The Grand Adventure

15. June 2011 · Comments Off on The Grand Adventure · Categories: General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Memoir, Military, War

“You’ll simply have to read his books, if you want to understand about Greece,” my next-door neighbor told me, very shortly after my then-three year old daughter and I settled into Kyrie Panayotis’ first floor flat (which is Brit-speak for second-floor apartment) at the corner of Knossou and Delphon streets in the Athens suburb of Ano Glyphada, early in the spring of 1983. Kyrie Panayoti did not speak any English; neither did his wife, or his wife’s sister, Kyria Yiota, who lived upstairs with her husband. The only inhabitants of the three-story apartment house who did were Kyrie Panayoti’s middle-school aged sons, who were learning English at school. And I – dullard that I am with languages aside from my native one – only retained a few scraps of high-school and college German. Given the modern history of Greece, and the long memories of older Greeks, a German vocabulary was neither tactful nor useful.

I can’t recall exactly when we hit the first linguistic snag, but it must have been within days of me moving in, lock, stock, barrel, toddler child and household goods. In mild frustration, Kyrie Panayoti leaned out the kitchen door of his apartment, and shouted in the general direction of the apartment block next door, a distance of about twelve or fifteen feet away.
“Kyria Penny!”
Almost immediately, a woman’s head with an old-fashioned kerchief tied around it, appeared out from one of the first floor (or second floor windows) – and that was my first introduction to Penny. She was English, married to a genial Greek accountant named George. She was slightly older than my own mother, her two sons were teenagers. Penny had been the British equivalent of a State Department employee, and in that capacity she had been assigned to various British consulates in Europe until she came to Athens, met and married George, and settled down into tidy domesticity in the three-floor, three-flat apartment building next to Kyrie Panayoti’s. Penny’s mother-in-law lived on the ground floor, Penny and George lived on the first – or second floor, exactly opposite mine – and George’s widowed brother and his two children lived in the top-floor flat.

I rather think Penny missed speaking English regularly, anyway – and we became excellent friends because of a mutual love of books and mad passion for Greece, ancient and modern. A love for Greece in general, on the part of us English and American eccentrics is one of those inexplicable things – rather like enduring affection for an exasperatingly self-centered boyfriend with one or two bad habits. He’s devastatingly handsome, scenic in all the right ways, erratically but theatrically devoted – but just when you have given up all hope and resolved to cut him off – he does something so heartbreakingly gallant, at something of a cost to him and with no thought of personal gain – that all is . . . well, not forgotten or overlooked (until next time). Anyway, I loved Greece, being a history wonk, and cheerfully overlooked all kinds of disincentives . . . a very real terrorism problem, endemic anti-Americanism, and a certain slap-dash approach to everything from driving habits to telephone company service. No exaggerating there: getting a phone in Greece in those days was . . . interesting, and supposedly took years, well above the time that any Americans serving at Hellenikon AB were prepared to wait. Kyrie Panayoti’s flat and Kyria Yiota’s each had a telephone jack. Mine might have had one also; I never cared enough to look for it. But there was only one telephone between the two families. They passed it between themselves, I guess according to need. Many was the time that I heard someone calling between apartments, and observed the telephone being hoisted or lowered past my kitchen window, in a plastic market bag at the end of a long length of rope.

Among the first books that Penny advised me to read – was Gerald Durrell, who wrote about his childhood in Corfu in the 1930s. He was Lawrence Durrell’s little brother; I rather think that Dad must have been a child like Gerald Durrell; entranced by wild animals of whatever sort, to the mystification of his parents – eventually being a zoologist and all, and giving us all the very best nature-walks ever, as the four of us grew up.

And the second of Penny’s recommended authors – Patrick Leigh-Fermor, especially his books about Greece: Mani and Roumeli, respectively southern Greece and Northern. Penny’s redoubtable mother-in-law was from the Southern Peloponnesus – the Mani. I read them both, traveled down into that part of the country when I could, and read the first of his books – A Time of Gifts – about the journey on foot that he had made at the age of 18; as the title goes, “On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube” in the fateful year of 1933. He took a little more than a year to make that journey, but writing about it took up the rest of his life. I bought a copy of the second installment, Between the Woods and Water as soon as it came out, the year after I had left Greece. At the time of his death earlier this month, the last installment of that journey was unfinished.

Of Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s greatest adventure? He never really wrote about that himself, although in certain circles his exploits as a British SOE agent during Crete in WWII became legend. He another SOE officer, in a daring strike by Leigh-Fermor’s band of Cretan guerillas kidnapped the German officer commanding the whole island, spirited him across the Cretan hills and mountains, and had him evacuated from Crete to North Africa. His co-conspirator, W. Stanley Moss wrote about that in his own book, Ill Met by Moonlight – which was made into a movie, in the days when movie-makers appreciated such real-life exploits. One of the grace notes to this adventure is that Moss and Leigh-Fermor left documents behind; clearly explaining that it was British commandos who had taken the general-commanding, so no point in going all reprisal-ish on the local Cretans.

About thirty years later, a Greek television version of This is Your Life reunited many of those participants. And Patrick Leigh Fermor lived for most of the rest of his life in Greece, regarded with awe and wonder, almost as a local saint.

Seriously?

06. June 2011 · Comments Off on Seriously? · Categories: Military, My Head Hurts, Veteran's Affairs

Mullen Says Pay, Benefit Cuts ‘On the Table’

Yeah, because there’s nowhere else where the military can save money.  If I were more cynical, I would say it’s someone’s “sneaky” idea to kill the volunteer service and go back to the draft.  If I were more cynical.

Stand-off at Salado – Part 2

02. May 2011 · Comments Off on Stand-off at Salado – Part 2 · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, Old West, War

Most people accept as conventional wisdom about the Texas frontier, that Anglo settlers were always the consummate horsemen, cowboys and cavalrymen that they were at the height of the cattle boom years. But that was not so: there was a learning curve involved. The wealthier Texas settlers who came from the Southern states of course valued fine horseflesh. Horse-races were always a popular amusement, and the more down-to-earth farmers and tradesmen who came to Texas used horses as draft animals. But the Anglo element was not accustomed to working cattle – the long-horned and wilderness adapted descendents of Spanish cattle – from horseback. Their eastern cattle were slow, tame and lumbering. Nor were many of them as accustomed to making war from the saddle as the Comanche were. Most of Sam Houston’s army who won victory at San Jacinto, were foot-soldiers: his scouts and cavalry was a comparatively small component of his force. It was a deliberate part of Sam Houston’s strategy to fall back into East Texas, where the lay of the land worked in the favor of his army. The Anglos’ preferred weapon in those early days in Texas the long Kentucky rifle, a muzzle-loading weapon, impossible to use effectively in the saddle, more suited to their preferred cover of woods – not the rolling grasslands interspersed with occasional clumps of trees which afforded Mexican lancers such grand maneuvering room.

When did this begin to change for the Anglo-Texans? Always hard to say about such things, but I suspect that the Anglo-Texas began morphing into a people who more nearly resembled what they fought almost as soon as Texas declared independence in 1836. The war with the Comanche was unrelenting for fifty years, and conflict with Mexico was open for all of the decade that the Republic of Texas existed, as well as simmering away in fits and starts for even longer. And one of the agents taking an active part in that metamorphosis from settler to centaur was John Coffee “Jack” Hays, during a handful of years that he led a company of Rangers stationed in San Antonio. The Rangers were not lawmen, then – they were local companies organized to protect their own communities from depredations by raiding Indians, and as close to cavalry as the perennially broke Republic of Texas possessed. Jack Hays, who with fifteen of his Rangers had narrowly escaped being caught in San Antonio when Woll’s troops took the town – was one of the most innovative and aggressive Ranger company captains. He had already begun schooling his contingent in horsemanship and hard riding, and in use of five-shot repeating pistols developed by Samuel Colt. It was Hay’s contingent who spread the alarm, and militia volunteers began to assemble from across the westernmost inhabited part of Texas. Colonel Matthew “Old Paint” Caldwell, from Gonzales began gathering a scratch force at Seguin, east and south of San Antonio. He collected up about a hundred and forty, and set out for a camp on Cibolo Creek, twenty miles from San Antonio, before settling on another camp, on the Salado, seven miles north of San Antonio. He gathered another seventy or eighty volunteers – and more were on the way. But “Old Paint” was in any case, outnumbered several times over, and being a sensible man knew there was absolutely no chance of re-taking San Antonio in a head-on assault. But what if a sufficient number of Woll’s force could be lured out of the town – which may not have been a fortified town in the European sense of things, but certainly was set up to enable a stout defense against lightly-armed infantry. Caldwell arranged his few men efficiently, among the trees, deep thickets and rocky banks of the creek, with the water at their backs, and rolling prairie, dotted with trees all the way to San Antonio spread out before them. Could any part of Woll’s invaders be lured into a kill-zone? The Texians grimly proposed to find out.

There were only thirty-eight horses counted fit enough for what would be an easy ride to San Antonio, but undoubtedly a hard ride back. Jack Hays and his Rangers, and another dozen men were dispatched very early on the morning of September 17th. At a certain point, still short of San Antonio, Hays ordered twenty-nine of the men with him to dismount and set up an ambush. He and the remaining eight then rode on – to within half a mile of the Alamo, where the main part of Woll’s force had camped. They would have been clearly seen from the walls of the old presidio; it would have been about sunrise. What else did they do besides show themselves? Perhaps they fired a few shots into the air, shouted taunts, made obscene gestures clearly visible to anyone with a spyglass. It was their assignment to provoke at least fifty of Woll’s cavalrymen into chasing after them, hell for leather . . . instead, two hundred Mexican cavalrymen boiled out of the Alamo, along with forty Cherokee Indians (who at that time had allied themselves with Mexico) and another three hundred and more, led personally by General Woll. Hay’s provocation had worked a little too well – it was a running fight, all the seven miles back to the camp and the carefully arranged line of Texians with the Salado and the green forest of the trees and thickets at their back. Caldwell and the others were just eating breakfast when Hays and his party arrived breathlessly and at a full gallop. Over two hundred shots had been fired at them, none with any effect – not particularly surprising, given that it would have been extremely difficult to hit a moving target from a position on a galloping horse, and that reloading would have been near to impossible.

