THE POPE'S NEW BOOK

Catholic World News has announced the publication of a new book by the current Roman Catholic pope.  In The Infancy Narratives, Benedict "dwells on the details of the Nativity story, including the poverty into which Jesus is born and the homage offered first by lowly shepherds, in a sign of God's special care for the poor."

I am not sure why "shepherds" have to be "lowly," except from the condescending perspective of the rich.  And if God has a "special care for the poor," nobody in the Vatican has paid any attention to it for about the last eighteen centuries--since the Catholic Church got rich.

The Catholic Church is the richest corporation on earth.  Its current CEO sits atop a large mountain of gold, an art collection which if sold would feed all the starving poor in the world for the next twenty years, and real estate worth more than the combined national budgets of  all the member states of the United Nations.

If God has a "special care for the poor," the Catholic Church and God have very different values.  And if God is going to judge us humans when this world comes to an end, surely he will condemn the Catholic Church and its leaders to burn forever in what the Cathlic Church calls "hell."

That simple bit of logic having been stated, I want to say one thing more. 

I read about Benedict's new book on something called "Catholic Culture.org"--which came to me courtesy of Google.  I would have responded to the news item from Catholic World News via "Catholic Culture.org" except that I couldn't.  "Only donors are allowed to Sound Off," I read.  "If you are a donor, log in."

The bona fides of the Catholic Church are always dependable.   When I was a young man, my grandfather was invalided for a long time.  The parish priest visited him, occasionally.  I remember one afternoon my younger sister's friend asking, innocently. "How much does he charge for a house call?"

It's not just a myth that in the middle ages clever monks in southern Europe sold Jesus's foreskin more than 1500 times. . . .

                                                                    Bert Hornback

Impriposter

Nihil Bonum

MAY SECESSION SUCCEED!

MAY SECESSION SUCCEED!


Georgia and twenty-nine other of these supposedly United States want to secede? What a lovely idea!  Why doesn't everybody secede? 

There are enough decent humans--even in Georgia--to guarantee that there wouldn't be any slave states.  There aren't enough mock-Christians anywhere to make a Mock-Jesus Hate State, or enough  fanatical Mormons in Utah to make a Moronic  State.  (Alas, there aren't enough Native Americans anywhere to make even one Native American State.)

There isn't a single state that could afford its share of the mis-named Defense Department (it was the War Department until 1946).  No single American state could afford nuclear weapons--or even unmanned bomber-drones.  No single state could afford anything closer to a dysfunctional CIA than a sherrif's office.   No single state would dare swagger stupidly into wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria.  No single sovereign American state would have been able to bomb Lybia, or invade Grenada, or Lebanon, or Panama, or buy an army to overturn the government of Nicaragua, or try the Bay of Pigs invasion, or engineer the Cuban embargo, or try more than thirty times to murder Fidel Castro.

So let's all secede--for the world's sake.  Let's have the Disunited States of America.  "United We Stand, Divided We Fall" we used to say.  But we aren't united, and what we seemed to have been united for--vain, stupid, arrogant, capitalist power--has been bad for everybody.  So let's change the motto:  "Divided We Fall--For All."

Europeans may be smart enough--civilised enough, after all these centuries--to be united in a civilised manner.  It seems so.  And rather than conquer or buy their neighbor states, the European Union has invited states to join it--and is even paying to bring poorer states' standards of living up to a European par.

But the United States of America was not founded upon such social principles, and has never even tried to exist as such a genuinely cooperative society.  So let's encourage its disunification.  Maybe, someday, its people will become wise enough to want to live together in civilised society.

So . . . I say--with mixed feelings, to be sure--hooray for Georgia!

PHIGS AND OTHER EUPHEMISMS

I don't pretend than anyone should care what I think, but just to be honest about my state of mind, I wish to say that I don't give a fig about the reasons for the outcome of the American presidential election.  That the majority of Americans voted for the lesser of two evils is hardly a cause for joy.

I am glad that Mitt Romney didn't win.  There is something postive in that:  the majority of Americans didn't vote for wealth and injustice, for anti-social government.  But a majority of voting Americans did vote for Barack Obama:  and Mr, Obama stands for violence, belligerance, murder, illegal detention, torture, and lies and broken promises.

Let me itemize these allegations

     Violence, belligerance, murder:  offensive wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria; unmanned "drones" used to kill suspected "enemies" but also killing innocent people who, when dead, are called "enemies."

     Illegal detention, torture:  at the illegal U.S. concentration camp at Guantanamo, where unindicted prisoners have been tortured for as much as twelve years; and at Fort Leavenworth, in the United States, where PFC Bradley Manning has been held illegally  for more than 900 days without being charged with a crime, and who was for more than a year tortured in solitary confinement at Quantico.

