 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Other addition of Hawaii in uniform, I'm your host, Calvin Griffin. For those of you who may not have seen the program, here we talk about a lot of things that deal with the veterans and military community, and also the interaction between the military and the civilian community. We have a lot of veterans over here, once they get out, they try to give back. That seems to be the spirit of most of our men and women who are serving. Today, it's my pleasure to have a very distinguished member of our community, Mr. Glenn Martinez, who is a former Marine and also currently with the Coast Guard. Glenn, welcome. May I call you, Glenn? Yeah, certainly. Go ahead. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your military background under your Marine, serving in Vietnam. I'm from the Vietnam, about 68 to 70, and I volunteered for the draft, and at the Induction Center in Florida, I volunteered for the Marine Corps. I went to Parris Island, did that, and got up to Quantico, Virginia, and requested to go to Vietnam as a combat photographer, because I'd been going to a two-year vocational college to become a photographer, and I wanted to be a life magazine, National Geographic-y kind of guy, and I noticed that in all these big magazines, most of the successful photographers were actually World War II correspondents, who were a lot of the famous guys, and they went on to Life Magazine, National Geographic, and they had a kind of a club of old timers, and so I went to Vietnam, I had a great time, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a combat photographer, I wanted to be in the Marine Corps, and I went from unit to unit, photographing them, and got to do a lot of neat programs in the Fleet Hometown Release where you go up to a young marine and you say, what's your name, what's your rank, what do you do, and what is your hometown newspaper, and I would roll that up, put it in a bag, and 72 hours later, that would be published in that young marine's hometown newspaper. Nobody else knows this kid, right, he's an 18, 19-year-old kid, but in his hometown, there he was, and the result was he would get mail from the hometown cookies, etc. And so it was a really good, feel-good campaign for it, in between mortars waking you up at night or going out on patrol, but if you're doing a job that you really want to do, I mean, sometimes not politically correct, I had a great time at war, but I'm sure General Patton did, I mean, sometimes you're born to do it, and I felt like that was it, and I came back from that and went into wedding photography, and I found that more hazardous than Vietnam, but then I became an electrician here in Hawaii, 23 years with Glenn's Electric, and did that, then I bought a fishing charter boat and became a merchant marine captain, and along the way of it, I got, with the Coast Guard Auxiliaries, started back in 1976 with them, and good fun. Are you the Auxiliary Commander? I'm the Fotella Commander for Coney O'e Bay, and so we have about 53 members in our Fotella. We used to be one of the most active Fotellas teaching more people than anybody else on boating safety and that, and it's really had good results. 20 years of doing three times a year of public education class, when we're community college or Kalahau High School, the number of incidents has shrunk. As people become more educated, they carry the proper equipment on their boat, they learn what the little red and black markers are coming in and out of the ocean, we're having less calls on them, such that we used to do rescues every week, and now we're hard put to do one a year. The good news is the public education work, so it's a great organization. I want to just to backtrack a little bit. As far as what your experiences in Vietnam want to ask you about, is there anything, any particular story or incident that happened with an individual or a group that stands out most in your memory? To me, it was the corpsmen that had done second tours. You learned to hang around guys that were on their second tour, and the kind of unique thing in Vietnam is we all knew we would only do 13 months and you would go home, and you only had to go once. Nobody would, to my knowledge, was made to go twice, okay? So if you did your 13 months and you got out, I was coming up to, I did less than 13 months because I was coming up to my discharge date. They could have extended me, you know, I was there and doing fine and everything, but they didn't. They didn't force people to do that. Now, come over here to Iraq and Afghanistan and that, I've got young Marines visiting my farm on their third and fourth tour, so they know they're going back. I mean this war has been going on 16 years, you know, and so in my generation, we never had to go back again. If you survived one trip, you were done. Yeah, that's one of the problems that we see, you know, of course with the multiple deployments and everything else, some of the other things that develop, the PTSD of course, which is going to happen if you've been out there long enough, of course the suicide rates, things of that nature that are not really, they address it when it's in the press, but when it falls by the wayside, you know, there's still a lot of things that, you know, fall through the cracks. You know, we do talk here on the program, I do talk about what's going on