Having succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in drawing the Mexican force to follow them, Jack Hays and the others took up their position in “Old Paint” Caldwell’s line – carefully screened and sheltered among the trees. Caldwell sent out messages saying that he was surrounded, but in a good spot for defense, if any at all could come to his aid – and so it turned out to be. The canny old Indian-fighter had a good eye for the ground, and for an enemy. The pursuing Mexican cavalry drew up short, upon seeing his positions, or whatever evidence they could see from their position on the open prairie, looking into the trees along the Salado – but they did not withdraw entirely. Instead, Woll, and most of his command lined up and prepared to sling a great deal of musket-fire and a barrage of artillery shot in the direction of Caldwell’s force, none of which had any noticeable effect at all – on the Texians. Instead, Anglo-Texian skirmishers went forward with their chosen and familiar weapon and from their favorite cover sniped at leisure all through the next five hours, inflicting considerable casualties, before scampering back to safety on the creek-bank. Some sources claim at least sixty dead and twice that number wounded, against one Texian killed, nine or ten injured and another half-dozen having had hairsbreadth escapes. At one point, General Woll ordered a direct attack – a few of his soldiers got within twenty feet of the dug-in Texians. Being a fairly rational man, and a professional soldier, the General knew when it was time to cut his losses. Leaving his campfires burning, he and his forces silently fell back to San Antonio under the cover of night, and then withdrew even farther – all the way back towards the Rio Grande.

This would have been a complete and total victory for Caldwell . . . except for one unfortunate circumstance: a company of fifty or so volunteers from Bastrop, on their way to join him, had the misfortune to almost make it – to even hear the sounds of the fight, from two miles distant. The company of Captain Nicholas Mosby Dawson, from Bastrop and the upper Colorado was caught by Woll’s rear-guard, as they retreated. Only fifteen of Dawson’s men would survive that battle and surrender to superior military force. Caldwell’s men would find the bodies of the dead on the following day, as the pursued Woll towards the somewhat amorphous border. The fifteen Dawson men would join those Anglo-Texians taken prisoner in San Antonio in chains in Perote prison – some of those would be held in durance vile until early 1844.

Coming Home in Dress Blues

22. April 2011 · Comments Off on Coming Home in Dress Blues · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Military, War

Found, through Bookworm Room –

The Westboro “Baptist Church” Freaks (note the viciously skeptical quote marks) had made plans to turn out for this. The citizens of SSgt. Jones’ home town took action that ensured they did not. What a wonderful place to be from. Even if it is one of those no-count (insert satirical quote marks here) tea-b***er-infested, ignorant, flyover-country places that no decent respectable person of the mainstream media, or our political elite would ever claim to come from, or know, at all.

Oh, This is So Not Good

07. April 2011 · Comments Off on Oh, This is So Not Good · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Military, sarcasm, Working In A Salt Mine...

Just so we get this perfectly clear, the active, serving military will go on earning their pay over the period of the shut down of the federal government . . . they just won’t be getting any actual paychecks, or automatic deposit of it into their bank accounts. In a time where there are kinetic military events going on – what we used to call hostilities – in three different countries. No matter what you call ‘em, it means that the families of troops serving in an active war zone are not going to be happy. Especially the families of those junior troops who are already living close to the bone anyway; there were years when I finished out the last day or so before a payday with $1 in my bank account and a handful of change in my handbag. And I’ve lost track of how many times I floated a check for groceries at the Commissary, a day or two before payday.

Just to throw some gasoline on the fire, it seems that just that very week that the paychecks won’t be arriving, the First Lady and Mrs. Biden are launching a big push to support military families. Nice timing, ladies – because they certainly will be needing support by then. Seriously, though, I would reconsider rescheduling any events involving actual military members’ families during this period, as you’re liable to get an earful of how they really feel and I don’t think the protocol officers are gonna be able to cope.

Heck of a job, Barry. Heck of a job.

Shaker of Worlds

11. March 2011 · Comments Off on Shaker of Worlds · Categories: Air Force, General, Good God, Memoir, Military

I was stationed for four years at Misawa AB, in the very north of Japan, from early 1977 until the very end of 1980. It’s a very rural part of Japan, relatively speaking; very cold in the winter. Misawa was a pretty smallish city, as Japan goes, about seven or eight miles from the coast; the countryside around is as flat as a pancake, and not terribly far above sea-level. There was a nice little mountain range to the north, within a short drive; very scenically wooded. Up to the mountains to see Lake Towada, over the mountains to Mutsu Bay; it was a very pleasant place to spend four years: Misawa’s mission then was as a security service base; a support system for a huge monitoring complex called the Elephant Cage, or just “the Hill.” Which was maybe thirty feet above sea level, which was enough to constitute a considerable height in that part of Japan.

The next big city to the south of Misawa City though – that would be Hachinohe; which was known for a peculiar style of carved and painted wooden horse sculpture. In the late 19th century and into the 20th, Hachinohe was horse-country, and the original Imperial Army establishment at Misawa had been a cavalry post. The next big city to the south after Hachinohe is Sendai – closest to the epicenter of the latest earthquake. It looks from the news headlines that a whole train full of passengers is now missing, from near Sendai. I visited Hachinohe once, maybe Sendai, too. Coming back from leave Stateside, I traveled by train from Tokyo to Misawa, coming home from leave, so I must have passed through there at least once.

There were constant small earthquakes, all during my time there; most usually just a small rattle and shake, rather like being inside a small frame building with a heavy truck rumbling past outside. In fact, sometimes it was hard to tell of it was an earthquake, or a heavy truck, the physical sensation was so similar. If we hadn’t heard a truck, then it was an earthquake. Slightly more emphatic earthquakes shifted furniture, sometimes . . . and at the old AFRTS radio/TV station where I worked, our usual indicator that it was a serious shake would be rolls of teletype paper falling off the shelves of the tall metal bookshelves where they were stored. If the paper rolls began toppling from the shelves, it was time to vacate the building. Which isn’t the recommended practice, generally – but in this particular case, there was an extenuating circumstance. That would be that the base water-tower sat about 100 feet away from the station, a creaky wooden water-tower standing on spindly 90 foot tall wooden supports. If there was ever a shake hard enough to collapse those spindly frame supports, there were good odds that however-many gallons of water in that tower would pour onto a rattle-trap frame building stuffed full of powered-up electronic equipment. So – mad dash by all staff, when stuff started rocking hard enough to fall from shelves.

Being from California, and having been through some small quakes and the big Sylmar shake in 1971 – I could be fairly blasé about the whole Pacific Rim of Fire/seismically active thing. Many of the other members of the unit weren’t – not at first. But with little ones, all the time – they’d get pretty blasé after a couple of months. But every once in a while, there would be much bigger one, which would grab everyone’s attention; once it was a pair of tremors on a Tuesday evening, almost exactly an hour apart; that was a quake which collapsed a department store in Hachinohe, or Sendai. Another time, a girl was briefly trapped in her barracks room, because her dresser slid across and blocked the door. Another shock caught one barracks resident in the middle of a shower; she shot straight out of the bathroom, down the corridor and out of the building, stark naked.

The one thing that struck me about the big quakes was that there really was a noise to them; an absolutely horrific noise. The one thing that I can easily compare it to is to imagine standing on the platform of a railway station, when a long fast train roars straight through the station without stopping. That’s what it sounds like – a long, rumbling and roaring sound; of course, part of this noise is the sound of things falling. In the Sylmar quake, I remember hearing the sounds of the sash-springs in the window-frames rattling like mad. And unlike all those movies of earthquakes – people don’t run and scream much. Most usually, they are getting underneath something, and trying to make themselves small, maybe shouting to someone in the same room or in the same building to do the same – but no running and screaming like a banshee.

This quake off the coast of Japan was several times the magnitude, and the pictures and video emerging are horrific. 8.8 on the Richter scale is something almost impossible to imagine – and to be compounded by tsunamis sweeping in from the sea, and the debris catching on fire – that just adds to the horror.

DADT

19. December 2010 · Comments Off on DADT · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Military

Moot point to me, actually – I retired from the Air Force in 1997, after DADT had been in place for about five years. The other female military NCOs and I actually rather welcomed it at the time as a solid compromise and a step up from the previous policy of discharging gay servicemen and women instanter. In actual practice this involved discharging the gay male service-member on an individual basis, but let a gay female service-member be discovered and all heck would break out – because all of her female co-workers, friends, roommates, associates and even casual acquaintances would also be suspected of being lesbians, and investigated so tirelessly and thoroughly by the CID/AFOSI/NCIS that many of them would indeed confess to being lesbians too, just to bring the inquisition to an end. This usually came as a great surprise to boyfriends and husbands.

Anyway, all it would take to kick off one of these witch-hunts would be a rumor or an accusation, no matter how unfounded . . . and there would go all of the women in some unit or base, kicked out of the service. It was as if there was something in the water. Really, it was healthier for your career to have a reputation as a slut. By the way, I didn’t think there were many lesbians among the military woman I knew in twenty years service in the Air Force; there are damn few secrets to be kept when living in a military dorm, and the object/intensity of sexual interest is one of them. I knew there were women who I thought might be lesbian; and ones that I found out afterwards were . . . but my semi-scientific wild-ass guess is maybe one or two in a hundred, or less. (That figure was probably much higher for career military women during the period from the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, once women were allowed to stay in service upon getting married and having children.) I actually am surprised that no one ever accused me of being one, being that I was unmarried, circumspect about my personal life and kept my hair cut very short. There were people who hated me enough to have done so. I suppose only my notorious lack of skill at and complete disinterest in women’s team sports saved me from a malicious accusation

Anyway, DADT was a ham-fisted and perhaps clumsy compromise; basically private life was off the table – as much as it could be, as long as long as the service-member kept his or her private live ..er .. private. Not much of a strain for the Air Force, actually – especially in peacetime – because of all of the services the chances for most AFSC’s (military code for ‘what do ya do for a living?’) to go on deployments for extensive periods of time and live in very, very close quarters were pretty small. And in my observation, the Air Force generally drew in more of a middle-class/skilled technician demographic anyway. The Navy does as well – but then they have sea duty; ships and submarines and all that, where a lack of personal privacy is epic. None the less, though – at the time that DADT was instituted, a lot of straight guys did have the heebie-jeebies about sharing close quarters with an un-straight guy. My female NCO friends all agreed, with a certain degree of gleeful humor that they were all apprehensive about being hit on, in the exact same way that a single unaccompanied woman would be hit on in the open NCO Club bar on ladies’ night . . . and that most guys were nervous about and lacked the skills to gracefully counter another guy pitching unwanted woo. Skills which we, as women had all acquired and polished since we were about 16 years old. Anyway, we were all universally relieved – no more witch-hunts.

