Tag Archives: military

Book Review – Into the Rising Sun – Patrick K. O’Donnell

Posted on August 16, 2012 by | 4 comments

 

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

This book ought to be required reading for all these namby-pamby ‘thank you for your service’ self-hugging smugness goodygoody submerged hypocrites, thinks I. 

These are the WWII experiences told by men who came back from WWII and didn’t talk about it.  Didn’t join the VFW, didn’t wave any flags, and grew old holding it inside their heads because what they saw and experienced as young men didn’t fit inside the picture the US Empire was drawing of itself and its conduct of WWII.

Eventually some decided it was time to tell it and O’Donnell was there to record what they said.  Into The Rising Sun was the result.  They told of being sent into places nobody needed to go, under-equipped with incompetent leadership, under-supplied, half-starved into malaria swamps against an enemy no better off than they were.

They told of the most significant experience of their lives.  A dismal experience perpetrated by negligence, mediocrity, politics, publicity and lies for the folks back home waving flags and beating drums.  Sending their own sons off to join them in jungles where getting captured meant becoming a meal for the enemy.  Where shooting all prisoners was the norm. 

Burma, the Solomons, the South Pacific they lived didn’t make its way into any Broadway musicals and the ‘thank you for your service’ expressions represented an irony too confusing to face.  Legions of men betrayed by their government for convenience, whims and indifference.  Betrayed by a failure of the military leadership to commit itself to the reality they were living and fulfill their own responsibilities, the only excuse for their existence.

The 20th Century is loaded with places a person wouldn’t care to have been.  What these men lived wasn’t unique.  Happened so many places to so many men of the 20th Century from all countries a book couldn’t list them all.

But this book probably represents as good a synopsis as anyone’s likely to produce.  It’s good the old men finally told it.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 1940's, 2000's, 2012, Adventure, America, Book Reviews, Books, Government, History, Human Behavior, Military, Politics

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Try, Try Again – Texas Secession, Invasion, Evasion and Forgetfulness

Posted on August 12, 2012 by | 4 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by  for a read this morning.  I promised a few days ago I wouldn’t tell you any Texas history anecdotes, but I’ve already got Old Sol’s sober promise to come up on schedule, the cats are fed, and I probably ought to write about something just to prove I can.

I mentioned Texas invaded New Mexico twice, once in 1841, then again during the early stages of the US War of Secession.  Both of those episodes were characterized by more human folly on both sides than anyone has a right to be part of, but one man, JS Sutton, was right up front for both of them.  First name on the monument. 

Captain in the 1841 Expedition, Lt. Colonel in the second.  Never got another shot at a third try because he was offed at Valverde.  But he must have been considered an expert on the second because the 1841 group surrendered without firing a shot and got frog-marched barefooted southward across the same route Sutton followed north to his death two decades later.

Sutton was a courageous, interesting man, lived a life I’d call worth living, but couldn’t seem to keep his eye on the dirt where he was standing, and it eventually got him killed.  As far as I’ve ever been able to establish, he was the only man involved in both expeditions.

However, there was a Lockridge [second name on the monument] involved in the 1841 debacle, shot himself while they were camped at Bird’s Battleground near Three Rivers.  Maybe this later Lockridge killed at Valverde was a brother, son, cousin.  Almost certainly kinfolk, in any case.

Some other similarities between the two expeditions involved both commanders spending a lot of their time drunk, generally being logistically ill prepared for the task, and plenty of poor command decisions to help it along.

That second expedition, however, came inches from being a success in the sense of achieving the main objective.  Driving the US Army out of Fort Union.  The secondary objective, Sherrod Hunter driving west, taking and holding Tucson, probably was doomed from the first.  Nobody could have anticipated the California Volunteers marching east with the equipment and numbers they managed.

Hunter’s force of 500 retreated from Tucson early in May, headed back to the Rio Grande with plenty of difficulties with Apache and desertion.  Only twelve of the force, including Hunter, arrived in Mesilla finally in August.

Which left them with one hell-of-a-long trek back to Texas and a long war to fight and lose when they got there.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, History, Human Behavior, Military, New Mexico, NM, Reading, Texas

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Limericks Honoring Undeclared Presidential Wars

Posted on July 13, 2012 by | 8 comments

The New Military Empireum
Just doesn’t exactly inspireum!
The wars presidential
Globular, non-essential
Don’t excite all that much to admireum.

Hairy-assed Truman began it
But maybe Joe Stalin helped plan it,
The Kennedy brothers
LBJ and the others
Threw darts at a map of the planet.

Kohreaah Bay of Pigs Vietnam,
Salvadore, Grenada and Iran
Let’s you and him fight
And do it up right
With rifles we sell you and bombs.

M16s for the Christians [our guys]
AK 47s you buys
From Rooskies and China
Moscow, Carolina
Both working three shifts get the prize.

