Eddie Vela

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Eddie

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I am Eddie Vela, a native of Port Lavaca, Texas, living near San Francisco. The Bay area's international population sustains my fascination with other cultures and languages. I volunteered for the US Coast Guard 1975-79 starting with boot camp on an island in the San Francisco Bay. If you swim there, do what the seals and otters do and wear a wetsuit, it's cold. I qualified Expert in pistol and rifle (M911A1 and M16).


My first duty station was in Natchez, MS, where I roomed briefly at Nellie's Jackson's brothel. No wait, Mom - I can explain it all! I had no idea the place was a cathouse when I moved in. In the South, it surpassed in fame and longevity the Chicken Ranch of La Grange, Texas. Subsequent assignments sent me to the western Pacific and South China Sea, areas that my former Governor and now President, George W. Bush, dodged with more energy than he's shown since.


"A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner."
- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley.

I was honorably discharged a Petty Officer 2nd Class (ET-2). Partying, college and work occupied me while earning my degrees. Actually, drinking (etc.) occupied me and being sober gave me a headache. While in school, I worked full-time variously as a weapons system engineer, a technical writer, and a reporter for several major news organizations, including The Dallas Morning News at a time when we were winning Pulitzers most years.


I quit weapons work when I realized from then-classified reports that our "smart bombs" were primarily killing civilians, and in conflicts most Americans were unaware of. I earned baccalaureates in physics, mathematics and journalism from the University of Texas. My favorite courses were in literature, music composition, and quantum theory.


After graduation I worked as a software engineer and systems engineer in Dallas, Manhattan, and Los Angeles (Santa Monica and Laguna Beach); the last located in southern California.





Lisa & Diana
The Sisters of Eddie: Lisa (l),
Diana. Worship them.

A word on "SoCal," which gave the world Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Ronald McDonald. It's called Socal by southern Californians, deriving perhaps from their famous antipathy to such intellectual tasks as pronouncing six-syllables. Neil Simon said, "When it's 32 degrees in New York, it's 78 in Los Angeles. When it's 102 degrees in New York, it's 78 in Los Angeles. There are about two million interesting people in New York -- and 78 in Los Angeles."



Meanwhile, everyone in my "nucular" family lives in the Fort Worth, Texas area. Of my two younger sisters, Lisa is married and Diana just got her doctorate in English Literature at TCU. They have six children between them - they breed well in captivity.

Diana
Update:
The Sister Diana emailed,
"Where the hell
is my halo?"

Lisa runs marathon races and recently helped with federal hurricane recovery in Florida.
I'm now living near the beach in Alameda, an island in the San Francisco Bay and pretty close to where I trained in the USCG. It's here I've begun the descendant of the Manhattan Project: the Martini Project.