But there is one element of dropping DADT which does worry me – because of the peculiar and authoritative nature of the military and the isolation that military members sometimes find themselves in – and that’s the matter of sexual predators. Generally, the rules about fraternization cover this: you may not socialize save in the most perfunctory way, with people in your chain of command. You certainly may not date them, drink with them, party with them, et cetera: enlisted, NCOs and officers must maintain a certain degree of separation. (In my own early career, some of this would be overlooked – I cheerfully dated officers – but outside my own assigned unit. The Air Force got much stricter about this in the 1990s and the Marines and Army always took a hard line about it.) One rationale for the rules about fraternization is that it’s unprofessional, leads to the perception of favoritism . . . and the unspoken other is because of the isolation, on deployment, in a remote location, or at sea, there has always been the potential for someone of a higher rank or in a command capacity to abuse that authority to gain access sexually to someone of a lower rank – and the rules about fraternization at least put some brakes on it. My take on the whole thing is that the military was just barely able to deal with the plain old-fashioned heterosexual predator – say, with a male officer or NCO using rank to force a sexual relationship with an unwilling lower-ranking female. Now . . . the military has potentially the other kind to deal with. Don’t tell me it won’t ever happen – it will, eventually if not sooner, and I hope the services are ready to enforce every jot and tittle of the fraternization statutes. Equally, I should add.

Korea Meditation, Revisited

24. November 2010 · Comments Off on Korea Meditation, Revisited · Categories: Air Force, Fun and Games, General, History, Memoir, Military, N. Korea

In the early 1990s, I did a tour in Korea; a year at Yongsan Garrison, working at HQ-AFKN, barely a stone’s throw from where my father had spent a couple of weeks at Camp Coiner in 1953. Camp Coiner was where new troops were processed for assignments in-country, and it was still a self-contained miniature garrison with a dining hall, movie theater, club, PX and chapel. Processing new arrivals takes only a day or two these days. When I was there, Camp Coiner housed soldiers assigned to Yongsan in a series of Quonset huts that had been covered in such a thick layer of foam insulation that they looked like nothing so much as a row of enormous Twinkies.

Camp Coiner to my father was a bunch of canvas tents in a field of mud, surrounded by deep rings of barbed wire and a deeper ring of hungry refugees, watching them intently. It quite took away one’s appetite, said my father, to have people watching you eat every bite of your C-rations; and it’s not as if C-rations were a gourmet treat to start with. The soldiers were forbidden to give away their food, but my father said a lot of them did anyway, tossing cans stealthily over the wire. Seoul was a wrecked place fifty years ago. While I was there at AKFN that year, I edited an interview which the late Col. David Hackworth had done for AFKN, where he described how he himself had first visited the place, retreating across the only bridge over the Han River. Nothing but rubble, and rats nibbling at corpses in the gutters, the only live people being his squad and the Chinese snipers shooting at them. What Colonel Hackworth and veterans like my father saw in the 1950ies and what they see when they visit Seoul now leaves them rubbing their eyes in astonishment.

I had the incredible good fortune to be put in the way of doing a lot of voice-over narration jobs while I was at Yongsan, as well as a regular part-time job copy-editing the English language simulcast of the regular Korea Broadcasting System evening TV newscast. Most evenings or Saturdays after I finished my day job, I was taking the subway or a bus to a production studio somewhere (a taxi if I was feeling extravagant), and reading an English-language script on practically anything that someone felt would go over really well if they did a version in English.Amonger other things, I did a script about the manufacture of soju (which put me off ever drinking the stuff), an assortment of company puff-pieces, some fiendishly complicated English lesson tapes, a kid’s storybook, unless they have re-done the whole thing since, I am the English-language version of the recorded information for Kimpo Airport. I was a skilled and experienced production technician, working with other skilled audio technicians, away from the post. I developed friendships with the people I worked with in the KBS newsroom, who laughed at me because I had never gone to any of the tourist things in Seoul. I had, I explained, gone close to them, or had seen them from the outside on my way to a job; just like a native does.

Modern Seoul is a sprawling city of high-rise buildings, eight-lane highways, a splendid subway system, a golden glass tower 63 stories tall close by one of the fifteen or twenty bridges spanning the Han, and the Namsan tower glittering like a Christmas tree topper on a green hilly island in the middle of the city. In the evening, coming back from KBS on the bus, I could smell the bakery smell of vanilla cake from a commercial bakery close by. Sometimes at KBS we talked about the North, wondering if the discipline of an invading army of North Koreans would last past the first big grocery store, or electronics shop. When the old Supreme Leader died, I sat in the newsroom and watched half an hour of newscast cobbled out of the same fifteen minutes of stock video of the North, plus new footage of the bereft Northerners mourning ostentatiously. It seemed to me the KBS technicians were horrified and embarrassed by the elaborate demonstration of grief; I and they could only wonder what sort of coercion could force such undignified displays from people.

I liked working in Seoul, I liked what Koreans have built in fifty years, these tough jolly people on the south side of the DMZ. Cosmopolitan and professional, possibly as a nation the sharpest-dressed people on the face of the earth, every salaryman or woman turned out fit to be on the cover of GQ; as different from their cousins and second cousins north of the DMZ and still be on the same planet.

OSer Don Rich poined out in a post yesterday that the North Koreans regularly perform what he called the Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken – every six months to two years, there is some kind of saber-rattling game, a bit of public theater intended to remind everyone that they are there and bellicose. The old-time Korea hands that I knew over there, as well as my Korean friends were relatively blase about it all, for several reasons. One of them was that – well, mostly it was a bit of theater; it would die down in a week or so. Another being that for all the sprockets and medals hung on Nork generals – they really haven’t fought a serious war, balls-to-the-wall-and-all-guns-blazing war since 1953. There’s been a lot of evolution since then. But – lest the South Koreans get too over-confident about calling the North Korean bluff; the city of Seoul is well within range of Nork artillery, and quite a lot of it, too. Which is a very good reason to keep a cool head. And the other great argument for the status quo being maintained – is that if the DMZ magically evaporated and the Koreas were united once again, the South would be carrying the burden of the North … pitiful, starving, traumatised and hermetically isolated for sixty years, a country-sized concentration camp with all the brutality and horror that implies. The North has been in such bad shape for so long that teenage refugees from there are actually physically stunted, in comparison to their Southern cousins. So – while everyone gives lip service to reunification, in actuality, not so much.

But this week the Norks opened fire, shelling civilian areas on Yeonpyeong Island – an action which will be a little harder to brush off on the part of the South, Japan, and the United States. That ratchets up the Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken to a whole new level. So – who acts first? At this point, any guess is as good as any other.

McChrystal McMysteries

28. June 2010 · Comments Off on McChrystal McMysteries · Categories: Fun and Games, General, Media Matters Not, Military, Politics, War, World

So, as expected General McChrystal resigned last week; a terribly drastic way to get an instant face to face attitude adjustment session with the boss, I must say. I skimmed the original Rolling Stone story, and I have to also observe that I am still mystified as to how and why a freelance reporter with no particular track record of being a friend of the military even got let through the door – or even was allowed by the General’s Public Affairs officer/advisor to ingratiate himself so thoroughly that they seem to have forgotten that said reporter was there. I mean, there are reporters and there are reporters . . . and as a public affairs professional, I completely internalized certain things; like being always aware that the outside media was present, and anything he or she saw had the potential to be on the record. In fact, most likely would be on the record, so a certain degree of circumspection was required. I would have thought that anyone savvy enough to have made any rank north of light colonel would also have absorbed that kind of situational awareness. Officers who have been promoted to general rank most always are pretty sharp. The military is a ruthless meritocracy, perhaps the most so of any of our various establishments. Even the political generals, promoted on account of who, rather than what they know – usually possess a high degree of low cunning. Was General McChrystal just arrogant enough to think that he, as Obama’s chosen general for Afghanistan, could treat with a supposedly sympathetic media outlet and get away with it. Arrogance I could buy – but not stupidity.

I read some comments and posts on OS and elsewhere, where the degree of pearl-clutching shock and horror over the disrespect reflected towards the civilian element in the chain of command by those comments from General McChrystal’s staff – as quoted in the story got to be rather poisonously amusing. If a military officer lets fall a derisive comment in private about VP Biden – and no reporter is there to hear it, does it make a sound? See; there is a difference between the private sphere and the official, duty sphere, the one where you follow the legitimate orders given by your superior – even if you privately disagree. Granted, sometimes the border between the two is blurry – especially at the levels where historians and reporters might be expected to take an interest, but it does exist. Official is when you put on the uniform, when you go on shift or deployment, when you release statements or make speeches in your official capacity as a member of the forces. Everyone in service has had it pounded into them repeatedly, about not bringing discredit on the service in your public actions; so did McChystal openly disobey any such orders given to him in securing Afghanistan? Or does failure to closely police the private comments of your close subordinates and staff in the manner of a grade school teacher with a classroom of fractious third-graders constitute an offense against the UCMJ? Apparently, under this current administration it does, although I suspect under the previous one, the parties in question might have been lauded for their courage in speaking “troof to power, man!”

Frankly, this is not the first administration in my lifetime to be held in something less than complete affection and respect among the military, even as they followed orders and kept a stoical public silence about their personal opinions. Jimmy Carter’s inaction following the Iranian takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran had many of us grinding our teeth, and Bill Clinton’s games with interns excited considerable contempt – especially since any military officer or NCO proven guilty of playing hide-the-salami with a subordinate and lying about it would have been disciplined and discharged. One standard for me, and another for thee, y’see.

It has been suggested by a milblogger or two, and a neighbor of mine with a background in Special Forces – that General McChrystal spend a lot of his military career in sort of a Special Forces cocoon, doing – and developing the habit of speaking bluntly – rather than having to deal much with those on the outside. I could tentatively accept something of that hypothesis, save that Special Forces is a ruthless meritocracy on steroids. Certain milboggers are speculating along the lines of General McChrystal deliberately setting off the explosive bolts on his career. What if he was going spare with frustration at the constraints and his civilian counterparts in Afghanistan are operating under, with zilch support from the current administration. What if he could already see the writing on the wall – or the helicopters taking off from the roof of the American Embassy and came to the conclusion that the military was going to take the blame for ‘losing’ Afghanistan?

To this day that ‘other America of defense’ as written about by Arthur Hadley – is haunted by Vietnam. There was the losing of it by failure of the political machine to support South Vietnam logistically after the withdrawal of American troops, and also by the fact that there were generations (in military terms) of able and creative officers who served there, knowing very well what needed to be done, but felt their efforts were stymied at the very highest levels, to include the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. I began my own service when the services were still thick with NCOs and officers who remembered Vietnam vividly, but fairly quietly – and to a man (they were just about all men, then) they despised McNamara with a passion that fairly made them incoherent. McNamara had a toweringly high estimation of his own and his ‘wiz kids’ abilities when it came to overseeing the war in Vietnam, and relative contempt for the uniformed military; a contempt returned in spades. Now and again it was bruited about that it might have been better all around – that McNamara be brought to see the light about the true effect of his policies with regard to Vietnam, if the generals on the Joint Chiefs of staff, and those others who disagreed with him had resigned their commissions in protest. Interestingly, one of those officers who did spectacularly criticize the war – on Sixty Minutes, no less – was an army colonel named David Hackworth. Almost 25 years later, I edited an interview that he gave to AFKN-TV, where he cheerfully acknowledged that yes, he had indeed thrown himself on his own sword, over policy and accepted the consequences more or less gracefully. He finished up as a best-selling author, and military journalist for a major national magazine, along with the awed respect of the next generation of military, so it all ended rather happily for him.
Is the McChrystal McMystery a repeat of this? Same song, slightly different verse. Discuss.

