Category Archives: Troops

Ain’t Ready for Marines Yet?

Posted on December 21, 2013 | 7 comments

A recent post by Darkwater on the Marines birthday, he being a proud former one (former only in the sense of a former FBI agent) reminded me of my encounter with the headline of this post.

I was wearing my ARMY cap one day at HEB soon after the Iraq invasion, in solidarity with the troops, you see, and a brash young cashier looked at it and said the words. I never knew ARMY could be treated as an acronym that way.

But, then, I was always a little slow. In Basic Training at Fort Knox the summer of 1967 I kept seeing FTA graffiti. I thought how interesting that the Future Teachers of America seemed to be everywhere on post. Finally learned, to my embarrassment, that FTA stood for F*** The Army.

The HEB encounter was likewise humiliating, until I remembered why I had avoided the Marines back when I was drafted and could have joined any one of the services to avoid the Army if I had wanted to: I had no interest in coming home in a bag and the Marines were/are well known for taking high casualties.

I found out why in OCS infantry training when our sergeant instructors said that we, unlike the Jarheads, did not, “charge hi diddle diddle, straight up the middle,” but hunkered down, called in an artillery prep and then worked the edges of the enemy position, if they still existed.

And that was, indeed, the way we operated in Viet Nam. Even when the enemy didn’t sit around and wait for the shells to arrive. They did often enough. When I came home I was surprised to discover the extent to which civilians held the Marines in awe, not needing to join, probably. And I began to realize that the Marines have always had better PR and advertising campaigns than the Army. Why that is I never figured out.

Then, many years later, one day at HEB, wearing an ARMY cap soon after the Iraq invasion, a brash young cashier looked at my cap and said: “Ain’t Ready for Marines Yet?” Cute. I should have replied (we always know what we should have said) “No, but I still have all my parts in reasonably good working order.”

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Posted in Blogosphere, Infantry OCS, Troops, Viet Nam

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They could retire some of the generals

Posted on December 14, 2013 | 6 comments

Acting secretary of the Air Force Eric K. Fanning says the zoomies will be forcing some 25,000 enlisted airmen into early retirement in the next few years. Downsizing the force could also eliminate 550 aircraft from the hangers and runways.

I realize that remotely-piloted drones are taking over some of the missions previously flown by manned aircraft, and so downsizing makes a certain sense, even if it’s most likely only the Democrats shoring up their growing welfare spending by cutting back on the military they hate so much.

But how about cutting back on some of the senior officers, especially the generals, whose salaries eat up a lot more of the personnel budget than the enlisted do. But, then, it’s always the little people who bear the burden, isn’t it?

Via Michael Yon.

6 Comments

Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Troops

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In at the creation

Posted on December 13, 2013 | 4 comments

Going through my late father’s old Air Force flight logs, I see that he was training to fly the B-29 at Alamogordo, New Mexico from June to September, 1945.

So he was probably there when the first atomic bomb was exploded at the Trinity Site, a few hundred sixty miles northwest of the base,  about 5:30 a.m. on July 16.

The surrounding mountains were lit up “brighter than daytime,” one scientist reportedly said, but as the mushroom cloud apparently only reached about eight miles high, dad probably couldn’t have seen it, assuming he was even awake at the time. The rumbling thunder might have awakened him but it had been thunderstorming in the week before the blast. If he was up, in time for an early flight, he never mentioned it to me. But it was Top Secret.

Paul Tibbets and the Enola Gay were already at Tinian in the Mariana Islands training to drop one on Hiroshima. Which they would have installed in their bomb bay by August 6 when they launched for the Empire’s rendezvous with the Atomic Age.

Interestingly, that first bomb was blooded like a Samurai’s katana sword.

The Navy captain who armed it high over the Pacific enroute to Japan badly cut a finger on its sharp tail fins, getting blood on his uniform and on the bomb, according to Robert F. Dorr, author of last year’s excellant Mission to Tokyo: The American Airmen Who Took The War To The Heart of Japan.

If you’re in the market for new details on an old subject, Dorr’s book is a fine read.

UPDATE:  Another book I like is a much-praised historical novel The Green Glass Sea, by Ellen Klages, which includes the fascinating detail that in the first year after the blast, the Trinity site was covered with thin sheets of pale green glass which the fireball had created from the white sand.

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Posted in Troops, War Without End

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Rule 5: Pacific Princess

Posted on December 12, 2013 | 4 comments

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B-25 Mitchell nose art, courtesy of Planes of The Past. It’s relatively tame compared to some of the full frontal pix of the pre-PC era.

I’ve been reading Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, then-Army Captain Ted Lawson’s 1943 tale of the training, launching, bombing and aftermath of the April, 1942 retaliation for Pearl Harbor. The language is quaint (probably scrubbed for a general audience), except when he calls the Japs inhuman. But the description of them bayoneting hospital patients in their beds justifies it. And other books I’ve read about what their Navy did to downed American pilots, i.e. interrogating them and then throwing them overboard.

