esrosedotblog

I forgot the poppies.

The VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) used to sell a fake poppy for this day,

In Flander's fields the poppies grow.......

World War I poetry.

This is the kind of thing that is now gone. Traditions down the hole.

That is OK with me.

A lot of people wore the poppy and then felt smug and satisfied whether they went off to War or not.

This reminds me of the resentments of those who went against those who did not. The phrase "draft dodger" was a pretty strong epithet.

In our small town there were a few people who fit this phrase. They used influence of the cover of a "critical job" to stay at home.

I bet they wore the fucking poppy though.

Labels: war and peace

When I was a kid, Memorial Day was a serious business.

You have to put yourself in the setting of the time.

World War II was just over. Perhaps three years when I first got to participate.

Then there was the Korean War. More dead.

In reality there were just two soldiers from our town who were killed. Their names adorned the American Legion Post.

One was buried in one graveyard, another in another. Word was that there wasn't much to bury in the one but they went through the forms.

So people would meet at the Consolidated School where I went for twelve years.

Then a lineup. A color guard. My Dad carried for the Navy one year.

Then vets from all the wars. Old timers, newcomers.

Then, I don't know.

Somewhere in there were the Scouts. I was not a Scout. Then the school kids. Not optional participation.

We went to the graveyards and a firing squad saluted over the grave of the year. Blanks.

Some words were said. We went home.

Before that and even to this day, graves were decorated. Decoration Day is the old name for it. This dates back to Civil War times.

All of this seems a bit morbid to me now.

My Dad took it seriously though. He had been in the Navy. Volunteered. The war was never over for him.

He had bad dreams, he had a piece of shrapnel in his neck, gift of a kamikaze. He was in the North Atlantic escorting ships back and forth. Then in the Pacific.

We placed flags on all the veteran graves. Little ones.

And so on.

Now, I don't know if any of that is done. Remembrance.

Now that we are in a kind of perpetual war time the past all seems quaint somehow.

Now Memorial Day is just another long weekend for a lot of people. We have not been in a war for a long time. Except the continuing great war with the Muslims.

Religion again.

Have fun, have hot dogs. Go see the parade. We will have a huge one here. Overflights and all.

To me, it is just kind of depressing.

Labels: holidays, war and peace

Most people I hang out with do not want to think about military matters.

They like to talk in sort of hippy-dippy terms, the flower stem put into a gun barrel.

I do not have that mental luxury. Something in me has me wanting to know what is going on. Something else in me wants to fix it.

Maybe it is my Dad still in there tuning to Lowell Thomas on ABC every night. WJZ New York.

Maybe my brief and absolutely benign tour of duty with the US Army Reserves. ROTC, six weeks summer camp, six months active duty as an Officers' Club manager in Fort Lee Virginia. Six more years of successfully avoiding any duty but the annual summer camp spent by the pool at Fort Lee with one of my first closeted boy friends from Philadelphia.

Guilt that others got sent to Germany during one of the Berlin crises? I don't know.

In any case, I do not warm up to pacifists. Or anti-military talk.

Let's not go there. I have probably pissed off half of whatever small audience I have.

Sorry/not sorry.

I remember that my Dad was a hellfire supporter of "bombing the little bastards" out of existence.

I am not that strong. But I am there with him in spirit.

I don't talk out loud about it. Not even at home. It is not a subject that leads to calm discourse. I don't talk religion either. Much.

So, to make an exception, I am interested in the idea of satellite warfare because it keeps people like me clean.

At a distance.

I am not alone.

To Keep America Safe, Embrace Drone Warfare

An Op-Ed today in the New York Times by Michael V. Hayden, a retired Air Force four-star general, who was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009.

One of the most argued issues here is the possibility that a drone will kill innocent people.

I assume that you, dear reader, know that there are no innocent people in a war time situation. We do our best with this but the fact is that in this day and age the soldiers do not rank up and march into fire in a column and drop until there are no more or until the enemy runs out of bullets.

Ever since WWII, there has been unconventional warfare and the means to do the same when it comes at us.

Some of the best war fiction is based on the behind the scenes killer, the sniper, the assassin.

Come on. You like to read that shit too. Don't say otherwise. And if you truly do not then quit reading this because you will be getting pissed at me and I do not want that.

I figure that drone warfare is as "clean" a way to conduct today's wars as there is.

By this I mean to target the enemy and kill him. The basic mission all of us service weenies learned in the first days of military training. To find the enemy and kill him.

Not capture, not harangue and propagandize, not anything else but to find the enemy and kill him.

Drones are very good at that.

But they are not perfect. Every so often a civilian walks into the situation and gets hit along with the insurgents or whatever they call themselves.

This is tragic.

But it is also tragic that some outfit like ISIS goes on a binge of rape and pillage. Brutal torture unchecked.

We live in a world in which evil is at play. Those of us who consider ourselves good owe no less than to root out the "evil-doers" and finish them off.

Yeh. George W. used that term. But you have to believe it to do the necessary job.

