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

The Bradley Manning Memorial Railroading

Why should a judge--even if she is a military judge--rule that the United Nations special representative on torture not be allowed to attend PFC Bradley Manning's trial?

And why should that same judge reject PFC Manning's calling the militart commander of the prison facility at Ft. Leavenworth where he is imprisoned?

Obviously this is not a trial.  It is a persecution, a railroading.  Manning has been tortured for obeying the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  Obama--a lawyer--has already pronounced him guilty.  And in a democracy, the Commander-in-Chief can never be wrong.

God bless America!

Interesting news items.

Last week the world marked the 25th anniversary of the U.S. navy's shooting down a civilian airliner full of people, taking off from the civilian airport in Iran.  All 300 of the people on board were killed.  The U.S. initially claimed that the civilian airliner was attacking U.S.navy ships.  The U.S. said it was diving toward the navy ships.  But films showed that it was taking off, flying up into the air when it was shot down.  The U.S. government didn't even apologise.  I wonder:  did the 25th anniversary of that mass murder appear in the news in the U.S last week?

Today's news reports that thirty years after the supposed "end" of the U.S. War Against Vietnam--which of course was also fought in Cambodia and Laos--the U.S. has finally agreed to "help" get rid of more than a million--that's 1,000,000--unexploded U.S. bombs in Laos.  Those million-plus bombs are still maiming and killing people in Laos--after thirty years.  If we spread them out, there is one unexploded U.S. bomb in every little 5 foot by 5 food piece of ground in Laos:  every space the size of a small bed has its own U.S. bomb, in Laos.  For thirty years now..

And todays news reports that the U.S. has now released Osama bin Laden's "driver"--the man who drove his car--from the U.S. Concentration Camp at Guantanamo.  He was never charged with a crime.  We don't know how often he was tortured.  But now--AFTER TEN YEARS IN AN ILLEGAL PRISON RUN BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT--he has been sent home.

All U.S. citizens should be proud of the U.S. government.  Right?  Now all we need to do is end the U.S. wars, occupations, and aggressions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria, stop killing Mexicans in Mexico, close Guantanamo, agree to stop torturing people, and release Bradley Manning who has been in prison for two years--for one year tortured and in solitary confinement--because he allegedly made public documents proving U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

If the U.S. could do all of that, then it might look like a decent country. 

I am an optimist.  And I hope to see the U.S. again a decent, law-abiding, honorable nation.


 

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Why Am I Voting For

What am I voting for?  Or does it matter?  Like many other people, I voted for Barack Obama in  2008.  I voted for him because he said--repeatedly--that he would end the US Bush Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would close the US concentration camp at Guantanamo, and would stop the US practice of illegal torture.  He also said--repeatedly--that we should honor "whistle-blowers."

He has done none of those things.  He has expanded Bush's two wars to four, adding Syria and Pakistan to Iraq and Afghanistan:  they are all four now Obama's wars.  (Obama is a good name for a warrior!)

Instead of closing Guantanamo, he has continued to flaunt international law and added nearly four more years to the brutal, inhumane punishment of prisoners there.  Both their continued imprisonment and their treatment violate the U. S. Constitution and U.S. law.  (In case you happen not to know it, at present--thanks to Bush II and Obama--US citizens no longer have their constitutionally guaranteed rights called "Habeas Corpus.") 

And rather than stop the use of torture in US prisons, Obama has expanded it beyond Guantanamo:  PFC Bradley Manning--an heroic whistle-blower--was tortured for one year at Guantanamo, and now has been held for another year (no "Habeas Corpus") without being charged with a crime. 

If Obama had promised to stop taxing Americans, and then doubled their taxes, Americans would have revolted.  But doubling the number of our wars instead of stopping them--as he promised--doesn't bother anybody.

If Obama had promised to double Social Security benefits,  but then reniged on that promise, Americans would have demanded his impeachment.  But not closing Guantanamo, despite his promise, doesn't bother anybody.

