brittblaser

Rush to Judgment

I spent most of 2003 trying to keep John Kerry out of the White House. I’m not a Democrat and I embrace the values of Dwight Eisenhower and, it turns out, his son.

But I’ve never felt that Bush has much of a hope of re-election, because, as long as the votes are fairly counted, he’s not likely to receive more votes than last time, and his opposition is highly energized. That has nothing to do with John Kerry and everything to do with the American dislike for hype, elective foreign wars, rich spoiled kids and big, intrusive gummint.

So I want to put out my forecast before the debate is rehashed, so my prescience can be noted.

And Now It Begins…

It begins tonight: a growing consensus by the press that George W. Bush doesn’t deserve our support. Most people in the press are more sensible than ideological, and a tight race is in the interest of the media. So the instinct that caused them to remark on Dubya’s “unexpectedly” good debate performance 4 years ago inclines them to see a shift back toward John Kerry, regardless of their true opinion. So that’s what we’ll see.

My other prediction is that few major newspapers will endorse Bush. Wherever objective, informed people gather, it’s hard for them to see the combination of cosmetic security, management malpractice and fiscal impropriety as supportable.

During October, the press will “reluctantly” reconsider their past support for the president and discover more promise in Kerry’s record than in a man who has shown his ineptitude in every endeavor he’s attempted, now including this one.

Unfortunately, his dad’s friends don’t have enough money to bail him out this time. That’s up to our kids, and theirs.

4:09:35 PM

67-E

Last week I attended a reunion of my USAF pilot training class, Williams 67-E. How the memories came rushing back!

The T-38 Talon supersonic trainer. It’s hard to believe they paid us to do this.

Almost 39 years ago, a group of American and German Air Force officers met at Williams Air Force Base in Chandler Arizona, southeast of Phoenix. Most of us had never touched the controls of an airplane but, by some arcane divination, we had been selected from among thousands of candidates to be trained at the finest Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT) base in the U.S. and thus, presumably, the world. (The U.S. Navy disagreed, but as far as we were concerned, they did not exist, except in the case of a ditching at sea. Besides, they wore brown shoes.)

Williams was The Fighter School. At least it said so on the plaques at the Officers Club and on the cash receipts in the Stag Bar, so it was a story we embraced. “Willy” had a long history of training men to fight in the air, as opposed to the less renowned who, like me, went on to fly cargo planes and tankers: shootees, so to speak, not shooters. That demanding tradition was maintained by holding an auction for the available slots at the eight UPT bases, the most appealing slots going fast, and the highest-ranking candidates invariably went to Willy, since the only currency in this auction was your class standing in whatever program had trained you as an officer. Here were the 8 UPT bases at the time, more or less in their order of attractiveness:

Williams – Phoenix, AZ
Reese – Lubbock, TX
Vance – Enid, OK
Laughlin – Del Rio, TX
Moody – Valdosta, GA
Craig – Selma, AL
Laredo – Laredo, TX
Webb – Big Spring, TX

In that heyday of male-only cockpits, the allure of tanned Arizona State coeds was overpowering. It also didn’t hurt that it was one of the few Air Force bases anywhere near a tourist destination.

In keeping with my “gentleman B-” academic record, I got to Willy by a single point. At the meeting where we made our choices, there was one precious slot left when the captain called my name. The lieutenant just after me, with just one point less out of about 1,500, declared, “Reese, dammit!” The captain corrected him, “That’s ‘dammit, Sir!‘.” It was a process immune to gaming, which explains why Dubya took his training at Moody.

So a gaggle of us college kids showed up at Willy in January, 1966 to learn to fly with future astronauts and generals and were taught by the best instructors, who had also won their own fierce competition for the prized slots at Willy. Most of the Americans were destined to fly over, around and, occasionally, into Vietnam. This was long before the Air Force abandoned the romantic tradition that it makes no sense to put an empty airplane in harm’s way.

