Art Of War (Soviet Jesus, Three, Tommy Tuberville Edition.)

You may talk o' gin and beer,
When you're quartered safe out 'ere
An' your sent to penny-fights and Aldershot it.
But when it comes to slaughter,
You will do your work on water
And you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it.
Now in India's sunny clime, where I used to spend my time
A servin' of 'er majesty the Queen
Of all them Black-faced crew, The finest man I knew
Was our regimental Bhisti, Gunga Din.
He was "Din! Din! Din!"
You limpin' lump of brick-dust Gunga Din!
Hai slippy hitherao, Water! Get it, Pannee Lao
'You squidgy-nosed old Idol, Gunga Din.' 

~Rudyard Kipling, Gunga Din.

...

Almighty Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep:
O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea. ~Eternal Father Strong To Save, United States Navy Hymn.

I saw this shit earlier today.

Tommy Tubesteak, who's never served a day in his life, and never served anybody but himself, saying "We have to get wokeness out of the Navy because there's people writing poems on Aircraft Carriers.

Hold the fuck on there, a minute, cupcake.

There's entire genres of fiction, literature and poetry concerning Naval operations, Sailors and the Sea and this long predates America...much less your disingenuous moral panics. Fuck you.

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, Mr. Roberts, directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda (among others) the Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey (Isn't at least some of this stuff, ya know, recognizable to current Republicans, at least? Or are they just stupid??)

For fuck's sake Alex Haley, the author of Roots, was a Coastguardsman. There's literally a Coast Guard Cutter named after him, because of meritorious service, not political correctness!

I learned a lot of this stuff from my elders, it wasn't a choice. I mean, goddamn, you wouldn't think you'd have to explain this shit to a Southerner, not if their culture is what they say it is, but here we are.

Ain't we?

My Grandpa was a Minnesota farm-boy who moved to the city and started doing war-work building B-24 Liberators at Willow Run, MI during WWII. Then, he joined the Navy because he didn't really like doing factory work. He was about halfway through a college degree at the University of Michigan by then, so one way or another...probably by pure ability to bullshit, knowing my Grandpa, he got his ass into Officer Candidate School (although after the War the Navy made his ass finish his degree proper.)

 He qualified for flight school, became a Naval Aviator...and was the last guy picked for his particular ship, a Casablanca-Class Escort Carrier named the USS Natoma Bay...which you've possibly never heard of, and that's fine. The next guys up went to the USS St. Lo, which you probably have heard of, because it was one of the first ships sunk by a Japanese Kamikaze at Leyte Gulf.

In the broader sweep of that same campaign, my Grandpa fought in the Battle off Samar, in which a small US Navy squadron called Taffy 3, centered on the Casablanca-Class Escort Carrier USS Gambier Bay, took the brunt of an Imperial Japanese Navy attack under the command of Admiral Kurita, that was intended for the main body of the US Navy's Third Fleet, and this strike force included the super-battleship, Yamato, Kurita's flagship.

The ships of Taffy 3, six escort carriers, three destroyers and four escorts, were hideously outgunned and outnumbered...it is impossible to overstate, in the terms of the time, how much that was so. 18-Inch shells from the Yamato's main guns were rumored, after the battle, to have passed all the way through the Gambier Bay and only detonated beneath the ship.

And yet those American sailors, trained to be more than the sum of their parts, fought back so violently and with such courage that they sank at least one ship and threw the entire elite Japanese squadron into total disarray. 

The next two squadrons up the line...which included my Grandpa's ship...threw their Air Wings into the fight and they bombed and torpedoed and strafed until they didn't have anything left to shoot with, then they made risky-as-hell 'dry runs' to distract the Japanese. More, the fanaticism of this air attack by hundreds of fighters in particular convinced Kurita that he'd hit the main body of the US fleet. The Japanese lost a further three ships to air attack, with several more damaged, and Kurita's forces were forced to retire in disarray. 

Taffy 3 was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation, and Captain Earnest Evans of the sunk USS Johnston was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Admiral Chester Nimitz wrote that the squadron's success was nothing less than "Special dispensation from the Almighty."

(Also, if the US Military's third-string bench could fuck up one of the world's best navies that bad, what makes one think a bunch of theoretical ragamuffin rebels in Arkansas have a chance?)

That's courage, pure unadulterated balls-to-the-wall courage. My Grandpa told a lot of stories, he didn't tell me that one until he found out I'd decided to enlist.

Which wasn't a thing he was happy about, by the way, but he said it was my choice to make.

When I asked him what it was like to try and strafe some ginormous battleship with nothing but a couple machine guns, he didn't answer so much as just take a long pull from his beer by way of getting the point across without words.

My Grandpa served for like 25 years between active duty and reserve, after enlisting in 1943 he served throughout the later part of WWII in the Pacific, was out for a little while after the war, got back in, then he helped train some of the first African-American naval aviators and enlisted aviation ratings. He went reserve...but was activated for duty both in Korea (where he flew Close Air Support for the Marines during the breakout from Chosin Reservoir) and Vietnam. In 1970 his career...both as a Detroit city worker and a Navy Reservist...was ended by a heart attack. 

Bullshit, he and my Grandma and my youngest aunt moved north and he got back to working (including as a local volunteer fireman in Northern Michigan) as soon as he was physically able. He (later assisted by myself) also did a lot of odd jobs, construction, maintenance, yard work...I've written about this. He measurably made the world a better place, sometimes for people who didn't have all that much to look forward to.

