Strange Report – World War II Version

26. January 2007 · Comments Off on Strange Report – World War II Version · Categories: General, History, Military, War

(The following lifted from a message posted on a Yahoo group for military broadcasters: a collection of oddball factoids about World War II. I do know the one about the Koreans is true, as it was written up in one of Stephen Ambroses’ books about D-Day. All others, salt to taste and discuss amongst yourselves.)

1. The first German serviceman killed in WW2 was killed by the Japanese (China, 1937), the first American serviceman killed was killed by the Russians (Finland 1940), the highest ranking American killed was Lt. Gen. Lesley McNair, killed by the US Army Air Corps. . . . So much for allies.

2. The youngest US serviceman was 12 year old Calvin Graham, USN. He was wounded and given a Dishonorable Discharge for lying about his age. (His benefits were later restored by act of Congress.)

3. At the time of Pearl Harbor the top US Navy command was Called CINCUS (pronounced “sink us”), the shoulder patch of the US Army’s 45th Infantry division was the Swastika, and Hitler’s private train was named “Amerika.” All three were soon changed for PR purposes.

4. More US servicemen died in the Air Corps than the Marine Corps. While completing the required 30 missions your chance of being killed was 71%.

5. Generally speaking there was no such thing as an average fighter pilot.You were either an ace or a target. For instance Japanese ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa shot down over 80 planes. He died while a passenger on a Cargo plane.

6. It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th round with a tracer round to aid in aiming. This was a mistake. Tracers had different ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target 80% of your rounds were missing. Worse yet tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. This was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down.

YOU’VE GOT TO LOVE THIS ONE….

7. When allied armies reached the Rhine the first thing men did was pee in it. This was pretty universal from the lowest private to Winston Churchill (who made a big show of it) and Gen. Patton (who had himself photographed in the act), found the photo (hand tinted black and white).

8. German Me-264 bombers were capable of bombing New York City but it wasn’t worth the effort.

9. German submarine U-120 was sunk by a malfunctioning toilet.

10. Among the first “Germans” captured at Normandy were several Koreans. They had been forced to fight for the Japanese Army until they were captured by the Russians and forced to fight for the Russian Army until they were captured by the Germans and forced to fight for the German Army until they were captured by the US Army.

AND I SAVED THE BEST FOR LAST….

11. Following a massive naval bombardment 35,000 US and Canadian troops stormed ashore at Kiska, in the Aleutian Islands. 21 troops were killed in the firefight. It would have been worse if there had been any Japanese on the island.

The Year of Living Dangerously

31. December 2006 · Comments Off on The Year of Living Dangerously · Categories: General, Media Matters Not, Pajama Game, War

If the personal stuff is anything to go by, then 2006 was the year of living dangerously. It’s the year when both my daughter and I cheerfully said “the hell” to what we had been doing for a while, and resolved to pursue what we really wanted. Blondie plunged into college (funded by the GI Bill, and a small VA disability payment), and I exited full-time employment in the pink-collar ghetto with a cheerful face and almost indecent haste. No, really, I think I was given a healthy shove just as I was nerving myself up to jump. Life is too short to spend it looking at the clock and wishing for the work day to end so you can get to the stuff you really want to be doing.

But I look ahead to 2007 with a vague yet unshakeable feeling of dread. I have the feeling that things are happening faster and faster; and that they are well beyond anyone’s ability to control. There have been… is the word “portents” too heavy? Baleful, maybe; like one of those Technicolor Texas sunrises; all purple clouds edged with gold and the sun rising blood-red in smear of pink sky. One thinks of that kind of sunrise as a herald, a red sky as a warning of storms.

The execution of Saddam Hussein is just the most recent of these events; did it not seem to happen very suddenly? The various trials looked to be one of those continuing circuses that would drag on for decades. Saddam would grow fat and old, and his lawyers would quibble, delay and appeal for stays, and he would eventually die of something prosaic like a heart attack, long after anyone ceased to care, except for the last few toothless protest ‘tards waving signs in front of the last few McDonalds’ in Europe. Instead… short walk and a swift drop, thank you very much.

Iran with nukes, and a charismatic leader with apocalyptic visions… and a hard-on for Jew-killing. Not a reassuring combination, all things considered. Consider also that this doesn’t seem to bother the usual UN and Euro protest ‘tards who have a conniption every time an American administration sneezes. The possibility of a mushroom cloud blossoming over Tel Aviv, or Marsailles, or Rome doesn’t seem to keep much more than a handful of us awake at night… Eh, it won’t be a US nuke, so what? They’re the only ones that really matter, apparently.

Even more dispiriting than the possibility of Iran using nuclear materiel for un-peaceful purposes, (which admittedly is only a possibility) is the challenge which has already been conceded, yielded up and surrendered by our mainstream press and so-called intellectual elites. Contemplate how easily and how consistently the flow of AP and Reuters news releases, video and still photography from Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority were slanted by partisan interests. Now there is a dagger in the heart of any pretense at impartiality. Rathergate and See-BS 60 Minutes might have been a one-off, and I’ve been able to avoid watching TV news magazines for years, but AP and Reuters releases are at the heart of local newspapers everywhere, especially those who can’t afford to send a reporter much beyond city limits.

