Tuesday - May 31, 2005

Deep Throat Unmasked …. For The Money

The man who was Woodward & Bernstein’s “anonymous source” for their Watergate investigation has been unmasked. It was W. Mark Felt, the former Number 2 man at the FBI (FOX News) ....

WASHINGTON — The Washington Post confirmed Tuesday that W. Mark Felt, the former No. 2 at the FBI, is “Deep Throat,” the famous source credited with helping blow open secrets about President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up.

Ben Bradlee, the Post’s top editor during the Watergate scandal, said in an interview with his old paper that he wouldn’t recognize Felt if he had seen him, but he knew all along that “Deep Throat” was a high-ranking FBI official and learned his name within a couple of weeks after Nixon’s resignation.

According to the Vanity Fair article, Felt only allowed his secret to be revealed after prodding from his children, who argued his legacy should be established while he was still alive and that the family should reap some monetary rewards from his newly established place in history. (emphasis mine)

(-- tip o’ the hat to Quidni for pointing this out to me)

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/31/2005 at 09:35 PM   
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Ring Of Misty Fire: 31-MAY-1916

“It was two o’clock in the afternoon watch, May 31, 1916.  A rusty tramp--the N.J. Fjord--with the flag of Denmark painted large upon her sides and splotches of red lead showing on her weather-beaten plates, steamed slowly across the North Sea.  On the far horizon the top hamper of a ship rapidly took shape:  the light cruiser Elbing of the Imperial German Navy.  There came the peremptory orders of the sea, ”Heave to!” The N.J. Fjord stopped.  ‘Her steam blowing off shot skyward in a cotton-white jet which mixed with her funnel smoke to spread into a listless cloud visible for miles against the leaden atmosphere.’ German destroyers nosed alongside--boarding and search, the routine procedure of wartime....”

The rival British and German battle fleets had been watching each other from the outset of World War I, across the narrow confines of the foggy and stormy North Sea.  The British fleet was easily the stronger of the two, having won a pre-war capital ship building race at a ratio of 3 to 2.

Within weeks of war’s outbreak, it became obvious that the German High Seas Fleet had no desire for a head-on clash with the far stronger British Grand Fleet.  The best the Germans could hope for was that a portion of the British fleet might be cut off and annihilated, thus “leveling the playing field.”

---

Aboard HMS Galatea, flying the broad pennant of Commodore Alexander-Sinclair, the white steam of the Fjord was sighted.  The light cruiser, far on the wing of Beatty’s Battle Cruiser Fleet then turning away to the northward, stood on to investigate.  At 2:18 she signaled to the fleet:  “Enemy in sight!” The rusty N.J. Fjord had lifted the curtain on “the greatest drama of modern naval warfare.  Der Tag had come.”

It had been slow in coming.  Taking advantage of her strategic position athwart the exits from the North Sea into the Atlantic, Great Britain had kept the German High Seas Fleet bottled up in the North Sea, and thus away from her vital Atlantic supply lines.  And Britain would have to be defeated at sea if she was to be defeated at all. 

The imprisonment of her High Seas Fleet had forced the Germans to result to U-boat warfare in attempting to interdict the Atlantic sea lanes, but since the Lusitania sinking in 1915, the U-boats had been held on leash, for fear of provoking the United States into entering the war.  President Woodrow Wilson had drawn the line.  Meanwhile, the German High Seas Fleet struggled to pop the cork of its bottle, and cut the British Fleet down to a manageable size.

Both fleets were divided into “battle forces” (built around battleships, or dreadnoughts, as they were then known) and “scouting forces” (built around much faster battle-cruisers).  Both wings of the High Seas Fleet were customarily stationed at Wilhelmshaven (the Jade Bay).  In May 1916, most of the major British battle force (the Grand Fleet) was based at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland, under Admiral Sir John Jellicoe.  Other elements were based at Cromarty, on Moray Firth.

