Don’t Fear the Beeper

26. September 2024 · Comments Off on Don’t Fear the Beeper · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Fun With Islam, Media Matters Not, Military, Smells Like Cedar, War

I have to admit that I am snickering still over the Mossad’s targeted beeper offensive against Hezbollah … who ought now to go by the nic of “Hezball-less” – snickering in those intervals between genuflecting in respectful admiration to a national intelligence organization who can actually undertake an operation of such … intelligence. And sneaky, original creativity. And command of technological aspects. And complicated operation conducted by a sub-rosa organization over a long period of time, without a single desk jockey blabbing to a fool like Seymour Hersh. And pulling the detonating cord at a time calculated to inflict the most damage on an enemy chain of command.

From the liver to the knee, indeed.

A commenter at Bayou Renaissance Man’s post about Operation Grim Beeper huffed and puffed indignantly – War crime! Horrible! Unprecedented! What about the Children! and calling the rest of us all kinds of unflattering names as we are markedly unsympathetic to the plight of the Hezball-less command echelon and those few innocent unfortunates caught in the immediate vicinity. The commenter went by the nic of Anonymous for the purpose of that comment thread, and likely for good reasons – cowardly reasons, but there you go. So brave to stand up thus anonymously on a conservative blog-thread! So … whatever. Sabotaging pagers, cellphones and walkie-talkies specifically ordered for the use of and put into the hands of a terror org’s operatives is a heck of a lot more targeted and focused than say … dropping thousands of tons of bombs on Germany and Japan in WWII, firing rockets at random into Northern Israel or sending hijacked airliners into a couple of tall office buildings in New York.

Frankly, I applaud the specificity of Operation Grim Beeper – it delivered in a very satisfactory way to people who had richly deserved such retribution and had deserved it for decades. I have not forgotten the Hezbollah truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, or the hideous torture and murder of kidnapped Americans in Lebanon at around the same time. The Israelis took out the trash in a way that it seemed that our own administrations since then were unable and then unwilling to do. Thanks, Mossad; you might not get anything but backbiting and quiet sabotage from the Biden administration and our State Department generally, but you have my personal gratitude as a military veteran.

Besides defanging Hezbollah/Hezball-less, in decapitating their chain of command by killing or incapacitating everyone sufficiently high-ranking enough to be issued a pager, Grim Beeper has some other interesting side effects; first, in lumbering the organization for immediate and ongoing medical care of their wounded. The dead burden an organization to a certain degree, but care of the wounded and permanently crippled ties up considerably more in resources. And secondly – having essential bits of male anatomy atomized by an exploding beeper – that’s just cruelly comic. Heartless – but funny. Becoming a laughingstock across the Middle East just has to sting. I’ve also seen speculation that Hezbollah/Hezball-less might also have lost whatever remains of toleration for their activities within Lebanon itself, although there may not be enough normal folk left there to return Beirut to being the Paris of the eastern Med again. As for notable Hamas-Hezbollah fan Rashida Talib getting all indignant and bent out of shape over a cartoon … well, she IS a fan of both … and pointing it out humorously by referencing an exploding pager on her desk is something we still can do. Honestly, you’d think that someone elected to a seat in our national legislature would have developed a thicker skin.
Your thoughts and insights?

Slow But Exceedingly Fine

31. July 2024 · Comments Off on Slow But Exceedingly Fine · Categories: Devil Dogs, European Disunion, Fun With Islam, History, Memoir, Military, War

I see from various sources that the Israelis have finally done in one of Hezbollah’s senior-ranking terrorists, one Fouad Shakar, who had a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head for involvement in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The mills of justice may grind very slowly, but they eventually grind very fine. Well, he got to live more than forty years longer than the 241 Marines blown up in 1983, and I hope without much conviction that he spent every one of those years looking nervously over his shoulder. The Hezbollah organization was also behind the kidnapping, gruesome torture and murder of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, and the protracted hijacking of TWA 847 in the summer of 1985.

I had to take an intense interest in all this at the time, because I was stationed in Athens, as part of the staff for the military radio station at Hellenikon Air Base. It was a particularly fraught time for Americans stationed in Europe generally, because of ongoing terrorism. Yes, there was terrorism aimed at Americans before 9-11, but the brunt of it fell on military, diplomatic staff and those generally alleged to be CIA operatives who stationed in Europe. The rest of the US might not have paid much attention at the time; we did, and almost obsessively, because it was a matter of life and very real death.
I was working the overnight shift in the days after the Marine barracks bombing and remember when the list of casualties came over the teletype – yard after yard of yellow paper, with triple-spaced names. The Marines are the smallest service, and the mesh in webs of relationships are probably closer and tighter than most other services. It’s not six degrees of separation, it’s more like two or three. Three or four years later, I worked with another military broadcaster who had made a cross-service jump from the Marines to the Air Force. He had been assigned to the Beirut force and had rotated out a month or so before the bombing, so of course, knew many of the dead and injured Marines – including the young Marine troop who had been on the cover of a Time magazine issue.

The hijacking of TWA 847 was even more horrifying for those of us stationed in Athens for a reason that didn’t get much mention then. It was the regular flight rotating between the US and the Mediterranean – and military personnel and families rotating in and out of Athens, and Crete usually came and went by that flight. The military travel office just purchased seats on civilian airliners going back and forth from CONUS (continental US) rather than erratically-scheduled and usually very uncomfortable Air Force transports. And I was on duty again, when news of the high-jacking came over the teletype, just before lunchtime.
Oh, my god – a flight out of Athens! I looked at the flight number and absolutely froze with horror. TWA 847. I went running through the building to where there was a little balcony with an emergency fire exit staircase over our parking lot and called down to the station manager and program director, were about to get into their cars to go someplace for lunch. “They’ve hijacked the TWA flight! The one that everyone rotates out on!”

They were also horrified, of course. We hung over the teletype for the rest of that day, the whole staff wracking our collective brains, trying to remember who we knew who had orders and was due to leave Hellenikon on leave, permanent-change-of-station or temporary duty, who might have had seats on that flight … and who would be traveling with their wives and children.
There might very well have been – but for the grace of G*d and good fortune, there weren’t any military families on that flight. There was a small party of Navy divers returning from a TDY to Iraklion, and I think some Army reservists. The reservists had the wit and foresight to hide their military ID and escape much abuse from the hijackers, if I am recalling correctly, but the Navy divers were traveling on orders and their ID cards, and so were readily singled out. Robert Stethem was beaten and murdered as a means of getting a demand for jet fuel met.

In the months after that, we had our eyes in swivel-stalks, whenever we traveled on by civilian means. We wore civilian clothes, ditched anything superficial what might indicate we were military, avoided known American hangouts, got civilian passports – and were told that if there were anything like the TWA 847 going down again, to conceal or ditch our military ID. For years afterwards, when anyone I encountered casually asked if I were American … I had this instant, paranoid hesitation in answering. Why do you want to know?

Finished!

24. October 2023 · Comments Off on Finished! · Categories: Domestic, General, History, War, Working In A Salt Mine...

The Civil War novel is at last finished! I rounded off the last few bits of dialog and narrative this last weekend. I’ll have to look back in my archive for when I started on it … sometime in early 2020, I think. The narrative concerned the experiences of Miss Minnie Vining, of an old Boston family, who was an abolitionist crusader in the 1850s, and then a battlefield nurse during the Civil War which resulted. The rough outline of her experiences and the Boston Vining family were alluded to in Sunset and Steel Rails, when the indominable Miss Minnie was a very elderly character, whose importance to the plot in that book was to aid her niece in escaping a dreadful situation. Minnie Vining was also briefly mentioned in My Dear Cousin, when a distant younger relative also served as a wartime Army nurse. Miss Minnie was first mentioned in Daughter of Texas, as the older bluestocking sister of Race Vining … well, anyway, this book rather filled out her character as a strong-willed and determined spinster of independent fortune and considerable education.

This narrative also allowed me to explore through Minnie’s experiences a number of fascinating themes; the immense yet subtle power that women wielded in 19th century America, and the enormous degree to which the anti-slavery movement roiled every aspect of American society and politics during the two decades leading up to the Civil War. The commonplace perception among most 21st century Americans is that because women didn’t have full political rights and were often treated unequally in legal proceedings, that women were completely without power economically and within their communities; barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. And that is just not the situation at all. Women had and wielded considerable economic, intellectual, and social power within communities, even under those constraints. This was demonstrated nowhere more clearly than in the abolitionist movement, where many of the popular “influencers” of the time were women, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin … a narrative that turned out to be so popular in the North that Abraham Lincoln himself humorously attributed the war to it. So, contra the dark insistence of those pushing the 1619 narrative, that the United States was primarily and irredeemably founded and perpetuated on the institution of Negro slavery, the fight against it was long, passionate, and carried on by a wide swath of citizens, almost from the very first. Although only the most prominent of them are known today, many of their peers in the abolitionist movement are relatively obscure – but they left writings and memoirs of their struggle. A lot of those memoirs, published in the decade after the Civil War are available through on-line archives. Many such activists, like my fictitious Minnie Vining, were women. Quite a few were also later involved in campaigning for female suffrage, or like Dorothea Dix, reformers in other causes. A fair number of these women were friends, or at least, acquainted with each other, and became much more famed for their efforts in that crusade for full suffrage.

Another eye-opening aspect, at least to me, was the degree to which women contributed to the military effort in the civil war, by getting involved with the Sanitary Commission – a volunteer organization formed to provide to the Civil War era military what now is provided by a combination of the military medical system, the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation service, and the current Red Cross. Up to the outbreak of hostilities in 1861, the US Army was small, the medical corps even smaller – and when the enormous numbers of militia volunteers took to the field, the existing medical care and soldier-support system was utterly swamped. Although the top leadership of the Sanitary Commission was male, women were everywhere else at regional levels, and formed the core of volunteers. Women, wishing to see to the welfare and care of their brothers, fathers and sons – raised funds to pay for all those necessary services through all manner of fairs, sales and donation drives, volunteered themselves as nurses, sewed shirts and knitted socks, contributed all kinds of comforts, and saw to goods being packed and distributed. The Sanitary Commission volunteer organization fielded hospital steamships to transport the wounded, opened hospitals, provided comforts for the troops, facilitated communications with families, and assisted soldiers traveling on furlough – all those services necessary to field a large national military and keep morale as high as could be expected. It was fascinating to read about all that.