      Lies and broken promises:  about our wars, our enemies, about closing Guantanamo, ending torture, supporting "whistle-blowers."

So I am not cheering.  I did so four years ago, naively.  I had supported Lyndon Johnson in 1964--and then came Vietnam.  I supported Jimmy Carter in 1976--and then he tried to start World War III by invading Iran--to free 48 (or was it 52) secret CIA operatives in the US Embassy in Teheran.  Bill Clinton was a good president--but he started his presidency by bombing Basra, in Iraq, because an Iraqi man was accused of plotting to kill George H. W. Bush.  (The man was never even brought to trial.)

Obama is among the worst of our warrior presidents--and we have had a lot of them!  He inherited the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and enlarged them to include attacks on Pakistan and Syria.   He has introduced CIA "drone" attacks, and enlarged our attacks on civilians.  (US news reports call our victims "enemies";  European news sources regularly identify the victims of our blind attacks as "civilians.")  Nixon and Kissinger's napalm war in Vietnam  and the "Christmas Bombings" of Cambodia, and Colin Powell's burying Iraqi troops in the sand with bulldozer blades attached to tanks
in George H. W. Bush's Iraq war were probably worse that Obama's use of unmanned drones, in terms of the numbers of innocent people killed.  But murder is murder, and mass murder is mass murder, never mind the size of the mass.

So I am not cheering.  I hope maybe Obama will spend the next four years trying to do the right thing,to govern morally.  But I'm not sure he can.  When you have done what he has done for four years, can you suddenly quit being evil, and become a good man?

ANYBODY INTERESTED IN WAR CRIMES?


Anybody interested in war crimes?  Crimes against humanity? 

Ooops!  I forgot.  Those don't exist any more.  No such thing.  Why not?  Nuremberg has been restored, and is ready for use. . . .

But most of what goes on in our modern wars could be classified as both war crimes and crimes against humanity.  And since the heyday of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon--napalm, the Christmas bombing of Cambodia, etc.--the U.S. has been the world leader in torture, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.  So if we reactivated Nuremberg,  the U.S. couldn't run the trials; its various leaders (Kissinger, Bush I, Colin Powell, Bush II, Obama) and so many of its military officers and men (and women) would all be on the docket, and trotted out through the underground tunnel into the courtroom.  They would be charged with war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Bradley Manning is alleged to have exposed war crimes.  Certainly the film that he is accused of letting us see--we have all seen it, surely--shows American troops committing war crimes.  But remarkably, none of the troops pictured murdering civilians from a helicopter gun-ship has been charged.  Instead, Bradley Manning has been held in prison without being charged with anything for nearly 1,000 days.  In solitary confinement, naked, for most of a year--but not charged with any crime.  (The United Nations torture investigator has not been allowed to speak with Manning privately.)

Does anybody in the U.S. remember what a writ of "habeas corpus" was?  We used to have a constitutional right to such:  we couldn't be detained indefinitely without being charged with a crime.  Bush II "suspended" that constitutional right--can a president suspend the U. S. Constitution? --in order to run his concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.  And despite his promise to close that illegal torture facility and prison, Obama has not done so, nor has he restored habeas corpus.  And Obama has had Bradley Manning imprisoned for most of his term as president.

What have we become--as a nation, as a people?   Our biggest crimes used to be greed and street violence, and what is called "organised crime."  But now our nation practices "organised crime" all around the world.  (Watch out for that drone!)  And as a people, we accept it.

Tuesday is voting day.  Four years ago, I happily voted for Obama--as did the Nobel Committee in Oslo.  I am told I must vote for him again this time.  Why?  Because he isn't as bad as Romney would be.   But Romney hasn't broken a promise about Guantanamo, or expanded our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to include Pakistan and Syria as well.  Romney isn't using unmanned drones to kill people in the Middle East--who, once dead, always turn out to have been members of al Qaida.  Romney hasn't approved torturing Bradley Manning, and is not responsible for Bradley Manning's illegal imprisonment.  Nor has Romney declared that Bradley Manning is guilty--without even being charged!--as Obama did:  "He broke the law."  (Those were the words of our lawyer, law-professor president.) 

So on Tuesday I will vote with my feet.  For the first time since 1956, when I voted for Adlai Stevenson, I won't go to a polling station, or cast an absentee ballot.  I can't.

FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

E.M. Forster, the early twentieth century English novelist, wrote a lovely book called Two Cheers for Democracy.  Two cheers, because it wasn't worth three.

As I grow older, I get more depressed by what is called "democracy" in the United States.  Not because we aren't a democracy, but because we are such a stupid democracy, a violent, murderous, lawless democracy.   I am not sure I could manage even one cheer for US democracy.