The German officers were at Willy because the Air Force provided undergraduate pilot training to the young Luftwaffe officers brave and foolhardy enough to fly the F-104 Starfighter “Widowmaker” jet fighters in Germany’s flaky weather. We don’t know why we formed such strong bonds. None of us knows of any other UPT class that holds regular reunions, but the 5th class to graduate in FY 1967 has held three previous reunions, and the fourth was this week in Scottsdale, AZ. Thanks to our German friends, the last one was held at St. Moritz, Switzerland. We remain fond of pleasant venues.

Coming together again after so long, I remembered some great tales, and heard some new ones. Invariably their theme is our general cluelessness in the cockpit and the intrinsic danger of hooking up a 23-year-old with a supersonic fighter, lacking only the weapons, capable of climbing to 40,000 feet in about a minute.

Bill Colegrove didn’t smoke, but his Instructor Pilot (“IP”, a demi-god to us) was a chain smoker and so were the other four students under his IP’s tutelage, so a blue haze hovered over their briefing table. After one particularly disappointing training mission, his IP told Bill, “I gotta level with ya. You might as well start smoking. The way you’re flying, you’ll never live long enough to get cancer.” Bill retired recently from a successful career as an airline captain.

Bill Stokes was as nervous as any of us facing a check ride – an airborne proficiency check that was the mother of all driver’s tests. He was so clanked that he closed the canopy on his little finger, severing the tip. But this was a check flight. Would they wash him out for such carelessness? The pain was great but not stronger than his fear of failure and, at least, his flight glove kept the blood from being obvious. Finally the check pilot asked, “Are you ready for takeoff, Lieutenant?” Stokes asked, “Sir, I’ve just cut off my finger. Will that count against me?“

Our first trainer was a Cessna 172, branded as the T-41. We were bussed out to Casa Grande Municipal Field each day and trained by civilian instructors–a motley crew of lifelong general aviation hangers-on, tough, impatient guys who never wanted to or couldn’t qualify as airline pilots. They collected a paycheck by introducing these aeronautical virgins to the wonders of stalls, spins, needle, ball & airspeed and, with any luck, landings. My instructor, a cynical alcoholic, embraced the time honored training tools of fear, harassment and ridicule. He was particularly impatient with my gradual uptake of flying skills, and the more he yelled, the less likely I was to solo this sucker. Finally, I was scheduled for a dreaded Flying Evaluation Board (FEB), the last formality before washing out, presumably to become a passive navigator.

I was despondent, but Capt. Jack Ferguson, our student flight commander and later my roommate, trusted my sense that I could land the airplane. Why not go rent a plane and instructor and solo before the Board meets? So I went over to the little Falcon airfield near us and signed up as a civilian for a lesson in landing a Cessna 172. Sure enough, once in control of the dynamic – a client whom the instructor wanted to succeed so I’d buy more lessons – I flew well as I shot three touch-and-go landings that this IP found surprisingly competent. On downwind leg I asked him if I was ready to solo and he couldn’t see why not. “Well, why don’t you get out this time and I’ll just do that.“

This was an egregious inversion of aviation tradition. The student never initiates the solo, but humbly works through his drills until the instructor, in the middle of a flight, renders the thrilling but dreaded judgment, “Well, son, ah guess yer ready to land this beast by yourself.” Then he’d get out and watch nervously as the student, generally, survived the required three landings. I guess I’m such a control freak I had to manage even that tradition. The landings were plenty good enough and I procured my solo certificate and brought it with me to the FEB.

“Lieutenant Blaser,” asked the Lt. Colonel, going through the motions before consigning this hopeless peckerwood to a career of flying sideways, poring over navigation charts, “Do you have anything you’d like to say before we make our decision?”

“Yes s
ir. The issue here is my failure to solo in the T-41. Does this make any difference?” I handed him my solo certificate and a big grin lit up his face. “Yes, Lieutenant, that makes all the difference in the world.” Apparently the Lt. Col. appreciated a little entrepreneurial spirit in his charges.

Fortunately, I never had any other issues flying or landing. There was no civilian airfield anywhere nearby that would rent me a jet trainer.

