Sunday - December 09, 2007
The Finest Shambles
Where did James Bond get his sang-froid? Well, when Ian Fleming began writing his novels in the 1950s, his fictional Bond was a vet of "the recent unpleasantness." And Britain had plenty such who had exactly the kind of wisecracking composure that Fleming imbued his fictional spy with -- men like Douglas Bader.
Bader had actually been put out of the RAF for, among other things, violating orders about low-level aerobatics and totaling his new Bristol Bulldog fighter, while proving that upright or inverted, you can't win the Worlds Low Flying Record -- just tie. But in the War all was forgiven and the dauntless pilot was back in action. Britain's National Archives has opened the vaults to allow mere mortals to search and download -- alas, for a price -- British combat air reports of the war. The sample they post as a teaser is Bader at his best.
The sky was then full of Spitfires and Hurricanes, queuing up and pushing each other out of the way to get at Dorniers, which for once were outnumbered.... I squirted at odd Dorniers at close range as they came into my sights, but could not hold them in my sights for fear of collision with other Spitfires and Hurricanes..... It was the finest shambles I have ever been in, since for once we had position, height and numbers. E/A [enemy aircraft] were a dirty looking collection.
Tell me again that Bond is braver, cooler, wittier than real life?
Monday - September 10, 2007
Who Were Those Dudes?
News stories -- like this one at Aero-News -- picked up on the visit of eight Medal of Honor recipients to EAA's great Airventure Museum. But to my disappointment, none of the stories, not this one, nor EAA's own, told you who these men were.
"Visiting recipients Thursday included Joe Jackson, John Finn (the oldest living recipient), Joe Marm, Jr., David McNerney, Barney Barnum, Bruce Crandall, and Bob Ingram."
A couple of these I know off the top of my head -- and you ought to, also. Joe Jackson did something pretty amazing during the Vietnam War. (You have to do something pretty amazing to be recommended for the Medal, but listen to this). After the Special Forces camp at Kham Duc was overrun by the enemy, he learned that an Air Force combat control team had mistakenly been dropped off on the runway -- after all the other Americans had left, or died.
Uh-oh. So Jackson slammed his C-123 down on the fire-swept runway and picked them up, pretty as you please. He is the only Medal of Honor recipient to date, for whom a photograph of the deed has ever been released. (The MOH actions of Gary Gordon and Randall Shughart were reportedly filmed, but the films remain classified).
Bruce Crandall's another one you ought to know, thanks to a strong portrayal in the Mel Gibson movie We Were Soldiers. Yep, he was that helicopter pilot. Crandall's actual exploits had to be toned down for the movie. One part that the movie definitely did not cover, but his citation (scroll down) does, is the extent to which Crandall's courage inspired his fellow pilots.
That made me want to look up the other three -- were they aviators, too? And so I did. Three good places to do this are Home of Heroes, Medal of Honor.com, and the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.
Sunday - September 09, 2007
The Man Who Scared Bin Laden
Six years ago today, September 9, 2001, the first blow in the latest campaign of the terror war was struck. Journalists working for Bin Laden got close to the charismatic Afghan guerilla leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and murdered him with explosives hidden in their camera.
The attack threw Massoud's party, the Jamiat-i Islami, and its allies in the Northern Alliance into despair and disarray. With his master stroke against the USA pending, Bin Laden wanted to secure his flanks by knocking out the nearest thing Afghanistan had to a visionary statesman. This would allow him and his Pakistani, Chechen and Arab mercenaries to firm up their wobbly control of Afghanistan, control expressed through illiterate and rustic Taliban mullahs. The event was mourned almost everywhere in Afghanistan, but was celebrated in Saudi Arabia and in some circles in Pakistan's renegade ISI intelligence agency.
The event hit me hard, personally; I had always followed the career of and admired Massoud, and people I knew had worked with him directly. I had added my small voice to the chorus of Americans asking to have our channels of support to him reopened, after he requested that in an open letter in 1998. It was easier said than done as our former conduit for that aid, Pakistan, was now on the opposing side.
I was also dealing with a personal shock. On a range evolution that I missed due to a corporate board meeting (one of the difficulties of Guard SF service is making civilian and military schedules mesh), a bullet pierced the Kevlar helmet of one of our men and shattered his skull. As of September 9th, Ranger Rich was still in a coma with a bad prognosis. No one on his team was sure who'd fired the shot, and they were all feeling guilty, a situation exacerbated by the Military Police's amateur detectives, CID, who had decided that someone must be cheating with Rich's wife.
"You're Special Forces," they explained. "You guys don't have gun accidents." No, not usually. But Rich was the most popular guy on the team... plenty of others would have been shot before him. Like me.
