JACK'S BLOG
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5/20/2012 1 Comment Are you ready to play Spy vs. Spy?Good ReadI CANNOT IMAGINE living the life of a spy. No, not James Bond. A real spy. From what I know of it, spy craft is a life without trust. A life full of doubt. A life lived on the edge with little reward at the end of the day. It is the spawning ground of ulcers for anyone who survives long enough to grow them. My Uncle Bill was a spy. He was a pilot in the United States Army Air Corps before America's entry into World War II. In those days, officers read the obituaries just to see what opportunities for advancement in rank were opening up. If a general died, a colonel could hope to be promoted to fill the spot. Then a major could advance to colonel, and a captain could advance to major. At the bottom of the heap were a scad of lieutenants scrambling for that one captaincy. The prospects for career advancement were not bright unless the nation went to war. Unfortunately for ambitious young officers like Bill, the prospects for America going to war weren't bright. It seemed that there was little sympathy for Europe and its wars, not in America. Roosevelt had been reelected President on the promise to keep us out of it. But, the writing was on the wall after Germany occupied France and the movers and shakers in Washington secretly formed the Office of Strategic Services to begin compiling intelligence data that the Department of War would need to manage the Armed Forces effectively if the United States became embroiled in it. Bill was one of the eager young pilots they recruited to begin flying photo reconnaissance missions over Europe. Stationed in England, he flew regular missions that earned him combat pay that he sent home to have his sister invest in War Bonds. If captured, Bill would have been executed as a spy. Inasmuch as the United States had not declared war, he flew as a civilian. Yes, they could have “lent” him to the British and he could have flown in their uniform, but that would have given them operational control over his missions, and access to the product of his spying. It is hard to imagine the strain he must have felt on every flight in an unarmed, unmarked airplane flying over an active war zone. I am certain that there must be a really good story in his service, but it is lost to the ages now. He is gone and he left nothing behind to memorialize his activities. Today's spies are nothing like Bill. Most are bureaucrats, members of the Central Intelligence Agency that replaced the OSS. Not only did they replace the OSS, but also the individual spy activities of the branches of the Armed Services. President Truman swept the OSS out of existence with the stroke of a pen in 1945. He attempted to do the same with the spies of the armed services in 1947 when he signed the National Security Act. However, the armed services distrusted the bureaucrats and kept their own programs alive for more than a decade following the birth of the CIA. However, in the end, they had to defer to the CIA as Cold War expenses ate up their budgets and Congress wouldn't fund duplicate spy services. As Operations Officer at the Strategic Communications Center for the Headquarters, United States Army Pacific in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was able to monitor intelligence reports and assessments as they traversed my facility. It gave me some insight into the problems of sifting through the minutiae that operatives filed and analysts sifted through to glean a gem here and there that might give them insight into secret plans and activities. In later years, a larger portion of that information began to come from high-flying satellites and electronic monitoring stations. However, there was always need for feet on the ground to collect vital information. During the 1950s and 1960s, many of those feet belonged to U.S. Army scouts and U.S. Marines. Concurrently, pilots of the U.S. Air Force flew spy planes over restricted areas and U.S. Navy ships and submarines observed and reported enemy concentrations and movements in the global chess match being played by the Free World and the Soviet Union. I touched on this subject in my novel, Rebels on the Mountain, in which a U.S. Army Ranger who has spent several years slipping in and out of Eastern Europe and the western reaches of the Soviet Union, is sent to Cuba to decipher the convoluted relationships between American businessmen, mafioso, and diplomats that had been driving U.S.-Cuban relations into a quagmire. Another author with even greater credentials than mine illuminated modern spy craft in an exciting story set in Iran, Satan's Spy. The author, André Le Gallo, has crafted a tale that is as thrilling as any told by Ian Fleming, but far more believable. Whereas my novel hints at the problems created for spies by self-serving politicians in the U.S. Congress, Le Gallo rips into them with a vengeance. In Satan's Spy, Steve Church, an independent operative who we met in Caliphate, is recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Iran to retrieve information about the Islamic Bomb, information that is vital to the policy makers in Washington who are attempting to decide how to respond to the prospect of a nuclear device in the hands of an unstable Middle Eastern government. Inasmuch as any citizen of the Great Satan, America, would be viewed with great suspicion, Steve enters the country under the guise of a Canadian businessman seeking to sell his companies services.