One of our German classmates was having trouble handling the T-38 supersonic trainer. His problem was one we all shared: the T-38’s controls are incredibly light and responsive. If you’re ham-fisted about it, you’ll be all over the sky–this is a fighter without guns that will spin at 450 degrees per second, should you hold the stick against its stop at cruise speed (500 degrees per second roll rate x .9 mach). Instructor pilots could chastise a student by flicking the stick fast enough to hit his helmet against the canopy.

Instructor pilots, however, got through to us with words, not random physical boinks. My friend’s instructor simply could not get through until he finally said in desperation,

No, no, no! You’ve got it all wrong. That’s not a baseball bat or a broom. Hold the stick with your thumb and two fingers only, and touch it as you would a woman’s thigh.

My friend’s flying improved instantly. Like life, flying’s a mind game.

Jim Sheets still has a rapier wit, but has probably never connected two dots so quickly and elegantly as he did one Saturday afternoon in late ’67. At the cocktail party, we were introduced to our first margaritas, a drink not yet served in bars. The sweet-sour taste and salted rim fascinated everybody, especially our dates.

“Can I lick your salt?” asked Jim’s date.
“Said Lot to his wife.” He didn’t miss a beat.

Jet fighters return from a mission all at once, at high speed and usually low on fuel. There’s no time for the leisurely lineup like the airliners you can see at night – bright jewels sliding down an invisible string. Instead, fighters fly at about 225 mph at 1500 feet above the ground, straight to a point halfway down the runway, often in four-ship formation. Then they pitch sharply into a 60 degree banked u-turn, slowing to 170, drop the gear and flaps and spiral down to the landing. From “pitchout” to touchdown takes maybe a minute, and it makes up in efficiency what it lacks in stateliness. When practicing multiple landings, you light the afterburners on touchdown, make a climbing turn back to 1500 feet, enter a big box pattern to line up on Initial Leg again. If a pilot elects not to land, he announces that he’s “carrying through on Initial” and flies the length of the 2 mile runway (about 32 seconds), then turns into the same box pattern as the aircraft climbing out from the runway. It’s a rhythmic pattern, sounding no more dramatic that UAL’s Channel 9, quiet and, in a way, peaceful.

Training college kids to do this requires a lot of repetition flying solo, so one night our squadron was spread over the immense darkness between Willy and Superstition Mountain, drilling the routine and its sensations into our ganglia. I don’t know if Jim Quick missed the call when he carried through or I didn’t hear him, but, just as I was climbing out in a right bank, Roy Bridges announces, “Collision alert on takeoff leg!“

I don’t know why this obvious Murphyism required a meatspace demo. The climbing, turning aircraft can’t see an overtaking, faster airplane behind and above him. The overtaking aircraft may not see the slower plane at 12 o’clock low, since his nose is in the way.

“Takeoff leg, hmm. That would be me,” I mused. “Holy fuck! That’ is me!” I look over my right shoulder and my canopy is filled with the white belly of a T-38, red rotating beacon flashing merrily. I dunno, maybe 15 feet above me, already breaking right. I can picture it still.

Airplanes fly on airspeed, so my reaction has always been, no matter the circumstance, to firewall the throttles and point the nose toward my happy place. So I dumped the stick, gave it the gas, weightless briefly, and there I was, diving toward the desert floor at, what? 330 mph? Well…

Certain I was no longer under an aluminum overcast, I pulled up as suddenly as I had dived, got the plane organized, then tooled around outside the pattern for a few minutes to get my metabolism organized. Seat cushion check: no stains. This is good.

I think I landed full stop at the next touchdown. What the hell, a dozen landings is enough for one night. When I got back to the Squadron room, I learned how our personal mortality affects our emotions. I’ve mentioned before that I’m no hero, but physical danger doesn’t affect me much. It’s pretty dysfunctional, but before that evening I’d already crashed my motorcycle, dinged 2 cars, had some spectacular ski wrecks, several interesting rock climbing moments and descended the highest fixed rappel in North America. Excitement in the presence of danger seems like a waste of bandwidth, as demonstrated by the C-130 pilot who, about a year later, flew into a large Vietnamese mountain avoiding small Vietnamese bullets.

