Decoration Day 2026

 

As is my wont this day, I left North Portland early to visit Willamette National Cemetery and spend some time with my Army brothers.

It was...well, you know what it was, because I do this every year, and if you're one of the few people still reading this (and, yes, that "few" is my own fault for being a Bad Blogger and not posting more content. I get it.) you've read these Memorial Day posts and know where I go and what I do.

The big burying ground was its usual serene and manicured self. The visitors were sparse, as always in the early morning, although a bit more numerous in the newer, outer areas, where more of the dead from what I think of as "my generation" of wars are buried.

Still vastly out-buried by the crowd from the mid-Twentieth-Century wars, mind. As the generation born in the 1920s and 30's goes down to the grave in hastening numbers the space for my people, the younger troops from Iraq and Afghanistan (and the other farcical imperial adventures like my own Caribbean vacation of 1983 or Panama in 1989), is grossly over-filled with our parents or grandparents.

So much so that I was almost shocked to find someone who was actually killed in Iraq, a Marine staff sergeant whose luck finally ran out on his third tour in June of 2007. 

I took the time to look him up; when he bought the farm he was working as a bomb-disposal guy, presumably hunting for IEDs. His obit said he'd joined as a 17-year-old kid who had wanted to be a rodeo bull rider and Marine, had volunteered for the 2336 MOS after a bunch of embassy guard tours, and had ended up in Anbar Province where some anonymous muj had built for him a bull he couldn't ride.

As always, I poured out a beer to him and all my brothers; not gone, just marching far away, and explaining that I'd be there soon; sooner than I'd hoped, anyway. 

And, as always, I apologized, for not being a better citizen and keeping them from wasting years or their lives in pointless wars in distant places because I'd let the lies and foolishness and stupidity and evil of my "leaders" go unpunished. 

I mourned for them, and for myself, that the ideals and illusions they and I had been raised on - of our country and our people - had turned out to be nonsense, a tissue of credulous fables spun around promises We the People had never fought and worked hard enough to redeem.

 
And then I left. 

Down the green and shining hill, up onto the freeway that took me back through the busy outlands of southeast then northeast Portland to the patch of grown-over waste ground that is now the Whittaker Pond greenspace, where I took up my binoculars and spent a quiet hour looking and listening.

To the sounds of wind and water. To the hushed noises of business and traffic. To the quiet life of the city around me, doing it's daily business through wars and rumors of wars.

And then I went home.

Don't get me wrong.

I'm still incandescent with rage at the wreckage the parcel of greedy fools led by a bloated moron has done to my nation. I'm still fulminating because of the betrayal of people like me, soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines - and all those we have been and will be sent to kill and maim - who have been and will be carelessly tossed in harm's way for a bump of the Dow or some AI-slop social media shit.

But I'm still here. 

Not dead yet.

And as I promised my brothers; if I can summon the sheer gall and anger to be there to piss on all their graves, every one of the sonsofbitches?

I will.

Until then?

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few,
And they're all dead.

------- 

As always on this day; this.

Welthauptstadt Germania; an update on D.C.

So the eagle has landed, and boy fuckin' howdy are the Bad Guys on the run:

"Between the first two nights of the federal takeover, 66 arrests were made, with another 45 being made Wednesday — numbers that Parker argued paled in comparison to the potential millions of dollars the deployment will cost taxpayers.

“In fact, 1,450 officers participated in Tuesday night’s operation to arrest 43 people; this comes to 34 officers per alleged offender,” Parker wrote.

“On Wednesday night, 1,650 officers participated, which breaks down to about 37 officers per alleged criminal. And on Thursday, 20 officers arrested a plainly overwrought man who allegedly threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent at 14th and U streets NW. Your tax dollars at work.”

Which takes us back to the first post about this, which asked several questions but not, perhaps, the most important one, which is

"What, exactly, are all these GIs going to actually do?"

These aren't civil cops. They're Joe and Molly, weekend warriors, cooks, bakers, mechanics, grunts, MPs, PAC clerks. You don't enforce law with fucking PAC clerks, you fill in forms.

That has been lingering in the back of my mind since I posted earlier.

Don't handwave. Be specific. What is one of these DCARNG "presence patrols" going to do?

Can you imagine a couple of the guys from your local Guard unit chasing robbers like T.J. Fucking Hooker? Rousting bums from the park? How? At bayonet point? With just their amazing Guard jedi mind trick powers?

Will they walk around hand-in-hand with the newly-federalized D.C. cops the way the Royal Army did the RUC in Belfast?

And if so, why? The IRA was an armed insurgency. Backing the Ulster cops with soldiers made perfect sense (not that I'm arguing that the British occupation of Ireland made or makes sense in any fashion, just that if you're going to try and do policing during a guerilla war you kinda have to do it that way...) but the D.C. cops aren't fighting guerrillas.

So...what? What are all these GIs shambling around the Tidal Basin doing? They're on our fucking taxpayer dime, so I'd sure like to know if my money is being wasted on the military equivalent of a multi-million dollar gold-encrusted fucking ballroom.

Just sayin'.

Update 8/17: So, couple of things. 

First, here's where all these Sicherheitsdienst commandos are strolling:

 

As the Fallows account post that contains this image notes; this ain't where the crooks are.

These are the "good" neighborhoods and where the public attractions like the monuments and other touristy shit are. These jokers are not Crushing Crime. They're wandering around doing fucking presence patrols, and about as uselessly as in Kandahar or Fallujah.

The other fucked-up part? Porky has got wingnut governors tripping over themselves to send GIs; Ohio, South Carolina, and West Virginia.

Okay, now. I mentioned that how you could do this here in Oregon is bus guys from downstate, or out in the Greater Idaho parts of the joint to bust Portland heads, but that the District is too small for that. 

This is how you get around that.

But...South Carolina? Seriously? You're gonna send those fucking crackers to D.C.? Now that's gonna fucking end well. That's just mindbendingly ridiculous. 

I get it; just like the rest of this, it's not about anything real. In this case it's wingnut governors competing to see who can get their tongue the furthest up Tubby'a anus.

Doesn't make it any less goddamn irritating, mind. 

Presence patrol

 Apparently we're doing this... 

 
...because it worked so fucking well in Baghdad and Kabul:

"President Donald Trump announced he is placing the Washington, DC, police department “under direct federal control” and deploying National Guard troops to the nation’s capital..."

It's easy enough to sanewash or handwave why the drooling moron is doing this, but to me the real issues are in the mechanics of the actual doing. Because...

