Tag: war

History Lesson: Let’s not play soldier.

Looking for information on military units like the one Bob served with in Vietnam is incredibly frustrating. Bob was in a special warfare unit in the Navy. This means that he was a UDT, or a SEAL, or a “Navy Scout” or something. So he was in one of these shadowy things like the “Maritime Studies Group” or “Studies and Observations Group” that were just killing machines. When you look for that stuff on the web there’s this mountain of macho horseshit to plow through. The official histories and some sites run by veterans are there, of course.

But good God, the fixation this country has on elite military units! Message board fights about who a real SEAL is, dissing of various public figures about their war records, lots of debunking of people who claim to be SEALs or Special Forces or whatever but aren’t. Every meathead in the country claims either to be a SEAL or claims to know all about them and have the real scoop, unlike those other poseurs. Regular soldiers aren’t enough; the poor bastards may get blown up, shot, underpaid, mistreated, and dumped to die but they don’t have flaming death’s head patches and special medals and really really cool face paint.

You know what that is? It’s pathetic. Bob killed so many innocent people and saw so many unspeakable things in his time at war that he spent the next 25 years marinated in Crown Royal and wreaking havoc on himself and everyone else. It was a nauseating, terrifying Hell that makes a very unlikely craggy cynical old bastard like Bob tear up and flinch when he sees a Vietnamese person to this day. Special Forces, in his case, meant an especially bad war that made him an especially bad person. If these web warriors and message board heroes had to see any of that they’d never stop shitting their Dockers. I suppose they have an image of a straight-jawed Hollywood actor heroically cutting down uniformed bad guys and saving his buddies. The reality was more like a gang of maniacs blowing up and burning houses and schools and hospitals, and one of the maniacs is you.

Dude Ranch Nation gives me ennui.

Another slice of Bob Trout

I get this ambulance ride to Hoag, because my back just fucking exploded. Yeah, you remember. About six years ago. Anyway, flash back to the old days. I was running with this… …thief, drunk, maniac. He and I had a great fuckin’ time together. And I was constantly drunk, big mule of a guy, poster boy for post-traumatic stress disorder. This guy Pat, he was a Harbor High football star from the sixties. complete degenerate. One time we installed a hot tub in the place for a doctor at Hoag, fourth floor place down on the Bay, bring the girls up in groups and fuck ’em. I remembered the guy’s name, he was an E.R. doc.

So then, right, my back goes. Fine since then, I take my drugs and I know the woman can’t be on top unless I got a good mattress. But this time they had a bodybuilder pick me up like I was a feather and toss me in the ambulance and I got to the Hoag E.R. I’m lying there and the orderly is saying well Mr. Trout we’re going to transfer you to the VA, and I say yeah, that’s right. And then I said to him “Does Dr. S. still work here?” “Why yes, he’s in charge of the E.R.” I said “Well tell him that Pat C. is dead, and the bastard owed me $200 and owed him $900.” Orderly looked at me kinda funny and left. He comes back a few later and wipes my ass with alcohol, sticks a needle in there and gives me a huge shot of morphine. Says “Dr. S. says that’s for you, and you can spend the night here.” He always knew I was the one doing the work and Pat was an asshole.

—

This is how we did it. You know, there was nothing but killing. No strategy, just kill. I was a fucking war criminal. And we killed a lot, a tremendous number of people. Be standing in a big clearing just piled with bodies and say well, let’s call this a hundred for the records.

We’d fly in on Pierre’s helicopter and he’d drop us about over by Hoag, in the weeds. And our target was maybe over there, by the YMCA. We took a week to get there and get ready, and we told Pierre we’d be right back at the same spot at this time and date. Thank God we had good pilots, they always fucking found us. I mean, if they didn’t, that was that. So we’d go into the Viet Cong training camp or whatever at night, and load the place up to the fucking treetops with mines. Claymores everywhere, interlocking blast fields. We’d back off and fire one shot and they’d all come running out of their tents. Boom! Claymores means chunks of metal flying around in every space there’s air. These guys are fucking lasagne. Almost all of them dead or dying. But we knew we didn’t get the instructors. And those guys would tend to some wounded and then come looking for us. And they knew how to kill and how to run in the jungle, and so did we.

But Pierre would be there, every time, waiting for us just when we said. God bless him he never missed the spot and you know you couldn’t fucking see it from up there, he just had to know. No electronic shit. Mark Tork, from Manhattan Kansas. I remembered the name, that’s something.

You don’t know these weapons until you see them. Like if you shot a water can over there on top of the bricks, one shot from an M-16. You’d expect maybe the can would go to pieces, water everywhere, but no. It flies straight up 20 yards in the air. What the fuck?

War is just the worst fuckin’ thing.

We have met the enemy, and it’s us again.