Then Jim Quick stormed into the ready room, blustering and spitting and yelling, apparently sure that I’d been plotting to kill him, even if I had to sacrifice myself to do it. I suggested to him that it was not my intention and that I’d be sure to go after someone else next time, if ever it happened again, and that maybe if he’d just land the fucker rather than waiting for the perfect setup, we wouldn’t have had this little talk. In truth I had calmed down from the near miss, but Jim’s outburst bothered me more, sensitive inner child that I have.

There are more stories, but you get the picture. Most of us were just college kids who spent some time in this amazing environment, then went on to other things, often aviation-related. For me, pilot training was the most intense post-graduate adventure I could have experienced, and for that reason it still seems like the smart alternative to law school. It was a moment in time not to be repeated. We were cannon fodder, for sure, but we knew we were immortal like all twenty-somethings. I hope Vietnam was the last big-time war, with its 58,000 dead and a couple hundred thousand wounded. It was the end of the hard-partying, devil-may-care times for military aviation, and I wouldn’t have missed that for the world, more resonant with WWII and Korea than today’s kids, better warriors, I’m sure, but who don’t go to the bar from the flight line.

I ran into Robin Olds in a Steamboat Springs bar sometime in the 70’s, where he had retired (to Steamboat, not specifically to that bar, only generally). A legend among fighter pilots, he’d been an Ace in WWII, Korea and Vietnam. But he was bitter and tired. “They’ve ruined it,” he said. “They’ve taken all the humanity out of flying, the adventure, the fun.” Here’s Col. Olds, being carried from his 100th mission over North Vietnam in 1967, about the time we were shipping out.

My classmates from 67-E feel pretty much the same way. Military aviation has a different taste today. It’s more precise and efficient, but there’s something intangibly noble about a
pilot in an imperfectly equipped jet, hurling himself at the earth at 400 knots in the pursuit of a precise strike.

We have seen the horror of war, horror that remains no matter how automated the strike. The difference is whether the warrior is also at risk. Our nation has become committed to the sanitized strike and the automatic bomb. I’m not so sure. We’re now faced with door-to-door combat in Iraq, partially because of our reliance on those fictions–fewer soldiers and smarter weapons. General George Patton said it well:

It’s the unconquerable soul of man, and not the nature of the weapon he uses, that insures victory.

And, no doubt, our humanity.

12:22:50 AM

Echoes of the Leader vs. Manager Meme

Heh. I had an interesting spilling-of-the-beans last night. I was talking with a friend close to, but not with, the Kerry campaign looking for the link to an ancient post from last January, barely remembered. It was from 1/11/03:

Would You Really Follow a Manager into Battle?

…these are managers, not leaders. Leaders are people who know how to do what is done by the people they lead. Leaders expose themselves to the inconvenience of proceeding in front of the troops, Tom Hanks-style, rather than piloting a desk while others pilot less predictable craft.

<veteran’s_rant>The current manager-in-residence, George II, went through the motions of flying F-102s on training missions with the Texas Air National Guard during the Viet Nam unpleasantness, in a squadron noted for its population of the scions of the Texas elite. (He was admitted to pilot training ahead of a coupla hundred more qualified other rich kids, despite having flunked the entrance exam). As if that weren’t little enough, the record seems clear that he was too busy on a political campaign to show up for service when assigned to Alabama for his last year of duty. Can you imagine what Colin Powell, a real soldier, thinks of this guy?

My personal resentment may stem from the fact that I enlisted in the Air Force at the same New Haven office as George, about 3 years earlier. About a week before he enlisted, I was on the C-130 that evacuated the last Marines from Kham Duc Viet Nam (the one before us was shot down on takeoff, killing all 150 souls on board). A month after George started his USAF Adventure Camp, I got shot down at Katum, Viet Nam. The real world has real work to be done. Leaders do that work and teach others. Managers arrange the doing of real work.</veteran’s_rant>

Grabbing the Bullshit by the Horns

The reason my old post was of any interest is that John Kerry wants to take that meme public. He sees himself as a leader where Bush is a manager. Apparently, the idea is to take the tax cuts back from the wealthy and use the proceeds to fund the war as the generals said we should–the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force. In other words, Kerry would like to wind the clock back two years and wage a campaign for peace the right way. So maybe Kerry gets it that Americans hate to lose more than they love George Bush, and so he favors a no-holds-barred assault on the Bushies’ corporate-style management style.