His lover, Kella, another familiar face from the Caliphate, accompanies him as his backup. Theirs is a tenuous relationship. Steve isn't certain of where he stands with Kella even though she voluntarily involves herself in this dangerous mission. Men are such fools, even the most daring of us. Steve's task is to make contact with XYSentinel, an asset recruited a few years earlier by Steve's father, himself a former CIA operative. Dealing with an asset who might renege on his “deal” at any moment only adds to the sense of danger that Steve faces working in a hostile nation whose leaders would happily torture and kill him after making a public spectacle of his capture. The author is able to inject a great sense of reality into the milieu of the story. His narrative is liberally spiced with first hand observations of the people and place. He himself had served there during some of the most turbulent times in Iranian-American relations. His plot progresses rapidly and logically to its thrilling conclusion. His characters are three dimensional. Most importantly, Steve's adversary is no bumbling radical fool. He is cunning, intelligent, and resourceful. He commands a cadre of willing and able cohorts who will quickly pounce on any sign of Steve's presence within their nation's borders and ferret him out quickly and efficiently. Indeed, these are men who will extend their reach to any corner of the world wherever they can inflict pain and suffering on any citizen of the Great Satan, especially its spies. Interestingly, this book had one other quality that greatly appealed to me. It's not only entertaining, but also informative. I felt that I was learning real and valuable information about a country and a part of the world that is at best worrisome in these troubled times. This is why I could classify it as a must read. Together with Rebels on the Mountain, you may learn a great deal as well as be entertained.
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5/19/2012 2 Comments Do you like the tough questions?OpinionHOW MANY ANGELS can dance on the head of a pin? No. Not that one. It's too easy. What will a woman do the first time you kiss her? The fiftieth time? The thousandth time? Again. Too easy. Come on, and let's go for the really hard stuff. How about this: What is historical fiction? Yeah, I hear you. Go ahead and laugh. The funny thing is that I belong to a group on LinkedIn – Historical Fiction – that has been wrestling with that question for more than three months. Seriously, three months. Some believe that it is any fiction set in history. That seems simple enough, doesn't it? Okay, what is history? Here's a sampling of the responses:
During this discussion, others have proffered the opinion that the times must be “historic.” That has led to branches from the original question.
It seems that the English care. Out of curiosity, I searched books in the category of Historical Fiction on Amazon and found that the best selling one is only ranked about 15,000th in the Kindle Store for all paid books. On Amazon UK, it is ranked about 26th. This leaves me with the most important question of all: What the hell am I doing writing Historical Fiction? Maybe I could be a commercial success if in my novel, Rebels on the Mountain, I had made Fidel Castro a vampire and Che Guevara a zombie. (Well, that wouldn't work, would it. Casting Che as a zombie would be an improvement over murderous thug.) What do you think? 5/17/2012 1 Comment Welcome to VietnamVietnamWE DESCENDED INTO Vietnam in the middle of the night. It was disconcerting to look out the window when the pilot pulled back on the throttles and see nothing below. Anyone who has traveled by airplane has seen civilization below, even from cruising altitude, marked with clusters of lights connected to each other by strings of lights. I assumed that a cloud layer might have been masking the view below, but dismissed that idea when I began to see the ocean shimmering with a ghostly glow. Soon we passed over a coastline and even that evidence was stolen from my view. I must have popped my ears two or three times before we heard and felt the landing gear deploy. Our angle of approach was much steeper than anything I had experienced before on any other flight. I didn't know until later that it was called a tactical approach dropping steeply rather than gliding gently to the landing. The idea was to avoid presenting an easy target to enemy gunners hiding in the countryside around the airstrip.
