Sky Sisters

21. September 2006 · Comments Off on Sky Sisters · Categories: General, History, Pajama Game, Technology, Wild Blue Yonder

I listened to a story on NPR this week, about the finding of the wreck of the Macon, one of the great navigatable dirigibles that for a time – or so the great minds of the early 20th century assumed – would give a run for their money to aircraft. For quite a long time, beginning with the Montgolfier brothers, it was assumed that various forms of lighter-than-air constructions were the wave of the future – not those fragile little mosquitoes that were the prototypical airplanes. From just before WWI, and for some time after, it looked like dirigibles would be the kings of commercial aviation, the seas patrolled, and the continents spanned commercially by luxuriously outfitted air-liners. Images of great silver airships are ubiquitous in commercial art, and futuristic visions throughout the 20ies and 30ies; the Empire State building, after all, was topped with a mast from which it was fondly hoped to moor dirigibles. (The thought of disembarking from a passenger liner moored there, and tripping merrily along some kind of walkway down to the observation deck is enough to give any acrophobic a case of the screaming willies, though, which may be why it never came to pass.)

The Germans had developed such rigid-framed airships late in the 19th century, and used them extensively during WWI, first as bombers, notably targeting London and Paris. They were huge lumbering craft, capable of traveling great distances and staying aloft for many hours. Alas, they were also slow and un- agile, which made them splendid targets in offensive operations – and they also burned spectacularly when struck, since they were usually filled with hydrogen gas. Although such aircraft with a variety of types of frames, or no frames at all went on being used throughout the war, they were more utilized for observation, or on ocean-going patrols. But when the war was over, it looked like the day for long-distance rigid-framed aircraft had dawned.

The British built a series of them, one of which was the first to make a trans-Atlantic round trip, in slightly less than 200 hours, in 1919. That craft, and its successor both crashed and burned spectacularly, as did an Italian-manufactured dirigible purchased at around that time by the US Navy. In 1923, the Navy built an entirely rigid-framed aircraft designed to be lifted by helium, the Shenandoah, the first such entirely built in the United States. Two years later, while on a publicity tour in the Midwest, the Shenandoah was caught in a violent thunderstorm and ripped into three pieces. The command cabin dropped like a rock, killing all in it, including the Shenandoah’s commander, but the stern and bow sections floated down more gently. Crewmen in the bow section called out to a farmer on the ground below to grab ropes trailing from the nose and tie them to a tree, and when everyone had slid to safety, brought shotguns for the survivors to use to puncture the helium cells.

Another dirigible manufactured in Germany and delivered to the US as part of war reparations was renamed the Los Angeles; fitted out as a passenger liner, with Pullman staterooms and bunks, it made over 200 uneventful trips, mostly to Puerto Rico and South America. An Italian semi-rigid airship called the Norge, fitted out by a scientific expedition flew from Spitsbergen, Norway to Teller Alaska by way of the North Pole in 1926: it would have been the very first aircraft to fly over the North Pole, but for Richard Byrd in an airplane, three days earlier. the Norge, and part of it’s crew was subsequently lost on another flight over the Pole, two years later.

But enthusiasm ran high during the mid-Twenties, regardless. Progress would always be a little bumpy, seemed to be the prevailing mood, and all these problems would be worked out, eventually. The American company Goodyear was granted certain patent rights related to dirigible construction, and began work on two more dirigibles for the US Navy, the Akron and Macon. They would be essentially flying aircraft carriers, capable of launching and retrieving four or five single-engine patrol airplanes from a hanger-bay equipped with a trapeze-like winch.

In the meantime, the British government launched a great project to build two enormous dirigibles, the R100 and the R101, which would be the largest in the world with accommodations for 100 passengers. The Germany Zeppelin firm had begun to recover enough to launch an enormous airship named after its founder. The Graf Zeppelin would be the first airship to circumnavigate the globe, and with it’s successors, partake in regular scheduled transatlantic passenger service. It was hoped that the British R 100 and R 101 would similarly expand passenger service: the R 100 flew to Canada and back, with no other event that being caught in a storm. On return, it was put into a hanger, pending return of the R 101 from it’s maiden voyage to India. But the R 101, plagued by technical problems and forced to fly too low in compensation, clipped a church steeple and crashed in flames near Beauvais, France early in 1930, with the loss of nearly all on board. The British government quietly pulled the plug on subsequent airship construction; so later did the US Congress. The Akron, launched with great hopes in 1931 was caught in a violent storm off New Jersey two years later, with the loss of all but a handful of its crew. The Macon, put into service at the same time was also caught in a storm, this one off the California coast near Monterey in 1935. Most of the Macon’s crew survived, and the wreckage of it and the patrol aircraft it carried, has just recently been located on the sea-bed.

The spectacular loss of the Hindenburg, two years after the crash of the Macon, only added to public misgivings, although the argument has been made that the great airships were doomed, by increasing competition from commercial airplane services and the coming of a new war, where conventional air craft would be of far more use. But the fairly constant series of spectacular airship disasters probably darkened the public and the political view, too. In the long run, airplanes may have been as much at a hazard, the development of air services just as rocky, and the cumulative casualties just as many. But there was enormous prestige placed in those few great dirigible projects, and great expectations by the public made the various disasters all the more public and crushing. It would have been as if over half the Mercury or Gemini flights launched by NASA had failed spectacularly in mid-flight. No matter what the prestige involved with dirigibles, or the lofty goals, a lot of people just quietly decided it just cost too much, even if it wasn’t a technological dead end in the first place. Now there are only a few places where you can stand, and imagine a great silver craft, hovering overhead, or being winched into a huge hanger: this great hanger at Moffit Field, near San Jose is one of them. And now the underwater wreck of the Macon may be the largest piece of interwar aviation history still identifiable on earth.

Reader Kaj added this comment, which was deleted in in my haste to clear out an accumulation of 30o auto-spam-comments this morning 9-29-06

“Admiral Byrds claims of being first to the pole by air are at best a bit
tenuous. The first undoubted crossing was by Norge, incidentally making Roald
Amundsen(and crew) the first, and the first to be on both poles.
I would have liked to refer to Wikipedia, but their page on admiral Byrd has
been used by hollow earth conspirazoids, claiming Byrd found the entrance to the
inner earth(!).
So much for Wikipedia credibility. ” – Sgt Mom

The Towers of Remembrance

11. September 2006 · Comments Off on The Towers of Remembrance · Categories: General, GWOT, History

It has been a beautiful day, here in South Texas, fair and a little warmer than most people favor for autumn days, but there you are. We do things differently here. Five years, half a decade, hardly any time at all in one sense – but a child born just after that shattering day is now old enough to go to school this fall, and a child old enough to be aware of what had happened is well into middle school or junior high school, and to them it is something that happened a long, long time ago.

The towers have never really been, for them, and for the rest of us, five years is long enough to grow accustomed to living in that other country. We are reminded of the WTC towers thought, almost ritually this time of year – and even when the reminders cease, they will continue to haunt September for many of us, most likely for the rest of our lives, unless superseded by some greater horror. Every once in a while, the towers appear unexpectedly, serendipitiously , and we can look back over the great gash across our days, and marvel at the time when they were just a part of the cityscape, the backdrop to hundreds of movies: the final scene of the animated feature Antz, and again and again in Men in Black, and Sleepless in Seattle – to mention just a few.

There was a great to-do in some circles, about removing them electronically from movies in which they featured, which were released or re-released after 9/11, which I think is kind of foolish. They were there once, and so were the lives of those people lost in them, and at the Pentagon, and on the four aircraft, and now they are gone. Might we have reached the point where we are better served by those little, fleeting glimpses and private memories, rather than a great clunky over-developed monument of bureaucratic taste genuflecting to political expediency and the whims of trendy architects? Not up to me, fortunately. But I wrote this, two years ago, and think it even more relevant now�
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Before the World Rushed In

03. September 2006 · Comments Off on Before the World Rushed In · Categories: General, History, Pajama Game, World

Being that I am now engrossed in writing a story about the early California emigrant trail… (Yes, PV, I am working on Chapter 13…. But I have to do a post for today, ‘kay?) I have been going back through my books and recollections about California, at a time when it was for all intents and purposes, a sleepy little backwater at the far end of the known world, a six-month to a year-long journey from practically anywhere else on the planet loosely defined as “civilization”.

Growing up there meant a bit of an advantage in that one could be aware of all the other layers behind the glitzy modern TV and Hollywood, West Coast/Left Coast, surfing safari/Haight-Ashbury layer that everyone with an awareness level above that of a mollusk knows. But peel that layer back, and there is another layer; the pre-World-War II layer, of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, of sleepy little towns buried in orange groves, Hollywood Boulevard a dirt track and Beverley Hills a wilderness… go back another couple of layers, and you arrive at a place that always seems to have had a dreaming, evanescent feel about it to me; California in the first half of the 19th century.

In many ways, that California marked the high tide-line of the Spanish empire in the New World: when the great tide of the conquistadores washed out of the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth century looking for gold, honor, glory and land, and roared across the Atlantic Ocean, sweeping Mexico and most of South America in consecutive mighty tides , seeping into the trackless wastes of what is now the American Southwest, and eventually lapping gently at the far northern coast, where that tide, cresting in the 18th century, dropped a linked chain of twenty-one missions, four presidios or military garrisons* and three small pueblos**, one of which failed almost immediately. Mostly on the coast, or near to it, this was the framework on which hung the charming, but ultimately fragile society of Spanish (later Mexican) colonial society in what was called Alta, or Upper California.

It was a rural society, of enormous holdings, or ranchos, presided over by an aristocracy of landowners who had been granted their vast holdings by the king, or the civil government, who ran cattle or sheep on their holdings which were worked at by native Indians. The great holdings produced hides, wool and tallow, and their owners lived lives of comfort, if no very great luxury, and from all accounts were openhandedly generous, amazingly hospitable, devout…perhaps a little touchy about personal insult and apt to fight duels over it, but that could said of most men of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The climate was a temperate and kindly one, especially in comparison with much of the rest of that continent, winters being mild, and summers fair. The missions, which in addition to the care of souls had an eye towards self-sufficiency, did a little more in the way of farming than the rancheros; with great orchards of olives and citrus, and vineyards.

Far from the eye and control of central authority, they managed a fair degree of self-sufficiency; the scattering of structures from that era which survived to the 20th century set a kind of architectural tone to the whole area. Stucco and tile, courtyards, miradors and balconies, which looked back to cathedrals in Spain and Moorish castles in Grenada were adapted in adobe and brick, copied in stucco, and hung with church bells brought with great effort from the Old Country. Richard Henry Dana’s classic “Two Years Before the Mast” is an eye-witness account of the trade in hides with the rancheros, in the 1830ies, and this novel offers an accessible description of what it looked like, in the 1840ies, as well as the difficulties involved in even traveling to such a distant fringe of the world. The immortal “Zorro” movies and TV show is set in this milieu, which is probably where most people know of this little, long gone world.

But the Spanish empire slowly lost it’s grip, and independent Mexico fought a rear-guard action for a while. I think they succeeded for a fair number of years, keeping their pleasant and gracious outpost, because of it’s very isolation, but other national powers waxed as Spain waned. The British had Canada to the north, and trade interests in the Pacific Northwest, the Russians had Alaska, and even a tiny foot-hold at Ft. Ross, on the coast of present-day Sonoma county, north of San Francisco. There was even a vaguely Swiss interest in Alta California, due to the presence of John Augustus Sutter, who founded an agricultural establishment where Sacramento is now… which inadvertently brought and end to the gracious life of the rancheros. The Spanish who ransacked Mexico and South America looking for gold, even sending a fruitless expedition far into the present-day American Southwest, eventually gave up looking for gold on the fringes of their empire… and it’s the purest sort of irony that gold in greater quantities than they had ever dreamed of was found, initially discovered during construction of a millrace for a saw-mill that Sutter had contracted to build at Coloma in the foothills, as he needed lumber for his various entrepreneurial projects.

*San Jose, El Puebla Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles sobre El Rio Porcinuncula, and Branciforte
**San Diego, Monterray, San Francisco, Santa Barbara

The Falling Man

19. August 2006 · Comments Off on The Falling Man · Categories: General, History, Media Matters Not

With all the recent photo-fakery attendent upon the fighting in Lebanon being much discussed in the blogosphere, I ran across a curious discussion of historic and iconic war photographs, and the chances that they were faked in some way, either by being staged, or having certain essential bits of information left out upon publication and dissemination.

I don’t remember hearing any of the aspersions about Robert Capa’s fameous snap of a Spanish Loyalist, caught by chance at the instant of death, but there is a rather fascinating story here, of how it was proved authentic, after all, and the soldier even given a name.

I would wonder if such a photo of a soldier today might be splashed all over the front page, above the fold… but I already know the answer to that one.

Vino, Veritas and Lucky

05. August 2006 · Comments Off on Vino, Veritas and Lucky · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Pajama Game, Stupidity, Wild Blue Yonder

Unaccustomed as I am to giving a good goddamn about the blatherings of movie stars and other reality-challenged morons in the entertainment industry— we pay these people inordinately large salaries to dress up and pretend to be other people for our amusement, and I have always just tried to think of them as a breed of well-trained performing monkeys— I am a little surprised to find myself even considering a blog-post about Mel Gibson’s drunk-driving arrest and his subsequent widely publicized anti-Semitic outburst, recorded apparently in its very ugly entirety. It’s been all over the entertainment industry media, to which I never (well hardly ever) pay attention, but Blondie does – and if her reaction to the whole thing is anything typical, the very photogenic Mr. Gibson may have a big-post rehab problem. She was honestly revolted by the whole nasty diatribe, will probably not see whatever his next movie is, and is even put off by the thought of watching any of the old Mad Max movies again. In vino, veritas, you see, truth at the bottom the wineglass; she and I have been around long enough to know that an over-sufficiency of alcohol doesn’t really change a person. It just loosens inhibitions, and their grip on whatever façade they maintain over their true personality. Everyone knows people who are kind, funny and amusing sober, and even more so when smashed – and conversely, at least one individual who only appears to be kind, funny and amusing, when sober. When that kind gets a skin-full, the real underlying person comes out, and it is usually a memorably nasty piece of work. So, while drunk on his ass, a movie star who has a public persona of being a rather genial, fairly devout sort of family man is revealed to be – well, something rather less genial, to put it kindly. And since he is in the entertainment business, this has implications for more than just his family, circle of friends and therapist.