One Of Those Moments

31. May 2010 · Comments Off on One Of Those Moments · Categories: General, Israel & Palestine, Military, War, World

You know, this morning when I read about the Gaza-Blockade-Runners’ shoot-out – I kept thinking that this may be Israel’s “Let it all be done” moment … and thinking of the moment in the 1998 movie “Elizabeth” when Elizabeth I said exactly that. It’s at about 8:00 in the clip…

Was this Israel’s –nothing to loose, so might as well act and let the stuff fall where it does – decision? Discuss in comments.

Another, Really?!! Moment

28. May 2010 · Comments Off on Another, Really?!! Moment · Categories: Media Matters Not, Military, Politics, The Funny

With all the other things going on:  President Obama’s running away from Washington to Chicago; This administration making post-Hurricane Katrina look successful; The Obama Presidency throwing former President Clinton under the bus in the Sestak sleaze-fest.  You may have missed this bit of news yesterday.

I received this from the HQ NORAD/NORTHCOM GROUP on Facebook and…and…I had to laugh.  Yesterday the White House released their National Security Strategy.  On the White House Blog, the title of the post that announces the release of the strategy is, and I couldn’t make this up myself if I wanted to:

“A BLUEPRINT FOR PURSUING THE WORLD THAT WE SEEK.”

What amazes me is that we all know that there were meetings about this.  There was brain-storming.  If nothing else, this administration knows the value of a well-turned phrase so they WORK at it.  THIS is what they came up with.  It’s the best they could do.  So basically, they’re not even doing the image thing very well anymore.

A Place Apart – Last Thoughts on the Milblog Convention

04. May 2010 · Comments Off on A Place Apart – Last Thoughts on the Milblog Convention · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military

So, three weeks later, and I am finally getting around to writing up the last of the Milblog Conference; real life intervened, had to go back to work a great number of hours for a regular client, and find a permanent home for the poopies, and do some work for the Tiny Publishing Bidness . . . and my problem is that I can get easily distracted . . .

Hey, was that a chicken? I could swear that was a chicken, outside in my yard . . . I wonder if it escaped from the neighbors’ yard. I found a ferret in my back yard, once. Really – cute little fellow. He came along quietly and rested in the cat-carrier until we could locate the owner . . . and where was I?

Oh – meditating on how the world of the military – the Other America of Defense as Arthur T. Hadley described it. He made note of how rarely the world of the military, their families and veterans intersected with that of the various elites – the political, social, intellectual and media elite. His book came out in the late eighties, and confirmed pretty much what I had sensed about the military generally. Which was, unless members of the military had been killed either grotesquely and/or in significant numbers, the existence of the contemporary military pretty much skated by the notice of the great and the good, with the exception of a fleeting up-tick in general interest during the Gulf war. Not much notice taken, otherwise – hardly any movies, maybe once or twice an abortive TV series, or a character who was a veteran of the non-messed up and fairly well-adjusted kind. There wouldn’t have even been much in popular fiction either, if it weren’t for WEB Griffen and others, writing in the military/adventure genre – and that is not everyone’s cup of tea, not even mine.

Arthur Hadley thought this kind of cultural/societal disconnect did not bode very well for the country as a whole – and so I thought I might do my very best to enlighten the general web-readership about the wonderful wacky world of that “Other America.” So I began contributing to the earlier iteration of this blog, at the crack-of-dawn, blogging-time. (August 2002, for those who keep count.) I have to say, the whole civilian-military cultural divide is not quite the yawning chasm it was twenty years ago. I have no idea of what to account for this feeling – probably something to do with 9-11, and the internet generally. Even so, I don’t think we’ll ever replicate the kind of national situation in which a citizen-scholar-soldier like Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain could move from being a professor of rhetoric and languages at Bowdoin College, to a combat command in the Civil War. In one shining, desperate moment on a hill at Gettysburg, the balance of that battle and by extension possibly the whole war – hung on his command for a bayonet charge. No, I don’t much think we’ll see that crossover involvement of that kind and to the degree that we did when there was a draft on, but now and again I am a little more hopeful about the likelihood of such a thing happening again than Arthur Hadley was, twenty years ago.

For at the Milblog Conference, one of the establishments or personalities making an appearance (aside from the others I have written about previously) was a representative and some students from Hillsdale College – a tiny and very traditional co-ed liberal arts college, buried in the wilds of southern Michigan. To read about Hillsdale’s history is to read the history of higher educational establishments on the American frontier. If Joshua Chamberlain hadn’t emerged from Bowdoin, he would have likely come from a school like Hillsdale. According to their website, a higher percentage of Hillsdale students enlisted for service in the Civil War than any other western college. Hillsdale’s other claim to prominence is a devotion to independence so fierce that it refuses all federal and state subsidies – student aid monies, as well as the GI Bill. Liberal when they were founded in 1844, although in stubbornly sticking to their founding principles when the world around has changed so much, they have indisputably slid all the way to the conservative side of the spectrum, through no other action than being . . . er stubborn. And dedicated to high standards.

Nonetheless, the college makes it possible through scholarships and donations for veterans to attend. I did meet one student, 2Lt Jack Shannon, who is now on active duty in the Marine Corps and stationed at Virginia Beach going through intelligence officer school . There will also be nearly a dozen other Hillsdale recruits attending the Marine’s Officer Candidate School this summer- which out of a student body of around 1,300 is not too shabby at all. Two of the other Hillsdale students I spoke to were veterans – when my daughter looked at a picture of the three, she could tell which two by the look of their faces.

James Markman served as a medic in the 82nd Airborne – in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which he was awarded a Purple Heart. Now he is intending to pursue a medical career, modeling himself after an Army doctor who impressed him no end, when he was serving.

Jon Lewis served three overseas tours as a Marine – a rifleman (although every Marine is a rifleman) section leader. Two of his tours were in Iraq. He intends to go into the ministry. I had the same feeling from all three of them that I have from my daughter – of a sense of focus and maturity in them that one usually doesn’t get from the ordinary college student in their early twenties. James and Jon preferred to attend Hillsdale on scholarships rather than any other school, where they could use their GI Bill educational benefits. In a way – through Hillsdale and other schools where these new veterans are going to classes – we may be replicating what happened just after World War II, when veterans flocked into higher education. There is a new cadre of citizen-leaders being developed – which will make it interesting when they run up against the old cadre.

And so that was it, for this year – the conference wrapped up with a banquet of no more than usual rowdiness – milbloggers being rather more exuberantly extrovert than would be expected of the stereotypical blogging sisteren and bretheren – and an awards ceremony for various categories of mil-blogs. There was a raffle (some gift bags featuring Ranger Up tee-shirts – very popular among military circles) to benefit Homes for Our Troops – another military-oriented charitable effort, that like Soldiers’ Angels, hardly anyone in the larger world might have heard of. They retrofit or build homes for veterans seriously disabled in service since 2001. All in all, a very interesting weekend – possibly the first time I have gone farther and stayed longer away from home in about fifteen years.

Time and Memory

24. April 2010 · Comments Off on Time and Memory · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, World

I was momentarily distracted last week by a comment thread at The Belmont Club, when one of the participants made mention of historian Jacques Barzun, who is something like 102 this year. The commenter noted that Mr. Barzun not only remembers Paris during World War I, when the German Army came perilously close to bombarding the place – but how he also remembers conversing with his own then-very-elderly grandmother, whose memories went back to the 1830s. Imagine, being just a step or two removed from such memories. It reminded me also of a conversation with another writer I know, who teaches languages and music, down in Beeville, Texas.

Imagine, he said – someone of our age (we are both in the fifty to sixty spectrum) talking to the oldest person we know – who would be in their nineties. So, their own childhood memories would go back to the early twentieth century – like Mr. Barzun’s. I did have this experience once, when I was just about 18, and because 18-year olds had just then been given the right to vote and it was an election year, I thought I ought to take some interest in politics. Which I did, but it proved to be very fleeting – the interest really didn’t kick in at full-strength until the last year or so. The mild interest of that year took the form of an afternoon at the Republican Party HQ in my home-town, doing what-I-can’t-quite-remember . . . but the other person minding the office that day was an elderly gentleman who said he was ninety-something, had grown up on a ranch in Montana and had been sent to school (a one-room schoolhouse, of course) every day on a horse; a very tall horse, so his father had to lift him up into the saddle, the horse took him to school, and the teacher lifted him down at the other end, and tied up the horse. In the afternoon, the teacher put him up into the saddle – and the operation proceeded in reverse. This would have put those schooldays of his in the late 1880s, at least – but he had some other fascinating yarns, of joining the Army and being a cavalryman in the days before World War I when the cavalry still meant horses. He had been on Black Jack Pershing’s expedition into Mexico, chasing after Pancho Villa, and had deployed to the Western Front as a very new 2nd Lieutenant. I so wish I had written much of this down at the time, or even remembered his name – it was much more fascinating than stuffing envelopes and answering the phone.

But, said my writer friend – now imagine that the oldest person you know, had talked as a child to the oldest person they knew. So, a child of ten or eleven in about 1920 had talked to a ninety-year old person . . . and that person’s memories – since they would have been born in the 1840s – might encompass the Gold Rush, and at the very least, the Civil War. A roll of typescript among some of my Granny Jessie’s papers paralleled that kind of memory-span. In about 1910, two of her aunts were learning to use that newfangled gadget, the typewriter, and as a typing exercise they had interviewed the oldest man in Lionville, Chester County PA. Alas, I do not recall his name either, and the roll of typescript is also long gone (a wildfire which burned my parents’ house pretty well cleaned out all the family memorabilia in 2003) but his first-hand recollections dated from the early 1800s. He told the great-aunts of long-horned wild cattle being brought in from the west, and of working as a carpenter. One of the curious notations was that coffins that were built then were constructed with a peaked lid, a puzzle which had just then been considerable of a mystery to the archeologist excavating Wolstonhome Town, near Jamestown. That design turned out to be the last of an archaic custom, which the archeologist went to a great deal of trouble to unravel – but there it was, testament for the use of an ancient and disused custom, preserved in an old typescript.

Now, let’s get really adventurous – and suppose that that oldest person who talked to the oldest person that you knew, who was born in the 1840s, had talked as a child to the oldest person they knew, who at eighty or ninety years of age in the 1850’s meant they had been born about 1760 – so that their memories would encompass the Revolution. Depending on where they lived, they might have seen George Washington, or his little army of Rebels on the march, heard Paul Revere or William Dawes riding by their house, shouting an alarm, or heard the church-bells ringing to celebrate their victory.

