MARINES REUNITED

Two Marines reunited after 51 years
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By NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS

Associated Press Writer

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) - Bogie Bogdanovich always felt bad about waving Brad Cate toward the front line during a furious firefight in Korea.

Cate stepped on a land mine and suffered horrific wounds.

So when the two old Marines finally met face-to-face for the first time in 51 years on Tuesday, it was understandable that Bogdanovich was overcome with emotion.

''This is one of the happiest moments in my life,'' Bogdanovich, 74, of Montesano, Wash., said as he embraced his 72-year-old comrade.

''I recognize you immediately,'' said Cate, of Colorado Springs, Colo.

The two Korean War veterans hugged as everyone in the packed lobby of a downtown hotel erupted into applause.

The two had so much of catch up on they scarcely knew where to begin. But the first order of business was sharing what each remembered about Oct. 25, 1951, when their small combat patrol went behind enemy lines up Hill 1052 in North Korea. Bogdanovich, a corporal, was section leader.

Cate, who volunteered for the Marines after high school in Scottsbluff, Neb., remembered it was about 10 a.m. when the patrol met enemy troops.

Pinned down and with men falling around him, Bogdanovich looked back and spotted Cate, who had been with the unit about three weeks. Thinking Cate had a bazooka, Bogdanovich motioned for him to move forward.

Cate did, and stepped almost immediately on a land mine.

''He took two steps and he went up in the air, butt over tea kettle,'' Bogdanovich said.

When Bogdanovich reached Cate, one foot was nearly blown off and his intestines were hanging outside his body.

''I felt that I had just ordered him to his death,'' Bogdanovich recalled.

A corpsman patched Cate up. Then Bogdanovich slung Cate onto his back and ran 1,800 yards back to an evacuation area. Along the way Bogdanovich was struck by shrapnel in the legs, stumbled to the ground, and got back to his feet.

Here the two men's memories diverge. Bogdanovich recalled putting Cate into a helicopter. Cate thought he was put into a ground ambulance.

''Things are pretty hazy,'' Cate said with a smile.

In any event, ''that was the last time I saw him,'' Bogdanovich said.

After dropping Cate off, Bogdanovich went into a bunker and said a rosary for the wounded man. Then he was treated at a field hospital for a few days for his shrapnel wounds and returned to combat as soon as he could. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his efforts.

Cate was hospitalized for two months with leg and internal injuries, and then had a long recovery. But he says now he was lucky.

''Ninety-five percent of the people who step on a land mine lost an arm or a leg or an eye or a hand, or were killed,'' Cate said. ''I was one of those 5 percent.''

Bogdanovich finished his tour of duty and returned home to Washington on Christmas Eve 1951.

He tracked down Cate and the two men corresponded for several years. But when some letters were returned as undelivered, Bogdanovich assumed Cate had died.

Meanwhile, Bogdanovich, whose real first name is Marion, played football at Western Washington University and embarked on a teaching career. He eventually retired as an elementary school principal.

Earlier this year, a friend of Bogdanovich decided to learn if Cate was still alive. She was able to locate him through the Marine Corps League.

The two first talked on the telephone a month and a half ago, and arranged the reunion during the Marine Corps League convention in Spokane this week.

Cate returned to the Marine Corps after graduating from college, and eventually retired with the rank of major. He won the Silver Star for an earlier battle while in Korea.

Both men married, and have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Each celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary this year.

But neither knows if there were any other survivors of their combat patrol.

Bogdanovich is looking forward to one development from the reunion. He said he cried for the first time in his life when he talked to Cate earlier this year, and has found himself crying since.

''I hope it dries up soon,'' he said.

AP-WS-08-05-03 2003EDT

THE COLLAPSE OF THE ARMED FORCES

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The Collapse Of The Armed Forces -- Col R.D. Heinl USMC
http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/heinl.html

THE COLLAPSE OF THE ARMED FORCES

By Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr.
North American Newspaper Alliance
Armed Forces Journal, 7 June, 1971

Table of Contents

Introduction

Back To The Campus

Bounties And Evasions

Society Notes

The Action Groups

Tough Laws, Weak Courts

Tactics of Harassment

Racial Incidents

Drugs and the Military

No Street Is Safe

Desertions and Disasters

Non-Volunteer Force?

Soulbone Connected to the Backbone

No Office for the Ombudsman

The Vocalists

Word to the Whys

A Hard Lot at Best

THE MORALE, DISCIPLINE and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.

Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.

Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian scapegoatise, draftee recalcitrance and malevolence, barracks theft and common crime, unsupported in their travail by the general government, in Congress as well as the executive branch, distrusted, disliked, and often reviled by the public, the uniformed services today are places of agony for the loyal, silent professions who doggedly hang on and try to keep the ship afloat.

The responses of the services to these unheard-of conditions, forces and new public attitudes, are confused, resentful, occasional pollyanna-ish, and in some cases even calculated to worsen the malaise that is wracking. While no senior officer (especially one on active duty) can openly voice any such assessment, the foregoing conclusions find virtually unanimous support in numerous non-attributable interviews with responsible senior and mid-level officer, as well as career noncommissioned officers and petty officers in all services.

Historical precedents do not exist for some of the services' problems, such as desertion, mutiny, unpopularity, seditious attacks, and racial troubles. Others, such as drugs, pose difficulties that are wholly NEW. Nowhere, however, in the history of the Armed Forces have comparable past troubles presented themselves in such general magnitude, acuteness, or concentrated focus as today.

By several orders of magnitude, the Army seems to be in worse trouble. But the Navy has serious and unprecedented problems, while the Air Force, on the surface at least still clear of the quicksands in which the Army is sinking, is itself facing disquieting difficulties.

Only the Marines - who have made news this year by their hard line against indiscipline and general permissiveness - seem with their expected staunchness and tough tradition, to be weathering the storm.

Back To The Campus

To understand the military consequences of what is happening to the U.S. Armed Forces, Vietnam is a good place to start. It is in Vietnam that the rearguard of a 500,000 man army, in its day and in the observation of the writer the best army the United States ever put into the field, is numbly extricating itself from a nightmare war the Armed Forces feel they had foisted on them by bright civilians who are now back on campus writing books about the folly of it all.

"They have set up separate companies," writes an American soldier from Cu Chi, quoted in the New York Times, "for men who refuse to go into the field. Is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to go to such and such a place he no longer goes through the hassle of refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at another base camp. Operations have become incredibly ragtag. Many guys don't even put on their uniforms any more... The American garrison on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our weapons from us and put them under lock and key...There have also been quite a few frag incidents in the battalion."

Can all this really be typical or even truthful?

Unfortunately the answer is yes.

"Frag incidents" or just "fragging" is current soldier slang in Vietnam for the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive officers and NCOs. With extreme reluctance (after a young West Pointer from Senator Mike Mansfield's Montana was fragged in his sleep) the Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in 1970(109) have more than doubled those of the previous year (96).

Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.

In one such division -- the morale plagued Americal -- fraggings during 1971 have been authoritatively estimated to be running about one a week.

Yet fraggings, though hard to document, form part of the ugly lore of every war. The first such verified incident known to have taken place occurred 190 years ago when Pennsylvania soldiers in the Continental Army killed one of their captains during the night of 1 January 1781.

Bounties And Evasions

Bounties, raised by common subscription in amounts running anywhere from $50 to $1,000, have been widely reported put on the heads of leaders whom the privates and Sp4s want to rub out.

Shortly after the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in mid-1969,the GI underground newspaper in Vietnam, "G.I. Says", publicly offered a $10,000 bounty on Lt. Col. Weldon Honeycutt, the officer who ordered(and led) the attack. Despite several attempts, however, Honeycutt managed to live out his tour and return Stateside.

"Another Hamburger Hill," (i.e., toughly contested assault), conceded a veteran major, is definitely out."

The issue of "combat refusal", and official euphemism for disobedience of orders to fight -- the soldier's gravest crime � has only recently been again precipitated on the frontier of Laos by Troop B, 1st Cavalry's mass refusal to recapture their captain's command vehicle containing communication gear, codes and other secret operation orders.

As early as mid-1969, however, an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade publicly sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, another rifle company, from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division, flatly refused -- on CBS-TV -- to advance down a dangerous trail.

(Yet combat refusals have been heard of before: as early as 1813,a corps of 4,000 Kentucky soldiers declined to engage British Indians who just sacked and massacred Ft Dearborn (later Chicago).)

While denying further unit refusals the Air Cav has admitted some 35 individual refusals in 1970 alone. By comparison, only two years earlier in 1968, the entire number of officially recorded refusals for our whole army in Vietnam -- from over seven divisions - was 68.

"Search and evade" (meaning tacit avoidance of combat by units in the field) is now virtually a principle of war, vividly expressed by the GI phrase, "CYA (cover your ass) and get home!"

That "search-and-evade" has not gone unnoticed by the enemy is underscored by the Viet Cong delegation's recent statement at the Paris Peace Talks that communist units in Indochina have been ordered not to engage American units which do not molest them. The same statement boasted - not without foundation in fact - that American defectors are in the VC ranks.

Symbolic anti-war fasts (such as the one at Pleiku where an entire medical unit, led by its officers, refused Thanksgiving turkey), peace symbols, "V"-signs not for victory but for peace, booing and cursing of officers and even of hapless entertainers such as Bob Hope, are unhappily commonplace.

As for drugs and race, Vietnam�s problems today not only reflect but reinforce those of t he Armed Forces as a whole. In April, for example, members of a Congressional investigating subcommittee reported that 120 to 15% of our troops in Vietnam are now using high-grade heroin, and that drug addiction there is "of epidemic proportions."

Only last year an Air Force major and command pilot for Ambassador Bunker was apprehended at Ton Son Nhut air base outside Saigon with $8 million worth of heroin in his aircraft. The major is now in Leavenworth.

Early this year, and Air force regular colonel was court-martialed and cashiered for leading his squadron in pot parties, while, at Cam Ranh Air Force Base, 43 members of the base security police squadron were recently swept up in dragnet narcotics raids.