I have lived in Germany these last five years.  I get my US news via Google.  Every day I see the headlines about the day's seven or eight mass murders.  I know the murder statistics for Detroit and Chicago--and for New Orleans, where I used to live.  And I read about Obama's unmanned drones, guided missiles used to attack supposed military targets, in one of Obama's five undeclared wars.

Of course, the drones--we must believe--kill Talaban operatives.  The drones are so sophisticated (as is American "intelligence, which programs them) that everybody they kill is a member of the Taliban.  In case you who live in the United States don't know--or haven't guessed--the rest of the world knows that Obama's drones kill people, indiscriminately.  The American aggressor-logic is simple:  if we kill somebody, he must have been the enemy.

Pfc. Bradley Manning is suspected of making public thousands of files which incriminate--make criminals of--US warriors, from individual solders to their commanders to the commander-in-chief.

According to both US military law--the Uniform Code of Military Justice--and US civil law, to conceal information about a felony is a crime:  "accesory after the fact" in civil law, "misprision of a felony" in military law.   Had Bradley Manning not made public the evidence he had, he would himself have been guilty of a felony offense.

Obama has already convicted Bradley Manning:  "He broke the law," said Obama.  (Obama is a lawyer, and a former law professor.)

It is now more than 800 days--more than 26 months, more than two years--since Bradley Manning was put in prison.  Never mind, for the moment, that he was tortured--kept in solitary conmfinement, deprived of sleep,  sexually humiliated--at Quantico for more than a year.  US military law says that if a prisoner is not brought to trial within 120 days of his confinement, he is free.

Bradley Mannisg should be free.

I have not done anything wrong, let alone anything heroic.  But I am afraid to come back to the United States.  I admire Bradley Manning, but I am not capable of his kind of heroism.

And given what US democracy is doing, these days--five illegal wars of aggression, CIA drones murdering people, the imprisonment of Bradley Manning (but no charges against the soldiers exposed by Manning, executing civilians)--I am frightened of returning to what, for 76 years, has been my homeland.

Cheers for democracy?  I have none for ours.  Not two, not one.  None.

INVADING LEBANON

 

            What I have to tell comes from my relatively short career as a militarist.  It’s about the U.S. invasion of Lebanon in 1958, which was the only opportunity I had in my three years of active duty to defend the world from whatever it is we defend it from.  I was part of that invasion of Lebanon, nearly fifty years ago.  Nobody ever told us invading good guys what our invasion was about, or who the enemy was.  But 10,000 Marines landed there, in the summer of 1958, and eventually 10,000 Army troops arrived as well..   I was one of the Marines, a second lieutenant in charge of a platoon. 

           I had managed to get through eight months of Basic School, finishing second in my class academically, and 619^th (out of 621) overall.  I sang in the Basic School Choir, edited our yearbook, and had my name written into the record book at Marine Corps Schools for qualifying as a “high expert” when we fired our M-1s on record day.  I had even served briefly as the president of my platoon’s mess, until our captain (who was a good man) decided I was a bad as well as incompetent representative of a platoon of forty-four officers and gentlemen.  By then I had named our platoon, and found our platoon song.  The other platoons in our company were Bowie’s Rangers, Parker’s Raders, and Field’s Rovers; we were Austgen’s Mice.  We sported mouse-ears above our Quonset hut’s doors, and when we marched we sang “Mickey Mouse.”

            I even enrolled our whole platoon in the Mickey Mouse Club, on television.

            One Friday afternoon in October we came in from an afternoon of playing in the Quantico mud, and were told that we would stand a rifle inspection—conducted by our captains, the real marines—before our weekends started.

            We all grumped, of course. When everybody was back inside our Quonset hut I went around and threw the bolt on each door. Then I stood up on Howie Luddington’s foot-locker, and got everybody’s attention.

            “Look,” I said, beginning on an original rhetorical high-note. “We are officers and gentlemen, and supposedly worthy of trust. If they don’t think we are worthy of trust—if we really aren’t officers and gentlemen—then they can inspect our rifles on Monday morning, and fry our tails if our weapons are fouled. But not now. We’re going on liberty. We’ll clean our rifles, and then go on liberty”

            Nobody—not even the two mustangs, up through the ranks—liked the way we wasted our time, our lives, at Quantico. So when the student first sergeant—another lieutenant—called the company out, the second platoon sat tight, with the doors locked. 

            We heard all the usual noise as the other lieutenants herded by squad and platoon. We heard the call for us. We heard the student first sergeant scream,

            “Second platoon, do you hear me? Fall out!”

            Then he banged authoritatively on our door.

            “Fall out, second platoon!”

            We sang “Mickey Mouse.”

