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 ..
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“Aim toward the Enemy.”
– Instruction printed on US Rocket Launcher
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“When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend.
– U.S. Marine Corps
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“Cluster bombing from B-52s is very, very accurate. The bombs are absolutely guaranteed to hit the ground.”
– USAF Ammo Troop
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“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
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“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.
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“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
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“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)
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“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
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“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!”
More »

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.

President’s Day ’06 Trivia #1

20. February 2006 · Comments Off on President’s Day ’06 Trivia #1 · Categories: Fun and Games, History

I was in the process of dreaming up my next Entertainment Trivia puzzle, when I realized what day it was, and thought it might be fun to have a Presidential Trivia Fest. If you have a good tidbit about one of or Presidents, or his administration, feel free to post one yourself. So, let me kick this off:

Prior to his election, this President’s many exploits included smuggling this/these.

Oops, forgot that my power is going off for a few hours shortly. carry on without me. 🙂

Update: Back online. No guesses yet? Wow!

The Answer! It’s commonly taught in most lower division US history classes that, in April of 1787, while Jefferson was Minister to France. he traveled across the Alps by foot and mule to investigate Piedmontese rice – the finest rice in Europe. The details, however, are less well known.

He thought the quality of Piedmontese rice was do to a superior hulling machine. On his arrival, he found their machines to be the same as used in France. But the actual strain of rice grown there was superior. When he inquired about seed rice, he found that its export from Savoy-Piedmont (if you’ll recall, this was before the unification of Italy) was illegal, and punishable by death. So, upon leaving Piedmont, he stuffed all he could in his pockets and smuggled it out.

Also, in his travels, he negotiated direct shipment of rice, tobacco, whale oil and other American products. As our newly independent nation was still quite dependent upon the British mercantile system. For a really good write-up on the demise of the rice trade at Cowes (from a British perspective) check this out.

A Good Read For WWII History Buffs

14. February 2006 · Comments Off on A Good Read For WWII History Buffs · Categories: History, War

It’s always been my impression that Japan’s conquest of Manchuria was a marginally positive move, more than negated by its further incursions into China. But reading this short, but dense, piece by James Graham over at HistoryOrb, I’m inclined to refine that view a bit:

Prior to the China Incident Japan had some success in achieving its economic aims in Manchuria. By 1931 Japan had spent 1.5 billion yen in Manchuria an amount rising to 3.7 billion yen by 1936. This was more than the total Japanese budget for any one year. Japan was able to invest in railroads, highways, hydro-electric plants and improve the area’s harbours and navigable rivers. Useful amounts of iron, aluminium and other minerals were also discovered. In contrast output of synthetic oil and coal production were modest at best. Both were vital industries where Japan was heavily reliant on foreign sources of supply. The failure of Manchuria to replace these sources was thus a huge disappointment. Five hundred thousand Japanese immigrated to Manchuria between 1931 and 1945 with half of these being the agricultural settlers Japan had aimed to resettle. The reality however was that few Japanese could compete with the locals who were prepared to work for much lower wages. Most lasted only six months before joining their countrymen as supervisors, police, bureaucrats, soldiers and foremen in Manchuria and later China itself. Despite these setbacks the occupation of Manchuria was initially seen by Japan as relatively inexpensive and successful.

One is left to wonder (and always well, as it is with such things) if Japan would have been so driven to further Chinese adventurism, were it not for the global tide of protectionism – policies brought about in response to depression which only made matters worse.

Jesse James – Hero?

06. February 2006 · Comments Off on Jesse James – Hero? · Categories: Domestic, General, History

PBS: American Experience is discussing Jesse James. In the opening sequence, talking heads say, among other things…

“he was about little people going up against things bigger than they were.”

“ultimate rebel, who fights, fights, goes down not by the system he fights against, but by a Judas in his own midst.”

Ummm… he was a bankrobber, a murderer, and a thug.

more later – I need to see where they’re going with this.

update:

I guess that was their way of hooking folks to watch the show – interesting that I had never heard those stories about him before, but they’re saying that Jesse tried to paint himself that way, to be more appealing to the masses.

Let’s Hear It!

25. January 2006 · Comments Off on Let’s Hear It! · Categories: General, History, Military, That's Entertainment!, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

Since we are, by definition, a “milblog,” I for one would like to see more stories like the “Redball” story that Radar graced us with last week. I am now old and decrepit, but there was a time when I was 23, and I lived that very story so closely that I could have written it. The Bomb-Nav shop was right down the hall from Comm-Nav, and we rode the same launch truck on the flight line. It could get interesting.

When we were stationed in Taiwan, we often got typhoon-evac’ed, and most of the time they sent us to Guam. Now, there ain’t a dang thing to do there, and the place is so small it’s claustrophobic. Joe Dubus, my roommate, and I met a nice guy who was stationed there in the base MARS station, and he took us for a tour of the island one day. Driving around the whole damn island took only 3 and a half hours!