Whoopteedo! I’m a Vet’ran you see,
Patriotic flag waver, that’s me.
Say, “Thank you!” I helped
Keep it going! But yelped
Nobody’s acknowledging me.

Say “Thank you!” Admire what I did.
The rest of my life I just slid
Along on past glories
Dreaming up good war stories
Of Commies and Muslims I rid.

I din’t get none of the riches
From selling the arms to the bitches
But I got me some poozle
And plenty of boozle
But now I’m just one of the snitches.

Contracted a dose of the clap
Saved your freedoms while you took a nap.
This bumper sign’s all that is left
Of those freedoms not taken by theft
But by always believing their crap.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Government, History, Military, Politics, US Army

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Beggars in Uniform – US Military 2012

Posted on July 13, 2012 by | 14 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I was walking around in the Dollar Tree Store [Everything’s a dollar or less] when the manager came on the intercom:

“Dollar Tree shoppers!  Don’t forget to pick up an item of school supplies for military dependents starting school in the fall.  Pencils, pens, tablets, erasers, any item related to school.  Dollar Tree will make sure it reaches the dependents of active military personnel.”

My hand stopped midway to a jar of Kosher dills.  “Eh?  My hearing’s really going to hell.  For a minute I thought she said something about donating school supplies to military kids.  Sheeze!”

But when she finished ringing up my purchases the cashier smiled and met my eye.  “Would you like to buy some pencils or a tablet for military dependents starting school?”

I went snake-eyes.  “You think I’m stupid for shopping here, don’t you?”  I slid my hat back exposing my forehead.  “Do I have a sign saying STUPUD tattooed up there?”

She tried to say something but I butted in.  “Got a program so’s I can buy schools supplies for kids of crack whores?  Kids of people in prison?  Likely they really need it.”

The lady blushed.  “They make us ask.  I didn’t do it.”

“Here!”  I pulled a dollar bag of flour out of one of the sacks.  “Give them that if you can find one who knows how to cook something.  Otherwise give them shopping carts and point them to your dumpster.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No problem.  I give food to beggars.  Not something they can sell or trade for drugs and whiskey.”

Soooo.  Evidently the military folks aren’t even giving their families money for school supplies these days.  Shouldn’t be long before their kids are darting out of alleyways surrounding people waiting at bus stops or traffic lights.  “You wanta buy watch?  Ring?  Skivvy pictures?

Learned it from mom and dad who learned it overseas.  Nice scam.

Back when they had the draft, conscripting people for $100 per month, wives and kids moving in with relatives, nobody thought of that one.  Now they’re all volunteers for undeclared presidential wars, helping bankrupt the federal budget with their salaries and benefits, they’re panhandling.  Trying to mooch off hamburger flippers and other minimum-wage-earners scrimping by shopping at Dollar Tree. 

Old Jules

14 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Current Issues, Government, Military, US Army

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Abdicating Personal Responsibility to Politicians

Posted on September 19, 2011 by | 6 comments

The comments on the Yin Yang Conspiracy post got me thinking about this:

In 1961, at the age of 17 I took an oath agreeing to be part of a team effort to kill anyone John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and later Lyndon Baines Johnson, thought needed killing.

Everything I’ve learned about those two men during the decades since has caused me to believe both were despicable, incorrigible individuals bent on personal power and self-aggrandizement, first, with the betterment of the US public only a priority to the extent it contributed to those.

But I raised my right hand and took an oath to become the trigger-finger for anything they wanted doing, volunteered to point a rifle and kill whomever these two car salesmen cum rich-boy opportunists found more convenient dead than alive.

My thinking today is that, despite the popularity of the choice I made, despite the fact millions of other men made the same choice to abdicate their ethics, their intelligence, their judgement to those men and others exactly of the same unworthy breed, [still do so today,] it’s not a choice to be admired, praised, encouraged, or rewarded.  If anything, it’s a testimony to my own shallowness, stupidity, weakness of character and obliquely, a failure of self-respect.

Today, men and women who openly vilify the President of the US, the US Congress, detest the US military command and officer corps, are nevertheless pointing their weapons at whomever those people they detest tell them to kill.  And label doing so a virtue.

Aside from the fact I didn’t know enough when I took my oath to recognize what scum the two presidents I agreed to kill for were, those people serving today are in precisely the same position I was in.  They’ve agreed to do whatever the dregs of humanity tell them to do, do it without question.

The main change between 1961, and 2011, is that I agreed to do it for $78 per month, whereas they’re getting paid one hell of a lot more to obey the orders about which unlucky human beings get the downrange surprises.

Think about it.  Thousands of young men died, thousands killed because Richard Milhaus Nixon told them to do it.  Yet Richard Nixon outranked those politicians of the time in scumhood so conspicuously he was casheered from office by the others of his club.  His own peers.

What am I missing here?

Is there something in this worthy of admiration?

Old Jules

6 Comments

Posted in Adventure, America, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Politics, Senior Citizens

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