Posted on 06/09/2017 12:48:42 PM PDT by LSUfan
I have my own copy of “Old Gimlet Eye’s” book - fun reading, but a bit thin and dated. I suspect Smedly would have recanted whe the Japanese attacked us.
Do you seriously believe that, given what happened just a couple of years later, that Butler was right?
voochie, I’m worried about you.
I’m likely to say it again next time the subject comes up.
Then it’s on your conscience.
If you really are an ex-GI, you will be betraying the memory of all of us who went before you.
DARN ISOLATIONISTS
I yell that to all my neighbors who like fences and locking their front doors, “You ISOLATIONIST!”
These isolationists have not been out of their homes for 10 years. It is so crazy.
Then I turn to my globalist neighbor, and ask, why are you such a liar calling boundaries, isolationism?
Liar, Liar, pants on fire!
“Back Door to War”
Yes - I’d even argue a good case could be made against our involvement in WWII. Pat Buchanan makes the conservative argument.
There is no question our entering WWI was a grave mistake which caused untold misery for hundreds of millions. Wilson was a evil man. FDR was bad, but Wilson was just plain evil.
Very pleased you kept that leg. You had me on pins and needles until the end there. Well written in that delightful but long lost Bill Maudlin GI voice. A gift.
I will send you the follow-on to that story in a minute.
You are certainly consistent in your beliefs! Going after Wilson for his decision to take up the fight against Germany is really novel (both of my grandfathers served during WWI).
The negatives against our fighting Germany were that we lost tens of thousands of men killed and wounded and we set ourselves up as an adversary of Germany. It is also likely that we were the locus and distributive agent of the "Spanish Flu" which killed ten of millions worldwide.
The positives were that we provided the final element that ended that bloodbath, we stopped Germany's atrocious occupation of Belgium and France and we emerged as a preeminent world power. That last part wasn't trivial, since it demonstrated to the world that the US wasn't to be ignored and we had finally become credible.
If we hadn't joined the fight against Germany, we would have developed a modern army far too late to be able to deal with the next set of threats in the forms of Europe dominated by Germany and a Bolshevist Russia.
Alternative history is fun stuff - but like imagining a successful Confederate government after the Civil War, the real history that followed would have been far worse for us and the world.
you should write more
Coming from you, that means a lot.
next one should be about either some event at boot camp or perhaps your decision to volunteer. it’s good reading
My family wants me to write the whole thing, from when I decided to join until I rejoined as an officer in ‘73 and went back for the end of the war in ‘75.
Lot of stuff happened - some pretty interesting. One funny thing was how I got back in: that leg of mine was still pretty nasty in ‘72 and I had been turned down for a lot of jobs - like the LAPD - because of it.
Of all things, I got a letter from the Marine Corps asking if I was interested in becoming an officer. I definitely was but didn’t think that they’d take me with that leg.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained - so I went to the Marine Corps Officer Selection office in Los Angeles and took all the tests and interviews and aced them. Then I was told to go downstairs for my physical and my heart sank..
When I went downstairs, I found that it was the draft reception center and the doctor was thrilled to meet me, an actual volunteer. He and I had a great conversation for a while - a long while - and it got close to closing time. He asked me what my history was and I told that I got shot. He asked me how I was now and I said “fine”, so he wrote “physically qualified” and didn’t even have to take my clothes off!
The Navy doctor at Quantico wasn’t thrilled but he told me that it was “my funeral” and let me start OCS.
I made it just fine and stretched it out to 1996 and retired as a lieutenant colonel.
dude,
write the bit about your decision to join in HS. that would make a good chapter
where in SoCal did you go to High School ?
The short version is that I attended St. Genevieve Catholic High School in Panorama City, graduating in '64. I am the oldest of ten kids, so it shouldn't surprise you that I had been out on my own since I was 17 but I finished high school on my own nickel by working at J.C. Penny's as a shoe salesman after school. I lived in Hollywood in a slightly converted garage and had some long commutes with a Honda 55 Trail Bike. Seriously.