The affair of the Danish Mohammad Cartoons depresses me even more, every time I think on it. For me it is a toss-up which of these qualities is more essential, more central to western society: intellectual openness to discussion and freewheeling criticism of any particular orthodoxy, the separation of civil and religious authority, and the presence of a robust and independent press. The cravenness of most of our legacy media in not publishing or broadcasting the Dread Cartoons o’ Doom still takes my breath away.

They have preened themselves for years on how brave they are, courageous in smiting the dread McCarthy Beast, ending the Horrid Vietnam Quagmire and bringing down the Loathsome Nixon… but a dozen relatively tame cartoons. Oh, dear… we must be sensitive to the delicate religious sensibilities of Moslems. Never mind about all that bold and fearless smiting with the pen, and upholding the right of the people to know, we mustn’t hurt the feelings of people who might blow up the Press Club*. The alacrity with which basic principals were given up by the legacy press in the face of quite real threats does not inspire me with confidence that other institutions will be any more stalwart.

Interesting times, interesting times… as that Chinese curse has it. It would make a great book, though… assuming that we survive it all. A then-obscure poem quoted in a New Years Day broadcast, sixty-eight years ago has a an odd resonance for me this year:

“I said to a man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown,’ and he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.”

(M.L. Harkins, 1875-1957, quoted by King George VI, 1 January 1940)

(BTW, The new book is shaping up nicely, with practically operatic levels of drama, murder, vengeance, betrayal and stolen children. The proposal for the novel about the Stephens Party is going to be presented by a writer friend of mine to his publisher, so keep fingers crossed on that one!)

* Meaning the MSM, legacy media, lamestream media… which as a national institution seems to be imploding of its’ own weight

Un-Civil War

28. December 2006 · Comments Off on Un-Civil War · Categories: General, History, Military, Old West, Pajama Game, War

“…From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean…”

In hot pursuit of my next “book”, I continue to plough through a great stack of readings, all about the German migration into Texas in the mid-19th century. Yes there is a great story there, of which practically no one outside Texas has ever heard, and given any sort of encouragement I will bore you rigid with all sorts of trivia. Like, for instance, the aristocratic patrons of the Society for the Protection of German Emigrants to Texas fell, hook, line, sinker and obscene amounts of cash to two of the biggest land swindles ever known. Three words “Fisher-Miller Grant”. That little fiasco was right on par with the sale of Manhattan Island, by a tribe that didn’t even own it. Ah, but it came out all right in the end… if the aristocratic members of the Society had possessed business acumen on par with their ambitions… well, let’s just say if that had been so, the second language of the state of Texas would not be Spanish. And it might not have joined the Union at all, but continued as an independent entity or quasi-German colony, which would have pleased a whole constellation of German princes and nobles, but really have annoyed the Confederate States, and deprived a great many Southern generals in the “late unpleasantness” circa 1861-65 of a great portion of their fire-eating, romping-stomping cavalry.

Texas joined the secession, to the heartbreak of Sam Houston, and enthusiastically entered into the whole spirit of the Confederacy… to be expected, since the Anglo (read American) settlers were mostly from southern states, and of that Scots-Irish breed of whom it has been oft-acknowledged that they were “born fighting”; Indians, British, the French or each other, whichever were most convenient at the moment. To read of the enthusiasm with which Texans volunteered to fight for the Confederacy is to wonder if it was just that they were spoiling for a fight, and the issues which impelled the secession were a minor bagatelle.

But this was not true of the considerable district around the German-settled areas around Fredericksburg and New Braunfels, all through the rolling lime-stone hills between San Antonio and Austin. This was the high country, the less-good land of hard-working farmers and small cattle ranches, solidly opposed to chattel slavery and who had opposed secession from the very beginning. They may have settled in Texas relatively recently, but they were a cohesive block, had put down deep roots, knew their rights and were prepared as stubborn and stiff-necked Americans to insist on them. If the Hill Country had been geographically contiguous with the Union at any point, doing a “West Virginia” and seceeding from the Secession would have met with solid approval.

As it was, the Hill Country Germans pretty much stood apart from the fray until a year into the war, in the spring of 1862, when the tide began to subtly shift against the Confederacy, to those who had the strategic sense to see the long picture. New Orleans was taken by the Union, whose forces began a slow progression up the Mississippi, slicing the Confederacy into two portions. Those who had been opposed to the whole secession thing were confirmed in their judgment, and those who had wavered began to wobble in the direction of loosing confidence… while the die-hard Confederates began to see the skull-grimace of death and defeat grinning at them from the corners.

Texas was put under martial law, and the supreme military commander was a foppish and overbearing little martinet named Hebert, who did much to make himself detestable to even supporters of the Confederacy. But what ignited resistance in the Hill Country, and farther north, around present-day Dallas, was the institution of conscription. Texas had poured 25,000 volunteers into the Confederate Army during the first year of the war. But volunteers were not enough, and in the spring of 1862 legislation passed which authorized the drafting of every Anglo (white) male between the age of 18 and 34… shortly thereafter, it was changed to 17 through 50. Resistance was instant and furious among Unionists. A party of 65 Unionist men from the Hill Country attempted to flee across the Rio Grande; they were ridden down by Confederate troops along the Nueces River, and half were killed outright or executed out of hand. In following weeks, another fifty men in Gillespie County, around Fredericksburg, were executed… many of them by Confederate vigilante gangs. It was said bitterly for decades afterwards, that more were killed in the Hill Country by such gangs during the Civil War than were ever killed by Indians, during the war or after it. A footnote in the history books, if even noted to begin with.

