About That Vietnam Campaign medal you say you've got...
My last three months in Vietnam I was Awards And Decorations Officer for a helicopter company. Almost daily I saw men who were the carefully selected and rigorously trained best our country had, our Kingsmen flight crews and support people, making heroic decisions and choices, and performing self-sacrificing acts of extreme risk to accomplish the mission or to protect the lives of others. These men all fulfilled the stated requirements for receiving many of the awards and medals, in Spades, like the Aces on the front of our ships. They did their part toward earning those decorations, not just on one rare heroic day in their tour, but every few days or so. It of course goes without saying that very few of them actually got the medals they deserved.
The admin process was the obstacle. First, somebody had to go through the steps of formally putting somebody in for something. Somebody then had to go find and interview others involved in the action, when they weren’t out getting shot at, and to get their statements documented. Next, there had to be a good writer in the loop, as the recommendations had to be very rigorously formatted, to include certain very specific language describing the action as prescribed in the regs for each different award. Without those specific words, it is rejected. To be selected by other admin people higher up the pile, people up at Division who read a stack of them every day, the description of the action had to read like a good adventure novel.
Then each page of each recommendation had to be duplicated in seven copies. Seven. (7!) The paper those who “support the troops” sold to the US Army those days was the crudest heavy acid-woodpulp stock made, not even newsprint grade, simply the worst paper in the world’s history. While paper made of papyrus or hemp (yes, that hemp) lasts thousands of years, the records of the Vietnam years are blackened and crumbling today. Our typewriters were huge ancient newsroom Royals, on which things were literally pounded out. Using carbon paper, it was possible to make one clear copy, and one barely legible fuzzy one. To make seven copies, every page had to be typed without error three times, or four if that last fuzzy one wasn’t legible.
I kept two clerks working full time just typing up recommendations for awards, and I wrote a lot of hyperbolic descriptions of the truly heroic things we Kingsmen were doing out there every day. I wish I’d had half of the super document processing tech we have today, and a lot more of that elite club of gray old vets now could say, “Yeah, I got the bones, with a V.”
I believe we who wear such things and hold them in high esteem as I do, are most likely to agree that having them is no big thing among ourselves, and they do not set those who have them apart from those who do not. Even so, the recognition by a grateful nation that you can show to your grandkids when it’s all just history to them is a meaningful thing, something to be held in honor for.
When so many who deserve that honor were not recognized, it is truly an indication of a very weak and not-so-clever character for a person to claim that honor to himself, when it is not deserved. Pretending to be a veteran to pick up girls at the country club bar is one thing. Girls know guys will lie about anything in the bar, so caveat emptora. Whether by innuendo or outright lie, however, saying it for the purpose of obtaining political power is a BIG RED FLAG. This guy wants to get elected for the wrong reason. Next he’ll be claiming the ghost of Ronald Reagan told him God wants him elected.
James Nathan Post
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Friday, June 4, 2010
Off Post On The Oil Slick.
Off Post On The Oil Slick.
We see a lot on TV involving the executives of the companies involved, various political figures from The President down, and boards of investigators and lawyers to determine such things as criminal negligence, and who has to pay what to whom. These are all worthwhile activities, but neither the business management guys nor the politicians are the ones I would expect to have the serious advantage in deciding how to deal with the oil leak. That is the real and foremost problem, even more than the horror of trying to clean up Pensacola before the tourists get there. To solve that problem, my background among working class engineers leads me to believe the people who know best how to fix that machine are the guys who built it, and who are out there every day working it. That would be not the CEO of BP, nor some Federal suit sent down there by a Senatorial committee, but the guys who live there and know every bolt and tube of that huge and terribly dangerous machine, like the crew of a submarine.
The GOP’s obstructionists-as-usual who last year were accusing President Obama of acting like a Fascist taking command of errant businesses are now yelling that he is a weakling because he has not taken Fascist command of the international corporations involved in this dreadful mishap. It appears to me he has arrived at the same street-smart conclusion that I did, and with his usual serene class, is letting the company’s engineers do it, while the pundits and the polits babble on about who is to blame, and how to vote next fall. It is quite likely that the first people he called a month ago included Robert Ballard, the deep-water expert who found Titanic, and a couple of nuclear subs working with US Navy dark ops. He would know the what and where of every piece of deep-water research and engineering equipment in both civilian science and military operations, anywhere in the world. If anybody had retrodesigned USO alien underwater technology, he would know about it. The next call was likely his CNO, the Chief Of Naval Operations, of whom he would ask the same question, “What do we have, secret or not, that has the capacity to work down there?” He would immediately inform the BP operations commander on the job at the site that certain resources were available, and would be brought in if they wanted them.
