Military – Page 4 – The Daily Brief

Reprise: An Odd Thing to See in a Military Museum

28. November 2008 · Comments Off · Categories: Fun With Islam, General, GWOT, History, Military, War, World

(This is a reworking of an essay I wrote, now lost and unreachable in the old MT archives, in light of current events in India. It seemed to have particular resonance, in light of some informed opinion, that the attacks in Mumbai are having rather the same effect locally and to the Indian diaspora that 9/11 had on Americans.)

It wasn’t quite the oddest thing I ever saw in a military museum: for my money, that would be Edith Cavell’s dog, stuffed and mounted in the Imperial War Museum, but it was the most unsettling, the most heartbreaking. The object was in the little local museum in the northern English city of Carlisle, in a suite of rooms in the castle, dedicated to the local regiments, which had been distinguishing themselves in the service of the British Empire for two or three centuries.

My younger brother JP and sister Pippy and I had spent a couple of weeks in the Lake District, and stopped in Carlisle on our way north to Scotland, during our wandering summer of 1977. We were discovering, or in my case, rediscovering the country of our ancestors, but on the bargain basement level— staying in youth hostels, traveling on public transportation, and buying groceries in the local Tesco. JP in particular was the champion of the inexpensive lunch; purchasing a hard roll, a slab of cheese and a tomato, and then sitting on the curb outside the store entrance and eating the lot.

Our itinerary was dictated by curiosity, a list of must-see locations, and the availability of a youth hostel, which charged the equivalent of about $1.00 a night for members, and offered some primitive kitchen facilities, but limited the duration of a stay to three consecutive nights, and locked us out during the day. We had gotten terribly efficient at looking after ourselves, and locating and extracting whatever inexpensive and educational resources were available in a city or town, over and above whatever attraction had drawn us there in the first place.

The first order of sightseeing business; go see the church and/or cathedral. There was always a church or cathedral, most usually with something interesting in it, and for free, or nearly free. Next, hang out in the park; there was always a park, nearly always a pleasant place to sit and kill an hour or so, and eat whatever we had bought for lunch.
Then go see the castle. There was always a castle, possibly in ruins, and if not, there would be a small fee to get in, but there would be something fascinating and educational within. Carlisle’s cathedral was interestingly truncated, owing to a little local spot of bother called the Civil War. The castle seemed to have escaped serious damage, and we were pleased to discover the military museum, three or four tiny stone rooms, with narrow windows and cases full of old uniforms and medals, a veritable military mathom-house of memorabilia. I had begun to suspect that many of the things in this museum and in the three or four others that we had seen were donated out of despair: what on earth to do with Great-Uncle Bert’s old dress tunic? Kukri? Camp tea service? You couldn’t throw it away, donate it to Goodwill, or the English equivalent thereof, and you certainly didn’t want to give it house room, so donating it to the museum was the honorable solution. The same sort of curious things tended to show up over and over, though, and we had begun to see them as familiar old friends.
“Have you found the Queen Victoria gift tin, yet?” I asked. During some long-ago imperial war, the dear Queen had made a gift to every man in the forces of a little tin of sweets, at least a third of whom had kept the tin as a souvenir, and his descendents had given it to the local military museum.
“Two of them,” reported JP, “Over here. Right next to the piece of hardtack with a poem written on it.”

There was always a piece of fossilized and slightly bug-nibbled piece of hardtack. In one museum I had seen one with a heroic ode neatly covering the playing-card sized surface, written in neat, flowing letters.
“Where’s the cap-badge? I didn’t see it in the other room.”
There was always a cap-badge, slightly dented where it had deflected a bullet and saved the life of the wearer. Every museum had a variant on that; if not a cap-badge, then a canteen, or one of those tiny Bibles with metal covers. The only exception I ever noticed, was the small metal-covered aircrew first aid kit. It was perforated with a bullet hole. According to the inscription next to it, the bearer had also been perforated, but non-fatally.

The last and largest room in the Carlisle museum— which wasn’t much bigger than the bedroom that Pippy and I shared at home— had a large case in the center, filled with weapons for the most part: Malay knives, and ancient pistols and swords, but the most curious thing of all was on a little stand in the center.
“What’s with that?” JP asked, “It doesn’t belong here at all.”

It was a white muslin baby’s cap, one of those lacily ornate Victorian bonnets, with ruffles and eyelet lace, and dangling ties that would make a bow under the baby’s soft little chin. Our family’s christening dress was about the same style, carefully sewn with tiny, tiny stitches, out of fine cotton muslin, but our dress was in pristine condition, and this little bonnet had a number of pale rusty blotches on it. We looked at it, and wondered what on earth a baby’s cap was doing in a case of guns and knives, and I walked around to the other side of the case, and found the card that explained why.
“Oh, dear, “ I said, “They found it at the well in Cawnpore. The local regiment was one of the first to re-enter the city.” I looked at the stains, and knew what they were, and what had happened to the baby who wore that little bonnet, and I felt quite sick.
“Cawnpore?” Pippy asked, “What’s that to do with it?”

By the time I finished explaining, poor Pippy looked very green. I knew about the Sepoy Mutiny, because I read a lot, and some of Kipling’s India stories had piqued my interest in history not covered in American public schools. The British garrison— and their wives and dependents, and any number of civilians, in the town of Cawnpore stood off a brutal siege by elements of their rebelling Indian soldiers, and local nobles who thrown in their lot with the mutineers in hopes of recovering their old position and authority. Reduced by disease, shot and starvation, the survivors had surrendered on the understanding that they be allowed to take boats down river, but they were massacred at the landing, in front of a large crowd, in as grisly and brutal a fashion as can be imagined.

Only one boat managed to float away, but all but five men were eventually recaptured and killed. Two hundred or so women and children who survived the massacre at the boat landing were taken to a small house close by, and held as hostages in horrible conditions. When the avenging British forces and their loyal allies were a day or so away, the leader of the mutineers in Cawnpore gave orders that those last surviving women and children be killed. They were hacked to death by a half-dozen men from the local bazaar, and the bodies thrown into a nearby well. Men from the returning British relief force later reported finding that house awash with blood, throughout all the rooms.

The horror of that particular massacre inflamed British popular opinion to an extraordinary degree. Sentimental and earnestly chivalrous, seeing it as their special duty to protect women and children, to live by the code of a gentleman, to keep promises— the actions of the Indian mutineers at Cawnpore, in breaking a truce and killing defenseless wives and children, seemed calculated to outrage every one of those values held dear by the typical Victorian. Commanders and soldiers came to look at the blood on the floor of the murder house— shoe-deep by some accounts— and resolved that there could be neither parley or mercy with those who had done this. The gentlemanly gloves came off, and the Mutiny was put down, with no quarter asked or given.

Captured mutineers were dragged back to Cawnpore and made to lick the floor of the massacre house, before they were hung, or tied over the mouths of cannon and blown to pieces. It’s all in the history books— this one is most thorough, and I recommend it. In reflecting on this, and on the running battles being fought in the streets of Mumbai – which is India’s modern Wall Street and Hollywood all mixed together – I wonder how much history those responsible for these bloody scenes at hotels, a hospital and a railway staion may know, or do they only know their own? I wonder if they have any clue of how much they risk putting themselves as far beyond the pale as the Cawnpore mutineers, all for making a show for their fellows and sympathizers? Eventually, when a group of terrorists violate enough norms, those who have been made targents will run out of any patience and sympathy, and feel no particular obligation to observe them in the breach. Having sown a storm, I wonder if those who sponsered a coordinated attack on India’s major city have any notion they are in danger of reaping a whirlwind. It has happened before, you know. In that very country and not to terribly far away.

A baby’s little white ruffled cap, faintly spotched with pale rusty bloodstains: we looked at it again, and went away, very quietly.

