Tag Archives: US Army

Japanese Bonsai Charges Onto Good American Machine Guns

Posted on December 16, 2014 by | Leave a comment

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

Most of you probably are celebrating the return to the Philippine Islands this day in Nineteen-hunnerd and forty-four today.  Or in the instance of my charming ex-wife, Caroline, merely being born in Nineteen-hunnerd and forty-seven.  Both events teetering the scales of the human  balance in the Universe somewhat in the direction of ‘good’.

The US Military experience in the Philippines was ‘good’ mostly because contrary to previous behavior on other islands the Japanese didn’t come storming out of caves with fixed bayonets pruning trees as they ran down onto US machine guns.  Those damned trees remained intact for the most part if they weren’t hit by good US bullets and shells.  No damned bonsai forests of fancy trees for the Filipino population to deal with after the surrender.

That, and there wasn’t a problem with Death Marches the way happened the last time the US military ran up against the Japanese military in the Philippines.  That Bataan Death March was evidently most unpleasant, both for the GIs being forced to walk shoeless and hungry across the island, and for the Japanese having to shoot or stick them with bayonets for lollygagging.  Nothing of that sort in 1944.  The Japanese were perfectly well behaved, though uncompromising.  And the GIs resisted the entirely justified impulse to kill every last man of them.

The harbor at Manilla ended up being a great place for US sailors to put in and get drunk and whore.

All in all everything worked out well in the end.  Seemed almost no-time at all the US was fire bombing Tokyo and nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Then rebuilding the Japanese steel and other industries bombed to rubble during the war so’s everyone made a pile of money.  And another great place for GIs to get drunk and whore!

Heck, guys were still getting drunk and whoring in Japan all the way up into the Vietnam War.  When I was in Korea almost all the GIs took two weeks ‘rest and recuperation’ leave to Japan sometime during their tours.  The Japanese whores were generally more cosmopolitan, it was believed, than Korean ladies.

So for those of us alive December 16, 1944, it was the first day of the rest of our lives and it all turned out good.  Except for a few Japanese troops hiding in the jungles who wouldn’t listen to reason.

Think of it!  If Japan had surrendered December 16, 1944, it could have avoided having Tokyo firebombed and Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuked.  And I’d have been able to celebrate it with this blog entry.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1940's, America, History, Human Behavior, Military, US Army, Veterans

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The Who-Ya-Gonna-Kill-Next Lottery tickets on sale at your Army Recruiter

Posted on August 29, 2014 by | 2 comments

Hi readers.  Back in the summer of 1961 the Rooskies were building the Berlin Wall and naturally we were all scared shitless they’d be wanting France or Britain next.  Because we were all dumber than cluckshit and we believed what the US government told us.

Anyway, July 1961, I was feeling patriotic as hell, wanted to kill me some young Russian guys.  Maybe shoot them, blow their damned brains from hell to breakfast.  Or maybe stab them with a bayonet close up, personal and bloody.  So I joined the US Army figuring they were the only branch of the service that actually rubbed up against Rooskies.

Damned Navy guys just floated around safely out in the ocean in ships loaded up with guns and munitions, never get a shot at a single Rooskie, most likely.  And the Air Force guys trained with .22 caliber rifles.  Jeeze.  Whoooo wants to shoot a damned Russian kid with a .22?  Stupid damned Air Force guys didn’t even march around carrying full field packs.

And the US Marines sounded okay, but how the hell would a Marine get all the way over to where there were Rooskies to be killed?  Ivan was going to be trying to hide behind that Berlin Wall.  Getting at him would be a job for good old American dogfaces, climbing over that wall and charging into machine guns aimed by Rooskie kids.  The best a Marine could hope for was maybe getting a chance to kill a Chinaman.

Whell hayuls bayuls!  I spent three years, went through the Cuban Missile Crisis, sea cruised to Japan and Korea and back, and never got to kill nobody, and especially not some Rooskie teenager with a bayonet nor hand grenade.