If I were President, when I heard that the reasonable-sounding idea of putting a big funnel over the pipe and sucking the oil right up it and into a tanker ship was not working because ice was forming inside it, I would have called that CNO and told him to immediately, like in 24 hours, inform me of which nuclear powered US Navy ship could be sent fastest to that accident site. That ship, whether a submarine or an aircraft carrier, would proceed there immediately, and get with that BP operations chief and work out the fastest way to use the ship’s nuclear power plant to create the largest amount of the hottest water possible, and to get it piped down to that capture chamber. It would be best if it was an aircraft carrier, where the jet jock students at Pensacola could fly out to conduct their carrier landing qualifications, and where The President could fly out there in Marine One and declare “Mission Accomplished” when it worked.
As for cleaning up the mess, I believe the answer lies in the power of American entrepreneurism. Last I heard, somebody was paying somebody about $75 a barrel for the stuff coming out of that hole, which is also known as crude oil we measure our lives in barrels of. How about if BP agreed to set up collection stations, and would pay anybody $75 a barrel for all of it they can bring in? I think the way to clean up the oil is not to tax us and pay somebody to treat it as toxic waste and get rid of it somewhere. The way to clean it up is to let Americans harvest it. Let the Junkyard Wars guys, and Adam and Jamie the Mythbusters, and the bayou boys who build those wonderful mud racers get ahold of the problem.
Here’s an answer I figure might be worth trying: you make a ten thousand gallon tank that sits in the hold of your little boat, which is basically just a hull for the tank, made like a fiberglass swimming pool. That would be a tank only about as big as an RV, really private-enterprise small boat stuff. On the front of the boat is a big suction scoop, which lies on the surface like a wide and flat vacuum cleaner, hooked up to a pump. You move through the oil slick and suck up the top surface of oil and water. That mixture is pumped into your tank. The tank is closed on the top, but has an opening at the bottom. As the oil and water separate, the tank is filled with oil from the top down. When it is full of oil, you close the vent on the bottom and proceed to the BP receiving station. 10,000 gallons is about 200 barrels, which at $75 a barrel is $15,000. Even if BP paid only $1 a gallon for the stuff, that would still be $10,000 a trip, which is enough to motivate unemployed guys who used to go out for shrimp. With floating oil and underwater plumes to be harvested only a few miles offshore, a boat that size could likely make four trips a day, working in four-man crews round the clock in shifts. It would be hard and dirty work, but they could make a pretty good working-class nickel. That is a policy that would really create jobs, lots of them, especially among those who have lost their fishing jobs. No government program I know of could possibly equal the ability to actually go pick up and recycle that spilled oil faster than just paying Americans to go get it. Even the entire Coast Guard does not have the ability to clean up as much of it as a couple hundred of such little boats… or a couple thousand.
James Nathan Post
Here is a song I wrote 30 years ago about working on the Texas Tower. Performed by “Sarah’n’Dippity.”
We see a lot on TV involving the executives of the companies involved, various political figures from The President down, and boards of investigators and lawyers to determine such things as criminal negligence, and who has to pay what to whom. These are all worthwhile activities, but neither the business management guys nor the politicians are the ones I would expect to have the serious advantage in deciding how to deal with the oil leak. That is the real and foremost problem, even more than the horror of trying to clean up Pensacola before the tourists get there. To solve that problem, my background among working class engineers leads me to believe the people who know best how to fix that machine are the guys who built it, and who are out there every day working it. That would be not the CEO of BP, nor some Federal suit sent down there by a Senatorial committee, but the guys who live there and know every bolt and tube of that huge and terribly dangerous machine, like the crew of a submarine.
The GOP’s obstructionists-as-usual who last year were accusing President Obama of acting like a Fascist taking command of errant businesses are now yelling that he is a weakling because he has not taken Fascist command of the international corporations involved in this dreadful mishap. It appears to me he has arrived at the same street-smart conclusion that I did, and with his usual serene class, is letting the company’s engineers do it, while the pundits and the polits babble on about who is to blame, and how to vote next fall. It is quite likely that the first people he called a month ago included Robert Ballard, the deep-water expert who found Titanic, and a couple of nuclear subs working with US Navy dark ops. He would know the what and where of every piece of deep-water research and engineering equipment in both civilian science and military operations, anywhere in the world. If anybody had retrodesigned USO alien underwater technology, he would know about it. The next call was likely his CNO, the Chief Of Naval Operations, of whom he would ask the same question, “What do we have, secret or not, that has the capacity to work down there?” He would immediately inform the BP operations commander on the job at the site that certain resources were available, and would be brought in if they wanted them.