At Rosyth on the Firth of Forth, much nearer the German North Sea naval bases, Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty was stationed with the battle-cruiser squadrons of the scouting force.  At any stir of the High Seas Fleet, Beatty would be “first responder.” Beatty, an outspoken, rakish mastiff of a commander, itched for action, and was often impatient with his senior officer, the prudent and cautious Jellicoe.  The Germans were well aware of Beatty’s hunger for a scrap.  It was likely that he could be baited.  Beatty’s squadrons became the logical choice for entrapment and destruction.



It had been tried before.  German battle-cruisers under Beatty’s opposite number, Admiral Franz von Hipper, had bombarded towns on England’s east coast, hoping to draw their quarry into a trap.  As Beatty’s opposite number, Hipper was well suited for his job.  He had spent much of his career in destroyers, and probably always remained a “Tin Can Sailor” at heart.  From this background, however, he brought dash and daring to his command of the German battle cruisers, and like Beatty, he chafed at being held on any kind of leash.

Thus the raids on the east coast of Britain.  They did not succeed, however, in trapping Beatty’s forces.
One such raid culminated in the Battle of Dogger Bank, 24 Jan 1915, in which the British, due to misunderstood signals, applied themselves to overwhelming a lumbering old armored cruiser, SMS Blücher, while the rest of Hipper’s force escaped.

In May 1916, Admiral Reinhard Scheer, recently risen to command of the High Seas Fleet, planned another entrapment raid, this time on the Sunderland.  Unable, however, to carry out aerial (Zeppelin) reconnaissance of the British Fleet due to bad weather, Scheer abandoned this scheme.  Instead, he substituted a sweep northward toward the Skagerrak, threatening British patrols and merchant shipping in that area.  Scheer thus hoped to lure the British into waters infested by U-boats, which could help him cut off and annihilate portions of the British Fleet. 

By the morning of 30 May, the British knew that something was up.  Reports of increased U-boat activity and intercepted radio signals led them to suppose that Scheer was coming out of the Jade.  By 10:30 p.m. on 30 May, the Grand Fleet was at sea, steaming to intercept.  Beatty was steaming eastward from Rosyth,
and Jellicoe was hurrying down from Scapa Flow.

On the morning of 31 May, Scheer put to sea, sending Hipper’s battle-cruisers well ahead of his main body.
They would be the bait that would lure the British into a trap.  Some U-boats had spotted some of Jellicoe’s ships, and one (U-32) had managed an unsuccessful attack, but the U-boat reports were sketchy, and were not enough to make Scheer believe that he had lured out the entire Grand Fleet.  At worst, he supposed, he would have only Beatty to deal with.

On the other hand, Jellicoe had received faulty intelligence from the Admiralty.  They reported to him that the German flagship (meaning Scheer) was still in port, and if Scheer was still in port, so was the German battle fleet, leaving only Hipper to be dealt with.



Thus, both fleets groped toward each other through the mists and choppy water of the North Sea, each unaware of the other’s presence, and each unaware that they were about to meet in the war’s only collision between the Grand Fleet and the High Seas Fleet.  At stake was strategic control of the North Sea.

The fleets all but missed each other.  On the afternoon on 31 May, Beatty’s forces were on a course that would take them well behind Hipper’s force and well ahead of Scheer’s, causing him to miss both.  But then HMS Galatea sighted the tramp steamer, N.J. Fjord,, stopped and blowing off steam, and investigated.....

“The battle that ensued, fought entirely in the sullen, heaving cockpit of the North Sea, was naturally divided by circumstance and tactics into four principal phases.  Beatty...and Hipper...had been sent ahead of the main fleets, each feeling for the enemy.  The first phase of the battle ensued when Beatty and Hipper made contact and dueled with their battle-cruisers as Hipper led Beatty southward toward the bulk of the German High Seas Fleet, hidden in the mists.”

It was during this “Run to the South” that two British battle-cruisers (HMS Indefatigable and HMS Queen Mary paid the price for their indifferent armoring, blowing up under fire, leaving only a handful of survivors between them.  Beatty’s flagship, HMS Lion, came within an ace of joining them.  Hits and a flash fire in one of her turrets nearly reached a magazine.  Only the gallantry of the mortally-wounded turret commander and his men resulted in the magazine doors being shut, and the magazine being flooded, with hardly a second to spare.  Some of the men who carried out the commander’s order were later found dead, with their hands still clutching the door clips.