On the other hand, it’s easy to spot the propaganda in the official news release in the appendix—especially the claim that their bombs fell only on military targets. The Air Force can’t do that now. I know they couldn’t then. The so-called greatest generation was no less adept at lying than we are. Still it’s a good read, and a good look at the WW2 era. I recommend it.

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Posted in Rule 5, Troops, War Without End

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Our new Democrat military

Posted on October 29, 2013 | 7 comments

Time was when the American military was proudly apolitical. No more.

The Democrats finally realized that most of them were voting Republican and decided to make sure they were more sympathetic to the Democrat view.

So our military is not only being warned away from right-wing groups, such as the Tea Party and Christian fundamentalists, they reportedly will be punished if they help these groups with contributions.

The Democrats were already seeing to it that the military wasn’t allowed to win in Iraq and Afghanistan or pay attention to in-house Jihadis like Major Hassan. And retirees such as Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely were saying there’s a purge of insufficiently-PC commanders underway.

So the new righty-scorning line is just the latest step towards a fully political, i.e. Democrat, military. Which is the best reason I can think of to keep on downsizing it. It doesn’t do much of anything anyhow except waste money.

Via Instapundit.

UPDATE:  More on the purge, which names names, though some of them seem to have been retired for other than political reasons.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, The War, Troops

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A true war story

Posted on October 16, 2013 | 18 comments

J.D. over at Mouth of the Brazos has a semi-book review that reminded me of a war story, a true one, as we say, to distinguish it from the stretchers some of us have been known to tell a time or two.

J.D., a onetime Marine who shared my year (1969) and approximate terrain in fun-loving Southeast Asia, was so irritated at the 2010 book An America Amnesia: How the US Congress Forced the Surrenders of South Vietnam and Cambodia that he stopped reading: “It was making me sick to my stomach. The entire viewpoint is asinine beyond description.”

His point is that we were losing the war practically the whole way along, even if the (highly suspect) official statistics seem to support the notion that we were winning. Thus when Congress cut off military aid to SVN (which did, indeed, force their surrender) they were only ratifying what practically everyone, except the Pentagon and the military careerists with their vested interests, seemed to finally understand. It is all debatable of course. Isn’t everything?

My true war story contains a clue to why we were losing the war long before the Congress acted: A Popular Forces squad my light-infantry Army advisory team set up in the summer of 1969 (about the time Neil Armstrong was taking his giant leap for mankind) in a sand and bamboo outpost on the edge of what we laughingly called our Controlled Fire Zone—it was such only for the American units which had to clear indirect fires with us. The enemy did what they pleased, mainly at night. They owned the night. “Charlie’s Dark,” I called it.

The PF’s were the lowest of the low in the SVN military, ill-equipped, ill-led, ill-clad and ill-fed. Ill everything. Mostly because the SVN command structure and their supply system were just totally corrupt. Everything got stolen or sold long before it filtered down to our lowly PFs. Which is a big reason the war was a loser.

These poor guys, some very young, a few old enough to be the grandfathers of the very young ones, had M-16s, of which they were very proud, but little else. They needed a 60mm mortar for their defense but we couldn’t get one through their crooked supply. So we stole one. We stole it from the 7th Marine Regiment which was the nearest and largest American unit in our AO (area of operations). We stole everything essential from the Marines: our food, our ammunition, the gasoline for our jeeps and our generators. If I remember correctly we stole a generator. But that might be a stretcher.

The true part is the poor PFs were overrun the first night they heroically agreed to stay in their pathetic little outpost. About half were killed, the other half sensibly ran away. The enemy (mainly Main Force VC and NVA in our neck of the woods) did leave the mortar behind. We passed it on to another PF squad. But we could never get them to stay in the outpost. They weren’t cowards. They just weren’t stupid. Unlike some of the guys still pushing the “congress lost the war” line. Any line doggie with any sense knows better whether he’s willing to admit it to himself or not. It can be a hard admission, even after all these years.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Guns, Obsessions, Troops, Viet Nam

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A sad Barrycade story

Posted on October 14, 2013 | 5 comments

PFC Cody Patterson, a young Army Ranger and a friend of Darkwater’s son, was one of four U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan recently, and Darkwater’s son escorted his remains home.

But Cody’s family must now scrounge for the expenses to get him buried, thanks to Obutthead and his slim-down, shut-down kabuki. The Republican House passed a bill to restore the federal money the White House cut off for such things, but the bill seems to be stalled by the petulant in the Democrat Senate.

Read the whole sad story at the links, complete with Darkwater’s photo of young Cody, a captain of his high school football team. The Oregonian newspaper’s see-no-evil version of the hassle is here.

5 Comments

Posted in Afghanistan, Blogosphere, Obamalot, The War, Troops

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