Never Give Up, Never Give In

04. November 2008 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, Politics

(clip posted by Simon at Classical Values, and Power and Control)

Don’t give it to him – make him steal it.

Touching History

31. October 2008 · Comments Off · Categories: Air Force, Domestic, General, History, Military, Old West, Wild Blue Yonder, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

My… is it Friday already? The end of October, with tomorrow being the Dia de los Muertos… or as we plain Anglos call it, the eve of All Saint’s Day. Time does have when you’re having fun. And I am having fun this week. My hours at the Corporate Call Center just up the road were slashed to the bone this week, allegedly to accommodate their slow time of the year. Perhaps I’ll get them back in November, perhaps not. It’s a job that I am privately most unenthusiastic about, although you’d never know it to hear me answer the incoming calls with brisk and chipper enthusiasm. I would not mind very much actually – I’d miss the money but not much else, as I the local publisher that I am doing work for has actually begun to pay me on a regular basis and shoot interesting little jobs my way.

The two most recent are transcribing old documents – one not all that old, since there is a Star Wars reference in it, but the other might have some actual historical interest, being a pocket year-diary from 1887, bound in crumbling red leather. The owner of it plans to sell, and wants an accurate transcription – or at least, as accurate a transcription of the contents as is humanly possible. The reason he is willing to pay someone to do it – is because the diary-keeper wrote in occasionally illegible ink, couldn’t spell for s**t, had an uncertain grasp of the principals governing the use of capital letters and appears to have been completely uninterested in using punctuation. On the plus side, each entry is only about one run-on sentence long, and three-quarters of those entries are variants on ‘spent the four Noon at Ranch/town …. No news … fair and cloudy to day’

It’s the other entries that are mildly fascinating, for the diary-keeper seems to have been a manager for a cattle ranch in the Pleasant Valley of Arizona, and on the periphery of the murderous Graham-Tewksbury feud. His apparent employer was one of the owners of the “Hashknife Outfit” – famed in West Texas lore and in the books of Zane Grey, so perhaps this is why the current owner thinks the diary is worth something to a collector. I don’t see any evidence so far that the diary-keeper did anything more than pop around like a squirrel on crack all through that year, from town to the ranch and up to various line camps, to Flagstaff for the 4th of July celebrations, seeing to his various duties, which must have ranged from the office-managerial to overseeing round-ups and short drives of cattle from the back-country to the railway (which paralleled Route 66 through Arizona.) There were a few interesting slips of paper tucked into a pocket in the back of the diary, like a bank receipt from a bank in Weatherford, Texas, long strings of figures which appear to be a tally of cattle and a scribbled recipe for some kind of remedy, featuring a lot of ingredients that today are controlled substances (belladonna? Sulphate of zinc and sugar of lead, one drachm) Still and all, as Blondie said – he was dedicated enough to actually sit down and make an entry, every day, in a whole year of days in which one day was mostly like any other, full of work and responsibility, and very little in the way of amusement, or at least amusement worth mentioning specifically. Still, an interesting peep-hole into the past, and another life, distant and yet close.

The other document is a rollicking memoir written by a WWII veteran, who spent nearly 18 months in the China-Burma-India theater, flying cargo over the notorious “Hump” – the Himalayas. At that time, there were large chunks of the land below their air route that was simply white on their maps; never explored by land or by air. This writer lost some friends to the perils of high-altitude flight among mountains that were sometimes even higher, but his exuberance and energy come through in his memoir, quite unquenched. His personality is a little more accessible than the ranch manager of 1887, and he spent a little more time noticing marvelous things like a spectacular show of St. Elmo’s fire lighting up his aircraft during a flight through a high-altitude blizzard, or the white-washed towers of a mountain monastery, perched at the top of a 6,000 foot sheer drop. He wondered about the faint lights seen at night, from tiny villages far below the aluminum wings of his aircraft, wondered if the people living in those simple houses even knew that young men had come from so very far away, to fly a perilous re-supply route over the dark land below. Did it make any difference to their lives? Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. The flier went home, married his girl, lived a long and successful life. Among the little things to be included in the transcription of his memoir was an envelope of papers – receipts from a grand hotel in Calcutta… and a BX ration card, in which Blondie and I were amused to note that he had maxed out his beer ration for the month of September, 1943—but only purchased one bar of soap.

The history, the past, near and a little distant, in bits of yellowed paper, a year of entries bound in faded red leather or eighteen eventful and frequently nerve-wracking months racking up 800 flying hours. It’s all there, our history. We must remember where we came from, who we are – who our ancestors were, and how they built their lives and did their work. It’s not far distant, it’s more than a few tedious chapters in a history textbook written by an academic with an ideological ax to grind. Our history is real people, meeting challenges and accepting responsibility with courage, grace and humor. It’s why I write books, to try and get people in touch with that history again, to connect with our ancestors. To remember who we are, and where we came from.

(Still taking pre-orders for the Adelsverein Trilogy, here The official release is December 10, and I have lined up some signings locally – schedule is here. Also a review of Book One – The Gathering just appeared in the Nov/Dec issue of True West (dead tree version) ! It’s on page 91, for those that are interested, but alas, no links – the True West website only goes as far as… September)

An Old Mission Church Half Tumbled Down

26. September 2008 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, Old West, World

That is just what it was, when the building which is the premier landmark in San Antonio – and perhaps all of the rest of Texas – first achieved fame immortal, in the short and bloody space of an hour and a half, just before sunrise on a chill spring morning in 1836. People who come to visit today, with an image in their mind from the movies about it – from John Wayne’s version, and the more recent 2004 movie, or from sketch-maps in books about the desperate, fourteen-day siege are usually taken back to discover that it is so small. So I know, because I thought so the first time I visited it as an AF trainee on town-pass in 1978. And it is small – one of those Spanish colonial era buildings, in limestone weathered to the color of old ivory. That chapel is only a remnant of a sprawling complex of buildings. Itself and the so-called ‘Long Barracks’ are the only things remaining of what was once called the Mission San Antonio de Valero, given it’s better known appellation by a company of Spanish cavalry stationed there in the early 19th century – they called it after the cottonwood trees around their previous station of Alamo de Parras, in Coahuila. It was the northernmost of a linked chain of five mission complexes, threaded like baroque pearls on a green ribbon, and originally established to tend to the spiritual needs and the protection of local Christianized Indian tribes. The missions were secularized at the end of the 18th century, the lands around distributed to the people who had lived there. Their chapels became local parish churches – while the oldest of them all became a garrison.

There is in existence a birds-eye view map of San Antonio in 1873, a quarter century after the last stand of Travis and Bowie’s company that shows a grove of trees in rows behind the apse of the old chapel building. In the year that the map was made, the chapel and the remaining buildings were still a garrison of sorts – an Army supply depot, and the plaza in front of it a marshalling yard. One wonders if any of the supply sergeants of that time or any of the laborers unloading the wagons bringing military supplies up from the coast and designated for the garrisons of the Western frontier forts gave a thought to the building they worked in. Did they think the place was haunted, perhaps? Did they hear whispers and groans in the dark, think anything of odd stains on the floors and walls, of regular depressions in the floor where defensive trenches had been dug at the last? What did they think, piling up crates, barrels and boxes, in the place that the final handful of survivors had made their last stand, against the tide of Santa Anna’s soldiers flooding over the crumbling walls?

Probably not much– whitewash covers a lot. And a useful, sturdy building is just that – useful. By the 1870s, those Regular Army NCOs working in there were veterans of the Civil War, and perhaps haunted enough by their own war, just lately over. The growing city had spread beyond those limits that William Travis, David Crocket and James Bowie would have seen, looking down from those very same walls.