Some would say that it is not our job. Well, fuck. Whose is it?

No answer to that one.

Live and let live?

Tell the Taliban that. The little kids and women, if you will, that get tortured for the fun of it.

Oh. You think that is propaganda. That these motherfuckers are not truly motherfuckers? Dream on.

No. Cancel that.

Wake up.

Enjoy the freedom you have to think like you do but at least let others defend it for you and above all get out of the way.

An old joke. Not a joke.

Lead, follow or get out of the way.

So yes. This is/was a rant.

I hope it did not hit any "innocent bystanders" but by now you know that I do not think there are any "innocent bystanders in the United States of America. We are all the little kid in Pakistan or wherever. And so on. And here we go again so I will stop.

Make love not war. I wish.

Labels: war and peace

CERTAINTY?

Today's movie was another documentary from Errol Morris

The Fog of War (2003)

interviewing Robert McNamara about the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam period.

This won the Oscar for best documentary in its year as well as several other prestigious awards.

Remarkable face close shots with McNamara using Morris invention for eye contact, the "Interrotron," "a video device that allows Morris and his subjects to look into each other's eyes while also looking directly into the camera lens".

The film is intercut with ingenious snatches of visual and aural history including stunning audio tape material between McNamara and Kennedy and then Johnson.

Philip Glass' music sets a mournful tone and is less intrusive than in an earlier film where he supplied the score.

I remember these times with some clarity. I marched. I wasn't a true peacenik because I was in the military myself and knew the uncertainty that obtains in any combat situation whether small scale in a platoon or in the big picture as seen in this film.

Ambivalence.

The backbone of the film is McNamara's 11 Lessons. A good backbone.

How does McNamara come off? He is 85 here. The events happened 30 - 40 years earlier.

He is clear and energetic. He is certain until he isn't. He is open. Tears and remorse are often not far from the surface.

The part about Kennedy's assassination are very moving. Upsetting. This is also very near the surface for me.

One thing is proven, more or less, and that is that LBJ was a prick.

On the other hand he had an impossible situation.

As a documentary, this film is rich. It is filled with evocative film shots as well as documents and handwritten notes close up.

It is more than fair to McNamara and his critics at the same time. There is a right and wrong and it gets evenly spread. The man was the SecDef for nine years. A lot of exposure to critics.

It is not an interview. Morris is there. Prompting. Sometimes exclaiming. Occasionally asking for some more. It is said that McNamara was going to give Morris an hour. He ended up doing 20.

I will make this a 4 out of Netflix 5 for, while I am willing to see this again, really feel that once is enough and the reliving of it all is better behind me than in front of me.

Labels: films, war and peace

CARRIER

I am in the middle of reading about the huge scam the Brits pulled on the Germans in WWII, fake intelligence to throw them off on many aspects of the war but mostly the DDay location.

There is a chapter on carrier pigeons and their utter ineffectiveness in wartime.

This made me think about it again.

Code Found on Pigeon Baffles British Cryptographers

I also am interested in homing pigeons. I have known some people who had them. I wouldn't want it because of the mess and worry. "Will they come home"?

So I really enjoyed reading this.

Labels: birds, war and peace

MEMORIAL

When I was a kid, Memorial Day was meant to acknowledge and honor the war dead of our country.

It was not about live veterans. That is another day.

It was the actual dead.

We marched to the graveyards on Memorial Day and usually honored a recently dead soldier or sailor.

As I recall, there was at least one in each of four or five cemeteries in our area. Of course, there were many old dead. The Civil War in many cases being the oldest, through the Spanish American, World War I and, of course, the WWII guys who were getting the honors.

It wasn't about cookouts or auto races or any of that. It was a time of quiet and remembrance.

And it wasn't about peace either. Or politics. Or even about the right and wrong of it.

These were people, mostly men, who died in the virtually perpetual state of war that we have had here since the beginning. Loss. Suffering. Sacrifice.

At every ceremony, each year, a kid would recite Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. One year, my sixth grade year, I think, I was that kid.

I can still remember most of it. Don't test me though.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

When thinking about what they died for, I also like to think of the MLKing line about the arc of history pointing toward justice.

War is a squalid, mean exercise but if it means anything at all, we hope for justice. I am less interested in "freedom" now because that word has been co-opted for the cause de jour.

Justice and more of it.

Memorial Day was also a day to go and clean up and decorate the family graves.

We would go and get rid of the dead flowers, mow or sickle the grass, sit and think about who is in the soil and so on.

The local VFW or American Legion would have put a little flag on the grave of each veteran. Nothing wrong with that.

I remember that you had to go and get buckets of water and carry the dead grasses and plants to the junk pile.

It was a serious deal.

I am proud to say that my kids still go and visit the family graves. A few of the go together. Make it a trip. An occasion.

This is more than I ever did in my adult years. They have taken a beloved tradition and made it real again. They have to travel to do this. Cross three states to do so.

By now they have a lot of visiting to do. Some of the graves go back beyond grand and great grand parents. Or great great, if you can find them still.