All the foregoing facts � and mean more dire indicators of the worse kind of military trouble � point to widespread conditions among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by the French Army�s Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.

Society Notes

It is a truism that national armies closely reflect societies from which they have been raised. It would be strange indeed if the Armed Forces did not today mirror the agonizing divisions and social traumas of American society, and of course they do.

For this very reason, our Armed Forces outside Vietnam not only reflect these conditions but disclose the depths of their troubles in an awful litany of sedition, disaffection, desertion, race, drugs, breakdowns of authority, abandonment of discipline, and, as a cumulative result, the lowest state of military morale in the history of the country.

Sedition � coupled with disaffection within the ranks, and externally fomented with an audacity and intensity previously inconceivable � infests the Armed Services:

At best count, there appear to be some 144 underground newspapers published on or aimed at U.S. military bases in this country and overseas. Since 1970 the number of such sheets has increased 40% (up from 103 last fall). These journals are not mere gripe-sheets that poke soldier fun in the "Beetle Bailey" tradition, at the brass and the sergeants. "In Vietnam," writes the Ft Lewis-McChord Free Press, "the Lifers, the Brass, are the true Enemy, not the enemy." Another West Coast sheet advises readers: "Don�t desert. Go to Vietnam and kill your commanding officer."

At least 14 GI dissent organizations (including two made up exclusively of officers) now operate more or less /31/ openly. Ancillary to these are at least six antiwar veterans� groups which strive to influence GIs.

Three well-established lawyer groups specialize in support of GI dissent. Two (GI Civil Liberties Defense Committee and new York Draft and Military Law Panel) operate in the open. A third is a semi-underground network of lawyers who can only be contacted through the GI Alliance, a Washing, D.C., group which tries to coordinate seditious antimilitary activities throughout the country.

One antimilitary legal effort operates right in the theater of war. A three-man law office, backed by the Lawyers� Military Defense Committee, of Cambridge, Mass., was set up last fall in Saigon to provide free civilian legal services for dissident soldiers being court-martialed in Vietnam.

Besides these lawyers� fronts, the Pacific Counseling Service (an umbrella organization with Unitarian backing for a prolifery of antimilitary activities) provides legal help and incitement to dissident GIs through not one but seven branches (Tacoma, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Monterey, Tokyo, and Okinawa).

Another of Pacific Counseling�s activities is to air-drop planeloads of sedition literature into Oakland�s sprawling Army Base, our major West Coast staging point for Vietnam

On the religious front, a community of turbulent priests and clergymen, some unfrocked, calls itself the Order of Maximilian. Maximilian is a saint said to have been martyred by the Romans for refusing military service as un-Christian. Maximilian�s present-day followers visit military posts, infiltrate brigs and stockades in the guise of spiritual counseling, work to recruit military chaplains, and hold services of "consecrations" of post chapels in the name of their saintly draft-dodger.

By present count at least 11 (some go as high as 26) off-base antiwar "coffee houses" ply GIs with rock music, lukewarm coffee, antiwar literature, how-t-do-it tips on desertion, and similar disruptive counsels. Among the best-known coffee houses are: The Shelter Half (Ft Lewis, Wash.); The Home Front (Ft Carson, Colo.); and The Oleo Strut (Ft Hood, Tex.).

Virtually all the coffee houses are or have been supported by the U.S. Serviceman�s Fund, whose offices are in new York City�s Bronx. Until may 1970 the Fund was recognized as a tax-exempt "charitable corporations," a determination which changed when IRS agents found that its main function was sowing dissention among GIs and that it was a satellite of "The new Mobilization Committee", a communist-front organization aimed at disruption of the Armed Forces.

Another "new Mobe" satellite is the G.I. Press Service, based in Washington, which calls itself the Associate Press of military underground newspapers. Robert Wilkinson, G.I. Press�s editor, is well known to military intelligence and has been barred from South Vietnam.

While refusing to divulge names, IRS sources say that the serviceman�s Fund has been largely bankrolled by well-to-do liberals. One example of this kind of liberal support for sedition which did surface identifiably last year was the $8,500 nut channeled from the Philip Stern Family Foundation to underwrite Seaman Roger Priest�s underground paper OM, which, among other writings, ran do-it-yourself advice for desertion to Canada and advocated assassination of President Nixon.

The nation-wide campus-radical offensive against ROTC and college officer-training is well known. Events last year at Stanford University, however, demonstrate the extremes to which this campaign (which peaked after Cambodia) has gone. After the Stanford faculty voted to accept a modified, specially restructured ROTC program, the university was subjected to a cyclone of continuing violence which included at least $200,000 in ultimate damage to buildings (highlighted by systematic destruction of 40 twenty-foot stained glass windows in the library). In the end, led by university president Richard W. Lyman, the faculty reversed itself. Lyman was quoted at the time that "ROTC is costing Stanford too much."

"Entertainment Industry for Peace and Justice," the antiwar show-biz front organized by Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, and Dalton Trumbo, now claims over 800 film, TV, and music names. This organization is backing Miss Fonda�s antimilitary road-show that opened outside the gates of Ft. Bragg, N.C., in mid-March.

Describing her performances (scripted by Jules Pfeiffer) as the soldiers� alternative to Bob Hope, Miss Fonda says her case will repeat the Ft Bragg show at or outside 19 more major bases. Although her project reportedly received financial backing from the ubiquitous Serviceman�s Fund, Miss Fonda insisted on $1.50 admission from each of her GI audience at Bragg, a factor which, according to soldiers, somewhat limited attendance.

Freshman Representative Ronald V. Deludes (D-Calif.) runs a somewhat different kind of antimilitary production. As a Congressman, Dellums cannot be barred from military posts and has been taking full advantage of the fact. At Ft Meade, Md., last month, Dellums led a soldier audience as they booed and cursed their commanding officer who was present on-stage in the post theater which the Army had to make available.

Dellums has also used Capitol Hill facilities for his "Ad Hoc hearings" on alleged war crimes in Vietnam, much of which involves repetition of unfounded and often unprovable charges first surfaced in the Detroit "Winter Soldiers" hearings earlier this year. As in the case of the latter, ex-soldier witnesses appearing before Dellums have not always been willing to cooperate with Army war-crimes investigators or even to disclose sufficient evidence to permit independent verification of their charges. Yet the fact that five West Point graduates willingly testified for Dellums suggests the extent to which officer solidarity and traditions against politics have been shattered in today�s Armed Forces.

The Action Groups

Not unsurprisingly, the end-product of the atmosphere of incitement of unpunished sedition, and of recalcitrant antimilitary malevolence which pervades the world of the draftee (and to an extent the low-ranking men in "volunteer" services, too) is overt action.

One militant West Coast Group, Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM), has specialized in weapons theft from military bases in California. During 1970, large armory thefts were successfully perpetrated against Oakland Army Base, Vets Cronkhite and Ord, and even the marine Corps Base at Camp Pendleton, where a team wearing Marine uniforms got away with nine M-16 rifles and an M-79 grenade launcher.

Operating in the middle West, three soldiers from Ft Carson, Colo., home of the Army�s permissive experimental unite, the 4th Mechanized Division, were recently indicted by a federal grand jury for dynamiting the telephone exchange, power plant and water works of another Army installation, Camp McCoy, Wis., on 26 July 1970.

The Navy, particularly on the West Coast, has also experienced disturbing cases of sabotage in the past two years, mainly directed at ships� engineering and electrical machinery.

It will be surprising, according to informed officers, if further such tangible evidence of disaffection within the ranks does not continue to come to light. Their view is that the situation could become considerably worse before it gets better.

Tough Laws, Weak Courts

A frequent reaction when people learn the extent and intensity of the subversion which has been beamed at the Armed forces for the past three or more years is to ask whether such activities aren�t banned by law. The answer is that indeed they are.

Federal law (18lUSC 2387) prohibits all manner of activities (including incitements, counseling, distribution or preparation of literature, and related conspiracies) intended to subvert the loyalty, morale or discipline of the Armed services. The penalty for violating this statute is up to ten years in prison, a $10,000 fine, or both.

Despite this tough law, on the books for many years, neither the Johnson, nor so far, the Nixon administration has brought a single prosecution against any of the wide range of individuals and groups, some mentioned here, whose avowed aims are to nullify the discipline and seduce the allegiance of the Armed forces.

Government lawyers (who asked not to be named) suggested two reasons for failure to prosecute. Under President Johnson, two liberal Attorneys General, Messers. Ramsey Clark and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, were reportedly unsympathetic to military pleas for help and in general to prosecutions for sedition of any kind. Besides, the lawyers said, the courts have now gone so far in extending First Amendment shelter to any form of utterance, that there is doubt whether cases brought under this law would hold.

Whatever the reason � and it appears mainly to be disinclination to prosecute or even test existing law � the services are today being denied legal protection they previously enjoyed without question and at a time when they need it worse than ever before. Continuing failure to invoke these sanctions prompted one senior commander to comment bitterly, "We simply can�t turn this thing around until we get some support from our elected and appointed civilian officials."

One area of the U.S. government in which the Armed forces are encountering noticeable lack of support is the federal judiciary.

Until a very few years ago, the processes of military justice were regarded as a nearly untouchable preserve which the civil courts entered with reluctance and diffidence.

Plagued by a new breed of litigious soldier (and some litigious officers, too), the courts have responded by unprecedented rulings, mostly libertarian in thrust, which both specifically and generally have hampered and impeded the traditional operations of military justice and dealt body blows to discipline.

Andrew Stapp, the seditious soldier who founded the American Serviceman�s Union, and organization aimed at undermining the disciplinary structure of the Armed forces, last year had his well earned undesirable discharge reversed by a U.S. judge who said Stapp�s right to unionize and try to overthrow the Army was an "off-duty" activity which the Army had no right to penalize in discharging him.

Libertarian Supreme Court Justice W.O. Douglas has impeded the Army in mobilizing and moving reservists, while his O�Callaghan decision not only released a convicted rapist but threw a wrench into military jurisdiction and court-martial precedents going back in some cases nearly two centuries.