In 1836 that cluster of buildings, and the old church with it’s ornate niches and columns twisted like lengths of barley sugar sat a little distance from the outskirts of the best established provincial town in that part of Spanish and Mexican Texas, out in the meadows by a loop of clear, narrow river fringed by rushes and willows. San Antonio de Bexar, mostly shortened then to simply “Bexar”, was then just a close clustered huddle of adobe brick buildings around two plazas and the stumpy spire of the church of San Fernando. It is a challenge to picture it, in the minds eye, to take away the tall glass buildings all around, the lawns and carefully tended flowering shrubs, to ignore the sounds of traffic, the SATrans busses belching exhaust, and see it as it might have appeared, a hundred and sixty years ago. I think there would have been cottonwood trees, close by. Thirsty trees, they plant themselves across the west, wherever there is water in plenty, their leaves trembling incessantly in the slightest breeze. There might have also have been some fruit orchards planted nearby – the 1873 map certainly shows them. But otherwise, it would have been open country, rolling meadows star-scattered with trees, and striped across by two roads; the Camino Real, the King’s road, towards Nacogdoches in the east, and the road towards the south, towards the Rio Grande. In the distance to the north, a long blue-green rise of hills marks the edge of what today is called the Balcones Escarpment. It is the demarcation between a mostly flat and fertile plain which stretches to the Gulf Coast, and the high and windswept plains of the Llano, haunted by fierce and war-loving Indians.

This is the place where three very different men came to, in that fateful year that the Texians rebelled against the rule of the dictatorship of what the knowledgeable settlers of Texas called the “Centralistas” – the dictatorship of the central government in Mexico City.

(More to follow)

6 June 44

06. June 2008 · Comments Off · Categories: General, History, Military, War, World

So this is one of those historic dates that seems to be slipping faster and faster out of sight, receding into a past at such a rate that we who were born afterwards, or long afterwards, can just barely see. But it was such an enormous, monumental enterprise – so longed looked for, so carefully planned and involved so many soldiers, sailors and airmen – of course the memory would linger long afterwards.

Think of looking down from the air, at that great metal armada, spilling out from every harbor, every estuary along England’s coast. Think of the sound of marching footsteps in a thousand encampments, and the silence left as the men marched away, counted out by squad, company and battalion, think of those great parks of tanks and vehicles, slowly emptying out, loaded into the holds of ships and onto the open decks of LSTs. Think of the roar of a thousand airplane engines, the sound of it rattling the china on the shelf, of white contrails scratching straight furrows across the moonless sky.

Think of the planners and architects of this enormous undertaking, the briefers and the specialists in all sorts of arcane specialties, most of whom would never set foot on Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha or Utah Beach. Many of those in the know would spend the last few days or hours before D-day in guarded lock-down, to preserve security. Think of them pacing up and down, looking out of windows or at blank walls, wondering if there might be one more thing they might have done, or considered, knowing that lives depended upon every tiny minutiae, hoping that they had accounted for everything possible.

Think of the people in country villages, and port towns, seeing the marching soldiers, the grey ships sliding away from quays and wharves, hearing the airplanes, with their wings boldly striped with black and white paint – and knowing that something was up – But only knowing for a certainty that those men, those ships and those planes were heading towards France, and also knowing just as surely that many of them would not return.

Think of the commanders, of Eisenhower and his subordinates, as the minutes ticked slowly down to H-Hour, considering all that was at stake, all the lives that they were putting into this grand effort, this gamble that Europe could be liberated through a force landing from the West. Think of all the diversions and practices, the secrecy and the responsibility, the burden of lives which they carried along with the rank on their shoulders. Eisenhower had in his pocket the draft of an announcement, just in case the invasion failed and he had to break off the grand enterprise; a soldier and commander hoping for the best, but already prepared for the worst.

Think on this day, and how the might of the Nazi Reich was cast down. June 6th was for Hitler the crack of doom, although he would not know for sure for many more months. After this day, his armies only advanced once – everywhere else and at every other time, they fell back upon a Reich in ruins. Think on this while there are still those alive who remember it at first hand.

Later, courtesy of Belmont Club – Another war, another June 6th, another battlefield in France –

Yet another view, cortest of Da Blogfaddah – the real ‘Greatest Generation’, and why we should pay some attention.

Big Screen and Operatic

06. April 2008 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Memoir, Military, Veteran's Affairs, World

Being a child of the later baby-boom, of course I remember seeing Charlton Heston on the big screen – the very big screen at the drive in, when Mom and Dad packed JP and Pippy and I into the back of the trusty jade-green Plymouth station wagon for an evening at the double-feature. We were all in our pajamas for this sort of excursion, with our pillows and blankets in the back; lamentably, we usually fell asleep before seeing very much of the first feature, let alone the second.

But I do have a hazy memory of him as El Cid, in desert exile, seen through the windshield of the Plymouth, between Mom and Dad’s heads, as Ben Hur – especially the bone-crunching chariot race – a very much better one of him as Moses in The Ten Commandments – this one at one Pasadena’s gloriously ornate picture palaces, and of him as the devious and worldly Cardinal Richelieu in Richard Lesters’ Three Musketeers and Four Musketeers. Mom always said it was because of his background in classical theater, that he could swish about in historical costume so convincingly.

So, he was about the biggest star that any of us had ever heard of, when he came to Zaragoza, Spain sometime in the late 1980s, and the Public Affairs office informed us that we had a chance for an interview. We were all of a twitter; Zaragoza was kind of a backwater – I used to compare it to Bakersfield – and whereas it had a lovely old downtown, a cathedral (two cathedrals), a Roman bridge and a Moorish castle, practically everywhere else in Spain had better, more beautiful, more historic and better preserved. Our radio and television broadcasters there had practically no chance of doing celebrity interviews; I saw more interesting and famous people come through Sondrestrom, Greenland than I ever did in Zaragoza.

What was he doing in Zaragoza, of all places? Filming the commentary for this program series, on location in the old Alcazar; of which he said jokingly during our interview that it was practically the only castle in Spain that he hadn’t been to before. We were the only news outlet to get a TV interview with him on that trip; he was terribly busy with the location shoots, and it wasn’t the sort of enterprise that needed additional publicity anyway. We all liked to think that it was because of his service connection that we even got in the door. He couldn’t have been more gracious or considerate to our two nervous young airmen who shot the interview.

No, I did not do the interview; I came up with the questions for our staffer to ask, since the ones suggested by the Public Affairs officer were embarrassingly amateurish. We all watched the raw video of the interview afterwards and marveled – because he was a pro. We could use practically every second of the footage we taped, he was that good. Most people we did interviews with were nervous, fidgety and stiff. They radiated discomfort; it came off them in little wavy lines that you could almost see, like those used in cartoons to signify a stink. We usually had to spend a lot of time putting them at ease, and a lot of video time and editing to just get something useable that didn’t make them and us look like idiots.

But Charlton Heston sat still, graciously playing to the camera – (Of course! He was an actor!) – he didn’t fidget nervously. His responses were thoughtful, smooth, as composed and literate as a small essay or sonnet. No awkward umms and pauses, no false starts; he was at ease, completely comfortable and polished to a high gloss in a way that most of us- even those who had interviewed various currently popular celebs before – had never seen. He wasn’t just a star; besides being a military veteran, he was a total pro in a way that you rarely see these days.

(Note – I am a bit off Amazon.com, and protesting their recent decision to pressure POD publishers into using their print service by sending all my links for books and DVDs to Barnes and Noble. Take that, Jeff Bezos!)

Food Fight

09. March 2008 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, History, Military, War

Interesting take on international relations beginning with WWII, in this animated short. Seriously warped and very creative, although you might develope the munchies after watching.

The Civil Rights March That Never Was

21. February 2008 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, War

Interesting post about an event that never happened… but still did a thing to our world. Scroll down to the “DMW Flashback: The Greatest March ” entry

About twenty years before our current popular culture records such an event happening.

Or not.