            Then our captain, Donny Austgen knocked, and announced himself.

            We sang “Mickey Mouse.”

            We heard everbody else dismissed—no rifle inspection if some of the kids wouldn’t play—and then Corporal Ruffing knocked on our hut’s front door. He wanted to talk to me.

            “They’re pissed, Lieutenant Hornback.”

            “So are we, my friend.”

            “They want to know what you want.”

            “Tell them, Ruffing, that we will go on liberty this afternoon, as we should have an hour ago, and we will let them inspect our rifles on Monday morning.”

            We settled in to clean our rifles—it was both easier and better for the rifles if we cleaned them now—and then left for the weekend.

            It was after that little affair that I ceased to be the president of our mess. And when I left Basic School, 619^th in my class of 621, I had a fitness report which said I was “a malcontent, probably a communist, and unfit to wear the uniform.” A couple of weeks later I was a platoon commander in “F” Company, 2^nd Battalion, 8^th Marines, 2^nd Marine Division, Fleet Marine Force.

            Our first important engagement came just four months after I met my platoon, and my noble platoon sergeant Doyle Humphrey. The battalion was on stand-by. For seven days we would represent the Marine Corps as the ever-ready, on-call U.S. response to anything bad anywhere in the world.

            On our third night of stand-by, I was sitting on our barracks at the Marine Corps Air Station in Cherry Point, North Carolina, waiting for another lieutenant; we were on our way to a movie version of Crime an Punishment.  Suddenly Sergeant Humphrey ran into the room.

            “Time to go, lieutenant!”

            We got our packs and ran outside.  Humph formed up the platoon, and we headed for our planes on the double. I had the first plane, Humph the second.

            We had practiced this twice, so we knew where to go.  When we arrived beside our planes Humph and I turned our troops over to squad leaders.  Nobody was there yet but us. No pilots, no crew.  And nobody running toward the other fifteen planes yet.  Humphrey and I tried speculating as to where we might be going, but gave it up.  We couldn’t even guess, let alone speculate. So he gave me advice.

            After an hour or so, the battalion operations officer arrived in a jeep, to tell me I should take my troops back to the hangar; our pilots were at home, having dinner, and would be most of an hour yet getting in.

            It was midnight when my flying boxcar—or, to use the proper Marine Corps name, the R4Q—taxied down the runway and we were airborne.  I had twenty-two Marines, and Humph had twenty-two more in the plane behind me.  My plane was loaded with wooden crates, all down the middle; we sat in canvas seats down both sides.

We headed up the east coast of the U.S., which meant we were going toward Europe.              Maybe we were off to free Czechoslovakia, or East Berlin.

            We landed at Argentia, Newfoundland the next morning. Humph’s plane was right behind mine. The U.S. Navy fed us breakfast, and gave us bunks in a barracks to rest while we were waiting. We waited long enough to be fed lunch, and then waited till they fed us dinner. No other planes full of Marines landed. In fact, no other planes landed at all.

            After dinner we were sent back to the airstrip. The pilot explained to Humph and me that because of all the extra weight we were carrying—the crates were full of ammunition—everybody was going to have to crowd forward while we were in the air. And only one person at a time could use the piss-tubes in the back toward the tail.

            We sat on top of each other in the forward part of the cabin. Eventually the crew made room for me in the cockpit; I stood behind the navigator, bent over almost double. The pilot was delighted; we were making 127 knots now, and flying almost level. Except when somebody would go piss.

            We landed the second morning at Lajes, on the little Portuguese island of Terceira in the Azores. We were in the middle of the Atlantic, about 1500 miles west of Gibralter.  I found that out when we landed, and the pilot told me. He had explained to me when we left Cherry Point that he couldn’t tell me where we were going until we got there. Those were his orders.

            I had asked him about the other planes in our convoy—the fifteen R4Qs and Constellations—that were supposed to be following us..  Humphrey’s plane was still with me, but I hadn’t seen anybody else in Newfoundland. The pilot said he didn’t know; that he had not been in contact with the others, or heard anything about them. 

            “Enjoy the Azores,” he advised.

            Lajes airport was pretty bleak, and needless to say we didn’t get to go sightseeing. We stayed for lunch, and stood around at the airstrip until late afternoon. Then the U.S. Navy generously gave us  little boxes with a chicken breast, an apple, and chocolate bar for our dinner. Most of us had emptied our boxes—out of boredom rather than hunger—before we were ready to go. 

            As I hoisted myself up into the R4Q the pilot asked me if Pfc. Haupright, my one 250-pounder, could take my place in the cockpit for this next leg.

            “We got something for you to do, Lieutenant,” the crew chief said. He motioned me toward a window. “See that? See that little hole on the back of the engine housing?”

I did.  

