The document is a newspaper article that discusses a photograph the author's sister sent him of his father from World War II. It includes the following key details: 1) The photograph shows the author's father as a member of the 336th Royal Hellenic Fighter Squadron in North Africa in 1943. 2) The author's father had a difficult journey during the war, as he was initially captured by Germans after Greece was invaded, but later escaped and joined the British air force to fight against the Axis powers. 3) After the war, the author's father continued fighting in Greece's civil wars, and was shot down and severely injured in 1949 while battling Communist forces, but survived due to a British

1. Page 4 — The PORTLAND Daily Sun, Friday, November 8, 2013
The weathered photograph arrived after 70 years,
sent by my sister. It heralded a great lesson from
human history: that Goliath ever lurks in the eye
Wars of our
fathers
Telly
Halkias
–––––
From the
Stacks
of a storm, and someone must
confront him.
With Veteran’s Day upon us,
it’s been on my mind. On the
back, an inscription framed it:
“Circa 1943. 336th Royal Hel-
lenic Fighter Squadron.”
Turning the picture over, 12
young Greek men looked out
at me through the fog of his-
tory. They were less than half
my age; while enjoying a brief
repose, it was clear they had
endured plenty by the time of
that frozen moment. Pausing
in front of a Spitfire, one of the
premier Allied fighters of World
War II, they seemed grateful to
be alive, and smiling.
Scanning the scene, I found a familiar face. Wear-
ing a wool greatcoat, and with dress cap off-kilter as
fighter pilots do to this day, stood my father Chris-
tos, one of the squadron’s flight leaders. He held his
see HALKIAS page 5
––––––––––––– COLUMN –––––––––––––
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– COLUMN ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
How did that newly legal-
in-Portland pot get there?
Spontaneous immaculate alchemy!
Curtis
Robinson
–––––
Usually
Reserved
Marijuana legalization sup-
porters have long noted the
herb’s qualities for pain relief,
digestion and stress manage-
ment.
But, until Portland voters
approved legal possession on
Tuesday, I did not fully compre-
hend what might be the plant’s
most amazing property: sponta-
neous immaculate alchemy.
How else can we explain that
it’s legal in Portland for adults
21-and-over to possess 2.5
ounces of marijuana, but not
legal to buy it, sell it, grow it or
give it away? At least, not out-
side the state’s medical mari-
juana law.
Clearly, then, this proves that
herb can simply “manifest”
itself.
This gives new credibility to
anyone who has ever said, “I
don’t know how that got there.”
Or maybe it’s time we realize that small poly-
mer-based bags can become mini-portals, like, you
know dude, maybe like a wormhole into another
dimension ... like, maybe someplace where there’s
advanced intelligence? Like, well, perhaps even
someplace where marijuana laws make sense?
So far, in the face of the election, local cops seem
to not be saying much beyond “we’ll continue to
enforce the laws.”
What the heck CAN they
say?
At least one broadcast report
said the sheriff intends to
enforce “the state law” because
it, of course, has dominion
over municipal law. But if you
follow that logic, then we’d be
enforcing the national laws
with dominion over state law
— those laws, let’s remember,
still make marijuana use and
possession a serious crime
with serious outcomes, at least
if you’re black and/or can’t
afford a decent attorney.
The Obama Administration
has not exactly cleared the
marijuana enforcement fog,
opting instead for a nudge-
nudge, wink-wink policy that
says “we’re not enforcing”
while continuing to enforce.
Call it the marijuana version of a healthcare prom-
ise: “If you like your current marijuana policy, you
can keep it” (unless somebody cancels it, like that
nice state trooper you just called a butthead despite
that medicine in the glovebox).
As it stands, for marijuana issues, our Portland
law enforcement officers will soon enjoy a virtual
see ROBINSON page 6
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Mondaynightforthreemonths.

2. The PORTLAND Daily Sun, Friday, November 8, 2013— Page 5
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– OPINION –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
HALKIAS from page 4
He was captured by invading Germans in 1941, held as a prisoner of war
trademark cigarette and wore an expression that
belied the chaos from which those boys called to me.