The experience of the Civil War had, I think, the effect of drawing the Texas German colonies into themselves, and emphasizing their distinct character, rather than diffusing amongst their neighbors as similar German enclaves did in the northern states. For they were long in forgetting what had been done to them, by their neighbors, and fellow Texans.

More about the German settlers, here and here, from the archives.

The Ripples Left After A Stone Drops

01. December 2006 · Comments Off on The Ripples Left After A Stone Drops · Categories: General, History, Mordor, War

After the last time America declared a victory and went home…
Cambodia.
(link through “Classical Values“)

For The Veterans of This Day

11. November 2006 · Comments Off on For The Veterans of This Day · Categories: General, GWOT, Home Front, Military, War

Arizona Flag

Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep,
Its own appointed limits keep.

Oh hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!

Eternal Father, lend Thy grace To
those with wings who fly thro’ space,
Thro wind and storm, thro’ sun and rain,
Oh bring them safely home again.

Oh Father, hear an humble prayer,
For those in peril in the air!

Oh Trinity of love and pow’r,
Our brethren shield in danger’s hour,
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them where so e’er they go.

Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea!

Let the Savage Mock-Kerry Continue!

03. November 2006 · Comments Off on Let the Savage Mock-Kerry Continue! · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, Fun and Games, General, General Nonsense, Iraq, War

Myself, I about wore out my arm two years ago, beating the dead horse that is the junior senator from Massachusetts, but our very own Detailed Recuiter, and his good buddy Station Commando continue the mockery here.

(Golf clap of appreciation) Well done, lads, well done!

Why he wants it

06. October 2006 · Comments Off on Why he wants it · Categories: General, GWOT, Home Front, Military, War

There is a program in the Army called the 09L Translator Aide Program. The point of 09L is to address a critical shortage of people who can speak Middle Eastern languages in the Army. If an applicant can speak one of about two dozen Middle Eastern languages they’re able to enlist for 09L regardless of their qualifications in several other areas such as education level and aptitude. It’s a wonderful program for the Army since it attracts people who posses a critical skill and who would otherwise be unable to serve in the military. And it’s also a valuable program for the first generation immigrants from the Middle East in that it allows them to serve their new home, possibly earn their citizenship while serving, and basically allowing those who pursue the program to become a bit more integrated into the nation. In a time when many immigrants from that part of the world refuse to assimilate into their new homes such integration may prove important years down the road. Or it may not.

This year I managed to find myself a member of the Afghan refugee community here in Phoenix who was interested in serving as a translator. He actually wanted to be a clerk but he didn’t qualify for that job so we went with the program for which he qualified. Because of my occasionally useful recruiting skills I was able to use my original applicant as a source for several of his friend who would later join. I’m currently working with one such indiviual.

This applicant is actually from Iraq, he knew my Afghan enlistee through school, and he bears some scars of his time in Iraq. I’ve been working with him for a while now, he’s a big guy and has been making slow progress in losing the excess weight. I enjoy working with him because, well, he’s someone who’s history makes me in getting him into the service. One day after having him run some stairs at the local stadium we talked and what he said was the sort of thing gets a recruiter’s heart motivated.

I’ll admit to cross posting this from my normal stomping grounds, but it was the sort of thing that never gets mention in the stories about people joining the military. I edited what he wrote for me to remove identifying info. Where I editted is marked with (DR:).

You asked me why I wanted to join the Army. It is simple. I want to join because it is the right thing to do. This country (DR: America) has taken my family in and did everything it could for us. We live in a nice house in a safe neighborhood. We have jobs and money and cars and we don’t worry about what we do. Me joining the Army is not a popular choice for some people in the refugees. They tell me I’m going to be harming my own country (DR: Iraq). They are wrong. I’ll be a translator. Americans are very smart, but they don’t understand our language like they do Spanish. They (DR: Soldiers in Iraq) are getting attacked and attacking because they don’t know who to talk to or how to talk to them. I can do that. I will be helping America and helping Iraq.

My father was a wanted man in Iraq. It’s why we left. He said things about Saddam and he was wanted. We came here with nothing and we were taken care of. My father has gone back to Iraq and has said things are 100% better. (DR: The town they’re from) is very safe and the people are happy now. Things work. There is electricity and markets and my father even bought a house for us for when we can go back. The only people who made this happen were America. Saddam was taken out by America when no one else would do it.

People in my community tell me I should not be in the Army because I will get killed. I tell them “So what?” (DR: Punctuation added) if I do. I will have died doing something good and my family will understand and they will thank me and know I was doing something I wanted to do. But I don’t think I will be killed. I will be with the Army and not just someone who isn’t in the Army. I don’t know if I will want to go back to Iraq if my family does. I like it in America. I want to get my citizenship and go to school. But I think I should be in the Army because if I don’t I will get all this without earning it.

This applicant is someone who I very much want to have in uniform. Not just because it’s my job as a recruiter to do so, but because he’s one of that percentage of recruits who really wants it. With luck he’ll be swearing in shortly and serving as a Soldier soon. Sooner the better.

An Obit

25. September 2006 · Comments Off on An Obit · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, GWOT, History, Military, War

One of the original military female “old breed”. Wish I had known her, but I didn’t. A Reservist. Exactly my age. A “first” in a lot of respects, according to this.

Link courtesy of “Rantburg“.

Not ready to let go

11. September 2006 · Comments Off on Not ready to let go · Categories: GWOT, Rant, War

Cross-posted at DragonLady’s World.