            “This left engine is leaking oil just a little.  The loss of the oil isn’t a problem,

but running full throttle all night the engine might get a bit hot.  So I want you to watch for smoke there. We don’t want a fire.  Okay lieutenant? Here’s a flashlight for when it gets dark.”

            When we taxied out onto the runway it was dusk already. All night—this was night number three—I pointed the crew chief’s flashlight out the window, and kept myself entertained by staring at the leaky left engine. I don’t know what the crew planned to do if it started spewing oil, or smoke, or caught on fire. Flying boxcars could no more fly on one engine than a chicken can fly with one wing. I know, chickens can’t fly at all, even with two wings. And the R4Q was a close as anything that flies can get to being a chicken.

            I helped us across the Atlantic, and when we got off the plane late the next

afternoon, we were in Africa. Port Lyautey has disappeared now; it used to be a U.S. base in Morocco, about thirty miles north of Casablanca. Four days after beginning this rush-hour-subway-car mostly-night-flight across the Atlantic, we were in Africa. I hadn’t thought of going to Africa, but here we were.

            A Navy commander came hustling up to me and did his best imitation of a very military salute.  I stood at attention and saluted him back. Sergeant  Humphrey was forming the troops up behind me. 

            “Lieutenant, welcome to Port Layoute.” He side-stepped me and said to my kids, “Men, as soon as your sergeant can get you there, breakfast is waiting for you in the mess hall.”

            Before Humph could dismiss them, they were scrambling onto the bus that had pulled up. The chicken in the box was twelve hours gone by now. 

            The commander and I climbed on the transporter, and we went to breakfast. After, we all took off our boots and stretched out. Except for Fuzz Boxx and me; one of his boots was bad. I persuaded an SP with a jeep to take us to the cobbler shop, and we got it fixed. 

            The commander had informed me very seriously that we were having a special meal at four. It was steak and eggs: what the Navy always served as the last meal before combat. When we arrived at the mess hall he was there, waiting for us. He stood at something like attention at the head of the line as Humphrey’s and my troops went through. Humph and I brought up the rear.

            We were all sitting at a couple of long mess tables, eating pretty noisily, and not looking very military, even if they were feeding us steak and eggs. 

            “Excuse me, lieutenant,” said a voice behind me.

            I turned. A Navy captain in a well starched and pressed uniform was standing behind me. I climbed over the bench seat and stood at a rather grubby attention.

            “I need to speak to you, lieutenant. Privately.”

            He motioned, and walked toward the end of the mess hall; I followed. When we got to a quiet corner we stopped. He stood very close to me, and took a paper from his pocket. I looked at it. It was a telegram, with bunches of numbers and a letters that seemed to be latitudes and longitudes. I gave it back.

            “Do you know what that is, lieutenant?”

            “Yes sir. It looks like instructions for avoiding the no-fly zone over Cyprus.”

            “Have you memorized it?”

            “No sir. I don’t fly the plane, sir.”

            A pause.

            “Oh. I thought—I suppose I should show this to the pilot.”

            “Yes sir.You should.”

            He walked away, in search, I trusted, of my pilot and the other one. I went back toward the mess table and my special meal. Just as I was about to sit down he touched my arm.

            “A word, lieutenant. I would appreciate your not saying anything about this to anyone. It would be embarrassing.”

            From Port Layoune to Malta, and then early the next morning—day five now—we flew to Suda Bay on Crete. Either we were getting close, taking these last two short hops, or our planes were too tired to go very far at a time any more. Maybe both.  So much for stand-by, ever-ready responses to trouble.

            Suda Bay was a brief stop; the only food we got was a box lunch, delivered to us in front of a hangar. While the R4Qs were being refueled, the pilot called me aside.

            “I can’t tell you where yet, but as soon as we’re in the air I will. It’s not far. And there’s fighting going on. If I were you, lieutenant, I’d issue my men some ammunition.”

            Humphrey and I uncovered the horde stashed down the middle of my plane; it was all machine-gun ammunition—and we didn’t have any machine-guns. Humph’s plane had more of the same. We told everybody to load their pockets with rocks, and did the same ourselves. That’s how we landed in Beirut.

            Nobody was fighting around the airport. And nobody even seemed to have noticed that two noisy, lumpy planes had landed, deposited a bunch of Marines, and roared away again without so much as a wave or a beep of the horn. We lay on our bellies in the grass for a few minutes, then I stood up. Nobody shot at me, so we all stood up, and walked to one side of the field. Then we sent out two scouting parties—armed with rocks—to find out what might be where with whom and why. One party found the third battalion of the sixth Marines; they had landed on the public beach four mornings ago. When I got to their colonel, he told me that obviously I must want the first battalion of the eighth Marines, who had also landed on the beach on a day after we left Cherry Point. He gave me directions, and a driver to get me there. But the first battalion knew nothing about us, and didn’t want us. The driver took me back to the airport, where I had left Humphrey and our platoon.