It was even more interesting to read the memoirs and accounts of the volunteer nurses, practically all of whom had any formal training for that field. Only a few orders of Catholic nursing sisters had any kind of training in the profession which we would recognize today. Just about all the nurses recruited for service in Civil War hospitals came straight from their homes, which might sound curious from today’s perspective, but caring for the sick at home would have been a large part of woman’s work, before vaccinations, modern sanitation standards and sterile surgery. Nurses Rebecca Pomroy and Mary Bickerdyke, just to give an example of two real-life women who feature as characters in That Fateful Lightning were widows who had spent years caring for husbands with compromised health. As an indication of how important this was in the 19th century, Mrs. Beeton’s popular cookery and household management book, contained a whole chapter on invalid cookery – light, nourishing and appealing dishes intended to appeal to the appetites of the ill. Those women volunteers who came into Civil War service already possessed a practical knowledge of nursing.

So there it is – all finished but for the final polishing. The next two book projects after this likely will be the 12th Luna City installment, and another collection of YA short adventures for the Lone Star Sons series – probably not to start on those until after the holiday season, though.

The New Pogrom

11. October 2023 · Comments Off on The New Pogrom · Categories: Fun With Islam, Iran, War

I think the reason that last Saturday’s massacre in Israel hits so close to the nerve of Americans like my daughter and I, is because we can look at the pictures and video of the victims and the aftermath and see ourselves. My daughter and I look at pictures of the blood-spattered crib and the baby carrier and see Wee Jamie. Hear him crying in pain and bewilderment. We see pictures of the pleasant little houses, the tree-planted neighborhoods targeted by the Hamas savages, and see our own neighborhood, as a bullet-riddled, blood-spattered smoking ruin. I look at pictures of the audience at the all-night music rave, and see my daughter among them, dancing with her friends and having fun, the next minute dragged away dead, or for treatment that used to be described as worse than death. My daughter can look at me or consider her memories of her bed-ridden invalid grandmother, and readily imagine either or both of us cut down mercilessly … and the murderers recording the whole bloody cruelty for posting to social media for the approval and cheers of their friends.

This is an organized and sponsored pogrom the cruelty and viciousness of which hasn’t been seen since medieval times, although the Nazis and Imperial Japanese certainly did their best in Europe and China within the living memory of elderly people still alive today.

Eventually whoever was responsible in the Israeli intelligence and defense organizations for last weekend’s failure will be identified and chastened. The Gaza strip will be a sea of bouncing, smoking rubble, regardless. Whichever state actor – looking at you, Iran – aided and abetted will likewise have some kind of retaliation meted out to them. I am also pretty certain that those Hamas operatives who were braggart and foolish enough to be videotaped or photographed on social media with recognizable faces will also be identified, as has various Antifa dirtbags here in the US were identified by the weaponized autistics of 4-Chan. I am certain that in coming days we will be treated to a succession of adorable dirty-faced moppets rescued from bombed buildings, and poor abaya-clad women of certain age wailing about their ruined home. I am also certain that members of the Greatest Generation vaguely regretted the necessities of war which meant scenes of adorable dirty-faced Japanese moppets rescued from the ruins of their homes, or the good German frauen lamenting the ruins of their cottage or apartment in Berlin or Hamburg. But we couldn’t then allow Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan to continue as they were. Neither can Israel continue living with the proven threat posed by Hamas in Gaza. (Or anywhere else.)

The Gaza strip will be a sea of bouncing rubble. Any country, not just Israel can’t endure the cruelty of what happened last Saturday morning. A long time ago, I would have felt sorry for the residents of Gaza. They wasted every chance, every opportunity to be a combination of Singapore, the Maldives, and the Marbella of that corner of the Mediterranean. Yes, they lost a war in 1947, a war they didn’t expect to lose, but hey … ask Japan, Germany, Argentina, the southern US or Mexico how it feels to lose a war that they all thought was in the bag. A lovely stretch of coast, with marvelous beaches, which could have drawn free-spending tourists and vacationers all across Europe, even day-trippers from Israel and Egypt itself. Such wasted potential, potential sabotaged by poisonous rage and resentment. Bernard Lewis wrote years ago, an explanation for Muslim rage and envy. Everything that Allah promised good observant Muslims seemed to have been withheld from them – and lavished upon the unbelievers. Riches, power, happy successful societies, military might, beautiful women dancing the night away at an outdoor concert … all of that. Muslims must look around, and see that almost without exception, strictly Muslim-ruled countries were pits of dysfunctional, wretched despair and poverty. And so, they raged and went rabid-mad.
Since last weekend, there have been a number of organizations and individuals pledging their true allyship and support of Hamas and the Palestinians – looking at you, BLM. I can only assume that these people and groups are perfectly OK with mass murder of defenseless audiences at an outdoor concert, slaughtering families wholesale, decapitating babies and gang-raping women until they hemorrhage. Good of you to let us all know where you stand, and what you stand for. Noted.
(Although a number of individuals have walked back from such statements of support for Hamas. I’d like to think that they realized how awful it made them look, personally, but suspect such regrets may have more to do with employers declining current or future employment.)
Discuss as you wish, and have the heart.

History Friday – The Care of an Army

14. July 2023 · Comments Off on History Friday – The Care of an Army · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, Ain't That America?, History, War, Working In A Salt Mine...

I’ve been going deep in the weeds in research for the current work in progress, the long-put-aside Civil War novel, concerning the experiences of a spinster of independent means, who is active as an abolitionist lecturer in the 1840-1850 time frame, and a battlefield nurse during the war years. Frankly, the research is fascinating in and of itself; the matter of the existence of slavery in the United States was a contentious and hard-fought-over issue in the antebellum years. It’s been quite the antidote to the current 1619 historical fantasy, reading through memoirs and accounts of and by notable abolitionist crusaders of the time. Not only did the existence of the ‘peculiar institution’ in the pre-war South retard economic progress there (as industry and immigration favored the North) but the fight against it was sustained and uncompromising. The first half of the book is just about complete – it’s the second half, concerning the war and most particularly the operation of field hospitals that has me deep in another field of weeds now, discovering some extraordinary stories and some extraordinary women.
One of the reasons that I love writing historical fiction – I very rarely need to create anything of whole cloth and imagination; generally, the honest-n-truth version of events often surpasses anything I could possibly make up. So it is with the epic of a little-recalled national volunteer relief organization called, most prosaically, the United States Sanitary Commission, which mobilized women for the war effort to an extraordinary degree – as nurses, administrators, counselors and organizers of countless benefits to raise funds for military support, the care and healing of the wounded, and later, for the welfare of veterans.

The existing pre-Civil War US Army was a small one as national armies of the times counted, with a correspondingly tiny medical corps. Hospitals at various forts and camps were minimal, usually no more than thirty or forty beds. There was no large centralized military general hospital; medical care of the sick or injured normally fell to orderlies or those soldiers who themselves were convalescent. All of that went out the window when recruiting surged, upon secession of Confederate states and the fall of Fort Sumter. Almost the moment that the newly-formed companies and regiments marched away, the wives, sisters and mothers of those new soldiers went home and ransacked their cupboards and pantries for home comforts – food, clothing, blankets, bits of this or that, writing materials, bandages and medicines for the lads recruited for a regional unit. Some of these first efforts were either ridiculously useless or went astray in transit – inexpertly canned items rotted, jars broke, and the contents of such ruined whatever else they had been packed with. It was all a muddle, at first – but in the middle of June, 1861 Congress authorized the creation of the Sanitary Commission, and it took off with a roar, mostly because many smaller regional and local relief groups eagerly joined their considerable efforts to the national Commission.

Although the national leadership of the Commission at the upper levels were male, women made up an extraordinarily large number of mid-level workers, fund-raisers, administrators, nurses and general support personnel. Being also proud of their contribution, many of those women contributed memoirs written after the war, and those accounts make for stirring reading. (There was a lot of overlap between abolitionists, temperance activists and women’s rights advocates during that period, and many of the best-known women campaigners were active on all three fronts, as well as being friends and associates.)
One of the best and most readable accounts that I am exploring was by Mary Ashton Livermore, who also served as reporter and editor for a newspaper which her Universalist husband owned. Mary Livermore was co-head of the Chicago branch of the Sanitary Commission and penned a particularly vivid description of what a day at work at “the office” involved – the sounds, the bustle of draymen delivering and dispatching boxes, the sights, the and the smells. (An account almost unique for a lack of florid Victorian purple prose, thickets of which must be metaphorically hacked through in other contemporary accounts.) Donations and items of all sorts arrived from all over the state and the mid-west, to be unpacked, sorted, inventoried, re-packed according to commodity, and sent out to those hospitals which had urgently requested them. That was on the first floor of the building housing the Chicago branch -the second floor was given over to sewing machines and volunteer seamstresses producing shirts, necessary linens, and hospital garments. The Commission office also served as a communications hub – for families wanting news of their soldiers, and for dispatching parties of nurses to hospitals where they were needed – especially following on a battle or a military advance.

One of those notable nurses was the formidable widow Mary Jane Bickerdyke. A curious thing that perhaps we do not consider today was how large a porportion of a woman’s domestic duties then involved caring for the sick and invalid. Mary Bickerdyke had cared for her invalid husband for years before he passed away. It must have been much the same for other women volunteer nurses – they had already done a lot of practical nursing, without the benefit of any formal medical training as such. And so, they followed the armies, to tend their boys, their sons and brothers.

(To be continued – the adventures of Mary Jane Bickerdyke in the Union Army of the West. The story is that one of General Grant’s juniors fumed to the General about ‘that damned bossy woman, and couldn’t the General do something about her?’ To which General Grant is supposed to have replied long the lines of, ‘I can’t – she ranks me.)

History Friday – The Murder of a Very Modern Major General

29. June 2023 · Comments Off on History Friday – The Murder of a Very Modern Major General · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, War

This post was inspired by a terse note next to a picture of the gentleman in question, on a page in one of my reference books – a note that the Confederate commander, one Major General Earl Van Dorn was murdered in mid-campaign, in his HQ in Spring Hill, Tennessee by an outraged husband. A personal thing, not an arranged assassination … or was it? Intrigued, for such is my butterfly interest in such matters, I went snorkeling around in the various sources, searching for more details.

Like the character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical Pinafore, Earl Van Dorn was a very modern major general for the 19th century; a handsome cavalryman, the very beau ideal of a certain breed of Victorian male. He was accounted to be very handsome, by the standards of the time, although my personal reaction is meh; the enormous bushy soup-strainer mustache in contemporary photographs is off-putting to me, but photographic portraiture of the time really doesn’t do much in establishing the raw sexual appeal of anyone. But Van Dorn was also a charismatic and flamboyant personality, so that may account for it. He was a gallant officer in service to the Noble Cause, cutting a splendid figure in the gray and gold-hung uniform of the Confederacy … he wrote poetry, painted, was a consummate horseman … and notoriously, loved the ladies, who loved him right back. He loved them so much that he had long been known as the terror of ugly husbands and nervous papas everywhere.