In Oakland, Cal., last year, a federal court yanked some 37 soldiers from the gangplank of a transport for Vietnam (where all 37 had suddenly discovered conscientious objections to war) and still has them stalled on the West Coast some 18 months later.

The long-standing federal law against wearing of Armed forces uniforms by persons intending to discredit the services was struck down in 1969 by the Supreme court, which reversed the conviction of a uniformed actor who put on an antimilitary �guerrilla theater" skit on the street in Houston, Tex. As a result the Armed Forces are now no longer able to control subversive exploitation of the uniform for seditious purposes.

Tactics of Harassment

Part of the defense establishment�s problem with the judiciary is the now widely pursued practice of taking commanding officers into civil courts by dissident soldiers either to harass or annul normal discipline or administrative procedures or the services.

Only a short time ago, for example, a dissident group of active-duty officers, members of the concerned Officers� Movement (COM), filed a sweeping lawsuit against Defense Secretary Laird himself, a well as all three service secretaries, demanding official recognition of their "right" to oppose the Vietnam war, accusing the secretaries of "harassing" them, and calling for court injunction to ban disciplinary "retaliation" against COM members.

Such nuisance suits from the inside (usually, like the Laird suit, on constitutional grounds) by people still in uniform, let alone by officers, were unheard-of until two or three years ago. Now, according to one Army general, the practice has become so command that, in his words, "I can�t even give a /34/ directive without getting permission from my staff judge advocate."

Racial Incidents

Sedition and subversion and legal harassment, rank near the top of what might be called the unprecedented external problems that elements in American society are inflicting on the Armed Forces.

Internally speaking, racial conflicts and drugs � also previously insignificant � are tearing the services apart today.

Racial trouble is no new thing for the Army. In 1906, after considerable provocation, three companies of the 25th Infantry (a colored regular regiment) attacked white troops and townspeople of Brownsville, Texas, and had to be disbanded. Among the few pre-World War II War Department records still heavily classified and thus unavailable to scholars are Army documents on racial troubles.

Racial conflicts (most but not all sparked by young black enlisted men) are erupting murderously in all services.

At a recent high commanders� conference, General Westmoreland and other senior generals heard the report from Germany that in many units white soldiers are now afraid to enter barracks alone at night for fear of "head-hunting" ambushes by blacks.

In the quoted words of one soldier on duty in West German, "I�m much more afraid of getting mugged on the post than I am of getting attacked by the Russians."

Other reports tell of jail-delivery attacks on Army stockades and military police to release black prisoners, and of officers being struck in public by black soldiers. Augsburg, Krailsheim, and Hohenfels are said to be rife with racial trouble. Hohenfels was the scene of a racial fragging last year � one of the few so recorded outside Vietnam.

In Ulm, last fall, a white noncommissioned officer killed a black soldier who was holding a loaded .45 on two unarmed white officers.

Elsewhere, according to Fortune magazine, junior officers are now being attacked at night when inspecting barracks containing numbers of black soldiers.

Kelley Hill, a Ft. Benning, Ga., barracks area, has been the scene of repeated nighttime assaults on white soldiers. One such soldier bitterly remarked, "Kelley Hill may belong to the commander in the daytime but it belongs to the blacks after dark."

Even the cloistered quarters of WACs have been hit by racial hair-pulling. In one West Coast WAC detachment this year, black women on duty as charge-o-quarters took advantage of their trust to vandalize unlocked rooms occupied by white WACS. On this rampage, they destroyed clothing, emptied drawers, and overturned furniture of their white sisters.

But the Army has no monopoly on racial troubles.

As early as July 1969 the Marines (who had previously enjoyed a highly praised record on race) made headlines at Camp Lejeune, N.C., when a mass affray launched by 30-50 black Marines ended fatally with a white corporal�s skull smashed in and 145 other white Marines in the sick bay.

That same year, at Newport, R.I., naval station, blacks killed a white petty officer, while in march 1971 the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., outside Washington, was beset by racial fighting so severe that the base enlisted men�s club had to be closed.

All services are today striving energetically to cool and control this ugly violence which in the words of one noncommissioned officer, has made his once tough unit divide up "like two street gangs."

MGen Orwin C. Talbott, at Ft. Benning, has instituted what he calls "race relations, coordinating groups" which work to defuse the resentments of young black troopers at a Georgia base.

MGen John C. Bennett, commanding the 4th Mechanized Division at Ft. Carson, Colo., has a highly successful "racial relations committee" which has kept Carson cool for over a year.

At once-troubled Camp Lejeune, MGen Michael P. Ryan, the Tarawa hero who commands the 2nd Marine Division, appears to have turned off the race war that two years ago was clawing at the vitals of his division.

Yet event he encouraging results attained by these commanders do not bespeak general containment of the service-wide race problem any more than the near-desperate attack being mounted on drug abuse has brought the narcotics epidemic under control within the military.

Drugs and the Military

The drug problem � like the civilian situation from which it directly derives � is running away with In March, Navy Secretary John H. the services. Chafee, speaking for the two sea services, said bluntly that drug abuse in both Navy and Marines is out of control.

In 1966, the Navy discharged 170 drug offenders. Three years later (1969), 3,800 were discharged. Last year in 1970, the total jumped to over 5,000.

Drug abuse in the Pacific Fleet � with Asia on one side, and kinky California on the other � gives the Navy its worst headaches. To cite one example, a destroyer due to sail from the West Coast last year for the Far East nearly had to postpone deployment when, five days before departure, a ring of some 30 drug users (over 10 percent of the crew) was uncovered.

Only last week, eight midshipmen were dismissed from the Naval Academy following disclosure of an alleged drug ring. While the Navy emphatically denies allegations in a copyrighted articles by the Annapolis Capitol that up to 12,000 midshipmen now use marijuana, midshipman sources confirm that pot is anything but unknown at Annapolis.

Yet the Navy is somewhat ahead in the drug game because of the difficulty in concealing addiction at close quarters abroad ship, and because fixes are unobtainable during long deployments at sea.

The Air force, despite 2,715 drug investigations in 1970, is in even better shape: its rate of 3 cases per thousand airmen is the lowest in the services.

By contrast, the Army had 17,742 drug investigations the same year. According to Col. Thomas B. Hauschild, of the medical Command of our Army forces in Europe, some 46 percent of the roughly 200,000 soldiers there had used illegal drugs at least once. In one /35/ battalion surveyed in West Germany, over 50 percent of the men smoked marijuana regularly (some on duty), while roughly half of those were using hard drugs of some type.

What these statistics say is that the Armed Forces (like their parent society) are in the grip of a drug pandemic � a conclusions underscored by the one fact that, just since 19168, the total number of verified drug addiction cases throughout the Armed Forces has nearly doubled. One other yardstick: according to military medical sources, needle hepatitis now poses as great a problem among young soldiers as VD.

At Ft. Bragg, the Army�s third largest post, adjacent to Fayetteville, N.C. (a garrison town whose conditions one official likened to New York�s "East Village" and San Francisco�s "Haight-Ashbury") a recent survey disclosed that 4% (or over 1,400) of the 36,000 soldiers there are hard-drug (mainly heroin and LSD) addicts. In the 82nd Airborne Division, the strategic-reserve unit that boasts its title of "America�s Honor Guard", approximately 450 soldier drug abusers were being treated when this reported visited the post in April. About a hundred were under intensive treatment in special drug wards.

Yet Bragg is the scene of one of the most imaginative and hopeful drug programs in the Armed forces. The post commander, LGen John J. Tolson, and the 82nd Airborne�s commander, MGen George S. Blanchard, are pushing "Operation Awareness," a broad post-wide program focused on hard drugs, prevention, and enforcement.

Spearheading Operation Awareness is a tough yet deeply humane Army chaplain and onetime Brooklyn longshoreman, LCol John P. McCullagh. Father McCullagh has made himself one of the Army�s top experts on drugs, and was last year called as an expert witness by Harold Hughes�s Senate Subcommittee on Alcohol and Narcotics.

No Street Is Safe

One side-effect of the narcotics flood throughout the services is a concurrent epidemic of barracks theft and common criminality inside military or naval bases which once had the safest streets in America.

According to the personnel chief of one of the Army�s major units, unauthorized absence, historically the services� top disciplinary problem, is now being crowded by the thefts. Barracks theft destroys trust and mutual loyalty among men who ought to be comrades and who must rely absolutely on each other in combat. It corrodes morale and is itself an indicator of impossible conditions in a fighting unit.

At Ft. Bragg, primarily because of addict thieves, soldiers in many units cannot even keep bedding on their bunks in barracks. After what used to be reveille, they strip their bunks of bedding and cram it away under lock and key with whatever valuables they dare keep on hand.

Radios, sports gear, tape decks, and cameras � let alone individual equipment � are stolen on sight. Unlocked cars, on the manicured streets of this fine old post, are more likely to be stolen than not. Fayetteville, according to soldiers, abounds with off-post fences who will pay pennies for Army blankets and higher amounts for just about anything else.

Unhappily, conditions at Ft. Bragg are not unusual.

Soldier muggings and holdups are on the rise everywhere. Ft. Dix, N.J., has a higher rate of on-post crime than any base on the East Coast. Soldier muggings are reported to average one a night, with a big upsurge every pay-day. Despite 450 MP�s (one for every 55 soldiers stationed there � one of the highest such rations in the country) no solution appears in sight.

Crimes are so intense and violent in the vicinity of an open-gate "honor system" detention facility at Ft. Dix that, according to press reports, units on the base are unwilling to detail armed sentinels to man posts nearby, for fear of assault and robbery.

Desertions and Disasters

With conditions what they are in the Armed Forces, and with intense efforts on the part of elements in our society to disrupt discipline and destroy morale the consequences can be clearly measured in two ultimate indicators: man-power retention (reenlistments and their antithesis, desertions); and the state of discipline.

In both respects the picture is anything but encouraging.

