Category Archives: War

Red Tails and the suspension of disbelief

Film, War

I saw Red Tails the other night and was particularly disappointed. I went expecting it to be not especially good but, like Peter Kuhlman, I love airplanes and once had a World War II airplane jones and I expected the air combat scenes to be at least as good as Star Wars I. They weren’t and I am not sure why.  I think that part of it, but only part of it, was that a huge percentage of the movie was CG and – like the picture above – just did not seem real. CG is great when the subject is not real, but when the subject can be real, like a real P51 airplane, CG seems to breakdown.

Even the airport sets that probably were real just seemed too precious to be a real place . They came across as the kind of dioramas that they have at the National Air and Space Museum. They are interesting but they just don’t look lived in. They have all the right parts – exactly the right parts – but they just don’t transcend the collection of parts. I felt the same way about the Imperial Star Dreadnoughts in Star Wars, they just didn’t feel real like the Nostromo in Alien.

Probably what bothered me the most was the hyping of the plot.  In the movie, the first time the Tuskegee Airmen go into aerial combat, we are to believe that they kick ass against a experienced German fighter group including blowing up their airfield. In their first dogfight!  The story of the Tuskegee Airmen is heroic and hyping the story somehow makes it seem less heroic, not more. From everything that I have read, this movie is a labor of love so I am sure George Lucas did not want to diminish the story, but he did.

 

Zorching

Americana, War

I ran into this line, by Navy spokesman Captain John Kirby, a couple of days ago, I don’t want to leave anybody with the impression that we’re somehow zorching 1two carriers over there because we’re concerned about what happened today in Iran. He was telling reporters that quickly moving two aircraft carriers to the Arabian Sea is not unusual. I like to think that I am more au courant than a Navy captain, the Navy, after all, being the most conservative of all the conservative military services; but I had no idea what zorching means. Oh, well, I guess I do now.

By the way, the U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carrier groups each with a supercarrier. Nobody else in the world has even one. And now the Republicans are running on saving our military from the ravages of the Democrats. I don’t know if they actually believe what they say, or they get up in the morning, check what the president is doing and then say the opposite. Either way, I do love zorch as a word, it just sounds so right.

1 Zorch is defined by the  Urban Dictionary as To travel with velocity approaching lightspeed.


We are all heroes

Americana, Psychological Musings, War, What's a man?

in our own minds, except that we are not. When I was about 31 or 32, I read The Winds of War by Herman Wouk. It is one of those book with lots of characters and shows the wind- up to WWII from different view points and if you haven’t read it, I would recommend it – although I may be wrong, as I did read it almost forty years ago and our collective sensibilities may have changed – if you like historical fiction. Anyway, a couple of the characters are Aaron Jastrow and his niece, Natalie. They are Jewish – duh! – and in Europe. From almost the beginning of their part of the story, it became obvious – from my view point of looking back on the war – that they were going to end up at one of the German Death Camps.

When I would get to the Aaron and Natalie sections, I would just skip ahead. I couldn’t read all the bad choices they were making; choices I knew that I would not have made. In my mind – at 31 or 32 – I would have, heroically, made much better choices. Now – forty years later – I know that I would not have made those heroic choices of my fantasies. Now I know that I couldn’t read many of those sections because I saw myself in Jastrow’s mistakes.
These remembrances came up when I read a  blog post by Ta-Nehisi Coates today. In it, he writes about how easy it is to think we would do something different than what the slave owners and slaves actually did do, if we had lived in the slave society of the pre-Civil War south. It is a constant theme of Coates and was brought up by an article by some fool white guy saying what he would do if he were a black kid being raised in poverty. Read it, really! It goes directly to the question that people who are raised in poverty tend to stay in poverty and should society try to change that or just say, It’s their fault, with all the ramifications that brings.
By the way, the prison camp photo above is one of the camps we – we being the United Sates of America – built, in one of our racist fits, to intern our Japanese citizens during WWII. I want to say that I would have been against these camps if I had been my parent’s age when they were built, but I doubt it.

 

“A date which will live in infamy.”

Americana, Psychological Musings, War

About fifteen years ago, when the Serbs were trying their best to be the alphadogs of the region, before we were worried about global jihad and the GWOT, the Serbs  justified attacking Kosovo because it was of major historical importance to them. Major historical importance because of the Battle of Kosovo in which Serbia got their ass kicked in 1389.

In the build up to the Clinton”11week air campaign that forced Yugoslavia to accept a Western peace plan for Kosovo” – to quote someone – we were pretty much anti-Serb and, among other things, their 1389 Battle of Kosovo fetish was used as as a reason they couldn’t be trusted. I remember reading a newspaper article – or maybe it was a magazine article – that said something like In The Balkans, the past is never dead, they still remember this loss like it was yesterday. The article was very critical of the Serbian personality that would remember a loss and not a win.

But we are all like that. Certainly we Americans are. We remember the Alamo, and remember Pearl Harbor. Here, in California we even have a special license plate for Pearl Harbor. We don’t have a special license plate for VJ Day or VE Day, or our smashing the Japanese at Iwo Jima or at Guadalcanal which may have been the roughest fight the US has ever been in.

I’m not going anywhere with this except that I find it interesting and I suspect it is pretty much a human trait.

 

 

Why are we in Afghanistan? We shouldn’t be.

Americana, Current Affairs, War

I don’t understand why we are in Afghanistan. I don’t understand what we are fighting for. I don’t understand what our men – and women – are getting wounded and dying for. I don’t know, even, how we would know if we were winning.

We are paying for truck companies to bring supplies in from Pakistan and up the highways across Afghanistan that, in many cases, we paid to build; then the truckers have to pay off the Taliban to pass on those highways. Or get killed. We are fighting the Taliban and funding them. And we can’t stop because we need the supplies to fight the Taliban but, if we were not fighting them, they wouldn’t be getting all that money. It is more bazaar than Catch 22.

Our strategy is to develop Afghanistan but almost everybody we hire is corrupt and Karzai’s family is especially corrupt. Because we are there, houses in Kabul rent for over $6,000 per month. The owners now live in Bahrain or Dubai, or some other nice safe place on the Gulf Coast. Drug export is a – if not the –  major source of export income for Afghanistan and the counter-narcotics mission is a waste of time and resources that just alienates the Afghans we are trying to get on our side.

Paradoxically, under Obama, we now have more troops in Afghanistan so we can fight the “big war” with American troops, just as we did in Vietnam. The plan in Afghanistan is to flood an area with troops, secure it, then rebuild it, and leave them a new, rebuilt area, in control of our “good” Afghan allies. In Vietnam, this was called the Oil-blot Strategy with fortified Strategic Hamlets. It doesn’t work.

When Obama first started talking about Afghanistan being the good war, I thought it sounded like such a good idea. I was wrong – which means nothing – and Obama was wrong – which means a lot. We should get out. Say it was a mistake, say we got Osama and we won, say whatever; just get out. This will not end well and it is time to cut our losses.