I didn't see any lights until the wheels were skimming the surface of the runway and the edge lights began flashing by. Necks craned all around me as we taxied off the runway. We were all looking for the terminal. There wasn't any. The doors opened as soon as the plane stopped, even before the engines were shut down and ground personnel rushed on board and began directing us to move quickly. There was no milling around in the aisle as you see on most planes when they stop at a terminal. We were instructed to remain in our seats until directed to stand, grab our carryons, and move quickly off the plane. Every door had been opened and stairways had been pushed up to each one. I couldn't help pausing in the doorway when it was my turn to exit. It was disorienting. I couldn't see anything other than the steps in front of me, dimly illuminated by small lamps on each side. All of the runway and taxiway lights had been extinguished before the airplane even came to a stop. A sergeant standing to one side urged me to keep moving. Rank meant nothing. The only thing that mattered was to empty the airplane as quickly as possible. I don't think we could have done it any faster had they deployed the inflatable emergency evacuation ramps. Another sergeant at the bottom of the stairway hurried us on our way towards a line of parked buses visible only by the dim light of their interior dome lights shining through their windows. A quick glance back at the plane showed me that every cargo hatch was open and teams of men had almost emptied it of everything already. I trotted towards the buses following the line of men ahead of me. Behind me, I could hear the planes engines restarting and it began to taxi back onto the runway when the last men had descended the stairways and they had been pulled just a few feet away from the fuselage. The men pushing the stairways from the front doors of the aircraft had to rush to keep from having them toppled over by the passing wings. It was roaring down the runway and lifting off before we were all on board the buses which departed just as quickly as each was loaded. They knew we had questions. A sergeant stood at the front of our bus explaining. The airfield we had just landed at was near the town of Bien Hoa. It was little more than an airstrip and a few shacks. The enemy would begin dropping mortar rounds on the airplanes if they remained on the ground long enough for them to set their sights. The planes were flying on to Thailand where their crews would rest before making the return flight with a stop at Ton Sun Hhut Air Force Base in Saigon to pick up passengers returning to the United States. I looked out the window at the night shrouded countryside when the sergeant paused in his explanation. The windows were covered in heavy wire mesh (to prevent anyone from tossing a grenade inside). The air blowing through the bus from its open windows was warm and heavy with the smell of humidity and rotting vegetation. Welcome to Vietnam. Welcome to the war. 5/16/2012 1 Comment Where is Vietnam?VietnamI REMEMBER ONE of the young candidates in Infantry Officer Candidate School who thought that Vietnam was somewhere in Europe. I wish it were. It would have been a helluva lot shorter flight. World Airways was one of several airlines that was chartering jets to the U.S. Air Force to transport the troops to Vietnam during the buildup in 1967. The photo above is one I snapped at Travis Air Force Base just before I boarded.
It was packed inside. There were no "cabins." It was just one long metal tube with seats crammed into every available space, and everyone of them filled. Luckily, as an officer, I was able to board first and get a window seat on the left side of the plane. That put my left arm, still smarting from from seventeen shots that I received minutes before we boarded, in the space next to the window where it wouldn't bump against anything. There was no functioning entertainment system. No music and definitely no movies. A young soldier sitting near me asked a stewardess. She replied that she was the "entertainment." She wasn't much good at it. Travis was built with extra long and wide runways to accommodate B-52 bombers. We needed them. As our plane began to roll we looked at each other. It didn't take an experienced flyer to realize that we were carrying the maximum load. The plane floated on its suspension. Every seam in the taxiway caused the planed to dip and float slowly back. The cargo compartments must have been even fuller than the passenger compartment. When we turned onto the runway, the pilot took us to the very end and made a u-turn so that we could take advantage of every inch of pavement to accelerate and get airborne. He set the brakes and revved up the engines until they were screaming with white hot fury. The plane rolled from side-to-side and we expected to take off as though launched from an aircraft carrier catapult. Instead, when the pilot released the brakes, we surged ahead like a giant glob of honey pouring from a jar. We were worried. Well, I was. I had flown enough to know that we needed speed to lift off. However, I swear that birds were passing us on the runway. And they were walking. Towards the end of the runway there were signs warning that we were approaching the end. (I'm not saying the end of what.) 5 - 4 - 3... I don't know how far apart they were, but the plane still hadn't rotated - the nose wheel was still on the ground - when we passed "2." I don't think it ever rotated. I believe that the pilot simply raised the landing gear like a woman might raise her skirts to cross a puddle, and we cleared the chainlink fence at the end of the runway. We circled until we gained enough altitude to clear the mountains circling Travis before heading northwest to Alaska. The planes headed for Vietnam alternated routes with the first stop being either Alaska or Hawaii. My plane went from Alaska to Japan to Guam to Wake Island to Bien Hoa, Vietnam. We were allowed to deplane and stretch our legs at each stop. I was comatose most of the time - almost 24 hours total - sleeping off a hangover and recovering some feeling in my arm. VietnamI ARRIVED IN Oakland, California, on the date specified in my orders and reported to the Army Terminal for transportation to Vietnam. The sergeant at the reception desk scanned my orders, handed them back, and told me to return the following morning. What was I supposed to do? He gave me a tired look and explained that he didn't have a seat for me that day. He might have one the next. I guess he had repeated that explanation countless times every day and didn't have the patience to recite it for another idiot lieutenant.