He was a Regular Army officer, a heroic veteran of the war with Mexico, who had thereafter served a somewhat rewarding and satisfactory career on the Texas frontier. He was accounted to be a master of cavalry command; fearless, able, competent. He was also a great grandnephew of Andrew Jackson, being born to one of Jackson’s nieces; a place at West Point was thereby assured, although he successfully graduated 52 out of 68 places, due to use of tobacco, failure to salute superiors and extravagant use of profanity. He had several sisters who adored him, a wife whom he married after graduating from West Point – and sired two children with her, although never quite being able to establish a permanent home for his family. Whether this was due to disinclination and lack of enthusiasm on either part, or the brutal requirements of service in the military in those decades is a matter of speculation. He had mixed success as a commander in the first few years of the Civil War – a loss at Pea Ridge in a Confederate attempt to take St. Louis, another in the Second Battle of Corinth, but slashing success as a cavalry commander in fights at Holly Springs, Thompson’s Station, and the first battle at Franklin.

In the spring of 1863, Van Dorn was stationed in Spring Hill, Tennessee, thirty miles south of Nashville and almost in the dead center of the state. According to some accounts, Van Dorn and his staff were first billeted in home of local magnate Aaron White and his wife and family, but that didn’t last long. Accounts vary – some have it that Mrs. White was unhappy at having most of her home taken over as a military HQ, leaving her family with a just couple of bedrooms and access to the kitchen. She was even more unhappy – scandalized, even – when rumors began to fly about General Van Dorn’s romance with a married woman in Spring Hill. Jessie Peters was the very pretty, flirtatious, and much younger third wife of Dr. George Peters, who very openly came to visit the General at the White residence – a considerable breach of Victorian etiquette. Mr. and Mrs. White were not pleased at this scandalous turn of events. At about this time, Van Dorn moved his headquarters to another residence in Spring Hill, the mansion owned by one Martin Cheairs, about half a mile distant. (Both houses still stand, apparently.)

George Peters was a wealthy landowner and politician, a doctor, and often gone on business for long periods of time, leaving his young wife to find her own amusements, domestic and otherwise. It was also rumored that he was of Union sympathies, but nevertheless, upon his return to Spring Hill in early April, 1863 Dr. Peters became aware of the rumors concerning his wife and General Van Dorn, the long unchaperoned carriage rides they went on together, and the General’s many visits to the Peters home. To say the very least, Dr. Peters was not pleased, especially after he caught his wife and the General in a passionate embrace. Angry words were exchanged; George Peters threatened to shoot Van Dorn then and there. Supposedly Van Dorn asked for forgiveness and took the blame for the affair all to himself … and the matter seemed to be smoothed over.

But two or three weeks later, Dr. Peters appeared at the Cheairs house, asking to speak to General Van Dorn. Assuming that he wanted another permit allowing him to pass through the Confederate lines, he was directed into the study where Van Dorn sat at his writing desk, hard at work. Dr. Peters pulled out a pistol and shot Van Dorn in the back of the head. No one among the general’s staff took notice of Dr. Peters’ swift departure – not until the young daughter of the Cheairs family ran out of the house, exclaiming that the General had been shot. Of course, everyone rushed into the study, where they found Van Dorn unconscious, but still breathing. He died hours later, much mourned across the South, although there seemed to have been many who considered that he had brought it upon himself with his reckless pursuit of women captivated by his personal appeal.
Eventually, Dr. Peters was apprehended and arrested for the murder, but curiously, never tried. He insisted that Van Dorn had, in his words, “violated the sanctity of his home.” Most everyone then and since assumed that it meant Van Dorn’s affair with Jessie Peters. But was it? A novel by another indy author, also fascinated by the conundrum and possessed of certain local-specific resources, suggests that the motive for murder was not simply Van Dorn’s affair with Jessie Peters but his seduction of Clara Peters, Dr. Peter’s unmarried teenage daughter from an earlier marriage … a doubly scandalous matter which resulted in Clara Peters being pregnant.

Just another rabbit-hole in the pursuit of writing engaging historical fiction – additional evidence that our 19th century forbearers were at least as horny as humans anywhere else. They just … didn’t do it in the road and frighten the horses. Comment as you wish.

Reprise Post; At the Tomb of Couperin – Thoughts on a Centenary

11. November 2022 · Comments Off on Reprise Post; At the Tomb of Couperin – Thoughts on a Centenary · Categories: History, Military, Veteran's Affairs, War

(For Veteran’s Day – a reprise post from 2018)

There is a lovely little classical piece by Maurice Ravel – Le Tombeau de Couperin, composed shortly after the end of the war, five of the six movements dedicated to the memory of an individual, and one for a pair of brothers, all close friends of the composer, every one of them fallen in a war of such ghastliness that it not only put paid to a century of optimistic progress, but barely twenty years later it birthed another and hardly less ghastly war. Maurice Ravel himself was over-age, under-tall and not in the most robust of health, but such was the sense of national emergency that he volunteered for the military anyway, eventually serving as a driver – frequently under fire and in danger. Not the usual place to find one of France’s contemporarily-famous composers, but they did things differently at the end of the 19th Century and heading all wide-eyed and optimistic into the 20th. Citizens of the intellectual and artistic ilk were not ashamed of their country, or feel obliged to apologize for a patriotic attachment, or make a show of sullen ingratitude for having been favored by the public in displaying their talents.

The war whose casualties Ravel memorialized in that way ended exactly a hundred years ago today; the eleventh month, eleventh day, eleventh hour. It seems now to have been unimaginably distant at this point. The soldiers who fought in it for every nation and yet managed by pluck and luck to survive are all gone now … but like a long-healed wound, that war left horrific scars both physical and psychic. Woodlands and meadows the length of the Western Front across Belgium and France to this day are still marked by trenchworks, crumbling fortifications, the soil still poisoned by chemicals. All across Europe, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany, what remained of Austria-Hungary – and the US, to a lesser extent – the smallest villages and the largest cities alike have memorials. Sometimes they are in odd corners, most often in a prominent place, with engraved tablets of names; the most notable were usually designed by the architectural great and good, standing on or near the battlefields themselves. The smallest memorials are sometimes the most moving – especially when the same handful of names appear. Everyone in this tiny village would have known this man or that, not just the immediate family and friends. This man, his neighbor, the boy who polished boots or delivered the mail; this and this, a hundred and a thousand times over. When those memorial monuments were first put up, the loss of the men – and sometimes of women – was a raw and savage grief. The observer picks up immediately on the sense of loss, the grief, the futile attempt to make a sense out of the cruelty visited on that community; they were here, they were of value, and now they are gone! The only thing we can do is to remember them.

The political and psychic scars from the First World War, I think, have proved to be the deepest, and the longest-lasting. We are still dealing politically with the fall-out and the razor-edged shards of broken empires. The Austro-Hungarian empire splintered into component nations; Russia replaced the Romanovs and old ruling nobility with an even more vicious ruling class, the Ottoman Empire both splintered geographically, replacing the old inefficient Sultanate with an equally inefficient and/or vicious assortment of local ruling talent. Germany, wracked in defeat, replaced their supreme ruler serially with inefficient democracy and then crowned that debacle with Hitler, suffering another round of defeat and division. France – gutted of a generation of able, healthy and patriotic young men, required for the continuance of a stable society, those friends whom Ravel honored and mourned in his composition. Great Britain and her far-flung Empire, also gutted of men and the supreme societal self-confidence required to maintain that Empire, fell apart on a slower timetable. Documented in small and large ways in western literature and in even popular contemporary genre novels, the war marked a turning, a vast gulf, a shattering of the old, 19th Century optimism, and the certainty that things were bound – with the aid of science and industry – to only get better and better for that part of the world which thought of itself as ‘civilized.’ To the characters created for a mass audience by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and any number of others – there seems in retrospect to be a “before” and an “after” to the war, which slashed a sharp dividing line across the cultural landscape; skirts were shorter, morals looser, music louder and more discordant, politics more rancorous, manners coarsened and buildings uglier. The shock and the loss of certainty in so much which had once been thought solid, stable, eternal … the reverberations when the guns finally fell silent on that day are still rippling across our consciousness, even when we don’t quite know why.

Also – found through Ace of Spades HQ – a meditation on Veteran’s Day, and how the Vietnam veterans were treated by the public – and generally slimed as unstable, drug-addled losers by the media for years after the war was over. I’m old enough to remember how veterans in the early 1970s were advised to leave a term of military service off their professional resumes.

Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Et Cetera

19. October 2022 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, European Disunion, Media Matters Not, Veteran's Affairs, War, World

“There are known knowns, things we know that we know;
and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don’t know.
But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don’t know.”
– Donald Rumsfeld

So last week’s post regarding the paucity of lefty anti-war protesters regarding the Ukrainian war is still going strong with comments, reminding me once again of the great sage, Donald Rumsfeld, regarding what we know, and what we know that we don’t know … and what we really don’t know that we don’t know.
What do I know for sure about the war? I know that both sides are … parsimonious with the truth about everything that is happening in the zone of conflict, to the point where a truckload of salt is necessary when reading the headlines, no matter if it’s the established print media, or blogs. What to believe? Practically nothing, save that yes, indeed, there is a war and a pretty hot one, too.
I am pretty certain that Ukraine served basically as the Biden family’s ATM. Corrupt government – yeah, that I do believe. But as corrupt than Russia itself, Nigeria, Pakistan, Belarus, South Sudan, Somalia, Burundi, Venezuela, and other frequent fliers on ‘most corrupt evah!’ list?
I do believe that Putin’s Russia apparently went into the Ukraine believing that it would be a one-two punch and settled to the advantage of Russia within a fortnight. That the war has been going on without a resolution since February of this year argues that Putin and his generals did indeed bite off more than they could chew, seriously overestimating their own capabilities and the Ukrainian will to resist.
The modern Ukrainians are descended from the Cossacks, in culture if not in blood, who had for centuries a tradition of making war … enthusiastically. They also, if I read my history right, still hold a grudge for being subjected to the Holodomor, the mass starvation under Stalin’s harsh rule in the 1930s. And that has to cast a very long shadow, among survivors of that state-instituted horror and their descendants.