1)  Soldiers are shitty cops.

That's also #2 through infinity.

Soldiers are trained to kill people and break shit. That's the nature of the business. So whenever you try to use them as "cops" (call them "OOTW", "assistance to the host nation", "peacekeeping", "occupation", whatever...) you run a genuine risk that that training will break out in unforeseen and usually disruptive or even dangerous ways.

Think the paras in Belfast, or the 325th in Fallujah. If you put Joe and Molly in a tight spot, they're going to default to their training, which is not "cop".

Mind you, as I think I've hammered hard on here, even "cops" aren't often very good at "peacekeeping". Confronted with people they dislike and distrust their go-to reaction is to pull out the club and the pepper spray and start shit.

So using soldiers to police D.C.? Just in and of itself that's not a smart thing, because

2) The things Trump is telling these GIs to do would be difficult to impossible even for truly gifted and well-led municipal leaders, police and social service organizations and staff.

"The Homeless will have to move out, IMMEDIATELY."

Where? 

How?

As I noted when the City of Portland had this brilliant idea a couple of years back, what the actual fuck do you expect these poor bastards to do? 

"The Good People for Portland are nutty enough about the hobo camps as it is. Can you imagine the reaction to wandering groups of encumbered homeless people like some sort of Mongol horde with shopping carts instead of horses? And this is the supposedly GOOD idea the Portland city government is proposing?"

Yeahno. 

So here's an interesting note on this whole "round 'em up and shove 'em in The Camps" thing.

I had a lovely evening with a dear friend not too long ago. She's a retired elementary school teacher, grandma, traveler, thoughtful and honest and kind. 

(FWIW, the tradition around here is that we don't show people's faces without their permission, but feet are fair game...)

But she's also a longtime Portlander who's had bad experience with homeless/feral street people in the past and, like the rest of us, is sick and tired of the trash and the noise and the apparent menace. 

She's all in on these camps.

"They can get help there. They can get treatment. They can get their lives straightened out".

My response was "Okay, let's say that happens." (thinking "we don't want to pay for that now, why would we pay for that once the hoboes are locked up out of sight..?") "Then what?"

Once you've caught-and-released these people? They're still broke. Still unable to afford a roof, a shower, a toilet. Still unemployed, or underemployed to where they don't make enough to pay for those. 

"We will give you places to stay..."

WTF? Seriously? How? Where? No, show your work. Where are these Homeless Havens? Who pays for them? Who maintains, and runs, and cleans them?

And how do soldiers help do all that?

Is Tubby suggesting that the D.C. Guard set up Homeless Refugee Camps in Bradenburg? Silver Spring? How? Who's gonna pay for that, and for how long?

And while we're on the subject of the D.C. Guard...

3) We're probably not talking the most elite of military material here or the best military experience for doing this, either.

Fatso might think that wearing the tree suit makes you a combination Rambo and Clausewitz (drink!), but in my experience a lot of Guard joes were fairly average at best, and a fair number of them had little or no active time. 

Farkling about Southwest Asia has changed that...but not for the better. So the ones that do have RA experience? A lot of these jokers will have "presence patrol" experience in Iraq or Afghanistan and associate that with policing at best unwelcoming and at worst dangerously hostile places.

Putting someone whose "peacekeeping" experience is Kandahar or Basra or Baghdad in NW Washington D.C.? Probably not a good idea.

I'm guessing that the primary unit that will be tasked for this is the 372nd Military Police Battalion. The D.C. Guard website says that the "Red Hand" outfit...

"...plays a crucial role in conducting traffic control, corrections, security and mobility support, especially during National Special Security Events, like Presidential Inaugurations and when deployed, such as the 276th Military Police Company’s deployment to Guantanamo Naval Base, Cuba in 2016."

So pretty much cage-kickers, with a short c.v. in crowd control. Not sure how that works on the Mean Streets of Foggy Bottom.

So this looks a lot like the "depopulation" thing we just talked about; a "one-simple-trick" "conservative" "solution" to a difficult and complex (and, I note passing, an imaginary-in-the-"no, crime and vandalism and mayhem are not really running wild in D.C."-sense, but that's pointless to drag in because this isn't about an actual thing but the usual "conservative" reality-is-what-I-believe-it-is bugnuttery) problem.

One of the worst aspects of Trumpism is the grinding stupidity of it.

It's exhausting. The daily piling of stupid on nonsensical on corrupt on ignorant all founded on ridiculous 4chan gibberish. Trying to push back against it is like shoveling water; it's ALL just bullshit all the way down, so there's no actual logic or reason or sense involved, there's no bedrock there outside bafflegab, so there's no pinning down these people or their ideas to beat the life out of them. They just ooze from one idiotic notion to another to justify whatever they want to do, because that's all it's really about. 

It's what they want to do and now they can.

And that it pisses their enemies off?

That's just gravy. 

Decoration Day 2025

 As usual this past Monday I spent part of the morning down among the dead men.

This time I sort of bogued on my Army brothers and instead of heading east to the big Willamette National Cemetery on Mt. Scott traveled only as far as the little burying ground at the old Vancouver Barracks, right across the river in Washington state.

It's an odd sort of place befitting the long and patchwork history of the old post along the Big River; frontier fort, trading post, white settlement and Indian agency, river port town, early aerodrome, and in the end neglected, largely forgotten, and finally abandoned.

The burials reflect this, both in style and content.

Unlike the green and shining uniformity of the flat headstones on the Willamette cemetery hill, Vancouver's green lawn is broken by many what I think of as the older "standard" above-ground stone markers you see in Arlington (so difficult to mow around!) as well as even older, non-spec markers like LT Watson's here:

 

The silent community includes not just soldiers but wives and children - so many infants and young kids from what I assume was the garrison of the 19th and early 20th Centuries! - and even a trio of former enemies; two German POWs and an Italian - though if I was SGT Dioguardi I'd have come bolting out of my grave in an undead fury:

"Wassafuck' a matta fo you!? You thinka this a flag Italiano? Tha fuck? You gotta Tedeschi flags for the fuckin' Tedeschi but notta Italiano fo' me? Betta nothing at-a all than this! You thinka Imma fuckin' Russian?!?! Fangool, tu bastardo!"

The sheer heterogeneity of the Vancouver burials kept me surprisingly entertained, so I wandered the little cemetery for a while with my dram of whisky in my pocket, bundled against the late May chill, until I ran across these two:

Army 1SG Carlisle and Marine 1SG Martin; the former possibly a First Shirt from one of the infantry companies posted here before the 1940s, the latter undoubtedly retired locally from his bootneck days.