with the VA and there are some issues systemically that need to be corrected, but there's something you brought up that we were talking about offline as far as the choice program and I know you wanted to relate that to the audience. Yeah, we've done, Tulsi Gabbard has done great things for us with the VA. She's been a great champion for us and one of the programs that she championed others did was the first choice program and that was so that veterans of any service that are qualified to go to Trippler to get medical care, if they live on Mollangai, Maui or Big Island, there's a plane ticket involved, right? And sure you get free medical care if you can get to the front door and they were, they championed this program called first choice and it means that they can go to a local doctor, particularly for the routine things in life, you know, everything from flu shots to you have to get a physical or whatever you're doing on and you go see a local eye doctor instead of coming all the way over here, you know, in the hotel rooms and everything else, it starts to add up quite a bit. Well, I live over in Waimanalo here on Oahu. That mountain in between the co-allows qualifies as a geographical barrier to me getting to Trippler and it allows me to go over to Castle Hospital or Waimanalo Health Center. Again, for the more routine things or I had troubles with my knees back from jumping out of a helicopter that wasn't as close to the ground as I thought it was, you know, and I impacted my knees and a lifelong problem with it. They referred me to a local civilian physical therapist and in two weeks he had me backing up and gainful again. And I teased him. I thought there were some of the silliest exercises I've ever done in my life, lean up against a ball on the wall and do squats and kind of silly. And it was amazing. He got the dexterity and it has now been two years and not reoccurred. So so many times in medical you get something that just gets you through the night or gets you through the week, but you still have the underlying problem. I was able to get referred out to some real first class civilian doctors that are dealing with this. So it's been great. Right. Like I say, systemically, a lot of things, of course, need to be addressed. But again, we have to recognize and one thing I do say about here on the program is that even with the systemic problems, you do have a lot of people in place who do the best they can with what they have to work with. Right. And one of the things as far as with the people who are not related to the military is to make sure that our elected officials, you know, uphold the promises that were made to our military active veterans to make sure, you know, so the active duty people need to know, like say that the public is behind them. You may not always agree with the policies, but it's the soldiers, you know, and sailors and marines that's out there, you know. And like when we have a local representative, Tulsi Gabbard, who goes to the federal, who served in National Guard, who went to Iraq, who had boots on the ground, that's a totally different level of compassion and energy as opposed to other people that have never served in the military. And, you know, you wonder if they have any empathy for what we've been through. Yeah. Well, some of the policies that seem like when we have certain cuts within the government, it seems where they want to go ahead and gravitate towards the veterans or, you know, the military to make certain cuts, you know, that we, you know, we know are essential, but for some reason it doesn't translate, you know, in the halls of Congress and, you know, some other places. But you mentioned, let's go ahead and transgress. I'll make it transgress, I mean, segue. I'm trying to find the right word. I always wanted to get a segue. I can't spell it, but anyhow. You mentioned that with the operation that you've run at their Olamana Farms. Okay. I know with that, you've been doing that for quite some time. You're an educator, you're an inventor. There's a lot of things that you have in place that have been implemented around the world. But tell us a little bit about just about that. And also, you know, to want to hit the good points, and also I know some of the obstacles that you run into, you know, in trying to get certain things in place. Right. But one of the programs is a national program. And I used to be president of the Hawaii National United Farmers Union, and did that for about two and a half, three years. And we championed a program called Vets to Farms. And that was for returning vets to come back and get to go out to a farm. And some of the programs are, I've done Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force people. And when they're down to only six months left in their enlistment, and let's say they're back here, they're allowed their programs in the military that let them go out and cross train to a civilian world. And so they would come out to my farm from eight in the morning till noon and train with us so that the day they got discharged, they had something to go and do. Right. Because if you're a machine gunner, it just isn't a lot of call for it out there, you know, our tank operator, you know, can you get them into a backhoe? And so what we try to do is if a guy was a tank operator or a motor pull guy is get them on equipment, backhoes and bull dozers