Desertion, to be sure, has often been a serious problem in the past. In 1826, for example, desertions exceeded 50% of the total enlistments in the Army. During the Civil War, in 1864, Jefferson Davis reported to the Confederate Congress: "Two thirds of our men are absent, most absent without leave."

Desertion rates are going straight up in Army, Marines, and Air Force. Curiously, however, during the period since 1968 when desertion has nearly doubled for all three other services, the Navy�s rate has risen by less than 20 percent.

In 1970, the Army had 65,643 deserters, or roughly the equivalent of four infantry divisions. This desertion rate (52.3 soldiers per thousand) is well over twice the peak rate for Korea (22.5 per thousand). It is more than quadruple the 1966 desertion-rate (14.7 per thousand) of the ten well-trained, high-spirited professional Army.

If desertions continue to rise(as they are still doing this year), they will attain or surpass the WWII peak of 63 per thousand, which, incidentally, occurred in the same year (1945) when more soldiers were actually being discharged from the Army for psychoneurosis than were drafted.

The Air Force, -- relatively uninvolved in the Vietnam war, all-volunteer, management-oriented rather than disciplinary and hierarchic � enjoys a numerical rate of less that one deserter per thousand men, but even this is double what it was three years ago.

The marines in 1970 had the highest desertion index in the modern history of the Corps and, for that year at least, slightly higher than the Army�s. As the Marines now phase out of Vietnam (and haven�t taken a draftee in nearly two years), their desertions are expected to decrease sharply. Meanwhile, grimly remarked one officer, "let the bastards go. We�re all the better without them."

Letting the bastards go is something the Marines can probably afford. "The Marine Corps Isn�t Looking for a Lot of Recruits," reads a current recruiting /36/ poster, "We Just Need a Few Good Men." This is the happy situation of a Corps slimming down to an elite force again composed of true volunteers who want to be professionals.

But letting the bastards go doesn�t work at all for the Army and the Navy, who do need a lot of recruits and whose reenlistment problems are dire.

Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., chief of naval Operations, minces no words. "We have a personnel crisis," he recently said, "that borders on disaster."

The Navy�s crisis, as Zumwalt accurately describes it, is that of a highly technical, material oriented service that finds itself unable to retain the expensively-trained technicians needed to operate warships, which are the largest, most complex items of machinery that man makes and uses.

Non-Volunteer Force?

If 45% of his sailors shipped over after their first enlistment, Admiral Zumwalt would be all smiles. With only 13% doing so, he is growing sideburns to enhance the Navy�s appeal to youth.

Among the Army�s volunteer (non-draftee) soldiers on their first hitch, the figures are much the same: less than 14% re-up.

The Air Force is slightly, but not much, better off: 16% of its first-termers stay on.

Moreover � and this is the heart of the Army�s dilemma � only 4 % of the voluntary enlistees now choose service in combat arms (infantry, armor, artillery) and of those only 2.5% opt for infantry. Today�s soldiers, it seems, volunteer readily enough for the tail of the Army, but not for its teeth.

For all services, the combined retention rate this past year is about half what it was in 1966, and the lowest since the bad times of similar low morale and national disenchantment after Korea.

Both Army and navy are responding to their manpower problems in measures intended to seduce recruits and reenlistees: disciplinary permissiveness, abolition of reveille and KP, fewer inspections, longer haircuts � essentially cosmetic changes aimed at softening (and blurring) traditional military and naval images.

Amid such changes (not unlike the Army�s 1946 Doolittle Board coincidences intended in their similar postwar day to sweeten life for the privates), those which are not cosmetic at all may well exert profound and deleterious effects on the leadership, command authority and discipline of the services.

Soulbone Connected to the Backbone

"Discipline," George Washington once remarked, "is the soul of an army."

Washington should know. In January 1781, all the Pennsylvania and New Jersey troops in the Continental Army mutinied. Washington only quelled the outbreaks by disarming the Jersey mutineers and having their leaders shot in hollow square � by a firing squad made up of fellow mutineers.

(the navy�s only mutiny, aboard USS Somers in 1842, was quelled when the captain hanged the mutineers from the yardarm while still at sea.)

If Washington was correct (and almost any professional soldier, whether officer or NCO, will agree), then the Armed Forces today are in deep trouble.

What enhances this trouble, by exponential dimensions, is the kind of manpower with which the Armed Forces now have to work. As early as three years ago, U.S. News and World Report reported that the services were already plagued with "� a new breed of man, who thinks he is his own Secretary of ?State, Secretary of Defense, and Attorney General. He considers himself superior to any officer alive. And he is smart enough to go by the book. He walks a tightrope between the regulations and sedition."

Yet the problem is not just one of trouble-makers and how to cope with them.

The trouble of the services � produced by and also in turn producing the dismaying conditions described in this article � is above all a crisis of soul and backbone. It entails � the word is not too strong � something very near a collapse of the command authority and leadership George Washington saw as the soul of military forces. This collapse results, at least in part, from a concurrent collapse of public confidence in the military establishment.

General Matthew B. Ridgway, one of the Army�s finest leaders in this century (who revitalized the shaken Eighth Army in Korea after its headlong rout by the Chinese in 1950) recently said, "Not before in my lifetime � has the Army�s public image fallen to such low esteem �"

But the fall in public esteem of all three major services � not just the Army � is exceeded by the fall or at least the enfeeblement of the hierarchic and disciplinary system by which they exist and, when ordered to do so, fight and sometimes die.

Take the case of the noncommissioned and petty officers.

In Rudyard Kipling�s lines, "the backbone o� the Army is the noncommissioned man!"

Today, the NCOs � the lifters � have been made strangers in their own home, the regular service, by the collective malevolence, recalcitrance, and cleverness of college �educated draftees who have outflanked the traditional NCO hierarchy and created a privates� power structure with more influence on the Army of today than its sergeants major.

No Office for the Ombudsman

In the 4th Mechanized Division at Ft. Carson, Sp 4 David Gyongyos, on his second year in the Army, enjoys an office across the hall from the division commander, a full-time secretary, and staff car and driver also assigned full time. He has the home phone numbers of the general and chief of staff and doesn�t hesitate to use them out of working hours when he feels like it.

Gyongyos (with a bachelor�s degree in theology and two years� law school) is chairman of the division�s Enlisted Men�s Councils, a system of elected soviets made up of privates and Sp 4s (NCOs aren�t allowed) which sits at the elbow of every unit commander down to the companies. "I represent, electively, " Gyongyos expansively told this reporter, "the 17,000 men on this post."

The division sergeant major, with a quarter-century in the Army, who is supposed to be the division�s first soldiers and � non-electively � father and ombudsman of every soldier, has an office with is on even on the same floor with the general (or Sp 4 Gyongyos either). He gets his transportation, as needed, from the motor pool. He does not "rap" freely over the phone to the general�s quarters.

The very most that Gyongyos will concede to the sergeant major, the first sergeants, the platoon sergeants � the historic enlisted leadership of armies � is that they are "combat technicians." They are not, he coldly adds, "highly skilled in the social sciences."

The soldiers� soviets of the 4th Division represent an experiment in what the Army calls "better communications". Conditions throughout the rest of the Army do not quite duplicate those at Carson, but the same spirit is abroad. And experienced NCOs everywhere feel threatened or at least puzzled.

Most major units of the Army, Navy, and Air force have some form of enlisted men�s councils, as well as junior officer councils. Even the trainee companies at Ft. Ord, Calif. Have councils, made up of recruits, who take questions and complaints past their DIs to company commanders and hold weekly meetings and post minutes on bulletin-boards. General Pershing, who once said, "All a soldier needs to know is how to shoot and salute", would be surprised.

The Vocalists

As for the officers, said a four-star admiral, "We have lost our voice."

The foregoing may be true as far as admirals are concerned, but hasn�t hampered short-term junior officers (including several West Pointers) from banding /37/ together into highly vocal antiwar and antimilitary organizations, such as the Concerned Officers� Movement (COM). At Norfolk, the local COM chapter has a peace billboard outside gate 2, Norfolk Naval Station, where every sailor can profit by the example of his officers.

Inspection � one of the most important and traditionally visible tools of command � is being widely soft-pedaled because it is looked on as "chicken" by young soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

In a move "to eliminate irritants to Air Force life" all major Air force commands got orders last year to cut back on inspection of people and facilities.

"You just damn near don�t inspect barracks any more," said one Air Force colonel, "this is considered an irritant." Besides, he added, (partly to prevent barracks theft and partly for privacy), airmen keep the keys to their own rooms, anyway.

Aboard ships of the Navy, where every inch of metal and flake of paint partakes in the seaworthiness and battle readiness of the vessel, inspection is still a vital and nearly constant process, but even here, Admiral Zumwalt has discouraged "unnecessary" inspections.

If officers have lost their voices, their ears have in many commands been opened if not burnt in an unprecedented fashion via direct "hot lines" or "action lines" whereby any enlisted man can ring up his CO and voice a gripe or an obscenity, or just tell him what he thinks about something or, for that matter, someone.

Starting last year at naval Air Station, Miramar, Cal., sailors have been able to dial "C-A-P-T" and get their captain on the line. The system so impressed Admiral Zumwalt that he ordered all other shore stations to follow suit, even permitting anonymous calls.

At Ft. Lewis, Wash., soldiers dial "B-O-S-S-" for the privilege of giving the general an earful.

At the Air Force Academy, cadets receive early indoctrination in the new order of things: here, too, a cadet (anonymously, if he wishes) can phone the Superintendent, record his message and, also by recording receive the general�s personal thanks for having called.

Word to the Whys

"Discipline," wrote Sir John Jervis, one of England�s greatest admirals, "is summed up in the one word, obedience."

Robert E. Lee later said, "Men must be habituated to obey or they cannot be controlled in battle."

In the Armed forces today, obedience appears to be a sometime thing.

"You can�t give them an order and expect them to obey immediately," says an infantry officer in Vietnam. "they ask why, and you have to tell them."

Command authority, i.e., the unquestioned ability of an officer or NCO to give an order and expect it to be complied with, is at an all-time low. It is so low that, in many units, officers give the impression of having lost their nerve in issuing, let alone enforcing orders.