I still wonder at the absence of serious peace protestors. Why, one might even hazard a supposition that the Biden administration really and truly wants a nuclear war, as an excuse to crush any of this insurrection talk. Wartime measures, for the good of the nation – that’s always been a fine pretext for crushing domestic opposition. And our current American ruling class certainly wouldn’t shed any tears over the deaths of flyover country, conservative middle- or working-class Americans – their open contempt for ordinary citizens can’t even be hidden any more.
Was the blowing up of the Nordstream pipelines deliberate or accidental? That’s one of those elements which falls into the category of known unknowns. The blogger Lawdog (whose Africa tales of his youth, growing up as the dependent of an oil industry manager are freaking hilarious) postulated an industrial accident. Now if we had a national news media worth anything, reporters would be taking Lawdog’s suggestion to as many oil and gas industry experts as they could get ahold of, asking them for their opinions. Alas, too many reporters for the national media who aren’t Salena Zito, are instead expensively educated twenty-somethings who don’t know anyone who drives a pickup truck … and very likely many of those experienced oil industry experts do drive a pickup truck and live way outside of the Acela Corridor. Just too infra dig to talk to one of those icky people, y’know.
Another known unknown – that retention and recruiting in our own military is collapsing. That last withdrawal from Afghanistan was a debacle, and the current fixation on DEI initiatives, dodgy Covid vaccinations and general incompetence among generals is doing a number on morale and effectiveness among the troops. Exactly how deep morale among our own armed forces has collapsed, right along with retention and recruiting is a deep dark secret. Probably one would have to take pliers to the fingernails of our current Secretary of Defense to get any straight answers at all … but the sense that my daughter and I get through our various veteran networks does not give any cause for reassurance.
And then there are the unknown unknowns… comment as you wish.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?*

14. October 2022 · Comments Off on Where Have All the Flowers Gone?* · Categories: Ain't That America?, European Disunion, Health and Wellness, Military, War

It’s an ongoing mystery to me, in this year of 2022, with a hot war going on in the Ukraine and the Biden Administration (or the Kalorama Kominturn which apparently holds the puppet strings) apparently doing everything it can to provoke Russia into turning the war even hotter … that the usual peace activists, who have been out to protest US involvement in every conflict going since I was in the 6th grade are nowhere to be found. Seriously, where are they – the usual peace activists, with their signs and protests at the gates of military bases, at recruiting offices and at the Pentagon … where are they? Where are the activist priests and nuns, the 60’s retreads, the determined if slightly addled, who used to routinely break into the back reaches of certain air bases in the southwest, searching for munitions and aircraft that they could splash blood-red paint and slogans all over, much to the bafflement of the security police patrols who often found them wandering in the desert, armed with buckets of paint and towering self-righteousness … yes, I had acquaintances in the security police back then, who often regaled me with tales like this.
Every time that matters of a military nature with regard to the US were about to turn from a warm simmer to red hot – there they were, on the ground, fulminating in the groves of academy, or on the pages of such reliably progressive publications like Harper’s, of the NY Times, and in the streets of Washington D.C. – there were the peace activists protesting. It was like the birds flying south for the winter; regular and predictable, until now. So, where are the deeply and ostentatiously committed peaceniks now? Are they out protesting the very real possibility of a nuclear war with Russia over independence of the Ukraine? Where are the Ramsay Clarkes, Noam Chomskys, even the Cindy Sheehans of 2022, the impassioned student peace marchers?
There was always a suspicion – and depending on the year and the conflict – a well-founded suspicion that many organized peace and anti-nuclear protest groups were Soviet-funded – and if so, I do wonder if they still are. Are the Soviet checks bouncing, or are they not being sent at all, since … open war with the United States is what Putin and his allies in what remains of the Soviet Union really want? Could it be that the Biden Administration also wants an open war with Russia, as a distraction and a ready excuse to crack down on critics and political opposition? Place your bets, ladies, gentlemen and uncommitted beings. Your insights are appreciated.

* Classical reference, link here.

The Light of Rutupaie Going Out

02. August 2022 · Comments Off on The Light of Rutupaie Going Out · Categories: Cry Wolf, European Disunion, History, Literary Good Stuff, War

Rutupaie, the modern Richborough Castle, in Kent, England – was once the site of a notable Roman military garrison graced by an enormous marble triumphal arch visible to ships arriving in the port, a tall lighthouse, and a thriving civilian town with an amphitheater. The lighthouse and the triumphal arch are long gone, but a large portion of the circuit of twenty-five-foot-high walls still remain visible above ground. This was the terminus of Watling Streat, a keystone in the network of carefully engineered roads which covered Britain like a net. It was most likely the site of the original Roman bridgehead in the time of the Emperor Claudius, which would in large part become the province of Britannia. Rutupaie became the major port of entry all throughout the four centuries that Roman power held sway over that far and misty isle, their ships and galleys guided into safe harbor after dark by the fire atop the lighthouse.
In one of the opening chapters of the novel The Lantern Bearers, a young Roman-British soldier makes his decision to remain in Britain when the legions are finally and officially withdrawn by order of the Emperor. Having deserted his unit as they are on the point of departure for the last time, he lights the great fire atop the lighthouse, as the galleys row away on the evening tide; a last defiant fire, as darkness descends. Peter Grant, who blogs at Bayou Renaissance Man noted this week that Rosemary Sutcliff’s series of novels about the Romans in Britain and the long, slow, painful dying of Roman civilization there were being republished at a reasonable price in eBook. This reminded me again of my very favorite historical author; The finest and most evocative historical novel ever in English is either the Rider of the White Horse or her retelling of the Arthurian epic, Sword at Sunset. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s version, The Mists of Avalon, is overwrought trash in comparison.

The haunting element of Rosemary Sutcliff’s series, which beings with The Eagle of the Ninth and ends with The Shield Ring, is the slow dying of a civilization, and how ofttimes those people in it look around, and know without a doubt that things are not as they once were and might never be again, for all that they might do. They see the unmistakable evidence, know that their world is disintegrating bit by bit, even as the Roman-built cities, garrisons and farmsteads in Britain decay or were abandoned, in the wake of continuing invasions by the Saxon tribes from the mainland. These various characters are haunted by knowledge that the best they can do may not be enough to keep the light of Rutupaie on for another night. They fought gallantly and died bravely, holding off the barbarian hordes who came over the walls and swept the old Roman laws, culture and establishments, civil and actual into oblivion and all memory, save for the archeologist’s trowel and the writer’s art. The walls crumbled, the roads were grown over, the cities either vanished underneath the green turf, or were inhabited by people who built simple timber shacks among the colonnades and walls that they no longer could rebuild, repair, or replicate until centuries later.
It’s the notion of a dying civilization that haunts, especially in this year. One has the sense of standing on a crumbling wall, looking at the odds and knowing that even if you win for the day, tomorrow there will be another assault, and another after that. Many of us are now standing on that wall, or lighting the fire in that tower, resolving to resist the barbarian horde, but there is a single overwhelming difference. In the times that Rosemary Sutcliff wrote about, the enemies of the Pax Romana were barbarians from outside, intent on conquest, wanting land and riches for themselves, and to brutally quash anyone getting in their way. In our own time, the barbarian savages, hungry for power above all and motivated by the unquenchable thirst to destroy through famine, plague, economic destruction, and open warfare against all of those who stand in their way … are none but our own ruling elite. Comment as you wish.

The Hash-Tag War

10. March 2022 · 2 comments · Categories: Cry Wolf, European Disunion, Media Matters Not, Military, The Bear, War

I’ve been cynically amused over the past couple of weeks at how efficiently the Laptoperati and Twitter-fixated media Powers That Be have swung to “Russia Bad-Ukraine Brave & Noble!!! Eleventy!!” since the Russian invasion-attempted-occupation-re-occupation of the place began in a big way nearly two weeks ago. How can it now be World War III already, when we still have our Covid-19 decorations still up? Watching practically every media outlet swing into action in being all sympathies for Ukraine and all-hate on Russia is … astonishing. All the parties who would have been lighting candles, holding vigils for peace, and lecturing us about how war is not good for children and other living things, and no blood for oil have changed tune without missing a beat, hardly. Suddenly Vladimir Putin is the enemy of all that is good and decent, and everyone is rushing to declare sympathy with and support of the Ukraine, declare anything Russian to be double-plus-ungood, and throwing Russian cats out of cat shows, Anna Netrebko out of the Met, and vodka with a Russian-origin brand-name down the drain. Celebrity fools with pretensions to adequacy issue hysterical demands that Russia be thrown out of NATO, or that NATO enforce a no-fly zone over the Ukraine – never mind that Russia wasn’t a member of that organization and instituting a no-fly zone would almost instantly involve the United States. The turn-around is purely astonishing to behold; a hashtag/social media war on steroids.

It reminds me of the last time there was a grand virtue-signaling rush on social media – Kony 2012, anyone? Bring back the Chibok girls. It also reminds me of a minor running jest in Angela Thirkell’s early wartime Barsetshire novels. A pair of elderly spinsters keep renaming their pet dog after the leader or national hero of whatever nation that Hitler had just lately overrun as a pathetically useless gesture of support for plucky little (insert name of country here) which likely left the poor little dog terribly confused, as there were quite a few countries or regions invaded by the Nazis in the late 1930s and early 1940s. But that was just light fiction.
About the last time the American public went in this heavily for round of ostentatious wartime virtue-signaling, it involved re-christening sauerkraut as Liberty cabbage, throwing stones at dachshunds, and a lot of German-Americans legally changing their surnames to something less identifiably Teutonic. It also contributed to wishing Prohibition on us, which might suggest that ostentatious virtue-signaling is not a wise choice when it comes to suggesting national policy.

Was the signal sent out officially, by some version of Journolist, or is it just a matter of all the birds in a media flock pivoting and turning independently in response to hints that the Biden administration may be in deep doo-doo? My daughter just yesterday saw gas at almost $4.00 – and last week, it jumped ten cents in a single day. In San Antonio. These costs cannot continue without resentment and protest. Neither can the cost of basic groceries, or their erratic delivery to the store shelves. I can’t think that whoever is pulling the strings in the Biden administration deliberately fomented a war with Russia as a means of distracting Americans from the various disasters building; inflation in the costs of practically every commodity on the market, catastrophic crime rates in red-run cities and farming and transportation woes. We may safely assume, though. that the Biden administration powers-that-be are taking full advantage of, and even encouraging the Ukraine-Russian war to that end. Discuss as you wish.

A Bodyguard of Lies

27. February 2022 · Comments Off on A Bodyguard of Lies · Categories: European Disunion, Media Matters Not, Military, The Bear, War, World

It’s screamingly obvious to anyone save perhaps the most gullible in a present-day university history program, that attempting to research the events and conduct of a war – and figuring out what is happening while the war is still ongoing is an impossibility. Were the defenders of Snake Island all killed in a Russian barrage … or are they alive, and prisoners of war? Is the Russian advance going as clockwork towards their goals … or are they being turned back? Have Ukrainian fighter aircraft shot down a Russian transport aircraft? Successfully ambushed a Russian column on an unspecified mission here or there in the conflict zone? Who is coming out ahead, dead or alive, on the ground or in the struggle for the eyeballs and sympathies of the outside world, watching with unswerving attention? What are we being told, and what is there to gain from us believing it?
The grim truth is – really, we can’t really believe much of what we see or hear about the war in the Ukraine at present. No armchair generals at this group blog, merely a collection of somewhat well-informed amateur (<em>and perhaps a sprinkling of professional</em>) analysists trying to make sense of what we can see, dimly through the fog. Truth is a nugget of pure gold somewhere in that fog and dirt; finding it may be more a matter of pure luck. <!–more–>

As Winston Churchill so cogently observed – the truth is protected with a bodyguard of lies. What’s in the headlines of the established media outlets certainly can’t be taken for that truth, and perhaps it never did, as the established media themselves are certainly not immune to being manipulated by clever and convincing operatives with an agenda. Social media like Twitter are not be all that credible, either, being as much given to repeating disinformation produced by a calculated campaign as the established news media. The best that we might have to go on is brief communications from people whom we have previously known and trusted, who – for reasons of profession and family – might be on the scene or adjacent. Anecdote is not date – but at this moment, it’s all that we have. The search for that golden truth nugget may be easier once all the dust is settled, the memoirs written and the official archives declassified … but then those historians on the search will have their own firmly held, hotly-defended theories, which will be good for a different kind of wrangling, when the fog of battle has cleared and the dust has settled. Discuss as you feel fit and qualified to observe.