And as for torture--and the conmtinued incarceration of Bradley Manning for exposing government crimes--Americans don't seem to care.  And Obama has already declared PFC Manning "guilty"--of the crime of whistle-blowing.

What am I voting for in 2012?  Nothing.  Why am I voting for?  I'm not.  And there is no provision for voting against.  (We learned that in 1968.)

None of these three serious issues--our wars, our concentration camp, our incarceration of Bradley Manning--has been mentioned so far in this campaign for the presidency.  None of the three has been mentioned either by the candidates or in the news media.

 God bless America:  it needs it!  May God forgive it, too, once it has corrected itself and repented.

And by the way:  the chorus of the second verse of "America the Beautiful" prays, "America, America!  God mend thine every flaw.  Confirm thy soul in self control, Thy liberty in law.".
 
Amen.

MY PAST AS A MILITARIST

WHAT I LEARNED TRAINING TO BE AN OFFICER IN THE MARINE CORPS

Believe it or not, I did spend three years and one day as a regular officer in the United States Marine Corps. That was more than half a century ago. Consequently, what I want to recall in this brief essay will be dated. Things will have changed—for the worse, I am sure.

But more on that later.

Now I want to tell you about the eight months I spent as a new lieutenant—number 073651—in the United Sates Marines. It began in late June of 1957. There were three companies of four platoons each in my “class,” as we were called. We were almost all recent college graduates, and we probably felt more comfortable being in a “class” at Marine Corps Schools, Quantico, Virginia.

We were issued about fifty textbooks the first day. And told that we would march to meals, but could walk back to our quonset huts—each platoon had one--on our own afterwards. (No doubt we wouldn’t have found the mess hall on our own; it was a full three blocks away, and we were only college graduates and lieutenants. Still, we had been issued compasses—and maps.)

I glanced at the books, and on Friday afternoon dumped them all into the trunk of my car. Our major saw me at it. “Taking them off for the weekend to study, lieutenant?” “No, sir. I need space more than I will ever need these. They can stay in the trunk.”

Almost all of the other forty-three lieutenants studied, regularly. Nightly, during the week. And every so often we had exams—and lieutenants crammed for them. Even graduates of decent universities: Yale, Wisconsin, Colgate, Vanderbilt, Texas. When we took our exams—every two or three weeks in each of our several courses, fifty minutes’ worth—another lieutenant and I used to race to see who could finish first. The only rule was that you had to read and answer all the questions. It never took more than fifteen or twenty minutes. After eight months of this nonsense, we were first and third in our class of 600 lieutenants, academically. I was next to last, however, in everything else—manner, bearing, appearance, attitude—and was ranked third from the bottom overall at our graduation. My first fitness report said that I was a malcontent, probably a Communist, and unfit to wear the uniform; but I had regular commission—I was not a reservist, as most of us were—and therefore I was assigned to an infantry post, as a platoon commander.

The third week I was in Basic School we went out on a twenty-eight mile hike. It took us about nine hours, including stops for chow. Two weeks later the schedule came up with another such hike. I went out with everybody else, and walked for an hour or so, until it got dark. Then I just disappeared. I went to the nearest road, and hitched a ride. And another ride. (People were used to seeing Marines in their “combat” gear—though they must have wondered why I was out so late, dressed that way and carrying my rifle and a pack.)

When I got back to our Quonset hut I read for a couple of hours, and crawled into my bunk. The others got in about four or five in the morning. And our captain came in to see me.

“Blisters, Lieutenant Hornback?” he asked.

I didn’t get up—and somehow he let that pass. I should have gotten out of bed and stood at attention.

“No sir.”

“Sick?”

“No sir.”

“Then why--?”

“Because, sir, we did this a couple of weeks ago, and I discovered that I can walk twenty-eight miles with no trouble. No need to practice, sir. I can do it.”

Officers in the Marine Corps have lots of uniforms. In addition to work uniforms, we had dress greens for the winter and dress khakis for the summer. And dress blues for the winter and dress whites for the summer. And so that we could learn how to wear our fancy dresses—the blues with the red-striped trousers and the whites—each platoon had to have a mess night. My platoon elected me its president.

