99% Invisible - 376- Great Bitter Lake Association

Episode Date: October 30, 2019

A little-known bit of world history about a rag tag group of sailors stranded for years in the Suez Canal at the center of a war. Great Bitter Lake Association

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When Eric Carlson retired, he dove headfirst into an old hobby. Philataly. Philataly is basically the love of stamps and it involves all aspects of stamp collecting from beginners to experts. Aside from being my new favorite word, Philataly is a tragically underappreciated field of study. A stamp can give you a perfect snapshot of the past in a single square inch of paper. Producer Vivian Le.

Of course, you've got the basic forever stamp with the flag waving on it. Then there are maritime stamps, commemorative stamps, architectural stamps, or my favorite Cinderella's, which resemble real stamps but can't be used for mail since they aren't issued by a postal authority. They're kind of like fan art.

Eric Carlson finds his stamps at the world's great supermarket for obscure collectibles, eBay. And one day, he found this really odd looking stamp, a Cinderella, actually. It's a very cumbersome looking red bird in the middle with a yellow background. Most official stamps are neat and tidy with clean lines, but not this one. This stamp was kind of rough looking. The lettering was hand drawn and the bird in the center was beautiful, but also a bit in elegant. Eric bought two. They're very charming, just in their simplicity and their

crudeness, sir. They're a joy to look at. He also didn't recognize the letters across the top, G-B-L-A. At first, I thought it was an acronym for some nation that escaped my attention. But the G-B-L-A wasn't a nation, or a postal authority, or any type of government body. It stood for the Great Bitter Lake Association.

Eric had stumbled upon the remnants of a forgotten bit of world history, left over from a rag-tag group of sailors, stranded at the center of a war. All my life has been attached to the sea. I'm more suited to a sea life. I don't think I'd be any good in an office scenario. I wouldn't fit in no Vivian. As much as I want to tell you this is Michael Cain, it is not.

My name is Peter Flake. I'm now 77 years of age. Quite a senior citizen, as you can imagine, at 77. Flack is retired now, but at the age of 16, he started a long career in the merchant navy working on commercial cargo ships, mostly in the Atlantic. And by his early 20s, he was ready to see something new.

I thought I wanted to see another part of the world, and I thought, oh, the fire east is, I like to see the fire east. In the mid-1960s, FLAQ was assigned on trade routes that took him from the UK to Asia. They'd haul everything from rubber to timber to toys. Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, that's where we've discharged and then loaded up again, and then on our way back to the UK, via the Suez Canal, which was our normal route. The Suez Canal is one of the busiest and most important shipping routes in the world. It connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean,

allowing quick passage from Asia to Europe through the Middle East. While flagship was busy delivering commercial goods from Singapore to the UK, tensions were escalating all around the canal. There have been border disputes and skirmishes for years between Israel and its neighboring countries, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. But on June 5, 1967, things reached a breaking point, and the Six Day War began.

Unfortunately for Peter Flack, he and his ship, the Agapinor, were on their way home via the Suez Canal, which was right at the heart of the conflict. We were in the line of ships. Our ship was the last but one. It was common for ships from different countries to pass through in a convoy together, because it was easier to control traffic that way. The Agapinor was one of 14 cargo ships and two tankers grouped together. Not long into the journey, the convoy entered a section of the Suez called the Great Bitter Lake. It's a hundred square mile body of saltwater in the canal.

Normally a ship like the Agapinor would anchor in the Great Bitter Lake for a few hours until the traffic cleared, but this time, the ship would be staying much longer. I relieved the chief officer at 8 o'clock, 0800, OK? The captain was in his cabin, and we were proceeding northbound through the southern part of the Suez Canal. It was early morning, and Flakid just taken up his post on the bridge of the ship. Shortly after I came on the bridge, the captain blew up to me. When I say blew up to me, we didn't have this modern communication.

There's like a pipe, so you put your ear to it. Anyway, and he said, Peter, I've just heard on a BBC, a world service that was broken out. He said, if you see anything, let me know. Flags first instinct was to grab his camera. At 8.45am, Israeli warplanes cut through the quiet morning and shot in fast and low from the east directly over his head into Egypt. In the previous wars, it was always used to say how the planes, if an attack would happen, would be advantageous if they came out of the sun.

