Category Archives: War

Fast-Roping 101

Current Affairs, Politics, War

We got back from the Smoke Creek late Tuesday only to see “Israel attacks flotilla”. Having had no news for three days, I don’t have a good picture of what happened except even India is pissed.1 It is as if Israel has been taken over by the Tea Bag Party. Andrew Sullivan, in a blog post entitled The Capitan Speaks,  quotes and comments on an article in Haaretz.Com.

An interesting account:

“I was the second to be lowered in by rope,” said Captain R. “My comrade who had already been dropped in was surrounded by a bunch of people. It started off as a one-on-one fight, but then more and more people started jumping us. I had to fight against quite a few terrorists who
were armed with knives and batons.”

I note two things. It began with a one-on-one fight. This was not a lynch mob primed to kill. It was a reaction that spread as more soldiers arrived. The second thing I note is that the captain describes the passengers as “terrorists.”

This picture, from the Center for a New American Security from where I blatantly ripped it off, is labeled Too Soon? and filed under Israel. 

 

Helos

1. We were in India at the camel festival at Pushkar when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995. The Indian government shut everything down and declared a national couple of days of morning. They were that pro-Israel. 

pas·to·ral [pas-ter-uhl], Pastoral, American Pastoral

Americana, Books, War

Five Men Of A Wellington 1

A couple of years ago, Richard Taylor – or, maybe, Tracy, or, probably, both – recommended that I read Philip Roth's American Pastoral. It just seemed slow. The plot sort of fluttered around, like a moth around a light. Yes, there were passages that were like a flash going off in a dark room; illuminating a moment, a scene, that perfectly caught the sixty's disintegration, but it wasn't a moment belonging to my generation – more my parent's generation – and I couldn't warm up to it. Not liking a book recommended by two people whose judgment I respect and I usually agree with – although, I suspect, I am much more low brow in my tastes than they are – is disconcerting. Even more so when the book wins the Pulitzer Prize and is on almost everybody's list of great American novels. Still, as much as I wanted to like it, I didn't.

Eventually, I learned to live with the disappointment.

A couple of weeks ago, Catherine Santos gave me a copy of Nevil Shute's Pastoral. Shute had the common decency to put, across from the front page – PASTORAL, n. A poem which describes the scenery and life of the country. (mus.) a simple melody. As I read Shute's Pastoral, the lights slowly came on.

Both books are describing the scenery and life of their time. Some physical scenery, but more emotional scenery. And the description in both books is much softer and simpler than the actual, horrific events that are taking place. The horrific events are the background to the simple, everyday actions of the protagonists. Like falling in love or being overwhelmed by despair.

Shute's pastoral takes place on a RAF bomber station in England during the early part of World War II. It is a love story between a young pilot and an W.A.A.F officer. It is a soft  – I can't find a better word – story of hope in a world of horror. The hope is bright; the horror dim. For example:

She got a letter from him punctually by the first post on Tuesday morning, and read it in the privacy of her room. She answered it on Tuesday afternoon, when she was supposed to be resting for the coming operation, which was Düsseldorf. She spent the night on duty out at the group W/T station. That night twenty two machines left Hartley Magna. Sixteen came back, one landed in Essex, the crew of one bailed out near Guildford, and four failed to return altogether.

Roth's pastoral takes place in New Jersey as the post war generation's world starts to fall apart. It is a world that the hero, Swede Levov, a second generation secular Jew, thought had been made safe by America's prosperity and the orderliness of his life. But the hope of the young lovers has been obliterated and Swede had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no
sense. He carefully learned the rules only to find out that The old system that made order doesn't work anymore. All that was left
was his fear and astonishment, but now concealed by nothing.


A-family-on-their-lawn-one-sunday-in-1968
 

The books are strangely complimentary, although strangely might not be the right word, because it is hard to believe that
Roth didn't know about Shute's Pastoral when he wrote his American
Pastoral. Together, the two books are terrific.Hell, American Pastoral by itself is terrific.

Slavery and Confederate History Month

Americana, Current Affairs, Photography, War, What's a man?

To me, from now, from here, slavery seems so improbable. Not informal, chance slavery like bringing home a captured souvenir from winning a war; but institutionalized slavery. It requires a belief that the slaves aren't really as human as the owners – how does someone do that to a person they are living with every day (and, more than sometimes, having sex with), it requires complex laws to define who are the slaves and who are the owners, it requires an huge infrastructure to  keep the slaves from escaping, it must, I think, require a preoccupation that permeates every part of society. 

That is why the whole concept of slavery in the south is abhorrent but not really real. And that is why a post, entitled Honoring CHM: One Drop, on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog, is so horrific. With little commentary, it shows a picture of eight people and reprints a letter asking for money to educate them. They are  emancipated slaves.- eight individual, traumatized, human beings.

8slaves

The letter describes each one of the people with passages like this

Wilson Chinn is about 60 years old, he was "raised" by Isaac
Howard of Woodford County, Kentucky. When 21 years old he was taken
down the river and sold to Volsey B. Marmillion, a sugar planter about
45 miles above New Orleans. This man was accustomed to brand his
negroes, and Wilson has on his forehead the letters "V. B. M." Of the
210 slaves on this plantation 105 left at one time and came into the
Union camp. Thirty of them had been branded like cattle with a hot iron,
four of them on the forehead, and the others on the breast or arm. 