So I came home and the Vietnam War geared up, and I got out.  The guys who went in just after I did ended up killing all manner of brown people who didn’t need killing, but no damned Rooskies.  Nor Chinamen, either.

Later on guys volunteered to go kill brown people in wossname, Kuwait, Iraq, and that other place over there, Africanistan?  Something along those lines, anyway.  But the Rooskies had donealready pulled all their teenagers back inside their boundaries and good American boys couldn’t get at them.

But there’s still hope.  Some damned warlord over there is making a nuisance of himself and threatening to send some teenagers off to get their asses blown away, and the guy, wossname, in the White House is making noises suggesting he might lie claiming those Rooskie kids need killing.

He ought to have a belly full of killing brown people by now.  Rooskie white kids would be a refreshing change.  And meanwhile there’s that hodgepodge thing going on over in Western Iraq and Syria where the sky’s the limit.  Hells bells, just kill anythng that moves and you’ll hit someone who hates our guts.  Because we’ve probably blown the legs off their relatives one-time-or-another.

As a backup plan, if our boys run out of people to drop explosives on, there’s always white people living in Israel, but they’re harder targets, hiding in colonies over in Palestine.
Old Jules

 

 

 

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Posted in 2014, America, Military, Senior Citizens, US Army

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“If those Japanese could have held out through one more atomic bomb we wouldn’t be eating this crap!”

Posted on July 4, 2014 by | 4 comments

Hi readers.  Here’s wishing you a fulfilling independence from having the British for your bosses ordering you around and making you drink their damned tea.  If our ancestors hadn’t won their independence from the British we’d have had to fight on their side during WWI and WWII, the way their other colonies did.

Anyway, that WWI museum got me thinking about what GIs used to eat.  There was a long shelf of displays of their mess kits, carved fancier than a POW would do.  Beautiful designs and artwork produced while their feet were rotting off in trenches between having the bejesus shelled out of them and being sniped at across no-man’s-land.

 In Korea, at least in the First Cavalry Division, what we ate in 1963-1964 whenever we were on field rations was all left over from WWII.  1945ish WWII.  K Rations.

Breakfast Unit Canned meat product Biscuits Compressed cereal bar Powdered coffee Fruit bar Chewing gum Sugar tablets Four cigarettes Water-purification tablets Can opener Wooden spoon

Breakfast Unit
Canned meat product
Biscuits
Compressed cereal bar
Powdered coffee
Fruit bar
Chewing gum
Sugar tablets
Four cigarettes
Water-purification tablets
Can opener
Wooden spoon

Camp Howze, Korea, had an enormous bunker chock full of K Rations of the nostalgic variety dating from before the Japanese surprised us with a surrender while we still had an atomic bomb and one-hell-of-a-lot of K Rations left.  I can testify from personal experience the US Army was patriotic and continued eating those rations 20 years after the premature and cowardly surrender of Japan.

Dinner Unit Canned cheese product Biscuits A candy bar Chewing gum Powdered beverage Granulated sugar Salt tablets Cigarettes Matches Can opener Wooden spoon

Dinner Unit
Canned cheese product
Biscuits
A candy bar
Chewing gum
Powdered beverage
Granulated sugar
Salt tablets
Cigarettes
Matches
Can opener
Wooden spoon

 Our quonsot hut had a corner filled with Ks still in the cartons so we could fill those long winter nights with partying song, beer, and anything worth eating in a crate of Ks.

Supper Unit Canned meat product Biscuits Bouillon powder Candy Chewing gum Powdered coffee Granulated sugar Cigarettes Can opener Toilet paper Wooden spoon

Supper Unit
Canned meat product
Biscuits
Bouillon powder
Candy
Chewing gum
Powdered coffee
Granulated sugar
Cigarettes
Can opener
Toilet paper
Wooden spoon

The cigarettes in ours weren’t Chesterfields.  Ours were Lucky Strikes in a Green package.  As in the old radio WWII jingle, “Lucky Strike green has gone to war!”  Lucky Strike changed colors after the war to red and white, but Luckies kept right on fighting in green until all those damned Ks were consumed by GIs.