You know, because then you couldn't see them arrive. This is what exactly did happen. They came out of the sun from the east. Around 200 Israeli fighter pilots used the low position of the rising sun and the convoy of ships to mask a surprise blitz on Egypt. The planes were headed westward over the Suez Canal and straight for an Egyptian airbase near the convoy's position. We were caught up in a, as far as we were concerned, in a war zone.

Flack in the rest of the crew suddenly had front row seats to the first wave of the six day war. The convoy of ships watched from their anchored positions as Israeli jets Unleashed gunfire and missiles on grounded Egyptian planes and after that first bombing raid the there's a cake fire going on as they Departed the Israelis departed after that first rate they came back over the convoy And using this convoy once again as a shield so that all the hair came fire. It was coming towards us, so we all did have y'all stuck. Israel claims to have destroyed the bulk of the Arab Air Forces in the air and on the ground in less than three hours.

The mites of Egypt's Russian equipment are to have been completely shattered. Amazingly no one in the convoy was hurt, but the Egyptian Air Force had been destroyed. After the attack, the Suez Canal became the dividing line between Egyptian forces on the west side and Israeli forces on the east, with the great bitter lake right in the middle. The convoy was sandwiched between two warring armies. This is Kath Sanker, author of Stranded in the Six Day War. With the war going on, I mean, they were ordered over the radio, you know, to stop where they were and to await further instructions.

The convoy was made up of commercial ships and had no choice but to comply with Egyptian authorities, as East Fire was reached in less than a week, but the diplomatic conflict dragged on. Egypt ordered a complete standstill of the Suez Canal. It was a defensive mechanism. Firstly, they did not want Israel to have access to the canal. It was something that they could do because they were in control of it, and they could

control the traffic. And that way nobody could use use it and no hostile power could get in there Even if the 14 ships wanted to go rogue and leave against orders, they physically couldn't The Egyptian government figured the best way to prevent Israel from using the canal was to block it entirely So a few days after the conflict started they dumped debris through in land mines and scuttled old ships to make the canal impassable. The convoy was completely trapped. After a few days when we thought, well, we're not going anywhere here. It's just a case of waiting. The 14 trap ships came from eight different countries, the UK, West Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, France, Bulgaria, and the United States. In the beginning, the crews didn't know what was going on.

The only information we got was through the World Service and the Merchant Navy program. There was no mail. I've still got a letter to prepare so they knew when I'd be arriving home. Despite the lack of communication, the shipping companies were working in the background to get their crews home while the United Nations tried to work out a deal to reopen the canal. A six-day Middle East war echoes along a second front. The diplomatic struggle at the United Nations Security Council, A series of emotionally charged meetings. Months dragged on and the boats still hadn't been released. They were stranded for so long

the convoy earned the nickname the yellow fleet because the sandstorms in the region stained the holes of the ships. It was surprising how the days did pass so there were others who didn't accept it, you know, batting at the bit, but I thought, well, this is our lot. After three months of the crews trying to maintain their ships and their sanity, the shipping companies and the Egyptian government

finally reached a compromise. The people trapped on board were released and Peter Flack and the rest of the stranded crew finally went home. I got back home, I'd carried on as normal, I'd go to a single as I say, I was, so I'd go on to a dance, you know, me to go, you know, for three weeks, you know, and have a good time and then go back to see that's how it was Vivian. But Egypt wouldn't reopen the canal, so while the sailors could go home, the ships had to stay.

And the shipping companies didn't want to completely abandon their vessels. So the logical thing to do was to keep people there to protect the valuable cargo and the investment that they've made in the ships. Every shipping company decided to recruit new crew members to keep the vessels in working condition, with the understanding that they would set sail the moment the passage reopened. While Peter Flaack was busy dancing with the ladies back home in Liverpool, a fresh batch of seafarers were sent to take his place. It couldn't wait to go home, of course.

So it was a new adventure for us and we just took it off from there. This is George Wharton, one of the members of that first relief crew. At the time, he was just 24 years old with the new wife and a baby on the way. Even with the risk of being in a conflict zone, going to the Great bitter lake was considered a pretty good gig. Unlike the first wave of sailors caught in the Six Day War, the replacement crews knew exactly what they were getting into, and they were offered double pay because of the ever present threat to war. It was classed as a good job and people when you fit when I was offered it and it worked around and said, oh aren't you lucky you know. The work was like being on any other

ship. There was a lot of cleaning running the engines and checking the cargo to make sure it kept fresh in the hot climate. But since they were in the middle of a lake in the middle of a desert in the middle of a war zone, Wharton says it was hard to get supplies. We started to run out of stores, you weren't going hungry or anything, but you were limited to the variety, if you like. The crews quickly realized that between the 14 ships, they actually had plenty. If they pulled their resources and traded with one another, they'd have enough of everything to go around.