For the most part, today has been just another day. I wasn’t going to do much more today than a “Never Forget” photo from 9/11, but Timmer’s post has been nagging at me. I was just going to comment, but it’s a lengthy enough comment that I am just going to post it. Timmer didn’t make me angry, and I understand and respect his desire to get over it. But I don’t want to get over it. I don’t want to heal. Not yet.

As long as our enemy lives and remains undefeated, I want to continue to feel the pain. I want to continue to mourn our innocent dead. As long as I do, I will remain angry. I want to remain angry until the bastards who attacked us, and continue trying to attack us, are soundly and undeniably defeated.

I think the reason our parents’ generation didn’t continue reliving Dec 7 is because they defeated the enemy who caused it. They had that closure that we do not and should not yet have. We need that wound to remain open. We need to relive it. We need to remember who did it to us and defeat them, soundly and unquestionably. Then, and only then, should we allow ourselves to heal. I will go one unpolitically-correct step forward and call the enemy Islam, and Islam will remain the enemy until one of two things happen. 1) Islam ceases to exist. 2) Islam sheds its culture of violence and intolerance. Religion of peace my ass!

So, Timmer, I really do hope you can successfully move on, but I can’t. Not yet.

The Fire Next Time

10. August 2006 · Comments Off on The Fire Next Time · Categories: General, GWOT, War

Connie Willis wrote a haunting novelette, ages ago, called “Firewatch” postulating a future where students of history could actually go and do their finals as a practical exercise, in the past. The hero of “Fire Watch” finds himself in London in 1940, as one of the cadre of volunteer fire watchers, sleeping in the crypt of St. Paul’s , and working feverishly during air raids, to protect the great church from bombs— not the high-explosive, but the incendiary kind, defending it with buckets of sand and stirrup-pumps— all the while haunted by the knowledge that seventy years after his practicum, St. Paul’s has been atomized by a terrorist with a nuclear weapon. In his own time, all that is left of it is part of the memorial stone, dedicated after the Second World War, honoring the work of the firewatchers:

“ “Remember men and women of St Paul’s Watch who by the grace of God saved this cathedral.”… Part of the stone is sheared off. Historians argue there was another line that said, “for all time,” but I do not believe that, not if Dean Matthews had anything to do with it. And none of the watch it was dedicated to would have believed it for a minute. We saved St Paul’s every time we put out an incendiary, and only until the next one fell. Keeping watch on the danger spots, putting out the little fires with sand and stirrup pumps, the big ones with our bodies, in order to keep the whole vast complex structure from burning down. “

So it appears this time we are saved, from the horror of airplanes falling out of the skies, spilling their contents prodigally over the earth, or as it seems to have been planned, over the ocean. Saved by watchfulness, and luck and dedication, saved by good policing, saved by those who know in their soul that we are at war, that there are indeed those few predators amongst us who are planning to kill, and kill and kill again, sating themselves with oceans of our blood, and the assurance of an eternity spent in the hereafter, rewarded as the clients of a particularly well-stocked celestial whorehouse. Perhaps this was the one big action, promised or threatened ever since 9-11, and perhaps it will take another five years to bring the next one to full and ghastly fruition, with another dozen small and ugly murderous actions in between. The saying is that the terrorists only need to be lucky, once… those who defend against terrorists must be lucky, over and over and over again.

We may continue to be lucky, and dedicated, and go on putting out all sorts of little fires with the equivalent of sand and stirrup pumps for many nights and for many years, but deep in my heart, I know that eventually there will be the day when we will not be lucky, and stome time, and in someplace… someplace that I may know, or someplace that I have only read about… will be gone, with nothing but a few blasted foundations left of it. Connie Willis wrote “Firewatch” in 1982, when the Cold War was cooling down, before the Wall fell, and it could still be barely credible to imagine a Communist as the villain, a nihilistic terrorist setting off a bomb to destroy the church of St. Paul’s, twenty years before we watched the towers fall in a shimmer of debris and a great cloud of smoke and fire, inspired by a terrorist of another horrifying and more potent ideology.

“We saved St. Paul’s every time we put out an incendiary, and only until the next one fell.”

Beginning in 3…2…1

10. August 2006 · Comments Off on Beginning in 3…2…1 · Categories: General, GWOT, sarcasm, War

In light of news reports of British authorities’ disruption of a terror plot, I should like to say that I hope they have got irrefutable evidence… like the perps on tape, or caught red-handed, or something.

Otherwise, we shall all be deafened by unimaginable levels of whining about how a certain community is being unfairly targeted, and how it is all a worked up plot by running dogs/minions of the “BUSHITLER junta” anyway.

Said seething, whining, and excuse-making to commence in 3…2….1…minutes after they wake up this morning.