If I were President, when I heard that the reasonable-sounding idea of putting a big funnel over the pipe and sucking the oil right up it and into a tanker ship was not working because ice was forming inside it, I would have called that CNO and told him to immediately, like in 24 hours, inform me of which nuclear powered US Navy ship could be sent fastest to that accident site. That ship, whether a submarine or an aircraft carrier, would proceed there immediately, and get with that BP operations chief and work out the fastest way to use the ship’s nuclear power plant to create the largest amount of the hottest water possible, and to get it piped down to that capture chamber. It would be best if it was an aircraft carrier, where the jet jock students at Pensacola could fly out to conduct their carrier landing qualifications, and where The President could fly out there in Marine One and declare “Mission Accomplished” when it worked.
As for cleaning up the mess, I believe the answer lies in the power of American entrepreneurism. Last I heard, somebody was paying somebody about $75 a barrel for the stuff coming out of that hole, which is also known as crude oil we measure our lives in barrels of. How about if BP agreed to set up collection stations, and would pay anybody $75 a barrel for all of it they can bring in? I think the way to clean up the oil is not to tax us and pay somebody to treat it as toxic waste and get rid of it somewhere. The way to clean it up is to let Americans harvest it. Let the Junkyard Wars guys, and Adam and Jamie the Mythbusters, and the bayou boys who build those wonderful mud racers get ahold of the problem.
Here’s an answer I figure might be worth trying: you make a ten thousand gallon tank that sits in the hold of your little boat, which is basically just a hull for the tank, made like a fiberglass swimming pool. That would be a tank only about as big as an RV, really private-enterprise small boat stuff. On the front of the boat is a big suction scoop, which lies on the surface like a wide and flat vacuum cleaner, hooked up to a pump. You move through the oil slick and suck up the top surface of oil and water. That mixture is pumped into your tank. The tank is closed on the top, but has an opening at the bottom. As the oil and water separate, the tank is filled with oil from the top down. When it is full of oil, you close the vent on the bottom and proceed to the BP receiving station. 10,000 gallons is about 200 barrels, which at $75 a barrel is $15,000. Even if BP paid only $1 a gallon for the stuff, that would still be $10,000 a trip, which is enough to motivate unemployed guys who used to go out for shrimp. With floating oil and underwater plumes to be harvested only a few miles offshore, a boat that size could likely make four trips a day, working in four-man crews round the clock in shifts. It would be hard and dirty work, but they could make a pretty good working-class nickel. That is a policy that would really create jobs, lots of them, especially among those who have lost their fishing jobs. No government program I know of could possibly equal the ability to actually go pick up and recycle that spilled oil faster than just paying Americans to go get it. Even the entire Coast Guard does not have the ability to clean up as much of it as a couple hundred of such little boats… or a couple thousand.
James Nathan Post
Here is a song I wrote 30 years ago about working on the Texas Tower. Performed by “Sarah’n’Dippity.”
Thursday, June 3, 2010
A Crime To Burn The Flag?
Is Burning The Flag A Crime?
(Note: this is one of the column essays of the first volume of The Anti-Cyclops Papers, written in 2000.)
The movement to amend the Constitution to prohibit burning the flag as a political statement is well-intentioned, but a terrible mistake. Our flag is a symbol of a special relationship between citizen and state: the voluntary loyalty of free private individuals. I was taught in Army officer training that obedience can be demanded, but respect must be earned. If a citizen may be prosecuted for disrespect toward a sacred symbol of freedom -- or any other symbol -- then his right to any dissent is eroded, and the flag is thus truly tarnished. How sad when the right to make public statements against the government is being newly granted in Russia to see that right attacked in America.
When a person wraps himself in the flag, then calls for a law against flag-burning, what is he really trying to protect, and where does it end? Would a flag-burning amendment also prohibit shredding the flag as a statement against covert government? How about throwing acid on the flag to protest toxic pollution, or staining the flag pink as a statement against pro-communist sentiment in America, or pro-gay? How about such similar disrespectful acts as burning the President in effigy, or peeing on The Wall many veterans hold so sacred? Surely these are deplorable acts, and some of them must rankle us pretty badly, but where the rights protecting such public declarations of political opinion are absent in the world, it is there we declare oppressive government exists. It is where we see the freedoms guaranteed by our Bill of Rights to be absent that we feel most justified in sending our soldiers as defenders of democracy. If in the name of defending the flag we abandon those rights, we shall have lost the battle for freedom without even facing an enemy.
The enslaved may be compelled to obey; the free must be inspired. So let the dogs bark at the flag, and if they tear it down and destroy it, raise high another. Let us stand firm as champions of personal liberty throughout the world to defend others’ right to yell insults and cast dung at any icon of power, and when those who see this are moved to revulsion for the desecrators of symbols and respect for the defenders of rights, then our purpose will have truly prevailed.
I am a combat veteran, and I fly the Stars and Stripes on my car and in my home, but I certainly did not, nor would I ever fight for "The Flag." I fought, and would fight again against any enemy, to preserve those principles of responsible freedom for which I was taught the Flag stands, that is, is a symbol of, a statement, a word. Whether flown, folded, or set on fire, it is not of itself a sacred thing, such that it should not be subject to the First Amendment's definition of free speech.