Another Fine Mess

17. January 2008 · Comments Off · Categories: General, General Nonsense, GWOT, Home Front, Media Matters Not, Military, Rant, sarcasm, Veteran's Affairs, War

Oh, so it looks like the ever beloved New York Times has nobly volunteered itself to be the Piniata o’the Month for unleashing yet again – in the words of Maxwell Smart “the old Krazed Killer Veteran Story”. You know, the same old, same old pathetic round of stories that those of us over a certain age saw in the 1970s – and not just in the news but on every damn cop show; the freak who got a taste for killin’ and brought it home with him after the war. Honest to key-rist, NYTimes-people – what is your assignments editor these days smoking these days? I am a little late to joining the predictable pile-on from every quarter, which looks like it includes just about everyone short of the VFW.

At least it’s nice to know legacy media drones can do a google search these days and assemble a laundry list of whatever it was they were looking for in the intertubules. A step up from a couple of years ago, all things considered. But… and that is a big but there, almost as big as a Michael Moore butt…it is just that – a laundry list of incidents where someone who was a military veteran of a tour in Afghanistan or Iraq was subsequently involved in or thought to be involved in a murder. Or manslaughter, or something.

No context, no analysis – just OMFG, the Krazed Killer Veterans are Koming (and it’s all the military’s fault!) Look, NYTimes-people, coincidence is not co-f**king causality. Sometimes, it is just a co-incidence, and laying on a smarmy layer of sympathy and glycerin tears over the poor *sniff* innocent *sniff* widdle misdiagnosed *sob* veterans does not make your s**t-sandwich of a story any more palatable. Not to veterans and their families.

Not only can we remember this kind of story post-Vietnam, but the very senior among us can remember it post-WWII. I am reliably informed that there was even a certain amount of heartburn over an anticipated propensity for free-lance violence on the part of returning veterans from the Civil War – and no, I will be not sidetracked into a discussion of how the still-expanding western frontier managed to provide an outlet for all of those Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs seeking post-war excitement.

My point would be that when this same-old-same-old went down post-hostilities every other damn time, the experience of military service was a bit more evenly spread among the general male population. The general reader had enough friends and relations in his immediate circle to take the whole Krazed Killer Veterans are Koming narrative with a large handful of salt. They knew enough veterans personally to not take what they read in the papers as necessarily the whole truth, and to put the sensational stories of post-war veteran crime into context. And they could blow them off as just another grab at the headlines.

But service in the military these days draws on a smaller sub-set of the population – and unfortunately that set does not include the media or cultural elite. Tripe like the NYT’s Krazed Killer Veteran – if it is not challenged and countered robustly- will soon solidify into conventional wisdom, just like it did with Vietnam veterans. And that, my little scribbling chickadees at the NY Times – is not going to happen again. Welcome to attitude adjustment, Times-folks. I can promise a real interesting and educational time for you over the next couple of days. Take notes. They will come in handy, especially for the next time you are assigned a story about military veterans.

Later: (Update from Iowahawk, too delicious to leave unlinked. Beware, NYTimes- this one is gonna leave a mark!)

Still later: And so will this blast from Col. Peters. My advice to the NYTimes writers is to load up on Midol, as well as taking notes.

Dulce et Decorum

06. January 2008 · Comments Off · Categories: General, GWOT, History, Iraq, Military, Veteran's Affairs, War, World

I suppose it is only one of those vast cosmic coincidences that mil-blogger Andrew Olmstead would be killed in an ambush in Iraq at about the same time that George Macdonald Fraser died of cancer in his 80s. On the surface they would seem to have had nothing much in common at all – save for being writers and having similar terminating dates on their memorials. Different ages, nationalities, different professional experience and all that… but one similarity – they both were soldiers and wrote about their experiences in uniform in a way that people who weren’t military could connect to and begin to understand something about what motivates men (and women, too) to take up a lonely position on the walls.

It’s one of those elemental and primal things, I suspect – almost the first obligation of a citizen to a community is to take up arms and defend it. Most Americans, or Brits or western Europeans have lived so long in relative safety that most people feel this duty can be farmed out to specialists; no need to serve in the same way as all adult male citizens of ancient Athens served as their cities army, or the Colonial militias, or rangers on the Texas frontier needed to defend their own isolated communities. The downside to this specialization is that most citizens – most especially our political and intellectual elite have little to do with the military, or that part of their community from which the serving military is drawn. Andrew Olmstead and other military bloggers have tried over the last five years with some success to bridge this experience gap, to convey to people half a world away what it is like at the point of the spear in this war.

G.M. Fraser is most famed as the creator of Flashman, the Victorian era rogue-hero, who managed to participate in just about every important 19th century event and meet up with every prominent personality of the time – usually unwillingly and glimpsed over a shoulder as he fled with great speed, buttoning up his trousers. His memoir of his own time as a soldier in WWII. Quartered Safe out Here or the adventures of his alter-ego Lieutenant Dand O’Neill in the post-war British Army as related in the McAuslan Trilogy, is a little less known than the flamboyant and fictional Flashman but very well worth reading. The O’Neill-McAuslan stories especially are a peep into the world of a military that if you take away the superficial trappings, the specific-era technology and the very specific slang… is timeless as it is familiar.

I kind of picture Fraser and Olmstead, sitting quietly together with a bottle of especially fine Scotch in some otherworld officers’ club, swapping stories and memories and eventually getting quite merry. For they had quite a lot in common, and one of them – to judge on what they wrote about being soldiers would have been agreement with this sentiment;

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods,

Thomas Babington Macauley – Lays of Ancient Rome

A Sunday Morning at the End of the World

07. December 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, War

“Life in the wide world goes on much as it has these past age, full of its own comings and goings, scarcely aware of the existence of hobbits… for which I am very thankful.” – Gandalf, from “The Fellowship of the Ring”

There are some things that are so obvious that 20-20 hind-sight is not required, and Sunday, December 7th 1941 is one of them. The events of a couple of hours in the skies over a tiny Pacific Island previously known more as a tourist destination and a source for sugar and pineapples created a rift across the American consciousness, an abrupt demarcation between “then” and “now”. Very much like the effect of 9-11, a snap of a cosmically huge cracker into two pieces; you could look across to the other half of the cracker, and see that on either side of the chasm everything appeared to look just the same… but in your heart, you knew that things were not the same, and would never be quite the same again.

It was a smaller world, that America of seven decades ago, a very local, insular and insulated world, and one which moved comparatively slowly. Only the wealthiest or most adventurous traveled widely. Those who did travel did so by train, or passenger steamship in varying degrees of luxury. Passenger air travel was in its infancy, an exotic and expensive curiosity, as was television – a fancy futuristic gadget displayed at the 1939 Worlds’ Fair. People got their news from newspapers and movie news reels, from weekly magazines like “Life” and “The Saturday Evening Post”, and from the radio. Telephones were large clumsy black objects, nine out of ten on a party line, if you had one at all in your home. Urgent news came by telegram, a little slip of paper delivered by a bicycle messenger.

There was a war on, in that year of 1941; a war that been brewing for years before it finally burst into the open. Europe had been at war and China… poor fractured China, had been racked and wrecked by warlords, civil war and the Japanese for most of a decade. To Americans, it was all very tragic… but it was happening somewhere else. America of 1941 was built on a century and half of emigration by people who had consciously chosen to leave the old world with its resentments and quarrels behind. The consensus among most ordinary working Americans was that it was none of our business and best to keep out of it. A bill to draft military-age men had just barely been passed, the standing regular Army and Navy were insular little worlds all their own. The catastrophe of our own Civil War was just passing out of living memory, but recollection of World War I remained quite vivid, along with the conviction that we had been suckered into participation against our best interests. Asia’s quarrels and Europe’s quarrels were nothing to do with Americans and there was an ocean – which took better than a week to cross by ship – between us and the belligerent parties anyway.