We were scheduled for our class’s fourth mess night. All the staff officers from the host platoon’s company were invited, and took with them their platoons’ mess presidents. Captain Austgen had to take me. I didn’t do anything bad, and I wore my dress whites well. But the day after the second one he called me in to say that I was forthwith relieved of my duties as our mess president, to be replaced by Lieutenant Howie Landis. Which was okay with me. Howie was a nice guy, a graduate of the Virginia Military Academy, and planned to make the Marine Corps his career.

Relieved of my leadership role, I devoted my energies to writing parody songs for us to sing at our mess night. I got Corporal Ruffing, our company clerk, to mimeograph the words for us, and after enough to drink, we sang them boisterously—as young combat-officers-to-be should. But the songs all mocked the military, and the Marine Corps, and all the nonsense of Basic School.

          Note the tree-line on the right,
         And the next machine-gun sight;
         With your compass you can see
         To shoot that sniper in the tree.
         Sing and shout until you’re deaf—
         Glory to the F.M.F.!

We sang that one to “Hark the Herald, Angels sing.”  And the F.M.F.--that's the "Fleet Marine Corps."  A branch of the U.S. Navy.

A few weeks later I was accepted into the Basic School Chorus. (Another irrelevant throwback to our college days.) After that I was excused from whatever we were doing every Wednesday afternoon. And then I was elected our company’s member of the 3/57 Basic School Yearbook staff—which election was nullified before I even got an afternoon off.   But I got to take a whole day off once because my congressman wanted to see me in Washington. And once General Lemuel C. Sheppard, recently retired as Commandant of the Marine Corps, wanted to speak with me. He was calling to invite another lieutenant and me to dinner.

Our major was bent much out of shape by this last above-his-head escape, and started to give me a very red-faced lecture. When he stopped for breath I told him not to worry. General Sheppard had told me we weren’t to wear our uniforms; this was an informal dinner. But Lieutenant Machenberg and I would of course need to have the afternoon off, to get ready.

I also got to spend two weeks in the hospital, recovering from “a virus of unknown etiology.” There were three other lieutenants in my ward; we played bridge until we were well.

One afternoon a captain named Stevens was supposed to give us a lecture about something. We were outside, sitting on bleachers, in the sun. When Captain Stevens was presented to us we all had to stand at attention until he gave the command “Seats!”

About ten minutes into his lecture he took off his cap to wipe his forehead. And I recognized him. Captain Alex Stevens from Gravel Switch, Kentucky. He was three years older than me. When he was in college—playing basketball—kids all called him “Gravel.”

So I shouted “Gravel!”

Everybody turned to look at me. He looked at me and said, “Jerry Hornback! I be dog!” (Gravel said “dawg.”) We both laughed, and at the end of the hour he motioned for me. We were standing in the shade a big tree when my Captain came up to claim me. Gravel stuck out his hand instead of saluting Captain Austgen, so my captain returned the civilized gesture. And then Gravel explained, “Jerry and I have known each other for years. His daddy was my basketball coach in college.” And then Gravel proposed that he would “send this boy along” when we were finished talking.

Twice I got to play platoon commander for our platoon, and both times we had an hour of marching on the drill field. One of the things you have to have to be a good Marine officer is a big voice. I have a big voice. The drill field was a paved parking lot, about the size of a football field. Platoon commanders usually march alongside their platoons, and give them commands. But when I marched our platoon I would stand in the middle of the drill field, and march them around the periphery for an hour, barking my various commands from where I stood. It was a great deal of fun—and none of our captains could do it.

The other three platoons all had marching songs. (Real Marines don’t have such, but we were still college boys, really, so we had marching songs.) There was a kids’ television program in those days, called the Mickey Mouse Club. Some of us used to watch it every now and then. The song was sort of catchy. And when kids joined the Mickey Mouse Club, they got their names read out during the program.