            We were hungry, and it was getting toward sunset. We formed a double column, and headed off toward the beach. Along the way we saw a tank unit, but didn’t stop. When we got to a good wide stretch of open beach, with the beach road and some shops visible not far away, we stopped. A couple of kids volunteered to go back to the tankers’ site and steal some boxes of c-rations. I gave another patrol of volunteers money to go find us some beer and pop. They came back with beer, but no pop—they said it was expensive—and a lot of good flat bread, to eat with our c-rations. 

            Humphrey had set a sort of perimeter watch while the foragers and shoppers were gone,  and the rest of us made camp.  Eventually everybody migrated into the warm Mediterranean. Five cramped nights on an R4Q and a longish hike down a hot beach in the afternoon sun makes being naked in the sea irresistible.  When we came out I counted to make sure I still had everybody, and went to sleep on top of my clothes.

            The guard managed to change itself through the night. When I awoke the sun was well up in the sky, and hot. And I was surrounded by forty-four naked kids, sprawled out on the sand, getting sunburned.

            Three days later all the other planes from my battalion landed. We were still living on the beach when we saw the head of the long double column marching toward us, our colonel in the lead. Humph formed our troops up, the colonel and I exchanged salutes, and he shook my hand—without stopping, of course. I ran along the beach backwards until he let me go. 

            “Fall in with your company, lieutenant,” he said, as though we hadn’t been on our own for nine days now. Lieutenant Hornback’s Expeditionary Force.  Then, with a friendly, relieved father’s look on his face, the colonel said,

            “Come tell me what you’ve been doing.   Tonight, Bert.”

Lieutenant Colonel Tillmann was a good man, and a good leader. I was happy to fall in with my troops behind him. A year and a half later he almost persuaded me to stay in the Marine Corps.  The military is too powerful to leave in the hands of dummies, Bert.  Al Tillmann stayed until 1968.  He was a full colonel, then, assigned to the Pentagon, and had been picked up for promotion to brigadier. But he had a sixteen year-old son who was worried about the Vietnam war. One night, after watching the news, they talked. Al told Ricky that he didn’t need to worry; he wouldn’t be drafted. How did Al know that?   He didn’t. Finally he told Ricky, If they try to draft you, we’ll move to Canada.  But a Marine colonel working at the Pentagon can’t commute from Canada so his son won’t be drafted. So Al resigned.

            On our short flight from Suda Bay to Beirut I had been writing in a little pocket-notebook. Sergeant Harris asked me if I were writing “battle orders.” I was sorry to disappoint him. I was writing a poem, a little doggerel four-line verse for each of my forty four kids, and Humphrey.

            My troops never did get ammunition. Sergeant Humphrey found bullets for his pistol and mine, and eventually, after a couple of weeks, a Jeep delivered a whole batch of ammunition for the rifles.  But I hid it—we were guarding the U.S.Ambassador and his residence by then, and I had access to a sort of carriage house in the garden where we kept things—and nobody ever complained.  Not even Sergeant Humphrey.

            Three things perhaps worth the telling happened to me or to us while we were in Beirut.  I’m sure there were more important things happening there, but I didn’t know much about them. 

            I knew that Frank Black had captured the Beirut police force on the beach the day his battalion landed on the beaches. Hundreds of Marines jumping out of little LCVPs provided quite a show, and—never mind the fighting in the city—Beirut came to the beach to watch. The police were there to keep order—but nobody in Frank’s battalion spoke either Arabic or French. 

            I also knew that there had been a secret intelligence discovery that warned us not to drink Coke; the bottler employed over a thousand known Communists. So they told us to drink 7-Up.  After four days, intelligence discovered that Coke and 7-Up were bottled by the same thousand known Communists, and none of us had been poisoned.  So we went back to drinking Coke. 

            And I knew that when Robert Murphey from the U.S. State Department arrived in Beirut, he had to try to undo the mess we were making by being there.  He persuaded President Chamound to call an election, and on election day all U.S. troops were ordered to stay hidden.  The election results gave Lebanon a Christian president and a Muslim prime minister, which didn’t solve anything, but at least it let the U.S. invaders go home.

            So much for the bigger picture. Meanwhile, my company was guarding the port facility. We lived in the streets, between rows of office buildings and warehouses. After the first night the kids started collecting big cardboard boxes and wooden crates, and building a little camp. We even rigged up a simple shower, made of a piece of metal grating, balanced on top of two tall crates.  You stood between the crates, and a buddy poured water from a five gallon can over the grating.  It worked well, two troops to a can of water.  If you wanted a hot shower, you left your water can in the sun for an hour or two.