It’s enough to make one madly nostalgic for the old studio morality clauses, actually. On the whole and over the long run, we rather prefer our entertainers to have a private life pretty much be congruent with what they play on the screen, assuming that we have to know anything about their personal lives at all. Frankly I’d rather see someone like Meryl Streep or Judi Dench spend three decades or more playing a great many different and interesting characters, and living a dull and blameless personal life out in the suburbs between movie shoots. Or even a Robert Mitchum, who seems to have in real life been pretty much the same kind of two-fisted, hard-drinking brawler he often played. I’m fairly sure that Rock Hudson would never have been as big a movie star as he was, if everyone had known that in real life he played for the other team, although we can now appreciate him being a much better actor than we thought back then, playing all those love scenes with women. If he had been outed in the 1950ies, Rock would have been dropped – er, like a hot rock. What he was in real life, was just not congruent with the roles he played, and the public personality he appeared to be. I get the giggles myself, picturing him in a passionate movie cinch with Doris Day, knowing what I know now. So, how many people will giggle cynically when they see Mel playing a regular guy?

As I wrote here last month, anti-Semitism in the US never quite has attained the virulence that it has in Europe, for a number of likely reasons. Not to say it anti-Semitism never appeared in the American cultural or political body politic; there are plenty of examples to the contrary. But set against that are even more accounts of how in a lot of places, and on a lot of occasions, it was something that, to use an English expression, was just not done, being neither condoned or approved of, and on one famous occasion, it brought down a bigger hero than a movie actor, a man whose credentials for being an American hero were somewhat more substantial than being able to recite lines in front of a camera; Charles Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle, Lucky Lindy himself, who by 1941 had spent nearly two decades in the public eye, after his epic crossing of the Atlantic, solo and non-stop in a single-engine and the ghastly kidnapping and death of his first child and the resulting investigation and trial. Aviator, writer, scientist and traveler, he had become a passionate speaker, and one of the leading lights in the America First Committee, a group formed to oppose any American involvement in what would become the Second World War. Many of the founding members- intellectuals, businessmen, and politicians alike- were honorable, and passionate patriots, who were convinced that the war in Europe was none of our affair, and that involvement in it would not end well or to American advantage, and had the example of the first war to go on. Conventional wisdom of that time had it that America had been suckered into participating in World War One by an unholy cabal of slick politicians and greedy arms merchants, and as war broke out in Europe in 1939, Americans very rightfully felt they’d better not get fooled again. But there were other, less honorable motivations motivating members of America First, traditional dislike of Britain’s imperial and financial powers, admiration for or fear of Germany, deep dislike of President Roosevelt – and as historian David Gardner wrote “Anti-Semitism was the most inflammatory issue in the isolationist debate. Jews had good reason to hate Hitler… Jewish interventionists could therefore be motivated only by a desire to help co-religionists in Europe. To save them, Jews appeared willing to sacrifice American lives. The fact that interventionist sentiment was strongest in the traditionally conservative south and southwest, areas of small Jewish population, had done little to change popular belief that Jews were leading the drive for war.”
And by the fall of 1941, events had skidded way beyond anyone’s control, least of all the passionate anti-interventionalists of America First. Rooseveldt had won re-election the year before, a military draft had been instituted, Lend-Lease aid and volunteers flowed towards Britian, along with considerable American sympathy. After a U-boat fired on an American destroyer, President Rooseveldt authorized the US Navy to shoot back. Passions ran high, as events converged, and Lindbergh addressed an America First rally in De Moines, saying “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals who believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depends upon the domination of the British Empire … These war agitators comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence … it is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany … But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences� Their greatest danger to this country is in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government…”
Lindbergh had long been a hero to most Americans, even as he had become so deeply involved in America First, and certainly viewed by many, especially in the Rooseveldt administration as an admirer of Hitler, and the Nazi Party, but this speech— described as intemperate and inflammatory — brought down a storm on his head. The America First Committee, fractured and was made irrelevant by Pearl Harbor, and Lindbergh himself was all but made a political outcast by the opprobrium that descended upon him.
Curiously, the speech that killed his political career was made on September 11th.
(More fascinating stuff about America First Committee… much of which seems curiously relevant, these days)

A Taste of the Good Stuff

23. July 2006 · Comments Off on A Taste of the Good Stuff · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Literary Good Stuff

This is tasty sample of the latest book, tenatively titled “To Truckee’s Trail”, the one for which I have a complete proposal all ready. The select few who have seen the story so far are fascinated, and I myself think it could be very, very big… could it be “Gone With the Wind” big, or “Harry Potter” big? Let’s see if the blogosphere can make it so…
I want to be able to sit at home and write the rest of it, I am deeply interested in the people I am writing about, enthralled by the process of working out how they pulled off their very daring adventure. I have had enough experience as an amateur “unknown” to know that just sending the proposal off to a handy selection of publishers listed in the Writers’ Guide is a waste of time and postage. Been there, did that, have a large collection of impersonal rejection slips that gave no indication that my submission envelope had even been opened.

I am posting this to show it off, and to get a serious publisher interested. I am bouyed by optimism, and the knowlege that big money has been paid for stuff that IMO is much, much worse than this. (Oh, and I have copyright protection for this. I did not spend three years working for an intellectual property firm for nothing.)

From Chapter 11, “To Truckee’s Trail”.

From Dr. Townsend’s Journal: “14th November, 1844 In the wilderness at the fork of Truckee’s River. This day, I can scarce put pen to paper, being distract’d with grief and worry. Our party is split yet again, this again being of our own decision. My own Dearest Darling is gone ahead with five others, judged fit and sound, and without the care of little ones to attend. Yesterday, our labors brought us to where a tributary came down from the mountains, athwart our path, and leading to the south…We made camp in late afternoon, and Captain Stephens called a meeting….”

“We can’t take the wagons much farther,” said Young Martin flatly, as if daring anyone to argue with him. “Unless we follow the west tributary.” He dropped down onto an upturned cask that he was using as a stool, and wincingly pulled off his waterlogged boots. He peeled off his socks, which were also soaked.
“Out of our way,” murmured Old Man Hitchcock, looking into the fire, past his eternal whittling, and the knife-blade. “The long way around.”
“The long way around, may prove the shortest, “said Stephens gently. “We done well before, always heading straight west. At the Green, and again from the Sink. I’ll wait to hear what Isaac says.” He sat a little way back from the fire on a half-rotted fallen log, Dog at his feet. Her great fawn and black head lay on her forepaws, golden eyes going back and forth as if she was paying intelligent attention to the conversation. The fire was the smallest of the three outside the circle of wagons and tents, set up on the lee side a barrier against the icy breeze roaring down from the high mountains, and the cold that came at sundown, the cold that was most particularly felt when the exertions of the day were over. Allen Montgomery, and the Murphy brothers, Jamie, Daniel, Bernard and Johnny hunkered around the fire. It had the air of an informal meeting of the men, while the women cooked a sparse, but much anticipated meal. The horses and Hitchcocks’ precious two mules were close-picketed for the night, just on the other side of the wagons, inside the circle jostling each other for mouthfuls of tall dry grass bristling up from the day’s accumulation of snow and armfuls of green rushes cut from the riverbank by the women and older children,. Around that fragile shelter of canvas, brush and fires, the snow was trampled to a muddy slush. At other fires, Isabella and Sarah, and the Murphy women moved in an intricate ballet, skirts, shawls and sleeves carefully held back from the fire, as they cooked the evening meal: stew and cornbread that tasted like sawdust with no butter to spread richly on it, dried apples stewed with a little spice Even Isabella’s milk cow had gone dry, months since. Mary-Bee Murphy sat with Mary Miller on a wagon-bench, dandling the baby Ellen, while her sons and Willie Miller and their cousin Mary leaned on Old Martin’s knees, or sat bundled in shawls at his feet as he told them another endless story about miracles, and goblins and old heroes of Erin. It was hard to judge by a casual looking, John thought, of how far along Mary-Bee was, all bundled in shawls as she was, but she still walked lightly. She was not far enough gone in pregnancy to be awkward, but she tired easily.

His glance was drawn finally, as it always would be, to his own Liz, her hair silver-gilt in the firelight, wrapped in two shawls and the buffalo robe that Old Man Hitchcock had traded for her at Fort Laramie, from the tribes. Sitting on another wagon-bench, she had Sadie in her lap, Nancy and Eddie leaning confidingly against her, under the shelter of that buffalo robe. Poor Liz, she had never been any shakes as a cook, had never even had to be, let alone over a campfire. But to do her fair, she tried her best, at a cost of some burnt fingers, scorching her own apron, and upsetting a pot a beans and near to putting the fire out, whereupon Isabella spoke out in tones of mixed exasperation and affection, somewhere back along the trail when the three families had begun to share a campfire. Elizabeth would do them all favors if she could but stay away from the fire and the hot kettles; chop the vegetables, if she would be so kind, and read to the children, give them lessons and keep them out from underfoot. In that mysterious way she had, of seeming to know when he was gazing at her, her eyes lifted from the book and met his for a smiling moment, quiet communion among the crowd around the campfire. He was here, she was there, and yet they were alone together. And then she went on reading to the children, and he was supposed to be also paying attention to the needs of others in the party.
They had all become a tribe, John realized, a tribe of nomads as like to any of the Indians, bound together, sharing hardship alike with those moments in the evening, those rare moments of rest. Across the trampled circle, Moses and Dennis Martin stepped out of the darkness between two wagons, each with an armload of firewood. They piled their burden roughly beside the largest of the fires, and a storm bright burst of sparks flew up like fireflies meeting the stars overhead.

“… tonight, after we’ve supped,”
“A meeting?” John was startled back from his nearly simultaneous contemplation of his own dear Liz, and of Young Martin’s left foot, dead white, nearly bloodless, propped up on his knee. “Pardon…I was lost, considering this interesting combination of foot-rot and frostbite. Dry socks, Martin, dry socks and liniment. And contemplate sealing your boots with tallow and paraffin… other than that, consider staying out of the water, as much as you can…”
There was a dry laugh, shared around the circle around fire. In the last three weeks, they had been forced into the river-bed time and time again, as it provided the easiest, and on occasion, the only passage for the wagons.
“We must consider what we should do now,” “Stephens said. “We might send a party ahead, along the south branch…” He fell silent, as Mary-Bee Murphy came with a basin and a steaming kettle and Isabella, bearing a dry cloth and her box of medicinal salts.
“Doctor, tell him to soak in this for a bit, and dry them carefully. We’ll bring a set of dry stockings, presently, and dry his boots beside the fire.”
“Mrs. Patterson, you are a tonic, “Extravagantly, John caught her hand, and took it to his lips.”And an excellent nurse; I shall see that the patient follows your advice to the letter.”
Isabella gave him a very severe look, as Mary-Bee awkwardly set down the basin and filled it with steaming water. Isabella added salts, and gathered up the socks and the sodden boots. Mary-Bee looked as if she would say something more, but she merely patted her husband’s shoulder and followed in Isabella’s wake.
“See that he does then, Doctor Townsend, see that he does.” Isabella shot, over her shoulder. When she was gone back to the cook-fire and out of hearing, Stephens remarked,
“A good woman is above the price of rubies.”
“I long to meet the man who would play Petruchio to her Kate,” John said, just as Greenwood appeared as silently as a ghost in the circle of firelight, shadowed by Britt, and heralded only by the scent of tobacco smoke. Stephens grinned, a flash of teeth in his whiskered face. “Nearly as much as I’d like to be warm again, and over those pestilential mountains; he must be a formidable man… I imagine a very Ajax.”
“Not so,” said Hitchcock seriously. “M’son-in-law’s a very mild-tempered man. Never has much to say for hisself.”
“Married to her, who’d wonder?” ungallantly ventured Bernard Murphy sotto voice, as Greenwood sank onto his heels, and held his hands to the fire, looking every day of his four-score. Britt took up a seat next to Stephens on the log, and casually gentled Dog’s alertly-raised head. She lay down again, with an inaudible “woof”.
Stephens merely lifted his brows, and Greenwood sighed;
“Not so good for wagons, Cap’n. Not ‘less you had a month of good weather and a hundred strong men and them with an ax in either hand. Horses? Yeah, easy enough. We blazed it, two, three miles, far as we could, ‘fore sunset. Horses and pack-mules. It looks right promising, otherwise… but I’ve always said if you want to be over these mountains by Winterset, you’ll have to leave all your traps and ride hard.”
“No.” It was Isabella’s voice. She had returned unobtrusively to the fire-circle, joining the men, as was her right as a wagon-owner and the head of a family. ”We cannot just leave our traps, as you say. We have chosen out all the most valuable and useful of goods, and brought them all this way; we cannot just drop them by the wayside as things of no consequence. ”
Greenwood shrugged. “They’re only things. You can get back things, or something like them.”
“Things?! Things, as you say, but they are our things! We considered them very carefully; these are things that are not only valuable to us, but things that we need! They are not frivolous possessions, but necessary tools to earning our livelihoods… without those “things” we should be beggars, dependant upon charity.” Her keen hawk-glance went round the circle of faces, and John thought of his books, the case of surgical instruments… Liz’ precious china tea set, that came from her grandmother, whose family had brought it from Germany and cherished through generations.
“And what about the children? Can they ride hard? Can Mary Miller ride, with a baby at breast, or Mary-Bee Murphy, so close to term? The wagon is our shelter, our home! I’ll not be a beggar, I’ll not be destitute. What if any of us fall sick, though lack of shelter? What do you say, Doctor? How many of us would be fit to leave all behind and ride hard?” Her hard, inimical hawk-glance pinned him, challenged him to speak, to venture his opinion.
“The very youngest or those of a weak constitution could not endure very long in such conditions as this without shelter, “John stammered. As many times as he had talked this over with Elizabeth in the privacy of their bed, be was still stuck on the two-horned dilemma, having never come to any conclusion in his own mind, “Nor the very old…” Old Hitchcock snorted derisively at this, and would have said more but for his daughter’s fierce gaze swinging around towards him. “The wagons… they are at least of some shelter. I would not choose to leave them.”
“I do not think we could carry enough food and blankets and tents on our backs for the weeks of traveling we still must endure… not if we had to carry the weakest of us, “ Stephens sighed, lines of weariness and responsibility harshly grooving his features in the firelight. “Our supplies diminish every day that we spend, this side of the mountains… I know that my own do, so I assume the same of you all. Old Man, how far do you think we might be from Sutter’s Fort?”
“I do not know for sure, “Greenwood said, bluntly. “Maybe a week’s journey on a good horse to the summit, maybe longer. Sutter’s place is down in the flatland, on the river, a good piece from the mountains on the other side.”
“What sort of man is he? If we sent for aid for ourselves, would he send it?”
“Aye, he would. I know nothing of him at first hand, though. But he is accounted to be generous, and he has ambitions.”
“As do most men… I’ve a hankering to know what he has ambitions for…” Stephens stood, wearily and stretched, “Doctor, I’d like to call a meeting… not now, after we’ve all supped. Not just the wagon-owners. Everybody. Tell them it’s to consider sending out a small party ahead. He saluted Isabella with a touch to his hat-brim, “Pardon, all. I shall check on the stock. No, “he added as Greenwood looked to get to his feet. “You’ve earned some rest, Old Man. ” Dog’s eyes had snapped open as soon as Stephens moved, and now she lurched to her feet and padded after him into the darkness outside the firelight. John sighed; he was wearied to his very bones, how Greenwood must feel after his long scout today, he could only imagine. The old man must be made of iron and buffalo sinews, to have endured this kind of odyssey for years.