”A German salvo struck the Princess Royal; a signalman on the Lion’s bridge, seeing the burst of impact and the licking flame, mistakenly reported:  ‘Princess Royal blown up, sir.’ Beatty turned his keen blue eyes and jutting jaw toward his flag captain:  “Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.  Turn two points to port’ (toward the enemy).”

Only HMS New Zealand among Beatty’s battle cruisers escaped severe damage during the “Run to the South.” But now Scheer’s battle fleet had been sighted, steaming up from the south, and it was Beatty’s turn; having been lured into Scheer’s jaws, he would lure Scheer into Jellicoe’s.

“When the German main body was encountered, Beatty turned north and steamed toward his own main fleet, with the Germans coming hard after him and the great guns echoing over the waters.  The third phase was the brief encounter of the main bodies, when Scheer with the High Seas Fleet steaming in column met the Grand Fleet ‘crossing them’ or steaming at a right angle across Scheer’s course.”

During this action, a third British battle-cruiser, HMS Invincible, went the way of her two recently departed sisters, under the guns of SMS Derfflinger..  Among the dead was Rear Admiral Sir Horace Hood.  Another British rear admiral, Sir Robert Arbuthnot, went down with armored cruiser HMS Defence..  One of the newest British dreadnoughts, HMS Warspite, suffered steering gear breakdown and grievous damage from 13 heavy-caliber shell hits.  HMS Marlborough took a torpedo, and like HMS Warspite, had to be ordered home.  On the other hand, Hipper’s flagship, SMS Lützow, was pounded into a sinking wreck and was ordered home; on the way, she had to be abandoned and left to sink.  Hipper transferred his flag to battle-cruiser SMS Moltke, least damaged of his heavy ships.

Scheer twice extricated his fleet from the skilful maneuvers of Jellicoe, although he suffered heavy damage to many of his vessels while inflicting minimal damage in return.  To cover his second escape, he ordered Hipper’s scouting forces to charge head-on into the center of the enemy line.  This suicidal charge became known as Hipper’s “death ride,” and the German battle-cruisers, already heavily pounded, took a dreadful beating.  All of them managed to withdraw, however, as their supporting destroyers scampered past and launched torpedoes at the Grand Fleet, causing Jellicoe to turn away.  In the aftermath, however, he positioned himself between Scheer and his bases, with night coming on.

”The final phase, after the Germans turned away back toward port was a sprawling, inchoate night action, chiefly between the light forces.”

Many light forces were lost as Scheer crossed behind Jellicoe and steamed right through the fringe of the Grand Fleet, to reach home and “pop the champagne” on the morning of June 1.  On paper at least, he had won a clear tactical victory.  In addition to SMS Lützow, he had lost one elderly pre-dreadnought battleship (SMS Pommern), four light cruisers, and five destroyers and torpedo boats.  The British losses were much heavier.  In addition to the three battle cruisers blown up, they lost three armored cruisers (forerunners of the heavy cruisers of World War II), and eight destroyers and torpedo boats.

Over 6000 British seamen lost their lives, compared to some 2551 German losses.  Germany was overjoyed, and the legend of the “victory of the Skagerrak” was born (and persists to this day).

But for Germany, Jutland was a strategic defeat.  An American newspaper noted, “The German Fleet has assaulted its jailer, but it is still in jail.” This was a crisp summary of the facts.  British strategic control of the North Sea had been maintained in the face of the most serious German assault of the war.

Scheer knew it, too, and went on to admit to his superiors that success in future fleet actions was highly unlikely.  The High Seas Fleet, still in its bottle, would have to remain there.  Further sorties of the High Seas Fleet did no more than prove that Scheer’s assessment was correct.

The men in the fleet realized this as well.  Disillusionment and disaffection set in, reinforced by memories of a misty horizon studded with the orange flashes of enemy guns, and the fighting spirit of the men was increasingly tainted as the war dragged on and the fleet swung round its anchors month in, month out.