After graduation, I attended Pierce Junior College for a year and kept working at Penney's. While I was at Pierce, I saw some Lefty "Ban the Bomb" demonstrators start yelling about the war in Vietnam and I remember thinking how odd and screwed up they seemed to be.
About the 16th of April 1965 I saw a Life magazine issue that showed a Marine helicopter Crew Chief trying to rescue some fellow Marines whose helicopter had crashed and I thought "I'm not better than he is" and within a week or so, went to the recruiter in Van Nuys and signed up for four years.
For me, there was never even a choice: my dad and my two uncles had served in WW II and as I said before, both grandfathers in WWI, so I just saw it as my turn.
elaborate this into a full chapter -
SoCal was a amazing place up until it became expensive, one could be a teenager working part time at Bob’s Big Boy and rent a place with a couple of buddies one block from the beach.
mine was a red trail 90. geez the 55 was a mini bike
Just a few months before I joined, I bought a used CL-77 Scrambler and I loved that thing! Nothing on earth sounded like it and I used to take it howling up the coast to San Fran and back.
Around September '66 we captured an NVA lieutenant, a wimpy little guy with French gradually shaded glasses(dark at the top and thinner as it got lower in the lenses). He spoke French and so did I so I spent hours that night just talking to him. It turned out that he had left his CL-77 back home in Hanoi - while mine got destroyed by my younger brother when he "borrowed" it and got T-boned by a car. He almost lost his leg too but that kept him out of the war. He didn't have the instincts (still doesn't) so he wouldn't have survived long.
My next younger brother served in the army EOD in Vietnam and he was wounded too.
Loved the darn thing - you could have straight pipes and shatter eardrums in those days!
My first platoon sergeant did two tours in Nam. I'll never forget his guidance after a field exercise that was kind of a cluster foxtrot. I was still fuming when we got back to the motor pool. Out of earshot of the platoon he said to me, "LT, consider this: everyone came back alive."
About 15 months later, after taking 3 platoons through tac evals, I was the maintenance officer and XO during a battery level evaluation. My First Sergeant was straight leg infantry, and had 3 tours in Nam. We got along great. At the start he said, "Sir, I don't know anything about ADA."
I asked him, "you know how to set up a Company HQ, right? No problem, Top, I'll handle the ADA crap."
Four hours later, I saw him sitting on a tree stump, head in hands, muttering "it's over, it's over." Turned out the battery commander screwed up coordinates for a mission, and the platoon leader was too incompetent to question him.
From my experience as a platoon leader, I knew as long as you showed improvement by the end of the exercise, you'd pass. We had one more day to right the ship.
True to my word, I handled the "ADA crap." I kind of usurped my authority, but I gave explicit instructions as to what each platoon would do the final day, down to each squad member. I didn't care who I pi$$ed off, but my soldiers, and that First Sergeant, needed to know their officers weren't complete screw-ups.
LOL, little did I know the evaluation team chief was within earshot of our tent, and he heard everything. When he saw me, he smiled and said, "that was beautiful, LT."
To this day, I thank those NCOs for teaching me lessons that could not be learned in the classroom.
write more
you bastard
So, what's your background? Clearly you know SoCal from the good old days..
Where'd you live, what high school, any cool stories?
catholic St Hedwigs in Los Alamitios, irish sister with mean rules wacked you on the hand, sisters all left during the summer of love and then we got laypersons ( aka moms )
High School Millkan Long Beach
I've got to write it for my kids, anyway.
I won't worry about what would be interesting - I'll just write and let you figure out what is interesting or not.
As you can tell, I knew what was going on around me was unique and historic and ordinary and crazy. I looked at myself a sort of an "armed tourist".
I also knew that it all would change my life forever and it did.
I sure wish that my grandparents had left something about their experiences in Europe (and Vladivostok for one of them) during their WW I service. One of my uncles got one kill and three possibles over Japan in his P-51 - he did leave a few stories for us, thank God.
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