In the words of an Air Force officer to this reporter, "If a captain went down on the line and gave an order and expected it to be obeyed because �I said so!� � there�d be a rebellion."

Other officers unhesitatingly confirmed the foregoing.

What all this amounts to � conspicuously in Vietnam and only less so elsewhere � is that today�s junior enlisted man, not the lifer, but the educated draftee or draft-motivated "volunteer" � now demands that orders be simplistically justified on his own terms before he feels any obligation to obey.

Yet the young soldiers, sailors and airmen might obey more willingly if they had more confidence in their leaders. And there are ample indications that Armed Forces junior (and NCO) leadership has been soft, inexperienced, and sometimes plain incompetent.

In the 82nd Airborne Division today, the average length of service of the company commanders is only 3 � years.

In the Navy, a man makes petty officer 2d class in about 2 � years after he first enlists. By contrast, in the taut and professional pre-WWII fleet, a man required 2 � years just to make himself a really first-class seaman.

The grade of corporal has practically been superseded in the Army: Sp 4s hold most of the corporals� billets. Where the corporal once commanded a squad, today�s Army gives the job to a staff sergeant, two ranks higher. Within the squad, it now takes a sergeant to command three other soldiers in the lowly fire-team.

"This never would have happened," somberly said a veteran artillery sergeant major, "if the NCOs had done their jobs � The NCOs are our weak point." Sp 4 Gyongyos at Ft. Carson agrees: "It is the shared perception of the privates that the NCOs have not looked out for the soldiers."

When B Troop, 1st Cavalry, mutinied during the Laos operation, and refused to fight, not an officer or NCO raised his hand (or his pistol) or stepped forward. Fifty-three privates and Sp 4s cowed all the lifers of their units.

"Officers," says a recently retired senior admiral, "do not stand up for what they believe. The older enlisted men are really horrified."

Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., an ex-company clerk, was a platoon leader who never even learned to read a map. His credentials for a commission were derisory; he was no more officer-material than any Pfc. in his platoon. Yet the Army had to take him because no one else was available. Commenting on the Calley conviction, a colonel at Ft. /38/ Benning said, "We have at least two or three thousand more Calleys in the Army just waiting for the next calamity."

Albert Johnson, the tough Master Chief Petty Officer of the Atlantic Fleet, shakes his head and says: "You used to hear it all the time � people would say, �The Chiefs run the Navy.� But you don�t hear it much any more, especially from the Chiefs."

A Hard Lot at Best

But the lot of even the best, most forceful leader is a hard one in today�s military.

In the words of a West Point lieutenant colonel commanding an airborne battalion, "There are so many ways nowadays for a soldier that is smart and bad to get back at you." The colonel should know: recently he reduced a sergeant for gross public insubordination and now he is having to prepare a lengthy apologia, though channels to the Secretary of The Army, in order to satisfy the offending sergeant�s congressman.

"How do we enforce discipline?" asks a senior general. Then he answers himself: "Sweep it under the rug. Keep them happy. Keep it out of the press. Do things the easy way: no court-martials, but strong discipline."

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, after years of costly, frustrating and considerably less than successful war, Britain�s armed forces sere swept by disaffection culminating in the widespread mutinies in most of the ships and fleets that constituted England�s "wooden walls" against France.

Writing to a friend in 1979, Britain�s First Lord of the Admiralty said, "The Channel Fleet is now lost to the country as much as if it was at the bottom of the sea."

Have things gone that far in the United States today?

The most optimistic answer is � probably not. Or at least not yet.

But many a thoughtful officer would be quick to echo the words of BGen Donn A. Starry, who recently wrote, "The Army can defend the nation against anything but the nation itself."

Or � in the wry words of Pogo � we have met the enemy, and they are us.

Back to Grover Furr's Vietnam War Page, Table of Contents

http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/heinl.html | furrg@alpha.montclair.edu | HTML'd 14 Oct 98

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* Related -- Harass The Brass.... Dick G on Dec 12, 2002, 4:07 PM

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Copyright � 2003 Network54. All rights reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Statement
All Rights Reserved

Gunny G's Marines Sites & Forums
By
R.W. "Dick" Gaines
GySgt USMC (Ret.)
1952-72

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

FOR ALL HANDS AND THE SHIP'S COOK -- 1stLt Frank Mitchell, MOH

For: All Hands and the Ship's Cook.

We've added a short story regarding another old friend of mine, 1stLt Frank Mitchell, MOH. You'll find this by going to my web site at http://www.sullyusmc.com, clicking on, "Menu," "Writers and Stories," "Sully," and finally "Frank Mitchell." Frank's MOH Citation is included in the story, as well as one of the most unusual pictures that I've ever seen emerge from a combat situation. I've included a story about how the latter picture was preserved for all these years which may be worth your time to read.

I know you'll recall when about a week ago I provided an email address for Mike Tank that was erroneous. I've decided that this was all Mike's fault because his email address says "michaeltank@..." rather than "miketank@..." Obviously, it should have been "mike" all along. That's what happens when you suffer from delusions of grandeur. (VBSEG). Further, that will teach Mike that he can't just willy-nilly refer to "Old Guys" and escape scot free. But enough of Mike....until he writes his next poem. At that time I'll do my best not to mess up his email address.

Many of you wrote that you thought that flogging and keel-hauling might be too good for me, given the circumstances of my foul-up of Mike's address. And I do want to thank those of you who wrote offering to lend your slightly used cat-of-nine-tails. That was thoughtful of you. But the best of the bunch of totally ribald suggestions were these submissions:

From Buddha Doc:

LOL Sully I have a keel but no mast, so it be keel haul for you.
TY
BD

(Now, the foregoing is obviously deeply Freudian. Wonder what it means?)

From Ted Gittinger:

....I raised six children, and as a consequence have most implements of torture/punishment ready to hand.

ted
grinning fiendishly

Anyone who thinks Ted is kidding doesn't know Ted.

And last, but far from being least, from Ron Cashman, my good friend from the "other side of the world," where 'roos and koalas thrive:

avast ye swab!!! mine bounced too!!!

Do ya think Ron was referring to his email to Mike, or his 'Roos? Him being a secretive type, we'll probably never know.

Enough for now.

"Keep Warm," " Maintain A Ten Pace Interval," and for cryin-out-loud, "Stay Off the !@#$%^&* Skyline," Semper Fidelis, Sully
~~~~~
This is...
Gunny G's Marines
GLOBE and ANCHOR Sites & Forums
By R.W. "Dick" Gaines
GySgt USMC (Ret.)
1952-72
~~~~~

PRE-EMPTIVE WARS - DETERRENCE IS NO LONGER A SOLUTION

Pre-emptive wars - Deterrence is no longer a solution

By Frederick Forsyth

Until the mid-1990s, terrorists always wanted something. The IRA wanted a
united Ireland, the ETA wanted a separate Basque state, the PFLP wanted a
Palestinian state and the extirpation of Israel, the Tamil Tigers wanted a
Tamil state in part of Sri Lanka...and so on.

Some wanted separation, some unification, some (like the Kurds) a state of
their own, others (like the Red Brigades) a fully communist state. Precisely
because of that, they wanted to stay alive and see their vision come true,
and therefore the Establishment could, if it wished, negotiate.

Then a small group arose who said this: "We do not want anything of you but
your deaths. In thousands, in hundreds of thousands and eventually in
millions.

"We say this because we hate you. We hate you with an all-consuming
passion, not just for what you have done (though that is bad enough) but for
what you are.

"There is no point in negotiating, for there is nothing to negotiate. We
are going to kill you whenever, wherever and in as great a number as we can.

"We do this because the Almighty has commanded it. We have His texts to
prove it. We do not fear death, we welcome it, for we are guaranteed eternal
bliss if we die while killing you."

It was a weird message. It did not come in the mail, nor was it enunciated
on Al-Jazeera television. It came from a thousand imams in a thousand
mosques. It was directed at the United States in particular and the West in
general. Its source can best be described as Islamist fundamentalism, a tiny
but virulent incubus within the body of that great, billion-devotee
religion, Islam. Not unnaturally, no one took it particularly seriously - at
first.

In 1993 a group of Islamists in New York tried to demolish the World Trade
Center by driving two vans packed with explosives into the underground
parking garages. The towers were too strong. A few were killed, many more
injured. The United States began, slowly, to wake up to a new and bizarre
peril.

For eight years, under Bill Clinton, a fairly lethargic hunt was mounted
for a shadowy body of religious "ultras" behind the new message. Two
embassies in Africa were blown up, then a destroyer in Aden Harbor. Then
came Sept. 11, 2001.

The rest of the world has, despite the ritual condolences at that time, not
even begun to understand the transformational trauma that has gripped the
United States since 9/11. That is why so much of what has been written is
exasperated anti-Americanism.

Sept. 11 happened to coincide with a new, tough, no-nonsense and hugely
underestimated (by Europe's intellectual snobs) president. Under Bush the
United States thought things over and came back with a reply.

Broadly, it is this: "What the devil are we supposed to do? We have no
choice. You leave us no choice. For 50 years of Cold War we practiced
deterrence and kept the Soviet threat at bay. Even in their most paranoid
moments, the Politburo did not want to die. But you do not fear death; you
welcome it. So be it.

"We Americans can either sit and wait for the next bomb, the next carnage,
the next wipeout of our citizens and then try to track down the
perpetrators. Or we can identify you and use our considerable resources to
hunt you down and take you 'out of the frame' before you strike, not after.

"That is called pre-emption, and that is what we choose to do." Ever since
9/11 that is what has been happening. But the so-called war on terror goes
further than the occasional eruption of secret agents into an apartment in
Pakistan to arrest or kill another fanatic. The American message is more
ample than that.

It continues: "Terrorists cannot eat and drink fresh air. They need a place
to live, camps in which to train, money to spend, equipment to turn into
bombs, officers to recruit. These have to be situated on someone's land, in
someone's country.