I’ve just finished reading Backfire, by Loren Baritz. It’s a book about the Vietnam War that I saw recommended somewhere here on Livejournal; if you recommended it, remind me.

I grew up in the shadow of my country’s Vietnam War. I was born just as it was starting, and the final defeat happened while I was in grade school. My older brother registered for the draft but wasn’t called. My childhood was colored by a war we were losing, that a majority of the country disliked. As I got older I read a lot about the war. Quite a few people my family knew had been in combat there, too. At least partly because of Vietnam, my country didn’t fight any serious wars for quite a while. We’d fought an unjust war, done it poorly, been beaten, mistreated our soldiers, made ourselves an international pariah, and lied to each other about it. Any suggestion of war made people consider the phrase “another Vietnam”.

Most books about the Vietnam War follow one of a few patterns. There are military histories, first-person journalistic accounts, vast tomes about the social impact in the United States, even more gigantic tomes about the strategies of various Great Men of the time, and rip-roaring military adventures. I recommend reading one of each, since they don’t vary much in quality.

I also recommend reading this one. Babitz treats the war as a disastrous expression of American culture. Our belief in American uniqueness and virtue, the explicitly religious belief that we are a “City on a Hill” that can heal the world’s ills, and a doggedly held belief that everyone everywhere wants to be American are three points that stick very well. Once we’d set out on this project of defending South Vietnam, it was impossible to back out or to admit that we were doing things poorly, because national prestige was at stake. There are depressingly many points along the way where the whole thing could have been stopped — and people in power who did their best to stop it — but the war was a cultural necessity. Everything else follows from this point. The total lack of strategy (one general is quoted as saying “The operations are the strategy!”), ignorance of our enemy, hatred of our allies, bureaucratic idiocy, official lying, and downright insanity of highly placed officials just mark the way that was set from the beginning when we declared ourselves to be the world’s savior.

That’s not why this book was such a gut-punch, though. I knew all of this before from other reading. No, the reason I’ve been so disturbed reading this is that the generals and CIA agents and politicians who fucked this thing up so badly are clearly superior to anyone we have managing our current war. White House staff, military officers, and CIA agents resigned in protest. Senators and Congressmen questioned the war and its conduct incessantly. I realized as I read that I was becoming nostalgic for the uniformed brass and right-wing politicians of 1966.

Because we didn’t learn. The reaction to Vietnam that I described from my childhood didn’t last. Starting in about 1980, the revisionists got to work. A new story was written about the war; It had been won by the soldiers but they were made to lose by our enemies at home: liberals, protesters, craven politicians, and desk-bound soldiers. Our boys could have won it but they were stabbed in the back, and spat on when they returned. A whole new genre of movies showed up: the Vietnam payback flick, in which POWs were rescued or angry vets got to do one right this time and shoot up some Central Americans or drug dealers. And at the end of the decade we had our Anti-Vietnam, the first Gulf War. We fought a set-piece battle against an enemy no one could love and rolled right over him using all the technology that failed us in an unconventional war against popular guerillas. The pride was back.

And now we’re doing it again, but worse. We’re ass deep in a country that hates us, fighting popular guerillas with the wrong weapons just as before. We’re losing and trying to extricate ourselves. We’re committing atrocities and idiocies right and left. But this time there’s no reporting worth reading, because that’s all been shut down. There will be no Seymour Hersh finding My Lai. There’s no draft, because that was unpopular. Therefore this war is fought entirely by the poor and mercenaries, and the great American middle class won’t see their children dead. And the reaction of those in power to the painful lessons of Vietnam is to deny them entirely. We are bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan; the people love us and want us to save them from evil. Any opposition to any tiny part of the war is treachery. There is no dissent within the government or the military. The solution to the problems that ended the Vietnam war is to silence the journalists, muzzle the naysayers in the government, and lie like crazy.

It’s trite and forced to make exact analogies with German in the Thirties; too many parallels are absent, and the culture is very different. But it’s hard not to see that Vietnam was our Great War and our Versailles. The first Gulf War was our Spain. And the current eternal war on Terror and Evil is an attempt at erasing the shame of Vietnam by beating the entire world into submission: a Thousand Year City on a Hill. We didn’t really lose that war before, we were stabbed in the back. And we’re a great people. And we’re going to show the whole world how great we are, and how right we were, by doing it all over again without the distractions of competent journalism, honest officials, a well-informed public, or the shadow of a doubt in this Administration’s mind that we were chosen by God to bring his light to the world.

This book does a good job of telling you why this happened; read it. And hope I’m wrong.

I link, I link, I link.

