawned on us at that point, you know, we
use
cultural relativity here because that’s just not going to work.
We didn’t insist upon it.
He kept his stuff, which he used for prestige, so he began.
Then we decided, well, maybe we should, maybe we should give it to these little pot-belly pigs, a little small little pigs.
They won’t see little potbelly pigs.
FPR, they are kind of, so that’s what we’re going to do.
So we got pigs.
We got big pigs.
We brought them in good old American pigs, good old American.
Well, two things about American pigs, or at least Southeast Asian pigs that were not pot-belly pigs.
One, they didn’t like the heat.
And oddly enough, we would have guessed, they didn’t do well in unsanitary conditions.
Hot belly pig, what’s the old phrase, a pig in?
That’s kind of where they were.
So what happened to our kids that we bought?
They all died, died of disease, they’re sad.
Just amazing, right?
So those are some of the examples of the kinds of things we get, and those are two examples of how they’ve applied. On other occasions, though, we see lots and lots of children from absolute misery and poverty.
We dug wells for people who had no wells and no water.
We did everything we could to ingratiate ourselves and knock out, who were hated by the DMPs and targeted by the North
Vietnamese.
Our people, our seven guys or six guys, we live in a compound with no American support.
You’ve heard about the guys in black pajamas.
That’s who we were living with.
They were on our side, the guys in black pajamas.
They were called Piaz, called Piaz.
And that’s where we live.
Wire, and did we get attacked?
Yes, we get attacked.
But I’ll tell you how lowly they thought it was.
The first battle between a North Vietnamese tank, or not orbit, tank unit, and an American unit happened when they came across the border and went around our unit and attacked the Green Beret, even if you hide. Now, if you want to know how far out we were.
When you’re in front of the Green Beret, you’re way too far out.
And that was our unit.
And so that’s kind of the way it was.
Now, I myself was in Quignon.
I was on team 14. And what I did was help go to school.
Big thing?
No, I was no hero.
Didn’t do anything spectacular.
I just did my job.
But I realized when I was doing all this,
How much fun
I was having, even though I was absolutely petrified, again, did not want to die on the wall.
So hang on.
Here’s where I got out of all that.
Because Vietnam at the time was a main battle, there were 580,000 American soldiers there when I was there.
And sometimes you get to 560,000, but there were a lot of us there.
And in that time, in that moment, where you’re in a conflict, and it’s a conflict with no front lines, it means everybody was involved.
Everybody, nobody got away with being safe.
You’re the commander of your own life, but unfortunately, the troops don’t always obey.
Bias is real, and yet it’s necessary.
You’ve got to be able to tell the good from the bad.
And we think in binary paradigms like pig and, you know, donkeys, but the universe doesn’t work with binaries, not linear, it’s expansive, exploding on the ground.
So when I got back from Vietnam, with these little brainy things in my head, I went on to college, and anyone who knows me knows what I majored in.
I majored in anthropology.
Because what happened in Vietnam said to me, there’s a bigger world out there.
There’s something bigger than all, and I’m going to make an attempt to understand. I also got my thumb out.
Put it back on me and my wife hip-hop for Europe, and we’re going on a hitchhiking, one-way ticket, go hitchhike, Europe and Georgia, and Africa.
Learn about some people, learn about their lives, learn about what’s going on
on.
And I
spent
Two years in graduate school, and what I got out of graduate school in anthropology was I was tasked with the scientific director of the Anthro Department.
In other words, understanding the scientific method, understanding how it’s used in social science, and how you can use that in your everyday life.
So when I left school, I ran out of money, and I had a kid, and I got to do something, so I was offered a job at Union Oil and a job at Hartford Insurance.
I know nothing about cars, one reason why I didn’t go to the transportation,
the way,
And I didn’t know what an underwriter was.
I have no clue what an underwriter is, what looked it up in the dictionary, and I went, oh, whoa, that calls for a big brain.
I’m not sure that’s where I go wrong.
So, I chose that because it seemed easy.
But I did that because I had a certain set of skills at that time.
And so I chose insurance over Union Oil and PD at Salesforce.
And those particular skills I have, there’s the homework, the scientific method as applied to social science.
It’s always kind, and secondly, it found me to help.
When I was in Vietnam, one of the things that I cannot overestimate is how poor and how destitute these invocations were.
In the middle of a battle or in the middle of a birthday party, it didn’t make any difference.
Things weren’t all that good.
So I understood there’s something bigger than all of us.
You just need to commit to them.
Just commit to
And whether you’re an evolutionist or a creationist, in the great scheme of things, our responsibility is to create life, to nurture it, to learn, to pass that law.
That’s what I took away from the 40% of affairs.
A crazy little unit that I was in.
So when I got Home, I went to the Chamber of Commerce.
And I came to the Lions Club.
Jim Stapp was my sponsor.
He was the Mayor of El Cajon.
When I got here, I went over here, and it was all about business, business, business, and came here.
It was all about eyesight.
Touched my heart.
It’s wonderful.
So
That’s how you go from a 19-year-old going to jail to a 78-year-old retirement reflecting back on and thinking, You know, that one decision, August 1968, has stayed with me now for 60 years.
One decision.
That’s why I’m the lion today.
UPCOMING PROGRAMS:
Last Meeting of the Year will be December 15th
The First Meeting of the New Year will be held on January 5th
ATTENDANCE DRAWING: __Ray Ridlon (not here)_____ $_____
50/50 OPPORTUNITY DRAWING: __Yvonne Paris __________$_57.00_______
TODAY’S RIB TICKLER
Lead to serve and serve to lead
AP Singh, International Lions President