Ahhh.  Nothing like sparking up a Lucky out of a carton of Ks, working fast to inhale a little tobacco smoke before it burned down to your fingertips.  Those smokes were 20 years old and we never found a way to add enough moisture to keep them smoking instead of burning.

And the chocolate!  The godforsaken chocolate turned white with age.  We didn’t care.  Everything in those Ks got tried and nobody ever died from them.  And I never heard of anyone getting drunk from them.

Fact was, a person with extra money could go to the PX and get crackers, but if he did he’d have to share with the whole hooch.  Same with sardines.  And we had KATUSAs in our hooch.  Four of them.  Korean Augmentations to the US Army.  And those bastards could go through a case of crackers, cans of sardines, quicker than you could make a grab for a can before they were gone.

But even the KATUSAs couldn’t make remarkably short work of a case of Ks.  There was always enough for everyone, along with some leftovers to munch on guard duty.

Damn.  These modern all-volunteer military guys are spoiled.  Except maybe in Korea.  Hell, in Korea they might still be eating Ks and wishing to hell the Japanese had gutted out another atomic bomb.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1960's, America, Government, History, Military

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Five Freedom Fighters for One GI

Posted on June 2, 2014 by | 5 comments

Hi readers.

The old guys down at physical therapy are pissed.  Evidently five of the Arab freedom fighters the US has been holding captive somewhere are going to be released so’s to get back one GI Arabs captured.  Hell of a deal, seems to me, though some might argue a GI is worth ten of anyone else anywhere.

But there are a lot of different ways of looking at the matter.  Elected officials are afraid we didn’t get our moneys worth on the deal.  I’d have to suspect they think after five years captivity that GI isn’t going to be much use to anyone, which might be their rationale.

On the other hand, people get out of prisons all the time after being gang-raped repeatedly the way that GI almost certainly has been in captivity.  And it doesn’t hold them back.  Ex convicts are almost all able to stick up convenience stores, steal cars, sell drugs, do a little rape and mayhem.  Being gang raped in prison hardly slows them down at all.

So my gut feel is this guy’s probably going to be okay and if he plays his cards right maybe he can sit on top of a building with a rifle somewhere and plink off a dozen-or-so anonymous people of one sort or another.  Plenty of ex-GIs are doing that nowadays anyway who haven’t even been gang-raped that we know of.

Anyway, people who are against the trade still ought to feel good knowing an American is worth five Arabs.  I can’t help wishing it was ten, though.  Would have been ten back during WWII when it was Japanese, I’m guessing.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2014, Adventure, America

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Tooth Fairies, Trouble-Makers and Japanese Nukes

Posted on August 19, 2013 by | Leave a comment
2013 Tooth Fairy with Radioactivity Sniffer Dog

2013 Tooth Fairy with Radioactivity Sniffer Dog

Hi readers.

If you’re like me you probably wonder why the Tooth Fairy changed so much since we were kids.  It was the Baby Tooth Survey did it.  Here’s what happened:

When the Commandant of the National Tooth Fairy Regiment died of cancer in 1963 a lot of traitorous whining wimps in Missouri started crying about the fact the US Government was dropping hydrogen bombs on itself to pre-emptively protect itself in case someone else should drop nukes on Nevada and New Mexico. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Tooth_Survey

Baby Tooth Survey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
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The Baby Tooth Survey was initiated by the Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information in conjunction with Saint Louis University and the Washington University School of Dental Medicine as a means of determining the effects of nuclear fallout in the human anatomy by examining the levels of radioactive material absorbed into the deciduous teeth of children.

Founded by the husband and wife team of physicians Eric and Louise Reiss, along with other scientists such as Barry Commoner, the research focused on detecting the presence of strontium-90, a cancer-causing radioactive isotope created by the more than 400 atomic tests conducted above ground that is absorbed from water and dairy products into the bones and teeth given its chemical similarity to calcium. The team sent collection forms to schools in the St. Louis, Missouri area, hoping to gather 50,000 teeth each year.[1] Ultimately, the project collected over 300,000 teeth from children of various ages before the project was ended in 1970.