And then one Sunday morning, under a tropical blue sky, all those happy assumptions went up in showers of smoke, explosions and flame. We may not have had an interest in the quarrels of others… but those quarrels definitely had an interest in us. And we were reminded again, those of us who forgotten or chosen to put that knowledge to one side, that the world is with us always.

A long while ago, I read an essay about the day after Pearl Harbor – can’t remember where, or by whom – but one of the memories recorded was from a person who had lived on or near the big Navaho Reservation, in the Southwest. On the morning of Monday, December 8th, 1941 – so this person recalled – every able-bodied male on the reservation over the age of seventeen showed up at their local post offices, carrying a gun and wanting to volunteer for the war… a war that had chosen them.

Memorial Day Links

11. November 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Iraq, Memoir, Military, War

Two essays for this day, the eleventh day of the elevenths month: First – Austin Bay and second, my own reminiscence of my great-uncle William

Later: from Youtube, via my computer genius friend who sent it to me this morning – “A Pittance of Time“.

Happy Birthday, Devil-Dogs!

10. November 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, History, Military

USMC, 232 years today and still kicking ass and taking names!

Now, y’all go and party like it’s 1775, you hear?

Good Grief, Here We Go Again

09. November 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, General Nonsense, Military, Rant

According to this story, this lot of blue-nosed busy-bodies is having another go at banning mags like Penthouse and Playboy from being sold in military PXs and bookstores on base. God save us, and as a small “f” feminist and mother I object to acres of objectified flesh on display next to the Air Force Times and “Family Circle” as much as any other woman with taste.

But hey, to each their own. I am fully cognizant of the fact that the military is largely made up of men. Most of them are young men, supposedly straight, and historically with an abiding interest in the female form – either in the flesh or pictorially. This is just one of those facts of life that one has to accept, as tacky as the morally over-fastidious may find it. Like the poor and recipes for tuna-noodle casserole that call for a can of cream of mushroom soup, these things are with us always. I can adjust, although apparently the good Reverend cannot.

Because, you see… the BX/PX Navy Exchange are there to supply the military community with the materiel items they need. Think of it as Wally-World with cammies and jungle boots. Embrace that concept, my dear little well-meaning anti-porn crusaders; the stuff for sale in military exchanges is there because the military members want to buy it – not necessarily because it has been judged good for them, or in good taste. And in overseas military bases, there is often no other alternative than the BX/PX, other than mail order.

Getting on a blue-nosed high-horse about banning certain magazines being for sale in the BX-PX is the start of a slippery slope – which is why I give a damn in the first place. The danger is that if every moral crusader and his brother, or sister can make a show of their virtue by pitching a fit about magazines whose appeal is contingent on displaying acres of siliconized boobies and Brazilian bikini-waxed hoo-hoos… well, what can be next, then? Eco-crusaders banning car magazines? Feminists wanting drive out “Cosmopolitan” or “Martha Stewart Living”?

I can very well recall how “The Last Temptation of Christ” was ostentatiously dropped from the Exchange inventory, never mind that some of us stationed overseas wanted to watch it, even if only to see what the fuss was about. The book and magazine selection used to run the whole political gamut, right to left and every shade and relevancy in between – but allow someone to burnish their image by engaging in a campaign to ban this, that or the other for the ostensible good of all military members… not good. It treats members of the military like children, with the good reverend and his ilk deciding what they think is good for them to have. And it sets a damn bad precedent.

I may not like the skin mags much – but someone obviously buys them, and if the BX/PX is in the business of supplying what military members buy… well, then… there you go. They are the military Walmart, not the YMCA.

Scroll down and take the poll in the middle of the story.

Newsflash: The Truth about the Service Academies

18. September 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, General Nonsense, Military, sarcasm, World

Apparently, it comes as an earth-shattering surprise to this student writer that the service academies… you know, West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy (and mustn’t forget the Coasties as well) are run by the various military services as a means of producing officers… and that the students of the various academies are, in fact, members of the military.

What a shocker. As Blondie remarked, in awed disbelief, “Wow… Did she go to college just for the drugs?”

In other late breaking developments, water is revealed to be wet, the Pope is Catholic and bears crap in the woods. And it is nice to know that just about anyone can get into college and write for the student publication, these days.

I can’t wait to see what other startling news is revealed in upcoming segments of this multi-part article.

Later: More acid remarks and comments from Andrea Harris, here

A Jolly Good Time Was Had by All: Pvt. Beauchamp

08. August 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, GWOT, Home Front, Iraq, Media Matters Not, Military, World

Well, that was fun; sort of what I imagine a fox-hunt to be, with a pack of hounds and a merry collection of red-coated hunters on swift steeds. The successful conclusion of the milblogosphere kerfuffle-du-jour, the beat-down of aspiring fabulist Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp was just like one of those exhilarating hunts beloved by viewers of the very high-quality BBC dramas that have been exported to the lonely outposts of Peoria, Tujunga and Boise for lo, these many years.

There was the wily fox; not as wily as he thought he was, obviously… spinning an oh-so-tempting yarn for the editor of TNR, who eagerly snapped it up. And over there is a hound, a hound with a very clever nose who thinks something stinks and begins to bay, and a huntsman with a horn blows “tally-ho”, as the hounds quarter the rough ground, yapping noisily as they discover more and more interesting little discrepancies. No wounded woman at FOB Falcon? A small graveyard and not a dumping ground for victims of an atrocity? And where are the officers and NCOs, and how the hell is it possible for a clumsy tracked vehicle to run over a nimble street-mutt anyway? And for someone to find himself jaded and degraded by war… before he even arrives in theater?

So the hunt went off, in full cry, hounds and horses pounding over the rolling field and between the trees, spilling through the gaps in the fences, in hot pursuit of the nimble fox… who runs and runs and runs, twisting and backtracking. But every time he looks over his shoulder, the pack and the hunters are closer behind. And when the fox looks ahead, suddenly there is another hunt… a hunt of grim-faced people in mottled green and brown cammies, with lots of stripes on their sleeves or dull-metal stuff on their collars.

And the fox runs to ground. But he is hauled out by the scruff of his neck by the grim-faced people, and held so that everyone in the milling crowd… the hounds, the hunters, a great crowd of spectators can take a good long look. The fox squeaks out a few words admitting that everything he wrote was not true, whereupon he is sentenced to clean latrines with his long bushy tail for the foreseeable future.

Oh, there was a hunt-saboteur who tried to run interference for the fox, insisting that everything the fox said was of a high degree of truthiness… most everything had been confirmed by other foxes and experts, but that he just couldn’t share their names just yet, and why was everyone being so mean?

Well, that’s what the hunt-saboteur was saying just as he got trampled by the hunt, so he went off on vacation, and is there still, nursing some bruises and wondering what he did to deserve this, no doubt.

I shouldn’t worry, though. There’ll be another fox and another hunt, any time now. Just listen for the hounds and the sound of a horn, ringing over the blogosphere. And it will be fun!

Renaissance Man

15. July 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, Old West, World

Among those brawling, restless borderers drawn to Texas like a trout going upstream during the tumultuous decade of the 1830s was a tall, ambitious and somewhat eccentrically skilled young man from Tennessee named John Salmon Ford. Like fellow adventurers, James Bowie, William Barrett Travis, and Sam Houston, his personal life was already fairly checkered, including one divorce. Unlike the first two, Ford would live through the tumultuous affair that was the Republic of Texas. Like Sam Houston, he would survive all the vicissitudes that an active life on the Texas frontier could throw at him, and die in bed at the ripe old age (for the 19th century) of 82. I assume he was mildly surprised by this happy chance. He had survived the usual accidents and epidemics of an age which predated antibiotics and germ theory in general, any but the crudest of surgeries, and routine vaccination for anything other than smallpox. He had also survived service in two wars and innumerable campaigns along the borders and against various hostile Indian tribes, several rounds of frontier exploration, election to public office… and as a newspaper editor, in the days when public discourse was conducted metaphorically with a set of brass knuckles.