WorthyofHomer
With the world ablaze around them, those pilots
were the best their homeland had to offer in defense
of global freedom. Chased from Greece years earlier
after resisting the Axis onslaught, they regrouped in
North Africa and formed one of the foreign fighter
squadrons of the British Royal Air Force. For the
rest of the war, they fought and died alongside their
Allied counterparts.
My father’s journey to that photo was an Odyssey
onto itself. Captured by invading Germans in 1941
and held as a prisoner of war, he attempted escape
several times with the intent of joining local guerilla
forces. Having failed, he then suffered the required
beatings and interrogations before heading back to
prison.
As a fighter pilot, though, his skills were needed
elsewhere. In 1942, a band of Greek partisans oper-
ating in concert with covert Allied operatives sprung
the cohort of aviators.Then they began a four-month
trek to freedom.
Moving by night, the group made its way from
Northern Greece to the Middle East along the coast
of Asia Minor. They hid during the day, stole fish-
ing boats to avoid dangerous stretches of land, and
had their share of small skirmishes and near-misses
with the enemy.
Finally, they reached Palestine, joining the Allies’
campaign against Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps.
The pilots defied all odds and survived almost intact
from the North African desert to the subsequent
invasions of Sicily and Italy.
Theirfinesthour
What they didn’t know at the time of that photo-
graph, was that while the Allied cause would find
victory, they were far from done with the stench of
carnage in their lives.
After two more years of combat, the Greek people
afforded them a hero’s welcome upon the libera-
tion of Athens in late 1944. Then they were thrown
into the middle of not one, but two civil wars which
lasted another five years, until 1949.
The outcomes saved Greece from falling behind
the Iron Curtain. Shortly following their victory in
the first internecine conflict, a second, larger scale
Communist insurgency backed by the U.S.S.R.
gripped the small Mediterranean peninsula.
Once, 90 percent of their homeland was under
siege. Yet with assistance from the United States
and the United Kingdom, the Greeks turned the
tide. As a result, their country remained the lone
Eastern European nation to elude four decades of
Soviet repression.
My father’s luck ran out in 1949 when Communist
ground fire brought his fighter down in the Gram-
mos-Vitsi mountains of northern Greece, during the
second civil war’s final campaign. Ironically, this
wasn’t far from where he had been a POW years
earlier.
Not able to bail out, he went down with the air-
craft. A British patrol was in the area and rushed to
the crash site. They extricated Dad from the cock-
pit, battered, burned and unconscious, before flames
engulfed the Spitfire.
The Greek government dispatched my father to
the U.S. for medical and psychological treatment.
He stayed on for two decades, intermittently serving
ABOVE: Members of the 336th Royal Hellenic Fighter Squadron, pause in front of a Spitfire at an unknown airfield in North Africa, 1943.The author’s father Christos is sixth from right, wearing the long overcoat.
BELOW: Flight Lt. Christos Halkias, RHAF, in the cockpit of a Hurricane, 1941. (Courtesy photos from Telly Halkias)
see VETERAN page 6

3. Page 6 — The PORTLAND Daily Sun, Friday, November 8, 2013
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– OPINION –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
in the Greek embassy in Washington, D.C., and the
consular office in New York City.
At the latter posting, he met and married my
mother, a Brooklyn, N.Y. native and daughter of
Greek immigrants. Together they raised three chil-
dren.
Landsofthefree
My father never sought American citizenship,
even after he retired from his military and diplo-
matic positions. He was, however, proud that my
sisters and I were born on U.S. soil. Our family later
moved back to Greece, yet Dad rejected dual citizen-
ship for his children, always urging that our future
was in the New World.
“In America, if you work hard, you can do what-
ever you want, and be whoever you want to be,” he
used to tell us.
Nonetheless, despite my father’s vision for our
future, he was a tortured man who had fallen victim
to the wars of his youth. Once out of combat, he then
fought demons for the rest of his life. As a child, one
has no way of fathoming this maelstrom, now known
as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Decades later, a father and a veteran myself, I
understand better but still regret what was stolen
from our family, and from Dad.
Someone who fought so long for other people’s
freedom deserved a long and happy life in peace.
When he died in 1996, masses attended his state
funeral in Greece, and the public hailed his wartime
record. Yet few knew what those boys had endured,
both in battle and beyond.