  1. How’d they pull that off? The Atkins diet people have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Oh, probably because they bet $300 million on a diet trend lasting forever.
  2. Acupuncture can reduce tension headaches by half according to a recent study.
  3. These people claim that they can “fingerprint” the unique identity of a document, package, or credit card.
  4. An Iraqi town has named a U.S soldier as a sheik, or village elder.
  5. The Gitmo trials are so thoroughly rigged that military prosecutors have resigned in protest. Have you ever seen what military “justice” is like? Hint: everyone is guilty. What could possibly squick these guys? Were actual kangaroos involved?

Even funnier, I had to ask her to turn it down.

Weird and cool: Coming into the living room and seeing my 76-year-old mother watching Nick Cave on the TV. And liking it.

Weird and funny: Getting two text messages from bikupan that appeared to be from a year ago, one saying “What, no potato salad? Bah!” and the other “Is something wrong?”. I vaguely remembered going back and forth about my accidentally vegan potato salad recipe last year and having some technical snafus. But no, she really did send those last night, and it wasn’t a temporal wormhole in the SMS system.

Neither weird, funny, nor cool: My re-discovery tonight of the fatal flaw in desktop computers nowadays: they’re all I/O bound. Here I sit with an 800 MHz PowerPC and 1 gig of RAM in my lap and I can’t do jack. Why? Because there’s disk intensive activity going on. The window manager slows to a crawl, none of my apps respond except in annoying bursts, and inexplicable errors occur probably due to clicks and keyboard presses out of focus because windows are changing erratically. It’s like I’m connecting to my own computer over a crappy old 14.4 modem link. RAAAAAAR. I want IDE to go away. [/geek]

Neither weird, funny, nor cool: I am reading a book about the Vietnam war. Bad: we’re doing it again. Worse: we’re doing it again much more stupidly . I’m experiencing nostalgia for the sincerity, honesty, and sense of duty of CIA and military officers from 1966. YOW!

Weird and funny but not cool: Bro ‘n’ ho couple arrive in D’s tonight and she asks D., who is behind the counter: “Do you have Chocolate Tea?” A moment of silence, and D. says “Umm, no?” Customer says: “Could you do that, like, put mocha in tea?” D: “I guess, yeah!” Customer: “Would that be disgusting, do you think?” D: “Yes, it would.”

Three depressing links about the war.

  1. Here’s a first-hand account of what it’s like to be arrested and jailed by the secret police in Iraq right now. If you’re lucky, that is.
  2. We’re scouring our poor island colonies for recruits. Young people in places like Guam have no jobs and no future in our WWII leftover archipelago, so we’re sending them to the next colony. It’s the new Gurkhas.
  3. Counterpunch is a marginal news source (I don’t trust Cockburn so much). However, if we really did lose nuclear warheads off Somalia in 1991 and someone got hold of it, we’re about to star in a really bad James Bond movie. We’ve certainly lost nukes before, including a spectacular incident off Spain a long time ago.

I’m going to go outside and pet puppies now.

I hate to keep bringing up Dr. Strangelove, but

For example, of the 12,500 targets in the SIOP at that time, one of them was slated to be hit by 69 consecutive nuclear weapons. It seems superfluous to say that this is crazy, but it is important to understand how the planning process could result in such a figure.

One misconception you may have is that the people who plan our military adventures are cold, calculating bureaucrats who comb through huge quantities of data and calculate invasions, bombings, and coups d’état with analytical precision. That would in fact be hateful and frightening.

Spreadsheets are involved and there are huge quantities of data. And bureaucrats, lots and lots of bureaucrats doing this work. But they’re all completely insane.They have abstracted the world so completely that there is no longer any connection to the ordinary evil of war; they live in another place. Remember that next time you’re watching the news and we do something tragicomic on a huge scale.

appeal.

oxfam

Famine in Niger, war and famine in Sudan, famine and disease after the tsunami, predatory landlords, dirty drinking water, the abuse of women and children, yet more war everywhere, AIDS, hurricanes, the impossible life of the subsistence farmer, drought, endless cycles of poverty and corruption, malaria, and still more war.

What’s a person to do?

Give a few bucks to Oxfam if nothing else. 77% of their donations and 90% of their emergency fund donations go directly to operations. They help in emergencies and crises, and they fight the root causes of the world’s miseries too. They do it locally, with global reach.

For those outside the U.S., the donation link is this one.

Mark Twain on the Flag and Foreign Wars

Twain had declared the American Flag polluted by the new imperial adventures in the Philippines, and had come in for a load of criticism. Here was his response.

The Flag Is Not Polluted [1901]

I am not finding fault with this use of our flag; for in order not to seem eccentric I have swung around, now, and joined the nation in the conviction that nothing can sully a flag. I was not properly reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts, lest it suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the Philippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I supposed it was polluted, and in an ignorant moment I said so. But I stand corrected. I concede and acknowledge that it was only the government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted. Let us compromise on that. I am glad to have it that way. For our flag could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it is different with the administration.