and sort of thing. One thing I like very much about when you're working with the ex-military people or former military is they tend to be mission orientated. They need to focus on something. Yeah. And so when you get them on to a farm where they can live and work and get off the daily pressures of commuting to work, having to have transportation to get to work, worrying about the meals and the whole juggling laundry, all of that, when they get to come to a farm and live there and get room and board and train four hours a day, then they're free till eight o'clock the next morning. They can do a special project or that. And it's good. And so we segued from that into working with the returning veterans that I've got different emotional problems and medical problems and they need a calm down period, you might say. And so they will come out to the farm normally for three months. And it's kind of funny, if somebody can have three months of less stress doing something that's entertaining and educational learning about the farming, learning about growing organic food. It's a different conversation in their life. And we don't allow sea stories. It's kind of like if we're dealing with an inmate that's got out of prison, we don't tell prison stories. If you came back from Iraq, we do not talk about Iraq. We talk about fishing or anything else, but not that area. You don't dwell on it. Yeah, I know that I visited your farm. It's got a great operation out there. And of course we talked offline. We know each other for a while anyhow. But I know that there are some things that you tried to put into place that you tried to introduce to certain of our representatives or elected officials. And the response has not been as all that enthusiastic as it possibly should. I believe it should be, you know, is there any changes or anything coming up when their attitudes or something that the public can do to, you know, help, you know, promote the programs that you're doing? It's kind of most of solutions. And I consider myself a solutionist. That is a person that if you started telling me a problem you have, my mind would start right away thinking about solutions, right? And I'd almost stop and say, Well, did you try this? Do you try that? And what you find out sometimes when somebody's telling you their troubles, they're not actually looking for a solution. They just want you to listen. And what we're finding out so much is the government really doesn't want a solution. They just want us to listen and then look the other way while they throw money, money, money at it. We have the right house, I think it's the housing complex out here in Kalihi, the headlines in the paper, they're going to spend a billion dollars to remodel this high rise building. And you're reading the article and it says there's 342 apartments, 342 affordable housing apartment. That's pretty nice. But go and divide that divide 1 billion by 342. It comes down to $2.7 million. And you got to ask yourself, what are you going to do? I mean, why don't we just give all the homeless people $100,000 on a plane ticket, you know? Yeah, I tell you, while we contemplate that, we're going to go ahead and take a short break, let the audience, you know, work on some kind of formulation for what you just mentioned. We'll take it from there. But we'll be back in just a moment here on Hawaiian Uniform. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark, and every Monday at one o'clock, I present Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Manoa, where we bring together researchers from across the campus to describe a whole series of scientifically interesting topics of interest both to Hawaii and around the world. So hopefully you can join me one o'clock Monday afternoon for Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Manoa. Okay, welcome back to military and uniform. I mean, Hawaiian Uniform, I keep getting the name of my own program screwed up here. Anyhow, before we took the break, you mentioned about, you know, certain solutions, you know, and that's the one thing that I think a lot of people confuse about, where people within the community, I mean, I've interviewed individuals who are more than willing to go ahead and donate their time, money, and everything else, will a very cost-effective solution to some of the programs or problems we have, like homeless and all these different things. And again, it's just like, where's the common sense, you know, it's costing us all types of money. You mentioned before we took the break about these housing, the money that they want. The mayor right housing. Yeah, so two and a half million per unit or? Yeah, I mean, every time you look at, say, like in Sand Island, they built a homeless shelter over there using math and containers, right? And you built 11 little containers for people to live in and, you know, set it up. And then you see the dollar figure and let's say it says they spent a million and a half dollars. In me, I have to take that million and a half dollars and divide it by 11 and go, really, you spent $150,000 for a math and container for somebody to live in? I mean, we can do better in that. Now, on the other hand, I was out in Waini and I saw some of the small houses they're providing for some of the homeless families out there. Very nice little units and they have a long term. They're not just going to be rotated out from