Both seemed likely to at least tolerate an old platoon sergeant, so I shared out the fine peaty draft, hoping that they'd had a laugh or two and come home sound from their service days. I found my little cars and joined the traffic drifting back across the River of the West to my new home in my old St. Johns.

That afternoon I completed my memorial obligations by finishing the "Murph", the Memorial Day workout dedicated specifically to a Navy SOF-type officer but to the war dead of the 21st Century in general. I did this last year and wrote about it here.

This year I rucked lighter -10kg instead of the EFMB standard 35lbs - but I hit a personal record for repetitions; 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 squats, so hooah, me.

Last year I came away from the day somewhat bitter and dissatisfied with my country and the way it has memory-holed the wars and the dead of my generation. 

I wrote:

"I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead."

 Oddly, at the end of yesterday I didn't feel quite so angry and bitter.

Yes, my country is going to Hell (or Republican Christopathic oligarchic MAGAt fascism, which is arguably worse).

Yes, I have lost the home and wife and family I worked for for twenty-five years.

Yes, I'm old, and alone, and dying slowly of Parkinson's Disease.

But I'm still here.

In George McDonald Fraser's memoirs he remembers his uncle toasting himself and his former mates of the 92nd Infantry Regiment, the Gordon Highlanders, with the pledge "Ninety-twa, no' deid yet!"

That always seemed to me an absolutely perfect soldierly sort of toast. Not a boast or a brag of great deeds done, not a promise of noble actions to come, but a simple declaration; I'm still here, still standing; I'm not dead yet.

And so I am. Sixty-seven, not dead yet. 

So here's to you, my brothers, on this Decoration Day 0f 2025.

Let the dead lie in honor and the living fight the good fight, to the end not dead. 

Yet. 

As always today: this.

Decoration Day 2024

Yesterday, as I often do this time of year, I drove down to the southeast, to the big national cemetery up on Mt. Scott  in the Lents neighborhood to spend some time with my Army brothers.

Willamette National Cemetery was its usual peaceful, pretty self. Shining in the morning sun, colorful with rank upon rank of little flags...

(which made me think, as it always does, of the unlucky bastards detailed to work their way along the rows of markers shoving little flag-sticks into the lawn. Given the lack of available privates, tho? Probably contract workers. Shame, that's kind of a perfect distillation of Army tradition; detailed, painstaking, back-achingly wearying, and boring all at the same time)

...which the Coasties had, again, infiltrated with their special Coast Guard flag-planting strike force. What IS it with those guys? Overcompensation? I mean, I like the USCG; they are the only uniformed service with jobs that 1) they get to do 24/7, and 2) don't have to include killing people and breaking shit. They're builders, not destroyers. Isn't that good enough for government work? Why this obsessive need to let everyone who visits, on this one day we set aside to ostensibly remember our dead, those of which wore the Coast Guard blue by being the only dead people with their own little service flags?

I still don't get it.

I drove through the glossy lawns down to the back side of the hill, looking for plots X, Y, and Z, where most of the dead of my generation are buried.

I didn't find them.

Well, there was this one poor joker, an E-Deuce who'd done his time in one of the Gulf Wars and made it home sound only to go toes-up at 44. 

Damn, dude. Sorry.

But as always my contemporaries were lost amid the huge crowd of the Greatest Generation. The WW2 and, to a lesser extent, Korean War people. And, I noticed, many more of the Vietnam era folks who are now running out of time. 

But from the Little Wars of the Oughts and Teens? Hardly anyone, and (because of the crowds on this day, the only day the park sees crowds...) I got caught in the one-way traffic routing that spit me out on the far side, irked and with my can of Pfriem IPA - shit, guys, I tried! And brought the good stuff this time! - unshared.

So fuck it. I drove home.

I putzed around the house, splitting time between chores and helping my soon-to-be-ex with the divorce paperwork (and if you think that military paperwork is grueling, get divorced; it's ridiculous), until finally I couldn't stand it and threw on my gym shoes and went to PDXStrength for the annual Murph.

This is apparently huge for the CrossFit crowd and is named for a Navy SEAL officer who was KIA in one of the many "how the fuck did you even think this would work..?" SEAL operations in Southwest Asia.

But despite the CrossFit/SEAL connections that would normally give iconoclastic Army me the giggy, it's a Memorial Day thing that involves effort, so I shoved a 35-pound plate in my old rucksack and got stuck in.

(The gist of this Murph thing is that it starts with an aerobic event (a mile run, usually) followed by strength events (pullups, pushups, squats) closed out with another mile run.

Well, my replacement parts rule out running, so I rucked a half-mile and quickly recalled how much I hated humping that thing when I had to do it for a living. Christ it sucks, hammering your back and legs no matter how hard you try and glide-step instead of jogging.

And, since pullups aren't my friend (and they're more of a sailor and marine thing, anyway), I substituted situps, and knocked out my sets of ten until I reached my age in reps; 66 pushups and situps are kind of my limit these days, anyway, then rucked up again and set off into Cathedral Park.

Where I couldn't help thinking that this young woman was enjoying her holiday much more than I was:

But that's the weird thing about this "holiday"; it's not supposed to be about fun. 

It's supposed to be a reflective, sorrowful remembrance of people who died. Many of them in great suffering, and all of them because of choices We the People made, or refused to make.

But We the People kinda suck at reflective. And sorrow. So Memorial Day is what it is; barbecues, mattress sales, lolling in the grass on a sunny summer day.

Okay, then.

Finally I returned to the gym. Shook some hands, ate a deviled egg (or four. Or six; fuck, they we fine), yarded the plate out of the damned ruck, and returned home to cook dinner.

In all? It was yet another in the string of semi-dissatisfying Memorial Days I've been having. 

My connection with my service days is waning, my irritation with my nation increasing. Now that, as the old jingle runs, the "...danger is passed and all things righted/God is forgotten and the soldier slighted" it seems even more futile to pretend to mourn or revere the war dead of our recent wars.

There are so few; no wonder the silent crowd of the wars of midcentury shoves them into silence.

I can't help but worry that my generation of soldiers will always be forgotten. I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead.

As always today: this.

Just following orders

 The end of the previous post reminded me of something recently that bugged me when I ran across it.

If you've read this blog for a while you've probably run into some maunderings about Star Wars in general (from my kid's former addiction) and the "clone trooper" characters in particular (because, well, soldiers and soldiering. And my affection for the Karen Traviss Republic Commando series).