He arrived in Texas in 1836 at the age of 21, having missed Santa Anna’s campaign against the recalcitrant Texans, and Sam Houston’s momentous victory over him at San Jacinto by a bare month. That was about the last significant historical event in Texas that John S. Ford would miss. He would be in the thick of it for the next sixty years, and at the end of his life he would sit down and turn his pen to writing his memoirs, which would fairly double as a history of Texas in the 19th century.

Over that time, Ford embraced a variety of causes with vigorous if sometimes unwise enthusiasm: unionism, temperance, know-nothingism, and secession, and education for the deaf. But he began his career in Texas with a medical practice in the settlement of San Augustine. He had studied medicine in Tennessee, with a local doctor, and under the rather sketchy standards of the time was qualified to hang out a shingle. He spent eight years there, practicing medicine, teaching Sunday school, and riding as a volunteer ranger with a series of local companies… including one commanded by Jack Hays. He also taught himself law. One supposes that San Augustine was a small town, where residents had to double-up on various jobs. In 1844 he was elected to the Texas Legislature as a pro-annexation platform, and took himself off to Washington on the Brazos. He served a term, married (for the second time) and decided to give up medicine for the newspaper business, specifically a weekly paper called the Texas National Register.

Ford was very much a partisan of Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto, who was not all that popular in Austin; Ford leapt to his defense with gusto. He and his partner changed the name of the paper to the “Texas Democrat”, and campaigned persistently for such things as more and better schools, and effective defense of the frontier. It was for the time, a rather liberal newspaper… and Ford participated gleefully in every ruckus raised in a state where the political scene usually resembled the ‘tomcats in a sack’ model. But in late 1845, Ford’s wife fell ill, and soon died, in spite of all he could do. Grief-stricken, he took himself off to join the company that his old friend Jack Hays was raising… for Mexico was disputing with the United States over the Texas border. Ford eventually became the regimental adjutant, and from his practice of writing “rest in peace” or “RIP” below his signature on the required reports of casualties, the nickname of “Old Rip”, which followed him for the rest of his life.
More »

Memo: On Nothing Certain Events

13. July 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: General, GWOT, Iraq, Media Matters Not, Military, Rant, sarcasm, Veteran's Affairs, World

To: Senator John Murtha, D. Penn (12th District)
From: Sgt Mom
Regarding: A Certain Matter in Regards to Certain Marines

1. That would be the Marines accused of murdering civilians in Haditha, Iraq in November of 2005, by you among a host of others.

2. This story seems to indicate that the whole case is falling apart faster than the Duke Lacross rape case. (see attached)

3. I, and other veterans await your apology to those Marines charged. You were quick enough to pile on with accusations of war crimes and atrocities, using the handy pulpit afforded to you as a member of Congress…. regardless of how it might have affected the outcome of an investigation and/or trial.

4. I’d like to see the apology given the same placement on the front page, and the same depth of coverage as your original statements, but I am not holding my breath.

Sincerely,
Sgt. Mom

PS: Congressman Murtha’s contact information is here. For… ummm. Whatever. (Keep it civil, people…)

Wrong Kind of Fireworks

09. July 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Air Force, Domestic, General, Military

Baldilocks has a story up this morning about a McGuire AFB loadmaster who was ~~killed~~ shot over the weekend. Seems some guy drove to the 22yr old airman’s home on Wed evening (umm, that would be July 4), and shot him in the chest, then killed himself.

The airman, Jonathan Schrieken, is in critical condition at Cooper University Hospital in Camden.

He and his family need your prayers and good thoughts. For that matter, so does the family of the ~~killer~~ shooter.

Authorities ~~have no idea what prompted the shooting~~ admit the ~~killer~~ shooter left 2 suicide notes, but the AP articles doesn’t mention that. Authorities do not know whether the two 22-yr olds even knew each other.

News Article

UPDATE: I should have followed the links in Juliette’s post before I posted this. She got the news from LGF. LGF posted an email from a reader who ~~knew~~ knows the airman, and has lots more details about the ~~killer’s~~ shooter’s motivation, which the AP chose to leave out of their article.

[The airman] had been on leave here in Ohio and got back to his home off base and was unpacking stuff from his car when this 22 year old guy walked up to him and asked him if he lived in the house. When Jon said yes, the guy said “not any more” and shot him point blank in the chest. He tried to shoot him again, but his gun jammed. Jonathan made it into the house. The guy then shot himself. Turns out the guy left a couple of suicide notes stating how much he hated the military and he wanted to go out making a statement, so he chose to make his statement on Independence Day trying to kill a soldier.

UPDATE 2: I should never write posts before coffee. The airman is ALIVE, not dead. So the creep is a creep, not a killer.

The Passing Parade

18. June 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Air Force, General, History, Military, Reader Mail, Wild Blue Yonder, World

Regular reader Robert D. emailed me overnight, letting me know that an ace in two wars, General Robin Olds had died over the weekend.

In my early time in service, General Olds was famous for a defiantly non-reg mustache, and for having flown with Chappie James over Vietnam, forming a duo nicknamed “Blackman and Robin”.

He was a colorful character; these days seeming like a character in a swashbuckling adventure novel, or a movie serial.

More here.

Houston and Lincoln

13. June 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: General, History, Military, Old West, World

It’s an old-fashioned study in contrasts, to look at the two of them, Abraham Lincoln and Sam Houston; both political giants, both of them a linchpin around which a certain point of American history turned, both of them men of the frontier. The similarities continue from that point: both of them almost entirely self-educated, as lawyers among other things, and from reading accounts by their contemporaries, it is clear that each possessed an enormous amount of personal charm. To put it in modern terms, both would have been a total blast to hang out with. In their own time, though, each of them also acquired equally enormous numbers of bitter enemies. In fact, for a hero-founder of Texas, Houston attracted a considerable degree of vitriol from his contemporaries, and a level of published vilification which was not bettered until Lincoln appeared on the national scene as the presidential candidate favored by the north in the 1860 election. And both of them had ups and downs in their political and personal lives, although it’s hard to argue that Lincoln’s personal story arc was anything as eventful as Houston, who appears as the ADHD child of Jacksonian-era politics.

But they were also opposites in at least as many ways as they were similar. The family of Samuel Houston had at least some pretensions to property and gentility, whereas that of Lincoln had not the slightest shred of either. Born in 1793, Houston was just barely old enough to have served actively in the War of 1812. He seems on that account to have been representative of an earlier generation than that of Lincoln, a generation only a half-step removed from the founding fathers. He came to the notice of Andrew Jackson, and thereafter spent much of his life when not strolling up and down the corridors of power, loitering meaningfully in the vicinity. He served variously in the Army or state militia of Tennessee, as an Indian agent, in Congress and as elected governor of Tennessee. He was married three times, was an absolutely legendary drunk and lived with the Cherokee tribe for a number of years on at least two occasions. He was brave, impulsive and addicted to flamboyant gestures and attire, being talked with great difficulty out of wearing a green velvet suit to one of his inaugurations as the President of independent Texas. He was also, to judge from portraits and photographs a very handsome man, resembling a rather rugged Colin Firth on a bad hair day.

Once Upon Another War

17. May 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Air Force, General, History, Military, War, Wild Blue Yonder, World

A meditation upon one of WWII’s most unusual missions… which in even at the time seemed almost as if it were a movie…

From Richard Fermandez, “Wretchard” at The Belmont Club, courtesy of PJ Media.