"So to all those who think it might be fun to arm, train, shelter, feed,
finance, hide, furnish diplomatic facilities or false papers prepared in
government laboratories - or even to touch with a 10-foot pole - those sworn
to kill our fellow Americans, we say this: The party is over. Desist now, or
be lumped with the terrorists and die with them. That includes the tyrant
states and the failed states. Expel them or be classed with them."

Far enough? The American message to the tyrant states includes one extra
proviso. It is: "There are some weapons so foul yet so simple that they may
be developed in basic government programs and yet can wipe out cities. There
are agents based on the filthiest and fastest-moving diseases known to man.
Medieval plagues, incurable scourges. There are gases and nerve agents so
strong that a vacuum flask released in a crowded place can destroy
thousands.

"None of you need research, develop, produce and store these weapons for
self-defense. They simply cannot be used for self-defense. But they can, if
suicidal fanatics are used as the delivery system, be brought to our cities
and detonated. This we will not permit. Therefore, stop manufacturing these
hideous weapons, destroy what you have, and do it now."

Saddam Hussein fit both categories. He manufactured some of the grisliest
killer toxins known to man: He sponsored, paid for and sheltered terror. He
was warned repeatedly. From 1991 he ducked and weaved, defying a flaccid,
timid U.N. Security Council through 16 resolutions. But after 9/11 he was
just a fool. He should have known. The United States was not joking. Not
anymore.

The real outrage of the European left and the Third World is that they are
horrified; apparently when the White House says "Enough is enough," it means
it. Clinton was never like that.

So the horrified may shout, like the Scottish congregation, "We didna
ken"("We didn't understand").

But the message from Washington is "Well, ye ken the noo" ("Well, you
understand now").
____________________________________________________________

Forsyth's new novel "Avenger," a best seller in Italy, goes on sale in
English in September. This essay is reprinted from Foreign Affairs Magazine.
September 7, 2003

Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.

~~~~~
This is...
Gunny G's Marines
GLOBE and ANCHOR Sites & Forums
By R.W. "Dick" Gaines
GySgt USMC (Ret.)
1952-72
~~~~~

Then And Now....Lessons Unlearned!

By Craig Roberts

http://www.riflewarrior.com
http://www.riflewarrior.com

It appears to be a rule in "military history and lessons learned" that
we don't remember the lessons.

Below is an article by Vince Morris of the New York Post, who is
probably too young to remember a little "conflict" called Vietnam. But I
won't forget it, or the lessons we learned, since I was a young US
Marine infantryman who did my share of rice paddy wading in I Corps in
1965-66.

One of the lessons American fighting men learn in the first few days of
war is that our rules don't count. We learn about the enemy, his
methods, madness and motivations. We also learn that they do not, ever,
think or act like Americans. It seems we never learn that we are
different, and they don't play by our rules.

Americans are a kind and compassionate people. We try to "liberate" and
not "conquer" when we go to war. Liberating Iraq and fighting terrorism
now is identical to defending South Vietnam and fighting Vietcong
terrorism in the '60s. I landed with H Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th
Marine Regiment at DaNang in July of 1965. Within three days of our
landing we were entrenched around a village called Duong Son and began
receiving fire from guerrillas of the Doc Lap battalion of Vietcong
(based in a tunnel complex under the village of Cam Ne, one kilometer
across the paddies to the west).

We established an outpost of one platoon on a small island in the
paddies between us and Cam NE, and sent two wiremen to string commo wire
to the "little ville" (which was one building used as a schoolhouse).
They left just before dark and never arrived at the "schoolhouse." They
never came back either.

The next morning we sent out patrols and found them at the edge of Cam
NE, hung up by their heals in a tree, tortured and killed as a signal to
us of what would happen in the future. There were other atrocities that
had been done to the bodies that I won't describe.

But it backfired. It had just the opposite effect on us that it may have
had on other nationalities. It did not scare us. It did not terrify us.
It did not make us want to quit and go home. Instead, it galvanized
us--and changed the rules.

Americans begin by being kind and understanding and compassionate. But
don't anger us. Don't try to shock us. Don't hurt any of our people.
Because if you do, you will bring down more fire and brimstone than you
ever reckoned existed.

Seeing the two bodies caused us (the entire Regiment) to change our
attitude about the enemy and the Vietnamese in general. This would last
for the rest of the war. THEY are the ones who caused more grief and
death and destruction on their personnel than would have happened if the
two young Marines had not been captured, tortured and executed. For the
next 11 months I never took a prisoner on purpose. I killed every VC and
NVA I could get in my sights (and later my scope as a sniper). I hated
them and when I took up the trigger slack on every target, I thought of
those two wireman who went home in body bags after only three days in
Vietnam.

Now we have young soldiers and Marines faced with the latest version of
the "wiremen incident of Duong Son." American National Guard reservists
from Texas, serving in a support role, made a wrong turn in Iraq and
evidently drove up to Iraqis wearing civilian clothes. No one knows what
happened next, but whatever happened it is evident that our guys were
not prepared for combat. If they had been, there would have been Iraqi
bodies on the road instead of American. Our guys expected Iraqi
"civilians" would be glad to see them, and they probably assumed these
"civilians" would be helpful if they stopped to ask directions. The
Iraqis were either soldiers in civvies, or militia. So, it appears no
defensive shots were fired. But the Al Jazeera TV footage shows dead GIs
with head wounds that appear to be from very close range. This was an
execution of POWs by war criminals. This is the Iraqi War version of the
Wiremen Incident. And now our guys are relearning the lessons we learned
in Vietnam: There Is No Compassionate War.

In my opinion, there are two missions for the man in the field: Win the
war quickly, and go home alive.

To do this, a warrior has to be careful, cautious and ruthless. We must
know we cannot fight a "careful war" in which we try not to hurt anyone.
The mission of the military is not that of policeman. The mission is to
go places, destroy real estate, break things, and kill people. We have
to relearn this in every war. But it is a lesson we quickly learn,
albeit often a bit late, and with far too much of our own blood.

When one sees the liberal socialist media whining about civilian
casualties, just put these images in your mind: Pan Am 103 at Lockerbie,
the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut, the attack on the USS Cole, the
9-11 WTC and Pentagon attacks, and the crash in Pennsylvania. Also
remember that we have over 100 Iraqi terrorist cells, not to mention al
Qaeda in this country just watching and waiting for a chance to "avenge
Saddam."

Here's to our troops: God Bless, God Speed, and now that you know the
"rules," Good Hunting!

Semper Fidelis,

Craig Roberts
LTC, USAR, INF, (Ret)
L/Cpl, USMC, Vietnam, '65-66
www.riflewarrior.com

Now, read on, my comments are in brackets...

ARTICLE:

****Marines Out To Avenge Blood Of 'Executed' GI's****

The Marines at this chopper base near the Iraqi border are seething with
rage and talking revenge over the treatment of American POWs - paraded
on TV and some possibly executed.

"OK, they want to play that way. We can play that way," vowed one
enraged pilot. Marine after Marine had the same message - many of them
warning that there would be "no second chances for those Iraqis now."
Virtually every conversation here touched on the POW's treatment and
possible executions yesterday. It was discussed on chow lines, in the
bomb shelters, outside the latrines.

(This is the latest version of The Wiremen Incident that changed the
rules of engagement in the field for the average grunt)


Robert "Doc" Davenport, a Marine medic trained to both save people and
kill them, was among those struggling to digest the appalling news. "It
makes it harder to do my job," he said, explaining he'll now think twice
about dressing the wounds of injured Iraqis. "If we run across one of
them and he needs my help, it will be harder for me to do it," he added.

(Our Doc Lindstrom felt the same way. As a Navy Corpsman, he wanted to
help people and save lives, but after the wireman incident he added four
grenades to his aid bag).

Many Marines on this desert base - affectionately known as "Snakepit" -
said they believe they were sent to Iraq not to hurt people, but to free
them from Saddam Hussein's ruthless grip. "We want to help these people
and look what they're doing to us," said more than one shocked Marine.

(Exactly what we thought and said at Duong Son in '65)

"What we should do is go in there and kill every last soul," growled
Sgt. Mike Brady. "If they realize that we are going to kill them like
that, they'll be like 'OK, OK, we surrender,' " said the 28-year-old
Texas native. Brady, who mans the twin 50-caliber machine-guns aboard a
Sea Stallion chopper, said he'll be much more wary now when he's flying
over Iraqi positions. He'll no longer give enemy soldiers the benefit of
the doubt when they start waving white flags. "I'm going to be a lot
quicker to pull that trigger if I think they're up to something," he
said.

(Our Sgt. Shireman said almost the same thing, but his version was "no
prisoners, any questions?")

During an air raid yesterday - when everyone rushed into the bomb
shelters with their gas masks and chemical and biological gear - one
Marine's muffled swearing was heard above the din. Repeating the
sneering nickname used for Saddam Hussein, he kept saying, " 'So damn'
insane, 'so damn' insane. I'm going to come up there myself and kill
you."

(Ho Ho, Ho Chi Minh, We're gonna hit you on the chin. Then we'll fire
shot and shell and send you sorry ass to hell!)

Of course, not everyone on the base is calling for blood - yet. Cpl.
Joseph Michinki said he's not convinced the executions actually took
place. "They can fake all kinds of things with video," noted Michinki,
21, of Georgia. "But if that really was Americans being killed, I'd be
pretty pissed," he added.

(This young Marine will learn, eventually. We all do)

Article by Vince Morris, NYPost.com (italic comments by Craig Roberts,
Consolidated Press Int'l)
March 25, 2003
(Reporting from a Marine helicopter base in the Kuwaiti desert)

****Kill'em And Let God Sort'em Out****

The (3rd Infantry) division commander, Maj. Gen. Buford Bloat, is candid
about the threat. "The Bah Party is very well organized and very active
with a lot of forces in Najaf and Samawah," he said in an interview
Monday night. "And they are capable of responding fluidly to us."It has
always been the hope of the American war planners to avoid Iraq's
cities, so as to minimize both American and Iraqi casualties. But there
are doubts. "I think these guys are going to keep coming out and
harassing us," Bloat said. "I think eventually we're going to have to go
in there and kill them. I think we will have to kill them unless we can
get rid of the top guy in Baghdad."