Way back in 2011 I wrote about one of the "Clone War" arcs that I watched with the Kiddo. I was actually impressed with the potential for depth of the story...

"You might think that this could have been a story fraught with brilliant opportunities to examine the relationship between these men - slave soldiers bred to die for a Republic that gave and owed them nothing - and the leaders placed over them. To look inside a man like "Captain Rex"; a veteran professional, a created-man bred and trained to obey, but already a survivor of dozens of Lucas-battles where he and his friends and fellow-troopers are taught to stand without cover and shoot or move until killed, and scores of them are, and get to understand how he thinks and feels about beings like his new general.

And, in particular, you'd suspect that he'd have figured out by this time that his Jedi "officers" have none of the tactical training he's received. They have certain psychic skills but even those are not by nature useful in battle. So there's no real reason for a man like that to trust another being whose primary qualification for combat leadership is some sort of participation in a woo-woo Force religion and the ability to twirl a laser-sword.

You might also think that this would be a terrific opportunity to look at the relationship from the other side; from a member of a semimonastic Order instructed to avoid "relationships" suddenly placed in the most intimate of relationships - of deciding who lives and who dies. Of being a being gifted with mental powers who is thrust into war and told to command soldiers whose skills are merely physical to overcome physical fear and death in order to win sordid, gross political objectives."

...while being frustrated and disappointed by the resolution: 

"...basically, after a ton of time spent on relatively aimless (but visually cool) thud and blunder, the clone soldiers in the television story finally turned on their Jedi master

- the near-impossibility they found the task of subduing him made a subtle point about the mechanics of "Order 66", though I'm not sure that was Lucas' intent - but it turned out that he was neither a sadistic fool nor a misunderstood genius but that weakest of cinematic conventions, the Hidden Enemy. He was a "Sith", not a "Jedi" at all, not a bad officer, not a clueless but insecure fucktard, not an incompetent promoted above his abilities and furious at the innocent soldiers that forced him to demonstrate just how incapable he was...but a simple Black Hat, a cartoon baddie, a cardboard villain who has been murdering his troops because he can and because he likes it.

And the soldiers didn't have to confront the questions they raised about their commander, about what they would have done if he HAD been an incompetent commander, a brute, a fool, or a power-mad rogue. He was just Evil. So they killed him.

The Boy was fine with that; they're surprisingly callous at eight. But I wasn't, and I found myself regretting again that the creator of this facile universe was not a better father to his creation that I was to my own. I just wish that ol' George had a little more Karen Traviss in him."

Well, not too long ago I found out that Lucas had retconned his prequels yet again.

This time it was to insert - literally - an Elmo-style brain implant into his clone soldiers. This gimmick is supposed to have taken control of them when "Order 66" is issued and turns all the guys into ruthless killers. 

In one of the story arcs at one point some of our heros manage to yank this thing (whut? how? without killing the guy, I mean...) which makes the troopers Good Guys again.

That...bugs the living shit out of me, and I finally figured out why.

Because it steals the soldiers' humanity.

Way too many people as it is already think of soldiers as robots, trained like seals, meat puppets, unable to think or choose rationally, slaves to the rules and their orders.

Now, here, it's even more explicit; these men aren't "men". They're just like robots, with an electronic device that enslaves them, that forces them to act on another's will.

One of the most troubling, and troubled, questions a soldier - a person - will ever face is whether to do something that is morally fraught. Whether it's on their own or at the insistence of another, to do something that's perilously close to - or even over the line into - outright wrong.

This was one of those and while the television episode 12 years ago missed a great opportunity to tell a real story about that crisis this is, if anything, worse.

Think of the fictional setting.

Here are soldiers and their officers who have, many of them, gone through years and long, hard miles together, fought alongside each other, suffered together, grieved their dead and maimed friends together.

Suddenly events take place that suggest that those officers may be part of a deadly conspiracy.

And those officers are, most of them, powerful magic users while the soldiers are just men, muggles in the Potteresque sense, as helpless before their officers' magic as a child before an adult.

They can "arrest" their officers only if the officers let them. And the whole point is that the officers are supposed to have already begun to act in what has been a secret takeover using that magic. So the government, the legal authority, can't take chances - it orders the soldiers to execute their own officers.

That's a horrific situation, and it should have been. It should have forced the soldiers - and their officers - to confront the ties that bound them and the difference in the balance of power that separated them.

It should have given us some drama with a crushing moral weight, including agony and conflict between those soldiers who followed what they believed to be lawful orders with those who refused, believing that no such order could be lawful. And the aftermath; those men who killed other men who might have been leader they loved like brothers.

Instead it had all been retconned into not a moral dilemma...just a technical problem, a hardware glitch, that can be solved with a hammer and chisel and some pliers.

Yeah, yeah...it's schlock, just junk fiction. But who says that junk fiction has to be schlock? Some writers have done damn good work in this fictional world, and if ever there was an opportunity, this was one.

 Buy'ce olar, kar'ta ogir.

What a waste.

The Eleventh Minute of the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day

Today, for the first time in twenty-one years, my country isn't making veterans, at least not in any "official" foreign wars.

Oh, sure. Hundreds of GIs of one stripe or another are doing the nation's dirty business - some of it dangerous, as well - in various unpaved parts of the world for some nebulous "national interests" that your average Joe and Molly Lunchpail couldn't identify if they sat on their hands and thought about it for a fortnight.

But the "big wars" of the post-9/11, Post-Gulf-War 1 era?

Done.

And, look! 

Suddenly all that "support the troops" guff? 

It's disappeared like magic, melted like a fallen ice cream cone on a hot summer sidewalk. I didn't see a single Veterans Day ad, didn't hear so much as a whispered "thank you for your service" today. 

Those who gave their youth and strength in the wars their fellow citizens either helped gin up or were at least indifferent to those who ginned them up? 

As invisible as Marley's Ghost was to the suffering poor.

It is as it has always been; "Danger past and all things righted/God is forgotten and the soldier slighted".

But that's fine. 

That's what happens after wars, if there is an "after" to the wars. The worst part about the "War on Terror" was there never was an "after". 

For years and years I wrote on this day of the seemingly endless trickle of maimed and dead that we brought home, unresolved, and the fields of maimed and dead (and widowed and orphaned and sown with ruin and merciless hatred) we left behind us abroad.

That was the most awful thing; that for years my nation learned nothing and yet forgot nothing, carelessly devouring its' own and others' children like the Titan Kronos.

Well. that's done. 

For now, anyway.