They wanted to swap, you know, sugar or tea or eggs. They realized that between the, you know, all the different ships that they had wide variety of supplies. One German ship had a ton of frozen meat. Another had way too much canned fruit, so they started trading. Wharton took a lifeboat from ship to ship. At first trading food, then swapping movie reels and bartering cigarettes. There was one ship, a checklist of academic ship, and if he went over to that ship, what

a welcome they would give you. They would open a bottle of whiskey, throw the co-ocaway. You could not leave the ship to that whiskey was gone. Soon they started hanging out a lot, and because they were a bunch of 20-something year old sailors, they started hanging out a lot, and because there were a bunch of 20-something-year-old sailors, they started partying a lot. Some of the captains, they were a little bit concerned, because clearly in the early days, you know, there was a kind of lot of drinking and just sort of hanging out and sleeping. And, you know, they were kind of thinking, well, you know, it would be good to kind of get together and organize some social activities.

They were worried that boredom would set in and then people would, you know, there would be, you know, people would get irritated. The captains figured a little structure would curb the worst behavior of their sailors. So in October of 1967, five months after the start of the Six Day War, they made a plan. Warton remembers seeing a notice on the bulletin board addressed to all the seafarers on the lake. Dear all, at a recent meeting attended by personnel from all the ships at present in the bitter lakes, it was decided to form an association to be called the Great Bitter Lake Association. The main aim of the association is to maintain and foster the many friendships that we have and no doubt you have formed with the people of the other

ships and other nationalities whilst here. The Great Bitter Lake Association was a way to regulate the unofficial marketplace that it sprung up between the ships and bring some order to their makeshift community. It was also a social committee. Membership in the GBLA included events hosted each week by a different vessel. Ships modified their lifeboats into sailboats and took turns hosting regottas. One ship built a functional soccer pitch on its deck in held tournaments. The Polish ship had a doctor and became the de facto medical center.

The sweetest ship had a gym. And even though the Great Bitter Lake Association was originally formed to curb drinking, a lot of alcohol was still consumed on the Great Bitter Lake Association was originally formed to curb drinking, a lot of alcohol was still consumed on the Great Bitter Lake. One chip captain estimated that perhaps 1.5 million empty beer bottles may have been dumped into the lake, writing, quote, one wonders what future archaeologists in a few thousand years' time will think of this. I think he's on the rest of it. I think off of those ships were a ground on bottles. But even though it may sound like the GBLA devolved into a fleet of partyboats, the association

was actually there to create a sense of stability in an incredibly unstable place. The sailors weren't just individuals on a ship, but members of a society. The sailors weren't just individuals on a ship, but members of a society. Everybody in the GBLA was given a specially designed bitter-like themed necktie in badge. The badge itself was in the shape of a shield, with a large anchor across the center. At the top were the letters GBLA, and the bottom was the number 14 for the 14 ships in the lake. Running diagonally behind the anchor with a thin blue strip to represent the Suez Canal. What was interesting was that you have western, those from western nations, from western

Germany as it then was France, Britain and the USA. On the other side you had from the eastern block countries, the Bulgarian ship, the Polar ships and the Czech ship, so you kind of had the kind of microcosm of the Cold War going on right there in the Great Bitter Lake. And the first decision of that organisation was that everybody would be equal wherever they were from. No matter where the crews came from, they left the politics of their home countries aside. This was especially true when the crews came together to celebrate their first big holiday

as a group. The first Christmas. That really was a night to remember. Warden has spent more than his fair share of Christmases at sea, but this one was unlike any he had ever experienced. The polar cement made this huge Christmas tree and mounted it on a raft and anchored it in the middle of all the ships. And our Christmas night, all the boats were invited over to the tree and we tied all tied up around the tree. And we had a cattle service. One of the boats actually had an organ in it, and so we had music and all sang cattle.