Yes, it is two hundred and change years ago – but to think of it in terms of memories, transmitted across the generations, we are only three steps removed. It isn’t really that long ago at all. History isn’t past – as another historical commentator remarked in another context, certain memories lie at the bottom of our minds, like lees at the bottom of a cup of wine, only waiting to be stirred up again.

Continuing Interesting Stuff at the Milblogger Conference

20. April 2010 · Comments Off on Continuing Interesting Stuff at the Milblogger Conference · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, Technology, Veteran's Affairs

Yes, it was a week ago last weekend, but I have several jobs, four books to market, two more to write . . . oh, and a tax bill to pay. So, forgive me for dishing out the good bloggy ice cream in small dishes, ‘kay?

One of the unexpected highlights of the conference was a late addition to the morning panel lineup; this man was almost a proto-blogger: Major Norman Hatch, who as a young NCO and combat cameraman in the Pacific during World War II oversaw the filming of the battle for Tarawa. Greyhawk provided a short version of this video, with the audio turned down, and Major Hatch gave us a live commentary – a sort of directors’ cut.

Anyway, as I have pointed out many times, the military is its whole ‘nother world. I swear, I’ve been convinced for years that most civilians get their ideas about it – not from a genu-wine military person, but from some (usually self-appointed) expert, anointed by the cultural powers that be. Which usually makes those of us who have long been domiciled in the military world just roll our eyes and laugh behind our hands. Or throw something heavy at the television – it all depends. BTW, really perversely-humored military members often amuse themselves by feeding tall tales to said self-appointed experts, just to see if they are going to bite on the tall tale, hook line and sinker. I know they do this – I’ve always called it the Wister Effect.*
Trying to put across something of what the military experience is really like to the average normal civilian is what got me started in mil-blogging, back in the Dark Ages of blogging. And sham-wow! Did Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief suddenly have a lot of readers! On one notable occasion just about the time that the drive into Kuwait began, CNN linked to our home page – and the resulting traffic crashed the server. We were included in a short list of mil-blogs listed in a short (is there any other sort?) article in Time Magazine, and Yours Truly was interviewed a couple of times by reporters for national newspapers, who were putting together a story about the Great E-Mail/Milblogging Adventure, and how it was possible for the deployed military to be in such very close contact with their families and friends. All very heady and amusing stuff, this was – but I kept thinking how odd it was that the official military Public Affairs offices seemed to be completely clueless.

Having worked in an airbase PA office, I knew very well that part of the PA staff’s duties was to scan print media for any mention of the service, the particular base, or the military in general. I didn’t think it likely, in other words, that the official military could NOT know about mil-blogs in 2003 – especially since I made a special effort to visit a local PA office and offer to blog about any particular needs the local command had, with regard to deployed troops from that post, or for any casualties they might be caring for. I talked to a civilian in the office – who seemed quite keen, and left my name, email addy and URL for his commander, and never heard another word. Eh – no skin off mine, as the saying goes. But at the first afternoon panel of the Milblog Conference, we had a full brace of commanders – including Admiral J.C. Harvey, Commander U.S. Fleet Forces Command, who is an enthusiastic blogger, and Col. Gregory Breazile, who blogs for the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan.

Obviously, the official blog has arrived; the technology has been embraced by the higher levels. I did get up and asked, precisely when and what event precipitated this interest, when we early bloggers were treated as if we smelled bad, early on. Eh – the answer seemed to be that the very high ranks realized the value of social media fairly early on. One does not achieve the high command rank in the military by being an idiot, by the way. I’ve met some colonels who were dumber than a box of hammers, but every general I ever met personally seemed to be pretty sharp. At the other end of the scale, the very sharpest of the junior ranks had embraced social media, blogging, twittering and youtube almost at once. It was just the intermediate level, or so the Admiral explained, who weren’t quite sure what to do with or about it. This tracked pretty well with my experience, being as the Daily Brief’s founding blogger was a smart-ass Air Force enlisted mechanic who loved to spend his nights on the intertubules. (He also got bored easily, which is why he recruited other writers for his blog after a year.) I have to admit, there is a decidedly different feel to a blog which is there because it’s essential to communicating about the mission, and one that’s a volunteer effort and done for sheer enthusiasm.

Final wrap up tomorrow – stay tuned, sportsfans.

* The Wister Effect: so called after Owen Wister, the writer of The Virginian, who related a story about some cowboys in a small Western town. When some traveling Easterners came to town on the train, and began hyperventilating about the violence and danger in the Wild West, the cowboys obligingly staged a mock-lynching for their edification. Wear your expections too openly – and very likely someone with a perverse sense of humor will make a special effort and arrange to deliver what you were expecting.

Still More of What I Saw @ The Milblogger’s Conference

18. April 2010 · Comments Off on Still More of What I Saw @ The Milblogger’s Conference · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Military, Veteran's Affairs, World

There were four panel discussions during Saturday, the one full day of the 5th Annual Milblogger’s Conference – some with panelists present front and center, and a few with either taped, or teleconferenced interviews. All of the panelists and the moderator, Greta Parry (who originated a blog called Kiss my Gumbo) touched upon the use of social media – that is, networking, blogging, tweeting and other uses of the internet in the service of various military enterprises. The first panel discussed the use of social media with regard to various military oriented charities, only one of which had been in existence longer than the last decade or so; the US Navy Memorial in Washington, DC. The VP for Marketing Communications confessed resignedly that she must still print out blogposts and email messages for many of the senior managers to peruse, since they are not exactly comfortable with this internet-thingy. The other organizations, such as Soldier’s Angels grew organically in response to various needs upon being publicized through mil-blogs and email appeals for items to be sent to deployed, hospitalized or disabled military members, or to assist their families. Soldier’s Angels started with family members sending ‘care packages’ to individuals – and then it just sort of snowballed.

Just to illustrate how these things grow: my daughter’s Marine unit deployed to Kuwait very early in 2003, and of course my parents and friends began sending her useful things – snack food and sanitary-wipes, drink mixes and big spray, books and magazines. She wrote to me about a kid in her unit who’s family had his APO address all mixed up, with the result that he was over there for almost two months and hadn’t gotten a letter or a care package from anyone. I wrote about this on my own blog, with the result that LCpl. Varnum was immediately adopted by about forty different people, and got so many boxes of goodies that there was no room for him to sleep in his little pup-tent shelter. My daughter’s unit was the recipient of boxes of books collected by another blogger, and a case of moon-pies from a lady in Virginia . . . eventually they had so much in the way of home comforts that I began referring people who emailed me asking to adopt-a-troop to Soldier’s Angels, which was formally organized and launched by this time. The milblogs have been supporting Soldier’s Angels every since. One of their big projects was to provide voice-activated laptop computers for the seriously injured – and another project I clearly recall was to collect clothing; underwear and sweats, and tee-shirts, for injured troops who had been medivacked from the field on a stretcher to hospitals in Germany to recover – and separated from all of their friends and possessions, had nothing but hospital PJs and robes to stand up in. Kind of hard, walking across the post to the PX in your slippers to buy more clothes; I suppose this problem must have come up now and again before, but in this case, Soldier’s Angels had an immediate solution.

I cut a certain “Doonesbury” strip out of the local newspaper the day it appeared, and it’s been on the front of my refrigerator ever since; the final panel of the strip contained the punchline. “Is it true that only 13% of American kids can find Iraq on a map?” And the reply from a cynical reporter character, “Yeah, but all 13% are Marines.”
During the first session, someone pointed out Garry Trudeau, among the conferees . . . yeah, that Garry Trudeau, the Doonesbury guy, who was not the very last person I would have expected to find at a military blogger’s conference – I’d say he’s have been among a list of a hundred or so. But it seems that he does a lot of quiet good for veterans, as well as providing a mil-blog venue. And yes, I did go up to him in the interval and tell him about the “13%” comic strip, still bravely magneted to my refrigerator door. Told him that he could have made another mint or so, selling the original art, or even prints of that strip. Just about every mother of a Marine would want one. Alas, he donated all the originals, all at once. (Yeah, I talked a little about my own books – do I look like an idiot! It’s all about the marketing, baby!)

The mild thrill from the second session came in a conference call from Afghanistan, from Michael Yon, who as of last weekend was lurking in the vicinity of Kandahar. Michael has been operating as a freelance journalist, covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for a good few years, now. He is supported through donations from his readers; all the milbloggers know of Mike Yon – the top story on his blog today is about one of those efforts to collect donations for a unit, or a place or a purpose . . . and how they expand. He thinks there is a ‘surge’ beginning to build up a head of steam in that part of Afghanistan; we’ll know by Christmas what kind of effect will be had by it. His next project is a means of introducing little biogas fuel generators to Afghanistan, in the hopes of replacing scarce wood as a fuel for cooking: off to Nepal to research on how they do it there. Apparently biogas generated from waste material is being widely used in Nepal . . . the technology is fairly simple, and straightforward. It would save the trees and save the time spent searching for a few little sticks of dry wood. I can see the sense in this – one of my books about the far west mentions that it was the constant quest by settlers for wood for fuel and for building that alienated the Plains Indians, at least as much as the ravages of buffalo hunters . . .

Seriously off-topic – more to follow, about the conference. Most amusingly – and I am kicking myself for not taking a picture of some of them doing so – about a third of them were tweeting and blogging each session as it happened. I did not have the advantage of a Blackberry, or i-Phone, laptop or notebook computer that many of the other conferees had, so I have to catch up days later.

More of What I Saw at the Milblogger Conference

15. April 2010 · Comments Off on More of What I Saw at the Milblogger Conference · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, General, Military, Veteran's Affairs

Milblogging – alas, I have had to explain that concept to a number of my purely civilian contacts over the last few weeks. Just a plain old military blogger. A blogger on active duty, a veteran, a family member or someone just interested in aspects of the military life, all of whom are blogging about their experiences and life in the military, around the military, or as the military touches on their life. To mainstream America, since the end of the draft, this is terra incognita. If all one knows about the life military is what can be gleaned from current movies, television and popular culture, then there might just as well be dragons out there over the edge in DOD land. Another language, of slang and shorthand, of instantly understood references, certain subtle habits of manners and bearing, the quiet display of badges, rings, patches, souvenir coins or tattoos – all of which serve as tells to other residents (or past residents) of DOD land. Most pure civilians usually miss the ‘tells’ – which is why fake veterans will fool them practically all the time.