But Britain had to be defeated at sea if she was to be defeated at all.  German High Command attention was turned toward their last remaining card to play at sea, renewal of unrestricted U-boat warfare.

In early 1917, it was renewed, and by the end of April, the United States was in the war.....

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:  Quotations taken from Hanson W. Baldwin, “Sea Fights and Shipwrecks, (New York:  Doubleday, 1955).

Further information about the Battle of Jutland may be found at:

www.firstworldwar.com

www.royal-navy.mod.uk

www.worldwar1.co.uk

GET ME OUT OF HERE ...

Posted by Tannenberg     on 05/31/2005 at 05:24 PM   
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Mathematicus Giganticus

googolplex

A googolplex is the number 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰, that is, 1 followed by a googol zeroes. The term googol was coined by the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner. Googolplex was coined by Kasner to define an especially large number by extension from his nephew’s idea.

A googol is greater than the number of particles in the known universe, which has been variously estimated from 10⁷² up to 10⁸⁷. Since this is less than the number of zeroes in a googolplex, it would not be possible to write down or store a googolplex in decimal notation, even if all the matter in the known universe were converted into paper and ink or disk drives.

Thinking of this another way, consider printing the digits of a googolplex in unreadable, 1-point font. Tex 1pt font is .3514598mm per digit, which means it would take about 3.5 * 10⁹⁶ meters to write in one point font. The known universe is estimated at 7.4 * 10²⁶ meters in diameter, which means the distance to write the digits would be about 4.7 * 10⁶⁹ times the diameter of the known universe.

-- courtesy of Answers.com

Your task for today is to figure out which of the following is closer to a googolplex:

• The US Federal budget deficit
• The combined salaries of all players in the NBA
• Bill Gates’ spare change
• The number of kilos of cocaine consumed annually in Hollywood
• The number of biased reports by the MSM on a daily basis

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/31/2005 at 02:18 PM   
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Wonder Woman

Lisa, at Urban Grind, is the blogosphere’s new Wonder Woman. In addition to the Grind, she has now started up a new blog (you’re gonna love this) to expose NewsSqueak magazine. It’s called the Madison Avenue Maverick. She is listing all of NewsSqueaks’s advertisers each week and plans to provide coverage of all the liberal MSM’s advertisers. Add it to your bookmarks and check it out regularly. The best way to send a message to the liberal media is through their pocketbook .... and say hello to Lisa while you’re there. Any gal who can run two blogs at once definitely has to be Wonder Woman!

P.S. Lisa is known here as BMEWS member “lisar915”. Watch out for her invisible jet and golden lasso though. Wonder Woman kicks butt, dont’cha know?

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/31/2005 at 11:59 AM   
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Bohemian Rhapsody

Mae, at Bohemian Conservative, has had a religious epiphany and it scares “epiph” out of me because it smells suspiciously like another religion’s “master plan”. Go read it. BYOK (Bring Your Own Kiwis).

But I’m just a poor boy and nobody loves me
He’s just a poor boy from a poor family
Spare him his life from this monstrosity
Easy come easy go - will you let me go
Bismillah! No - we will not let you go - let him go
Bismillah! We will not let you go - let him go
Bismillah! We will not let you go - let me go
Will not let you go - let me go (never)
Never let you go - let me go
Never let me go - ooo
No, no, no, no, no, no, no -
Oh mama mia, mama mia, mama mia let me go
Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me
for me ..
for me ....

Note: Yes, I’m finally back home after a rough weekend. I’m catching up on e-mails now.

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/31/2005 at 11:44 AM   
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Amnesty Internationale

_{Mike Thompson, Detroit, Michigan, The Detroit Free Press}

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 05/31/2005 at 11:18 AM   
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SCOTUS Promotes Religion

The Supreme Court this week decided that prisoners must be provided with religious materials or states risk losing federal funding for their prisons ....

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the constitutionality of a federal law requiring state prisons to accommodate inmate religions.

Justices unanimously sided with Ohio inmates, including a witch and a Satanist, who had claimed they were denied access to religious literature, ceremonial items and time to worship.