“Supper’s ready,” said Isabella abruptly. “The table is set… that is, if we had a table.”
John stood, and bowed, elaborately offering her his arm,
“My dear Mrs. Patterson, may I then escort you to… our lack of table and our evening repast?”
Isabella nodded, regally, her lips twitching with her effort not to laugh.
“How very kind of you, my dear Doctor.” She took his arm with a flourish, and they moved with elaborate gentility across the trampled mud to their own fire, where Elizabeth watched them, laughing, while the children stared in baffled astonishment.
“La, Mrs. Patterson, I fear you are flirting with my own husband!” she said, while Isabella dissolved into hearty and infectious giggles.
“My dearest, I am wounded at the heart!” John slapped his chest theatrically, “How could I consider being unfaithful to you, even in thought!” He sank onto the bench next to her, as the children had sprung up to help Isabella pass out tin plates. He added in a low voice, “Although I confess, Darling Dearest, I now can see how Mr. Patterson’s affections might have been drawn towards our own Kate.”
“Because she is altogether splendid, “Elizabeth replied, “But too many men are fools. A pretty face and a kind regard is all that is necessary for their attentions. A strong mind and a stout heart are not obviously apparent.”
“I am properly rebuked,” John said, and they sat together in perfect companionship under the buffalo robe, while Sadie brought around the tin plates and her brother a pan of cornbread. Isabella carried an iron Dutch oven, from which the most savory scents emanated. She carefully doled out a ladle and a half to each. Across the fire, John noticed that Allen and Sarah sat next to each other, but separate. Elizabeth followed his gaze, and intuited his thoughts, perfectly.
“They are not happy, Dearest Darling. I doubt they will ever be. They married in haste, thinking they would come to love each other… but I cannot think how that will happen, under the trials of such a journey as this.”
“Perhaps when we get to California…” John ventured, “It may yet work out….” He took a mouthful of the stew. “Oh, this is truly succulent fare… or am I just amazingly hungry?”
Elizabeth twinkled at him.
“It is a most Luccellian feast, is it not?”
“This cannot be a potato, surely? I thought we had eaten the last of the potatoes months ago… Murphy made such an event of it; I made a note in the trail diary.”
“No, “Elizabeth replied, serenely. “Those things that taste somewhat potato-like are roots of water-reeds. The Indians eat them, even dry and grind a sort of flour out of them or so Mr. Hitchcock says. And we found stands of wild onions when we first came up into the mountains. Truly, this wilderness is a garden if you know where to look.”
“Ah, well… “John looked with new interest into the contents of his tin plate. “We are well served, and well fed, Darling Dearest. I could not ask for better companions in all the world.”
“So…” Elizabeth ate with renewed interest, “What does Mr. Stephens think we should do next?”
“He wants to hold a meeting.” John replied, “I think he wants to send an advance party, following the creek towards the south, whilst we move the wagons west along the main body. We cannot spare too many men, or horses, though. But at least, they could bring fresh supplies and teams from Sutter’s.”
“Who will he send?” Elizabeth looked around the camp. “Who can be spared? Who can be asked to leave their families behind?” John followed her gaze. Across the fire, Moses and Allen laughed together. Sarah’s back was to her husband; she talked quietly with Isabella, who seemed to be listening with half an ear while she supervised the children. A tiny line worry-line appeared between Elizabeth’s level brows.
“He’ll ask for volunteers, first.”
“Moses will ask, I am sure of it.”
“Darling Dear, he is not a child any more. He is a man, or close enough to it. And we will talk it all over tonight after we have supped.” Elizabeth’s merry mood seemed to have fled, though, and they ate in companionable silence, until they could see that other men were drifting to Stephens’s campfire, carrying benches and stools; Old Martin Murphy and his sons and James Miller, Patrick Martin and his boys, young Sullivan, and the various drovers. Sarah and Elizabeth hastily scoured the plates clean, and followed Isabella. John clambered up into the wagon for his little writing-case; he had a sense that he ought to be taking the minutes.

The wagon-owners settled themselves in the first circle around the fire: Stephens and Greenwood, Isabella and her father, Allan, Martin Murphy and his sons, and James Miller, John Sullivan and Patrick Martin. Wives, and older children, brothers, and the hired men filled in the spaces, and spilled over to a second circle, and stood in the gaps behind benches and chairs brought out from the wagons. Coming to the confluence of waters meant a very real decision about what route to take now, a decision with nearly unbearable consequences, now that snow had been falling for weeks. No wonder Old Martin looked particularly worn, and cosseted his grandchildren. Fully half the party was his blood kin, and he the person most responsible for bringing them here, too.

“Aye, we must send for assistance, while we can, “Old Martin agreed. Like Isabella, he would not countenance abandoning the wagons; consensus regarding taking the slightly more open but possibly longer route along the creek was complete. “And how many shall we send? And who can we spare, when we’ll need every strong man to move the wagons, hey?”
“No more than six, “Greenwood replied. “Strong riders, with little gear and just enough food. Eight of the horses are in fair condition, still— six to ride, two for spares and packs.” He cleared his throat and spat thoughtfully into the fire. He seemed almost to hesitate before saying more. “Whoever they be, ‘twill be six less on the foodstuff left to the main party. And they need not all be men, either.”
That was a notion to cause an intake of breath around the fire, and a sudden, thoughtful silence. Old Martin was the first to break it.
“I’d not countenance asking a mother or a father yet, to leave children behind in a place such as this… no, no, never, ‘tis an unnatural thing you would be asking. Not even the heathen savages would ask such.”
“No,” Agreed Old Man Greenwood, “But among the tribes, women without children commonly ride with the hunting parties. They do the butchering and dressing out, and cooking and all.”
“What a wonderful time they must have, doing all the work of it!” Sarah said, in a voice that carried just far enough, and there was a rustle of wry laughter from the women on the edge of the campfire.
“So how do we choose the six; should we draw lots from among those of age, young, fit and without children?”
“Aye,” agreed Old Martin readily, “But it is in my mind; we should first pledge to assist the families of those chosen, in whatever they may require. Our needs might leave them short of a provider, and ready hands.”
“So… are we agreed on that, then? To draw lots for a place and to see to the needs of any family left short.” Stephens’ ugly, lined face appeared more than usually like a grim, fire-gilded gargoyle, looking around the circle. “We are agreed then? Are there any exceptions?”
“None but you, Captain…and the Doctor. You are more needed here with us.”
“I had no intent of leaving this company, until we are all safe,” replied Stephens, dourly. “Nor does Doctor Townsend; so, how many will draw?” He leant down and began pulling stems of dried grass from the brown tufts which were still un-trampled around his log seat.”
The quiet murmurs ran around the campfire, quickly tallying names; Alan and Sarah, Greenwood’s two sons, and Stephens’ young drover, Tom Flombeau, Oliver Patterson, old Martin’s youngest children, Daniel, Bernard and Johnny, and their sister Helen. The four drovers, Edmund Bray, Vincent Calvin, Matthew Harbin, Oliver Magnent, and Francis, John’s own hired man. Joseph Foster, and Moses’ close friends, Dennis and Patrick Martin. Not the Sullivans, though, after some discussion, since John and Mary had the care of their younger brothers. But that left Moses himself… and his Elizabeth. John’s heart seemed to turn over in his chest; all of them, fit and strong and young, and childless, twenty of them, nearly a half of the party. Stephens cut twenty straws, and then cut six of them in half. He set them in his palm so they were all level, and then closed his fist. He held out that fist towards Allan Montgomery first, then Britt and John Greenwood. Allan and John Greenwood drew long straws, and so did Britt. Moses also drew a long straw. His disappointment was obvious, but John hoped that his own relief was not. The hired men drew in a body: the Irish drover boys and Stephens’s drover lad, the dark Louisiana French boy whose name was such a tongue-twister, all drew long straws, but Oliver Magnent, and Francis Deland both drew short. Joseph Foster stepped forward to draw: another long.
“Ach, another two months of this!” he said, in good-humored disappointment. “And all on short rations, too!”
“Daniel… Johnny, ye and Bernard step forrard… and where’s Helen?” Old Martin chided his three youngest into the circle and looked on with a deathly countenance, when Helen, Johnny and Daniel all drew short straws. Oliver Patterson stepped forward into the firelight to draw, and Stephens looked at him with a particularly severe and interrogatory frown.
“Boy, are you of age for this venture?” and Oliver blushed deep red as Isabella said, white-lipped.
“He will be eighteen in three months.”
Oliver drew a long straw though, leaving a pair of wispy straws in Stephens’ fist; Sarah and Elizabeth stepped forward, and John’s heart felt like was turning over entirely within his chest. Sarah drew a long straw, and could not hide the disappointment on her face. And Elizabeth then took forth the last of the straws from Stephens’ hand: a short straw for the horse party.
Elizabeth, not Moses; John was shaken down to the soul. Old Martin looked hardly better. Stephens let the murmurings of excitement and sympathy die down and quietly said,
“Doctor, take down their names into the trail journal… I’ll want to talk to them, all together. They must leave in the morning, as soon as we are ready.” He spoke a little louder, to the gathering at large. “Thank-ee all, sitting out in the cold for this. It’s only trail business we had to settle tonight.” Taking their cue, the women began chivvying away the children who already had not been settled to bed. The younger men and the families of those who had not been chosen drifted away from Stephens’ campfire in their wake; after such a day of travel, a warm bedroll had a powerful and irresistible allure. As the evening meeting broke apart, Greenwood thoughtfully sized up the six chosen.
“You were well-guided, Cap’n… they are well-suited. Among the women, Mrs. Townsend has the best seat, and little Helen is young and strong. It is good that her brothers are among them, they are both good hands with the beasts, and fearless about venturing into wilderness. Magnent and Deland are good shots, and as trail-wise as they come, besides being used to the cold and the snow…”
“For myself, I am glad Mrs. Townsend is amongst them.” John said. His voice sounded hollow to his own ears. “The cold and the hardships are so extreme, I fear for her, under these circumstances, and welcome any means for her to escape farther exposure.”
“Aye, it may be best at that.” Old Greenwood sighed, grimly. “Would that I could urge all to travel so light, and escape these mountains. At least, they will be six less appetites upon the supplies we have left.”
Old Martin and his children, Elizabeth and the two French lads, all of the chosen lingered by the fire as they were bidden. In the firelight, Elizabeth looked as young as they; all of them so eager, fired by the prospect of adventure, just as they all had been six months ago at Council Bluffs, when the grass was lush and deep, escaping the drudgery of a mundane existence. Now they looked fair to escape another one, of everlasting cold, and the brutal labor of moving the wagons another mile or so farther up the river, the river whose jaws were closing in on them like a trap. Stephens looked at them, and smiled, wryly,
“No great words… wish I did. Ride hard. Look after each other and the horses. Get to Sutters’ place and bring back help.”
“We shall!” Elizabeth’s chin lifted, and her eyes were fired with determination. “We are leaving our kin and dearest ones, and our friends, knowing that their very salvation depends on us. Depend on us, Captain Stephens, we will not fail.”
And even if Old Greenwood seemed to hide a half-cynical smile, the others; Helen and her brothers, the two Frenchmen, all shared the same look of bright dedication. They could not fail; they would throw themselves at the high mountains, the rocks and rivers and the ice, they would win through it all, they would come through, rescue their families, and John’s heart felt as if it would burst with a combination of pride and dread.