I knew a girl who had moved to San Francisco about the time I joined the Army and I decided to look her up. She grabbed her boyfriend and a friend to be my "date," and we went out on the town. They had me return my rental car and threw my dufflebag in the trunk of their car. The party lasted until they delivered me back to Oakland the next morning. They waited while I checked in and learned that they still didn't have a seat on a flight for me. I was again instructed to come back the next day. It was April, 1967, and a chartered flight was taking off every twenty minutes, 24/7, and I still couldn't get a seat. It was the height of the Vietnam "buildup." The party continued another 24 hours and I was begging for a seat the next morning. I didn't think I could survive another day. If I was going to die, please let it be in Vietnam where I could at least be decorated with a Purple Heart. The last thing I remember was a kindly policeman coaxing me to return the stone cupid I was carrying out of some park, somewhere. The sergeant at the Oakland Army Terminal took pity and I joined a queue headed towards a bus. Unfortunately, I was yanked out of line at the last minute. A corpsman asked if I had my vaccination record. No. Well, it wasn't in my medical records either and I had to be re-inoculated before I could get on the plane. The bus was loading as the corpsman pumped me with seventeen different injections, all in the left arm. I decided that I needed at least one good arm. It was not a comfortable ride from there to Travis Air Force Base where our plane waited. VietnamIN THE BEGINNING, we believed President Johnson when he said that there was an important mission for us in South Vietnam. President Eisenhower had warned us that all the nations in Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes if Vietnam fell to the Communists. President Kennedy sent advisers there to train the South Vietnamese to fight for themselves, but they were outgunned, out-maneuvered, and out-smarted by the Soviet-backed North Vietnamese. So, when President Johnson said it was time to go, we went. Only later did some begin to question his judgment. If you've been following this blog, you already know that I spent a year getting ready to go as an infantry officer, but was commissioned into the Adjutant General's Corps at the last minute. Along with my commission, I was handed orders to report to the 185th Military Intelligence Company in Saigon after a brief - six week - stint at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana to learn how to be an administrative officer. During a week layover at home, I reconnected with my girlfriend - the one who had sent me a "Dear John" while in Officer Candidate School - and we "reconnected." Yes, I was really that dumb. (That last statement shouldn't require any explanation if you think about it or if you have been following my blog for any time.) When I arrived at Ben Harrison, I was told that there was only one room left at the Bachelor Officer's Quarters on post. I slipped away and didn't return until after another lieutenant had taken it. That way I was able to collect a substantial amount of TDY (Temporary Duty) money for living off post, and was able to replenish my savings that were sorely depleted after I had to buy new uniforms as an officer. I met up with three other lieutenants who had graduated from Officer Candidate School with me and we found a two-bedroom apartment to rent by the week. It was located in a building filled with a surprising number of young women. Only one of the other lieutenants was married and we became popular additions to the community. The girls took pity on us and we were treated to many "home cooked" meals. Unfortunately, most were pretty bad and the guys insisted that I do the cooking. (I had been cooking since I was eleven years old.) A trio of young women lived across the hall and I became friends with one of them. Unfortunately, I maintained a hands off policy in deference to the girl back home (yeah, the one who had sent me the "Dear John" and who would repeat the performance while I was in Vietnam. Now you must understand the part about me being really dumb.) After learning the intricacies of Army paperwork and the Functional Filing System (aren't you just dying to know the intimate details - the filing system, not the blonde), I went back home to dump my excess gear and have another week with my girl friend.