---Michael Kelly, Syndicated Columnist
March 26, 2003

Copyright 2003 The Sierra Times
Permission to reprint/republish granted, as long as you include the name
of our site, the author, and our URL. www.SierraTimes.com All Sierra
Times news reports, and all editorials are � 2003 SierraTimes.com
(unless otherwise noted)
SierraTimes.com� A Subsidiary of J.J. Johnson Enterprises, Inc.




http://www.sierratimes.com/03/03/31/editorialcr.htm


R.W. "Dick" Gaines
GySgt USMC (Ret.)
1952-72
Gunny G's Old Salt Marines Tavern

The Two Cultures

In Which Fred Endeavors To Get Himself Lynched

Fred Reed

April 21, 2003

I spoke recently to a gentleman, now getting on in years, who spent a career in the slum schools of a big American city. He was bright, tough, and realistic, one of the very few gringos hereabout who speaks good Spanish. Though white, he had also grown up in a housing project and so knew well the culture of the bottom of society.

Most of what he said of his experience tracked with the descriptions of slum schools that are found everywhere-dropout rates in excess of fifty percent, unconcerned parents, the usual. We need not recapitulate them here.

He made the interesting point that most education has no purpose other than to prepare the student for further education. Algebra in high school, for example, readies the student for the study of chemistry in college, but is otherwise useless, as one never uses algebra in daily life. Other examples may easily be imagined. Roman history has no relevance to anything that a black teenager in downtown Chicago may do in life; it does however prepare one for the study of further Roman history and of Shakespeare, which also have nothing to do with the teenager's future life.

He thought that instead of academic subjects, students should be taught to read, do arithmetic, balance checkbooks, be good parents, take out a mortgage, care for their health, and suchlike practical matters.

He had a point. The majority of students don't need to know history, mathematics, physics, or literature, do not want to know them, and in fact do not know them. Few are interested. Most children of the urban slums, if one can believe the studies, will pass their entire lives without reading a book. Why try to teach them what, for them, are hideously boring subjects they won't learn, and in any event will never think of again?

Why indeed? Much of the public, probably a majority, lacks either the capacity or the interest required for an academic education. Nor do they need the knowledge conveyed by a liberal studies. They do not need to know how to write clearly, since they never will. Virtually everything they learn after graduation will come either through television or conversation. An eighth-grade vocabulary suffices. They don't need to know the multiplication tables since, on rare occasions when they need to know the product of two numbers, a calculator will serve.

In fact they do not know these things. It is well documented that the schools teach little. Poll after study after test shows that astonishing majorities of Americans cannot find England on an outline map, place the Civil War in the correct century, name the major countries involved in WWI, or recognize the Bill of Rights. Poor teaching and dumbing-down account for some of this dark night of the mind. A lot, I think, springs from trying to teach people what they don't want to know.

Why waste their time and the public monies?

All of this strikes me as reasonable. Yet I find myself becoming annoyed when I think about it. I come from the minority culture that does not regard education as preparation for watching television and punching a time-clock. I saw algebra as worth learning because, yes, it was necessary for chemistry and calculus later-but also because it was just plain interesting, and further because it is an important element in the intellectual development of mankind. I'm glad I studied it. Later in life, when for mysterious reasons I became interested in differential geometry and classical mechanics, a fluency in algebra and calculus allowed me to read them.

For some, reasons exist for learning things beyond tying one's shoes and reading traffic signs. People who do not know history live in temporal isolation; those who do not read literature, in a small mental world.

The gentleman from the big city saw no purpose in diagramming sentences. For his students, no. But for others, there is a purpose: Those who do not understand the mechanics of their language cannot appreciate such writers as Spenser and Milton and T.S. Eliot, as Twain and Mencken and Milne. Writing is an art as well as a means of communication. Art means imagination within rules. You have to know the rules.

Nor are the grammatically inept at all likely to be able to learn to read or speak another language. The reason is less that they have no idea what an indirect object or past subjunctive is than that they are incapable of seeing the language apart from its content.

It is true, as the gentleman suggested, that most people have no interest in languages or literature. But I do. So do countless others from cultivated families. How do we reconcile the existence of the two cultures? Of people who want from the schools things almost diametrically opposed?

The beginning of wisdom would be to recognize that there are two cultures, and to let each study what it chooses. No?

I should not be allowed to impose algebra on people who will never do more than count on their fingers; they should not be allowed to enstupidate the schools to which I send my daughters. (Yes, they may be intelligent. But they are an enstupidating influence to the extent that they are uninterested.) As far as I am concerned, the lower classes (which is largely what we're talking about) can study anything they want, or nothing at all. I don't care. It's their choice. But leave my schools, my language, and my civilization alone.

I'm not being heartless. Should the intellectually uninspired ask my advice, I would happily give it. If they wanted to study Sophocles or digital design, or bird-watching or golf-ball repair, I'd be delighted to supply the teachers. Anyone from any class with the ability and desire should be encouraged to learn. But if people choose not to, I don't care.

Why require anything of them beyond basic literacy and let them out after the eighth grade? They aren't going to learn anything else anyway. (Again, this is documented reality.

For those who want an academic education, I say establish separate schools, and make attendance at all schools voluntary after the eighth grade. Those who wanted to learn nothing more would simply drop out, to the great benefit of serious students. The force of parental suasion would keep those students in attendance who ought to be in attendance.

Finally, decouple jobs from degrees. Hiring should be dependent on the results of a test, given by the prospective employer, of preparation for the particular job. This would empty the universities of students with no academic drive--a splendid idea.

How's that for PC?


�Fred Reed 2003

THE FEW, THE PROUD, THE ARMY?

The few. The proud. The Army?
From expeditionary brigades to a rifleman ethos, the Army sees the Corps as a model for its future

By Christian Lowe
Times staff writer

It started with a new troop carrier that looks suspiciously like a Marine Light Armored Vehicle.

Then they decided to field more units that could deploy at a moment’s notice to trouble spots around the globe. Sound familiar?

They even prefer the Corps’ new digital camouflage pattern to those their own service has in mind.

While it’s unlikely soldiers will go from yelling “hoo-ah” to “ooo-rah,” the service is tearing more than a few pages from the Marine Corps’ playbook.

With several initiatives in the works to transform the force, the Army’s new chief of staff appears to be stealing several chapters from the Corps’ text.

This fall, the Army launched a tectonic shift in how it does business, with an eye toward being more expeditionary and breeding better warrior skills into its non-infantry troops.

Modular brigades that look a lot like mini-Marine Air Ground Task Forces. Training cycles that run more like the Corps’ Marine Expeditionary Unit work-ups. Realistic, less-scripted training. Combat training for all soldiers, regardless of job specialty. It’s all part of the Army’s new shift to be, well, more like the Corps.

“Everybody in the United States Army’s gotta be a soldier first,” said Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army’s top officer, at an Oct. 7 discussion with Washington reporters.

Citing a real-world example of why the change is necessary, Schoomaker pointed to the fact that artillery soldiers in Iraq are working not as cannon-cockers, but as military policemen and infantry troops.

“Everybody’s got to be able to do that,” he said. “Everybody’s a rifleman first.”

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?

Not necessarily. Some Marines are bristling at the mimicry, saying there’s no way the Army will ever match up with the Corps.

“For 27 years, I have watched the Army try to become the Marine Corps, and it hasn’t happened yet,” said a grinning Sgt. Maj. Gregory Leal, who was the top enlisted leader for 1st Marines during Operation Iraqi Freedom. “And never will.”

But even so, the Army aims to become more agile and better able to deploy to a fight quickly. Does that mean the Corps could be edged out of a fight in favor of the bigger, “better” Army? Most analysts say no. There’s plenty of work for both, they say.

“Does anyone think that we have too many ground forces that you can, with any speed, get to distant trouble spots? I don’t think so,” said Pat Towell, a visiting fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C., defense think tank. “It may be that we have a synergy rather than a competition.”

A warrior ethos

The Army set a course to become lighter and faster long before Operation Iraqi Freedom, but the need for more drastic measures was made shockingly clear by the March 23 ambush of a routine Army supply convoy south of Nasiriyah, Iraq.

Iraqi forces captured seven soldiers with the 507th Maintenance Company after ambushing the wayward troops, who had become separated from a larger convoy group. Eleven other soldiers were killed in the ambush.

According to an Army report, the soldiers were fatigued, confused and many could not fight back because their weapons malfunctioned due to poor maintenance. The report describes a chaotic scene in which individual heroics replaced sound tactics.

Army officials and outside experts point to the incident as a prime example of why all soldiers — from wrench-turners to computer-punchers — need to know how to fight. The safety of the “rear” isn’t a given on today’s battlefield, where convoy drivers are just as likely to see combat as tank commanders.

Many top Army leaders are convinced that the focus on noncombat technical skills has come at the expense of basic infantry training, something the Corps emphasizes from day 1.

“To be a warrior, you’ve got to be able to use your individual weapon. You’ve got to be able to operate in small, lethal teams if called to do so,” Lt. Gen. William Wallace, commander of the Army’s combined arms center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., told reporters Oct. 6. “You’ve got to have that mental and physical capability to deal with the enemy, regardless of whether you’re a front-line soldier or you’re someone fixing helicopters for a living, because you are a soldier first and a mechanic second.”

That’s something the Corps’ top infantry commander for Operation Iraqi Freedom took as a matter of course. He made sure every Marine unit, no matter what their job, went into battle prepared to fight aggressively when attacked.

“You shoot at a Marine convoy, they’re not just going to shoot back or drive away,” said Maj. Gen. James Mattis, 1st Marine Division commander, in an Oct. 2 interview with Marine Corps Times. “They’re going to pull over. They’re going to go after you. Every single one of the convoys in the First Marine Division, including the last convoy coming out of Iraq going down to Kuwait.”