Memorial Day.

Labels: nostalgia, patriotism, war and peace

COMPARED TO WHAT

People who get upset about drone planes must be thinking about the alternative. Aren't they?

Come on. Objectively, what is the best way to stop one or more of these bastards who are fighting us?

Unless you believe that we should not be doing any attacking at all, pacifists or modified pacifists, then the drone is a very desirable tool.

It is accurate, scary, a deterrent actually. It minimizes both military and civilian collateral damage.

What's not to like unless you are bad guy.

So why do so many libs get all upset about it.

Well, there is the issue of whether you are going to knock off an American citizen or not. Maliki, a bad piece of work who went to war against his own country. No lack of proof about that. Due process? Get fucking serious.

Anyway, Kevin Drum has been thinking about it. This is a big day for him in this blog. Two articles on day! See the last one.

Drone Attacks Are Popular Because They're Better Than the Alternative

Labels: Administration Obama, war and peace

SKULLDUGGERY

Good news / bad news

Our Home Owners Association (HOA) had an election in December. Board of directors.

For the first time in living memory the East Side of our complex gained control of the board. Decidedly. Not close.

Within minutes there was upset. The incumbents could not believe it. Did not accept it.

We have a CPA who handles the whole process. The report is unmistakably the outcome. We have copies of the letters.

But, the secretary of the board who is not a member wrote the wrong results into the minutes and the old board, as its last act, accepted the secretary's wrong results which, surprise, surprise, re-elected all officers.

So the Board met and elected Board Officers.

And did other shit they had no authority to do.

Consternation on the part of the newly elected members. Major shit hitting the fan.

Somewhere in here "someone" told the CPA to destroy the ballots. They are gone.

The new members who do not trust the retained board lawyer are seeking alternative advice.

Now all of this is subject to very finely delineated regulations. It will all come out in the wash.

This has been going on a long timer. East vs. West, two separate tracts in the same complex, new versus old, leasing versus permanent owners, young versus old. There is plenty of division go go around.

We are in the east, we will support the proper election and, if necessary will give some money to it.

But, there is no way that either one of us is going to get involved in what is a high stress goat fuck. We are getting our popcorn out and watching the show.

Labels: condo, war and peace

LYBIAN LIBERATION

Labels: war and peace

THE LANGUAGE CONSPIRACY

Now this is something the culture warriors should take a serious look at.

Forget the fucking mosques.

Do I have to keep telling you to look at this shit on the full screen? Well, do it.

And earphones would be great too.

Labels: culture, fun, republican whack jobs, war and peace

PEARL

This is Pearl Harbor Day.

I already have young friends who have no idea what that means.

We all have different wars of our own times.

I remember it happening because it upset the whole house and extended family.

My mother cried. And fainted.

Always the center of attention. Even at war.

Today, it is just a memory. The period of time, 1941 -1945 was tough on everyone. More so the people in Europe and Asia.

I was between 4 and 8. My Dad went to war. All that.

Soon, no one will really remember it. They will know about it but not remember. Two different things.

Transience.

That is OK. We have our own times to work with. No baggage.

Labels: war and peace

COLBERT BLOWS UP

Labels: war and peace

WALLED OUT

Twenty years ago today the Berlin Wall fell. Well, it was torn down.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of this step in the dissolution of the "iron curtain". Younger people have their own walls and new iron curtains in the world.

This is a great story. See the video. One man made a difference.

The German people took a bad rap for a long time about going along.

This guy didn't really go along. One man.

The Hinge of History

I don't think it was fake. It didn't matter. It was tangible evidence that the wall was gone. Some wall somewhere.

There is more than a little bit of fate hanging on this as well.

In 1959, I left active duty in the Army for 6 years of attendance at a reserve unit. I was a six month wonder. ROTC. Summer camp, six months and then six years of weekly meetings and two weeks of summer camp.

I never attended one meeting.

I had an "advisor" who took a liking to me. He had a cabin near where I grew up.

A small thing.

He put me in a bullshit correspondence course instead of a local reserve unit. I did go to summer camp for 5 summers with another guy from Philadelphia. We had it knocked. No unit, they didn't know what to do with us. We did. It was a walk in the park. Sure, a walk in the Army base park but still.

He was a closeted gay also. But that is another story.

The unit I would have been in went to Germany in one of the Berlin crises. The crisis was over before they got there but they were activated and had to serve out their two years.

I, on the other hand, took my time with the correspondence course, dragged my feet and was eventually decommissioned for not maintaining my obligation. They had so many of us they didn't care.

It was not long after that, not a year, before Viet Nam started to grind up our young men.

So the end of The Wall was the end of a whole period of anxiety and worry about having my life disrupted by arbitrary power and bureaucracy.

At least that is how I see it.

By the time it was over, so was I. I was into the peace movement and had I been told to go on active duty again, I would not have gone.

I have been fortunate in my life to have been born at exactly the right time to miss WWII, the Korean Action, or any other conflagration.

Labels: history, life, war and peace