            After a couple of days Mr. Nazir, the civilian who seemed to run the port facility, explained to me that in Lebanese culture nakedness was not a good thing, and the people who worked in the buildings on our street objected to our showering so publicly. 

            “Somebody is always in the shower, all day,” he said. “There is always a naked man on this street.”  We knocked the top and bottom out of one of the crates, and turned it into a closed shower stall.  No more nakedness.

            We had been in the port area for about a week when two big Navy cargo ships docked on either side of a nearby pier.  I went over to see what they were bringing us.             The USS Dalton Victory off-loaded dozens of trucks, bull-dozers, cranes, and other heavy equipment.  Each piece had “DV” chalked on its side, and its deck and hold number.  Their drivers rubbed off the chalk markings before pulling out for wherever they were going. The USS John Boyce off-loaded a pretty similar cargo.  Then a seaman with a clip-board started down the line of the Boyce’s cargo, erasing the chalk markings and replacing them with new ones.  A tanker-truck marked “JB-3-2” would become “DV-4-1,” and a crane marked “JB-1-5” would get re-tagged “DV-2-3.”  As the sailor re-designated the John Boyce’s cargo for the Dalton Victory’s hold, drivers came and repositioned the vehicles alongside the Victory.  By nightfall the Dalton Victory was re-loaded, and the next morning both ships were gone.

            For some reason the Army used one of the cranes it received to move a load of telephone poles into the port area.  It left the logs and the crane in my section. The day the logs arrived Mr. Nazir told me that his men needed to do some work on the water mains, and would be turning off the water in the area for a few hours. 

            At about three that afternoon the hot July sun did what hot sun usually does to newly creosoted telephone poles, and they combusted.  Someone sounded the alarm, and my troops ran to help.  They unrolled the firehoses, and turned them on, but there wasn’t any water.  Eventually the Navy managed to pump water from a ship to the scene of the fire, but by then the logs and the crane had been burnt up.

            None of us knew much about why we were in Lebanon, and some of us didn’t even know where Lebanon was. Corporal Olbrich sent out a scouting party and found me a plywood packing crate top about five feet by eight feet. The communications clerk gave me a couple of grease pencils, and—bless you, Sister Georgiana of the Colored Chalk—I drew a map of the world on one side of my packing crate top, and the middle east on the other. I could get the Herald Tribune and the Times of London a day or two late at a little shop just outside the gates to the port area, and occasionally a Time magazine; there was also an English-language newspaper published most days in Beirut. 

            Every afternoon at one, I sat up my map on top of a box or something, and told

my platoon what I had learned.

            My captain decided to give me an hour a day with the company, to talk about where we were and what was going on in the world. And then locals—men who worked in the dock area, or nearby, started to come as well. After a talk, when the troops had left, some of them would offer comments, or ask questions; they all spoke French, and most of them spoke English. I learned more talking with them than I did from Time or The Times—and what I learned from them was probably more reliable.

            Toward the end of the month I was moved to the U.S. ambassador’s residence, and another platoon was sent to reinforce the guard at the U.S. embassy. I arrived at the ambassador’s with my platoon, some machine-gunners from our company, two jeeps from somewhere with a pair of 105 mm. recoilless rifles mounted on each of them, and two amphibious armored personnel carriers—amtracks, they were called.  The machine-gunners had borrowed bullets for their guns; their ammunition had gone back to the U.S. on Humph’s and my escaping R4Qs.

             I met with the ambassador’s driver every morning, and gave him money to buy beer and ice. My troops had found a good-sized wooden crate somewhere, and then had stolen tar-paper to line the crate with. Every afternoon, starting at four, I sold beer out of my box on the ambassador’s side yard. Almaza and Laziza, a dime for a liter bottle. Not quite a dime; so every time I sold ten bottles the next kid got a free one. That’s one of the things worth mentioning. From four every afternoon until ten or eleven at night, I sat there talking with my kids, and listening to them talk. Sometimes they talked about themselves, and their families and maybe their girlfriends. Sometimes they talked about their ambitions, but not often. Sometimes they talked about the world.

            That’s the first thing about my invasion of Lebanon that’s maybe worth the telling. My packing-crate map of the world, and selling Almaza and Laziza on the ambassador’s side lawn:  both are about talking with people, and what I learned.

            The second important thing has to do with those amtracks in front of the ambassador’s house. I had them in case of an emergency. One afternoon a major from somewhere up the line had come to see me. He had an eight-by-ten photograph of the beleaguered Lebanese president with him, which he told me to commit to memory. 