One day while typhoon evaced, Joe and I were on night shift and were supposed to be sleeping. But the un-airconditioned transient barracks got hot in the day time so we had gone to the beach to cool off. Both of us got sunburned to a fare thee well, and when the Maint Officer decided that he needed a few more people to cover the launch of a huge gaggle of aircraft, they found us and hijacked our “time off”, driving us straight to the shop where we picked up our tool bags, and took us to the flight line, where we met up with the #2 launch truck. Out on the launch truck we just took our shirts off. Well, that was OK until we got a call that a KC 135’s TACAN would not lock on. We zoomed down the ramp to the plane, and both of us, smelling like a brewery, went flying, shirtless and looking like lobsters, up the ladder to the cockpit. We looked at the TACAN needle swinging merrily round and round, and Joe (not me) looked out in front of the plane and spotted the problem. He turned around and motioned to the flightline chief standing behind us, and said “Tell them to move that truck.” There was a truck parked right in front of the plane, blocking the signal from getting to the set, which didn’t work real well on the ground anyway. Now Joe didn’t exactly look or smell like a highly trained professional, so he had to repeat his corrective action request to the line chief, “I said move the truck. It’s making the TACAN not work.” His best official assessment of the problem. I turned around to verify the truth of his assessment, and now the chief had two red-as-a-beet avionics techs, both of whom smelled like a barracks party at 2 AM, giving him professional advice. OK, he turned around and shouted down the hatchway, for somebody to move the truck. They did, and bingo, the TACAN, which shows distance and direction to the station, locked on as pretty as you please. Problem fixed, the two highly trained professionals hauled tail down the ladder and the bird taxiied out and the mission was saved, no abort for this team of great US Air Force avionics technicians!

I’ll bet that many of our readers would like to hear more personal stories from those of us who have been there, done that. I know I personally would love to read those great war stories, ones very different from the ones that Radar and I have experienced, so come on, let ‘er rip!

7/4/1754

18. January 2006 · Comments Off on 7/4/1754 · Categories: History, That's Entertainment!

I am currently watching the first big PBS must see of 2006: The War that Made America. They are, of course, covering the French and Indian War. But they are doing it in a rather novel way, relative to most popular tellings of American History, and a manner I have proclaimed for at least the past thirty years: as a specific precursor to the American Revolution.

Indeed, those that fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it. And understanding global power politics on this level, devoid of instant communications and WMD, should be de rigour for every high school student.

Update: So, this series is rife with the same loathsome, vile, bandwidth wasteful “dramatic reenactments” as anything you might see on History Channel. It’s still pretty good. Gotta’ keep the world’s Deltas and Epsilons entertained.

Another Brush With History

14. January 2006 · Comments Off on Another Brush With History · Categories: General, History, Israel & Palestine, Memoir, Military, World

I had long put it out of my mind, and was only reminded when I ran across this picture at Chicago Boyz… that I actually went to see one of these men speak. For some reason (probably because he had recently resigned from the government) he came to speak at Cal. State Northridge, sometime in the spring of 1975 or 1976, under the sponsership of (I think) the campus chapter of Hillel.

I an fairly sure it was spring, because it was raining cats and dogs, and I was still inexperienced enough a driver to be mildly terrified of the ordeal of driving across the Valley in a downpour, what with the lights reflecting off the water in the road making it hard to see where the lanes were. On the whole the drive was a titch more unsettling than getting into the campus theater was. Each of us lined up to go into the theater— and there was a fair turnout— was patted down, briskly and effeciently, and all the women’s handbags were opened for inspection. Now that was unsettling. It hadn’t been unheard of, that kind of precaution, after all, it was only a half-dozen years after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, a dozen since Jack Ruby walked into a police station in Dallas and killed another Kennedy assassin… but still.

Even on a wet and unpleasant evening, there were protestors, or course…. practically the only time I had ever seen such on campus with my own eyes… chanting dispiritedly “Palestina! Palestina!” in the downpour that the weather gods save for those who are convinced the sun always shines in Southern California. (There was hardly any campus culture of protest after about 1972, and anyway, Northridge was a commuter school— most students going there had jobs and real lives, and just wanted the damned education, thank you very much.)

I think most of the other people in the audience were, like me, curious and interested… and polite. The person we had come to hear speak was famous, of course, mostly for winning wars— something that our own generals had not lately had much experience with. He had been on the cover of Time, and all. There was an air in the audience of pleasant anticipation, not excitement as if for a rock concert, but more like that in a classroom, when a really rivetingly good lecturer is about to begin. And there were good lecturers at Cal State, and there was a history prof at Glendale JC who was so fabulous that people sat out in the corridor to audition his classes. This man was truely a historic person, well worth driving across the Valley in driving rain to see and listen to.

For a hero, though, he was pretty short, and rather modestly ordinary looking, for all the world like a small local business owner at a Rotary or Lions meeting, wearing a plain tan-colored suit and a wholly lamentable tie. Perhaps I should have looked back in the diary I kept at the time before writing this because I would have written about what he said, because I can’t really remember any of it. But I am good with voices and accents, and they stick in my mind more tenaciously, and I thought it was curious how he spoke English well, but with sometimes a very pronounced accent, alternating jarringly with some words and phrases in perfectly fluent British English— as if he had once spoken English often and comfortably, but not lately, and so become rusted linguistically.

Exept for the eye-patch, one would have hardly noticed Moshe Dayan at all, in that campus theater; he had, I think now with my own experience in the military, perfected the art of putting aside the command presence that a military leader must have in order to lead… but that only the very finest of them can put aside when the occasion demands, and appear to be only ordinary.

(I saw Ray Bradbury lecture once, in the same theater, and remember that he told the story of being arrested for walking in LA, but I think he’s been telling that one for years.)

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