Good ReadTHERE WEREN'T SO MANY intellectuals in times past as there are now. Roosevelt had his “Brain Trust.” Woodrow Wilson had the enigmatically named group of intellectuals, “The Inquiry.” John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson depended on the “Whiz Kids” for advice. However, no President has relied nearly as heavily on intellectuals as the current President, Barack Obama. Only about twenty percent of his cabinet and closest advisers have any significant practical experience. Indeed, he is the first President who himself may be labeled as an “intellectual.” What is an “intellectual?” Of all the definitions I have heard, I like best the one promulgated by Professor Thomas Sowell in his book, Intellectuals and Society. He refers to “intellectuals” as “...an occupational category, people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas – writers, academics, and the like.” The central theme of Professor Sowell's book is the appalling record of intellectuals, especially those of the twentieth century. “Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the twentieth century was without his intellectual supporters, not simply in his own country, but also in foreign democracies where people were free to say 'whatever they wished.' Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler all had their admirers and apologists among the intelligentsia in Western democratic nations, despite the fact that these dictators each ended up killing people of their own country on a scale unprecedented by despotic regimes that preceded them.” Is Professor Sowell attempting to scare us with the notion that President Obama may one day begin murdering Americans? Of course not. Indeed, his book isn't about President Obama. It's a scholarly look at the nature of intellectuals and intellectualism. However, he has helped me understand the source of the ideology that drives this Administration and its political allies in Congress. He has helped me understand how they could cling to an ideology that has endowed us with unprecedented debt and a web of stifling regulations that prevent us from producing enough wealth to hope that we could ever repay it. He has helped me understand how seemingly intelligent men and women – possibly the most intelligent among us – could ignore the damage they're doing and insist on doing even more. It's a concept that I've touched on many times in my life and in this blog. Just last Sunday I wrote humorously comparing economists with weather girls. (See Opinion) The weather girls, obviously selected for assets well south of their brains, regularly outperform the economists. In the coming weeks, I will be blogging about my experiences in Vietnam and you'll learn that my closest encounter with real danger was inspired by the complete lack of common sense exhibited by a Harvard graduate. Therein lies the question that has nagged at me so many decades: Why do such intelligent people lack common sense? In response to that question, Professor Sowell quotes George Orwell who said that “...some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.” If you read Professor Sowell's book you will learn that the schools who are graduating these intellectuals have become like religious institutions wherein intelligentsia believe that their ideas are good and worthy simply because they all share them. They have dropped any requirement to prove the worth or validity of their ideas through empirical evidence. He cites numerous examples as proof of this thesis. Once you understand this concept it is easy to see how these politicians can incite class warfare for the sake of some obscure concept of fairness. A former Marxist himself, Professor Sowell admits that he too fell victim to the fundamental misconception that “...'labor', the physical handling of the materials and instruments of production, is the real source of wealth.” He surrendered that belief because it is not empirically true. Professor Sowell's book is surprisingly readable, even by the layman. It's a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the true nature of the problems now confronting our nation and the world. People who dismiss our current leaders because of race, political affiliation, or ideology, are not only missing the point, but also demonstrating their own prejudices and lack of common sense. The problem is with our leaders' lack of practical knowledge of America and its rise to preeminence through free markets and limited government. Unfortunately, it is a lack in a significant portion of our population as well, and we are not going to turn things around until we begin testing the ideas that our leaders propose to insure through empirical evidence, that they will work.
5/12/2012 3 Comments Was mama a right wing nut?OpinionMAMA ALWAYS SAID that “life isn't fair.” That's what she told me when my brother was allowed to cross the street by himself. No fair! Well, he was six years older than me. My brother won a trophy and I didn't. No fair! Well, he was a better athlete. My brother got a bigger piece of pie. No fair! Well, I was putting on too much weight. Just what is “fair?” The President and his political allies in Congress seem to have different ideas than mama on that subject. Whereas mama fought for her boys to have a fair chance in life, the people in Washington seem to believe that it's only fair that we all have an equal outcome. Let's consider two examples that have been in the news of late: Health care and education. Mama wanted her boys to have a chance to go to college. We were both bright boys, but our academic records were sketchy. We were bored with school. Things came too easily to us and we often found ourselves with time to get into mischief while our classmates struggled with assignments that we had already completed or dismissed as dull and repetitive. Our father refused to waste his money sending poor students like us to college and we had to work to pay our own way. Ultimately, we both earned degrees and enjoyed a level of success in our careers. Fortunately, the cost of going to college was reasonable enough in those days for us to pay our own way. Congress wants all children to have a college education whether they want it, appreciate it, need it, or not. It has legislated guaranteed loans to pay for those educations. That's only “fair,” isn't it? Unfortunately for my brother and myself, this program didn't begin until 1965, the year I graduated from law school. That's not fair! The system was reformed in 1993, when the government began making direct loans to students without making any provision for repaying my brother and I for our education expenses. Totally unfair! Of course, I'm wasting my breath complaining. Mama's dead these forty years now, and she would have told me to hush. After all, life isn't fair. Has it been fair for America? Take a look at this interesting statistical correlation. The rate of inflation in the cost of education, which had roughly coincided with the general rate of inflation, began to climb precipitously after the government began footing the bill! I think that mama would have said that this was very unfair, especially since taxpayers are now picking up the tab for an ever increasing number of these beneficiaries who are now defaulting on their loans. How about health care? Isn't it only fair that every American have good health care? The truth is that I've never heard anyone argue against that proposition. The real problem we've been trying to solve is: How do we pay for the health care facilities, train the medical service providers, and maintain a system that gives all Americans all the health care they need? Unfortunately, no one has been able to solve it. Congress has succeeded only in reducing the availability of health care and increasing its costs? They took a system with a few broken parts and shot it in the head. Just look at the proof. Medicare was passed by Congress in 1965 (they certainly were busy creating entitlement programs in that year, weren't they?) I was working as a Post Entitlement Adjudicator at Social Security at the time, and we all believed that the new entitlement was going to inflate the costs of medical care. Sadly, we were correct. Again, the rate of inflation for healthcare climbed precipitously above the general inflation rate as soon as the government became a direct participant. Is that fair?
Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office is already projecting that the costs of healthcare are going to spiral exponentially under the terms of the recently passed Affordable Health Care Act making it even more unaffordable for Americans, and no one is laughing at the irony of the act's title. The reasons why government involvement has such disastrous effects are beyond the scope of this opinion piece. We only came together as reader and writer to consider the question: What is fair? All we have learned thus far is that any attempt to insure an “equality of outcome” erodes the equality of opportunity". Maybe we should limit our concern to insuring “equality of opportunity.” What do you think? 5/10/2012 1 Comment An End And A BeginningInfantry School/VietnamTHERE YOU HAVE IT. Almost a year spent to become an infantry officer and I became something else. But, more importantly, America was beginning to become something else during that year. Inasmuch as I had fallen off the face of the planet – we had almost no contact with the “real” world while in training – I had not been there to see it happen. The change in America was subtle during 1966 while I was away. The Civil Rights Act had been passed in 1964, but its affect was only beginning to be felt. The United States was getting ready to begin a massive deployment of troops to Vietnam – I was among those – but its impact had not yet been felt in America because most of that early troop buildup consisted of volunteers like me. Nancy Sinatra was singing "These Boots Were Made For Walking" and the Orioles won the World Series.
The Baltimore Orioles won the world series? I was eleven years old when the St Louis Browns moved to Baltimore and took the name of the official State bird. They resided in the cellar of the league standings every year thereafter, until I left. I was an Infantry Officer Candidate when the World Series rolled around that year and I asked if anyone knew who was playing. We didn't get much in the way of outside news. I thought they were joking when they told me the Orioles. I've felt like a jinx ever since. Was it my fault they never amounted to anything until the year I left Baltimore? Even more changes would come to America in the following year while I was stationed in Vietnam, even more cut off from news of the “real” world. More change came during the following three years while I was stationed in Hawaii, almost as remote from the “real” world as Vietnam. I suppose this is why I escaped the change that seems to have characterized the national psyche ever since. I will reserve those observations for my weekly opinion piece each Sunday. Beginning next week, I will share my journal of the events in Vietnam. I served thirteen months in the war zone as a member of the Adjutant General's office of the 9th Infantry Division. My position gave me a broader view of the war than I might have had as an infantry platoon leader. I was able to travel throughout our division's tactical area of operations and mingle with unit commanders. During the first couple of months of my tour of duty, I supervised the processing of battle casualties and corresponding with their next of kin. Later, I was assigned to help manage and then took over the Awards and Decorations Branch where I investigated and processed recommendations to cite acts of valor. I was a platoon leader for the division's base camp defense force. I was the division's duty officer the night that the Tet Offensive of 1968 began. Guilt at surviving the war without facing the hazards of the infantrymen I had trained with drove me to take unnecessary risks. That guilt remains with me to this day. My objective over the coming weeks is to document the war as I saw it, to rebut the propaganda that antiwar factions in the media and at home propagated - propaganda that has filtered its way into lesson plans throughout American schools. If America is to overcome and cast off its guilt and self-loathing, then its citizens must come to understand the true nature of our actions in Vietnam. I am especially concerned that those veterans who returned from Vietnam and cloaked themselves in guilt and self-loathing to disappear chameleon-like among the anti-war protestors, will find peace within themselves. 