Preliminary results published by the team in the November 24, 1961, edition of the journal Science showed that levels of strontium 90 in children had risen steadily in children born in the 1950s, with those born later showing the most increased levels.[2] The results of a more comprehensive study of the elements found in the teeth collected showed that children born after 1963 had levels of strontium 90 in their baby teeth that was 50 times higher than that found in children born before the advent of large-scale atomic testing. The findings helped convince U.S. President John F. Kennedy to sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the United Kingdom and Soviet Union, which ended the above-ground nuclear weapons testing that placed the greatest amounts of nuclear fallout into the atmosphere.[3]

Follow-up analysis
A set of 85,000 teeth that had been uncovered in storage in 2001 by Washington University were given to the Radiation and Public Health Project. By tracking 3,000 individuals who had participated in the tooth-collection project, the RHPR published results in a 2010 issue of the International Journal of Health Service that showed that the 12 children who later died of cancer before the age of 50 had levels of strontium 90 in their stored baby teeth that was twice the level of those who were still alive at 50.[3][4]

After that things seemed to settle down okay for a while.  Then came Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl.  Tooth Fairies were dying off like flies.  Gums rotting away, skin peeling off them like overcoats.

Fact is, we almost lost the whole kaboodle of Tooth Fairies when the Japanese started dumping all the radioactivity they could scrape together and sending it into the atmosphere headed for Alaska, California, Washington and Oregon.  Pumping water hotter than a two-dollar pistol into the Pacific Ocean.

Tooth Fairy recruitment programs went to zilch.  Finding new Tooth Fairies to replace the ones getting the blind staggers was tougher than the Mother Church trying to find women willing to be nuns.

Luckily, the US Military and the National Academy of Multi-Layered Police Forces, comprising about half the US population, came to the rescue.  Provided pistols to be held to the temples of potential Tooth Fairies who were trying to take French leave from the job.  But to compensate, providing body armor and radioactivity sniffing dogs to help the ones still able bodied enough to slip into a bedroom at night and reach under a pillow for a tooth stay alive longer.

Saved again by the police and the US military and mercenary forces.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2013, America, Animals, Current Issues, Education, Government, History, Human Behavior, Police, Science, US Army

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Symbiopatriosis – the 21st Century Killer Disease

Posted on June 6, 2013 by | 2 comments

Military Industrial Complex

20th Century had its share, though.

The Yosarian syndrome.  Bastards are trying to kill me!  They’re trying to kill me every time I go up to drop bombs on them.

Support this current war because our soldiers got killed trying to invade them.  Can’t let the troops down.

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Posted in Government, Military, Politics

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The joys of patriotism

Posted on June 4, 2013 by | 11 comments

hero patriot2

Being the staunch patriot that I am, I love seeing those pictures of some brave good American boy marine, or seabee, or special forces hero crawl out of a hideyhole and blow the head off some anonymous coward on a cliff half-mile away.

I love it when some good brave American hero technician punches a button in Kabul to launch a drone and blows the arms and legs off a village full of anonymous people all the way over in Pakistan who should have been more careful where they lived.

I love it that good American hero soldier boys can hide inside a tank that a nuclear weapon couldn’t penetrate and blow up anything that offends their sensibilities in some godforsaken country where the people don’t value human life the way we do.

We’re paying a million, or a billion dollars a day into keeping our good brave troops over there all over places nobody ever heard of for reasons nobody can fathom.  But at least we’re getting something worthwhile for our money.  We can look at those pictures of bodies falling off cliffs and blood and guts of kids, women and even the occasional man, and know our heroes are defending our country and our freedom.

 

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Posted in America, Military

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Learning handy skills while defending the US

Posted on June 4, 2013 by | 11 comments

1stcav2

When I joined the US Army in 1961 it had a lot of attractions for a young man of 17.  First off, it didn’t involve going to work in a moly mine in Questa, New Mexico.  Secondly, it was the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and I naturally hoped I’d get an opportunity to kill me some young Russians to defend this country.  Thirdly, the recruiter promised they’d teach me some skills I’d find useful in civilian life.

