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Posts in Category: View From 1964
A War Being Run By the Second String
I was in the Army Corps of Engineers for six years. Sounds impressive. I must know my stuff.
Let me tell you war stories. Let me show you my tattoos. Let me regale you with heroics that will make you swoon. I will lead into battle and command troops like no other. Just look at me — a true American hero. All you have to do is be stupid enough to believe me.
Now for the truth.
Yes, I was in the Army for six years. Yes, I was trained as a Pioneer Combat Engineer. Yes, I was taught to clear minefields with a bayonet, build bridges between our infantry and theirs, and duck when the bullets screamed by.
But what wasn’t said — what never gets said by people like me — is that I enlisted right after my 17th birthday, still in high school, in the California National Guard. November 1963. Monthly Guard meetings until graduation, then off to basic training at Fort Ord.
For anyone who went through basic training, you know the first thing they try to do is intimidate, confuse, and disorient you. That’s a pretty hard thing to accomplish when you and your brother had the run of the base because your father had been the East Garrison Commander — but that’s another story.
Basic done. Off to Fort Leonard Wood for advanced training. Back by Christmas. Monthly meetings. First summer camp and we had the Watts Riots — not nice, but afterwards a walk in the park.
Why? Because I did the worst thing you can do in the military. I volunteered.
During monthly meetings there isn’t much to do except clean things. So when they needed a cook I raised my hand. I like to cook. Every summer camp afterward, instead of going to the desert and sleeping in the dirt, I went to Camp San Luis Obispo and cooked for the California Military Academy. Didn’t ride in a deuce and a half for 200 miles — I drove my ’48 MG TC and later my ’68 Plymouth GTX. Rough six years. Great war stories — catching flies and drag racing up the main entrance.
I tell you all of this for one reason.
The people who tell you heroic war stories are liars. The people who actually saw the horrors of war keep it to themselves. My father served in the Pacific, was stationed in Japan, served in Korea, was stationed in Germany. My brother’s National Guard unit was one of the very few activated and sent to Vietnam. I had close friends drafted who went. None of them ever told me war stories. And I never asked.
I also tell you this because I know what I am talking about. I am an Army brat — born and bred. And I know BS when I smell it.
You don’t have to be Rambo. You just have to be honest with and about yourself.
Which is why I am bothered — genuinely, deeply bothered — when a Fox News broadcaster covered in tattoos has the unmitigated gall to believe he has the experience and wisdom to lead our fine service personnel into battle.
He is such a leader that his spiritual pep talks are plagiarized from Tarantino movies.
Perhaps that explains why Major General William Green Jr., Army Chief of Chaplains, was fired in April 2026. He may have thought the Bible was a better source for scripture than Pulp Fiction.
He wasn’t alone. Here is what the first string looks like after the second string finished with it:
General Randy George, Army Chief of Staff — removed and asked to retire, April 2026, following disputes with Hegseth. Major General William Green Jr., Army Chief of Chaplains — fired — the first time in history this role was terminated by the Secretary of Defense. General David Hodne — removed from command of the Transformation and Training Command. General C.Q. Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs — fired. General James Slife, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff — removed. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Chief of Naval Operations — fired. Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, Defense Intelligence Agency — fired.
The first string was either fired or asked to resign. What we have left is the second string. At best.
And at the very top — bone spurs and all — a man now talking about bringing back firing squads because he finds other people’s free speech inconvenient. Only his own has value.
Pete’s Crusader Cross tattoo is going to look real interesting sagging off an eighty year old man’s bitch tits in about twenty years. But that’s the least of our problems right now.
We have the second string running the show.
Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?
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The Ash Didn’t Disappear
I was eight or nine years old, an American officer’s son, when I walked through Dachau.
I remember the ovens. I remember the showers. I remember the stains still on the walls. I remember the ash piles — this was 1954, nine years after liberation — and the ash still hadn’t disappeared. It had not yet soaked completely into the dirt.
If you think eight years old is too young to remember something like that, you don’t know a child whose memory is a video recorder without an erase feature.
As I grew older I could never understand how the German people had allowed it to happen. How ordinary men and women watched it unfold and did nothing. How a civilization that produced Beethoven and Goethe looked away while the ovens ran.
I am getting a better understanding these days.
Ignorance and apathy go a long way. Distance from history plays a large role as well. And the road has to stretch far enough that the people who remember are gone before the circle closes.
But not all of us are gone.
My father was stationed in postwar Germany, Army Corps of Engineers officially. When you read through his documents as an adult he appears to have played larger roles — why else would his pancreatic cancer have been attributed to White Sands testing? He was 6’2″, quiet, decorated. Purple Hearts. Bronze Star. Never talked about any of it.
Dachau was probably a Saturday or Sunday outing. Dad, Mom, my brother and I. Before the monuments, before the cleanup, before the ash was removed or fully absorbed. Just the ovens and the showers and the stains and the silence of a place where the horror was still present enough to touch.
We went home afterward. I honestly don’t remember if we were still driving the 1952 red Ford convertible my mother had bought when my father turned his back and left for Germany, or the new 1955 Austin Healey — all red, red leather, red top. Either way there were four of us, none of us small, a full sized long haired dachshund, and a very little car touring a lot of postwar Germany. One of us boys on the padded hump, the other between Mom’s legs, the dog on the floorboard. I don’t remember any of us complaining much.
But I am drifting from what brought me here.
A brief history is in order.
On February 27, 1933, the German Reichstag building burned. Within hours Hitler’s government blamed the Communists. The following day the Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties across Germany. Within weeks political opponents were being arrested for using their voices to warn about the man in power.
Whether the fire was set by the Nazis themselves remains disputed. What is not disputed is what they did with it. The crisis — real or manufactured — became the mechanism. The emergency became the justification. And by the time people understood what was happening the machinery was already running.
We don’t need to know who fired the shots at the White House Correspondents Dinner. What matters is what came immediately after.
The White House Press Secretary — who by any reasonable standard should have been on maternity leave — delivered remarks that directly attacked the First Amendment. What we say going forward will not be treated as political commentary. It will be treated as slander. As sedition.
This was delivered shortly after the Department of Justice had been instructed to explore reinstating firing squads as a form of capital punishment.
I am not speculating about the shooting. I am not attributing motive. I am simply observing the sequence. Crisis. Immediate response. Threats against speech. Escalating consequences for dissent.
I have seen this sequence before.
Not in a textbook. In the dirt. In the ash that hadn’t yet disappeared nine years after the fact.
We look at history as a linear line. We open the textbook at the beginning and work forward to where we are standing. But I cannot help feeling, standing on this hill in time and looking at that line from the side, that it has taken a detour and made a circle back onto itself.
The problem is that the road stretched far enough that most of the people who would recognize the circle have died.
But not all of us.
I walked through Dachau at eight years old. The ash was still there.
I am still here too.
And I remember everything.