So, I have been a milblogger since 16 August, 2002, which is the Dark Ages of blogging, practically. I was invited to join this blog when it was still called Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief, at a time when there was a sudden and increased national interest in the military experience during the ramp-up to the Iraq War. SSDB was one of only a handful of milblogs carried on the Instapundit blog-roll. I had just barely discovered this newfangled internet thingy, I had a background in public affairs, wanted an outlet for my own writing . . . and my daughter was a Marine, heading towards a deployment in Kuwait and eventually, Iraq in the spring and summer of 2003. Comparing notes at the Milblog Conference, I discovered that the date of my first blog-post predated everyone elses’ by at least six months.

That entry is included, for your benefit, as a historical document –

Sgt. Mom’s Ancient Tech Story:

So the new colonel commanding was getting a tour of the AFRTS station, from the Station Manager. The colonel looks through the soundproofed glass window into the radio studio, and there is the on-duty DJ, stripped to his underwear, sitting cross-legged on the turntable*, going round and round and round. The colonel, slightly-bug-eyed, turns to the Station Manager and demands
“What the %#@&&& is he doing?
The Station Manager shrugs and says,
“Thirty-three and a third.” **

(footnotes appended for those under the age of 30ish)
* Probably a heavy, 16″ Gates turntable. They were used to play “records” also called ETs, or Electrical Transcriptions, which in the days when the only body parts being pierced were ears, were 16 or 14 inches across.
** Revolutions per minute. 16-inch records were played at 78 RPMs, 14-inch records (which replaced them) at 33 1/3

Yeah, I’ve gone a long way since then, although the audience laughed their hummm-hums off, when I re-told it at the conference. A good few didn’t even need the footnotes – but don’t let that lead you to assume that all attending were old fogies . . . I met a trio of earnest young college students, two veterans and one heading military-wards. A bit of an interview to follow about them, over the next two days. (Look, am I a public utility? I produce good bloggy ice-cream when I can!) There was also this young lady present, who is not only extraordinarily pleasant and patriotic, but possesses a charmingly retro aesthetic sense – as well as a sense of duty. (No, I never minded girlie pinups – as long as I could admire the equivalent and aesthetically pleasing male form . . .)

But enough of the wander down blogging-memory lane, more observations of the 5th Annual Milblogger Conference. It is the very first one which I have attended, which made for a curious experience. I have ‘known’ some of the other bloggers nearly as long as I’ve blogged and consider them as friends and fellow veterans, but this was the first time I ever met them face to face. I tend to think of them first as they named themselves with their original nom du blog – Greyhawk, Blackfive, Baldilocks – rather than their given names. Most of the early milbloggers chose to do so, not wanting to put absolutely everything out there.

Another curiosity – I’d guess that a little under a half of the conference attendees were women: fair number of veterans, or DOD civilian employees, some from various military-oriented charitable organizations, or military spouses. There were present, though, a fair number of active-duty men with the high-and tight haircut – that which makes them look as if they had shaved their heads entirely, and then parked a small, short-furred rodent on top. On the first panel of the conference – a selection of early bloggers, three of us were Air Force or AF veterans (Baldi, me, and Greyhawk – all NCOs), one Army veteran – Blackfive, and one Marine officer – “Taco”. (His last name is Bell.) This distribution drew some comment from the audience: I have no explanation for this. Another very early blogger was a Reserve Navy officer, Lt. Smash. My purely amateur and scientific wild-ass guess about this distribution is something along the lines of the Air Force and the Navy being more technically oriented, and drawing in a more middle-class and educated recruit. Another curiosity is that four of us have written or edited books, and “Taco” is planning to write one as soon as he retires and can uncork his best stories. Eh – one of my best-received one-liners: blogging is a gateway drug. (Did I mention that I do have a mad compulsion to entertain and inform? Laugher from an audience – manna to the starving!) More to follow, including how I had the neck ask a blunt question of a 4-star and to tell Garry Trudeau about the newspaper clipping that has been on the front of my refrigerator for almost eight years now – I promise. Real life and bills to pay will interfere. Really.

What I Saw at the Milblogger Convention

12. April 2010 · Comments Off on What I Saw at the Milblogger Convention · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Home Front, Media Matters Not, Military

Let’s see – I experienced air travel at the end of the first decade of this century. I can report that practically every shred of comfort, convenience, and excitement has been removed from the travel experience itself with almost surgical precision – although the ability to check in from your home computer and print up your boarding pass is a welcome development, and the lavish proliferation of food courts at the major hubs is similarly welcome. Especially as it seems that a tiny bag of peanuts, or a cookie and some juice or a soft-drink of choice is about the only thing served to coach passengers on short haul flights. I expect that the next step in the progression will be that the cabin staff will no longer actually hand them out from the narrow metal cart hauled up and down the aisles. Within a short time, I think they will probably hand them out after they swipe your boarding pass at the departure gate, and save the cabin staff considerable trouble. (It’s still better than MAC flights, though. Not much, but still better.)

The Atlanta airport is presently so big that it could possibly secede from Atlanta proper, and set up as its own municipality.

The area around the mid-Atlantic coast is green, green, green. Even from the air, you can make out vivid blobs of pink from the cherry trees in bloom. The dogwood trees are in bloom, too, and all along the parkway between Baltimore and Washington DC, there were tangles of purple wisteria. It’s very nice, to have belts of trees, along the parkways and highways, separating the housing tracts, warehouses and whatever from the highway. Looking at the ass-end of a strip-mall as you drive along is not aesthetically appealing. Sad lack of ground-growing wildflowers, though. I looked at the verges, which had grass and dandelions in plenty, but not much else, and thought, “Dandelions! Dandelions!!!That’s all you got, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia! Pah!”

I have seen the Washington Monument at a distance and close-up and from many angles, as I suspect the shuttle-bus driver actually circled through downtown DC several times. I have also seen the Capitol Building, and the White House, inspected the façade of the Department of Commerce building, and the quaint brick sidewalks and cobbled streets of Georgetown. We were stuck in traffic, so I had plenty of time to contemplate all of these structures. Teensy brick three and four-story townhouses in Georgetown about the width of a small yawn apparently sell for $500,000 when they come on the market.

This is a beautiful time to visit that part of the country; I am told that only the autumn foliage equals spring for sheer natural spectacle.

The Westin Arlington Gateway is a very pleasant place to stay, as hotels go, although slightly on the pricy side. The rooms are mega-comfortable, being designed around a tasteful luxury-spa theme, with lots of pale green, sage and white. The beds are piled with pillows and a thick comforter – all in pristine white. They have their own very special brand of scented white-tea-aloe soap and toiletries – and have them for sale in regular sizes for those who just can’t take away enough of the little individual bottles.

Contra the usual expectation of bloggers being socially inept loners and introverts, who cannot relate face to face to others of their species – the military version appear to be exuberant extroverts . . . even without having had much alcohol to drink.

No one that I talked to at the conference had been mil-blogging longer than I had. I started in August, 2002 – the Dark Ages of mil-blogging – and am still at it, although I have drifted into wider circles than a strictly military/veteran focus. Which makes me rather famous in those circles, although no one asked for my autograph.

To Be Continued – Garry Trudeau, a blogging 4-star admiral, the most gullible troop in all the world, three young men from Hillsdale, and other observations from the 5th Annual Milblogging Conference.

Road Trip!

17. January 2010 · Comments Off on Road Trip! · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry, General, Home Front, Military, World

I’ve been invited to be on one of the panels at the 5th Annual MilBlog Conference, in Arlington, Virginia, April 9th and 10th – and Blondie and I are intending to drive, since she will be on spring break! (Route tentatively planned as Dallas-Memphis-Knoxville-Harrisonburg)

Any other milbloggers from the San Antonio or Ft. Hood area also going to the Milblog Conference? Anyone in Arkansas, Tennessee or Virgina want us to stop and visit along the way? Recommend some good eats, or something interesting to see?

A Favor From a Blog-Friend

27. December 2009 · Comments Off on A Favor From a Blog-Friend · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Local, Military, Wild Blue Yonder, Working In A Salt Mine...

(Recieved this request from a reader of my Open Salon Blog

I am an officially middle-aged, female, Canadian civilian from the Toronto area in Canada. You can find the first of several weekly Sunday night posts at my Open Salon blog, here.
Sgt Mom, I am hoping you may be willing to help me with a writing project I am developing. The project is about the stories of the fans, or fanatics as he likes to call us, of Henry Rollins. I am going to take time this next year researching, and compiling the personal stories of a significant number of ‘fanatics’ who have been inspired, influenced, helped, and otherwise impacted, by Henry. While the personal stories will not be specific to those in the military, it is absolutely critical that as many of those stories are captured as possible. During the first week of this project I have received some great personal stories, both military and civilian, through my preliminary post at opensalon.com.
If you would be willing to put this request for stories from Henry Rollins fans out to your online community at The Daily Brief, and any other blogs or networks you might be connected to, I would be so grateful.

Any personal stories, will not be published without the consent of the writers, prior to final publication. At this early stage I am thinking it will be an electronic publication, with a completion date of December 2010. I will stay in touch with all contributors as the project evolves to answer any questions, and keep people up to speed on how it’s unfolding. I would like to send the final work to Henry Rollins for his 50th birthday in February of 2011. None of the information I receive will be published elsewhere without the consent of the authors prior to publication. I will keep people posted on the project as it starts to roll out. I expect it to take most of 2010 as I will be working on this around my paid gig and teenagers, responsibilities I am grateful to have, yet leave little time for life’s other passions like writing.
Questions, stories and comments can be emailed to me at bennettangela@rogers.com, or through my Open Salon Blog.
Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about posting this to your online community. I sincerely appreciate anything you might be able to do to help. I’m just another Rollins fanatic, trying to give back a little something to someone who has had a significant impact on me, and many others in our global neighbourhood.

Sincerely,
Angela.

(All right then – got any good stories for Angela?)

In Honor of the USMC Birthday – Marine Rules for Gunfights

10. November 2009 · Comments Off on In Honor of the USMC Birthday – Marine Rules for Gunfights · Categories: Ain't That America?, Devil Dogs, General, History, Military

1. Bring a gun. Preferably two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns.
2. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive.
3. Only hits count. The only thing worse than a miss is a slow miss.
4. Move away from your attacker. Distance is your friend. (Lateral and diagonal movement are preferred.)
5. If you can choose what to bring to a gunfight, bring a long gun and a friend with a long gun.
6. In ten years nobody will remember the details of caliber or tactics. They will only remember who lived.
7. If you are not shooting, you should be communicating, reloading, and running.
8. Use a gun that works EVERY TIME. “All skill is in vain when an angel pisses in the flintlock of your musket.”
9. Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.
10. Always cheat; always win. The only unfair fight is the one you lose.
11. Have a plan.
12. Have a back-up plan, because the first one won’t work.
13. Use cover or concealment as much as possible.
14. Flank your adversary when possible and always protect yours.
15. Never drop your guard.
16. Always tactical load and threat scan 360 degrees.
17. Watch their hands. Hands kill. (In God we trust…everyone else keep your hands where I can see them).
18. Decide to be aggressive ENOUGH, quickly ENOUGH…hesitation kills.
19. The faster you finish the fight, the less injured you will get.
20. Be polite. Be professional. And have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
21. Be courteous to everyone, friendly to no one.
22. Your number one option for Personal Security is a lifelong commitment to avoidance, deterrence, and de-escalation.
23. Do not attend a gunfight with a handgun the caliber of which does not start with a “4.”