them. It's a new way of life. We have a young member of our family, my extended family, Hawaiian family, they just got housing and a plantation housing, brand new housing out in, by out there and it's fantastic program and they pay like $400 a month rent and their own utilities but they get a three-bedroom, two-bath house, a new house as long as they're an agricultural worker and that's where you come down to, if you're going to be an agricultural worker, you're going to go into farming like that to be able to have housing, to have a real home, you know, modern construction home for $400 a month. You can see where that will be a shot in the arm. Yeah, it seems to be, again, when you look at the news it seems like we're raising our taxes all the time for all these boondog ol' operations and stuff like that and when, you know, it just doesn't make any sense what's going on like saying, you know, people get very frustrated, you know, when they say break it down to what it's going to cost or, you know, like the bottom line is who's making the money? That's one of the dirty little secrets that they don't discuss in public over here. Exactly. And even in the tourist, we do I champion ag tourism and all the Montagardens was a flagship place. Basically, we get thrown under the bus every now and then for promoting ag tourism and the Big Island used my farm as their model of how to do ag tourism in that we have school groups come out and tour, you know, for $10 a student, they come out from nine in the morning to one in the afternoon, they eat lunch at our farm, they bring their own and but they tour a five-acre organic farm. We have, you know, three horses, you know, six goats, 200 chickens and ducks and they do a hands-on project. Well, it's educational. Well, then we had, we've had 28 different countries come to my farm and stay three months or longer. We had like five men come from Rota, USDA paid for them. They came, stayed at our farm for three months, learned all about aquaponics. Now, when you live and work right on site and you do something six to eight hours a day and you don't have all the distractions of driving to and from work or going back to a hotel and going out and drinking or whatever else, but you still contained onto a farm and you concentrate on something, it's amazing what people absorb in three months and so it's been a really good program. I think for the younger generation, not everybody is built to be a tech tycoon or whatever it is, you know, some people just want to get back to the basics, you know, and if you give them the opportunity, you know, to for a program, you know, like you have, you know, I think it's more, it's more is being done for the community and for the individuals and and also set the example as far as what can be done when you, you know, you put your mind to it, you know, yeah. I know that also that you travel around, you and your partner Natalie, she travels with, I mean you guys go around the world, I know that you've mentioned before you're an inventor, there's a lot of things I know that you invented that you just turned over to the public and let them, you know, benefit from that, you know, there's not that many people that I'm aware of who are so selfless where they're willing to go ahead and share what they're doing, but I know the, you know, where you're coming from, you've set a great example, you know, for community spirit. Well, a lot of what we've done is for the public at large, okay, in that we traveled to the Philippines, Korea, China, we went to Jamaica last year, we're going back here in about two weeks, we're going back to Jamaica, we've gotten calls to go back to San Juan, Puerto Rico, we put in aquaponics system there, they got totally wiped out with the hurricane and so you go back and help people put it back together, you know, rapidly and so we're troubleshooters kind of thing, so we come in and it can be very heartwarming. I love with the Coast Guard Auxiliary, I became a certified instructor with the Coast Guard, so I tried to learn how to teach public courses and I end up being a lecturer for University of Hawaii. They sent Natalie and I down to American Samoa and West Samoa, they sent us to the Philippines and it's nice to be an ambassador of your country and of the educational system and I don't have my PhD, I have my NCW and I worked for about four and a half years before somebody asked me what the NCW was and I said it's no credentials whatsoever, I just simply do it and so what Olamante Gardens became is we do less and less of the PowerPoint presentation and more and more get a shovel or a hoe or pick and I think the one of the attributes we have with Olamante Gardens is and we specialized in doing aquaponics where you raise fish in a tank and you pump the water through the vegetable, a lot of people when they think farming they think a hoe or pick or a shovel and out in the sun and a hard, tough life but aquaponics is a bit different. You're inside of a greenhouse most of the time, you're in a protected environment and so they call it CEA, controlled environment agriculture and for kids that show up dressed nicely and in clean clothes and white tennis shoes, they can do aquaponics because it's a very clean environment, all the beds are raised up waist level high and that you don't have the stoop labor mentality but one of the really cool things is it