As Rich dangled between life and death in a coma, in a condition that shocked our medics when they visited him, the word came that Massoud had been injured by a assassination attempt. The coincidence was eerie and disturbing. Then word came that Massoud did not survive. The Taliban launched a coordinated offensive against the Jamiat forces.
Saturday - June 09, 2007
Sympathy for the Devil at the AP
The increasingly anti-American Associated Press is up with a sob story about how the US mistreated Germans and German-Americans in WWII. But its own article, by Frederic J. Frommer, doesn't entirely back up either of the two assertions that are key to the article: that the internees were mistreated, and that they were incarcerated for no reason.
Saturday - December 16, 2006
Holocaust "Invention" and Me
My father’s father died when I was 16, 15 years ago.... He lived, and then he died. It is a fact.[much powerful stuff deleted]
I have no cousins. I have no second cousins. I have no third cousins on my father’s side. I have no fourth cousins on my father’s side. How long is the list of natural numbers? If you get to the end of the list, which is not a mathematical possibility, I don’t have those cousins on my father’s side. I have never been to a large gathering of my family – there is not much of it to gather. My father’s father was lucky – he played the trumpet far away from home that year. My father’s father begot my father. My father begot me. That is it on that side. It is a fact.
He goes on to explore the mechanisms of Holocaust denial, and how its perpetrators may glibly explain away his absent family.
There is a method to this madness. If you prove that one invented one’s past suffering, one’s future suffering does not seem as atrocious. No reason to feel bad about exterminating a people who have pretended to have been part-exterminated before – they are just getting what they have been faking all along. If my grandfather’s family did not exist, when I go, who is to say I ever was here?
I had an experience myself that brought the Holocaust home to me in stark horror. Sure, I had visited Dachau; I had shelf-yards of books by everyone from survivors to victims to perpetrators; I have since gone to the Holocaust Museum in DC (a powerful experience in itself) with a friend, who described how one of the exhibits made his father break down; and listened to a docent's explanation of how one exhibit (a mass of human hair shorn from victims, destined to be used as mattress stuffing) had to be removed due to public shock and outrage.
I know about the Holocaust, and all these things help me know. But I felt the Holocaust one day when I was walking in the woods. (continued in the extended entry)
Wednesday - October 25, 2006
Stolen Valor: Congressman's Phony Vet Claim
Delahunt is labeled as a veteran on the ballot, and has loudly denounced various Republicans as "Chickenhawks." But -- after ten years in Congress -- a radio station finally looked into his claim.
Bill Delahunt did serve... sort of... in the Coast Guard Reserve... for a few weeks. Some "veteran." Not to bag on the Coast Guard, a military service whose contributions too often go unseen and unsung, but those Coasties put a bit more into it than Delahunt did. He doesn't even clear the lowest of the low bars, minimum time (180 days' duty) to claim vet status on a ballot (Massachusetts lists whether a candidate is a vet or not right on the ballot, but the Secretary of State's office relies on the honor system on that, and Delahunt lied, so the old fraud is listed on the ballots as a vet).
Delahunt's opponent, Jeff Beatty, is a real veteran. A Cape Cod newspaper story shows a photo of Beatty landing on USS Guam off Grenada, displaying a combat wound (and the sort of face fuzz that had me hiding from every General Officer visit to my task force in Afghanistan). Beatty's service in 1st SFOD-D has been confirmed, and an email from Bucky Burruss, vouching for Beatty, is making the SF/SO rounds. (Beatty might be one of the wounded operators I met on a visit to Womack Army Hospital in October, 1982, while attending SF Light Weapons Phase II, but I honestly can't say I remember him specifically. I was with a group of Rangers visiting their friends, so I remember Rangers rather than Delta guys -- maybe they were not in Womack, but ratholed somewhere else. And then, it looks like his wound would not have kept him in hospital long -- the only people that hate and fear doctors more that SF types are aviators).
This is particularly interesting because Delahunt is no supporter of the military or veterans. He is a dependable vote against new weapons and equipment, and usually fights military pay raises. He has used his (bogus) veteran status as a shield against charges of unpatriotic policymaking.
In the same article linked above, the newspaper has another picture, which is much more amusing than Jeff Beatty's grim, tired, wounded gimp across Guam's flight deck. It is a picture which perfectly characterizes Delahunt: he's reaching out a servile arm to steady Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, whom the paper describes as "impaired." Having encountered Ted the Red already into the booze at 0800, I have no doubt how he came to be "impaired" at the function in question. (Kennedy, unlike Delahunt, is actually a veteran. He joined the Army to avoid the draft when he was expelled from Harvard for cheating, and served in a relatively cushy billet in Germany).