Eventually I learned that moly mine mightn’t have been a bad idea.  Never got to kill me any Russians, neither.  Never defended this country worth nuthun.  And thirdly, the only skill I learned that might have helped me as a civilian was how to kill a man by hitting him in the face with an entrenching tool.  A lot of years have passed since then, but I’m still hoping to put that entrenching tool thing to use.

Fact is, that like the US troops who served in WWI, the Spanish American War, the Mexican War, and all the US Army who fought the Apache, the Comanche, the Cheyenne along with dozens of other tribes, we were not ‘defending’ this country.  Until WWII a person would have to go back to the Civil War and include the soldiers fighting for the Confederacy to locate someone defending his country.

Well, I suppose you could say the Mexican soldiers who fought against the US in the Mexican War were defending their country.  And the Apache was defending his, and so on.

But those serving in the US Army were doing something else, entirely.

Care to guess what it was?

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Posted in 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, America, History, Human Behavior, Military, Native American, Native Americans

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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

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

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Introduction to Being a Hermit

Posted on April 18, 2012 by | 2 comments

The following is an email that Old Jules wrote several years ago and subsequently posted on a previous blog. I’m posting it after his description of the Peace Corps experience to give continuity to that time period.  ~Jeanne

Old Jules:
This was the most recent of a long line of exchanges with an online friend, a man  who mostly he believes his life is a living hell out of habit, except when he reminds himself he’s blessed, which is only when I remind him to remind himself, thinks I.

Thought I’d share it with you blog readers.  I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned my brief life as a hermit.

Morning Pal:

I suppose you’re right.  You live a complicated life.  It would be complicated, just with your interpersonal relationships, even if you didn’t have a job that would be enough to satisfy most needs for complication.  Even if you didn’t have a piece of real estate that’s located in and part of a subtle war zone.  It’s relatively easy to imagine how you’d have some difficulties focusing, relaxing, or anything else.

A long time ago, when I had a complicated life, I used to wonder whether a stay in the sort of place where you work, an asylum, would do the trick as a means of getting me removed from the system of complications I’d built around myself to help make myself unhappy.  I concluded that it wouldn’t.

 I also gave some thought to whether prison life would do it, but unless it was one of those kinds of Federal prisons all the Watergate folks went to, I don’t think it could.

Thought about a Trappist monastery a bit, even.  That might do it.  I don’t know, but it seemed so otherwise out of sync with my nature that I never tried it.

But I had the advantage over most people, because I knew what I was missing.  When I got booted out of the Peace Corps in 1964, after a bit of time trying to complicate my life in Honolulu the way a person will, I was contacted by the US Army Reserve telling me they wanted to know where I was in case they wanted to reactivate me for Vietnam if they needed people with my particular MOS.  In those early days of 1965 nobody knew where all that was going and reactivating the reserves was considered a real possibility.

My support for US military adventures overseas went away entirely during my tour in the Far East.  I was gonna have nothing to do with Vietnam.  I decided I was going to spend the remainder of my life as a hermit living in the jungle on the big island….. a place called Wiamono Valley on the drainage of the Kohala range…. used to be a village in there but it was wiped out by the tidal wave in 1947 and nobody laid claim on it since.  Nobody in there but a blind mule and me…. for six weeks that mule had company.

That six weeks with nobody to talk to but a blind mule changed my whole life.  It was a pivotal moment for me, one of the greatest blessings of my stay in this reality this time around.  In addition to a book-full of other benefits, it gave me a realization of what’s possible for a human being, mind-wise, if he can succeed in either simplifying his life, or in (I didn’t know then) distancing himself from the web of values, properties, interpersonal relationships and other tangle we do our best to mire ourselves in so we can’t see or hear what we’re trying to keep from seeing and hearing…… the voice of what’s beneath.

I definitely understand what you’re saying, my friend.  Hang in there.

(Old Jules)

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Posted in 1960's, Adventure, Hawaii, Human Behavior, Solitude, Survival, Youth

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