My Grandma was a school secretary and substitute teacher in Department Of Defense educational activity while he was active duty...and later worked in elementary schools in Detroit.

My Grandpa was also a lifelong lover of and student of the lyric phrase.

Because of him, I could quote this by heart without thinking about it by the time I was in high school.

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;

The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune; Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew, And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.

When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

There's men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell;
And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell;
With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done,
As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one.
Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he'd do,
And I turned my head — and there watching him was the lady that's known as Lou. 

~Robert W. Service, The Shooting of Dan McGrew.

While I'm at it, I can rap and trash-talk because I learned that shit in the military right along with learning how to be an Air Force Security Policeman and later an Non-Commissioned Officer because I had friends, bros, people I had to learn to keep up with and whose respect I had to have...just as they had to have mine, because we were a team, in the field or simply in the day-to-day grind of life at bases like KI Sawyer and Minot. You might not consider attending some BS event, basketball, or public drunkenness and shit to be team-building exercises, but that would be wrong. Our lives all depended on each other's. And that went double once I made Sergeant...because respect is earned, by every action, every day, all the time. You cannot just decree that it will be so. 

If you want to be a Leader...you have to go out and DO it. Saying "No" all the time...least of all for bullshit or ideological reasons...ain't leadership. By definition this is not about you.

And if you have to have this, or the concept of responsibility explained to you, you'll never be one.

If you're a leader...sooner or later you are going to be charged with leading people who are different from yourself...and the results expected of you will not be any different from what they'd be if you were leading a squad of Clones.

For fuck's sake I sat through my first Diversity and Sexual Harassment trainings in 1993.

Does that make me "Woke?" I don't think so...not least because I learned all this stuff long before the current usage of that word. And I learned a hell of a lot of it as a conservative Republican, back when that meant one could be something other than a bigot. You don't have to be in a profession of arms to understand that...but that's where I learned it.

The Ukrainians have shown that they understand this stuff...and such is not a small part of the reason they have been able to resist, to fight back, to take the fight to the Russians and their Soviet Jesus.

They've sure as fuck shown that they understand, creativity is part of the Art of War.

And it's why they'll win, too, because they figured out how to be more than the sum of their parts.

Republicans used to know this stuff, too. For fuck's sake, Ronald Reagan was an Actor and the president of the Screen Actor's Guild! Was the Gipper "Woke?" He famously quoted a lot of poetry, too.

Now I don't know what the hell these fucking people's idea of culture, or tradition, or any of the things that bind us all together in and out of Uniform even are, and I'm pretty sure I just don't want to.

But we'd best not give these angry, bigoted, pinch-faced, tight-assed absolute motherfuckers the chance to impose their bullshit on other people...because if we don't stop them, they will never stop.

And if these motherfucking people have shown us anything in the last decade or so, it's that you can believe all the bullshit tautologies and check all the boxes you want...the rise and fall of Ron DeSantis should teach us that. Life ain't a balance sheet or an Operational Readiness Inspection, you have to go out and Do. You have to stand and deliver at some point. 

Standing in the way of others for bullshit-ass reasons don't cut it.

The fundamental sin of modern "Conservatism" is it takes people...bad or good...and turns them into less than the sum of their parts. You will be a miserable son of a bitch and you will pretend to like it.

But you're still a miserable son of a bitch, and sooner or later that's going to show in the quality of your work.

Like my Grandpa used to say "Some things are not done in the better places."

Republicans like Tommy Tuberville believe from the bottom of their very souls that some men are better than others...they just fundamentally fail to grasp how low-down vile they are, in the grand scheme of things.

You either believe in freedom...hell, believe in what you're doing...or you don't.

Remember that, because there will be a test.

Two

Слава Україна!

I shan’t forget the night
When I dropped be’ind the fight
With a bullet where my belt-plate should ’a’ been.
I was chokin’ mad with thirst,
An’ the man that spied me first
Was our good old grinnin’, gruntin’ Gunga Din.
’E lifted up my ’ead,
An’ he plugged me where I bled,
An’ ’e guv me ’arf-a-pint o’ water green.
It was crawlin’ and it stunk,
But of all the drinks I’ve drunk,
I’m gratefullest for one from Gunga Din.
It was 'Din! Din! Din!
‘’Ere’s a beggar with a bullet through ’is spleen;
‘’E's chewin’ up the ground,
‘An’ ’e’s kickin’ all around:
‘For Gawd’s sake git the water, Gunga Din!’

’E carried me away
To where a doolie lay,
An’ a bullet come an’ drilled the beggar clean.
’E put me safe inside,
An’ just before ’e died,
'I hope you liked your drink,’ sez Gunga Din.
So I’ll meet ’im later on
At the place where ’e is gone—
Where it’s always double drill and no canteen.
’E’ll be squattin’ on the coals
Givin’ drink to poor damned souls,
An’ I’ll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!
Yes, Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,
By the livin’ God that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

 ~Rudyard Kipling, Gunga Din.

(Author's Note: Rudyard Kipling was a British artist, journalist-specializing in military matters, and poet, the author of many books including a number of famous children's books. Many consider him, unofficially, to the the poet laureate of white British colonialism. Was he...Woke?)

...

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press