Thursday - June 15, 2006
Flags of our Fathers (...Fathers' Fathers' Fathers?)
A most remarkable auction took place at Sotheby's June 14th, which was --
fittingly -- flag day. Four Revolutionary battle flags that have remained for
over 200 years the property of legendary Revolutionary bad guy, Lt. Col.
Banastre Tarleton, came home to the United States and sold.
It didn't get a lot of play in the press. Once they used to make a big deal out of Flag Day. Now they are only interested in a flag if it's on fire or being presented to a grieving widow.
Sotheby's was expecting as much as ten million for the remarkable flags, which are unquestionably authentic, with well-documented provenance, and which are staggeringly historic. "Their significance became more and more apparent to us as we researched them," Sotheby's vice-chairman David Redden says in an informative audio presentation at the auction house's website. These remarkable regimental colours, among other things:
- were the only Revolutionary War flags still in private hands
- were the only captured American flags still held by Englishmen
- include the oldest surviving flag to have thirteen stars on a blue canton
- include the oldest surviving flag to have thirteen red-and-white stripes, as seen on American flags for most of the nation's history.
This is, of course, on top of the degree to which these rare flags are steeped in history themselves.
The 2nd Continental Light Dragoons flag shown here, taken by Tarleton from the
Connecticut regiment at Bedford/Pound Ridge, New York, in 1779, is the oldest
surviving flag with the thirteen stripes that still make the US banner stand out
worldwide. Left, the centered canton, the unit symbol of a winged ball of
thunderbolts, was painted on silk, then attached to the flag. Sotheby's notes:
"The Latin motto below the badge can be roughly translated, 'When their country
calls, her sons answer in tones of thunder.'"
To the embarrassment of the 2nd Dragoons, this colour was taken from a meeting house in Pound Ridge where the unit had left it when they formed up, before they broke before Tarleton's attack; it was replaced by simpler versions. (Tarleton also burned the meeting house and a couple of homes, to dislodge colonial snipers that were firing from the structures -- a violation of the usages of war, in his mind).
UPDATE: This flag drew over $12 million at the auction. The other three, $5 million.
The other flags were taken at the battle of Waxhaw in 1780, and are the only surviving "stand" of colours from the Revolution. This famous Sir Joshua Reynolds portrait of Tarleton depicts him at about the time of that battle, and now belongs to the National Gallery, whence it was bequeathed by Tarleton's heirs (Tarleton, who cut a wide swath through Georgian-as-in-George-III society, was also painted by Gainsborough). At Tarleton's country home, Breakspears, the flags long hung alongside the Reynolds portrait.
In the end, Sotheby's got more than $10 million -- more like $17.5 mil (a good deal of which will stick to Sotheby's fingers, as is the nature of such things). And apart from the money, the family knows that the ancient trophies of their ancestor will be better preserved than was possible, hanging on their walls. The buyer is (as far as I know) unknown. The auction was held in Charleston, South Carolina -- indeed, the flags were displayed in the very State House that their ill-fated unit was intended to defend (thanks in part to Tarleton's victory at Waxhaw, the British took Charleston).
What's Bloody Ban's great-great-great-great-nephew, Captain Christopher Tarleton Fagan, going to do with the money? He expects, among other things, to make a large donation to an American soldiers' charity. Given our history books' harsh -- and possibly undeserved, as I'll cover in the "read more" extended entry -- treatment of his famous ancestor, that's very generous of him.
Is it too late to propose a toast to Banastre Tarleton?
Monday - October 03, 2005
History Made in NYC: Rocket Racing League announced!
This is a new form of air racing -- that may one day become space racing.
I've known about this for months now and it has been irritating as hell to keep it secret. Secret's out -- soon you'll be able to turn on the tube (or go to a venue) and watch rocket planes flown by daring pilots compete against one another.
Tuesday - September 27, 2005
Somebody We Should Know
Lance who? you might ask. Because Wade is the most famous 25-victory ace nobody ever heard of. His own logbook shows 40 kills, the remaining 15 were unconfirmed.
Wednesday - August 24, 2005
On Serving in Peace and War
Most of my military service was in peacetime. When I was a fit young tiger, the call didn't come. But it was on my watch that the Iranian hostage mission went off (I was in Monterey, California, at the Defense Language Institute). When Grenada was taken down, I was in Phase II, Light Weapons, of the Special Forces qualification course. One of my classmates, who had been at 2nd Ranger Battalion before coming to SF, went to visit his Ranger replacement in Womack Army Hospital the day before the wounded man succumbed. It didn't do his head any good, that's for sure.