“And we will not fail, “Elizabeth whispered, when they lay tucked together in their bedroll of blankets and quilts, and the trusty buffalo robe, all spread out on top of the platform of boxes and flat-topped trunks in their wagon. The drawstrings and flaps were drawn tight against the cold, and a kettle of coals taken from the fire lent an illusion of warmth to the tiny, canvas-walled room. A pair of flat stones heated in the fire, wrapped in a blanket and tucked in the bottom of their bed produced a slightly more convincing degree of warmth, together with the warmth of each other, curled into each other, spoon-fashioned. Around and outside this fragile shelter, came the quiet, near-to sleep voices of Isabella’s children, Allan Montgomery’s irritated voice, raised and quickly hushed, a quiet crunch of regular footsteps in new snow, the horses pawing the frozen ground, searching for more of the thin dried grass. Under it all, a nearly-imperceptible yet menacing rustle, the constant sound of more snow falling, brushing the canvas and pine branches; fat flakes like feathers, like falling leaves.
“I wish…” said John, into her hair, hugging her dear and familiar self into the shelter of his own body, “…I wish that we…”
“Had not taken this journey?” Elizabeth picked up the thread of his thoughts as expertly as she had always done. “Dearest Darling, never wish that. No, never. For I am glad that we have, even if this would be the last night we spend in each others’ arms… and it will not be, “she added firmly, and took his hand in hers, and held it first to her lips, and then her cheek. After a moment, she continued, thoughtfully. “I almost feel as if my life before we started this journey was lived in shadows, a sort of half-life, and then I came out into bright sunshine. Did not we decide upon this great adventure partly because of my own health? And now I am in good heath, and have shared your life in a way that I never could before… in our present emergency, I am accounted strong enough to be given a great task, a responsibility? There should be no greater reward, I do not ask for any such. My Dearest Darling, there is nothing to regret… I love you all the more for having made this possible. Have no fear for me… I will be safe, and we will not fail.”
“I pray that shall be so, “ John tightened his arms around her, at once wishing for this night with Elizabeth never to end, full knowing it would be the last they would spend together for months, and yet wishing that it were tomorrow already, and the agony of parting already over. He was torn between pride in her courage, and worry for her that shook him down to his bones. “We should go to sleep, Dearest Darling, you’ll need as much rest tonight as possible.”
“Mmmm. Don’t stay awake yourself, watching over me, “Elizabeth said, teasingly, but John did try to fight off slumber for a while, until sleep claimed them both. And then too soon it was dark morning, and snow still falling, and he was standing, wretchedly tongue-tied in front of people, for once. He had promised Elizabeth, back in the desert, that he should not have to go on a long scout again, and be separated from her. And now, ironically, she was riding on a long scout, leaving him to plod behind. “Promise me rather, that wherever one of us will go, the other will follow after in a little while,” she had said, and so he would be following after, but it was bitter, bitter. Moses and he had saddled Beau, had rolled up the buffalo robe and two or three blankets around a pitiful bag of dried meats and hard-tack, and a little ground coffee and strapped them behind her saddle. Isabella and Sarah had fussed over what to send with her, just as the Murphy women had fussed over Helen, Johnny and Daniel. Old Martin had tears rolling down his cheeks as he gave his youngest daughter a boost into the saddle. Daniel’s paint pony danced impatiently, crunching the fresh-fallen snow underfoot; the lads were eager to be away.
“Dearest Darling, I must go now.” She leaned down from the saddle, and brushed his cheek with her lips, and then she was gone, following the rest of the mounted party. They were veiled in falling slow before they reached the first bend and were lost to sight, but he was almost sure she turned in the saddle and lifted her hand in one last farewell.

More Stolen Kisses at the Skylark

20. July 2006 · Comments Off on More Stolen Kisses at the Skylark · Categories: Air Force, General, History, Iran, Pajama Game, Veteran's Affairs

Our TI, Sgt. Petre’s pre-liberty lecture as regards the possibly alien mores and amorous intentions of various foreign military members that we might encounter was all of a piece with other informative lectures, mostly tinged with a certain air of dark warning. The famous Dempsy-Dumpster story was featured prominently, presumably as a cautionary tale for those of use whose lusts were so uncontrollable and whose aesthetic senses were so un-fastidious as to pick exactly that venue for a tête-à-tête. The choice of venues for engaging in sexual congress were pretty slim, on Lackland AFB’s training side, where total privacy was by practice and edict impossible. For that substantial portion of the world who has not gone through USAF basic training during the last four decades, the Dempsy-Dumpster story involved a male and female trainee who chose one of those enormous metal industrial trash containers for their particular brief encounter, only to be brutally interrupted in coitus by one of those enormous trash trucks, mechanically picking up the dumpster, and dumping all contents into the back of the truck. Hilarity ensued, along with least one broken limb, a considerable amount of embarrassment and a folk-tale for the ages. It might even have really happened, sometime in the early 1970ies, but I myself would have to see the contemporary incident report to believe it.

Anyway, we were forewarned, and presumably forearmed about the dangers posed to our virtue… although I thought it was very amusing that we had the birth control lecture a couple of days before we had town liberty, by an NCO who frizbee’d a diaphragm the entire length of the classroom, by way of catching our attention. Which she certainly did for some of us; that was the first time in my life I had actually seen any such thing. It was probably lost on others, though; one of our number included the wife of an E-6 who had four children. Others women were married, or had been married, or hoped to become married, and had practiced a bit… but we didn’t have much in the way of illusion about some of the foreign troops, after what happened to four of us, one drear December day.

It was at the point in our training when we were allowed in pairs and fours to go to various places on base by ourselves, on formally sanction errands… after overcoming a certain amount of disorientation. Like: how the hell can you find your way back to a place when all you have ever seen of the way there, is the back of the neck of the girl in formation ahead of you? And what the hell do you do, when the four of you are marching along, two and two— as you have to, because your TI said so— when you are about to intersect with a full flight of fifty or so other trainees, with their TI and guidon and all the pomp and majesty of a flight of trainees marching on their way to somewhere or other? Why, of course, just has you have been told— stand at full attention, until they have marched by, and then you can go about your own business.

But this flight was a flight of Saudi tech school trainees, and I had the dubious honor of standing at rigid attention on the sidewalk, while an entire flight of them marched by, making every sort of vulgar comment, sotto voice out of the ranks; bird-whistles, crude suggestions, rude noises, low whistles… the entire armory of disgusting guy behavior, all in one fell blast, on four female Air Force trainees, who were under orders to stand there at attention, without responding, in obedience to military protocol, as we were verbally treated like whores in a particularly disreputable neighborhood. Sgt Petre looked particularly black, when we reported this to her, afterwards. We were distraught, and particularly outraged that this would happen to us, on a military base, and when we were constrained from showing any kind of reaction. It was a thoroughly nasty experience, and during twenty subsequent years in the military, nothing quite equaled it for the feeling that it gave me of slugs crawling over my bare flesh. We all agreed that if we were ever out and about again, and spotted a Saudi flight, we would turn around and go a couple of blocks out of the way. No one wanted to repeat the experience, although Airman Duncan— tall, gawky, plain and outspoken— was haunted for the rest of her base liberties by a short, squat and silent Saudi student who magically appeared in any place were Duncan was, and spent the time watching her yearningly from across the room. We couldn’t figure out how he always knew where she was. Efficient information pipeline among the male students, I suppose. I had developed my own admirer, but at least he could bring himself to make pleasant conversation.

On Christmas Day, we had liberty base liberty for all of that afternoon, but no better place to spend it than the bowling alley. The snack bar was open, and a half dozen or so of us were making the most of a couple of hours of freedom; free to drink soft drinks, to laugh with the usual constellation of male trainees. After a certain point, I noticed that one of the Iranian trainees had been drawn into the happy little group. We knew he was Iranian because his uniform was hung with a lot of ornament, and in two clashing shades of blue. Oddly enough, he reminded me of Kiet, my Vietnamese foster-brother; the same air of gentle diffidence, even shyness. He lingered on the edge of the group, not speaking very much at first, but eventually he began talking to me. His name turned out to be Nassir. He had a picture of the Shah in his wallet, and one of the Empress Farah, too. We pointed out Dunc’s admirer, watching her as per usual from across the room, and Nassir laughed and told us how the Iranian students looked down on the Saudis as uncouth and ignorant country bumpkins— hicks from the sticks, with no culture.

We met a couple of more times, after that, and spent some pleasant hours in the darker corners of the Skylark, holding hands and kissing shyly, while he paid me elaborately flowery compliments… which amused me no end. I had never met a man in real life who could unreel yards and yards of it, like Elizabethan love poetry. I never took this gallent compliments seriously, being fairly level-headed about my own attractions; knowing that my own citizenship probably featured rather highly among them. No, I took his attentions not the least bit seriously, but I liked him and wished him well. He wrote to me a couple of times, after I departed for tech school and that real world outside from those stolen hours of base liberty. I fell in love with someone else, and went on to Japan, and about four years later the whirlwind of Khomeini’s Islamic revolution swept away the Shah’s government. I’ve always hoped that Nassir was able to avoid being caught up in that, or the war with Iraq that followed; it would have been such a bad place for a gentle, courtly poet, who was so proud of being a Persian, and had a picture of the Shah in his wallet, and stole kisses from the girl I used to be, in the shadowy corners of the Skylark.

Pax Romana

25. June 2006 · Comments Off on Pax Romana · Categories: General, History, Military, Pajama Game, War

The stone ruins of Imperial Rome underlie Western Europe and the Mediterranean like the bones of a body, partially buried, yet here and there still visible and grandly manifest above ground, all but complete. From Leptis Magna in North Africa, to Hadrian’s Wall in the contentious border between Scotland and England proper, from Split in the Former Yugoslavia, to the 81 perfectly preserved arches of the ancient bridge over the Guadiana River, in Merida – that part of the empire called Hispania –and in thousands of lesser or greater remnants, the presence of Rome is everywhere and inescapable. The same sort of cast- concrete walls, faced with pebbles, or stone or tile, the same sort of curved roof-tiles, the same temples to Vesta, and Jupiter, to Claudius, Mars and Mithras; the same baths and fora, market-places, villas and apartment buildings, all tied together by a network of commerce and administration. Goods both luxury and otherwise, adventurous tourists, soldiers and civil administrators— the very blood of an empire, all moved along the veins and arteries of well-maintained roads and way-stations, of which the very beating heart was Rome itself. Carrying that image a little farther than absolutely necessary, I can visualize that heart as being a human, four-chambered one; of which two— the political/imperial establishment, and the flamboyantly military Rome of battles and conquest— have always rather overshadowed the other two in popular imagination. Commerce and civil administration just do not fire the blood and imagination – unless one is wonkishly fascinated by these things, and it would take a gifted writer to make them as interesting as imperial intrigues and soldiering adventures.

But close to the Palatine Hill, where the sprawling palace of the emperors looked out over the linked fora, law courts and temples in one direction, and the Circus Maximus in another— Trajan’s concrete and brick central market rambled over three or four levels, from the great hall of the Corn Exchange down to the open plaza of the meat market at the level of the forum below . Here was the embodiment of the great hearts’ economic chamber. Every sort of imaginable commodity moved from one end of the empire to another and from parts outside the Roman hegemony: corn from the Egyptian breadbasket, silk from faraway China, spices from India, African ivory and gold, olive oil, oranges and wine from the Mediterranean to everywhere else. And that trade was enabled by law and technology. Roman roads, waterworks, and civic infrastructure like harbors, lighthouses and bridges would in some cases, not be equaled or bettered until the 19th century. While emperors and soldiers came and went, sometimes with messy and protracted splatters of blood, the unspectacular and dull work of the empire went tirelessly on and on, little changing from day to day, decade to decade, until Rome itself seemed eternal, fixed forever, immutable like the stars in the sky.
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Memo: Reciprocity

22. June 2006 · Comments Off on Memo: Reciprocity · Categories: General, GWOT, History, Iraq, Military, War

To: Amnesty International, the IRC, Human Rights Watch and other professional international worry-warts
From: Sgt Mom
Re: The Treatment of POWS:

1. So, once the oozing layers of condescension and spurious moral equivalence are wiped off, this guardian of the imprisoned and mal-treated is on the record as condemning the treatment of Privates Menchaca and Tucker. Ummm. Yeah. Thanks. Heaps. I am sure their families will be really appreciative of your concern. You probably will want to remove them from your mailing lists for the immediate future, though. Don’t thank me for this bit of advice, I live to serve.

2. I am sure the above-named parties would have been assiduous, tireless, noisy, and above all, effective in protecting the basic rights of all Americans, military and otherwise, who were taken captive by insurgents, free-lance Jihadists, Talibanis, Baathists… or whatever we call the gentlemen with the mad enthusiasm for the “Religion of Peace”, depending on the week, and the location. Oops— they would have been, should those various captives have… you know… lived long enough, after having been taken captive.

3. Tortured, decapitated, eviscerated, mutilated to the point of having to resort to DNA analysis to make a positive ID… sort of puts that whole panties on the head, dog-leash, kinky humiliation games, locked up in Guantanamo and having your Koran flushed in the crapper into a whole ‘nother perspective, doesn’t it? Reminds you of what you were all about, once upon a time? Maybe? Just a teensy bit?

4. Frankly, I rather think your dilemma as regards this matter may be rather short-term: it’s pretty well acknowledged among military circles that there is no surrender in this war. There just is not. There is a Marine axiom to the effect that an enemy may kill you with your own weapon, but they’d have to beat you to death with it, because it had better be empty. One way or another, there will be no American POWs. No retreat, no surrender.

5. And after this episode, there may not be many of the insurgents taken prisoner, either. Think on that, gentlemen; think on WWII in the Pacific theater, once it got around what kind of treatment the Japanese accorded to prisoners. Surrender was neither offered, nor accepted. You might be able to work up some sort of retroactive campaign about this brutal disregard of human rights, but you might want to hurry, since most of the participants are well into their third quarter-century.

6. Thanks for your expressed concern, though. We shall take it into active consideration. (Which is military code for thrown into the recycle bin, wadded up, and with great force.)

Sincerely
Sgt. Mom

PS—a note to the usual commenters, you know who you are. Please consider very carefully, any response you may make to this post. This is a matter I feel deeply and personally about, ever since my daughter told me about the conference she and the other female Marines had at their base in Kuwait, after the capture of the Army convoy which contained Pvt. Jessica Lynch, and other female Army personnel. Please do not try to provoke me on this issue, I will delete the comment without a backwards look, and if I am sufficiently offended, I will blacklist the commenter. Word to the wise, chaps, word to the wise.

Later: Additional words from New Sisyphus, via Rantburg and Daily Pundit.

Changes

03. June 2006 · Comments Off on Changes · Categories: Air Force, General, History, Pajama Game, World

In the air, in the water… oh, sorry, flashback to last weeks’ post. Changes, they come thicker and faster. There was an article posted about the six most important strategic overseas bases last week, and none of them any that I had ever served a tour at— and I think I clocked duty time at about every major overseas base there was, even if it were only to pass through long enough to get a soda from the machine and admire the gooney birds.

1. Andersen Air Force Base & Apra Harbor, Guam;
2. Balad Air Base/Camp Anaconda, Iraq;
3. Bezmer Air Base, Bulgaria;
4. Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory;
5. Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba;
6. Manas Air Base, Kirgizstan

Three old, three new, and none of them the old, stalwart long-established bases, the very anchor of service in the Far East, or in Europe— Clark AB, in the PI is long-closed and buried in volcanic ash. Yongsan Garrison in Seoul is for the chop also; transferring all functions to the Hump may turn out to be more of a hassle than it’s worth.