So, Here It Is…

13. July 2006 · Comments Off on So, Here It Is… · Categories: General, GWOT, Israel & Palestine, War

Here we are then, with things happening too fast and close together to keep track, and the definite feeling that all most participants can do is tighten grip and hope to hold fast, as events gallop towards an abyss. Hezbollah picking a fight with Israel, and Iran holding their coat, and f**k all the UN or any other internationally based busybodies will ever be able to do. I was resoundingly chided by some of our international commenters last month for voicing my personal and inchoate feelings of dread… I am drinking some cheap Chablis this evening, and I do not feel any better than I did when I wrote this.“Events and portents appear, flashing like lightning in one of our summer Texas thunderstorms, finally occurring so frequently that the sky is continuously lit with an eerie blue-white light…”
See, here’s an analogy about co-incident and co-dependent states who have a certain history; it’s not a perfect analogy because there’s only a few features that the Independent Entity of The Gaza Strip has in common with Mexico; a lot of acrimonious and co-dependent history, and a lot of back-and-forth familiarity. Sort of like a lot of countries in Europe, come to think on it in my naïve American way.
Suppose, just suppose that — just by way of example, a group of Mexican narco-traffickers (who are a powerful influence in the borderlands, and perhaps not entirely de-linked from the official Mexican establishment, such as it is) decided to pop across the border— after months of lobbing a lot of indiscriminate and indifferently aimed rockets— say into Brownsville and Laredo, or El Paso and Yuma, where they had succeeded in doing nothing much except make local residents extremely nervous about loud noises, and extraordinarily prompt about hitting the deck— and snatched a couple of soldiers from Ft. Huachuca. Suppose they took them back over the border, and demanded that the federal government immediately free any Mexican nationals held by the various American law authorities. Imagine how that would go over?! And just to extend that simile— how would it go over, if Basque separatists in Spain did the same to soldiers of France? Or any other irredentist European community to a neighboring state… and consider that all any other such group would have do thereafter to extract concessions would be to go on a brief cross-border shopping trip for human capital.

No, d’huh. I do not have a good feeling about this.

The eastern world it tis explodin’,
violence flarin’, bullets loadin’,
you’re old enough to kill but not for votin’,
you don’t believe in war, what’s that gun you’re totin’,
and even the Jordan river has bodies floatin’,
but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

Don’t you understand, what I’m trying to say?
Can’t you see the fear that I’m feeling today?
If the button is pushed, there’s no running away,
There’ll be no-one to save with the world in a grave,
take a look around you, boy, it’s bound to scare you, boy,
but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

Barry McGuire “Eve of Destruction”

KoreaTown

07. July 2006 · Comments Off on KoreaTown · Categories: Fun and Games, General, N. Korea, Pajama Game, War

About the first thing I ever noticed about Korea— during the bus ride from Osan AB to the Yongsan Garrison bus terminal in Seoul— was that it didn’t look a thing in like M*A*S*H… even allowing for the whole show being unconvincingly filmed in the wilds of California, on a set built out in a valley between very obviously chaparral-covered hills … and hills that were dark sage-green, and gently rounded— not the steep and bright green hills, painstakingly terraced that I could see from the bus. And also nothing like the distant mountains visible all the way round Seoul on clear morning, chipped and jagged, like something cut from jade-green glass, just like the mountains in ancient oriental prints. Seoul, cut through by the wide silvered loops of the Han river did rather resemble Los Angeles, in that it went on seemingly forever, flowing around hills and tracts of parkland, a jumble of high, low and medium-rise buildings and which offered pretty much everything a reasonably cosmopolitan person could want. Myself, I loved the retail and wholesale fabric market, near to Tongdemun Stadium… not much harked back to what Korea had been half a century before, unless it was the porters who carried enormous burdens on their backs up and down the tall staircase of the fabric market building. No, South Korea had moved on, since the days of M*A*S*H.

So, NPR did an interview this week with the two apparatchiks who came out strongly in favor of blowing up the Nork’s Two-dong (or whatever name it has that is a natural fodder for more sophomoric jokes than mine) long-range missile on the launch-pad as some sort of crushing pre-emptive strike to send a serious message to the Norks about what happens when you threaten America. They were quite airily confident not only of our ability to do this, neatly and effectively (which is actually a rather comforting thought) but seemingly quite careless of the risks to South Korea if we had done so— which is not. And since the gentlemen in question are of the party that currently seems to be getting off 24-7 by condemning George Bush being pre-emptive, unilateral, careless of world opinion, and barging straight on to the main point of actually blowing up stuff, rather than sitting around and talking about it until everyone has gone mad with boredom, and issuing a strongly worded memorandum… well, it had the charm of the unusual. I wondered if somewhere, there is a Rovish political consultant, thinking agent provocateurish thoughts. (And if either of the gentlemen concerned were acquainted with the old saying about sending a message and using Western Union— probably not, since it has to be explained carefully to anyone over the age of 50-ish— none of this awareness showed in the interview.)

Well, never mind— they just struck me as being quite chipper about “doing something!” and quite horribly casual about possible Nork reprisals. No veteran who has ever served a tour in South Korea can be entirely insouciant about that— not with knowing how close Seoul is to the range of Nork artillery fire, how close to the DMZ, and how bat-shit insane the self-isolated regime to the immediate north has demonstrated itself to be, in all sorts of large and small ways. Well-meaning and intelligent people usually do not advise intentionally pissing off a deranged street-person holding a hand-grenade with the pin missing. I have probably just horribly maligned all deranged street-persons with access to personal explosives here… but what can you honestly say about a mini-nation who kidnapped Japanese citizens in order to force them to train spies, and South Korean movie actors to force them to make movies, confiscates the Chinese trains which are shipping them relief supplies, fields a diplomatic corps which deals in drugs and counterfeit money in order to make their budget, honors the family of the founding leader in a manner usually confused in the outside world by worship of a deity— and that would be the outside world of circa 1st century Rome.. except assume that someone with a Pythonesque turn of mind has made this all up.