This War Comes Already Pre-Nuked

14. February 2022 · Comments Off on This War Comes Already Pre-Nuked · Categories: Allied Treachery, Cry Wolf, European Disunion, Rant, Veteran's Affairs, War

So, the Biden (Mis) Administration, or whoever and whatever powers have the strings firmly attached to the puppet in the Oval Office seems determined to pick a fight and a war with Russia over the Ukraine. A fight in which most Americans might have some mild-to-moderate sympathies with the Ukrainians, as they were most viciously abused under Soviet rule, having the misfortune to be essentially the breadbasket of the Soviet Union and relatively unwilling to have their crops and livelihoods confiscated for the good of the Party of the Workers, and having in the interim since the fall of the Iron Curtain to have developed some pesky notions of a separate and rather rebellious national identity. The Ukraine, like Poland, is luckless geographically, in being the pathway of invading armies from either direction, so one can’t really blame them for being a little testy and proactive about another one.
But it’s not really our fight, and it seems to be one constructed in a Potemkin village fashion.
There was a story, most likely apocryphal regarding a proposed alliance sometime during the late 19th century, between (IIRC) Britain and France, likely against a bellicose Germany, wherein a high-level British diplomat and his equally high-level French counterpart began pounding out the details of the proposed military alliance. The British diplo asked his French counterpart; what would be the absolute minimum number of troops that Britain would contribute to the situation in an emergency in the case of German invasion. “Only one,” replied the French diplomat, “And we would make certain that he would be killed at once.”
That is what the Biden administration would like, apparently. They would like to be able to wave the bloody shirt, the blood-saturated BDU blouses of American military personnel as a cynical and calculated distraction from a year of epic fail. More »

All That Remains

13. October 2021 · Comments Off on All That Remains · Categories: Domestic, History, War

So, I was watching Youtube videos, mostly to amuse Wee Jamie, the Grandson Unit, as he sits propped up in my lap – we are attempting to keep him awake and amused during the day so that he will sleep for a good portion of the night. I found this video, about antique historic home renovation, wherein the couple who purchased a historic Victorian went through the room where all the unwanted detritus from the previous owners were stashed in tatty boxes, ancient suitcases.

The couple went through the room full of junk left over from the owners of the next of kin and rejects from the estate sale, looking for treasure, or at least, interesting relics of modest value … and one of the assortments they found was stuff consigned to a trash bag – a disintegrating photo album stuffed with seventy-year old pictures and documents to do with a first brief engagement of the wife of the previous owner to a naval aviator. The engagement took place during WWII and ended when the fiancé was lost at sea during a naval aviation action. There were the photographs, letters, certain documents, attesting to the existence of the doomed romance: a portion of two lives – possibly all that was left of one, all wrapped up in a single bag.

It all reminded me of several members of my own family – that all of their lives were summed up in a handful of pictures, documents and bits of this or that, and fading memories, as the people who knew them the best passed away themselves. There was a small, cheap suitcase which held the bits and pieces of my Uncle Jimmy’s nineteen years; the olive-green wool serge blouse and trousers of his US Army Air Corps uniform, a scrapbook he kept, full of newspaper and magazine cuttings, which were equal thirds divided between the war, news about aviation and various big bands, a small black pocket diary for 1941, which mostly documented the movies and big bands that he went to see, and the friends that he hung out with. For December 7, the entry was “War” with three exclamation points. There were a few other items in the suitcase which I don’t remember. My brother Alex has the diary, possibly the scrapbook, too. The rest likely burned in the 2003 fire which took down my parents’ retirement home, along with just about all the other relics and things which Mom and Dad inherited from their respective parents.

Of Great-Aunt Nan, I have an autograph book, full of messages from her friends, pictures of her in her WAAC uniform, a tiny “Ruptured Duck” service pin and a couple of other things. Nan lived a peripatetic life in small rented apartments. She traveled the world; some of her souvenirs also gravitated to me; some silver bracelets, a couple of tiny dolls which serve as Christmas ornaments. Of her older half-brother, Will, who perished on the Somme in 1916, there is even less remaining – copy of a single picture of Nan and Will. Nan herself was the last person living who remembered Will at first hand. Mom will be the last one, save for some childhood friends of the same vintage who remember her brother.

In the end, that’s all that most of us ordinary people leave – memories in the minds of those who knew us, a few faded pictures and entries in various public and private records.

1942 – The Year That Everything Happened

21. September 2020 · Comments Off on 1942 – The Year That Everything Happened · Categories: History, Literary Good Stuff, War

Weirdly enough – and this apparently happens to authors at random – I had a dream about the plot of a new book late this past summer and woke up just in time to remember it all. A novel set in WWII, which is at least half a century or more out of my fictional headspace; I like the 19th century. Got all the reference books, the books or art, a grasp of the vocab and the look of the whole 19th century universe and outlook. (The costumes, too; yes – I dress in late Victorian or Edwardian garb to do a book event. No, the corset isn’t that uncomfortable, and yes, how people react to me in this get-up, hat, reticule, gloves and all … it’s amazing. Last time out in all this, I had a guy tip his hat to me and say, ‘Howdy, ma-am’ and that is just freaking amazing!)

But – WWII. For me, it is just enough close in time that I knew a lot of people personally involved, from Great-Aunt Nan, who was one of the first-ever women recruited for the WAACs, to any number of high school teachers (some of whom were more forthcoming about their service than others) to the Gentleman With Whom I Kept Company for about a decade, to a neighbor of Mom and Dad’s who had been a prisoner of war in the Far East and fortunate enough to have survived the experience. In short, the books, the movies, even the TV shows that I watched as a kid and teenager, were all marinated in the memories of the Second World War. I was born a bare decade after it was all over; shows like “World at War” were in the ‘must watch’ category at our house, as well as any number of now slightly cringe-making series like … never mind. Just take it for granted that WWII was inescapable for a person of my age. I also scribbled some bad and derivative juvenile fiction with a WWII setting. (Which I found in a box in the garage during the most recent turn out … yep, it was bad. Supposedly, one must write a good few millions of words to get the bad out of your system. Just about all of that is in a box in the garage, against which are orders to the Daughter Unit to burn in future.) And I had a self-directed exploration into the 1930s-1940s in college, when I had access to a college library with microfiche scans of a certain newspaper; I read every issue from 1935-1945, which was like seeing a whole decade of history’s first draft narrowly through a key-hole.

Anyway – enough of the throat-clearing. As is my wont when working out the fine details in a plot, I set up an Excel spreadsheet broken out by month and year, marking events in various theaters, all the better to work the travails of my fictional characters against. It struck me all over again that 1942 was the year That Everything Happened. For Americans, it was the first full year of war on two fronts; for Britain and her colonies and the governments-in-exile of her allies, it was the start of a third year of a war formerly limited, more or less, to Europe and North Africa. And then all merry old hell broke out in the Far East. Possessions, colonies, independent small countries began falling like nine-pins to the Japanese war machine. British Malaya and Fortress Singapore, Dutch Indonesia, the Philippines, Guam and Wake Islands, a good chunk of New Guinea and other islands all across the South China Sea – all fell in the first few months of 1942. It would have been a depressing thing, reading any major Western newspaper during those weeks; weeks where Allied confidence in their own ability to fight a balls-to-the-wall war and win took a considerable beating. The Allies reeled … but in May, the fortunes of War began to smile on the Allies. A naval clash between Japanese, American and Australian naval forces in the Coral Sea checked Japanese attempts to take Rabaul in New Guinea. In the next month, another sea battle – again between dueling aircraft carriers in the defense of Midway Island – blunted further Japanese advances in the Central Pacific. In July and a world away – the Germans were blocked and turned back from Egypt at the first battle at El Alamein, and then again three months later, in the same place. In the month of August, the Americans began landing on Guadalcanal and the Australians began taking back New Guinea. The Axis tide was checked, and slowly began to retreat. In November, the Allies (American and British with Canadian, Australian and the Free Dutch naval backup) opened a second front with the Torch Landings in French-controlled Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco – this not quite a year after Pearl Harbor. In barely a year, the Allies went from disaster and defeat on practically every front, to regroup and to begin effectively striking back. It would take another two years and more to completely defeat the Axis Powers, but it is striking to look at the timeline for 1942 and to see how the war situation turned from humiliating defeat, through resolve, and then to begin the long march back.

Discuss as you wish.    

Who’s Your Baghdaddy?

30. October 2019 · 2 comments · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, Fun With Islam, GWOT, Iraq, Military, sarcasm, War

It is deeply, solidly ironic that at almost the very hour that US forces were bagging Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, fearless leader of the ISIL/ISIS-established caliphate in the Middle East, that the catastrophically-unfunny cast of Saturday Night Live had just finished ragging on President Trump for supposedly coddling ISIS by pulling out of Syria. There hasn’t been a case of timing this bad since 70ies Weatherman terrorist-turned-educator Bill Ayres launched his memoir of bomb-building and social mayhem the very week that Osama Bin Laden’s merry crew of jihadis murdered nearly 3,000 Americans and others in a single day, on September 11th, 2001.

Well, who would have thought that our intelligence services were actually performing the hard graft of tracking down dangerous international enemies, instead of attempting to reverse the results of an election, and harass domestic political opponents? Seeing that our military leadership was dead-as-a-doornail serious about taking care of business, in facilitating Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi date with his seventy-two cranky virgins or white grapes, or whatever – was grimly satisfactory. This is the jolly lad whose ISIS/ISIL hardliners set a standard for psychopathic cruelty to captives which might have 19th century Comanche and Apache warriors saying, “Oh, hey, guys – don’t you think that’s going a little too far?” (Or maybe not – those fellows had some stomach-churningly inventive notions about killing slowly.)