If the Cold War is over, South Korea might have nothing more urgent to deal with than their starved and retarded cousins to the North, and much joy of that may they have of that. No mention of Okinawa on the list… and none in Western Europe. The Cold War is truly over, there. The chain of kasernes and camps in Germany is much reduced—one senses only little removed from having the last floor swept and the last light turned off, and generations of American military and dependent family members who rotated in and out, and raised their children, and developed a fondness for German beer and gemutlichiet, volks-marching and sightseeing among the castles of the Rheinland – all will soon be only a ghostly memory.

Harry’s in K-Town, the Kino in Landstuhl, the McDonalds on the 40-Mark Strasse, and a thousand other retail establishments who counted very much on the GI dollar may look back ruefully on what will seem a golden age in retail sails and services. Hellenikon and Nea Makri in Greece are long closed: some years after I drove away down the road towards Patras and the car-ferry that would take us to Italy and points west, my next door neighbor sent me a clip from one of the English-language papers that catered to the ex-pat community: a story about taxi drivers and owners of bars in Sourmena and Glyphada, lamenting their personal economic woes after Hellinikon AB closed. The final paragraph of the story was the kicker; across the apse end of a church that faced (across an barren lot) the front gate on Vouliagmeni, which had long born a bright red spray-painted memo “Americans Go Home!” someone had spray-painted an addenda: “And Take Us With You!”

Zaragoza reverted to the Spanish Air Force Air Tranport Service; even while I was there, I escourted a party of Spanish officers on a property survey through the EBS buildings, pointing out the equipment that was ours, and would be going with us, and what we would be leaving to their use with our best wishes. Not a whole lot, actually, three ancient Quonset-huts, only one with indifferent plumbing, but all of them with electrical conduits up the wazoo, and they were welcome to it. It was already evident that the Cold War was over, and the Soviet Menace had crumbled, and what we were still doing there was still a matter of debate. Anderson and Guantanamo are long-established, with a permanent infrastructure and corporate memory and all those habits that this implies, all the employees, all the structures… but the other four are new and raw, and where the action is, in this new war. The military moves on, as we are not mired in old habits and the practices of the war before the last war, clinging on to them like a child with a well-worn security object. I do wonder what the ville outside the gates of Bezmer and Manas are like, though… but I would advise everyone not to get to used to it all.

One of the saddest conversations I ever had was sometime before I left Spain, when Zaragoza was already scheduled to be closed down. There were a scattering of retired Air Force men who lived in my neighborhood, or worked at EBS, who had married Spanish women , and made their homes in Spain, for decades in most cases. They had raised their children in Spain, had jobs on base, had boxes at the post office, and/or BX privilidges, health care through the base hospital and by extension to the major military hospitals and specialists in Germany, they had NCO club memberships, they managed to reconcile two different worlds, and the imminent closing of the base meant that they had to live entirely in one world without any of the accustomed support systems… or uproot their lives, and live in the other.

Famous Military Statements

31. May 2006 · Comments Off on Famous Military Statements · Categories: General, General Nonsense, History, Military, The Funny

This collection was sent to me by a blog-fan, it’s one of those things that go the rounds, but funny and apt, nonetheless.

A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in what’s left of your unit.”
– Army’s magazine of preventive maintenance ..
———————————————————–
“Aim toward the Enemy.”
– Instruction printed on US Rocket Launcher
———————————————————–
“When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend.
– U.S. Marine Corps
———————————————————–
“Cluster bombing from B-52s is very, very accurate. The bombs are absolutely guaranteed to hit the ground.”
– USAF Ammo Troop
——————————————————-
“If the enemy is in range, so are you.”
– Infantry Journal
——————————————————-
“It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you just bombed.”
– U.S. Air Force Manual
——————————————————-
“Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons.”
– General MacArthur
———————————————————–
“Try to look unimportant; they may be low on ammo.”
– Infantry Journal
————————————————! ——–
“You, you, and you … Panic. The rest of you, come with me.”
– U.S. Marine Corp Gunnery Sgt.
——————————————————–
“Tracers work both ways.”
– U.S. Army Ordnance
——————————————————–
“Five second fuses only last three seconds.”
– Infantry Journal
——————————————————
“Don’t ever be the first, don’t ever be the last, and don’t ever volunteer to do anything.”
– U.S. Navy Swabbie
———————————————————
“Bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.”
– David Hackworth
———————————————————-
“If your attack is going too well, you’re walking into an ambush.”
– Infantry Journal
——————————————————–
“No combat-ready unit has ever passed inspection.”
– Joe Gay
———————————————————-
“Any ship can be a minesweeper … once.”
– Anonymous
——————————————————–
“Never tell the Platoon Sergeant you have nothing to do.”
– Unknown Marine Recruit
——————————————————-
“Don’t draw fire; it irritates the people around you.”
– Your Buddies
——————————————————-
“If you see a bomb technician running, follow him.”
– USAF Ammo Troop
——————————————————–
“Though I Fly Through the Valley of Death , I Shall Fear No Evil. For I am at 80,000 Feet and Climbing.”
– At the entrance to the old SR-71 operating base Kadena , Japan
—————————————————–
“You’ve never been lost until you’ve been lost at Mach 3.”
– Paul F. Crickmore (test pilot)
———————————————————
“The only time you have too much fuel is when you’re on fire.”
——————————————————
“Blue water Navy truism: There are more planes in the ocean than submarines in the sky.”
– From an old carrier sailor
——————————————————-
“If the wings are traveling faster than the fuselage, it’s probably a helicopter — and therefore, unsafe.”
——————————————————
“When one engine fails on a twin-engine airplane you always have enough power left to get you to the scene of the crash.”
——————————————————
“Without ammunition, the USAF would be just another expensive flying club.”
——————————————————
“What is the similarity between air traffic controllers and pilots? If a pilot screws up, the pilot dies; If ATC screws up, …. the pilot dies.”
——————————————————–
“Never trade luck for skill.”
——————————————————
“Weather forecasts are horoscopes with numbers.”
——————————————————-
Airspeed, altitude and brains. Two are always needed to successfully complete the flight.”
——————————————————-
“A smooth carrier landing is mostly luck; two in a row is all luck; three in a row is prevarication.”
—————————————————–
“Mankind has a perfect record in aviation; we never left one up there!”
——————————————————
“Flashlights are tubular metal containers kept in a flight bag for the purpose of storing dead batteries.”
——————————————————–
“Flying the airplane is more important than radioing your plight to a person on the ground incapable of understanding or doing anything about it.”
——————————————————–
“When a flight is proceeding incredibly well, something was forgotten.”
——————————————————-
“Just remember, if you crash because of weather, your funeral will be held on a sunny day.”
——————————————————–
Advice given to RAF pilots during WWII: “When a prang (crash) seems inevitable, endeavor to strike the softest, cheapest object in the vicinity as slow and gently as possible.”
——————————————————-
“The Piper Cub is the safest airplane in the world; it can just barely kill you.”
– Attributed to Max Stanley (Northrop test pilot)
——————————————————–
“A pilot who doesn’t have any fear probably isn’t flying his plane to its maximum.”
– Jon McBride, astronaut
———————————————————–
“If you’re faced with a forced landing, fly the thing as far into the crash as possible.”
– Bob Hoover (renowned aerobatic and test pilot)
———————————————————–
Never fly in the same cockpit with someone braver than you.”
——————————————————-
“There is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime.”
– Sign over squadron ops desk at Davis-Monthan AFB, AZ, 1970
——————————————————–
“If something hasn’t broken on your helicopter, it’s about to.”
——————————————————-
Basic Flying Rules: “Try to stay in the middle of the air. Do not go near the edges of it. The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there.”
——————————————————–
“You know that your landing gear is up and locked when it takes full power to taxi to the terminal.”
———————————————————
As the test pilot climbs out of the experimental aircraft, having torn off the wings and tail in the crash landing, the crash truck arrives, the rescuer sees a bloodied pilot and asks “What happened?”.
The pilot’s reply: “I don’t know, I just got here myself!”
– Attributed to Ray Crandell (Lockheed test pilot )

Add your own personal favorites in the comments…

Nineteen, Thirty-Eight

25. May 2006 · Comments Off on Nineteen, Thirty-Eight · Categories: General, History, Iran, Mordor, Pajama Game, War

“The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air…”

From “The Fellowship of the Ring”

There is a change in our world, and in the world of the blogosphere, that most sensitive of organisms, like a jellyfish that flinches at the slightest change in the water, the temperature or the flow of it, curling in upon itself, tensing in readiness against something harsh and horrible. I thought it was just me, for the last six months or so, feeling a jangling unease, thinking it was just me that found it hard to write, finding it all sad and wearying and depressing, finding it all too horrible, words and ideas not flowing easily, thoughts all incoherent, un-climbable mountains of trollage and spam piling up, of editorial issues and looking for a new job, of temp wage slavery at the Enormous Corporate Behemoth… all of that, and thinking it was just me and my personal issues, not finding blogging to be fun any more, just another grim job to be dealt with, until I read this, and thought with no little relief; “Oh, it just isn’t me, after all.”

I have really enjoyed blogging over the last four years— it is a lifeline and outlet, a useful purpose and a voice, my connection to others of like mind… and if not of like, at least of interesting and stimulating minds. And sometimes I am touched by fire, and write something interesting and cogent and relevant, and someone on the other side of the world or in the next city reads it, and is touched by the fire also, and lets me know about how I have made it possible to understand something, or feel something, or be able to see an event with someone elses’ eyes. Blogging here is an opportunity to educate about the many-splendored weirdness of the military world and I would hate to think I was at the point of giving it up, after the fun of the coaster-ride over the last four years… and since it only this last week the NY Times, the magisterial paper of record, had to publish a correction about muddling a Purple Heart and a Gold Star in a story about the funeral of a serving military member, it would seem that there is still a heck of a lot of educating to do. (Sheesh! Three years of war, and they’re as bone ignorant today as they were then, another reason to be slightly depressed… ok, breath deeply, and repeat the mantra…. It is not my job to reform the NY Times, it is not my job to reform the NY Times, it is not my job to reform the NY Times… better be someone’s job soon, otherwise they will just be a local fish-wrap with an amusingly elevated sense of its’ own importance, and about thirty readers, who all live in expensive condos in a very small part of town. See the LA Times, which used to be a fine and respected newspaper.)

I can suppose this is only cosmic payback for a lifetime spent entranced in history, of the times before… of the times before things changed, of the times just out of reach of my own memory, the times of my grandparents’ and my parents’ formative years, of the worlds that they remembered, but which irretrievably slipped away. Grandpa Jim, Grandpa Al, Grannie Jessie and Grannie Dodie all were born into a world of horse-drawn conveyances, of gaslights and steamships, where the monarchies of Russia and Austria and Germany were seemingly set-in-stone eternal, and the sun never set on the British Empire… and then, hey presto by the time they were all teenagers or in their early twenties, three of those verities were gone and the fourth moved into twilight. But my grandparents moved on, did their jobs and made their homes, raised their families into that new world, and then there was that other seismic shift, the next war that shattered and reformed their established world, the one that I most particularly studied, almost to the extent of sometimes thinking I was re-living it.

In a curious way, I think that it is 1938 again, the very last year that it was possible for the well-meaning and well-intentioned to believe with a whole heart that total war was not inevitable, the year of the annexation of Austria, of Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to buy peace—followed promptly by the German annexation of the Sudetenland, and the Night of Broken Glass— the year that it became obvious to more than just the extremely far-sighted that no peaceful and well-meant actions on the part of the British and French administrations could swerve Hitler from his appointed path, that there was nothing to be expected from the League of Nations, that however much they wished otherwise, bad stuff would be happening. It might be soon, it might be later, but it would be happening, however much one wished and prayed for, otherwise… war would come. And there was nothing to be done that would stop it happening

Events and portents appear, flashing like lightning in one of our summer Texas thunderstorms, finally occurring so frequently that the sky is continuously lit with an eerie blue-white light…riots in Paris and in Australia, murders of Thai teachers, the Affair of the Danish Cartoons. The abject truckling in to threats and violence by western main-stream media, and now threats by Iran’s president to destroy Israel, twinned with Iran’s nuclear ambitions… and such threats reported not in fringy little foreign-affairs journals and blogs, but over and over again, on the front pages and in the headlines. Are they credible threats? Whose lives do we bet that they are not?

I wonder now, if some of the contemporary venom, and malice directed towards FDR, and to a lesser extent, Churchill— both of whom quite clear-eyed about the menace that Hitler posed from a fairly early date— might be a sort of displacement of their fears. There are terrible, lurking dangers, awful people that you can, in the long run, essentially do nothing about— more comfortable to be able to displace your fear and anger, aim it all towards someone that you can do something about, not some fanatic in a cave, or in Berlin, far, far away. Best to focus all your fears and apprehensions, and aim that at the closer and more comprehensible target, and comfort yourself that you have done what you could, that you are blameless and above reproach, sincere in not wanting any of that nasty war and violence. If it falls on someone else, then it must be all their fault then, it was something they did, or didn’t do, that caused war to be interested in them and their children, their houses and cities, and tall shining buildings on a lovely September morning.

What could our grandparents and great-grandparents do, in 1938, but wait for the inevitable to fall, knowing that all their safe and peaceful world would not be eternal and everlasting, but would be finite, and of short duration; that there would soon be an end to all the lovely, predictable joys of a settled existence. What better encouragement to enjoy them with bitter-sweet gusto, knowing that the ship was definitively and slowly sinking, that the ordinary pleasures of life would be at an end?

I am going to finish the touch-ups to the house this weekend, painstakingly climbing up and down a tall ladder borrowed from a neighbor, who most definitely will be wanting it back soon, since I have had it since early this month, carrying a small brush and a paint-can, my pockets filled with nails and tools. I have a notion to pave the center part of the back yard with concrete pavers of my own creation, set with black river pebbles set on end, to make flowers and geometric patterns, like the stairs and terraces I saw in Spain and have never seen again…. I want to set a small fountain in the middle of it, to hear the sound of running water in the afternoons of these brutally hot summer days, which is work that will take months to accomplish and about the same to pay for. And all the time I am doing it, I will have the radio on. And all these days to come, I’ll know that someday, some time, I’ll hear a news bulletin about a mushroom cloud someplace in the Middle East, or Europe, or maybe over an American city… and that these days of peace will be ended for once and all.