Happy Birthday, Devil-Dogs! And as a bonus – Colonel Jessup’s speech!

Memo – Fort Hood Fallout

08. November 2009 · Comments Off on Memo – Fort Hood Fallout · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, General, Military, Rant, sarcasm, Stupidity, War

From: Sgt Mom
To: Various
Re: Ft. Hood Murders

1. To the families, loved ones, comrades and friends of those killed at Ft. Hood this last week: I am so sorry; our prayers and condolences go out to you all.

2. To our current President: Please start going to your local Toastmaster’s organization, and work on your impromptu speech-making techniques. You are acceptable when prepped and reading it off the teleprompter, but looking all over the place in a triangular pattern – up left, down right, across and up left again – it’s really distracting. Oh, and as the C-in-C you should really learn the difference between the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Maybe working with flash cards would help you remember this stuff.

3. To CAIR, and other prominent members of various mainstream Muslim-American associations: Clean house. Start shopping violent jihadi a-holes to law enforcement. Immediately, if not yesterday.

4. To various deep thinkers, bloggers and trolls of the leftish persuasion, who are inclined to write and post with variations of really, those violent, warmongering and racist, hicks all got just what they deserved; just stop. Just stop it.

5. Department of Homeland Defense: Nice set of priorities, Janet! Looks like everyone was too busy running around in circles, looking for violent Tea Party activists to pay any attention to a whacked-out jihadist. Nice job, lady.

6. Army Personnel Management cadre at Walter Reed: Yeah, I know the usual drill for dealing with a problem troop/officer – quietly send them TDY, give them a pencil-pushing job someplace where they can do the minimum amount of damage, and eventually transfer them someplace remote. Didn’t work out well this time –maybe it would have been worthwhile doing some direct attitude adjustment on Major Hasan?

7. Major Hasan: Hmm … I guess Leavenworth still has a place where they can stand up traitors against a wall and have the firing squad finish the job?

8. Police Sgt. Kim Munley: most excellent job. Need something with more stopping power than a 9mm. Just sayin’…

Sgt Mom.

Thursday Random Assortment

16. July 2009 · Comments Off on Thursday Random Assortment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Media Matters Not, Military, Politics

(Insert ritual apology for apparent disinterest in providing rich bloggy ice-creamy goodness in the way of posts in the last week. Sorry, blog-fans, beat to a crisp, and not for lack of material. Just … well, beat to a crisp and the necessity of earning a living, mixed in with a greater-than-expected number of duties post 4th of July Tea Party…)

Well, I deduce that the income stream for the Southern Poverty Law Center must be drying up, so a new money well must be drilled, somewhere. Dammit, folks, there must be a rich vein of rampaging white bigots somewhere that we can raise a fresh alarm about! Don’t you people realize, we have offices to support, and salaries to be paid! So after much ado, they find no less than forty saddoes on a white-power website who claim to be members of the US military … well, leaving aside the fact that people on the internet can claim any damned thing they like, forty out of what… something like two million active duty and reservists, doesn’t seem like a threat worthy of a whole new massive fund-drive. Now, if Mr. Dees would like to drill farther down, in his mad search for racial extremists who just happen to be members of the military, and consider members of – oh, I don’t know, La Raza and the Black Muslims spring to mind; he might then find numbers worthy of a full-court-press as far as fund-raising goes. Or maybe not – the military has a way of kicking a lot of racist attitudes out of individuals, a peculiar capability of which Mr. Dees seems to be fairly ignorant.

Speaking of the military, now there’s a push on to ban smoking entirely? Hey, good luck with that. Note – I do not smoke, never did smoke, was never event empted to smoke and the smell of it drives me mad, but seriously, are these nanny-state types picking on G.I. Joe and G.I. Jane just because they can? Ohhh, here’s a captive element we can screw around with for their own good, and because it makes us feel well in control of lesser mortals.

Sarah Palin, resigning from the governorship of Alaska … I dunno, but I don’t think she should be written off as a dead duck, just yet. She drives the elite political/media establishment seriously nucking futz, which is good for the rest of us, pointing and laughing at their spasms of incoherent temper. Leading the Tea Party insurgency? Eh – I don’t think it’s a good idea to pin our homes on one person, one shining leader on a white horse out in front. Seriously, they’re too good a target. I like better the idea of a thousand anonymous leaders, all moving in more or less the same direction. Relentless, swift-moving and unstoppable, too many for the usual media attack machine to concentrate fire upon: We are all Spartacus. No one holds a leash on us, we are beholden to no political combine, the usual political observers have never heard of us in a meaningful way until now. Spartacus – that’s the way to go.

Oh, and if anyone has read the Adelsverein Trilogy, and loved it, can you post a review on Amazon.com? Pretty please? Reviews – even just short ones – generate interest, which generates sales, which move me closer the day that I can quit the hell-hole. (And spend more time working on the next book!) Thanks!

For Memorial Day

25. May 2009 · Comments Off on For Memorial Day · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Military

JUST A COMMON SOLDIER
(A Soldier Died Today)
by A. Lawrence Vaincourt

He was getting old and paunchy and his hair was falling fast,
And he sat around the Legion, telling stories of the past
Of a war that he had fought in and the deeds that he had done,
In his exploits with his buddies; they were heroes, every one.

And tho’ sometimes, to his neighbors, his tales became a joke,
All his Legion buddies listened, for they knew whereof he spoke.
But we’ll hear his tales no longer for old Bill has passed away,
And the world’s a little poorer, for a soldier died today.

He will not be mourned by many, just his children and his wife,
For he lived an ordinary and quite uneventful life.
Held a job and raised a family, quietly going his own way,
And the world won’t note his passing, though a soldier died today.

When politicians leave this earth, their bodies lie in state,
While thousands note their passing and proclaim that they were great.
Papers tell their whole life stories, from the time that they were young,
But the passing of a soldier goes unnoticed and unsung.

Is the greatest contribution to the welfare of our land
A guy who breaks his promises and cons his fellow man?
Or the ordinary fellow who, in times of war and strife,
Goes off to serve his Country and offers up his life?

A politician’s stipend and the style in which he lives
Are sometimes disproportionate to the service that he gives.
While the ordinary soldier, who offered up his all,
Is paid off with a medal and perhaps, a pension small.

It’s so easy to forget them for it was so long ago,
That the old Bills of our Country went to battle, but we know
It was not the politicians, with their compromise and ploys,
Who won for us the freedom that our Country now enjoys.

Should you find yourself in danger, with your enemies at hand,
Would you want a politician with his ever-shifting stand?
Or would you prefer a soldier, who has sworn to defend
His home, his kin and Country and would fight until the end?

He was just a common soldier and his ranks are growing thin,
But his presence should remind us we may need his like again.
For when countries are in conflict, then we find the soldier’s part
Is to clean up all the troubles that the politicians start.

If we cannot do him honor while he’s here to hear the praise,
Then at least let’s give him homage at the ending of his days.
Perhaps just a simple headline in a paper that would say,
Our Country is in mourning,
for a soldier died today.

Movies & Memories

23. May 2009 · Comments Off on Movies & Memories · Categories: General, History, Memoir, Military

TCM is showing war movies all weekend – right now is one of my favorites: “Battleground” about the Battle of the Bulge. As I sit here watching the 101st spend winter in Belgium, surrounded by Germans, with the fog keeping them from seeing much of anything, I remembered my own trip to Bastogne – not my first, but the one that meant the most to me.

It was November, 1988. I forget the exact date: either the 10th or 11th, a Thursday or a Friday. I know that I had graduated from NCO Leadership School the day before, at Lindsey Air Station in Wiesbaden. This was my travel day to drive back Florennes Air Base, where I had 60 days left on my tour, and I thought Bastogne was an appropriate place to visit at that particular time of year.

I didn’t pay much attention to WWII history before I was stationed in Belgium. In my high school history classes, we rarely got past the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, if we got that far. I had heard of the Battle of the Bulge, but had no idea what it was, why it mattered, or where it was fought. Then I spent a year in Florennes, not far from the Ardennes Forest, maybe a 90 minute drive from Bastogne.

I learned about WWII history, that year. It was all around me, in my face no matter where I turned. Then one late-summer day, some friends & I stopped in Bastogne on our way to Luxembourg, and I learned about America. About determination, steadfastness, and courage. About a single word answer that an American General gave to a German emissary, when invited to surrender. My hazy memory is telling me that my friends climbed on the tank in the village square, and we took their pictures (I didn’t, but only because I have acrophobia, and it was too high off the ground for me).

But that’s not the trip I was reminded of when I saw the fog surrounding the men in the movie. It was the Veterans’ Day trip. The trip with snow on the ground, with fog. And a deep silence, which is why I think it was the 10th, not the 11th. I cannot imagine that the Bastogne Memorial would be empty and silent on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of any year.

I walked silently on that hallowed ground, thinking about the soldiers who had bled & died there. That day’s fog was their shroud, and seemed to also be a time-machine. I stood on one side of the road, and all I saw on the other side were the ghostly shadows of trees poking through the fog. I could almost see the frozen, exhausted, out-numbered GI Joes, mostly hidden by the fog, dodging from tree to tree, ducking & covering, with the weather as deadly an enemy as the Germans.

I said a prayer for them, those who fought and died, and those who fought & survived to fight again elsewhere, before I got back in my truck and headed towards home.

I pray for them again this weekend, a weekend that will be spent remembering them and all like them, and honoring their sacrifices.

I Thought It Was Your Turn

13. May 2009 · Comments Off on I Thought It Was Your Turn · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Memoir, Military

So, I rather giggled over this link, courtesy of Da Blogfadddah this morning, about a funky breakroom refrigerator, the righteous cleansing of which sent seven people to the hospital, and grossed-out everyone else within smelling range; I’d bet anything that some sort of air intake vent was within or near the area in question, and that was how everyone in the building got to share the experience. That’s how it worked but in a pleasant way, at AFKN-Seoul. Our microwave was directly underneath such, and whenever anyone nuked a bag of popcorn, everyone else in the building would smell it and get hungry; one person would set off a whole chain reaction of other personnel with the serious munchies.