Alas, North Korea is all too real; a small nation with delusions of adequacy about being a military power despite not having fought a serious, balls-out, all hands on deck war since the 1950ies… and them with the aid of the Chinese, who must seriously be having doubts about now. Yes, North Korea is their dog in this dispute; a small, hyper-active, bug-eyed, noisy and incontinent dog, of the kind that make people itch to kick into the next dimension, and I so wonder if the Chinese are getting pretty testy with their bad-tempered, and vicious little pet. When desperate refugee Nork citizens are taken pity upon by the stereotypically hard-off Chinese peasants along the China-Nork border, you really have to wonder about how things are, in the last rigidly Stalinist armpit of the world. Especially when young refugees from the North are clearly recognizable in the South, because (thanks to the juche and economic independence, all-around socialist superior spirit and the resulting endemic malnourishment) they are very obviously shorter, thinner, and weedier looking. And I do not forget for a moment, that these are still the same human stock— the same jolly, tough and resourceful people who on the south of the DMZ, worked themselves out of a Third World, war-torn, desperately poor UN-dependent basket-case that they were in the mid 1950ies. South Koreans built a shining and modern city out of the wreck that it was when my father passed through there at the end of the Korean War.

What their kin have built out of the North may be a country-sized concentration camp, and every dreadful story that has managed to leak out, against brutal control, will likely prove to both the gospel truth, and the least portion of the horrors. So, there you go. North Korean may have the Bomb, and more distressing still, be able and willing to sell it to anyone with the wherewithal. And the assumption has always been that Seoul is in range of whatever violently explosive munitions they have. So, what really can you do, knowing what is at risk? Do you openly provoke the violently insane, and one with a proven track record of being totally immune to shame, or wait until they melt down entirely? I read a comment last week (Can’t remember who— Angie at “Dark Blogules” maybe… who said that her enjoyment of old episodes of M*A*S*H had been forever ruined by the various characters’ blathering about how useless, pointless and aimless the “war” was… when it had been in retrospect a successful effort protect the South Korea— now a vibrant, successful and interesting place, from becoming the dysfunctional horror of North Korea.

Interesting times, people, interesting times. Discuss.

Pax Romana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely
Sgt. Mom

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

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

Memo: In Answer To Your Three Questions

12. June 2006 · Comments Off on Memo: In Answer To Your Three Questions · Categories: General, GWOT, Media Matters Not, Rant, sarcasm, War

To: NPR’s Daniel Schorr
From: Sgt. Mom
Re: The Answer to Three of the Lamest Rhetorical Questions I have ever heard

1. The questions that ruffle the magisterial mind and furrow the brow of old-line journalism’s greyest eminence are, if I understand tonight’s commentary correctly: (a) how could a squad of Marines kill 25 civilians in vicious house-to-house fighting, (b) why did we drop a pair of 500lb bombs on Al-Zarkawi’s hideout, and then administer medical care when in turned out that the head-chopping psychopath wasn’t quite dead, and finally, (c) why were the three suicides at Guantanamo described as being aggressive acts, instead of being acts of despair at being held indefinably without trial (insert obligatory moaning here… the man reminds me of no one so much as he does of Eyore, gloom, despair and agony, wall to tall and treetop tall.)

2. Here are the short answers, Mr. Shorr; read and heed:
(a) Tragic and regrettable collateral damage, caused by the insurgents’ well established habit of not wearing recognized uniforms, and hiding behind non-combatants. Be a sport, and inform whoever keeps track of stuff like this, during a war… isn’t that supposed to be the Geneva Convention something or other? Someone has been remiss in their duties, I look forward to whatever moaning commentary you have to make about this. Please also exercise some proper journalistic discipline and skepticism with anyone who tells you that the Marines lined up all twenty, or twenty-five, or however many civilians, and executed them point-blank. (See rape victims at the New Orleans super dome, refrigerators full of bodies, massacre at Jenin.)

(b) Ok, so we’re softies. Our bad. We should have dropped a pair of thousand-pound bombs. Wouldn’t have made such a nice, clear post-mortem picture, though. I don’t care how nice the gold frame was, a bucket of blood and dismembered body parts wouldn’t have had quite as much convincing power at the press conference. It wouldn’t have wasted quite so much of the duty medic’s valuable time and effort, though.

(c) Because, as much as one might wish otherwise, there is a war on, and Gitmo is the POW camp? And the commonly accepted practice is to keep POWs until the war is over? This does mean, given that interpretation, that the Gitmo internees have an excellent chance of eventually creaking their way out the front gate on walkers, and hauling little tanks of oxygen after them, on the day the war is over. We’re just grateful that at least they managed to off themselves without taking anyone else with them, as is the jihadi custom in this degraded age.

3. Finally, I wonder how much longer you can milk out having been on Nixon’s Enemies List as the central jewel in your major-league journalism crown. Nixon has been dead for years, and major-league journalism is hardly looking any healthier.

4. Hoping this has been of help to you, in your search for enlightenment.

Sincerely,

Sgt. Mom

Most Deeply, Sincerely Dead

08. June 2006 · Comments Off on Most Deeply, Sincerely Dead · Categories: General, GWOT, Iraq, War, World

That head-chopping psychopath, Zarkawi – and his aides and so-called spiritual advisor. It must be excellent news, as NPR has been banging on about nothing else for the last two hours. Haditha was only mentioned only once.