Today,thepilotsareallgone.Aremnantoftheirvalor
rests in the hands of anAmerican son in New England
— once home to a kindred group of upstarts seeking
freedom, the Minutemen. Recently, I recounted Dad’s
adventures to a friend and showed him the squadron
photo. His excitement was so palpable that we contin-
ued our history chat into the night.
At one point he gushed: “Can you imagine? These
guys from some little country knew nothing but
war through their entire youth, and many of them
went on and volunteered to fight in Korea just a few
years after that — all because free will was at stake.
Where can you find that today?”
Whatittakes
On this Veteran’s Day, and three generations
removed from the photograph, the question lingers.
My father’s squadron, from tiny Greece, carried
with it the legacy of the 300 Spartans who had held
their ground at Thermopylae two millennia earlier,
against a half-million Persians: they had no choice
but to fight.
When I was growing up, I never heard Dad glo-
rify war or suggest that killing was the only way to
dispatch an enemy. He did, however, consider it a
last resort to defeat greater evils — to take down
those who would oppress, subjugate and extermi-
nate anyone weaker.
While never calling themselves heroes, those fly-
boys helped to beat back a tide of evil that made the
difference in their fate, and ours. Only now, and by
not forgetting them, can we comprehend their sacri-
fice, and that of a million other veterans from that
era who never came home.
When Dad died he was ill in body and broken in
mind, but in 1943 he was young, strong, and part of
something far bigger than himself. And so, from his
desert airstrip, a dozen young Greeks looked out at
the world’s dim future with hope — and defiance.
Somewhere, they seemed to tell me, an unflinch-
ing David still waits to scramble his Spitfire full
throttle into the darkest clouds.
(Telly Halkias is an award-winning freelance jour-
nalist from Portland’s West End. You may contact
him at tchalkias@aol.com or follow him on Twitter
at @TellyHalkias.)
VETERAN from page 5
Hewasatorturedmanwhohadfallenvictimtothewarsofhisyouth
cafeteria plan of possible options in
any array of situations.
“Officer discretion” is about to
become performance art.
The modern Portland policehu-
man can choose to deal with mari-
juana possession the way they were
likely trained, where marijuana is
an illegal drug (which, you know, it
still is for feds); they can honor state
law that allows use/possession with
appropriate medical documentation;
they can honor the will of municipal
voters (and most of their friends) and
ignore the situation outright, unless
of course they feel this is not a “pri-
vate” situation (perhaps, by defini-
tion, because cops are involved?) in
which case ... or, what the hell, go
with Plan B, which is “shoot yourself
in the leg and call it in as a Bigfoot
attack.”
The “Bigfoot shot me with my own
gun!” ends nearly any situation, and
as an option is sure to be less paper-
work while cutting your time in court
by at least 95 percent. An added
benefit: It won’t require your poor
beleaguered chief to smooch political
bums every Monday night for three
months.
Why risk it? After all, when it
comes to pot, this is not so much the
“legalization of Portland” but the
“battle of Portland.”
The voters have decided! Let’s
decide again!
David Boyer, the Maine political
director for the Marijuana Policy
Project, said as much on election
night with his statement: “Now
that marijuana is legal for adults
in Maine’s largest city, there is an
even greater need for comprehensive
reform at the state level. By regulat-
ing marijuana like alcohol, we could
take sales out of the
hands of drug cartels
in the underground
market and put them
behind the counters
of licensed, tax-paying
businesses. It’s time to
move beyond prohibi-
tion and adopt a more
sensible approach.”
But as Portland
moves toward becom-
ing the Amsterdam
of the East Coast,
and as state lawmak-
ers ponder their own
Bigfoot-attack options,
nobody in Washing-
ton is bogarting the
common sense. Eventu-
ally, this issue calls for
electing more adults to
Congress and ending
this latest prohibition.
Hey, any plant that
can use spontaneous
immaculate alchemy to
will itself into existence
deserves no less.
(Curtis Robinson is
the founding editor of
The Portland Daily
Sun.)
ROBINSON from page 4
Eventually, this issue calls for electing more adults to Congress
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