Posted on 09/13/2004 6:56:42 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
MIAMI, FL. – If I hear one more Vietnam war story out of either presidential campaign I might just sit out this election. But the documents "60 Minutes" recently revealed as proof of President Bush's dereliction of military duty made me want to send my old Army sergeant out to Dan Rather's office. He had a way to deal with misguided trainees - he'd whack us with his "Ugly Stick." After high school I enlisted in the US Army, the only clear alternative for a teen without college plans in the late 1970s. I had two options: a rifleman posting or an administrative position. As a Grateful Dead democrat, I chose typewriter keys as my weapon. After basic training, I was sent to clerk school at Fort Jackson, S.C. There, in concert with thousands of push-ups and hundreds of grueling force-marched miles, I learned how to type in 1980.
And nearly a decade after the dubious "60 Minutes" documents were allegedly created, military-issue typewriters were still unable to produce such memoranda.
The clerk's Bible at Jackson typist training was Army Regulation 340-15, "Preparation and Management of Military Correspondence." Our Moses: Staff Sgt. Phillips, a tall, balding Vietnam veteran whose starched fatigues belied his smoke-stained teeth and eye-burning breath. He was quick with quips in his thick Southern drawl and just as fast to anger. Speed was our only goal as we tapped out "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" on our Olivetti manuals. Too slow? Do it again. Errors were acceptable, but only a few. And no backspacing or correction fluid was allowed; that was considered cheating and we always got caught.
If a trainee stepped out of line, he got the Ugly Stick. Sarge brandished the remnants of a golf club with its head broken off in what was surely a fit of rage at the nearby Ft. Jackson Country Club. He spun it, Chaplin-esque, as he wandered the classroom rows of sweating trainees.
Normally, Phillips would bring the club shaft down on an errant GI's desk with a crack that stopped all typing. Sometimes, he might clip you with the sharp end.
More important, we had to quote AR340-15, chapter and verse. Don't remember the salutation for a Congressman? You get the Ugly Stick. Can't recall the margins on an official memorandum? Ugly Stick. Get a signature block wrong? Duck, and fast.
After training, I was shipped off to the 25th Infantry Division in Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. At the division public affairs office, I suffered one recurring error: In the final signature block, after carefully typing through paragraphs and pages, I couldn't seem to add the "TH" after the "25" without fouling up the entire document. When my new sergeant caught the first such error, he made me fetch AR340-15 and recite the relevant guideline aloud. By the time my enlistment was up, that page in the manual was dog-eared and brown with fingerprints.
I have one clear memory of my Army enlistment in the early 1980s. We clerks cursed every day that our well-supplied, active duty infantry division headquarters had no word processors and not enough electric typewriters. Those electric typewriters we had did not shrink and raise the TH to a superscript like one "60 Minutes" memo allegedly typed to file in 1973 by Bush's National Guard squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian.
Our apostrophes weren't curlicues like in the CBS memo where Killian supposedly wrote about pressure on him from "upstairs" to "sugarcoat" Bush's performance report. Military documents of that era had erratic character spacing; every hunt-and-peck letter was a dash different shade of black ink.
But not in these "blockbuster" documents impugning the president - they were perfectly uniform Times Roman word processing.
Mr. Rather's documents are too perfect, too much like Microsoft Word. In fact, the closer you look the more this looks like a con. The authenticity was incredibly easy to check, but the perpetrators of the possible forgery and the legendary newsman were too eager to tarnish the president.
They missed the obvious. But they also missed a vital rule in campaign politics that I learned as a marginal communications staffer in the 1992 Bush/Quayle reelection campaign. The imperative: don't panic.
In the last days of that doomed 1992 Bush reelection effort, we knew we were losing. James Baker and other close Bush friends and family moved in to keep a close eye on all our work. In particular, they were looking for mistakes that would embarrass the family. At the time, dubious documents about the Arkansas governor's alleged "zipper problem" were floating temptingly around campaign headquarters. Wrong-headed whispers among junior staff about "saving the campaign" could be heard if you listened closely.
Finally, we were called into a meeting and given a simple instruction: Anyone caught trafficking in this information would be summarily fired. The Bush family did not want to "win this way." Because we were almost sure to lose anyway, they made a further promise that violators would never work in Washington again. Any doubts were laid to rest when we were told who sent this message: the president's son, George W. Bush.
It was an important campaign lesson: Don't act in haste and anger. Always check and recheck all information, especially when your candidate is dreadfully stalled. Only smart politics and hard work can recover a campaign in disarray.
Somehow, John Kerry's allies forgot this rule. So did Dan Rather. He, especially, gets the Ugly Stick.
Thanks for the ping. I'm heading for bed, see you tomorrow, hopefully!!
Scroll down for this item:
Selectric Composer Theory Decomposing
The owner of LGF was on my local talk radio tonight .. well yesterday .. whatever
Anyhow .. he was talking about that and the type writer and hearing from experts on it
BTW .. he also gave FR credit for asking the questions first about the memos .. I thought that was pretty cool
Bump!
That is a nice blog.
bttt
I hope you read James Jones' From Here To Eternity while you were there. Old timers tell me that Jones' book PERFECTLY captured the feel of pre-war Hawaii.
I was Army Reserves/National Guard from 1971 - 1977.
I did a lot of 'clerking' for the Captain and First Seargent.
I never saw anything but a manual typewriter the entire time.
Sorry for the rant but I never had so much trouble receiving payments on eBay sales before. One newbie hit the BIN button and then claims she deleted the sale. Funny, but that item is now listed as SOLD.
I was a Marine Corps aircraft maintenance administration clerk from 1984-1991. When my first tactical squadron (HMH-466, "The Wolfpack") was standing up, I shared an office with two captains (the aircraft maintenance officer and the assistant AMO), and I typed on a manual typewriter.
One fine day, the AAMO walks in with a calendar. "Where'd Captain Fracassa want this hung up?"
Without looking up, I pointed at the wall. "Right there." THUMP.
Something felt funny. I looked up--I'd poked my finger through the SheetRoc.
The AAMO looked at me for a long moment, then said, "We've got to find you a Selectric, you're getting the Ninja Typist Fingers of Death."
Brings to mind Brer Rabbit's Tar Baby
Ex Army clerk tells all ping.
My letter emailed to CBS's SCAM email address:
Subject: Dan Rather's smear of President Bush using FAKE documents .....
To whom it may concern:
On "60 Minutes" last week, Dan Rather promoted a smear of President Bush's service in the Texas Air Natl Guard using documents that have been shown to be fake. Evidence of forgery is that the font used in the documents are inconsistent with those used at the time in the offices where the documents "originated". There is also strong evidence to show that the signatures in the alledged "new" documents are not Killians and are forged, per FOX News yesterday.
Please do a REAL investigation on this scam and report it honestly. Dan Rather should be fired from CBS immediately and CBS should apologize to it's Nightly News viewers for this blatent attempt to smear President Bush using forged documents.
Sincerely,
It's amusing to watch them miss the point so thoroghly and completely. Yes, it's true that reduced-size superscripts, proportional spacing, and so on were available in the early '70s, and well before that:
But somehow I don't think that one of these was used to prepare a memo to file in the TXANG by a LTC who didn't type.
Am I allowed to post this?
CONSUMER ALERT: Know of a scam that needs investigating? Tell us about it! Email us at scams@cbsnews.com .
Oh, yeah. Heck, yeah! I should have posted it with my note there. Thanks!
Excellent!
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