Mind you, I don't expect that my fellow citizens have learned anything from the dark and bloody tale of our Adventures in Politics By Other Means. The next time some irksome foreigner pokes us in the giggy I'm sure the Great American Public can be counted on to rise in righteous wrath, wrapped in the flag and roaring that gawdawful "God Bless The USA" song, demanding that someone - someone else, mind you - go smite the dusky foe.

But at least, for now, we're nominally at peace.

And I'll take that.

Because, as Herodotus wrote: "No man is so foolish as to desire war more than peace: for in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons."

I wish you and all of yours a peaceful day full of small joys.

And to those of my brothers and sisters who also once wore the particolored clothes; 

Here's to us. Who's like us? Damn few, and they're all dead.

Decoration Day 2022

 I visited my Army brothers down in the Deep Southeast today, as has been my tradition this day for the past several years.

The big graveyard on the slopes of Mt. Scott hasn't changed. It was just like it always is, neat, tidy, orderly, quiet. Everything, in other words, that war and fighting are not. We like our wars to be distant and iconic, if we can make them so, and so Willamette National Cemetery plays its part.

Today was, as it always is, busy. Cars and truck-loads of families coming to visit their lost ones, "...not gone but marching far away". Older adults my age visiting parents of my parents generation, middle-aged kids of Vietnam-era parents, and young adults or actual kids who looked mostly to be grandkids or even great grandkids of the people who were there waiting silently for their living remainders.

The absence of truly young adults, the peers of the young men and women whose stone dates ended in our recent wars, was marked; at least I marked it. We've managed to make our dead disappear much as we made them disappear while they lived and fought the wars we wanted kept out of our lives.

I had to walk among the dead for a bit, not an unpleasant task on a warm spring day in a pretty garden spot, until I found one of my own generation; another platoon daddy, SFC Groome, who was only four years older than me but had done much hard service in the Gulf Wars. He'd also died a dozen years earlier, so it seemed like a good spot to stop and share a drink.

It wasn't a Bud or a Rainier pounder - when I go visit the dead I tend to drink like a grunt - but it was a fine malty draft, and after sharing I sat with him a while. I hoped he'd had a good life. I also apologized for the Iraq service his stone testified; for not being a better citizen and letting fools and knaves abuse his trust. 

I hoped that he'd had a decent tour, had time for a laugh or two, and had come home sound. And wished him a loving family to come and visit him now and then, to remember fondly his empty chair, and to keep his spirit alive in their hearts.

On the way back to the little Prius parked up the hill two lovely douce matrons asked me to take their photo; it seemed odd to want to pose over someone's grave, but they were kindly and I was obliging, so I snapped off some shots and made sure they checked their camera to ensure I'd done right. They thanked me sweetly, we exchanged courtesies amongst the orderly dead, and I resumed my climb, back to the car, then back down the hill, then back across the cloud-dappled Portland Monday to North and home.

As always on this day I felt ever more disconnected and adrift from the country that made this day a holiday for me and mine. 

Every year it seems less and less the country I'd hoped for when I was young and strong and proud in my own Army blue.

Yet.

As always today;

This.

 

H-Plus-40,471,200

Seventy-seven years ago last night one of my old units, the 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment went out the C-47 doors into the dark over northwestern France.

When you look at the record the 505th has been a pretty hard-luck unit.

In Sicily the green pilots of Air Transport Command and the inexperienced Allied commanders didn't think what the high wind over the south shore of the island might do to a night drop of a cherry outfit and scattered the 505th all over hell.

After getting hammered in Sicily the 505th jumped into the Salerno beachhead; the 505th missed the nightmare that had been the German attack two days earlier but spent the rest of 1943 grinding up the Italian peninsula and getting ground up in the process.

The plan for the Normandy drop was for the '05 to take and hold the town of St. Mere Eglise. 

 

As you can see from the map, this village was a chokepoint for roads both leading to Utah Beach as well as the high-speed lateral route along the shore. So nailing it down was pretty critical.

Well, as it seemed typical with those WW2 jumps, the real thing looked nothing like the plan.

See the little black dots? Each one is a "stick", a C-47-load of GIs. The biggest cluster is actually pretty damn close to the DZ, mind, which isn't bad given the darkness and the flak, but look at the other big cluster just to the left of the oval. See the gray hatch pattern where those guys landed?

That's the valley of a tributary of the Douve River that the Germans had flooded knowing that the Allies were damn likely to throw some paratroops at them. My guess is that the WW2 guys had a "water landing" gimmick just like we had in the Eighties, but just like ours it was a whole lot more likely to work in calm daylight training than in a night full of chaos and antiaircraft fire.

A lot of guys from my old outfit never made it out of the swamp.

Enough did, though, to take the town and win the war.

The '05 got stuck into the mess that was The Bridge Too Far, as well, and then had a rough winter on the northern side of the "Bulge".

After the Big War the '05 did the usual sorts of imperial grunt work, including - alone of the 82nd, Vietnam - and has deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, where continuing in the hard-luck tradition the 1st Battalion drew the Fallujah short straw.

I can't find a listing of how many of the guys who went out the doors that night are still around. Probably not too many, and those have to be in their nineties, so they're going to be gone, too, before too long. 

So I'm not sure there's a larger lesson to this one, other than "fucked up things happen in wartime", and that's been true since Thucydides' day.

But I guess the point is; here's to the boys of the 505th.

Who's like us?

Damn few, and they're all dead.

A view from the high hills

The only official national cemetery in Portland is down in the deepest Southeast, home of the New Copper Penny and every third you-pull-it junkyard in the metro region, so it was to there that I sailed down I-205 on a sunny morning to have the drink with the dead I share on this day.

 
Like every military cemetery I've every walked in Willamette is overwhelmingly tidy, dominated by the dress-right-dress-and-cover-down orderliness that we're taught in our training, as if by the sheer force of design and construction it can overwhelm the bizarre and random nature that has been what happens every time people have met each other with deadly force since the first homo erectus picked up a rock.

Willamette is perfect for that peaceful illusion. It sprawls high over the northern slope of Mount Scott, and the wooded hillside lifts you far above the workaday grime of the Southeast. 

Especially on a gorgeous early summer Monday the hillside really is perfect; shining green grass curving away with the tiny forest of red-white-and-blue flags (interrupted by the white service banner of the Coast Guard - for some reason the Coasties have sent their flag-planters out to set their dead apart from the uniform ranks and files of flat stones around them) disappearing into the dark green firs that shade the older subdivisions that surround the field, and beyond that the skyline of Portland under a bright blue sky.