It is additionally rather delicious that al-Baghdadi was chased by a military working dog into his last hide-out, and that it was a female working dog at that. And there, the wretched man chose to blow himself up, with three of his kids, although Jamie Lee Curtis expressed some indignation and sorrow on his behalf. Did she or anyone else among the Hollywood Trump-haters express any such tender feelings about those captives of al-Baghdadi who were burned alive, drowned in metal cages, executed with det-cord around their necks, and beheaded in job-lots? Anything about the Yazidi women and girls sold into sex-slavery? So help me, I can’t recall, but then we have come to expect this kind of one-sided concern from the denizens of the celebrity world.

Finally – that the whole operation was kept from the Dem leadership on grounds of operational security? Ah yes; I won’t go as far as to say that Nancy Pelosi would have picked up the phone and called a contact at the Washington Post, saying, “You’ll never guess what is going down – the Special Forces are going after al Baghdadi – but don’t tell anyone, it’s Top Secret!” but at the rate that stuff keeps getting leaked from Dem offices into the media … good call. Yes, someone on a senior Dem leadership staff would have spilled to a media contact, likely out of sheer ignorance and malice toward Trump. The kind of mindset what sees the lower serving military ranks as disposable pawns, only useful for holding umbrellas, or as background for a nice photo op … or if their deaths can be used for a purpose. Yes, I’m that cynical. Discuss as you wish.

Occupation: A French Village

12. October 2019 · Comments Off on Occupation: A French Village · Categories: European Disunion, History, That's Entertainment!, War

On the strong recommendation of David Foster, the Daughter-Unit and I began to watch: A French Village, that seven-season long miniseries which follows five years of German occupation and a bit of the aftermath as it affects the lives of a handful of characters in a small town in eastern France close to the Swiss border – from the day that the German invaders arrive, to the aftermath of the occupation, in a fractured peace, when all was said and done. (It’s available through Amazon Prime.) A good few of the occupants of that village did not really welcome liberation and had damn good reasons – guilty consciences, mostly, for having collaborated with the Germans with varying degrees of enthusiasm. (A benefit is that this series stars actors of whom we have never heard, in French with English subtitles. Given how the establishment American entertainment media has gone all noisily woke, anti-Trump and abusive towards us conservative residents of Flyoverlandia, this is a darned good thing. Seriously, for years and years I used to only personally boycott Jane Fonda and Cat Stevens, now my list of ‘oh, hell NEVER! actors and personalities is well into the scores.)
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Dross to Gold and Vice Versa

07. December 2018 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force, Devil Dogs, Eat, Drink and be Merry, Politics, War, Working In A Salt Mine...

I was skimming through the various stories about the late President Bush the First this week, especially one about how he and Barbara were so considerate of and beloved by the Security Service agents who guarded them. It was kind of sweet, the account of a peckish agent going through the White House kitchen in the wee hours, looking for the cookies that he knew that the stewards of the kitchen had baked for the next day … and being joined by Bush the First, in ransacking the kitchen in search of the elusive cookies. That Bush the First and Barbara were loved and respected by the agents whose mission I can attest to at second hand. One of the Air Force security service NCOs I served with in Korea had just come off an assignment at the White House protection detachment. He adored Barbara, BTW – to hear him tell it, he was one of her favorite agents. She called him “Timmy”, which was kind of cute, as he was one of these six-foot-something guys and built like a concrete traffic bollard; probably Barbara was the only one aside from his mother who called him by that name.

The Bushes – the first and second – made a point of staying in Washington over Christmas Eve, so that their staff and security teams could spend Christmas with their families. Think on that – as I have. More than times I have to count, I spent holidays on duty – many of them having to listen to news and feature stories about how the day was a time to celebrate with family and loved ones, enjoying a lavish meal and relaxing; this when I was alone at midnight in a dark building, ripping teletype copy off the machine, re-shelving records in the library, and wondering if I would have time to eat a ham sandwich while I typed up spots for the reader book with one hand. That the Bushes held off on traveling out of town in order that their staffs could have a nice Christmas at home with their families, instead of jetting off for two or three weeks over the holidays, bag, baggage, staff and security to … someplace else; that was considerate, above and beyond.

I saw this as an acknowledgement that other people, especially those lower on the power totem pole – their private lives, their families and all, had purpose and value, to which decent folk in a position of power, ought to acknowledge. It was very old-school of the senior Bushes; and quite a contrast to the Obamas, who went swanning off to Hawaii for their Christmas holidays, and having a meet-n-greet for Marines and their families on Christmas morning. I suppose that the Marines and their families may have been flattered and thrilled to be so honored … but still. Christmas morning, having to be on hand hours before, the active duty troops likely having been up to all hours ensuring that everything was ship-shape. Spouses and small children taken from their family time and space on a holiday morning. My daughter still wonders how many of those appearing in the pictures taken of those various events were “volentold” : Their presence was required. For the photo-op. On Christmas morning.

I suppose that some of those present would have been OK, would have been there; because, President of the USA! Personal appearance, deigning to appear among the working stiffs, at the pointy end of the spear … but still. Christmas morning. Military – but can’t there be private time with the family carved out? So, I felt kind of sorry for the troops and their families, put on the spot during what should have been private, family, at-home time.

That led tangentially to another thought – about how certain politicians and activists, who make a big show about how much they care for humanity, or the downtrodden minorities, or women – or whomever – are in their personal sphere rude and abusive to their families, employees, or even just those casually encountered. Ted Kennedy, after all – was the darling of Establishment Feminists. In real life he was a drunken an abusive pig towards say, ordinary working-class women like waitresses. Yet someone like Mitt Romney – who likely hasn’t been impolite to a woman of any class in his entire adult life – had the same Feminists raining scorn and outright hatred down upon him. Even though these very same Establishment Feminists have been insisting for decades that the personal is political. How very fortunate that those who talk a good talk and garner credit for having the correct opinions and political stances in the abstract seem to be allowed all kinds of latitude in their real-life conduct … while those who are the epitome of grace and good manners in personal conduct are damned as racists and misogynist haters for not toeing the politically-correct line. Are we, at this late date, effectively calling out any of these hypocrites? Discuss as you will.

The Current Range of Derangement

14. June 2018 · Comments Off on The Current Range of Derangement · Categories: Fun and Games, GWOT, History, Media Matters Not, Memoir, N. Korea, Politics, War

I freely confess to having initially thought that when Donald Trump threw his hat into the political ring and began campaigning for election to the highest office in our fair land – it was a colossal joke and not one in particularly good taste. But I was never an adamant never-Trumper, and eventually came to think that hey – a wheeler-dealer Noo Yawk property developer (who after all HAD run a good-sized business enterprise for years) couldn’t possibly stuff up the job any more disastrously than He Who Dances With Teleprompters and his merry band of faculty lounge theorizers, career bureaucrats and second-gen beneficiaries of elite parental, fraternal or marital connections. In any case – I’d vote for practically anyone than Her Inevitableness the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua, even if I had to pin my nostrils shut with C-clamp. So – what the hell. Reader, I voted for him. I have to admit that when it sends rabid lefty celebs like Robert De Niro into a spittle-flecked rant on live television, I am tempted to rub my hands together and cackle with evil glee like Mr. Burns in the Simpsons, watching them come unglued with their hate for flyover country and those denizens of it which also voted for him. A man is known in a large part by the character and quantity of his enemies; Trumps’ are as numerous and as varied as any collection of grotesqueries in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

So I started this post as yet another meditation on how ever-flipping-out-of-their minds the current iteration of Trump-haters are … and then the meeting in Singapore happened, and actually promises … maybe, if all goes well, a resolution to a war which started just before I was born, in a country to which my father was stationed as an Army draftee when I was born, in which I served for a year (three and a half decades later) and in which my daughter might very well have drawn duty in her turn. The Korean War – bloody and vicious, as we are reminded through M*A*S*H reruns – ended in an armistice and a heavily-armed border which slices the Korean peninsula into halves. Not anywhere equal halves, other than geographical.

Back at the start of it all, the northern part of that peninsula was the industrially-developed part. The inhabited part, whereas the southern bits were the rural and primitive parts. The whole of the place, as I came to understand in the year that I lived there, emerged as a feisty and independent kingdom, with a very distinct culture, identity, and language; a language with its’ own phonetic alphabet – the notion of one of their genius kings. Not Chinese, definitely not Japanese, in spite of seventy years of heavy-handed Japanese occupation, which only ended after WWII. I liked Korea enormously, for all that my taste of it was relatively brief. Seoul was a hectic, spectacular, modern city. I think that I went across it in every direction, via the subway, bus, or by taxi, innumerable times on my way to do an English-language voice-job, and never felt the least bit threatened or in danger because of being a foreigner. I was not much taller than the average Korean woman, or all that much more fair-skinned, and with my hair bundled up under a beret, not all that much darker of hair color. Unless people looked directly at me … I didn’t stand out all that much and I worked at not attracting attention to myself anyway. (But with one of my comrades in doing voice-work, who was about six and a half-foot tall … yeah, then we got noticed on public transportation.)

The Korean nationals that I worked with, on my various voice and broadcasting jobs were a relatively cosmopolitan lot, and we talked now and again about the North, and the threat intermittently posed, most notably to Seoul, well within artillery range of North Korean big guns. Indeed, about every six months or so, the Norks indulged in what another blogger termed the Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken – a regularly-scheduled theatrical bit of sabre-rattling, to which the old Korea hands (and possibly most ordinary Koreans) eventually became pretty blasé. (More here from The Daily Brief) Is there now a possible end in sight to a situation which has existed slightly longer than I have been alive, through Donald Trump’s surprisingly cordial summit with Little Fat Kim? Speculation on the imminent collapse of the North floats around at about the same frequency as the Korean Motherland Unity Game of Repeated Chicken. But this time, I do wonder if the Reign of Kim really is on very shaky ground – and Little Fat Kim knows it and is nervous about survival – his personal survival and that of his circle. Bits and dribbles of dismaying information keep trickling out of the hermetically-sealed kingdom; that the soldiers forage for food in the cultivated fields, that the Nork soldier who defected across the DMZ was riddled with intestinal parasites, that the underground nuclear test site collapsed the whole side of the mountain where it was located, that whole districts are stripped bare of vegetation … and perhaps at long last, the Chinese are not quite so blindly supportive of their favorite client state. Is North Korea circling the drain of history, and the Kim regime is trying one last desperate throw of the dice while North Korea still has the appearance of a viable state? Discuss.

Don’t Mean Nothin

24. May 2017 · 1 comment · Categories: Media Matters Not, Rant, War

(That’s a phrase from the Vietnam War era military, BTW.)