To listen to the Germans sing silent night in their language, oh, you imagine in the middle of the desert it's like a million stars just above your head. It was just incredible to listen to them. The Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of the Holy Spirit of Wharton happily returned home after the holidays to his wife and brand new daughter. He figured his time in the lake was a once in a lifetime experience, but to his surprise, a year later, the UN hadn't figured out a solution. The ships were still in the canal, and he was given a chance to go back. The bus call made a gettish and said, well, as you know, the ships are still there, do you want to go back there?

Well, I suggest, well, as you know, the ships are still there. Do you want to go back there? Well, I suggest, definitely. When you got back to the lake, Wharton realized the association had become more important than when he left. Between the brotherhood, the sports, and the official badges, the Great Bitter Lake Association started feeling like something bigger than just a club. There was also an idea that the ships in the middle of the Great Bitter Lake formed that own little

autonomous community. The GBLA didn't feel like a convoy of international ships. It felt more like its own nation. And therefore, as a little nation, they should have their own postage stump. Each stamp was handcrafted and designed by members of the association and required a lot of resourcefulness. I think the extraordinary thing is the level of craftsmanship that went into creating these tiny, tiny works of art, using whatever materials they could find. Coffee grounds might be used

to create sand or anything that they could find really. They also used crayons, potato skins, and some were even carved or etched out of brass. The stamps were copied using a hector graph, which is kind of like a crude copier, and distributed to the rest of the members. Technically, these stamps were Cinderella stamps, with no postal value, and were made mostly for their own amusement, but some actually made it through as official postage. We started putting them on our envelopes and some of them were accepted by the Egyptian government and the council of them is post and the lessons got back home. I have a couple of the stamps that have birds.

They did birds to symbolize freedom, basically freedom from being stranded in the Suez. And I know some of these depictions show the birds tied to an anchor. This is Eric Carlson, the Philatalyst from earlier. The stamps often featured nautical imagery, like ships and anchors. And occasionally they had pictures of ladies because, you know, sailors. A lot of these stamps do have a kind of a tattoo quality to them in their straightforwardness of the design. The artwork on each stamp acted like a tiny time capsule

of their experiences. They documented Christmases, anniversaries, soccer tournaments, even a great bitter lake Olympics that they held in honor of the 1968 Mexico City Games. But the heyday of the great Bitter Lake Association couldn't last forever. In 1973, during the Yom Kupur War, a stray missile hit and sank an American vessel called the African Glen.

Thankfully, no one was killed. Over time, the shipping companies reduced their personnel to skeleton crews, all the while their ships were slowly decaying. By 1974, when a deal was broker to reopen the canal, most of the ships were no longer seeworthy. After the agreement, it took a full year to remove the debris blocking the passage. There were a hundred bridge sections, twenty trucks, eight tanks, a hundred vessels, and 750,000 explosive devices thrown into the waters of the Suez. And finally, in 1975, eight years after the start of the Six Day War, the ships were

towed out and said their final goodbyes to the great bitter leg. A clear passage has been made up the Suez Canal from the Elfer Dan bridge to port side. And 13 marooned merchant ships have it last been able to pull up their hooks and head towards the open Mediterranean. They even commemorated the moment with one last set of stamps that said G-B-L-A farewell. Peter Flack, who was on board at the start of the Six-Day War, says that it's pretty

rare for seafarers to form such a strong bond. You go out, you try your best to get along with your crew, and then you move on to the next job. He says there's even a term for people who serve in the merchant navy, the board of trade acquaintances. You know, we just stick to our ships and that was it. It's very rare, do we, did shipmates keep in touch. But from 1967 to 1975, over 3,000 men and one woman actually

served alongside each other on the grape at her lake. In 2017, they held a 50-year reunion in Liverpool, and members in Germany and Slovakia still meet up annually. It remains a quiet tradition over 50 years later. The GBLA is mostly a footnote in the complicated history of the Six-Day War, but there are little pieces here and there that remind the rest of the world that this makeshift nation once existed. You could find them in a well-designed badge,

a custom necktie, or a stamp that you stumble across on eBay. Vivian comes back with another story about stamps and canals after this. So now I'm in the studio with Vivian and you're going to tell us another story about historical stamps. Yes. And believe it or not, I have another story at the intersection of Philataly and canals. That's quite a narrow, Venn diagram of beet coverage you've carved out for yourself. It's my, it's my

beat, my 9PI beat. And it has sports and I have canals slash stamps. It has sports, sports and fish, New York canals and stamps. Okay, tell us about it. Okay, so the Panama Canal basically connects the Atlantic and the Pacific. But did you know that it was almost built in Nicaragua instead of Panama? I mean, I think I vaguely remember that there was a little bit of a back and forth as to

it being a Panama or a Nicaragua, but I don't know the details of that. So, in the early 1800s, Congress had decided that they wanted to build a Nicaragua rather than Panama. Oh, okay. And why was that? So, there's a bunch of reasons. So basically, France had attempted to build a canal through Panama about 20 years earlier.