Up on this shining hillside there's no fear. No hate, or boredom, no frustration, or anger, not even the exaltation of rage and the power of holding life and death in your hand that war can bring. None of the things that make war what it is, so great and terrible.

There's nothing but a sort of unreflecting quiet, where the hiss of tires and the sound of the wind that stirs the thousands of tiny flags are only passing thoughts.

I've parked at the bottom of the hill, and my knees are bitching at me for that as I climb between the rows of stone.

The remnants around me are almost all from my parents' generation.

That's the thought that follows me up that green, green hill; how many people buried here lived through the last Big War. No wonder we're still followed by their unquiet ghosts, even today. 

They're all "veterans", though. Survivors. The dates end in the Eighties and Nineties and Oughts, the time of the dying-off of the generation that saw so much war; Europe and the Pacific in World War II, Korea, Vietnam.

The war dead of our small wars are tucked away in Sections X, Y, and Z, lost amid the crowded memorials of the older generations. They seem to have more flowers and other mementos of living grief, raw and unassuaged. The families walking among them are younger, with only the occasional middle-aged father or mother to remind us that the tragedy of war is that, soldier or civilian, American or German or Iraqi or Vietnamese, fathers and mothers bury their sons and daughters.

Maybe it's the oppressive orderliness. Maybe it's just me; maybe I've lived too long with the weird not-war warring my country has waged that makes me feel so hollow and unmoored. I share a whiskey with my dead brothers, but I don't feel the connection I usually do to them this day. My pledge seems empty.

I trudge slowly back down the hill wondering what it means, this day, to my country, to me.

What does it mean? To die in a war that your own people don't understand, that to the vast crowd of them is no more than a noise just below the range of human hearing, a fire far away that is no more than a sullen glow on a dim horizon, utterly distant from the shining green hill and the blue skies dreaming over the peaceful city below?

 
I'm troubled, because I just don't know.

It's still a lovely morning all the way back up the freeway and then the busy side streets back to North Portland. There are lines at the Starbucks and wheelbarrows creaking through the rock and gravel store, and mattresses on sale, and the busy life of a big city goes on below that shining green hill and those tiny bright flags stirring softly on the warm breeze that carries me home.

As always on this day: this.

Chumps, Suckers, and Losers

We're now apparently supposed to be all aghast that the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military thinks that people who get killed wearing a uniform are "suckers" and "losers".

 (pausing here to note that many of these same pearl-clutchers seemed juuuust fine with the same individual when he was raging and threatening any and all of his fellow citizens who happened to disagree with him politically in fine caudillo style. But we're not here for partisanship at the moment...)

Here's the thing.

If you are a GI, or someone who loves or cares for a GI, or just someone who “supports the troops”...at the very least be honest. 

Those of us who wear the tree suit are tokens in the Game of Thrones. I'm not whining about that. That's the nature of the business. We knew that when we took the re-up bonus. When it comes right down to it our job is, at the final throw, to be used - and spent, if need be - gaining or trying to gain some geopolitical thing.

We can hope that those spending our health and lives and futures are doing that wisely, judiciously, frugally, and for only the best and gravest of reasons.

All the while knowing that the opposite is very often the case; we will be thrown away for ignorance, pride, hubris, and foolishness. Our lives, or some portion of them, will often be wasted.

That's what we get paid for. That's our bottom line. That's the bargain we've made.

 And if you don’t like that, or that saddens or appalls, or horrifies you?

You need to be better citizens. Learn the issues. Question authority. Support people and policies...or protest against them! Vote...and vote with your head, not with FOX or Facebook or your old high school buddy’s latest email attachment.

Voting for some trashbag or fool or madman, or not even bothering to vote when there's a chance that trashbag of a human being might be elected, means that you lose the privilege to be shocked, shocked, when that trashbag trashes your precious "troops". 

We are your responsibility. We the People are supposed to be sovereign in this republic. So We the People are the ones who ultimately decide whether our futures are hoarded, or wasted.

If someone you helped vote into power - or someone you're not fighting with all your might to keep from power - is disparaging, or mocking, or wasting your soldiers’ lives?

It’s not their problem.

It’s yours.

An open letter to my fellow U.S. citizens

I'm sitting in the dark house on a pre-dawn Saturday morning, sipping my coffee and watching Newcastle United look like boys against men in Liverpool, but - seeing how piss-poor the Lads are playing - I'm also parsing my Facebook feed and reading comments about the ill-advised recruiting stunt the Portland MEPs guys and the Thorns Front Office pulled last Wednesday (you can read about it here).

One of the comments is from another GI who talks about how emotional an occasion it is to swear to defend the people of the United States.

And it occurs to me that the Oath of Enlistment says nothing about "defending the people".

The exact wording is: "...support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..."

Domestic enemies?

That would be..."the people" sometimes, right?

Right.

Which is why past presidents have used us GIs to do things like shoot and kill striking workers, and ol' Dugout Doug MacArthur could use us to attack the Bonus Army of our fellow GIs and their families. If the Constitution in the form of the president or Congress tells us that some portion of We the People are a "domestic enemy"?

We as soldiers are obligated by that oath to use whatever means we are ordered to use to "defend the Constitution".

Kinda scary, innit?

Think about that next time you see one of those "Land of the Free Because of the Brave" bumper stickers, hmmm..?

As GIs you, my fellow citizens, give us a lot of tongue-bathing. You're constantly told to "support the troops". You get a crap-ton of military PR shoved at you, like the recruiting stunt at the Thorns match. And in general that's lovely. We all like to get some love.

But maybe - just maybe - as "citizens" you might want to be a trifle less credulous about all this "support the troops" stuff.

Because it usually takes troops to make "citizens" into "subjects".

Maybe I'm just being a cynical old sergeant. Sergeants are notorious pessimists, the Eeyores of the Army. We always look for the flaws in the officers' plans so we can head them off. And I'm certainly not telling you that my fellow GIs would agree to do that, or would blindly follow orders to herd you into a camp, or shoot you down when you take to the streets if, say, a President were to refuse to accept the result of an election and not yield his power to his elected sucessor.

But...you might want to think about what you're being told.

Just sayin'.

Forgiveness of the Dead

On this day, 64 years ago, Americans gathered at the cemetery at Nettuno, near what had been the terrible charnel-house beachhead of Anzio, to dedicate what would become the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery and to "honor" those killed in the war that had just ended.

You know how I loathe all the flag-waving, pontificating, self-justifying “memorial” dog-and-pony shows that serve only to make the living feel better about themselves and their willingness – or, worse, eagerness – to cheer on others to die for their country if it wasn’t for those dang bone spurs.