Fall and Rise, Part 2

11. May 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: European Disunion, General, History, Memoir, Military, War

The summer that I was sixteen and a half was the one spent in Britain and Europe, doing the Eurailpass/Youth Hostel/$5.00 a day adventure… which upon reflection at a point nearly four decades later seems nearly as long ago as luxury steamship travel and the Grand Tour. I learned many useful and useless things during that summer, and acquired a certain sort of fearlessness about travel and new places, and strange people, as well as the ability to manage a 70-pound backpack in all situations, including the narrow confines of the little stairway to the top level of an English double-decker bus. It’s an awkward thing to manage, of course, and sometimes total strangers were moved to be of assistance, especially when we were shedding our packs (which were our entire luggage) or taking them up again.

It’s of enormous help, you see, for someone to grab the pack and hold it steady as you slip the straps off your shoulders. Then you turn around and thank them, and taking the pack by the frame, you stow it away in the overhead, or set it down…or whatever. We came to know that there were two kinds of men who would instantly offer this assistance: the young ones were Boy Scouts… and all the older ones had been soldiers.

My travel buddy, Esther Tutwyler and I struck up a conversation with one of those helpful older sorts in an English railway compartment… who of course turned out to have been a soldier, and also confessed that he was always grateful to Americans because Patton’s army had liberated him from a German POW camp. This was an instant bond, as Esther’s father was a career Army warrant officer who had fought his way all across France and Germany and done his share of liberating various bits of personnel and real estate. But when I asked the Englishman where he had been captured, he answered with the name of his unit, and that he had been captured at Dunkirk as part of the British Expeditionary Force. I actually recognized the name of his unit, (I knew all sorts of useless trivia at this time) and remarked that they had been part of the defending force around the pocket where the British forces had been driven, upon the opening of the German drive into France,
“Oh, yes,” he said, with great good humor, “But if I had known then it was the perimeter around the bloody place, I would have made Jesse Owens look like a turtle!”

The German offensive of May, 1940 punched through the weak point— Belgium, Holland, and Luxemburg— and split the Allies in two. The bulk of the British Expeditionary Force fell back towards the flat sandy coast between Calais and the Belgian frontier… towards Gravelines and La Panne, Nieuport and Bergues… and Dunkirk, with its inner harbor and much of the town smashed to rubble and rendered useless by German air raid. Black smoke from burning oil stocks shrouded the town, and set up a column of black smoke that could be seen for miles. But the outer harbor was sheltered by a long jetty, or mole; wooden gangways spanning concrete plinths reaching out from the shore and sheltering the outer harbor. The moles were not intended as a means of landing or loading personnel, but in a pinch, ocean-going ships could tie up and take on troops… but it was a tricky maneuver at best, and made even more of a hazard by constant German air raids. German artillery dominated most of the sea routes approaching the town… but still, according to most accounts, more than three-quarters of those rescued from Dunkirk were taken off from the moles, by ships who packed in human cargo wherever there was room. It took about seven hours to load 1,000 men on a destroyer, for example… and every minute of those hours, that ship and the men lined up on the mole, patiently waiting their turn to board would be a target of everything the Germans could throw at them. On the evening of 27 May, 1940 the Navy officer on station in Dunkirk sent a message to his superior, saying essentially that evacuating from the moles was too slow, too hazardous. He asked for ships to be sent towards the beaches, east of Dunkirk… and for all available small craft to serve as ferries between the beach and the larger craft.

There were already hundreds of regular Naval and merchant-marine vessels at hand to serve in the evacuation, plus a number of requisitioned Dutch coastal transports, known as “scoots”… but during the night of the 27th, Navy officers scoured boatyards, yacht-ports and wharves all through the south-eastern coast and rivers of England for small craft that could be of use. Fishing trawlers and tramps, tug boats, motor yachts and countless numbers of row-boats, fire-boats and cross-channel paddle-steamers were pressed into immediate service, with crews formed by a mix of reservists, regulars, volunteers, civilians and owners… hastily equipped and fueled up, sketchily armed, formed into convoys or taken under tow, they all went straight into the thick of it… to get their soldiers out.

The legend of the little boats was born out of Dunkirk, of civilian boat-owners sailing into hell … even though it wasn’t quite like that, there’s enough truth in it to stir the blood of anyone inclined to step forward in a time of crisis. Though most of the BEF that escaped did so through the harbor, the image of shallow-draft little boats sailing close into the shore, and of columns of soldiers standing chest-deep in the water, waiting for their countrymen to come for them and bring them safe home … oh, yes; there is the image imperishable, of nine days of glory in the midst of defeat. The British Army left their armor, their heavy artillery, their transport behind; with luck all of it spiked, scattered and burned all along the sandy dunes along the shore from Dunkirk to La Panne. They came away with what they carried, their weariness and pride, for they were still alive.

Arms and transport, armor and artillery, they could be replaced… at a cost, and in some little time; but in only a fraction of the time it takes to train an officer or an NCO, or to raise up an Army. And that was the victory of Dunkirk, delivered out of defeat and captivity at the hands of Hitler’s marvelous war machine; an Army that would return. And that was the victory of the little boats, the volunteers, and the organization of everything that could float, and head towards the column of smoke in the sky…and carry away a soldier or two. It must have been all the sweeter, a victory and an army, snatched from the wreck following on the defeat of an ally which had been until then thought stout and strong.

I couldn’t resist this coda, found from one of my reference books: A very junior Navy officer on the destroyer HMS Grenade was later asked by his commanding officer to write an account of his experience, after the ship was fatally disabled by a bomb which went straight down the funnel and exploded in the boiler. He wrote

“Dear Sir: there was a bloody great bang. I have the honor to be, Sir, Your Obedient servant.”

R.I.P. Master Sergeant Wert

10. May 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: A Href, Domestic, Military

From FoxNews.com

Master Sergeant Michael Wert, a Marine stationed at Cherry Point, was on vacation. He and his family were soaking up the sun at Atlantic Beach when he noticed two boys in trouble. They were drowning.

Wert ran into the water, swimming to the boys to help them. His wife ran to call 911. His daughter grabbed her boogie board and paddled after dad.

The boys are safe. Wert saved them, and his daughter got them onto her boogie board. But Wert was nowhere in sight. Rescue personnel found him, but it was too late.

Thank you, Master Sergeant Wert, for putting others before yourself. Not that we would expect anything else from a Marine.

h/t Blonde Sagacity

Power and Control

02. May 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Fun and Games, General, Military, My Head Hurts, Rant, Stupidity, World

Well, so much for active-duty Army mil-blogging, if the Army Powers-That-Be have their way. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, public affairs-wise… but color me fairly unsurprised by this latest move to constrain active-duty Army bloggers. Frankly, if I am surprised at anything, it’s that milblogs by active-duty troops managed to escape the clammy clutches of the Public Affairs office for as long as they have. For a long while, I thought that someone up in the higher-echelons was actually being rather clever; in taking the hands-off approach. Milblogs got the word out, without being tainted by association with military propaganda; about the war, about the military, provided expert commentary and feedback, under no particular censorship other than that of good sense and op-sec as practiced by the individual.

For surely the military public affairs world must have known about military bloggers, fairly early on (say at least by 2002). I myself made a long slog up to the PA shop at BAMC about that time, offering to pass on any appeals they might have on behalf of injured troops. This was when Blondie was over in Kuwait, and our readers at the time were overwhelmingly generous to her unit… to the point where I wanted to see it shared with other troops. I talked to a civilian PA type, who at least had heard of military blogs, and promised to pass on my e-mail and URL to his superiors, and that was the last I ever heard. I’d have thought, based on my own experience, that as interested as the Public Affairs was in traditional media coverage of the military… I’d have seen a little more interest. Unless they were total boobs about this newfangled internet thingy. That wouldn’t have surprised me… much, but assuming some sort of hands-off policy at least gave credit for intelligence and creative thinking at the highest military PA level.