It failed miserably just because the terrain of Panama is like mountainous and the rainy season caused like flooding and mudslides. So many people died of yellow fever and malaria. So the terrain of Nicaragua seemed a lot simpler to build through. And it also has this giant lake that was kind of a natural body water that the canal can flow through. So there was already like a partial waterway right there. When you see the geography, you think Panama makes a lot of sense because it's really thin right there and it's right at that dividing point between North and South America. And Nicaragua is much bigger, but that lake kind of helps and it not being mountainous

kind of helps. Yeah, so it would be a longer canal, but it would just be simpler altogether for construction. Yeah, and also at the time, which is like the early 1900s, Panama was still a province of Colombia and not an independent nation yet. So geologically and politically, the US thought that Nicaragua would be a better choice. Okay. So if Nicaragua was a location that made more sense at the time, why did they end up ultimately deciding to go with Panama? So it was basically because of these two lobbyists. One was an American attorney named William Nelson Cromwell, and the other was a French engineer named Philippe Buno-Varilla.

And Buno-Varilla was actually involved in the French Panama Canal project from like 20 years earlier. But he really wanted to stay on the project because he owned this big stake in the Panama Canal company. So he hired Cromwell to help him lobby Congress to build in Panama rather than Nicaragua. And how did they manage to convince Congress that Panama would be better than Nicaragua after this long series of disasters?

One element was that, you know, to build through Nicaragua, the Canal would just have to be longer. So like for practical purposes, it would just be more construction. But they also used a stamp. They used a stamp to convince them. Yes. How did they do that? So Nicaragua has a volcano called Mount Momotomo, which is this beloved symbol of Nicaragua,

but around the same time, which was around 1902, Mount Pale and Martinique erupted and killed 30,000 people. Wow, OK. So this happened right before Congress was supposed to decide on the canal project. So, Bueno Varia and Kromel made this argument that Nicaragua was a bad choice because of all this volcanic activity.

So to further prove their point, they turned to the January 1st, 1900, three cent stamp of Nicaragua. And I have a picture of that. So. That's it. This is what it looks like. Okay, so it says Nicaragua.

It's a three-cent stamp. And you see it, and it looks... You see the volcano in the background. But is it kind of erupting? It looks like there's smoke building out of this volcano. Yeah, and I guess my suspicion is, it was not a very active volcano, but they just painted it as such. So, like, it's just a, yeah, you know, you see a volcano, it's like a symbol of your

country, you're going to want it doing something. Yeah, okay. It's not going to erupt. But, yeah, so, their argument was basically that Nicaragua has so much volcanic activity that they put it on this national stamp. So what Cromwell and Bunova Ria did was they bought like 500 of these Nicaraguan stamps and sent them to each member of the House in the Senate with a note that said an official witness of the volcanic activity on the isthmus of Nicaragua.

And so this was just part of like a huge lobbying campaign. It was like one element of it, but it probably did help their case. Wow. So they made it seem like a more dangerous place than it was because of their own stamp and used it against them. Yes. I think that we definitely think of how stamps,

as you mentioned in the story, there's this great document of history, whether or not they are kind of how we see ourselves and present ourselves officially. But it's funny to find a story where the stamp actually changes history. Yeah, it's an active participant in the history. Oh, that's so cool.

I have one last button to the story. Bunova dea became an ambassador to Panama. And his wife actually proposed a design for a flag of Panama, and I'd like to show it to you because it's one of the worst flags I've ever seen. Really? Okay, well, it's not the one that is present right now. No, no, no, I love. It's a current flag. It's one of my favorite flags in the world. The current Panama flag is Yes. I like it.

Okay. But this is what Bunova did. I wanted the flag to look like. Oh my goodness. Great as me. And so it looks like a variation of the American flag. Yeah. Red and yellow stripes.