“It confers no privileged status on any particular religious sect, and singles out no bona fide faith for disadvantageous treatment,” Ginsburg wrote.

The law requires states that receive federal money to accommodate prisoners’ religious beliefs unless wardens can show that the accommodation would be disruptive.

Opponents of the law had argued that inmate requests for particular diets, special haircuts or religious symbols could make it harder to manage prisons.

“We do not read (the law) to elevate accommodation of religious observances over an institution’s need to maintain order and safety,” wrote Ginsburg. “We have no cause to believe that (the law) would not be applied in an appropriately balanced way, without sensitivity to security concerns.”

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 05/31/2005 at 11:06 AM   
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News You Can Use

• French voters rejected the EU “constitution” on Sunday and the Dutch are up next on Wednesday. It looks like the United States Of Europe is dead on arrival.


• The Supreme Court has just overturned the conviction of the Arthur Anderson auditing firm for destroying documents in the Enron scandal. I still think Nixon should have burned the tapes too.


• Former Iraqi President Sodomy Insane will go on trial within the next two months. Talk about your trial of the century.


• Rich twit Paris Hilton engaged to Greek shipping tycoon. The happy couple made the announcement at a friendly backyard barbecue.


• Kubie, the 600-pound tiger just got a root canal. Now there was one scared dentist .... with good reason ....

Kubie has teeth as long as human fingers and generates about 10,000 pounds of jaw pressure with each bite. That power is especially daunting considering Kubie had a toothache.

So the experts relied on anesthesia and hard-earned skills Saturday to make sure the big cat got the proper care.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 05/31/2005 at 10:35 AM   
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   Monday - May 30, 2005

Skipper Update

I have just got off the phone with The Skipper. For the record, he is in the North Georgia hills and will be flying back to St. Louis tomorrow. That’s a good thing because I have run out of the stuff he left me to post over the Memorial Day weekend. I will try to post some stuff in the news tomorrow and hopefully Skipper will be back on Wednesday and this ghost can fade back into the woodwork.

For those who are wondering, Skipper asked me to restrict all guest posters until his return. He says that it is just time for him to resume his full duties on this blog and to thank the gang who stood in for him in recent months. He says he will still accept guest posts that are e-mailed to him but he feels he needs to jump back in full-time.

I shouldn’t pass this along yet but here goes .... the reason for The Skipper’s abrupt absence was the death of a close friend .... more importantly, the suicide of a man he has known for nearly thirty years. I’m afraid it shook him pretty badly. I have never heard him sound so quiet and withdrawn as when I talked to him a little while ago. I’m sure he’ll be alright and may provide more insight when he returns.

I thank you all for bearing with me over the last several days.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 05/30/2005 at 03:06 PM   
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A Warrior’s Tale

nce upon a time, in a far-away land, there lived a man who was a warrior and philosopher. His name was Xenophon and he lived from 427-355 BC in Greece. He was born an Athenian and was a student of Socrates. He was highly intelligent, loved the cavalry and was reputed to be the first “Horse Whisperer”, based on his book On Horsemanship.

In 401 BC, the Peloponnesian War had come to an end. There were thousands of Greek warriors with years of veteran experience under their belts and no one to fight. Out of Asia came Cyrus The Younger ready to hire the Greeks as mercenaries to help him take the Persian throne from his older brother Ataxerxes II. The Greeks willingly signed on for the expedition, believing Cyrus’ lies that he had been cheated out of the throne. There is much, much more to the story than I can tell about here, involving Cyrus’ father Darius and his support of Sparta against Athens, the treachery of Tissaphernes, the cunning plots of Alcibiades .... the entire region was one large soap opera.

Anyway, Xenophon marched off into Asia with 10,000 (approximate) Greek warriors to fight the Persians, along with approximately 20,000 Asian allies rounded up by Cyrus. The Greek infrantry marched across modern-day Turkey and finally confronted the enemy at a place called Cunaxa (near modern-day Baghdad). In the broad plains between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers a hard fought pitched battle was won by the battle-hardened Greeks .... but in the course of the battle, Cyrus was killed. When their allies saw that Cyrus was dead, they surrendered to Ataxerxes, leaving the 10,000 alone between Iraq and a hard place.