brings in technology because they're doing their aduinos they're doing computer control systems, they don't want to walk around and do the clipboard right down the temperature of the pH, the oxygen pretty soon they learn to do a raspberry pie and bring it back out to you know the computer and monitor it on a computer such that I can pull up my phone, hit my phone and I can show you my fish tanks from anywhere in the world as long as I have cell service, I can look at my fish tank and see that everything's okay and I tell you what, seeing a video of them swimming around is more important to me than all the scientific instruments saying pH, water temperature, your oxygenation, you know pictures a thousand words, so it's good fun. Okay, one of the things that urban survival, we see what happened in Puerto Rico, you know, and around lately with the weather systems and everything else, we know that well they tell us what we have a seven-day period for food or whatever it is, I don't I don't quite understand why there's not more emphasis placed on programs because with the aquaponics and some of the other technologies is available you don't need a large operation, you know, to grow food or whatever, you know, you can do your own thing, you know, on a smaller scale, you know, and then when the time comes if there is an emergency for those who don't have or can't, you know, are not in the position to help themselves, it makes it easier when you're more self-sustainable for a period of time, you know, to help with the situation. It's kind of funny, when we have a disaster situation like what you have in San Juan, Puerto Rico and that going on, and normal life is disrupted, well we fly in MREs, we fly in bottled water and all of that, and what we're promoting is fly in seeds, send them seeds, and three weeks they'll have their own food, you know, you've got to get back to it. I think one of my favorite stories is Havana, when they went through the missile crisis, and America embargoed them, and no ship that went to Cuba was allowed to come to America for the next six months, so that pretty much just starved Cuba out, and they call it their special time, the average person lost 25 pounds in Cuba, okay, and they were not known for being large people to begin with, right? Well, what happened is the Australians went over, they're a neutral country, and they went over and they promoted permaculture and organic farming, and now Cuba raises 85% of what Cuba eats, and they export. Here in Hawaii, we import 85% of what we eat, all right, and what we do export, it might look like food, like coffee, sounds like a food, but you know, coffee has no calories, it's not even a food, you know, and in macadamias, yeah, it's edible certainly, but it's not a meal, sugar cane, certainly it's a basis of food thing, but you don't live on sugar, you know, except my teenage kids that seem to do okay on sugar, but the point being is that so much of our crop that we do grow in Hawaii, the coffee, the macadamia, even the fish down in Kona, we grow in the offshore nets, 95% of all those things are shipped out of state. You know, how much coffee can you drink, how much pineapple, but here's the absurdity of the situation, that a child in our Hawaii school system, the public school system, will virtually never eat a pineapple at lunch that was grown in Hawaii, can't afford it, they will be served imported pineapple from foreign countries, because it's cheaper, it's all about the money, you know, I mean, and you talk to the people that run the school problem, they say we got $1.47, we got $1.87, you don't serve organic food on $1.87, you serve pizzas, okay, and then we get into the absurdity of our life, we know we have a problem with obese kids in school, you know, we have a problem with obesity in America period, but definitely our children, I remember back in my generation, President Kennedy with his physical fitness, and he started touting, every kid would do, you know, two days or three days a week, a P.E. in school, they get physical exercise was deemed to be important, right, now you fast forward up to now, I have our federal government comes out to the schools and tells them, because they're getting federal subsidies, that they have must serve 1,500 calories at lunch. Right, okay, this is very interesting, we need to continue the conversation, I'm hoping that, you know, sometime in the future, that people will be able to view you on your program anyhow, but yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, we don't have much more time anyhow, but I want to thank you for, you know, joining us, and for your community service, and I think we're about 30 seconds do you need any information you want to put out, contact information. One thing I want to throw out is the, we have the convention coming up for the Hawaii Farmers United, it's coming up here October the 7th, real close, it's going to be one day at the college, in Leeward Community College, and then they're going to be on farms for two days, just go up and check that information out, and I think you'll find that interesting. Good, well thanks for coming on the program, I'm looking forward to seeing you more in the public eye anyhow, but I want to thank everybody for viewing the program, check us out on YouTube, and a few other avenues out there, but thanks again, and God bless and until that time.