The closest to fitting "memorial day" act I’ve ever read of was LTG Truscott’s address that day.

Truscott had commanded the VI Corps at Anzio, and a lot of the dead guys there were from his outfits. And he was a hard man, known to be kind of salty, and was probably more sick of hearing the pious patriotic platitudes than I am.

So when the opening caprioling was done he looked out over the rows of “dignitaries” and reporters and guests, turned, and faced the rows of silent markers behind the rostrum.

Nobody knows exactly what he said – probably because there was either no plan to record his words or because he couldn’t be heard – but based on Bill Mauldin's account the gist was that Truscott didn’t see how there was anything particularly good or heroic about getting killed in your teens or 20s or 30s, and that while generals and politicians would tell you that all your dying was noble and sacrificial that most generals, anyway, kinda suspected that was pretty much bullshit.

He agreed that lots of them had died because somebody, maybe he, had fucked up and if that had happened he was grievously sorry and apologized to them. That he knew that was a big ask, but that he owed it to them to ask their forgiveness anyway.

And that he promised that if, in the coming years, he ever ran into anyone tubthumping a line of guff about the glory of war and heroic death that he, Truscott, would tighten the joker's shot group damn quick smart.

So as far as I’m concerned it'd be great if every damn politician and talking head can stay the hell away and leave those haunted graves to the grass, and the sky, and the dead, and those who knew and loved and lost them.

They won't, because that's not how we do "Memorial Day". But I wish they would.

But I will be in that cemetery today, sharing a drink with my Army brothers. I hope you will, too.

And, as always today, this.

Momento Mori

I never quite know how to deal with this day.

Typically I simmer all day in a sort of low, sullen anger like a peat fire deep below the surface. The clueless, careless, indifference of my fellow citizens is bitter gall to me, and the unfortunate alternative is a kind of fawning reverence for some imaginary soldier who has "fought for their freedom" that is almost more clueless than the indifferent and even more irking.

I dimly understand that most of these people are trying to say or do something "nice" on a day that has been set aside for what they dimly sense as a sort of patriotic celebration of GIs. They usually have no clue that this is something different from Veterans' Day, and, like a drunk at a wedding, proceed to either offend with their gaucherie or by their tiptoeing around the abyss that is death in war.

I want them to just say it; these men and women died not for me but because of me, because of my choices, or because I chose not a make choices. And many of them, and all of them that have died since the end of the Korean War in 1953, died for nothing, died chasing the ghosts of my fears and ignorance. They died because I thought of dominoes, or of Evil Empires, or of fighting them there so we wouldn't have to fight them here. They died because I let unscrupulous men lie me into fear, into foolish anger, into hate. They died because I was a bad citizen.

And I have never come to terms with that. I've never admitted that, or repented of that, or apologized to the dead for my acts or my indifference.

I know that won't happen, and that galls me, too. We Americans are bad at things like regret, repentance, and apologies.

So I'll say it here.

Fuck, I'm sorry, guys.

I fucked up. I trusted people I never should have. I didn't rage with fire and steel against those people who killed you. No, not the people you fought. The people who sent you to fight for nonsense, or hubris, or greed, or stupidity. And once I knew that they were fools, or criminals, or both I did nothing to punish them for murdering you. They still live, many of them honored and respected, while you are nothing but dust and ashes.

I am ashamed.

All I can promise is that I'll try and do better in the future. I'll try and make sure that they can't make more of you.

That's all.

Take a break in place and smoke 'em if you gottem.

And, as always on this day; this.

Acting 1SG Lawes reads the morning formation announcements

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

At ease.

Okay, listen up. Coupla things here.

First.

Y'all continue to ignore the Brigade Sarn't Major's directive on not wearing y'all's PT shorts whilst exercising, not in formation. Now far be it from me to suggest that our Brigade Sarn't Major is a nitpicky ding-dong with Wheatina inside his fucking brain housing group who should really have better things to do than obsess about what y'all are wrapping around your asses when you go for a jog down Ardennes Street. That would be unprofessional and disrespectful to our chain of command.

So I will simply remind you that, while possibly being the sort of thing that only a nitpicky ding-dong with Wheatina inside his fucking brain housing group who should really have better things to do than obsess about what y'all are wrapping around your asses when you go for a jog down Ardennes Street would do, that directive has the force of law in this here outfit.

I personally could not give a rat's ass if y'all sashay down the street in a pink tulle' tutu. But, after this formation, you will put the PT shorts up and wear them only when in morning PT formation so you will not incur the wrath of said Brigade Sarn't Major onto this company and the First Sergeant thereof, that being me, who is infernally tired of the goddamn Brigade Sarn't Major and who, if lectured one more time on this issue by that infernal product of an incestuous union will take it out of your ass, seriatim. Is that understood?

I thought so.

Now. Second.

I have received word from Battalion that this Division is going to be tasked to provide a brigade to march in some sort of parade in Washington D.C. Now y'all know my feelings about parades; the pleasure is fucking transient, the position is goddamn ridiculous, and the expense is completely and utterly ridiculous.

However, due to certain feelings of masculine inadequacy of certain persons in certain elected positions this parade will happen and it is entirely likely that this brigade will be tasked, given that Second Brigade in march order looks like nothing so much as a traveling leper colony, and the less said about what will happen if First Brigade is allowed out amongst unprepared civilians the better, although my hyfuckingpothesis is that there will not be an un-emptied bottle of spirits or an unmolested domestic animal within ten kilometers of their line of march.

Now. I still remember the last time we did this, and I will not have a repetition of some of the things you people thought up last Fourth of July.

No, AT Platoon, your vehicles are not public conveyances and you are not authorized to give "free joyrides" in them.

No, Medics, you are not, I say again, not qualified to perform pelvic exams.

No, Commo, you are not "DJ Slicky" and you cannot play Lady Gaga's "Sexxx Dreams" on the brigade command push. Or the battalion command push, either. And don't even think about my company net.

Yes, y'all will be issued MRE meals on the day of the parade and, no, you cannot trade them to civilians for Bonus Jacks, Whoppers, or any other sort of civilian chow. Y'all will keep your assigned weapon with you at all times, and that includes not encouraging civilian women to "touch your gun", Specialist Black. I got my eye on you, heee-ro.

