Category Archives: War

Veterans Day

Americana, Politics, War

Korean War Memorial at the western end of the National Mall, Washington DC       

Washington is full of war memorials; it makes me sad that there are so many. On the east end of the Mall, is the The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial  facing toward the Lincoln Memorial at the west end. They unite the Mall like they united the country. In between are newer monuments: World War II, The Korean Conflict – named Conflict or Police Action so Congress didn’t have to vote for it – The Vietnam War. We are becoming an Empire, filling our capitol with memorials to our distant, empirical, wars.

It is nice we honor our Veterans – I am a Veteran and am proud of it, maybe too much at times, considering that I have never heard a shot fired in anger – but I fear that the Honoring is covering up national policies we shouldn’t have. I fear that the Honoring is covering up the debate and discussion on whether we should even be fighting these wars. I fear that the Honoring is covering up our neglect of the shattered bodies and psyches that are the waste products of these empirical wars.

In all the wars, in each war, young men and, now, women – or old boys and, now girls,  depending on your point of view – have been sent to distant places by old men to kill people whose names they don’t know and, in most cases, can pronounce. They are sent to places we don’t really know or understand. It is not making us great, it is not making us rich, it is not making us safe.

A rant on uniforms

Americana, Psychological Musings, Sports, War

Actually, not those uniforms although I find the whole Olympic rule that women Beach Volleyball players have to wear bikinis weirdly sexist (not that I am complaining, I love looking at young women in scanty clothing). The Olympics presents a squeaky clean, almost innocent image, and they put alot of effort in keeping it that way. At the same time the biggest Olympic women sports are sports that require scanty clothing, think swimming, diving, track, and – of course – gymnastics. Don’t expect to see much women’s fencing or rowing.

As an aside – an aside from uniforms that is – the Olympics are the biggest sexual free-for-all on the planet. There are 10,960 young, hyper-conditioned, attractive, athletes from around the world living together for two weeks. These Olympians are people who are very much in their bodies and, probably, very much into their bodies, all brushing up against each  other on a daily basis in tight  quarters, with lots of alcohol, other drugs, and – once their event is over – free time. Even in China, a fairly controlled place, the athletes went through their allotted 70,000 condoms. In Britain, a much freer place and more understanding host country, they are providing  150,000 condoms which is about 15 condoms per athlete. Watching Michele Jenneke run the hurdles, it is easy to believe they will be used.

End aside.

But that is not my rant, my rant is about camo clothing in the US Military. Obviously camo clothing is very helpful when Soldiers and Marines are on the ground and do not want to stand out.

But an Army general in a rear area command center, in Washington or Qatar, wearing combat fatigues just seems ridiculous. I am not one to worship the past, but I do pine for the days when the rear echelon – known in front line units as REMFs – commanders and support dressed as if they were going to the office, which, of course, they really are. But the military – and police, for that matter – has fetishized camouflaged fatigues and everybody is now in on the act, including the navy with blueish uniforms. It makes no sense at all. It doesn’t hide them on the ship and, of course, it shouldn’t and then – to make it even stupider – in the highly unlikely event that the ship did see combat and did sink, it makes it harder to find the survivors.

It seems sort of wacko that the Navy is building ten $700 million ships designed for operation in near-shore environments but – by the Navy’s own assessment – is not able to take on heavy duty shore defenses, but I understand that there is a lobby for that: I understand there is money to made.  What I don’t understand is why the crew running the ship should be dressed in pseudo- camouflaged fatigues. End of rant.

Paul Fussell R.I.P.

Art, War

Paul Fussell died a week or so ago and I didn’t know until Michele read his obit in Time late last night. Fussell was a writer who I very much admired. Not so much for how he wrote – although he was a very good writer winning a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award – but for what he wrote about. At a time when most writers glorified war with books like A Band of Brothers, he wrote – in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War and The Boys’ Crusade – about the horror of war, about  how people die in war in agony,  mutilated, and disfigured. Fussell wrote about a war that was not honorable, a war that is is gruesome.

He knew first hand, having been a front line infantry officer in Europe when the turn over in junior officers was 100% every six months. One story that is burned into my psyche is how his platoon slaughtered a group of trapped Germans. And that was not the gruesome part, the gruesome part was that the story of the slaughter became a joke told to cheer people up when they were down, Remember the turkeyshoot? when we killed all those Germans trapped in the basement?

Fussell also wrote about Class in America, a topic I know by personal experience to be taboo. His book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System is a classic and, even twenty years after it was written, still dead on.

I won’t say that I will miss him – like I miss David Foster Wallace – but I am saddened that he is no longer with us.

What is our goal in Afghanistan?

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics, Psychological Musings, War

I really don’t know and I don’t think anybody else does either. I guess that our goal is to beat the forces of the Taliban; to have the forces of of the old Northern Alliance – you know, the same Northern Alliance that the Russkis backed1 – be in some sort of stable control. I don’t think that anybody really thinks we are fighting for Jeffersonian democracy, in fact we may be hindering the re-establishment of the kind of ruling by consensus of elders or loya jirga that probably was closer to democracy than the rigged elections we are now backing.

Part of the problem is that we think that there is only one right answer on how to run a country and that is our way. This week has been a perfect storm of information – that is not the right word, maybe experiences? maybe events? – that has left me feeling our national hubris is staggering and we are not going to accomplish anything lasting in Afghanistan. The events revolve around, Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, and Korea.