I’d wish they had mentioned how the tips about his location came in from local Iraqi nationals just a little more… and perhaps explored how unpopular his tendency to blow up school children, police recruits and the odd passing stranger has made him among ordinary citizens. I hope the bounty on him is shared out fairly among anyone who had a hand in narking out the murdering freak.

Discuss.

It Took Three Whole Minutes…

02. June 2006 · Comments Off on It Took Three Whole Minutes… · Categories: Domestic, General, Iraq, Media Matters Not, War

…after seeing this cartoon in my local paper, the San Antonio Express News, to get on the phone and tell them to cancel what was left of my subscription.

I had cut back when I got the internet at home, and realised that I was reading stuff on-line a couple of days before it was printed on dead-tree media and left like a rotting fish in my driveway. And, increasingly, I never had time to read it, except on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

I asked the customer service rep to please pass on a message to Mr. Branch— that I would sooner trust the word of a Marine, over the word of most main-stream media reporters.

Nineteen, Thirty-Eight

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

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

From “The Fellowship of the Ring”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memo: Winter Soldier Redoux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,

Sgt. Mom

Memo: Your Recent Kind Letter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,
Sgt. Mom

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

Death of a Journalist

07. May 2006 · Comments Off on Death of a Journalist · Categories: General, GWOT, Iraq, Media Matters Not, War

At the hands of Michael Moore ‘s brave, quasi-minuteman insurgents?
The method of execution would argue so.

(Warning:very graphic discription at link, thanks to Mudville Gazette.)

Update: It seems the recorded beheading is not that of a female journalist, but of a Nepali truck driver. Doesn’t make it any less nasty, though.

Memo: Regarding the Recent Bombings in Egypt

24. April 2006 · Comments Off on Memo: Regarding the Recent Bombings in Egypt · Categories: General, GWOT, Mordor, sarcasm, War, World

To: Osama Bin Laden
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Dahab Bombing

So, Effendi, how is that hearts and minds thing going in Moslim countries, these days?

Sincerely,

Sgt. Mom

Imperial Muslims

04. April 2006 · Comments Off on Imperial Muslims · Categories: General, War

I’ve been spending a lot of time researching whether we should be paranoid about Muslims, or whether they really are out to get us. This article in the WSJ online edition (courtesy of Powerline) pretty much summarizes and confirms a lot of what I have read elsewhere. There are, however, glimmers of hope – in a separate post at Powerline, John Hinderaker quotes (with a link to a video) Iraqi politician Iyad Jamal Al-Din as asking: “How come Israel has developed a democratic regime…whereas the Arabs have not developed democratic regimes, using the existence of Israel as a pretext? How come Israel is not using the Arabs as a pretext for delaying its economic development, its free economy, and its free press?” How come indeed.

Deaquisition of Illusion.

22. March 2006 · Comments Off on Deaquisition of Illusion. · Categories: General, GWOT, Pajama Game, War, World

Well, if we read the polls right, in the light of the port-management imbroglio, it may indicate that there is a sort of sub-rosa, grass-movements, silent-majority distrust of… well, international Islam. Surprise, surprise, surprise. This comes as a matter of slack-jawed amazement or grave concern to parties as various as the Zogby polls, CAIR, and our local congress-critters on both sides of the aisle. The rote insistence on Islam being a Religion of Peace is wearing very thin, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary… evidence that bulks large despite all the heroic efforts of Hollywood, an assortment of well-meaning civic associations, the intellectual strongholds, and last and not least, that final bastion of telling truth to power, those major news establishments.

Whoo-hoo! We must have all been brainwashed by the powers of the major media, at the express bidding of the eeeeeevviiiil Bush administration.
Yes, that would be the major media who have no trouble “disappearing” all those pictures of people jumping from the Twin Towers, tying up the 2004 presidential race in a pretty pink bow and handing it to a favored candidate, and making a mockery of every brave pledge of a free press and all the news that’s fit to print, unless it’s mockeries of Mohammad. The lords and grandees of our established press are powerless to banish uncomfortable suspicions amongst the proletariat, who have latched on to the very infra dig notion that the forces of militant Islam— which might possibly incorporate quite a lot more than the tiny percentage which is always being presented to us as being that which has committed the outrage du jour— presents to us a real and present danger. Despite our marching orders from our betters, we persist in our peasant conviction that the Religion of Peace is something other than advertised. This knowledge is the elephant in the room. Not looking at it’s wide flappy ears, long ropelike tail, and tree-trunk legs and all the rest of it, will not make it go away. The elephant is in the room, and has crapped copiously all over the carpet. Some politicians and pollsters, whose livelihood depends on accurately sensing certain aromas on the breeze are reacting already— an otherwise competent, well-thought of, and efficient port-management concern may have caught it in the neck because of this conviction. Interested and easily offended parties like CAIR are frantically applying the metaphorical room freshener, with less and less effect. It’s all gotten very, very stale, and I suspect that a lot of us are very, very tired of it all.

We are tired, and wearied to death of it all, and the Affair of the Danish Cartoons was the final straw. Or perhaps a sentence of death for apostasy for a Christian Afghan convert is the penultimate final straw… unless there is one absolutely final, ultimately ultimate straw, a Religion of Peace inspired outrage which I desperately hope will not involve a mushroom-shaped cloud over Tel Aviv, or some European or American city.