And before you ask, no. I have no fucking idea what the fuck this is for. It ain't no victory parade that I can think of, 'cause we ain't beat nobody's ass lately. If it's a "thank you for your service" thing we can get enough of that at the goddamn airport. If the idea is to scare our enemies then they should really make the Navy do it, because I dunno about anyone else but the Navy scares the hell out of me, floating around the ocean somewhere with nuclear torpedoes an' shit.

But here's the bottom line, people; we are GIs, and we got our orders, so our mission is to salute and move out smartly. Including down fucking Pennsylvania Avenue for a big ol' goat rodeo, if that's what the country wants, God in his wisdom knoweth why. Are we clear on that?

Good. That is all.

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

Platoon sergeants, take charge.

The Eleventh Minute of the Eleventh Hour

I had an incandescent rant all ready to go for today, similar to the one I put up here last November 11th. I wrote it out. I looked at it, and I just couldn't find the heart to publish it.

What's the point?

You all know as well as I do what I was going to say. War is a racket. We - me, everyone I served with, the people serving now, the veterans of tomorrow and next week and next year - are just the bailiff's men, serving our country's liens in places and on people all over the world. No, we don't do sweet fuck all to "defend your freedoms". We kill people and break shit that our "leaders" have designated as inimical to our national interests. We're the button men and women for Donnie "Five-Deferment" Trump and his crew of racketeers just as we have been for every President and every Congress since 1945.

Now there's some honor and decency serving as an imperial legionary. Not all empires are pure Evil. But to pretend that we're still the Arsenal of Democracy of Remember Pearl Harbor? To tell ourselves that the people who wore the uniforms in the 1980's and 1990's and Oughts and now the Teens are somehow like the Greatest Generation that saw off Hitler and Tojo? That's just foolish, the self-deluding mumbling of an idiot child needing the comfort of a kindly lie.

I won't pretend that I didn't enjoy my Army days. I won't pretend that I'm not proud that I was a good soldier and then a good sergeant. When my days are done I'll gladly slope off for a pint in Hell with my old pals from Division, from my Reserve and Guard outfits, and maybe if we're lucky with the hard boys of the Legio X Fretensis, and the 3rd Company of the 1st Battalion of the Légion étrangère. Here's to us. Who's like us. Damn few, and they're all dead.

I know who I am, and what I did. I'm not ashamed of it, but I'm not vauntingly proud, either. I didn't hold Bastogne or Guadalcanal. I did the dirty work of geopolitics and I'm okay with that. I served with good people, had a laugh, and came home sound, and no legionary can ask more than that.

No, it is you, my friends, my fellow Americans, who need to look into your hearts and souls and ask why you have been happy to be lied to, gleeful to parrot the nonsense taught you about "freedom" and "fighting them there", eager to pretend that you have not sent, or been willing to let others send in your name, young men and women into harm's way for nothing more than a handful of dollars, or a passing bit of geopolitics, or some fancy of "national honor", or some fantasy about dangerous enemies, where there is nothing but ruin and impotent anger that our own nation has grown from the seeds of our own ignorant hate and fear while pretending to be the victims ourselves.

I just don't have the heart to rant about this. I am just tired, and a little grieved, for the foolish waste of it all.

On this day I offer only the cold comfort that our nation's ideals promise that We the People can choose to honor our veterans by choosing not to make more of them unless it's for a truly fucking good reason.

For those of you who have come here seeking grave words hymning this day, weighted with honor and glory of the service I and mine have done and do, I have none.

Acting 1SG Lawes reads the morning formation announcements

Comp-ney, Atten-shun! At ease. Okay, listen up. Coupla things here.

First.

I've been hearing a bunch of you he-roes prancing around the dayroom talking smack about how y'all are "the best 1 percent this country produces".

I hear tell that y'all got that shit from some jarhead, and a jarhead general at that.

Now y'all know how I feel about jarheads. So hearing y'all woofing because one said something about how “We don’t look down upon those of you who that haven’t served. In fact, in a way we’re a little bit sorry because you’ll have never have experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kinds of things our servicemen and women do.” just means that the overpromoted shavetail doesn't know about the kinds of things our servicemen did down at the Flaming Mug last week and, yes, I'm looking at you, AT Platoon. I've got my eye on you, slickyboys.

So before you get all "Ooo-rah! We bad, we bad!" take a look to your left and right flanks. You know as well as I do what that guy next to you is capable of. We all went to high school with that guy. The dude that locked himself in the last stall in the boys' bathroom in the B-wing and had to get pulled out by the school cops?

That's him.

The joker that useta take polaroid dick pics and put them in the romance novels in the library?

That's him.

And don't get me started on surfing the fucking storm drains on their sleeping mats, am I right, Blackie?

The "best 1 percent" my rosy red ass.

The civilians are too fucking busy shoving their tongues up your collective fourth-point-of-contact to remember this, but y'all, at least, should know that y'all are the same jocks, nerds, stoners, wierdos, brainiacs, goofballs, and just regular American dipwads they went to high school with only now y'all wear the same colored clothes. Raisin' your right hand didn't suddenly make any of y'all smarter, braver, more honest, or less likely to fuck up a wet dream and yes, I mean you, night bakers. I saw your fuckin' mess hall this morning and we gonna have a little come-to-Jesus chat right after this formation.

Y'all are good troops, and that's what you're supposed to be. But don't let that make you think that you're some sort of national gold standard. That's how good troops end up getting waxed in combat.

Y'all get free food and clothes, y'all get to get all-expenses-paid vacations to the shitty parts of the world to fuck up things there. Don't let that make you kid yourselves about what a bunch of special fuckin' snowflakes you are just because some goddamn gyrene general who probably hasn't actually seen one of y'all in his natural environment since he was a itty-bitty lieutenant. Those fuckin' star-warriors run around in a little general-officer bubble and they have no more idea of what y'all are really doing out here than a cow knows about the fuckin' Council of Trent.

So. Get over yourselves, people. Like I tol' ya last week; thinking you're all better than civilians is a straight-up dick move, and I won't tolerate that shit in my company, regardless of what the Old Man tells you about how awesome you are.

OK.

Second.

Rumor has it that the Brigade Sergeant Major is gonna be in the company AO this Friday. Y'all know that dick as well as I do, so I highly recommend that you ensure that those "extra" toolkits find their way to SSG Reye's garage, Commo, and Medics? The quarter-ton y'all keep "forgetting" to turn in? That sumbitch needs to go live in the woods starting Thursday night.

Oh, and I will be doing a walkthrough tomorrow at fourteen hundred hours and if I find more pogie bait in your walllockers I will go medieval on your ass. Are we clear on that?

I thought so.

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

Platoon sergeants, take charge.