The first platoon belonged to Captain Bowie. They called themselves “Bowie’s Raiders,” and put a little sign up over the front door to their Quonset hut. The second were “Parker’s Barkers”—or Farkers, or Jerkers or Larkers or Narkers, or whatever. Captain Field had the fourth platoon, which called itself “Field’s Tigers.” We put a pair of wooden mouse-ears above our door, and called ourselves “Austgen’s Mice.”

Our marching song was “Mickey Mouse.” And one day I sent in the names of all forty-four of us Mouse-Lieutenants to become members of the Mickey Mouse Club—and we had our names read out on the air!

Once I was made student company commander. When the student first sergeant fell everybody in, and turned the company over to me, I returned his salute, looked at my company, and ordered them to fall out for class. That was all there was to it.

Major Thomas accosted me as I headed off toward the lecture hall.  “Lieutenant Hornback, you will never make it as an officer. Never smile at your troops. You are dismissed.”

One rainy, cold Friday afternoon we came in from waddling around in the mud at a little before five. Five was quitting time for us warriors. Before dismissing us to our quonset huts, the student company commander announced that we would have a rifle inspection in half an hour. Groans, and we all fell out.

Back in our hut, I went around and locked all four doors. Then I asked for attention. I reminded the platoon that we were “officers and gentlemen,” That we were young men supposedly in responsible positions, and that our commissions said that our government had “special trust and confidence” in us.. That we all knew how to clean our rifles, and knew what happened to them if they weren’t properly cleaned. And then I told them that we weren’t going to have our rifles inspected till Monday morning. That we would all clean our rifles, shower, and then go on liberty for the weekend.

We settled in to cleaning our rifles.The voice of the student company commander called “fall in”—but we didn’t. Again. Some of the lieutenants looked at me, worried. Then somebody tried a door, from the outside. Unable to open it, he knocked. “Third platoon, fall in!” We all sang “Mickey Mouse.” Then another knock, and another voice: “This is Captain Austgen. Fall in!” We sang “Mickey Mouse.”

A couple of minutes later yet another voice shouted,  angrily,  “Company, dismissed!”

Then a knock at our door. “It’s Corporal Ruffing. Can I speak to Lieutenant Hornback?” We let Ruffing in, and he asked what we wanted. I told him. They can inspect our rifles Monday morning at eight o’clock, I said, but now we want to go on liberty.

After a few minutes he came back, and we let him in again.  Ruffing was a bright, funny little guy.  Now he was grinning from ear to ear, but he stood at attention: after all, we were officers.

“The major says rifle inspections at eight o’clock on Monday. And he wants to see you, Lieutenant Hornback.”

I went across with Ruffing to the company headquarters quonset hut. But the major had decided—quickly—to go home. And Captain Austgen—showering-- didn’t want to talk to me at all.

All in all, Basic School wasn’t so bad. If it had been maybe three or four weeks long—and I could have stuffed the good things all into those three or four weeks—it would have been okay. But it lasted for eight full, empty months. And that was bad.

So, what did I learn in those eight months?

An officer shouldn’t smile, and must speak in a deep voice. The acronym for the principles of warfare is “MOSS COMES”—not “OOMEMSSSC.” Marines don’t call rifles “guns.” When wearing dress greens, officers carry their gloves; they do not wear them. Most officers are idiots: it’s a necessary part of the job.

It’s a wonder the U. S. military doesn’t get more people killed than it does. Maybe that’s because everybody’s military is stupid.

In learned right away that Major Thomas was a silly little fool. He wanted to be big, but wasn’t. He thought he was shrewd, but was just mean in a sort of bullyingly cowardly way. Captain Bowie was too old for his job, and delicately unfit for it; he was as out of place as an older nun in football pads. Captain Evan Parker was a rich jock who loved to show off his muscles and his Jaguar. Captain Harry Field was a very nice man of maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven who was utterly out of place in the military; the Marine Corps probably discovered that soon enough—but I hope Harry discovered it first, and resigned. Donnie Austgen was a good man, a serious and thoughtful man. I liked him a lot—even if he was a Marine. And I think he liked me—or would have, if I hadn’t been a Marine. He put up with me rather heroically.