Over at the Foreign Policy Magazine’s website, on Tom Rick’s Blog – The Best Defense – a former soldier has a post entitled Some reflections on the Vietnam War after visiting where my battalion was cut off and surrounded near Hue during Tet ’68 in which he says, among other things, while visiting Vietnam,  Not only are there no Americans on the roads, in the air or in the fields, doing what Americans do, the Vietnamese seem perfectly in control of their own destinies. Maybe they were then too, but we were too driven to notice. He goes on to say This makes me think about the American Way of War — maybe best expressed as “you move over, we’re taking over.” It is an interesting comment and worth reading.

Over the weekend and again this afternoon, I saw the Iranian movie A Separation. It was the best movie I have seen in a year, maybe longer. If you like movies or if you are just interested in relationships, see it. It won the Academy Award for best foreign language film but it should have won the award for best film. A warning, though, it is a devastating story about a couple getting separated. Much of the movie takes place in court or, at least, in front of a judge. As somebody who has gone through the American – really Californian – divorce legal system with lawyers making more money the longer they can string out the case and argue with each other, I was taken by how much better the Iranian system seemed to be. I am obviously not a Muslim – or a Christian for that matter – and didn’t agree with all the legal conclusions, but, it seemed more humane than our system which is built on confrontation and has pretty much left compassion at the door.

Then I read that some Staff Sergeant in Afghanistan has gone tragically amok killing, among others, sleeping children. Sleeping children!

Lastly, on the way home from the movie, we went out of our way to stop at a Korean market in Daily City to pick up some tasty Korean marinated meat and some kim chee. I spent a year in Korea, as a Sergeant in the Army on a HAWK Missile site looking down on Koreans2.  Americans felt superior and most GIs let the Koreans know it. Most GIs didn’t like their food and didn’t like their customs, we even didn’t even like their women although we were willing to pay to have sex with them. The Koreans in the unit I was in were relagated to being dog handelers and generators operators; they were not let near the radars or missiles. Strangely enough, when the Koreans helped us fight in Vietnam, they were considered superb troops. Oh! by the way, have you checked out the new Hyundai Elantra? It is awesome.

After all this rambling around, I do want to make a point. The world does not need us to be its nanny. Afghanistan does not need us to tell them how to run their country. No country does, not Vietnam, or Korea, or Iraq, or Iceland. No country! We are not doing very well with our own country and we certainly should not be trying to pull a Terri  Schiavo on other countries.  The Republicans seem to be worse in this regard than the Democrats, but both sides are culpable.

We should get out. Just get out!

 

1. This is somewhat of a simplification, but not much.

2. Something that, today, I am loath to admit.


150 years ago continued

Americana, General U.S. Grant, War

 

On February 16, 1862, Brigadier General Simon Buckner surrendered Fort Donaldson and about 13,500 men to Brigadier General Grant. Buckner and Grant had been friends in their previous and now different lives. The  military leaders of both the North and the South had often been in the old United States Army together and most had gone to West Point together. When the Civil War started, the majority of the seasoned officers were from the South and most of them deserted the Union. Simon Buckner was one of these.

Buckner had been born in Kentucky   but went north to go to West Point and graduated one year after Grant. He fought in the Mexican-American war and then Buckner returned to New York to teach at West Point but – and I love this part – he quit the teaching post as a protest of West Point’s policy of compulsory chapel attendance. About this time, he married a woman from Connecticut. When the war broke out, Buckner was offered a generalship in the Union army by President Lincoln himself, but he turned it down and, eventually ended up in the Confederate army. And then ended up at Fort Donaldson under a general who deserted his post, leaving Buckner to face Grant.

Ulysses S. Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant but his mother dropped the Hiram when he went to West Point. She realized his initials would be HUG when she was stenciling his footlocker and she was afraid that he would be teased which, at 5′-1″ and 117 pounds was probably right (the Congressman that sponsored Grant to West Point added the S for Grant’s mother’s maiden name of Simpson, but, in a clerical error, it was changed to S for Sam and he became Sam Grant at West Point). Like Buckner – and Robert Lee, for that matter – Grant fought in the Mexican-American war. He then hoped to teach math at West Point; instead, he ended up at the almost end of the world, Fort Vancouver in Oregon Territory.

Away from his wife and probably bored, Grant left the Army in disgrace for binge drinking. On his way home, broke and in disgrace, Grant ran into Buckner in New York and – probably very embarrassed – borrowed money from him while he was waiting for money to be sent from Ohio so that Grant could get back to his wife and his home. Buckner and Grant met again, almost eight years later, at Fort Donaldson.

The surrender of Fort Donaldson and an army of 13,500 men was the first major victory for the Union and the first of only three times during the Civil War when an entire army was captured – all by Grant. It was an equally major catastrophe for the South. The victory kept Kentucky in the Union and opened up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers for the North to start driving south in a campaign to open the Mississippi River all the way to New Orleans.

Buckner expected his old friend, Sam Grant, to be sympathetic to his position and asked for special consideration in his and his army’s loss, but for Grant, war was war and it trumped friendship.  He replied to his old friend and one time benefactor, in a letter that included the famous quotation, “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” A pissed off Buckner replied “Sir:—The distribution of the forces under my command, incident to an unexpected change of commanders, and the overwhelming force under your command, compel me, notwithstanding the brilliant success of the Confederate arms yesterday, to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose.”

Grant offered to loan Buckner money and to help him with his imminent imprisonment, but a still pissed Buckner declined and was sent to prison in Boston. Five months later, he was exchanged for another general.  Grant became instantly famous and was promoted to Major General U. S. – “Unconditional Surrender” – Grant.

While Grant only had about 500 killed, he did have another 2,000 wounded and the battle was not as easy as it later looked.  Grant made several major mistakes – like leaving the battlefield to meet with the Navy but not leaving anybody in command – that he was able to overcome and Grant being Grant, they were mistakes that he never made again.