Frodo: “I wish none of this had happened. ”
Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
From “The Fellowship of the Ring”

Memo: Winter Soldier Redoux

22. May 2006 · Comments Off on Memo: Winter Soldier Redoux · Categories: Cry Wolf, General, GWOT, History, Iraq, Media Matters Not, Rant, Veteran's Affairs, War

To: The Usual “Give peace a chance” ‘Tards
From: Sgt. Mom
Re: Pseuds, Wanna-Be’s and War Crimes

1. Once more I take my trusty pen in hand and do my best to advise skepticism as regards your choice in “Exhibit A” in this year’s “Anti-war Veteran Sweepstakes!” (Film at 11!) Again, you seem to be hastily embracing yet another so-called veteran with a certain taste for resume-enhancing. Well, they are a useful part of your public witnesses to the horror and waste of it all… salt to taste, people, salt to taste.

2. You are, of course, entitled to believe whatever you please, of someone who makes himself out to be a former member of a trained, selective and elite band of warriors, driven to madness by the horrors he was forced to participate in during our brutal and unjustified war in Vietnam…. Oops, sorry, dozed off there, thought I was watching an old episode of China Beach… where was I? Oh, trained, elite, hard-core… ever wonder why they appear to be such mentally-unbalanced, undisciplined, unsuccessful, scummy dirt bags, after their service in supposedly elite, selective units? Well, seriously, some of us do, even if you don’t. Your latest very public anti-war veteran…oh, dear, what to say about his credibility, except that you’d better start screening these losers, or you’ll have even less of it. Hint: DD214. What they did, and where, and how long, and with what unit, and what decs and awards they got for it, it’ll all be there. Really. Try it, you’ll be blown away… err, but in the non-military, non-explosive sense.

3. Here’s the thing: for those who were not paying attention in the first class. The military is not some huge, impersonal machine; it’s a series of very tightly controlled, interlinked communities. In a startlingly large number of them, if you stick around for more than an enlistment or two, everyone in said community knows everyone else, or has at least heard of them. And no matter where you go, and what you do, there are always other people there with you: Over you in command, under you as your subordinates, on either side of you as your peers and comrades. There are always other people there, who will remember strange and unusual events, especially of the possibility of a criminal investigation is involved. And the more recent the events, the easier it is to locate all of them. The internet greatly facilitates this process, as Micah Wright will no doubt attest.

4. Here’s another thing for you to consider at your next casting call; it’s very, very hard for a non-veteran to fake military experience and qualifications, and for the average single-hitch enlistee, almost as hard to fake very specialized, elite qualifications and experience. Veterans and serving military members, especially those of long-service, are extremely observant about all sorts of tiny clues in dress and bearing, deportment and language, about all sorts of service-specific arcane knowledge. And the more specialized the service, and the more selective the intake, and the more confined to specific times and places… well, the result will be a very specific pool of people who will either back up tales of extraordinarily events, or debunk them in with extreme attention to detail. Your choice, of course.

5. Jesse MacBeth is not the first anti-war veteran to add a lot of “interesting” qualifications to his resume, and not the last, not as long as you lot line up with your mouths all a-gape like a lot of baby birds, eager to be fed a heaping helping of crappy, easily-disproved, regurgitated fake atrocity stories. Take a swig of the Kool-Aid, people, it’ll take the taste of all that crap out of your mouth. Just ‘cause you want it to be true, don’t make it so.

6. Seriously, next time you feel this impulse to speak war-veteran truth to military power, spare yourself some heartburn, and go over the DD214s with a calendar, a map, some DOD Public Affairs releases, and maybe some reality-based military veterans. Really, you’ll be all the better for it

Sincerely,

Sgt. Mom

The Dead Hand

18. May 2006 · Comments Off on The Dead Hand · Categories: General, History, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game, That's Entertainment!

Once upon a dark and distant time in military broadcasting overseas, the only thing there was in the weekly television broadcast package that resembled daytime talk shows as we now know them was Phil Donahue, which we used to rather enjoy in a mild sort of way. It was occasionally intelligent, mostly interesting, and the host seemed to treat the guests and audience with friendly interest and respect. As such, it was easy to take— the give and take, the various viewpoints and inputs— especially in the small bites dished up on the AFRTS program schedule. How little we knew, that out of this innocent, and fairly innocuous chrysalis would blunder the ilk of Jerry Springer, the king of trailer-trash cat-fights, and the omnipotent Oprah, amongst others to horrible to mention. A mere decade later, we would be channel-surfing the wilderness of mid-day talk shows on the break-room television, looking for the trans-gendered/transvestite hookers which would inevitably be featured on one or another of them during the week – usually by Wednesday, Monday during sweeps week.

But one of the guests featured in the dear, long-gone innocent early days of Phil Donohue, was a veteran teacher who had garnered a small bit of fame by establishing a college-prep academy in the heart of one of the nastier big-city ghettoes. By all accounts, she was a gifted, hard-driving teacher, as demanding as any military TI – and like the TI, had hit upon success by working her charges hard, and keeping them too busy to be any more than exhausted – too exhausted to even think about getting up to counter-productive mischief. By all the print media accounts, she was a miracle worker, transforming academically floundering African-American ghetto kids into well-educated college-intake bound citizens, well-suited to join any freshman class at the more exacting institutes of higher education. To the best of our knowledge, reading the advance Teletips, this was the first time she had appeared on any of the limited television venues available to us overseas, and those of us who had even heard of her were at least a little intrigued.

The miracle-working teacher turned out to be a middle-aged black woman, very thin, very intense, and with very scary, piercing eyes; the eyes of a fanatic, I thought. She seemed to quiver with suppressed emotion; an emotion held on a very tight leash. She was accompanied onto the talk show set by her lawyer, which should have been some kind of clue to her expectations of the whole interview, but somewhat – well, overdrawn, given that the audience was cordial, curious and quite interested in her experience and insights, to judge from the initial questions from the moderator and the audience. It started off well, what with her explaining her goals, methods and intentions; I thought she was being a little more confrontational than the audience merited, what with the lawyer and all, though. I really don’t recall with any precision the actual racial mix of the audience, probably something around the average for this sort of thing, at that point in time, and in that place (Chicago, if memory and Google serve) but again, interested, respectful, polite, and her answers reasonable and well-considered, right up until she fielded a question from a middle-aged white guy about why she had picked Milton’s Paradise Lost as part of the English syllabus; what could that particular work have to say to the average black, inner-city ghetto kid, and how did she go about making it relevant— (that dearly beloved buzzword of the time.)
I thought it was a fair question— Paradise Lost is one of those difficult, old-fashioned classical English-lit texts. I didn’t encounter it myself in any depth at all until college and then only wading in to about shin-deep. There are any number of thoughtful, honest answers to be had to that question: Personally, I thought she may have been trying to best the best of the old-fashioned, beating those rigorous and retro prep-academies at their own game, throwing down an academic challenge, going toe to toe in teaching the classics that are the foundation of Western thought and literary tradition. She would have made points by explaining how she wanted to graduate pupils who were erudite, the equal of anything the well-endowed and exclusive— and expensive—academies could turn out, to prove that her disadvantaged sow’s ears of inner-city materials were capable of being woven into silk purses. She might also have expounded, as did another teacher of the classics that I read of a couple of decades later, who wrote about how he went about teaching the classical core texts to dead-enders and no-hopers, thinking that it would give his students a way to cope with human experience, by giving a means to touch the divine, and thereby becoming fully-realized, thoughtful human beings. Or pointed out (as did another teacher of the classics, possibly the same one, since I have near-perfect recall of the ideas I read about, but not the personnel responsible for them, or the venue that I read of them) that things like the Iliad and the Mort d’Arthur and Beowulf actually spoke with a more resounding voice to inner-city gangster youth than it did to middle-class preppies, what with it’s world of violence, ritual and touchy personal honor. But it appeared that the emotion on a short leash was anger, and the leash was readily snapped.

No, the genius woman teacher, with the fanatic eyes, and the lawyer in tow, took off after the poor, unwary white guy that had asked a seemingly reasonable question. She chewed him up one side, and lectured him down the other, calling him a racist, and several other sorts of horrible, nasty human being for even daring, even presuming to ask that question; having her lawyer along for the ride might have been a good idea, all the way around. The chill on any additional questioning was perceptible; the notion of any more easy and honest and collegiate give-and-take exchange was pretty well killed from that moment on. No one in the audience wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings, or to be screamed at, and called a racist. And so, any number of pertinent or interesting questions were strangled before they were even asked, because no one dared to ask them for fear of being thought rude, or a racist, or whatever, even if the answers to the unspoken questions might be interesting, or relevant. It does no one any favors to not even to dare ask the questions, and open them up for air, and discussion and disputation� never mind answering them -even if the answer is ambiguous.

Memo: Your Recent Kind Letter

12. May 2006 · Comments Off on Memo: Your Recent Kind Letter · Categories: General, GWOT, History, Iran, sarcasm, War, World

To: His Whateverness Ahmedinajad, President of Iran
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Your recent kind letter*

1. How nice to know that we are all on haranguing terms, just now. And this makes a change from the last quarter-century…. how?

2. We are given to understand from the better sort of middle-eastern newspaper that your co-religionists have been importuning the Presidente-for-Life Fidel Castro of Cuba to convert to Islam. We personally are skeptical, wondering how on earth anyone in the same room with the Dear Leader (Western Hemisphere Version) could get in a word edgeways with a wedge and hammer. But frankly, some of these middle eastern media sources are about on par with the sort of tabloids who run stories about mutant alien babies, and reappearances of the Titanic and Elvis. Oh, dear, a fair number of our very own dear media sources have achieved that same degree of credibility. My bad, and on to my next point. (Although this may validate Blair’s Law, which states that all sorts of extremism eventually go around the bend from different directions…and finally merge in one huge pulsating ball of idiocy.)

3. Your “very scholarly” * and “fascinating”* correspondence concluded with a rather disquieting salutation… disquieting, to those with an inclination to history. According to this source, it translates as “Peace only unto those who follow the true path.”… which however way you slice it, sounds… well, a bit threatening. Rather like the comment of a certain sort of local “insurance”* agent, who says “Nice little place you have here, be a shame if something bad happened to it.”

4. Your “diplomatic”* attempt at direct communication are noted, however, and I would have but one… well, several prerequisites before a “diplomatic”* reply can be tendered, the first of which is to return the American Embassy in Teheran to American custody, scrubbed of various abusive graffiti, cleaned and comprehensively refurbished, and every scrap of US government property taken from those premises, either returned, or a like replacement. I would also demand an official delegation from your government to go around to each of the American citizens and employees taken hostage in 1979, and apologize personally to each of them, (those still living, or their next of kin) and to offer a suitable recompense of their choosing.

5. Until then, my Dear President Ahmedinajad, I have only three words in reply to your missive.

6. Rat-hole.
7. Sand
8. Pound.

Sincerely,
Sgt. Mom

* Do I have to add this— those are “viciously skeptical “quote-marks… and a small but vital correction added at 3:05 after a comment

Plundered

11. May 2006 · Comments Off on Plundered · Categories: General, History, Memoir, Pajama Game

A number of summers ago, when I was still stationed in Spain, I packed up my daughter, and a tent and all the necessary gear, and did a long looping camping tour of the southern part of Spain, down through the Extremadura, and to the rock of Gib al Tarik, and a long leisurely drive along the Golden Coast� I had driven from Sevilla, past the sherry-manufacturies around Jerez La Frontera (on a Sunday, so they were closed, although the Harvey�s people should have given me a freebie on general principals, I had sipped enough of their stuff, over the years), made a pit stop at the Rota naval base for laundry and groceries. I had driven into Gibraltar, done a tour of the historic gun galleries, seen the famous Gibraltar apes, and then waited in the long customs line to come back into Spain. We had even stopped at the Most Disgusting Public Loo on the face of the earth, at a gas station outside of San Roque, before following the road signs along the coastal road towards Malaga and Motril, and our turn-off, the road that climbed steadily higher into the mountains, the tall mountains that guarded the fortress city of Granada, and the fragile fairy-tale pavilions of the Alhambra.

The road followed the coastline, for the most part, sweeping through towns like Estepona and Marbella as the main thoroughfare, always the dark blue Mediterranean on the right, running wide of the open beaches, hugging the headlands, with new condos and little towns shaded by palm and olive trees, splashed with the brilliant colors of bougainvillea, interspersed with the sage-green scrublands. The traffic was light enough along the coastal road, and I began to notice a certain trend in place names; Torre de Calahonda� Torremolinos, Torre del Mar, Torrenueva� and to notice that most of the tall headlands, rearing up to the left of the road, were topped by a (usually) ruinous stone watchtower. Forever and brokenly looking out to the sea, and a danger that might come from there, a danger of such permanence as to justify the building of many strong towers, to guard the little towns, and the inlets where fisher-folk would beach their boats and mend their nets.

This rich and lovely coast was scourged for centuries by corsairs who swept in from the sea, peacetime and wartime all alike, savage raiders with swords and torches and chains, who came to burn and pillage� not just the portable riches of gold, or silver, but those human folk who had a cold, hard cash value along the Barbary Coast, in the slave markets of Algiers and Sale. It was a scourge of such magnitude that came close to emptying out the coastal districts all along the Spanish, French and Italian coasts, and even reached insolently into Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and Iceland. The raiders from the port of Sale (present-day Morocco) grew fabulously wealthy form their expertise in capturing and trafficking in captured Christians from all across coastal villages in Western Europe, and from ships� crews taken in the Mediterranean and the coastal Atlantic waters. This desperate state of affairs lasted into the early 19th century, until the power and reach of the Barbary slave-raiders was decisively broken. For three hundred years, though, families all along this coast and elsewhere must have risen up from bed every morning knowing that by the end of the day they and or their loved ones might very well be in chains, on their way to the slave markets across the water, free no longer, but a market commodity.

This kind of life-knowledge is out of living memory along that golden Spanish coast, but it is within nearly touchable distance in Texas and other parts of the American West, where my own parent�s generation, as children in the Twenties and Thirties would have known elderly men and women who remembered the frontier� not out of movies, or from television, but as children themselves, first-hand and with that particular vividness of sight that children have, all that adventure, and danger, privation and beauty, the triumph of building a successful life and community out of nothing more than homesteaded land and hard work.