Whatever the Islamic outrage du jour is, we are tired of it. We are tired of easily-set off mobs, burning and murdering, of hatred preached in mosques and middle-eastern newspapers, of vile insults and lies, of beheadings and bombs, of bullying and threats, of rapes and mutilations and the oppression of women, and the usual slickly-suited creatures oozing justifications for it on the TV and radio afterwards. We are tired of the same old whine about persecution by the same creatures whose co-religionists practice persecution with vigor and keen enjoyment. We are tired to exhaustion of the Islamic worlds’ tattered woobie of the Palestinian people, taken out and shaken about whenever interest flags—never mind that the so-called Palestinian people seem to have suffered more at the hands of their so-called friends than they have gotten from their ostensible enemy. (If we need an example for strategic stupidity, counter-productive behavior and bad choice of friends in the face of misfortune and adversity, the Palestinian State must be Exhibit A through Exhibit-X whatever. But that is material for another rant, another day.) We are tired of being told we have to understand, to respect and to tolerate… and yet to see that that understanding, respect and toleration is not reciprocated in any meaningful way, in most of those places where Islam meets the other.

We are tired of being hectored about getting to know the Koran, and the Islamic street; especially since the more we get to know it, the more we dislike it, all of its works and ways; prejudices, ignorance and barbarities on full display, courtesy of the unfiltered blog media.
We are just tired, tired of being tolerant and calm and understanding and enduring. We want to think the best of people, truly we do— but there is a limit, and someday — probably terrifingly soon– it will be reached. I hope, personally, that it will not be tomorrow or the day after, when the last patient nerve is shredded into microscopic threads, and the limit has been reached. If and when that happens, the going will get really, really ugly.

Note to the Islamic world; please, please do not step on that last un-shredded nerve. Just, please. Don’t. It won’t be worth it. Trust me on this. Just don’t.

Will Saddam Die Before Verdict Is Rendered?

12. March 2006 · Comments Off on Will Saddam Die Before Verdict Is Rendered? · Categories: GWOT, Iraq, War

Glenn Reynolds reflects upon the drawn-out trial, and death (by natural causes) of Slobodan Milosevic:

So should we just hang ’em? Perhaps. These trials are pretty much a foregone conclusion, and their character is more political than judicial anyway. When critics call them “show trials” they have a point. Do they do more good than harm? That’s not at all clear. I’m not sure what I think, but it certainly seems that trials that last until the defendant dies of old age aren’t the solution. Nuremberg didn’t take as long as the Milosevic trial.

While I am contra-death penalty, in the case of regular criminal proceedings, matters of war and “crimes against humanity” are another matter. A declaration of war is a virtual death warrant against the principals of your enemy anyway. I mean, if you are willing to drop bombs on a neighborhood, based upon questionable intelligence that your enemy’s leader might be there, why not just summarily execute the person, once in custody?

Capt. (Soon to be Maj.Loggie) Reports

04. March 2006 · Comments Off on Capt. (Soon to be Maj.Loggie) Reports · Categories: General, GWOT, Iraq, Military, War

I got back from Afghanistan last week. Just got the home system hooked back up here in Germany so I’ve got web connectivity now.

After Action Report from the Stan:

I know you don’t get the reports from the media on what goes on over there, but we’ve got alot of international support. One of my missions was to assist the Lithuanian Provincial Reconstruction Team with their logistics. Fantastic people, fantastic soldiers. All about getting the job done. We have the support of the people of Afganistan. I could see that every day I went outside the wire in Herat. We were so safe there we didn’t need to ride around in uparmored vehicles and didn’t need to wear our helmets. That area is now under control of Italian and Spanish troops. We’re handing over RC South, the Kandahar Region, over to the British, Canadians, and Dutch. These guys have some top quality troops and they’re coming in hard and heavy. The Brits are sending in their Apache and Harrier Squadrons and the Canadians will have their Stryker type vehicles (which I think they call the Kodiak). Fantastic soldiers and ready to do the mission….I just hope that their governments don’t constrain them on the Rules of Engagement. The Canadians have already taken some casualties in IED strikes and Ambushes. The Romainains are there too, they do the Force protection in Kandahar, They’ve got a whole battalion from a motorized rifle Regiment there. The Poles and South Koreans each have an Engineer battalion doing mine clearing and construction. The Egyptians and Jordanians each have hospitals there giving care to the local Afghans. Norway, Austrialia, New Zealand, Denmark, and Germany all have contributed with either PRTs or Special Operations Forces.

Bottom line is that the coalition is strong and committed. The Afghan Army and Police have come along way. A crowd of people actually applauded when a border policeman arrested a truck driver for smuggling and after trying to bribe him, something that they have never seen before. Conditions are improving and the support of the locals is strong. The terrorists that are there are all along the Pak border and they infiltrate into RC South and East to cause chaos. They are generally not supported by the locals. Most of them work for ex warlords from the Taliban regime or are foreign fighters who believe in the Jihadi movement. But they rely on the IED and suicide bombers to attack us. If they do engage in an ambush it is usually from a distance so they can run…and rarely do they inflict casualties that way. When that does happen, we pounce on them with everything we’ve got available, and they pay, big time.

If you’d like you can post the above on the webpage, its all unclassified. And if there are any questions that come from it I’ll try to answer the best I can.

By the way. I just made the list for Major. Waiting for my promotion date, Once that happens I’ll be known from now on and for evermore as MAJ LOGGIE.

(PS– from Sgt. Mom…. well, as long as you are not known as “Major Pain-in-the-A**”….)

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