            “This is Camille Chamound. If you get the order, you will board the first amtrack and proceed to the presidential palace. The amtrack will climb the stone stairs, smash open the double doors with its ramp, and you will go inside and rescue the president. You will then head straight to the beach, stopping for nothing, and transport him directly and without delay to the USS Pocono, anchored in the harbor.”

            When I asked why I had two amtracks, I got as an answer the obvious: the second amtrack was there in case the first one didn’t run.  But amtracks usually ran. We fired up those two amtracks every eight hours, and they always started. The problem was that amtracks sank a lot—and having a spare to cover that eventuality wasn’t going to be very useful.

            (When Ronald Reagan visited Ireland as president of the U.S., his secret service flew in seventeen surface-to-air missiles to guard Ashfort Castle while he was there—and three armor-plated limousines, just in case two of them didn’t work.)

            I asked the sergeant in charge of the 105 mm. recoilless rifles what his place in all this was.  He said he had none: that if they fired those rifles in the city, the backblast from the tubes would blow down the buildings behind them, and probably kill him and his men.

            The third thing has to do with the U.S. ambassador, whom my men and I were guarding. Every evening at about nine the ambassador would send for me. Ambassador McClintock was a fifty-five year-old bachelor. When Admiral Holloway had started making noises about invading Lebanon, Mr. McClintock told me he had advised against it. Eventually he had cabled the president, to tell Ike that landing U.S. troops in Lebanon would be a grave error. The U.S.landed anyway, with 10,000 Marines over the beaches, World War II style, and by air. Now the U.S. had 10,000 Army troops—mostly tankers and their support, and engineers—in Lebanon as well.

            Ambassador McClintock seemed to me a serious and thoughtful man. He was also afraid. When I came in each evening, he was seated in a big brocade wing chair in the main sitting room. I was requested to sit opposite him, in a matching wing chair, ten or fifteen feet away.

            Every night Mr. McClintock had a bottle of Jim Beam on the table beside him, and a glass. There would be a glass on the table beside my chair as well; but mine would be empty, and his would already be in use.

            “I know you are on duty, lieutenant, and I won’t ask you to drink. But if you care to, please fill your glass.”

            Then he would start to talk to me. Sometimes—most times—I would have a drink at some point; he drank until he fell asleep in his chair.

            Early on, he asked me about the amtracks. I explained what they were for.

            “I see,” he said. “Well, if ever the call comes and you are to go rescue President Chamound, would you mind taking me with you?”

 

            It took us eighteen days to get home from Beirut. The USS Monmouth County dutifully steamed toward North America every day, but not very fast. Sometimes we would see ships, off toward the horizon, speeding past us. Once one of the three ships in convoy with us broke down, and we left her behind; the next day, however, she had caught up again. The convoy sailed at the Monmouth County’s speed.

            “We may not be fast, but we’re steady,” I said to the chief engineer one day.

            “Just hope we don’t break down, lieutenant.  If ever this one stops, it will never start again.  I can guarantee that. We’ve been carrying replacement steam pipes in the hold for eight months now, and somehow they haven’t scheduled us for refitting.  This thing could just quit, any day.”

            It was a long ride. The only movie on board was “The Court Jester,” with Danny Kaye. Our communications officer and I saw it every night. After the first couple of weeks, we started watching it from behind the sheet that was the screen, so we could see it backwards.

            To relieve the boredom I printed up a newsletter every day, complete with a home-made crossword puzzle in which the colonel always found a flat-out, stupid, brazen mistake. One morning I was working on my puzzle in the transport wardroom—the wardroom for passenger-officers, as it were—when our executive officer wandered in.

“What are you doing, lieutenant? Practicing for civilization?”

            I laughed. Major Powell was a real Marine. He had been in the Pacific as a kid in World War II, and then in Korea. This was his first chance at a war since, and he felt it.

“Damn it, lieutenant! I thought sure we’d get a chance to win some medals there. Shit. We didn’t even get to fire any shots in anger.”

            True. And we only killed one person, an eighteen year-old Marine who forgot the password and was shot by his platoon sergeant. So it almost wasn’t a bad war—almost wasn’t a war at all.

            We did, however, get an “expeditionary forces” medal. During the Vietnam war I hung a peace sign from my ribbon, and wore it.

            The U.S. invaded Lebanon in 1958 for no strategic reason. We accomplished nothing, unless you count ruining the city’s streets by driving tanks and amtracks around on them, or proving that the stand-by, ever-ready, on-call quick-response Marines could fly from Cherry Point, North Carolina to Beirut, Lebanon is five days.  Or at any rate, forty-four of them could; it took the rest of the battalion eight days.

            And one of the kids who went didn’t make it home alive. He was killed by what is called friendly fire.

 

                                                                        Bert Hornback