I really recommend that you follow the link back to the original post. It is hard to read – at least it was for me – but it makes real what we often think of as abstract. Check it out.

General David Petraeus touting General U.S. Grant as an intro to a rant against “Confederate History Month”

Americana, Current Affairs, General U.S. Grant, Politics, War

Recently, Tom Ricks, who has an excellent blog called The Best Defense on the Foreign Policy website, in an interview of David Petraeus, asked this question:

BD:
We do a lot of reading lists on my blog. What is one book
you’ve read lately that you think should be better known?

General Petraeus: Bruce Catton’s Grant Takes Command (and
Jean Edward
Smith’s Grant). Both support historian Sean Wilentz’ recent
assertion that Grant was a truly great commander and president, vastly
better than historians assessed some years back. 

Grant 2

I am a big fan of General Ulysses S Grant and think that he is a greatly underappreciated  American hero  – in case, somehow, you didn’t know . I love that people are starting to relook at Grant and, in doing so, are seeing his humanity and greatness. But Grant being underappreciated is part of a bigger picture that includes Confederate History Month.

From – oh, say – the turn of the last century to  the 1950s, the southern revisionists rewrote both slavery and the Civil War. The novel, Gone With the Wind, with its defense of the Ku Klux Klan and depiction of happy slaves was an example of this. The crux of the revision was that the war was not about slavery and that the North, lead by the inept butcher, Grant, only won because they out numbered and out resourced the noble South and because Grant was willing to lose more men than the superior man and general, Robert E Lee.

That is hooey. The war was clearly about slavery, the abomination that had been tearing at the fabric of the United States since the 3/5’s clause was put in the Constitution. South Carolina was the first state to secede and, following its secession, South Carolina requested the other southern states to join them in forming a southern Confederacy. It said We . . . [are] dissolving a union with non-slaveholding confederates and seeking a confederation with slaveholding states.
Mississippi became the second state to secede, and it said Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. . . . [A] blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.
The other states that followed had similar statements. Fifty years later, these statements transmogrified into the so-called virtuous goals of states rights, independence, and the protection of traditional values. But those traditional values and states rights were slavery.

The North won the Civil War for lots of reasons including that it outnumbered and out resourced the South but the South had the advantage of being on the defensive. It knew the ground it was defending and always had shorter lines of communication and supply. It is much easier to defend a position than take it it.

But the North had better generals in Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Thomas, among others. Especially Grant. The generals on the North were younger, they were more adaptive and more inventive, and they had a more compelling vision.    As always happens – given enough time – the future won over the past.

So now I come to Confederate History Month – which I don’t understand any more than I understand displaying the confederate battle flag. As an aside. Often people who display the confederate battle flag have the common decency to also display the swastika so, at least, we know that they are just pissed at everybody. End aside.

But why Confederate History Month? What is it about a feudal society that supported itself by slavery that they find so compelling?  The Virginia proclamation, which seems to have received the most PR, starts out WHEREAS, April is the month in which the people of Virginia joined the Confederate States of America in a four year war between the states for independence that concluded at Appomattox Courthouse;
As Reagan once said There you go again…. Here we have the war between the states for independence that concluded at Appomattox. Concluded? As when Lee surrendered? So, I guess, it makes sense if the celebration is for a war of independence that was not lost, but just, you know, concluded. I think we should celebrate a North Kicked the South’s Ass Month to celebrate that the war concluded for Virginia when Bobbie Lee surrendered his sorry, whooped, ass to General Ulysses S Grant.

 

 

The Taliban’s problem

Current Affairs, Film, Music, War

When we read about the war in Afghanistan, we almost always read about it from the US point of view – duh! – or a Marines point of view, or a NGO peace workers point of view.

A couple of days ago, I read a blog in the NY Times (it is amazing how much good stuff is in the Times, I wonder, and not in a good way, where it will go after the Times folds – if it doesn't just disappear) that talked about why the Taliban are such poor shots. And it sort of talked about it , inadvertently, I think, from the Afghans point of view. Among a long list of problems like having and using equipment in poorly maintained condition, relying on automatic fire rather than aiming, using mismatched and bad ammunition, was

a matter of public health. Many Afghans suffer from
uncorrected vision problems, which have roots in factors ranging from
poor childhood nutrition to the scarcity of medical care.

Sunday afternoon, while the rain feel all afternoon, I watched Afghan Star


The two of them, together, left me with an almost overwhelming feeling of how poor Afghanistan really is. Not We have no doctors, poor. but We have no good sanitation poor. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on Earth. So poor, most of the adult population can't see very well.

And there is a huge minority of the Afghan population that is afraid to move away from that poverty,. Afraid that they will lose more than they will gain. Maybe they are right – they will lose community, they will lose their convictions and answers – I don't think they are right to be afraid, but, then, I've eaten from the apple a long time ago. I am biased.