Another day, another mass-killing, inspired by fundamentalist Islam, and perpetuated by a killer prepared to explode himself with a bomb packed with ball-bearings, or nails, chunks of scrap metal, whatever … as long as he or she takes a bunch of infidels with him, thereby to enjoy eternity in the endless whorehouse that is the Islamic version of paradise. Another Bataclan, another Pulse nightclub, another Fort Hood, another San Bernardino, another Boston Marathon. Sometimes the program is varied with guns and plenty of ammunition. But mostly – bombs, calculated to splatter as much human flesh as far as possible. And there is another round of faces of the dead, the bloodied limbs of the injured, splashed over the internet and newspaper pages. Another round of flowers and candles and teddy bears piled up in impromptu memorials, another moment of silence, of services where members of the prominent ruling class assume somber expressions, the inevitable hash-tag and Book of Face filter (where one expresses sympathy and solidarity on the cheap on ones’ page). And the inevitable footnote – where an assortment of media personalities and a selection of plummy-voiced representatives express pious dismay regarding the inevitable anti-Muslim backlash and claim that Islam is a religion of peace. (At this point, I suspect said representatives have their fingers crossed behind their backs, such is the degree of cynicism to which I have sunk since September 11, 2001.) More »

Another Round of Chicken

30. April 2017 · Comments Off on Another Round of Chicken · Categories: Military, War

Or as another Open Saloner called it, some years ago, “The semi-annual national unity game of chicken”; that is the ostentation round of saber-rattling which has been played by North Korea every six months or so since … since the armistice which divided the Norks from the Sorks about the time that I was born. I wrote in 2013;

“The Norks do this every six months, usually when they want to squeeze some concessions out of the outside world. It’s like an overgrown toddler throwing an international temper tantrum. Likely, all of his generals (or uncles, even the generals who are not his uncles) have to go along and make the usual noises and poses for the cameras, in spite of the fact that for all their resplendent ribbon-salad displays – they have not fought an all-out, balls-to-the wall war since 1954. Which war was nearly sixty years and three wars ago, as Americans are counting it, which means that their equipment must be getting pretty worn-out as well as their tactical schemes and field practice for using them – outside the boundaries of a pretty tightly-controlled war game which will allow no margin for making the Kim dynasty’s pet soldiers look bad in any way, shape or form … while they might have been able to buy some new stuff on the international black market – which hints that those drug sales by their diplomatic staff must really be paying off, big-time, and they might actually be able to hit what they might be aiming at, on a good day, depending on what they have purchased, and if their vendors didn’t rob them blind, and if the Chinese actually gave them some of the good stuff … I do believe they can hit Seoul on a good day with their artillery, and kidnap lonely strangers off the beachfront towns in Japan in the wee hours, and possibly come close to hitting Japan with something high-explosive … whacking the continental United States with a ballistic missile is a bit of a chancy prospect.”

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Under Siege

01. August 2016 · Comments Off on Under Siege · Categories: Air Force, Allied Treachery, Fun With Islam, Military, War

The base at Hellenikon was often under siege and sometimes physically so; before, during and after I was stationed there in the early 1980s; regularly once a year when the local national employees went on strike, and blockaded the front gate, and now and again by anti-US and anti-NATO protesters. Although there was a Greek Air Force installation right next to the American base, there was no passage between the two, unlike the base at Zaragoza, where Spanish and American personnel had pretty much free passage between their respective halves of the facility. In the case of striking workers, or hostile protestors at the main – and only entrance – those of us inside the base were stuck there, while those outside were also cut off. Only one year did it become a problem lasting more than a single day – but it was an inconvenience for us all, and particularly frightening for family members.

And I was remembering all of that, this weekend, reading about how Incirlik Air Base – which also used to be called Adana Air Base – was cut off for about a day this weekend, after having commercial power cut off for nearly a week by Turkish civil authorities, in the wake of an attempted coup against a president who strong-armed himself into office by side-stepping the established rules. Because of the deteriorating situation in Turkey, all family members were ordered out at the end of March, 2016; a NEO evacuation, as it used to be and still is termed, for Non-combatant Evacuation Operation. (I used to have to keep current paperwork for an escort for my daughter, in the case of one of these; she would travel with various friends who would deposit her eventually with my parents, while I would stay behind.) Months before, the military quietly stopped facilitating accompanied tours to Incirlik. Currently, according to the bases’ own website, there are about 1,400 American military personnel serving there, with another 400 civilian employees. The dependent schools, teen center, child care center – all are closed; presumably the various employees of same are either evacuated themselves, or enjoying a nice vacation.

Incirlik’s mission and that of the 39th Air Base Wing is, according to the bases’ website, “to help protect U.S. and NATO interests in the Southern Region by providing a responsive staging and operational air base ready to project integrated, forward-based air power.” Part of this mission also includes a store of nuclear weapons. The base website is naturally, non-committal about this aspect of their mission. Even if there aren’t any such weapons in the bomb dump at Incirlik, likely there are all kinds of interesting munitions and weapons. Which is all very good and well – but Turkey’s President Erdogan has been loudly accusing the US – and the former USAF commander of Incirlik – of plotting and assisting with the failed coup. The commander of the Turkish Air Force assets at Incirlik is reported to have asked the US for asylum, which was refused; the man is now under arrest, as part of the purge of Erdogan’s political enemies. I have read here and there that those American military assigned to the base are confined to the base itself; considering Erdogan’s incendiary accusations, probably a wise move.

As for what now – like Will Rogers of blessed memory, all I know is what I read in the newspaper, or on-line at various sites. But the nightmare visioning that woke me up several times this weekend was of a full-on mob attack on Incirlik’s American sector, on the order of the Benghazi consulate writ large, and with even more weapons and determination … and with the tacit encouragement of Erdogan’s government and Islamist allies.
So much for being a NATO ally. And since our State Department did very little in the case of the Benghazi attack, save for blaming it all afterwards on a mysterious video that hardly anyone had heard of … can one count on the DoD being all that proactive in the event of a serious attack on Incirlik AB? Discuss.

Vinegar Joe’s Long Walk (Conclusion)

04. February 2016 · Comments Off on Vinegar Joe’s Long Walk (Conclusion) · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, War

(OK – finally the last of the history post I started earlier this week. Things to do, places to, things to write about. I said I would have this second part on Friday, but … real world, you know?)

Towards the end of that day, May 6th, 1942, the road petered out. Stilwell abandoned the last of the trucks and the radio van – the radio set weighed 200 pounds alone. Last messages were sent, one advising General Brereton, in New Delhi that Stilwell and his party were on foot, heading for Homalin and then Imphal, and asking for them to be met at Homalin by resupply and medical aid. “Indian govt. should be warned rice, police, and doctors urgently needed by refugees on all routes to India from Burma. Large numbers on way. All control gone. Catastrophe quite possible. End.” Another, to the US War Department via Chunking, ended, “We are armed, have food and map and are on foot 50 miles west of Indaw … believe this is probably our last message for a while. Cheerio. Stilwell.”
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Vinegar Joe’s Long Walk

27. January 2016 · Comments Off on Vinegar Joe’s Long Walk · Categories: History, War

He was an abrasive man, as his nickname suggests – and had very little of soothing diplomacy in him. A soft-spoken and conciliatory manner might have served him better in the long run over the duration of his tour as the American commander of Chinese troops in Burma during WWII, but considering the dire situation there in March of 1942, perhaps irascible and decisive better served the immediate situation. A 1904 graduate of the US Military Academy, General Joseph Warren Stilwell had a particular talent for languages – to include blistering invective, written and spoken Chinese, field tactics and the training of soldiers. He had come to Burma to take charge of reorganizing the nationalist Chinese military forces there … just the Allied defense of South-east Asia crumbled under a vigorous Japanese offensive. The invasion of Burma was intended to cut off the land route which supplied China, blockaded along the coast by the Japanese. War materiel for China reached there only by ship via the Burmese port of Rangoon and thence by truck, traveling 700 miles over the Burma Road. This ran from Lashio to Kunming and Yunnan; a perilous track hacked out by hand labor through jungle and over steep mountains several years earlier.

The defense of Burma rested primarily on British, Commonwealth, and Chinese forces – all supplied with difficulty as the Japanese launched their great offensive in December, 1941. About the only thing that the fractious Allied command in Burma possessed in quantity was distrust, suspicion, and an awareness of impending defeat at the hands of triumphant Japanese pushing north along a line from Rangoon to Mandalay. Stilwell, nominally in command of the Chinese armies, was constantly back-bitten by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, who was reluctant to gamble troops and materiel, preferring to conserve them against future needs – fighting the Japanese in short term and Chinese Communists in the long. The Generalissimo also did not repose much trust in the British, either – suspecting them of imperialist designs on China. This was a distaste shared with Stilwell, although for a slightly different reason. Stilwell abhorred pomp, circumstance, military ritual, jazzy uniforms, many privileges of rank, and swagger sticks, in no particular order – some or all of which were delighted in by the British military establishment. (To be fair, some American officers delighted in them as well.)
Stilwell, who if anything was an active and hands-on commander, had two small field HQs – one at Lashio, and the other at a small town called Shwebo, just north of Mandalay – where Stilwell was when the commander of British forces in Burma, General Harold Alexander ordered evacuation of Burma. Allied defense of Burma had collapsed utterly; Alexander’s evacuation order was merely confirmation of the dire situation on the ground. British, Indian, Chinese, Burmese troops and civilians were already making a mad dash along any route leading to India and safety.

General Alexander had experience in military disaster and withdrawal, having covered, as a divisional commander in France in 1940, the evacuation of British forces at Dunkirk. Alexander had left on the last destroyer out of Dunkirk; Stilwell had much more strenuous plans. Even in defeat, and with a disinclination to pull rank for his own advantage, Stilwell had pull. An American transport aircraft arrived on May the 1st. Stilwell refused to get on it himself – he sent out fifteen members of his HQ staff instead, and set off north by truck and jeep, on a route which paralleled the railway between Mandalay and the strategic town of Myitkyina, where the airfield was still in operation. He started with a group of about eighty, with the intent of traveling by train to Myitkyina, evacuating all but a few by air and trying to rally the Chinese troops.
The railway turned out to be useless to them, blocked by damage to the rails beyond the power of Stilwell’s party to clear it. The best way of reaching India and safety, in Stilwell’s judgement, was to turn westerly, and head for the valley of the Chindwin River, and cross the mountains beyond on foot. This had the advantage of avoiding mobs of the defeated Allied troops and frantic civilian evacuees clogging the well-traveled routes out of Burma; the Japanese advance leap-frogging ahead … and with luck, would skim through before torrential rains of the seasonal monsoon. On the 5th of May, the general ordered several trucks of his convoy abandoned when they bogged down in a river ford. They carried on westwards toward the Chindwin with the remaining trucks, the lighter jeeps carrying the most critical supplies, and the radio van.