The only guy in my own Ranger class from my original hometown, Philip Grenier of Worcester, Mass., was killed in a helicopter midair on that operation. Military operations involve humans, stress, and machinery, and so are practically begging for accidents.
Most Americans never knew we fought a war in El Salvador. There wasn't much fighting for our guys, compared to what the El Sals had to do on their own, but Greg Fronius was killed by mortar fire one hectic night. I met him a few times in the Q, and guys I knew vouched for him, which is a big thing. Your reputation starts on the first day (or for a guy like me who was on a SOTA at a Group already, it starts before that -- the day you sign in). Greg's reputation was good when I met him, before anyone knew he'd die on a fire-swept parade ground to help a bunch of foreigners live free.
I didn't lose any friends when the blight of Noriega was lifted from Panama, but I didn't participate, either (I was in a unit that specialized in the Arctic). At the time of Desert Storm, I was still in an Arctic-oriented unit, a Reserve unit, and we did go to Norway, and skied up and down the Dovrefjell, and came back windburned and cranky to a bus with three-foot-high-lettering, "Welcome Home, Desert Storm Heroes." Not an ego booster, that.
It wasn't until Afghanistan that my nation's war was my, personal, war. But my war got started the weekend before, although I didn't know it at the time. I'll explain if you read more.
The thing that put me in mind of all this was this post at the Powerline blog. John Hinderaker (rhymes with cinder rocker) notes that the US had a higher casualty rate in peacetime for the years for which he has numbers (83-96) than in Iraq.
The media's breathless tabulation of casualties in Iraq--now, over 1,800 deaths--is generally devoid of context. Here's some context: between 1983 and 1996, 18,006 American military personnel died accidentally in the service of their country. That death rate of 1,286 per year exceeds the rate of combat deaths in Iraq by a ratio of nearly two to one.That's right: all through the years when hardly anyone was paying attention, soldiers, sailors and Marines were dying in accidents, training and otherwise, at nearly twice the rate of combat deaths in Iraq from the start of the war in 2003 to the present. Somehow, though, when there was no political hay to be made, I don't recall any great outcry, or gleeful reporting, or erecting of crosses in the President's home town.
He's off in one trifling detail, which is that the 18,006 were for worldwide operations, and while the press usually throws the Afghan and, for example, Phillipines casualties in with the Iraq ones, they're not counting all the GIs that manage to whack themselves in traditional GI ways, drinking and driving or exploring the corners of a Japanese superbike's performance envelope. Still, the man has a point. All we hear from the self-proclaimed peddlers of history's first draft with reference to Iraq and Afghanistan are stories about US casualties, denuded of context. Sometimes these losses are gleefully reported, as when Ted Koppel periodically reads the names of the dead, clearly enjoying each one. And like most long-serving soldiers, I've lost more people when the war wasn't on. The most shocking and unwelcome news was of an event on September 8, 2001, an event that almost none of you have heard of, but that affected a family as powerfully as some of the bad news from the stans has done.
Thursday - August 04, 2005
The Great Great War Hoax
In 1933, a year that saw a number of other developments that followed from the Great War, a book was published in England called Death in the Air. It purported to be the diary of an RFC pilot, who was not further identified. What created the stir was the reproduction of a number of photos that the pilot reportedly took during dogfights.
Of course, the whole thing was a hoax. If you stop and think about the difficulty of operating both an airplane and a camera of 1918 vintage, under combat stress, it should have been obvious that this stuff was phony. It's puzzling that it wasn't called out at the time. What's even more mystifying is that no Allied or Axis airman -- thousands of whom from Billy Bishop to Hermann Goering were still thriving in 1933 -- stepped forward to throw the el toro poo poo flag on this charade.
Monday - July 11, 2005
Who was this Lafayette dude?
One even thought the unit might have been named after Lafayette Square in New York.
Ouch. That makes me feel so old I'd have to cut off a leg and count the rings to know just how old that is.
I lived at one time in Lafayette Street, named because the great man himself proceeded along it in 1824; I attended a college in the same street for two years. You can't throw a rock around here without hitting a Lafayette square, or circle, or avenue... or a statue of him. And the kids never heard of him! At first I was puzzled by what appeared to me to be arrant ignorance, but now I think I understand. (In Read more, I explain, and provide a link with more about this interesting guy).
In 1917, when the American Expeditionary Force finally arrived in war-weary France, bringing Americans who would fight under Old Glory rather than the Tricolor, General John J. Pershing announced with a flourish, "Lafayette, we are here!" Amazing how much national patrimony can plunge down the memory hole in ninety years (actually, thirty-five years or so; Lafayette was considered worth learning about until the fad-based education that came in in the late sixties and continues to overstay its welcome).