There was no chain of watchtowers in the harsh and open borderlands, watching over far-scattered settlements and little towns, and lonely ranches in a country never entirely at peace, but not absolutely at war. The southwestern tribes, Comanche, Apache and their allies roamed as they wished, a wild and free life, hunting what they wanted, raiding when they felt like it, and could get away with it. Sometimes, it was just a coarse game, to frighten the settlers, to watch a settler family run for the shelter of their rickety cabin, fumbling for a weapon with shaking hands, children sheltering behind their parents like chicks�. But all too often, for all too many homesteading and ranching families, it ended with the cabin looted and burned, the adults and small children butchered in the cruelest fashion, stripped and scalped.

And the cruelest cut of all, to survivors of such raids in Texas and the borderlands, was that children of a certain age— not too young to be a burden, not too old to be un-malleable (aged about seven to twelve, usually) were carried away, and adopted into the tribes. Over months and years, such children adapted to that life so completely that even when they were ransomed back, and brought home, they never entirely fitted in to a life that seemed like a cage. They had been taken as children, returned as teenagers or adults, to an alien life, to parents and family they could no longer see as theirs. Some of them pined away after their return, like the most famous of them, Cynthia Ann Parker, others returned to their Indian families. For parents of these lost children, that must have been so cruel, to lose a much-loved child not just once, but to finally get them back, and then to discover that they were no longer yours, they had not been a slave, in captivity, but that they longed to be away, roving the open lands as free as a bird.

(The connection between these two topics is that I was reading Giles Milton�s �White Gold�, and Scott Zesch�s �Captured� at more or less the same time.)

Memo: Royal Families

07. May 2006 · Comments Off on Memo: Royal Families · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game, Politics, Rant

To: The Usual Media
From: Sgt.Mom
Re: Use of a Particular Cliché

1. I refer, of course, to the lazy habit of more than a few of you to refer to the Kennedy family, of Hyannisport, late of the White House, and Camelot, as “royalty”, without use of the appropriate viciously skeptical quote marks. Please cease doing this immediately, lest I snap my mental moorings entirely, track down the most current offender, and beat him/her bloody with a rolled-up copy of the Constitution. This is the US of A, for god’s sake. We do not have royalty.

2. We did, once, as an agreeable and moderately loyal colony of His Majesty, Geo. III, before becoming first rather testy and then quite unreasonable about the taxation and representation thingy, but we put paid to the whole notion of hereditary monarchy for ourselves some two centuries and change ago. There is a certain amount of respect and affection for certain of Geo. III’s descendents, including the current incumbent; a lady of certain age with the curious and old-fashioned habit of always wearing distinctive hats, and carrying a handbag with no discernable reason for doing so. (What does Queen E. II have in her handbag, anyway? Not her house-key to all the residences; not her car keys; not a checkbook and credit cards, not a pocket calendar or business card case, not a spare pair of stockings— I understand the lady-in-waiting takes care of that— handkerchief, maybe? In the case of her late mother, a flask of gin? William once had the chance to ask that question, I harassed him unmercifully for not having the nerve ). Oh, anyway, back to the subject: royalty, or why we, a free people, should feel any need to grovel before the descendents of particularly successful freebooters, mercenary businessmen, and social climbing whores of both sexes.

3. We do still have all of the above, BTW, but locally grown. Sort of like the Kennedys, come to think on it, but without coronets and courts. Considered in that sense, perhaps they could be construed “royalty”; descendents of an energetic and ambitious and wildly successful (and not too scrupulous) progenitor, given to hubris, excess, degradation and (with luck) an eventual downfall, usually a drama that takes place over centuries. But around here, unless the descendents are competent and careful, and wily, or failing that, in posession of an enormous trust fund that they can be kept from frittering away, without the aid of a political structure that enforces the power of an hereditary aristocracy and monarchy , our native versions tend to fade away after three or four generations, sort of like we hope Paris Hilton eventually will.

4. We do have, however, in many places and professions, certain old and established families. There are business and banking families, show business families, military families, even newspaper families. Over generations, they produce more of the same; entrepreneurs, bankers, actors, generals and newspaper magnates, some better known than others. There are also regional “old families”, those associated with certain towns or counties, prominent in a quiet local way, sometimes wealthy, most often not. Describing any such as “royalty” ought to be punished by something painful, as a grim offense against small “d” democratic ideals.

5. There have also been from the very beginning of this nation, political families: Adamses and Rooseveldts, continuing to this present with Bushes, Gores… and of course, the Kennedys, who were pungently described by humorist PJ O’Rourke some years ago as “ sewer trout (who) managed to swim upstream into our body politic”. How they ever got to where they did is as mysterious as Joseph Kennedy, Seniors’ business dealings. We can be sure of it involving brutal ambition, lots unsavory back-room dealing, and a lot of money, though. If the whole Kennedy saga were one of those operatic, generational tele-novelas, what we have seen working out ever since is the result of an implacable curse old Joe earned on himself for wronging some old gypsy witch in the 1920ies.

6. I do not care for the Kennedys, the whole Camelot thing, the whole lot of manufactured glamour and I mean glamour in the old, fairy-tale way; an elaborate fraud practiced on the American people, with the aid of journalists and intellectuals who should have known better. Just about everything about JFK was a pretense and fraud, from the state of his health to the state of his marriage. He was a handsome showboat, with a court of paid lickspittles, whose’ political ascension was stage-managed by his father. The rest of the clan has been coasting on that bought reputation, and shreds of illusion ever since.

7. They are not royalty; they are only a rich, recklessly self-indulgent political family, with a predisposition to think that consequences are just something that happens to other, lesser people. Get up off your knees, and shake off that old Camelot spell. You’ll feel all the better for it.

Thank you for your attention to this matter
Sgt Mom

(Slightly edited at 5:3o PM to make some sentances a little clearer.)

Rites, Rituals and Legends #18: The Club

03. May 2006 · Comments Off on Rites, Rituals and Legends #18: The Club · Categories: Air Force, Fun and Games, General, History, Military, Pajama Game

A well-established military base, being that it has to be all things to all residents therein, contains all or most of the elements contained in any well-run established community, over and above the bare requirements of troop housing and mission fulfillment. Some of these I have written about before— the post or base exchange retail stores, the commissary or grocery store, dependents’ schools, family housing. Others I have not: things like base troop clinics and hospitals, and recreation venues like gyms and swimming pools, bowling alleys, riding stables and swimming pools, movie theaters, snack bars, package (or liqueur stores), and the economic engine that drives many of a bases’ recreational venues— the clubs. A long-established location like the Yongsan Garrison, the major American Army garrison in Seoul, ROK, will have all of these, plus refinements like thrift stores, a little theatre venue, odd little gift concessions and snack bars, being accumulated by accretion like one of those odd shellfish, adding a little bit of this or that to it’s shell. (Yongsan had a couple of bespoke tailor concessions and a bicycle-repair shop, to my great interest and mystification.)

The Clubs are official and traditional: classically broken down (with variations according to service, location and era) into Officer, NCO and EM (enlisted men) Clubs. Once upon a military time, (probably during the century before the last) one would be safe in assuming that the officer’s club would be the plushest, not to mention the liveliest, but actually that would all depend— depend upon sufficient numbers of officers to keep the O’Club in the style to which it was once and would like again to become accustomed. In practice, at most Air Force bases of my experience, the NCO and lower ranks clubs were where the numbers and the free-spenders were, not to mention the women.

Lately, the trend in the Air Force seems to have been toward just one large consolidated club facility, with a central kitchen and various lounges, dining rooms and bars designated for officers, enlisted, or both. The Air Force, it would appear, has dealt with the potential indignity of a colonel’s lady, an NCO’s wife, and an airman’s girlfriend, all dealing with separate but similar over-indulgences and barfing up in adjacent lavatory stalls by deciding that everyone is an adult (well, mostly) and can just suck it up and move on. It’s not likely that anyone will remember on Monday morning anyway.

Again, in my experience— which was predominantly overseas— the clubs were a very mixed bag. The clubs in Greenland, for example were lively places, and the food was great. They packed them in, all the nights of the week that they were open… because, of course, there was absolutely bloody nothing out there beyond the base gates (not even any base gate, come to think on it, only the billboard outside the MAC terminal that said “Welcome to Sondrestrom, the Miami of the North!!), just thousands of square miles of rocky, ice-glazed tundra. What little competition there was came in the form of the SAS hotel cafeteria, and private and unofficial bar clubs focused around the lounges in the barracks buildings… very popular on those occasions when one wanted to party hearty and not run the risk of having to crawl outside on your way back to your barracks room.

Conversely, the Air Force NCO club at Zaragoza AB— what with all that lovely downtown competition— was lackluster and the food there thoroughly explored the narrow range of territory between the totally vile and the completely disgusting. I postulated the existence of a warehouse on base, completely filled with #10 cans of sludgy, salty brown gravy, as nearly every dish on the menu arrived from the NCO and O’Club kitchen swimming in a puddle of the disgusting stuff. The only time the Zaragoza clubs made any sort of profit at all was during the run-up to Gulf War I. All the troops passing through on their way to Saudi Arabia (otherwise referred to as “down-range”) were confined to base while laid-over… and the clubs had the best damn two or three months they ever had.

In Japan, the NCO/Enlisted Club was a lively and happening venue, the O’Club a gloomy and over-decorated establishment with wallpaper that would have disgraced a Tunisian cat-house, and appalling dining-room service: some friends of my friend Cheryl (who had a thing for guys in flight-suits) regaled us with an account of how they had gone in for dinner, one evening, placed an order… and then ordered take-out from the NCO club’s delivery service, to be delivered to room so and so, building so and such. Everyone was enormously amused at their description of the delivery-service driver, walking into the O’s dining room, laden with paper bags. The Club in Greece eventually was located in a rented tourist hotel high-rise in Glyphada, all of it and the swimming pool, transient quarters and barber shop, under one roof, guarded by armed, and flack-vest wearing Security Police. I was never able to decide if the sight of the SPS passing in front of the plate-glass dining room window was an unsettling or a reassuring sight.

It gets interesting when there are different services located close by, which affords an opportunity to comparison-shop, as it were, and for the Army and Marines to turn green-eyed envious at the comparative luxury of the Air Force enlisted clubs, and for the Air Force enlisted to appreciate the appallingly Spartan lifestyle lived by those who just couldn’t connect with an Air Force recruiter. The Marines on Okinawa took out their resentments by starting fights in the Air Force NCO club at Kadena AB and trashing the place, from which they were frequently banned. Sgt. Blondie tells me that the Marines do still have a go at the Air Force club now and again, but it’s become more of token bow to tradition, an occasional ritual for old-times sake. And rumor had it around Lackland AB, just before I retired, that the EM club at Ft. Sam was on the verge of being declared off-limits to Air Force personnel, due to the number of unsavory characters that congregated there… most of said unsavories being civilians, not Army troops, since Ft. Sam was an open post, pre 9/11. Only the thought of how this would look to civilians — imagine the horselaughs, an Army club being off-limits!— kept the command from actually doing it. (Or so the rumor had it.)

Your own recollections of clubs, fond or otherwise are invited in the comments.

An Acute Shortage of Care

25. April 2006 · Comments Off on An Acute Shortage of Care · Categories: General, History, Israel & Palestine, Pajama Game, Rant

So, one of NPR’s news shows had another story, banging on (yet again) about the plight of the poor, pitiful, persecuted Palestinians, now that the money tap looks to be severely constricted; no money, no jobs, no mama no papa no Uncle Sam, yadda, yadda yadda. (It’s sort of like an insistent parent insisting that a stubborn child eat a helping of fried liver and onions, with a lovely side helping of filboid sludge. You will feel sorry for these people, the international press, a certain segment of the intellectual and political elite insist— you must! You simply must! It’s good for you!) I briefly felt a pang, but upon brief consideration, I wrote it off to the effect of the green salsa on a breakfast taco from a divey little place along the Austin Highway. (Lovely tacos, by the way, and the green salsa is nuclear fission in a plastic cup. Name of Divey Little Place available upon request, but really, you can’t miss it. It’s painted two shades of orange, with navy blue trim.)

It may have been a pang of regret, barely perceptible, for the nice, sympathetic person I used to be. I used to feel sorry for the Palestinians, in a distant sort of way, the same way I feel about the Tibetans, and the Armenians, and the Kurds, and the Chechens (well, once upon a time, say before the Beslan school atrocity) and the poor starving Biafrans and Somalis, and whoever the international press was holding the current pity party for. Really, I used to be a nice person. I really did feel kindly, and well-disposed to those parties, and I wished them well, since all of them (and more) being victims of historical misfortune.

My appreciation of Palestinian misfortune didn’t diminish the way I felt about the state of Israel, particularly— like I should jettison my preferential feelings for the only state in the middle east with more than a cosmetic resemblance to a fully functioning democracy, the only one with a free press, the one hacked out and fought for by survivors of the 20th century’s most horrific genocide? Oh please. Yes, there are things to criticize Israel but it exists, it has a right to exist, don’t google-bomb me with comments to the contrary, I’ll delete them without a second thought. The right to ride a bus or cross a street or go to a grocery store or a pizza restaurant without running an excellent chance of being perforated by bits of scrap metal and nails coated with rat poison is one of those non-negotiable things.

And no, that really is one of those non-negotiable and bottom-line demands; right up there with being able to go to work on a sunny September morning, without having to make an unenviable choice between jumping from the 102nd floor or burning to death. Or being able to take your kid to school on the first day of the new term without being taken hostage, and having to watch your kid drinking their own pee in 100 degree temperatures. After a certain point has been reached, I really don’t give a rodent’s patoot about the righteousness and worthiness of your cause, or how much you have been persecuted and for how many centuries, blah, blah, blah. And no, I don’t want to argue about American hegemony, sponsored terrorism, or responsibility for x deaths in fill-in-the-blank-here because of our nasty/bad/counterproductive/policies here, there or wherever. Pay attention; the topic is me, my personal feelings and I, and that charming little body of international residents upon the world stage who describe themselves as “Palestinian”.
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This Is Worth Watching

07. April 2006 · Comments Off on This Is Worth Watching · Categories: History, That's Entertainment!

I’m currently watching Bible Battles, on the History Channel, which treats the OT books dealing with the rise of the Israelites (Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, etc.) as military treatise. It first aired last December.

