I am not going to make a big deal of this. I will make no effort to advise Ukrainian freedom fighters that, if they ever have Vladimir Putin, himself, personally on the run, they should chase him toward a shallow stream and then look for a breathing tube of some kind sticking up above the surface and Putin himself splashing around trying desperately to follow his father's example.
But I can't help reporting this. In Putin's memoir, First Person, he tells "a story that my father told me" about his World War II experience. Putin Sr. was in a unit of 28 men engaged in sabotage behind German lines. The Germans got wind of them.
"They had almost no chance of survival," Putin tells us. "The Germans had them surrounded on all sides, and only a few people, including my father, managed to break out. They lost a few more people along the road and decided to split up. My father jumped into a swamp over his head and breathed through a hollow reed until the dogs had passed by. That's how he survived."
Worked for the father, must work for the son, right?
Not according to Charles Portis’s experience. In a memoir published first in The Atlantic and reprinted in Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany, edited by Jay Jennings, Portis recalls that "I made my first experiments in breathing underwater at the age of nine, in 1943."
Portis, too, was being pursued by Nazis, but in his case they were spies infesting his home state of Arkansas and his movie-serial-inspired imagination.
In the movies, "the trick looked simple enough. . . First you cut a reed. You put one end of the reed in your mouth and lay face up, very still, on the bottom of a shallow stream."
But Arkansas creeks apparently had "the wrong kind of reeds. . . The green ones weren't hollow. The brown ones . . . were somewhat hollow but too thin to carry much air . . . They also tended to collapse, like wet paper drinking straws, with the first sharp intake of breath . . . .
"Bamboo ('cane,' we called it) was more promising than reeds," but "at each circular joint there was a partial blockage of some white pithy matter. With a long rattail file and a good deal of poking and blowing, it took me about five minutes to clear the pith."
But would he be carrying a rattail file when the Axis agents (Japanese saboteurs, too) were after him? Would he have five minutes? Would his bamboo tube "really fool anyone? It looked just like a breathing tube."
He tried a "black and smelly rubber hose, with a spiral curl to it. I had to expose a small but conspicuous hand above the surface of the water to keep this one upright."
Furthermore, "when I was underwater, clutching a tree root, lying more or less supine, and took a deep draft of air through my mouth tube, an equal volume of water would come rushing in through my nose, with a strangling effect . . .
"Couldn't I simply have pinched my nostrils shut with thumb and finger? Yes, nothing easier, except that both hands were already occupied, with the tube and the root. And . . . my telltale feet would rise. Feet unfettered float . . . and when toes break the surface and bob about, they will catch the eye of the dullest observer."
Did Putin's father lie to his son? I wouldn't put it past him.
Another in Our Widely Heralded Series of Limericks About No-Good Men
A student of breeding named Jackson
Is seven-eighths Anglo-Saxon
And some Swedish and Thai.
Should you ask him why,
It will give him undue satisfaction.
Putin's grandfather cooked for Lenin and Stalin. (an interesting obscure fact)
Ukrainian freedom fighters 'Drain the Swamp' with Putin's last breath.