But… and that is the industrial-sized, multi-purpose, all-wool-and-a-yard-wide but (Hey, who let Rosie O’Donnell in here?). But… the military is an authoritarian institution. Top down and paved wall-to-wall with regulations for most things. As a rough rule of thumb, those in charge are supposed to have an idea about what the lower ranks are up to… yes, even you, General Karpinski. And those in charge prefer that those lower down the chain of command are doing what they have been told to do. Personal initiative is all very nice, and even lauded from those who have proved they can exercise it wisely and responsibly. For everyone else, there are rules. And it is one of those lamentable realities of the military world that almost the first reaction to a new situation or set of conditions is to make a rule or regulation about it. Leopard, spots, can’t change. Reaction, knee-jerk, officers for the use of.

I thought the Army was about the most extreme in this regard; the Air Force generally operated on the initial assumption that their personnel were intelligent and responsible, and only descended like a ton of bricks when an individual decisively proved the contrary. The Army seemed to operate from the opposite set of assumptions…possibly because it either saved time or was just easier. I saw a perfect example of this during my year in Korea, at Yongsan Garrison. Out of the clear blue, the Army Powers-That-Be suddenly forbade uniformed personnel to consume food from street-vendors, unless it was something like a sealed soft-drink can, or something in a package. Probably some poor troop got a tummy-ache from a bite of bad bulgogi at a street stand, but after a great deal of vociferous complaint and requests for clarification (what constituted the sort of food that was forbidden, what exactly was a street vender? Some of the open-air vendors were pretty permanent establishments!) the Powers-That-Be grudgingly clarified their purpose; which was that they didn’t want us to be eating food prepared by unlicensed vendors. Well, asked we at AFN… wouldn’t it be more logical just to tell people to not eat from unlicensed vendors… maybe, perhaps, maybe teach our audience what a Korean Department of Health food-vendor’s license looked like, and how to request it politely?
Certainly not, returned the Army Powers-That-Be, rather grumpily… that was not how the Army did things.

Ah, said we, in resignation… Of course; it was just the easy way. Not the most thoughtful way, or the way that encouraged people’s own sense of self-preservation, or the way that preserved the livelihood of those hard-working and licensed local national food vendors, or the way that might truly protect uniformed personnel from bad food. It was just the easy way. Make a rule.

Dump Sweet Dump

02. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Air Force, Domestic, General, Home Front, Military, Pajama Game

Some heartburn noted this week in some quarters about the Washington Post story about the treatment and the living conditions of outpatients at Walter Reed Army Hospital, and why the milblogosphere is not having a conniption-fit over that, with many dark hints about how we would be screeching like a cage of howler-monkeys if it had happened under another administration.

Not having a background in medical administration, or any particular knowledge of the set-up at Walter Reed, or even personal knowledge of anyone undergoing treatment there, I’d have to defer involvement in this fracas… except for a comment on the reported decrepitude of the building where many of the out-patients were living. From the description it sounds like, and most probably is, a dump.

All of these might come as a surprise to the dear little civilian writers of the WaPo and it’s ilk, who see the nice, shiny public side of the gold-plated bases, and assume that the rest of the base, post or fort is similarly bright and shiny and new. Au contraire, as they say in France, and ‘twas ever thus: George Washington lived in a house at Valley Forge, but everyone else lived in something considerably less commodious.

The reason that no one in the mil-blogosphere is hyperventilating over that aspect of the story is that most of us have lived in, or did business in worse, during our time in service. Peeling paint, leaking plumbing, sagging floors, corroding pipes, herds of rampant vermin wandering untrammeled in cheap and badly-maintained structures that are two or three decades (or more) past their best-if-used-by date? Been there, done that, got a raft of horror stories of my own.

Let’s see, there was the old high school on Misawa AB, back in the days when it was a sleepy little Security Service base; it was housed in three long sheds which had been stables when Misawa AB was a Japanese Army cavalry post in the late 1930ies. On a hot summer day the place still smelled distinctly of horses. It was slated to be replaced during the Carter Administration, except that Jimmeh passed on the defense spending bill which would have paid for it; another good reason to despise him even before bungling the Iran Embassy hostage crisis. Even the relatively newer facilities on MAB then were no prize: famously the hospital barracks was in such bad shape that a guy once walked into the upstairs shower room and crashed straight through the floor into the downstairs shower room. This was the place where I developed my life-to-date habit of storing all non-refrigerated foodstuffs in sealed jars, since the barracks I lived in then had roaches. Lots and lots of roaches.

The infrastructure on Zaragoza AB wasn’t too awful— this was an Air Force Base, where we do cling to some standards— but the water pipes were so corroded that tap-water on base came out colored orange, about the color and consistency of Tang. People living in base housing spent a lot of money on bottled water.

The infrastructure at the Yongsan Garrison, ROK was not that much better. A couple of decades of living with the expectation of relocating the mission elsewere had left the electrical grid in such shakey condition as to make power-outages a part of the expected routine. The water pipes were so corroded that I earned fame everlasting on the day I walked into the Air Force female dorm bathroom and noticed that the shower-heads emitted a bare trickle. I took out my trusty Swiss-Army knife, unscrewed the shower-head-plate and emptied about a quarter of a cup of crud out of each. This was also the place where some of the Army troops were domiciled in Korean War-era Quonset huts. In the fall, CE had to hold training classes for the dorm managers to teach them how to run the antique kerosene heaters that warmed them… the heaters were so old that the average soldier would never in his or her life laid eyes on artifacts of such antiquity.

The AFRTS station building in Greenland had mice so tame that one of the board operaters tried to train them to sit up and beg for food. A broadcaster friend of mine who was stationed at a Pacific Island Navy base was warming a pan of canned chili in a saucepan, when a huge rat jumped into the hot chili… and jumped out again, and skittered down the hallway of the dorm, leaving little rat-footprints of chili con carne.

Maintenance of facilities; it’s one of those dull, dull issues that hardly anyone ever pays attention to except those who have to deal directly with it on a daily basis. It’s not one of those sexy military spending issues; it is more of enduring headache, for there is never quite enough money approved for a tenth of local needs. What there is, winds up being spread as thin as a pat of butter on an acre of toast.

Overseas bases, and facilities that are on the verge of being closed generally get last call; and I’d note that politicians and investagative reporters are usually among the first to make a lot of hay when there is money spent on an aging military facility about to be closed.

So call me grimly amused, when they are making hay about money not being spent on an aging military facility.

Just for the heck of it though, the next time I have an appointment at BAMC, here in San Antonio, I’ll snoop around and take a look at what the outpatient troop quarters look like… but the last time I looked, six months ago, they all looked pretty good.

Any recollections of infamously awful troop billets are invited, of course. Misery loves company.

SLOW BLEED = SCREW THE MILITARY

18. February 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Iraq, Military, Politics, Rant

The lengths to which the far left will go to avenge the election and re-election of George Bush have amazed me since 2000, but their most recent behavior takes vulgarity, indecency and cynism to a new level. This business of the so-called slow bleed strategy has nothing to do with whether we should or should not have gone into Iraq, and everything to do with adding suspenders to the belt in insuring that defeat is certain. I for one believe that the notion of micromanaging military affairs to the extent that they have threatened is unconstitutional under Article II Section 2. While Jack Murtha and his supporters would have us believe that his convictions are especially valid on the basis of his military service, I submit that his pandering to the fanatic left wing base of his party is his sole motivation and completely negates any respect he may have earned in the service of his country. Actually, earning the disrespect of his fellow Americans has been a work in progress since at least 1980, when he was caught up in the Abscam scandal

If you want to hear what a true hero has to say about funding the troops, watch Texas congressman Sam Johnson here as he speaks at House hearings. Not only a true hero, but a gentleman to boot.

The Daily Brief