Through an act of treachery during proposed amnesty talks, the Persians killed Clearchus, the Spartan leader of the Greeks. The Greeks were left to elect new leaders and try to fight their way out of Injun Country. Thousands of miles from home or from the sea, they began the long march north to the Euxine Sea (present-day Black Sea).

Xenophon was one of those elected to lead the retreat and eventually became overall leader through attrition as the Persians harried and pursued them every inch of the way. Xenophon recorded the entire story in his monumental work, “Anabasis” ("March Up Country"). It is a tale of tremendous heroism and suffering. It is a tale of the infantry. It is a story everyone should read who would understand the rigors of war.

As a present to our many readers I present the full text of “Anabasis”, translated from the Greek (PDF - 528 KB), courtesy of the Gutenberg Project. You may download it and read it at your leisure. Any of our troops reading this may wish to visit the site of the Battle Of Cunaxa when the dust settles over there. I’m sure they will understand that in 2400 years, little has changed in the life of the infantryman. I salute all the warriors currently on duty in Iraq, Afghanistan and other lonely outposts around the world.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 05/30/2005 at 02:20 PM   
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In Order To Form A More Perfect Union

“An army of skeletons appeared before our eyes naked, starved, sick and discouraged.”
-- New York’s Gouverneur Morris of the Continental Congress

“The unfortunate soldiers were in want of everything; they had neither coats nor hats, nor shirts, nor shoes. Their feet and their legs froze until they were black, and it was often necessary to amputate them.”
-- Marquis de Lafayette

To David Ayers
March 3, 1836

Take care of my little boy. If the country should be saved, I may make for him a splendid fortune; but if the country be lost and I should perish, he will have nothing but the proud recollection that he is the son of a man who died for his country.

William Barret Travis

The letter to David Ayers is the last known letter
written by Travis before the fall of the Alamo on
the morning of March 6, 1836.

William Barret Travis died at his post on the cannon
platform at the northeast corner of the fortress.

He was 26 years old.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 05/30/2005 at 10:22 AM   
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So That Others Might Be Free, Part VI

On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country.  Americans have known wars—but for the past 136 years, they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941.  Americans have known the casualties of war—but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning.  Americans have known surprise attacks—but never before on thousands of civilians.  All of this was brought upon us in a single day—and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.

After all that has just passed—all the lives taken, and all the possibilities and hopes that died with them—it is natural to wonder if America’s future is one of fear.  Some speak of an age of terror.  I know there are struggles ahead, and dangers to face.  But this country will define our times, not be defined by them.  As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror; this will be an age of liberty, here and across the world.

Great harm has been done to us.  We have suffered great loss.  And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment.  Freedom and fear are at war.  The advance of human freedom—the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time—now depends on us.  Our nation—this generation—will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future.  We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage.  We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.

-- President George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, September 20, 2001

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 05/30/2005 at 09:32 AM   
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So That Others Might Be Free, Part V

The Tet Offensive was a series of battles in the Vietnam War. It was a major offensive by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the National Liberation Front (NLF), commonly known as the Viet Cong, beginning on the night of January 30-31, 1968, Tết Nguyên Đán (the lunar new year day). It involved military action in most of the major cities in southern Vietnam and attacks on the US firebase at Khe Sanh. The attacks on Khe Sanh are usually considered separate from the actual Tet Offensive occurring at approximately the same time. The objective of the 1968 Tet Offensive was to take the Nationalist and the US armies by surprise since the North Vietnam’s government proposed a ceasefire for the celebration of the Lunar New Year.

The NLF and the NVA lost around 35,000 men killed, 60,000 wounded and 6,000 POWs. The US and ARVN dead totalled around 3,900 (1,100 US). US media reports of the battles shocked both the American public and its politicians. Apparently the depth of the US reaction surprised even the North Vietnamese leadership. The role of the US media in forming popular opinion about the results of the Tet Offensive has been most notably explored in Peter Braestrup’s book Big Story.