The party had grown since leaving Shwebo; by the morning of May 6th it was a multinational and civilian-military affair: nearly thirty US Army personnel – most of them officers of Stillwell’s staff, fifteen ragged British soldiers and fourteen Chinese, a volunteer medical unit commanded by Dr. Gordon Seagrave (the son of long-time American missionaries in Burma and fluent in the Karen language), including 19 Christian Burmese nurses, a small British Quaker ambulance unit, Jack Beldon, civilian correspondent for Time and Life Magazines, some native Burmese, Indian and Malayan cooks, and the Reverend Breedham Case, another missionary with extensive knowledge of upper Burma and the various dialects spoken there. One of the British officers, a Major Barton had also spent many years in up-country Burma. The knowledge of the country and languages possessed by those three – Major Barton, the Reverend Case, and Dr. Seagrave would prove invaluable to the party over the course of their long walk to India and safety.

(To be continued on Friday)

Rituals of the Season

06. December 2015 · Comments Off on Rituals of the Season · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun With Islam, GWOT, History, Iraq, Media Matters Not, War, World

My daughter was nearly ten years old, in that Christmastime of 1990. I was stationed at Zaragoza AB, in the Ebro River Valley of Spain, which was serving as one of the staging bases in Europe for the build-up to the First Gulf War … the effort to liberate Kuwait, which Saddam Hussein seemed to believe that he had a perfect right to occupy, loot and exterminate those opposing him in that small matter. But this is not about that war, particularly – only as it affected those of us located far along the haft of the military spear towards the sharp and pointy end.

Zaragoza was a long-established US base in Spain by then – sufficiently long enough to have grown up a second generation of children born to American servicemen and their Spanish wives. It was sufficiently well-established to have a fairly modern on-base school, which housed the elementary classes in one wing, and the high school in the other. My daughter started there in kindergarten, the very week that we arrived, in 1985, to the day that we departed, six years later, when she started the sixth grade. It was a safe posting, especially considered after my previous assignment to Athens, Greece, where terrorism aimed at American personnel and at the base generally was accepted grimly as an ongoing part of life, like hurricanes along the southern coasts. One took every careful precaution and internalized certain practices against an irregular and specifically unpredictably-occurring threat. One of my daughter’s earliest memories is of watching me from the front step of the suburban Athens apartment where we lived then … kneeling down to look underneath my car, parked out in the street. I was, of course, looking for something explody-ish with trailing wires, where such a device ought to not be attached to the underside of the bright orange Volvo sedan that I had purchased from a fellow NCO upon arrival in Athens. (The Volvo had the temporary USG or US Forces Greece license plates on it, which branded the vehicle as being owned/driven by a member of the American military, and thus a likely target for anything from crude vandalism to a bomb.  Just one of those things; it was a relief to get to Spain, where the practice was for regular Spanish license plates to be placed on automobiles owned by American service personnel.)

Late in autumn of that year the build-up began. Zaragoza AB went on a war footing, which meant that duties and hours devoted to those duties doubled, or in some cases, tripled for all personnel. Bright new concertina wire went up, all along the base perimeter; one of my memories of that period was how weirdly beautiful it looked under a layer of winter frost  in the early morning – like sunshine brilliantly glittering on matte-finished silver.

Christmas was coming.  After that, New Year’s Day, and then the deadline for Saddam Hussein to give up Kuwait. We knew that, barring a miracle, he wouldn’t. And then War, sometime in those days of the first week. Inevitable. The dark grey storm cloud on the horizon, flickering with flashes of interior lightning, blotting out the horizon and moving inexorably closer. One was made aware of it in dozens of ways, as the minutes, hours, days ticked by – even as the prosaic routines went on. My daughter had school every day, I cooked a family supper every evening, read to her at bed-time, shopped for groceries at the commissary, pressed a fresh blue uniform shirt every morning, mailed out Christmas cards, bought and wrapped presents. Because Christmas. One holds on to as many shreds and shards of normality as one can, when it comes to children.

These last few weeks, I have been feeling the same foreboding that I did, that holiday season more than twenty years ago. My daughter and I have a full schedule of weekend holiday markets and events. When we were setting up for the first of them, on a Friday afternoon, we came home to the news about the Islamic massacre in Paris. This week, as we were getting ready for another, it was the Islamic massacre of local government employees in San Bernardino. Next week … who knows? I am fairly certain that there will be another atrocity perpetrated by Daesh fanatics over the coming holiday season. It will occur in a place and at a time where it will all come as a horrifying surprise to the victims of it, to our national leadership cadre and to our major news outlets. The latter two will, of course, be horribly inconvenienced by having to throw some thin shreds of career-saving rationale or justification excusing such an unexpected event. This I know, as surely as I saw the deadline for military action in the Gulf inch closer and closer.

Merry Christmas, y’all.

 

The Crossroads of History

22. May 2015 · Comments Off on The Crossroads of History · Categories: Fun With Islam, GWOT, War

Almost four years ago I wrote about how the monuments and artifacts of ancient Egypt were possibly in peril from militant Islam – those grim and sternly bearded fanatics devoted to the principal that nothing rightfully exists before or outside of Islam. It was being suggested then that the Pyramids be covered up – certainly a considerable chore, but their fellow coreligionists energetically set about destroying the ancient Bamiyan Buddhas based on the same argument. So, one might have had good cause four years ago to worry about the relics of pre-Islamic Egypt – temples, monuments, ruined cities and tombs. How many thousands of years’ worth of relics, ornaments and paintings might be at risk? Fortunately for Egypt, it seems that soberer heads have prevailed for now: after all, someday they might want the tourists to come back again.

It is written in Psalms, “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.” We die, kingdoms and empires pass in time, but the earth endures as well as those monuments and ruins left behind. Fragments of the past, of our mutual human history usually aren’t as thick on the ground as they are in Egypt, the Middle East, Greece and Italy; if not the cradle of Western civilization, then at the very least the kindergarten playground. So the rest of us have always felt a rather proprietary interest in those relics and places. These were places written of in the Bible, in the Greek and Roman classics, in a thousand epics, poems and legends – Jerusalem, Babylon, Ur of the Chaldees, Ninevah and Tyre, Athens and Sparta … and in travel accounts like Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, and for me – Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels.

I don’t think many people over a certain age know of syndicated travel writer, adventurer and all-round eccentric Richard Halliburton, whose brilliant heyday was in the mad-and-booming 1920s and the escape-and adventure-starved 1930s. He vanished in mid-Pacific in 1939 in a calculated attempt – in the interests of another series of columns and a book – to cross that ocean in a replica Chinese junk. One of the relics of his evanescent popularity was a copy of the complete Book of Marvels, which belonged to Mom as a teenager, and which I read … or rather, ate up, omnivorously. The original copy (no dusk-jacket, worn green cloth covers, with Mom’s bookplate glued into the front endsheet) might be on my shelves somewhere; if not, it was one of those burned in the 2003 fire which pretty well cleansed this family of all but a few especially precious and portable relics. I am pretty certain that this is where I first read of legendary Palmyra, and Zenobia – the beautiful warrior queen of a desert kingdom, who led a heroic rebellion against Rome with all the usual dramatic success of rebellions against Rome when it was at its imperial height.

A beautiful city, by all accounts – adorned with all the art and architecture that a wealthy small kingdom at the trading crossroads of the known world, later added onto with whatever Imperial Rome could add and which enthusiasts of the last two centuries could excavate, restore and reconstruct – a wondrous ancient city by all accounts. Reviewing the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, to pre-Islamic relics all across the Middle East and most recently at the site of ancient Hatra and Nimrud, one simply can’t avoid knowing what is in store for Palmyra. And this hurts on such a deep level – that these marvelous buildings, frescoes, statues and all could have endured for so many years will be smashed by barbarians in a few hours or days – and furthermore, barbarians who could not, on the best day they ever had, build something as beautiful and enduring. But then, destruction is always easier than creation.

Likely it won’t end with Palmyra, either. In a recently released publication intended as a sort of Rough Guide to the brand-new caliphate, the author ended with this bit of chest-beating bravado (emphasis added by underlining) : “When we descend on the streets of London, Paris and Washington the taste will be far bitterer, because not only will we spill your blood, but we will also demolish your statues, erase your history and, most painfully, convert your children who will then go on to champion our name and curse their forefathers.”
How will Italians handle such a threat to their Coliseum in Rome, or Greeks to the Athenian Acropolis, and English to say – the Tower of London? I’d like to think they would not be entirely supine when it happens locally, especially since Greeks still bitterly despise Turks for the Muslim Turkish occupation. Interesting times, indeed; discuss.

(Crossposted at www.chicagoboyz.net)

Archive Post: A Vietnam Meditation

01. May 2015 · Comments Off on Archive Post: A Vietnam Meditation · Categories: History, War

(From the archives as I have been reminded of the anniversary of the fall of Saigon. I wrote a version of this early on at SSDB, around 2004.)

Never been there, never particularly wanted to: to someone of my age, it is Bad Place, a haunted place, where ugly things happened. It gave nightmares to friends, co-workers, and lovers for years after it dropped out of the headlines and the six-o-clock news. Today in light of the current war, it seems as far away in time and nearly as pointless as the Western Front. You look, and remember, and wonder, knowing that yes, it really happened, but really, what was the point of it all? Platoon seems as much of a relic as Journey’s End, the image of a helicopter hovering over jungle with “All Along the Watchtower” on the soundtrack an image as archaic as doughboys with puttees and soup-plate helmets, marching along and singing “Mademoiselle from Armentieres”.

But it was a beautiful place. My friends Xuan-An and Hai brought away pictures of where they lived in Dalat, in the highlands, where they married and lived with their three older children, snaps of cool, misty green pines and gardens of rhododendrons, and a horizon of mountains. Eventually, they had to flee Dalat for Saigon, where their youngest daughter was born, and Xuan-An’s mother came to live with them. Hai had left Hanoi as a teenager when the Communists took over there, his family being well to do, part Chinese, and immensely scholarly. He worked as a librarian for the USIS, and Xuan-An as a teacher of English and sciences, so they were on the Embassy list of Vietnamese citizens to be evacuated in the spring of 1975, with their four children, aged 12 to 2 years old. They were waiting at their home, for someone to come fetch them, on that last day. Perhaps someone from the Embassy might have come for them eventually, but Xuan-An’s brother who was the captain of a Vietnamese coastal patrol vessel came to their house after dark, instead. He had sent his crewmen all to fetch their families, they were going to make a run for safety out to sea, and he came to get his and Xuan-Ans’ mother. He was appalled to find his sister and brother-in-law and the children still there, and urged them to come with him straight away, and not wait any longer for rescue. They brought away no more luggage than what the adults could carry, in small packs the size of student’s book-bags, and the youngest daughter was a toddler and had to be carried herself. Xuan-An’s brother’s motor launch was a hundred feet long, and there were a hundred people crammed onto it, carrying them out to an American cargo ship, the Pioneer Contender, which waited with other American rescuers, just beyond the horizon.
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