Whatever your religious convictions, this is well worth a watch. While it seems to rely upon only a few expert sources, it doesn’t go too far from Biblical legend – the greatest departure likely being another possible debunk of the absurd and embattled notion that Joshua blew his horn, and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down.

Drawing Power

26. March 2006 · Comments Off on Drawing Power · Categories: General, History, Technology

1965 Chrysler 300

Virginia Postrel has this interesting post on the history of American automotive art, including lots of links, including this exibit at Detroit’s Skillman Branch Library, and this to the online collection, Plan59.

1956 Desoto

The Fantasy Country

26. March 2006 · Comments Off on The Fantasy Country · Categories: European Disunion, General, History, Memoir, Pajama Game

With a bit of surprise, I tallied it up today, and realized it has been slightly over 20 years since I was in France, actually, driving across Europe in the VEV (Very Elderly Volvo) with a nearly-5-year old Blondie tucked up in the back seat with a couple of pillows, the tattered striped baby blanket that was her woobie for more years than she is comfortable admitting and a stock of Asterix and Obelix comics. I took a zig-zaggy course across Europe in the autumn of 1985; the car-ferry from Patras to Brindisi, then up the boot of Italy, over the Brenner Pass, across the narrow neck of Austria, west across Germany with a stop in the Rhineland and a charming small town along the Moselle – and because the major roads across France were toll-roads, and (to me) hideously expensive, I went across France entirely on secondary roads, guided by my invaluable road atlas, the Hallwag Euroguide.

I hit a couple of places in France that I had visited 15 years before, as a teen-aged Girl Scout on a sub-budget, Youth-Hostel & Eurail-Pass tour of Europe, and a great many more that I had not, thanks to a slightly higher expenditure allowance (the going rate for the Youth Hostel & Eurail Pass summer vacation trip in 1970, which now seems as far distant as the proud tower of pre-WW1 Europe, was $5.00 a day.)
England— halfway home, deja-vu familiar, Germany— slight distrust, being an enemy and the land of Mordor, metaphorically speaking, for two generations, but won over by overall tidiness and devotion to children .Italy— charming, slapdash and slightly grubby. But France—there was ambivalence.

France meant so much to us, after all, and not just when it came to cooking, and an appreciation for fine food and wines. It meant marvelous architecture and interior decoration, translated into the American landscape, gallery after gallery of paintings, the Impressionists and Moderns and all. France was Monet’s Gardens, salons filled with witty conversation, the fountain of elegance in couture clothing, Madeline and the old House in Paris Covered in Vines, Chartres and the soaring galleries of the Louvre. France was the very last word in sophistication. It was where our aspiring artists and intellectuals went to acquire their training and polish, and American tourists tried for a bit of the same— although always with a feeling that such heights of worldly savoir-faire were well beyond them — and being pretty certain that the headwaiters were laughing at them anyway.

France was my collection of cookbooks, and Peter Mayle in Provence, Van Gogh’s fields of sunflowers, Chartres floating like a stone ship in a field of golden wheat, me negotiating country roads and traffic circles in tiny towns, and Blondie’s Asterix and Obelix comics. It was buying a copper pudding mold at Dillerhain, and carrying a heavy box packed full of porcelain cooking things on packed subway train car, and watching a street musician plug his electric guitar onto a portable amp, play some fast boogie-woogie, pass the hat and dash off at the next stop. France was also fields of lavender in Provence, and fields of crosses in Flanders and Normandy. We had a history with France, after all.

It’s been an on-again, off-again history at that, more troubled than most Francophiles like to admit. France is usually visualized— starting with Henry James– as the elusive and mercurial girlfriend, but it strikes me these days that France is more like an erratic and long-time occasional boyfriend. Most women have had a brush with that sort: the guy who swoops in and sweeps her off her feet, because he is attractive, and lots of fun, sometimes handsome, always cultured, at home in the world. It never lasts, because he starts to make her feel lumpish and homely by tactlessly criticizing her clothes, or preference in books and friends. Or he is denigrating her in front of his friends, laughing at her behind her back, even while he helps himself to anything he pleases of hers. And then he borrows a lot of money— never repaid— or throws a horrendous scene in a public place, and is off again for a good long time, leaving her furious and embarrassed, and wondering if he really some sort of sociopath after all. Eventually, after a couple of rounds of this, she deletes his phone number, and doesn’t answer his messages.

Which is by way of leading up to these essays written over the last half-decade or so, by an American medievalist, fluent in French, who visits often. They make depressing reading; and I look at my collection of cookbooks, and memoirs by people like Peter Mayle, and wonder if that France, of vineyards and old houses, and cafes full of charming people talking about art and history is now a fantasy itself.

This Obit Worth Repeating

24. March 2006 · Comments Off on This Obit Worth Repeating · Categories: General, History, Military

A hat tip to James Taranto at OpinionJournal for pointing to this obituary:

Desmond T. Doss, Sr., the only conscientious objector to win the Congressional Medal of Honor during World War II, has died. He was 87 years old.

Mr. Doss never liked being called a conscientious objector. He preferred the term conscientious cooperator. Raised a Seventh-day Adventist, Mr. Doss did not believe in using a gun or killing because of the sixth commandment which states, “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13). Doss was a patriot, however, and believed in serving his country.

During World War II, instead of accepting a deferment, Mr. Doss voluntarily joined the Army as a conscientious objector. Assigned to the 307th Infantry Division as a company medic he was harassed and ridiculed for his beliefs, yet he served with distinction and ultimately received the Congressional Medal of Honor on Oct. 12, 1945 for his fearless acts of bravery.

According to his Medal of Honor citation, time after time, Mr. Doss’ fellow soldiers witnessed how unafraid he was for his own safety. He was always willing to go after a wounded fellow, no matter how great the danger. On one occasion in Okinawa, he refused to take cover from enemy fire as he rescued approximately 75 wounded soldiers, carrying them one-by-one and lowering them over the edge of the 400-foot Maeda Escarpment. He did not stop until he had brought everyone to safety nearly 12 hours later.

Truth In a Print Petticoat

12. March 2006 · Comments Off on Truth In a Print Petticoat · Categories: General, GWOT, History, Pajama Game, World

Sometime around the turn of the last century, Rudyard Kipling (my very favorite short-story writer, after Saki, or H.H. Munro)— a writer not entirely unexposed to the real world, or the machinations of newspapers, society or the military—wrote a fine little story about three newspaper writers, whose life advendures had them on a little tramp steamship in the middle of the ocean. Suddenly, there is a strange, underwater volcanic explosion, a mysterious fog over a mysteriously calm sea, with all sorts of strange debris floating in it… and a pair of aquatic, apparently prehistoric sea dinosaurs nearby. The sea monsters are enormous, but it becomes clear to the riveted newshounds that they are a mated pair. One of them has been terribly injured by the underwater eruption, and is dying, right before their eyes, and to the evident distress of it’s mate. The three journalists watch in horrified sympathy… and their first impulse is to make it the biggest scoop of their lives… but then they realize that it is so incredible, that no one will ever, every believe them, and by the time they are all safe on land and trying to sell the story to their editors, they realize that they are best off just putting it across as fiction.
“For truth is a naked lady,” says the narrator, in the story’s punch-line, “And if by accident she is drawn up from the bottom of the sea, it behooves a gentleman to either give her a print petticoat or turn his face to the wall and vow that he did not see.”

It’s a pretty apt description of how most of our western media outlets treated the Affair of the Danish Cartoons. Throw a print burka over it, repeat the obligatory invocation “But Islam is a religion of peace!” as needed, as reflexively as a Catholic congregation crossing themselves at the mention of the Trinity, turn away and look at the wall and pretend you just don’t see anything in the interval. The trouble is, the monsters are being thrown up to the surface faster and faster. For most of us who are drawn to pay attention, especially after 9/11, we are all but drowning in a tsunami of incidents and portents, every one of which involves militant Islam, political Islam, aggressive Islam, or just local thugs (or individual nutcases) justifying themselves by wrapping themselves in a supremacist Moslem identity. The Madrid and London bombings, the Paris riots, Bali and Beslan, Kenya and Cronulla. Mass protests demanding that their archaic religious laws apply to non-believers. Demanding a respect to their beliefs which is not reciprocated. A tidal spew of insult, lies and incitements to individual and mass murder, from so-called religious leaders across the Moslem world. Simmering war in Chechnya and Indonesia, Darfur, and European banlieus; car bombs, gang rapes, beheadings; the victims are piled high and world-wide. American contractors, Russian soldiers, Afghan teachers, Indonesian school-girls, Australian teenagers, Iraqi policemen. Dutch filmmakers, British and Italian writers, Danish cartoonists, American reporters and pacifists, doctors and do gooders. Hindu temples, Shia shrines, Egyptian and Kenyan hotel complexes, bars in Bali….

…and our Western freedom of speech. Our right to discuss, criticize, parody and analyze critically is nakedly threatened, and our intellectual and cultural leading lights, as well as our mainstream news personalities guard their own tongues metaphorically, lest the rest of them have to be guarded in reality. To be fair, there are some brave exceptions, and a sense of good fairness and rough knowledge of people in general commands me to admit that there are good and upright Moslems in nations across the globe who are content in their beliefs, they are internally strong and confident in their beliefs, and are not demanding our intellectual and political obeisance.

There are those good people in the Arab and Islamic world, and I trust in their existence, and honor their courage when they speak out… but alas, there are so few of them, and the ignorant mobs, the oil-money fueled imams, the bought-and-paid for lobbyists speak so deafeningly louder. They crush all the questions and doubt with the certainty of their vision; it is all too horrendous, all too large. To admit the reality of it is to shake the foundations of ones’ safe world. Better for those mainstream news outlets, those with buildings and employees and a market-share at risk, just to pull the print petticoat, the print blanket, the print shroud over it all, let it go away, and hope that tomorrow will bring something easier, more amenable, more ordinary, something that can be safely tucked into the same old comfortable world vision.

The mainstream media can indulge themselves in fantasies; the rest of us can not. We cannot escape the world; it is still with us, in spite of how hard some of its manifestations are to believe.

Borderline Radio

04. March 2006 · Comments Off on Borderline Radio · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game, That's Entertainment!, The Funny

Our local public radio station (which full disclosure impels me to mention that I am employed by their 24-hour classical sister station on a part-time basis) is advertising a special which airs this weekend on “border radio”— that is, a collection of stations located just over the Mexican border which during the 1950ies and 1960ie— joyfully free of FCC restrictions on power restrictions… or practically any other kind of restriction— blasted the very latest rock, and the most daring DJ commentary, on stations so high-powered they could be heard all the way into the deep mid-west… and probably on peoples’ fillings, too.

My parents were… umm, kind of stodgy about radio entertainment, and Mom kept the radio at home always tuned to the venerable Los Angeles classical station, with the result that I may have been the single “ most totally clueless about popular music” military broadcaster trainee ever to graduate from DINFOS. I knew about Elvis, and the Beatles, of course— JP played the “White Album” incessantly, and the Beach Boys were omnipresent in California… and I rather liked Simon & Garfunkle, but everything else… major unexplored territory there. Except for obscure and weird stuff like… umm, classical music. And the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. JP was a fan. I actually won money in tech school, betting on the existence of a band called the “Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band”. (They had a single in the AFRTS library— my winning move, going to the index file and triumphantly producing the card for “I am the Urban Spaceman”.) Otherwise, popular music, country music, all the rest of it was pretty much new news to me. I could be really open-minded about it all, which turned out to be a good thing, in the long run. DJ’s with strong personal inclinations about genre, decade and groups sometimes had a problem when it came to being ecumenical. (Weekend jazz… no problem. Midnight AOR.. no problem… just give me a couple of bottles of extra-strength Anacin. Afternoon drive-time… eh, no problem.)

So I managed to get to that point in my life without ever having heard of Wolfman Jack, the king of the border radio personalities. Raunchy, borderline profane, very funny, the Wolfman was about the most daring DJ in the regular weekly AFRTS package of radio programming for a good long time, which might have seemed even longer to station managers gritting their teeth and crossing their fingers that there might be nothing potentially offensive to the host nation in his show… this week, anyway. Master-Sgt. Rob, the first station manager that I worked for, at FEN-Misawa had been around for at least fifteen years before that. MSgt. Rob was one of the old-timers, who had served tours in South-East Asia, a clannish set loosely known as the “Thai Mafia”… so many of them had passed through a tour of duty at Udorn. Thailand’s reputation as a sort of sexual Disneyland dates from that time— although I swear Scouts’ honor, (fingers crossed here) that military broadcasters contributed very little to that. (Military broadcasters tended to be a little odd. I’d be willing to take bets that many of them had some degree of Ausburgers’ Syndrome). The Thai government was and is extremely embarrassed about this reputation, and sensitive of slight against national honor. So late one night, MSgt. Rob happened to turn on the radio, and of course, the Wolfman was on, and the first words MSgt. Rob heard was a joke:
“What’s brown and lays in the forest?” And the Wolfman answered his own question in that deep baritone that seemed especially made to relay the punch-line of raunchy jokes. “Smokey the Hooker!”
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Reclassifying History

04. March 2006 · Comments Off on Reclassifying History · Categories: History, Stupidity

The blogosphere seems to have overlooked this story:

US intelligence agencies have been removing thousands of historical documents from public access, the New York Times has reported.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 pages began in 1999, the paper said.

At that time, the CIA and five other agencies reportedly objected to what they saw as a “hasty release” of sensitive information.

The files include documents already published or obtained by historians.

The New York Times said the reclassification programme accelerated after President Bush took office and especially after the 9/11 attacks.

[…]

Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is a particular reason to keep them secret.

But some historians argued that the reclassification program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security, the New York Times said.

Some conspiracy theorists and Bush-bashers (even though the project started under Clinton) are running with this. But this seems more like another example of government bureaucrats with too much time on their hands to me. The original NYTimes article is now archived, and access costs, at least for non-subscribers. If anyone can forward me a copy, I would appreciate it.

First to Fly

04. March 2006 · Comments Off on First to Fly · Categories: Air Force, General, History, Local, Military, Technology, Wild Blue Yonder

This month is the anniversary of the very crack of dawn, for American military aviation, and it happened in San Antonio. At the Fort Sam Houston parade ground… or to be precise, over it. More here, by a local reporter.

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