As a libertarian refinement of a democratic constitution, the Bill Of Rights is a pinnacle of achievement in applied social philosophy. It is unique in that it is intended not to impose limitations on the citizen, but instead to guarantee limitations shall not be imposed. For me, the Flag is a sacred symbol of that statutory guarantee of the freedom of the private citizen.
Those who promote the No-Burn Amendment wish to add to the Constitution not another guarantee of liberty, but a punitive restriction of political expression. That is, they would make of the Flag a symbol not of civil freedom, but of enforced display of civil obedience. The movement is an attempt to rally the unthinkingly obedient around the Flag as a symbol of patriotic loyalty, where they lack committment to an issue that might mobilize an informed and politically active citizenry -- a practice sometimes called jingoism. As such, the Jingo Amendment is the antithesis of those principles for which the Flag stands.
If the freedom for which the Flag stands is sacrificed to prevent destruction of that symbol as a statement of political dissent, then is the Flag truly desecrated. If the libertarian spirit of the Bill of Rights is not kept alive in the United States of America, then that great document becomes only the hemp linen shroud in which the greatest political experiment in the history of mankind is mummified for the historians -- and perhaps the hopeful idealists -- of another day. This is our day. Let us not lose it.
James Nathan Post
(Note: this is one of the column essays of the first volume of The Anti-Cyclops Papers, written in 2000.)
The movement to amend the Constitution to prohibit burning the flag as a political statement is well-intentioned, but a terrible mistake. Our flag is a symbol of a special relationship between citizen and state: the voluntary loyalty of free private individuals. I was taught in Army officer training that obedience can be demanded, but respect must be earned. If a citizen may be prosecuted for disrespect toward a sacred symbol of freedom -- or any other symbol -- then his right to any dissent is eroded, and the flag is thus truly tarnished. How sad when the right to make public statements against the government is being newly granted in Russia to see that right attacked in America.
When a person wraps himself in the flag, then calls for a law against flag-burning, what is he really trying to protect, and where does it end? Would a flag-burning amendment also prohibit shredding the flag as a statement against covert government? How about throwing acid on the flag to protest toxic pollution, or staining the flag pink as a statement against pro-communist sentiment in America, or pro-gay? How about such similar disrespectful acts as burning the President in effigy, or peeing on The Wall many veterans hold so sacred? Surely these are deplorable acts, and some of them must rankle us pretty badly, but where the rights protecting such public declarations of political opinion are absent in the world, it is there we declare oppressive government exists. It is where we see the freedoms guaranteed by our Bill of Rights to be absent that we feel most justified in sending our soldiers as defenders of democracy. If in the name of defending the flag we abandon those rights, we shall have lost the battle for freedom without even facing an enemy.
The enslaved may be compelled to obey; the free must be inspired. So let the dogs bark at the flag, and if they tear it down and destroy it, raise high another. Let us stand firm as champions of personal liberty throughout the world to defend others’ right to yell insults and cast dung at any icon of power, and when those who see this are moved to revulsion for the desecrators of symbols and respect for the defenders of rights, then our purpose will have truly prevailed.
I am a combat veteran, and I fly the Stars and Stripes on my car and in my home, but I certainly did not, nor would I ever fight for "The Flag." I fought, and would fight again against any enemy, to preserve those principles of responsible freedom for which I was taught the Flag stands, that is, is a symbol of, a statement, a word. Whether flown, folded, or set on fire, it is not of itself a sacred thing, such that it should not be subject to the First Amendment's definition of free speech.
As a libertarian refinement of a democratic constitution, the Bill Of Rights is a pinnacle of achievement in applied social philosophy. It is unique in that it is intended not to impose limitations on the citizen, but instead to guarantee limitations shall not be imposed. For me, the Flag is a sacred symbol of that statutory guarantee of the freedom of the private citizen.
Those who promote the No-Burn Amendment wish to add to the Constitution not another guarantee of liberty, but a punitive restriction of political expression. That is, they would make of the Flag a symbol not of civil freedom, but of enforced display of civil obedience. The movement is an attempt to rally the unthinkingly obedient around the Flag as a symbol of patriotic loyalty, where they lack committment to an issue that might mobilize an informed and politically active citizenry -- a practice sometimes called jingoism. As such, the Jingo Amendment is the antithesis of those principles for which the Flag stands.
If the freedom for which the Flag stands is sacrificed to prevent destruction of that symbol as a statement of political dissent, then is the Flag truly desecrated. If the libertarian spirit of the Bill of Rights is not kept alive in the United States of America, then that great document becomes only the hemp linen shroud in which the greatest political experiment in the history of mankind is mummified for the historians -- and perhaps the hopeful idealists -- of another day. This is our day. Let us not lose it.
James Nathan Post
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