I don’t recall the unit refrigerator there having a serious funk; unless it might have been momentarily generated by the Korean staff’s kimchee box lunches. But bless them all, Miss Radio Yi, Miss TV Yi, Miss Finance Office Yi, Mr. Pak, Yu Mi the Receptionist and all the others, even the Boot Odishi – they were all terrifically fastidious about all that sort of thing. Never any qualms or worries about the AFKN refrigeration, but I couldn’t say the same about the previous unit refrigerator, at Det 8, Hill AFB Combat Camera.

We had a nice little break room there, with a television, and shelves for all the little snack items sold by the unit snack fund; an assortment that was so varied and usually so well-stocked that frequently had people from other units wandering in to buy their candy bars, snack cakes, soft-drinks and bottled ice teas from it. Alas, the refrigerator often fell far below the standard held by the rest of the break room. Well, what can you expect, when there are nearly a hundred people in the unit, counting military and civilians, TDY visitors and all, many of whom bring a lunch and store it in the refrigeration? It is just one of the immutable laws of the universe that leftovers will be forgotten, that healthy bits of fruit will be forgotten in the bins, to grow mushy and disgusting, and that whole colonies of mold will stake out new territories inside plastic containers, and bottles of condiments will be abandoned, far, far after their “best-if-used-by-date”. Eventually, when people passing by in the corridor outside the break room could detect the funk from the refrigerator – which happened about every month or so – someone would be voluntold to sort it out.

This usually translated to posting a notice on the fridge, notifying everyone of the date, warning them if they didn’t remove, they would loose – then arming oneself with a large double-weight trashbag on the chosen day and ruthlessly dumping everything left into it. The refrigerator usually didn’t have much sticky crud stuck to the shelves or bins, so a quick wipe-down with Clorox and hot water usually did the trick, setting up a fairly clean slate until next time.

But on one particular occasion, the reek from the fridge was especially noticeable; it had a sort of grab-around-the-throat-and-squeeze power about it, and was reaching a considerable distance down the central hallway in either direction. Obviously, there was something especially rancid, simmering away in the back forty of the refrigerator – and just by luck, I was the one administering the monthly cleansing. Really, I didn’t find anything much out of line, until I got to a thick plastic zip-lock bag, pushed to the back of one of the lower shelves … and there it was. I knew as soon as I maneuvered it carefully out of the refrigerator and towards my trash bag, swathing it in another couple of layers of plastic, just for good luck.

Before I did that, I called in some witnesses – I wanted to make sure that everyone else saw it as well; an 18-20 inch long whole fish, head, scales, tail and all, gone impressively rotten, but still recognizable, in about a cupful of unspeakably murky fluid. Everyone agreed, looking at it and uneasily at each other, that someone had gone fishing over the weekend, several weeks previously. For some reason, they brought in the fish to the unit – perhaps to present to someone else – and then forgotten it in the break room fridge.

Well, no wonder the smell was so bad, that month, with a dead fish molding away in the back.

Miscellaneous Thoughts and Wanderings

09. May 2009 · Comments Off on Miscellaneous Thoughts and Wanderings · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Military, sarcasm, Tea Time, Working In A Salt Mine...

The SA Tea Party made the final decision on a venue for our 4th of July bash – the lovely destination ranch, the Rio Cibolo Ranch, which a group of us went to visit last Saturday. I just hope the fields are still as green and lovely in July as they are right now. Well, the property is bounded on two sides by a fairly deep waterway, so I don’t suppose the water bill is as much of a challenge. There is a huge pavilion with a stage, a small arena with stadium seats, and we will probably have a larger stage put up out in the open for our main events. We’ll have live music, games, hayrides… the reading of the Declaration of Independence, and fireworks and all.

At this point, the SA Tea Party is sort of catching their collective breath, still; everything was so focused on the Tax Day event, then with sorting things out for the long hard long-distance pull. And there will be a long, hard pull: there are just too many people that are unhappy with the current administration. We make sick jokes about who the FBI infiltrator is among all the people who come to the open meetings, and wonder how many of us are now on the Homeland Security watchlist … although our security specialist (a retired LAPD officer, with his own consulting firm) has pointed out, with some humor that mostly, the working agents tend to be rather straight-laced conservatives, whose natural sympathies are with us anyway. And a lot of us are military veterans also – so it kind of boggles the mind, thinking of us all being painted as dangerous political activists and radicals. Seriously, if worse came to worse – who would come and arrest us all? Ourselves?

Note to the alphabet networks – I am looking at you, CNN – not many people outside a certain milieu were familiar with the term “tea-bagging” three weeks ago. Look, if you are going to insult and denigrate a wide swath of your public, it would help to use a term of abuse that people didn’t have to go look up a definition for. Oh, and I found this little gem courtesy of a google-search at Huffington Post

Oh, my – what delicate little flowers they are, at the Huff-Po – was that truly the worst they could find? When I think of some of the signs referencing GWB that were featured here and there at Huff-Po approved protests, I can’t help shaking my head. Poor babies – it must have been a considerable shock, finding out that so very many of the unwashed are somewhat less than totally enamored of the One. Who was the blogger who used the tag line “Did I hurt your feewings? Good!” – I can’t remember if it was Acidman or Kim du Toit.

Speaking of the One – who else besides me is pretty tired of seeing his face, or Michelle’s face all over every damned magazine on the supermarket check-out stand news-racks? It’s been three months now – are they just doing an Oprah on us? The same face on the cover of every issue. It’s worse than Tiger Beat in the days of the British invasion – it’s like Pravda, with the bright’n’shiny happy face of the Leader and his coterie on the front page and on all the covers, and in the newsreels, while the kulaks are being ground down and starved into submission, the workers are taking over the factories and running them into the ground, and the professional middle class are threatened with being gutted and reduced to camping out in a few rooms of their McMansion, cooking over a fire of sticks in the middle of the room. And I am sitting here, in front of my computer, saying “Well, gosh-darn it, you knew he was a product of Chicago machine politics for chrissakes – what the frack else did you expect?”

Oh, and I still hate my call-center job, by the way. Still can’t count on the income stream from the books to the point where I can quit it, though.

Decking The Halls…

08. December 2008 · Comments Off on Decking The Halls… · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Memoir, Military

…and the boughs, and the front of the house. Blondie and I are staying in Texas this Christmas, so we got out the Christmas tree and the various tubs of ornaments, and strings of lights. I can’t claim that we do anything remotely like the full Griswald when it comes to Christmas cheer, but we do put together a very nice traditional tree, with presents underneath and all. It’s an artificial tree – sorry. The only live trees available in Texas are half-dead by the time they are bought, are hideously expensive and shed needles all over, coming and going. The current tree is, alas, artificial and sheds needles (in the form of narrow, needle-like slips of plastic) – but was not expensive, even the first year that Blondie bought it. And it actually looks very nice, once decorated, and with equally artificial springs of poinsettia inserted between the branches, to fill in the gaps. We will leave the giant inflatables, the miles of lights, the bows and the herds of wire-form deer, the banners and ribbons and all to the various enthusiastic neighbors. Really, I wonder what the Chinese workers who manufacture this stuff think of it all … the giant inflatable Santa riding a Harley, the teeter-totter with Santa on one end, and three fabric reindeer on the other, and the eight-foot tall snow-globe a family of carolers and a blizzard of plastic fluff whirling around inside. Probably wonder about the sanity of the American consumer, not to mention their aesthetic taste. Frankly, I haven’t got the energy that some of them have, to redecorate seasonally – not just at Christmas, but every month.

I do like our own Christmas tree, though – it’s quirky, just like Mom and Dad’s tree used to be, with a similar accretion of ornaments. When Mom and Dad’s house in Valley Center burned some years ago in the Paradise fire, one of the first things that Blondie and I thought about missing was the Christmas stuff. At the time, we were pretty sure that some things had been saved out of Mom and Dad’s house. After all, we had been drilled on the eventuality of fire for years. We were fairly certain that in such an emergency, no one would spare a thought for three crumbling cardboard boxes full of Christmas stuff, stashed in the rafters of the garage – the garage which turned out to have been the first to go up in flames. Gone the 1930’s Santa-Claus lights and the crumbling four-colored printed carton they had come in, decades since. Gone the Anri Christmas angels that I had sent from Italy, the pipe-cleaner and bead ornaments that JP and I had constructed in grade school, the assorted blown-glass balls, the red and white stockings with our names knitted into the tops, which Granny Jessie had done for each of us; for Mom and Dad when they married and produced us all. Gone the hand-knit stocking for Blondie that I had bought for her at a craft-fair in Utah, with a black kitten knitted into the pattern, and her name that I had added in chain-stitch… all of that gone to ashes, which were scraped up by a bulldozer and carried away, in preparation for rebuilding the house.

Our traditional Christmas stuff is now devolved on my own collection, as eccentric as ever my parents assembled, for I now have a record of celebrating thirty years of Christmasses on my own, and all the ornaments to go with it. I only occasionally was back at Mom and Dad’s for Christmas during the time that I was overseas. In the meantime, in between time, I generated my own collection. The oldest of the lot – thirty felt-covered round ornaments, trimmed with lace, gilt ribbons, fake seed-pearls and jewels, to adorn the little plastic tree in my room in the barracks in Japan, when I first went overseas. These were augmented with a flock of little birds, made of satin and ornamented with silk embroidery – they came from India, and I bought them at a base Christmas bazaar at about the same time. Both sets have proved fairly indestructible – since they can stand a drop to a hard floor. For a couple of years while in Greece I bought a single box of ornaments from one of the high-end catalogue retailers every year: the paper-mache globes covered with red and green curlicues, the stuffed teddy-bears with little scarves, and the vintage wooden airplanes are from that period; the airplanes looked especially fine, hanging from the ends of the branches, as if they were whirling in some endless tree-shaped dog-fight. There are the terra-cotta ornaments from Portugal that look like ginger-cookies, and dozens of traditional German wooden ornaments; little Santas on the backs of whales, or in the basket of a dirigible, angels and little sleds with piles of presents, Father Time with a tiny golden key… all those bought when we were in Spain and I went TDY to Germany every January for a broadcasting conference. A handful of Anri flying angels – those bought when we passed through Rome on our way to Spain. All very traditional and conventional … until we get to the three Enterprise spaceships, and the shuttle-craft, with their tiny blinking lights. I bought the first of those when we came back to the States, the very year they brought the Star Trek ornaments out. I wish I had a Tardis ornament, but I don’t even know if they make one. The rest of the tree is filled with things bought on sale, usually after Christmas and saved for the next year. Blondie contributed four blown-glass ornaments she bought in Egypt, when she went there in 2001 for Bright Star. Those are hung very carefully at the top of the tree, being not nearly as hard-wearing as my own first Christmas ornaments.

It’s more than a Christmas tree – it’s a sort of family history, a history that only families know.

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