To instill that same kind of “warrior ethos” in its soldiers, the Army plans to require that all troopers, regardless of MOS and unit, conduct at least one live-fire combat drill per year. For rear-echelon units, the drill might include reacting to an ambush, such as the one that trapped the 507th, Army officials said.

An effort also is gathering steam in the Army ranks to expand its Modern Combatives Program — similar to the Corps’ martial-arts program — so that every soldier is versed in practical hand-to-hand combat techniques and philosophies.

Moreover, soldiers will be required to qualify on their individual weapons twice per year, rather than just once per year — a move that could help forge a combat mind-set Army leaders believe is lacking. For some, making the adjustment could be uncomfortable.

“It will be a little harder for the old NCOs and officers who see themselves as specialists,” said Gary Anderson, a 29-year Marine veteran and a defense analyst with Hicks and Associates, an Arlington, Va.-based defense consulting group. “But it will be easy to get the younger soldiers excited about it.”

However, word of the Army’s new warrior campaign drew some raised eyebrows and strong doubts from Marine riflemen in and around Camp Pendleton, Calif.

“They’ll never be like Marines,” declared Lance Cpl. Russell Bullock, a 19-year-old from Holland, Mich., who noted that the focus and discipline instilled in every Marine from day one isn’t easily duplicated.

What most impresses him about the Corps is the responsibility given to junior Marine infantrymen, compared to what junior soldiers can do.

“We’ve been in one year, and we’re already going to be in charge of the young Marines,” said Bullock, a rifleman with Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines.

And senior enlisted Marines often do jobs that the Army gives to officers, a point not lost on Bullock. His new first sergeant came to the unit from Afghanistan, where an Army major replaced him in the job, he said, adding: “That says a lot.”

But the changes go far beyond punching up infantry training for individual soldiers. Army officials want to change the way the force is organized, shrinking some units, lightening others and making all units more modular.

In other words, their proposal looks a lot like the Corps’ MAGTF concept.

The Army wants to be able to attach aviation units to infantry units or to plug armor from a heavy division into a light unit. The service has 33 brigade combat teams that encompass the full range of combat power, but Schoomaker wants more and wants them to be able to deploy more quickly and with less of a logistical footprint.

And chalk up another one, if you’re keeping score. In another look-alike move, the Army’s even trying to field a vehicle similar to one of the Corps’ favorites: the Light Armored Vehicle.

Arguing that its heavier M2 Bradley fighting vehicles and M1A1 Abrams tanks are too heavy to deploy quickly, the Army launched an effort in the mid-1990s to build an “interim armored vehicle.” Known as the Stryker, the wheeled vehicle is intended to deploy aboard a C-130 Hercules transport.

But one Marine infantry officer believes moving to a lighter armored force could be a mistake.

“I like the fact the Army has tanks,” said the major, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re a combat multiplier against an armored threat in a large-scale ground conflict. If Operation Iraqi Freedom proved one thing, the enemy doesn’t like tanks, and they’ll run from them if they are given the opportunity.”

The Stryker has been the centerpiece of the Army’s “expeditionary” transformation goals, which include the ability to deploy a brigade in 96 hours, a division in 120 hours or five divisions in 30 days. In preparation for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Corps deployed nearly 70,000 troops to the theater in slightly over 40 days — darn close to the Army’s goal.

“Clearly, the pattern of the last decade has been toward more expeditionary operations throughout the [Defense Department], not only in the sea services. This has been true with the Air Force as well as the Army,” said Thomas Donnelly, a defense expert and resident fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

Looking good

Whether today’s rank-and-file Army is ready for the kind of changes Schoomaker has proposed still is an open question. But an informal Army Times poll last December shows that a lot of them want to look like gung-ho devil dogs.

The poll presented the Army’s candidates for a revamped camouflage pattern and the Corps’ new digital pattern for a vote. Soldiers preferred the Marine pattern to 10 others — garnering second place behind one of the Army patterns.

One key question remains, though. As the Army starts to look more like the Corps, will that mean that soldiers will squeeze out leathernecks from their niche as America’s kick-in-the-door force?

Most doubt it.

“A quicker, faster Army sounds good to me,” said Commandant Gen. Mike Hagee in a Sept. 29 interview with Marine Corps Times reporters and editors. “I’ve never seen, ever, a crowded battlefield.”

Instead, most see the change as the Army finally coming to grips with the reality that they’re still shaped to fight Cold War battles.

The Corps never positioned itself to meet the Soviet threat during the Cold War, focusing instead on fighting frequent-but-small flare-ups that came on the Cold War’s fringes.

“The Corps was always organized to meet the market,” Anderson said. “They are structured to do things that other services couldn’t.”

And it’s a structure that lends itself to fighting America’s new war on terrorism. In the months immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Corps did make some forward-looking adjustments, creating a new antiterrorism brigade and forging a new relationship with U.S. Special Operations Command that led to the creation of a new Marine Corps special-operations detachment.

The Army, meanwhile, finds itself playing catch-up.

“It all comes down to the Marine psyche,” Sgt. Maj. Leal said. “It starts in boot camp. We’ve had it for 228 years, and they’re just now starting?”

Gidget Fuentes, C. Mark Brinkley and Sean D. Naylor contributed to this report. Naylor covers the Army.

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story.php?f=0-MARINEPAPER-2309819.php
http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story.php?f=0-MARINEPAPER-2309819.php



~~~~~
This is...
Gunny G's Marines
GLOBE and ANCHOR Sites & Forums
By R.W. "Dick" Gaines
GySgt USMC (Ret.)
1952-72
~~~~~

THEY CAME IN PEACE...THE CORPS REMEMBERS...

They came in peace...
Corps remembers victims, survivors of Beirut bombing

Submitted by: MCRD Parris Island
Story Identification Number: 20031020145639
Story by Staff Sgt. Benjamin N. Haynes



MCRD/ERR PARRIS ISLAND, S.C.(Oct. 17, 2003) -- "When we fight, we strongly believe in God, Corps and Country, but we fight for our buddies."-Anonymous Beirut veteran

At approximately 6:22 a.m., Oct. 23,1983, a truck loaded with 2,000 pounds of explosives crashed through the gates of the U.S. Marine Corps Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The bomb exploded inside the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regimental Battalion Landing Team taking the lives of 241 Marines, sailors and soldiers and wounding more than 100 others.

The bombing is considered the most deadly act of terrorism prior to Sept. 11, 2001, when the world witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center and the damage to the Pentagon.

Although the two terrorist attacks took place nearly 20 years apart, the reasons behind the bombing are the same. According to an anonymous letter from a Marine who served in Beirut, the purpose of these cowardly acts was to separate us.

However, the effect of these acts had the opposite affect on the American people and military.

"As Americans, these tactics only serve to draw us together," the letter read. "Some are calling Beirut the first battle of World War III. This is a conflict we did not want, but one in which we cannot afford to lose. It is a war between good and evil. We have the will to win, and we will prevail."

Prior to the bombing there were nearly 1,600 Marines serving as part of a multinational force trying to help restore order and stability in Lebanon. The Marines had been stationed in Lebanon to provide a presence. The year before, in June, the Israelis had invaded Lebanon in one final push to drive out PLO terrorists. This move upset balance in the Middle East and U.S. forces were attempting to referee the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Lebanon. They had been deployed around the Beirut airport to stand between the Lebanese army and Syrian-backed Shiite units fighting in the Shouf Mountains.

In the months leading up to the attack, Marines operated in a high-threat environment and continued to actively patrol, train the Lebanese armed forces, and improve security.

Throughout their stand in Beirut, there was a noticeable conflict with some local groups. The embassy Marines faced verbal harassment, rocket and mortar attacks against the LAF, and stray rounds coming into their positions. The Marines recognized the increased threat posed by this firing, and continued to harden positions by emplacing sandbags and digging in deeper.

After a Sept. 26 cease-fire began to break down, the threat of terrorism remained vague, while the active threat from artillery and small arms was increasing.

While the majority of the Marine forces lay asleep on the early morning of Oct. 23, 1983, a five-ton truck entered a public parking lot adjacent to the four-story, steel-reinforced concrete and sandbagged building which housed the headquarters elements of BLT 1/8. After making a complete circle around the parking lot for acceleration, and while traveling at a high speed, the truck crashed through the outer defense of a barbed-wire emplacement. It moved at high speed between two sandbagged sentry posts; passed through a gate into an iron fence; jumped over a sewer pipe which had been placed there as an obstacle to impede vehicles; plowed through a sandbag barrier; and precisely hit a four-foot wide passenger entry into the lobby where its cargo detonated.

According to then Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. P. X. Kelley, the entire event, which can best be described as the delivery by a suicidal driver of a 5,000-pound truck-bomb at very high speed, took approximately six seconds from start to finish.

Thursday will mark the 20-year anniversary of the tragedy our fellow Marines and armed forces faced in Beirut. Marine Corps Base, Camp Lejeune, N.C., has special programs planned for those who sacrificed and served. The Beirut Veterans Association will host ceremonies, dedications and banquets to honor the heroes of Beirut Thursday. For more information on the events, visit www.lejeune.usmc.mil/ncb/beirutmemorial.asp.
-30-

Photos included with story:
The explosion of the Marine Corps Building in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983, totally demolished every floor of the building, leaving 220 Marines and 21 other service members dead. Photo by: Official USMC Photo The explosion of the Marine Corps Building in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983, totally demolished every floor of the building, leaving 220 Marines and 21 other service members dead. Photo by: Official USMC Photo
The building shown above was used by the Marines as a barracks before the terrorist attack Oct. 23,1983. Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the attack. For more information on memorial services, visit www.lejeune.usmc.mil/mcb/beirutmemorial.asp. Photo by: Official USMC Photo The building shown above was used by the Marines as a barracks before the terrorist attack Oct. 23,1983. Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the attack. For more information on memorial services, visit www.lejeune.usmc.mil/mcb/beirutmemorial.asp. Photo by: Official USMC Photo
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~~~~~
This is...
Gunny G's Marines
GLOBE and ANCHOR Sites & Forums
By R.W. "Dick" Gaines
GySgt USMC (Ret.)
1952-72
~~~~~