There's the stripes. Yeah. And then there's a blue canton. Mm-hmm. And in the blue canton, there's supposed to be, it's supposed to look like two suns being bridged together kind of like the bridging of the Pacific and the Atlantic. Yeah. But it looks like something else to me. It was like Harry balls. Yeah. No, trying to say. I was I I wasn't sure if it was like

my fifth grader brain that went to it. So okay. Yeah. No, this is the Harry ball flag of minimal. Yeah. Yeah, that's not good. That's not good. That's not good at all. But so everyone should look that up just to see it. But also look up the flag of Panama because I think it's actually, it's, it's, as these quarters and, and red and blue, you know, counterpoints, it's really, really beautiful. It's gorgeous. It's really beautiful.

Oh, well, I got to see a really ugly flag and we got to talk about stamps. So I consider this and balls and so I consider this a very successful discussion. Great. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. 99% of Asible was produced this week by Vivian Le.

So, okay, so I'm in the street with Vivian Le. So Vivian,. So, okay, so I'm in the stream with Vivian Le. So Vivian, for two years, I've been saying your name Vivianly because I was told your name was Vivianly. By you. I told you my name was Vivianly. Okay, okay. But now I credit you and your listeners will know that I credit you in the beginning of this piece as Vivian Le. So tell us why Vivian Le and not Vivian Le. So I'm Vietnamese American. So the traditional pronunciation of the last name LE is Le, but I'm used to calling myself Le because growing up, I like, if you come from a Vietnamese American family or like an immigrant family, you have like an

American way of saying your name and a Vietnamese way of saying your name. So yeah, I just grew up feeling like Lee was my last name. And so hearing it any other way was kind of like it felt off from me. So I decided kind of recently that I'd prefer to go by lay just because I recently got married and I decided to keep my last name and I made a big stink out of it to my husband. And I figured like if I'm going to keep my name, I might as well keep the whole name, the way that I feel like I'm supposed to be pronouncing it. But the thing is, you know, a lot of people go by Lee.

A lot of, I know like a ton of Vietnamese people with L.E. They prefer Lee and that's fine, but I think from now on I just prefer. Lay. Okay. Well, that's great. I'm happy to call you Vivian Lay. I'm happy to hear it. And I'm sorry that if you've ever felt like you couldn't bring up the change. No, not at all. Not at all. Yeah. Yeah. It was just a recent thing. It's like, you know what? Even if it brings me a little bit of discomfort, that will go away. And then from now on, this will just be my name.

Is it uncomfortable to even talk about in this context? No, not really. It's more like when people would call me Vivian Lay, I wouldn't recognize it as much as Vivian Lay. Yeah, no, I get that. Yeah, but no, it's Vivian Lay. And we're drawing a line in the sand. This is where this is what's happening.

It's pretty official. We're putting it on podcast. On the podcast. Okay, so everyone just, no, it's Vivian Lay, Ellie, saying this is where this is what's happened. It's pretty official. We're putting it on podcast. We're putting it on the podcast. Okay, so everyone just know it's Vivian Leigh. Ellie, Vivian Leigh. Great. Thank you. I'm glad we had this talk.

Good talk. Good talk. Thanks. 99% of visible with Bruce's week by Vivian Leigh. Mix and Deck production by Srivusif. Music by Sean Rial. Additional music in this episode was composed by Jenny Conley-Drizos, John Newfeld, and Nate Query.

Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstead, is the digital director. The rest of the team is Emmett Fitzgerald, Avery Trouffman, Joe Rosenberg, Delaney Hall, Chris Perrubay, Sophia Klatsger, and me Roman Mars. A very special thanks to the Gertlush choir for letting us use their beautiful rendition of Silent Night into Peter Volner. If you want to read more about the Great Biter Lake Association, you can find Kath Sinker's book, stranded in the Sixth Day War at KathSinker.co.uk, or you can get a digital download on Amazon. There were tons of really cool details that we couldn't get into this piece, so I really suggest you check it out. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful, downtown,

Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. You can find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI or work. Run Instagram and read it too. Here's the moment where we always encourage you to stop by our website. But make sure you really do it this week because you can see GBLI stamps for yourself as well as some amazing photographs that Peter Flock personally took of the Six Day War in 1967 from the Great

Bitter Lake. They're really amazing. They're at 99pi.org. Rx.