5/9/2012 3 Comments I was a "chairborne" rangerInfantry SchoolYOU PROBABLY WONDER what sort of an infantry officer I became after all this training. I didn't. I was commissioned into the Adjutant General's Corps. What's that, you ask? Don't feel badly. I didn't know either, until it was too late. The Adjutant General's Corps (AGC) sounds impressive. The word “General” gives it a feeling of importance. It isn't. The AGC superintends all personnel functions in the Army. That's right. I went through all of that infantry training, almost a year's worth, to become a Rear Echelon Mother F**ker (REMF). I wore what was affectionately known as the “shield of shame.” And if that isn't depressing enough, we were also responsible for delivering the mail, marching the band, and operating post theaters and craft shops. Okay, I'm being hard on myself. These were all important functions, especially delivering the mail. Mail was one of the greatest morale boosters to young men in combat far from home. Someone had to do it. Indeed, the vast majority of soldiers never see combat. They support the combat arms – Infantry, Artillery, and Armor – with everything they need to move, shoot, and communicate. Without these troops, the battle would be lost. However, it seems a waste of all that infantry training to post me to the rear to shuffle papers. I suppose that I was chosen for service in the Adjutant General Corps because of my age and education. However, with a degree in law, posting to the Military Police would have made more sense, wouldn't it? The full import of the assignment didn't hit me until I reported to, Colonel Bell, the G1 – the member of the general staff responsible for all administrative matters – for the 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam. Opening my 201 (personnel) file, his eyes lit up when he saw my MOS (Military Occupational Skill) listed as 1542 – Platoon Leader. They were always short of qualified platoon leaders. However, his gaze dimmed when his sergeant leaned closer and pointed out that another MOS was listed: 2210 – Personnel Officer – and that I had been assigned to the division to serve in the Adjutant General's Office. He shrugged and ordered his sergeant to escort me to their offices. Although I served Colonel Bell well during my year in Vietnam (he often came to me bypassing the AG to get things done), I never forgot his disappointment that day. Still worse is the sense of guilt that I bear to this day – survivor's guilt. My classmates went on to serve as infantry officers while I braved paper cuts on their behalf. I even had the horror of writing to one of their young wives to announce his death in combat. I met her when her husband came to tell me that our Tactical Officer wanted to see me at our graduation dance. He brought her to our room when he came with the summons. We were marched to a classroom at 06:00 (6 a.m.) on the day of our graduation to be sworn in. We had been discharged from enlisted service the day before. Thus, we were civilians for twenty-four hours. The father of one of my classmates was an Army colonel and he had the honor of swearing us in as second lieutenants. And to think, just the day before, many of us couldn't even spell “lieutenant.” The battalion sergeant-major saluted each of us as we exited the classroom. We returned the salute and handed him a dollar as is the custom with your first salute. The money was used for a party for the enlisted cadre who had supported us. Maybe we should have given more. A little less than half who began with us graduated. Very few failed Officer Candidate School. The vast majority quit. Our tactical officers found our weakness – physical, emotional, or academic – and preyed on it during the entire six months trying to make us quit. I still remember vividly running back to the barracks to get ready for the graduation ceremony after we were sworn in. My feet barely touched the ground for more than a mile. A note waited for me commanding my presence at the post finance office to square away a discrepancy in my records. I borrowed a Corvair from a classmate so that I could get there and back quickly. When I got into the car after taking care of business at the finance office, I reached for the gear shift lever and it was missing. There was an automatic shifter on the dash. Strange. I could have sworn that it had a manual transmission. As I drove away, I saw another Corvair of the same color. I stopped and looked at it momentarily, then backed up, parked and locked the car I was driving. I discovered the other car had a manual transmission and the key worked. That's the one I drove back to the barracks. The ceremony featured an audio visual production extolling the Infantry, Queen of Battle. We then stood and repeated the same oath of office that we had taken earlier, and then walked across the stage one at a time to collect our commissions. Later, my mother pinned on my new gold bars on my shoulders at the base of the Follow Me statue outside Infantry Hall. The irony didn't escape me as I was wearing the “shield of shame.”
Ultimately, I wasn't a very good "chairborne" ranger. I bridled at the posting, and made life miserable for my superiors who seemed quite content with their lot in the military. I sneaked away against orders to play infantry officer - or plain infantryman - whenever I could get away with it, and the Army was happy to release me from active duty when we began abandoning our commitment to a free Vietnam. |
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