-- Wikipedia

I graduated from high school in June of 1967. Like every other young man in those days, I had few choices. It was either get into college, join the National Guard or be drafted and sent to Vietnam (in my family, running away to Canada or claiming to be either homosexual or a conscientious objector were not options). I was lucky. A scholarship to the University Of Alabama kept me out of Vietnam, otherwise my family could never have afforded it. Others were not so lucky.

From the relative safety of my dorm room , I watched the protesters on the evening news, saw the carnage of the war, heard the reassurances from LBJ, Westmoreland and the other “powers that be” and tried to keep it all straight in my head. I also kept my head in my books and worried about all the friends and family I knew who were patrolling the jungles of Vietnam. I slowly began to hate the leftist, anti-war protesters as much as I hated the government they were protesting.

We had all begun to suspect there was something terribly wrong with that war. There is not enough room here to explain in detail all the things that went wrong both in Vietnam and on America’s streets and college campuses. There was mismanagement by our government, under Lyndon B. Johnson, lies from the top brass in the military, treasonous acts by Hollywood actresses, drug-fueled protests by leftist hippies all over the country (covered extensively by an increasingly liberal media) and .... caught in the middle were The Unlucky Few.

They didn’t ask for that war, they didn’t want to fight, they just did what they thought they had to do.

Others ran off to Canada, burned their draft cards, protested, chanted, marched and .... took it out on The Unlucky Few. Soldiers returning from Vietnam were treated horribly by a large number of Americans who felt their protests against the war should include protests against the soldiers.

These “others” lived in a virtual reality, all their own. Drugs played a large part in that scene. Self-righteous arrogance played an even bigger part. This great nation has yet to recover from their insanity. They are still blaming America for all the world’s ills, still living in a drug induced never-land of the mind, still spewing their hatred of the military.

And what happened to The Unlucky Few?

My father was one of The Unlucky Few. He died in 1978, after the war in Vietnam was finally concluded. Thirty years in the military and three tours in Vietnam. God rest his soul.

And the rest of them? Well, a grateful nation gave them a memorial. This nation dug a big hole in the ground and threw two huge black rocks in it in the shape of a “V”, then inscribed the names of all The Unlucky Few who had fought and died in that misbegotten war .... all 58, 253 of them. In my opinion, that just added insult to injury.

I take hope that today in America, there is a rebirth of common sense and pride in our country that is steadily growing. The majority of Americans are coming to realize that freedom is costly and any war should always be the last resort of an honest nation. Make no mistake, the current war on terror is justified .... by over 3,000 American lives that were lost on September 11, 2001. The problems in the Middle East have been festering for centuries. Our troops over there today will fight to help spread freedom and democracy. Some of them will die. So that we may live. In freedom.

I only hope and pray that one day our nation will allow the memory of those who died in Vietnam to climb out of that hole and shed the black rock they have been consigned to. When that happens, the people of this great nation may finally be forgiven by .... The Unlucky Few.

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/30/2005 at 06:00 AM   
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   Sunday - May 29, 2005

So That Others Might Be Free, Part IV

Officially it was designated Hill 255, but its contour lines on a map of Korea and a 1959 film made it world famous as Pork Chop Hill. Based on a book by military historian S.L.A. Marshall, the movie dealt only with the penultimate, two-day battle for Pork Chop Hill in April 1953. In actuality, that hill claimed the lives of soldiers from the United States, Thailand, Colombia, the Republic of Korea (ROK) and China in an ongoing struggle that lasted longer than on any other single battlefield in Korea.

After Communist North Korean forces invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, the war raged up and down the peninsula several times as the United States, the United Nations (U.N.) and finally Communist China sent ground forces there. By July 1952, however, both sides had constructed such strong defensive lines that neither could undertake a major offensive without suffering unacceptable losses. In 1952, North Korea and China had 290,000 men on the front lines and another 600,000 in reserve. The U.N. countered with 250,000 troops on the line, backed by 450,000 reserves.

Posted by Ronald Reagan's Ghost     on 05/29/2005 at 03:59 PM   
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