I had learned how to take apart and clean a rifle at training camp the summer before; in Basic School I learned how to do the same to a pistol. I learned to shoot them both. And (I taught myself this) I learned not to try to fire a .45 caliber pistol with your left hand. Somehow I managed to shoot 238/250 with the rifle on record day, which was the highest in my Basic School class, so high that they had to write my name down in their record book.

I learned I could walk for twenty-eight miles. I learned how to use a compass, and how to read a topographical map. (I didn’t learn the latter very well, and in the following two years got my platoon lost frequently.) And by carrying with me at all times a page or two out of the Oscar Williams Anthology of American Poetry, I learned a lot of poems by heart.

Otherwise, I learned nothing except that I wanted out of there. After Basic School was over, I worked for a very good captain, Bob Zuern, and then for one of the best and brightest people I have ever known, Colonel Al Tillmann. And under both of those excellent officers, I worked with dozens of good young Marines: good young men who happened, briefly, to be Marines. And though the Marine Corps was wasting two or three years of their time, at least I took good care of them while they were wasting their time.

I forgot about the Marine Corps after the first of June 1960, when I was released from active duty. I was reminded of it in the fall of 1961—I was studying in Ireland at the time—by a forwarded letter telling me that I now had a top secret security clearance. I wrote back, thanking whoever it was, and asking for some Top Secret mail to look at. Then in 1963 I received a letter informing me that I had been promoted to the rank of Permanent Captain in the Marine Corps Reserve.

My brief military career was a long time after the horrors of World War II, more than ten years after the outrages of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though in 1960 the radiation from those two nuclear bombs was still killing hundreds of people a year. It was just after the end of the United States’ non-war called the Korean War. (It was a non-war because in 1950 only Congress could declare war, so Harry Truman called the war in Korea a “police action.”)

We could expect our troops, when they came home from Korea, to act like human beings. True, they had—many of them—killed other human beings; but they hadn’t been spraying little girls with napalm, or being ordered to slaughter whole villages of men and women and children. For the most part, they were as human as soldiers can be, given what war is.

That was before that undeclared and murderous Vietnam War.   In 1966 I remembered that I had never resigned my Marine Corps commission, and did so in opposition to that war. I tried to get rid of my draft cards—males were required to carry them until they turned thirty-five—but my draft board sent them back to me.

My time in the military was long before either of the two Bush Wars, both hideously murderous, and neither of them declared by Congress. And of course my time as a Marine officer has had nothing at all to do with Barack Obama’s many shameful and obscene high-tech wars today. And it had nothing to do with the low-tech inhumanity, the barbarity of the American soldiers now collecting human fingers and human hands and a human skull or two as souvenirs of their heroic fight for whatever it is they are fighting for all over the Middle East.

Still, I was in the military. I am sorry for that. I was even part of the United States invasion of Lebanon in 1958. That was a war that we didn’t get to start. We tried, of course; and our tanks even had “tactical” nuclear weapons with them. I had seventy troops in Beirut, for eight weeks. But I didn’t issue them any bullets for their guns. I was given two vehicles with four 105mm. recoilless rifles each, but the sergeant in charge of them explained that it would be suicidal to fire those things in the city because the back-blast would knock down the buildings behind them—and all the rubble would fall on top of us.

I have never recommended the military to anyone, and never will. I used to warn young people to beware any time somebody wanted to give you a fancy uniform to wear. But that’s outdated advice now. Until recently, in the United States, people in the military were not allowed out in public—off their bases—wearing their “combat” uniforms. They had to wear their dress duds, if they wore uniforms. But now airports in the United States are full of young men and women in combat gear—reminding us that they are warriors, that they are supposed to be off killing people somewhere. I wonder when American soldiers will start coming home on leave wearing dried human fingers around their necks, or carrying souvenir arms or legs home for the folks to see.

Maybe in Basic School today young Marine Corps lieutenants are taught that such stuff is okay.  Or maybe they aren't taught anything at all--which was pretty much the way it was in Basic School fifty-five years ago.