At least that’s what I inferred from my friend’s sound bite, and it was no more than that, but the gist was unequivocal: rob the rich to win the peace. The closet speechwriter in me would like the announcement to go like this:

In February, 2005, I will order the prosecution of the Iraq War as it should have been fought in the first place: 300,000 troops in Iraq, supported by a repeal of the Bush tax cuts for people earning over $300,000. We would have sent that many troops if George Bush were a leader but he’s not. I’ve led in combat and learned that it takes a soldier to lead other soldiers. When his top military commander told him it would take 300,000 troops, he acted as a weak manager does: fired the messenger. A leader isn’t afraid of information. When the truth hurts, you accept its pain and then show the troops why we must take the courageous correct action. Sometimes you turn your boat toward the guns when you’re not supposed to.

The mission of these troops will be security, reconstruction and humanitarian aid. Their numbers and support will make them and Iraq safer than they are today. Our goal is to put Iraq back the way it was before we broke it, and give Iraqis what we expect in a civilized country: reliable electricity, fuel, water and sanitary conditions, proper health care and an independent media. I know we can do this with the active support of the American people, not just by government programs but also through grassroots programs like Spirit of America.

Now your choice is simple. Do the American people want to bear the sacrifice of doing the right thing in Iraq, especially our wealthy citizens? Or do we want to let things drift in Iraq as we did in Vietnam, a series of timid escalations until we are forced into a humiliating retreat once again? Are we prepared to admit that the mideast crisis is our greatest threat since World War II?

Have we got the guts and strength to do the right thing, or do we feel lucky?

If you agree with the soldiers’ rule that ‘hope is not a plan’ you will make sure that, on February 1, 2005, I lead this campaign from the only desk in the world where such boldness is possible.

The John Kerry we know will probably make the prose more tortured, but the message is so crystal clear–rich people “sacrificing” for peace–that it’s easy to get across.

Will he do it? my friend couldn’t say. But I got the sense that, unless the polls start looking better real soon, Kerry will take the bold stroke that makes his managers uncomfortable.

11:51:49 AM

Paying For Others’ Sins

What do you do with the information that several hundred children have been killed or wounded to make a point? There are two things we know for sure:

There are bad people in the world
We need to do something about it.

Once you accept those obvious points, you then must decide what you can do. I’d like to avoid the blogger’s conceit: the absurdity that what’s written here might affect large numbers of people or somehow sway the body politic. No, the little clique of people around this virtual water cooler have more constrained choices. We need to do something that matches our time, energy and money.

One thing we can do is send some money for relief in Beslan, where 335 people, mostly children, were killed by terrorists, and even more hospitalized. Donovan Janus pointed me to Moscow Help.org, which says it has collected $196,082 in 2-1/2 days. I looked over the site and, for about 15 seconds, my cautious wimp within locked on to the fact that the site is half in Russian and half in English, apparently set up by expatriate Russians, mostly in the Philadelphia area. This is the kind of thing that can put a cynical person off.

But what kind of a response is that? Is one to remain ordinary in extraordinary times? No. In every crisis, there’s no end to the reasons to not act. The bright side of our post-9/11 dystopia is the reason to reach across the miles and transmit a signal that you care. So, after just a bit of due diligence, I ignored that small-minded person and clicked on one of their PayPal icons, which I provide here for your convenience. Or, you can start at the home page of the site and arrive at the following in due course (I left off the next row of donation amounts. You can’t blame them for keeping our options open):

2. PayPal – THIS IS OUR PREFERRED WAY TO ACCEPT DONATIONS
Please send payments to donate@moscowhelp.org
You may also use one of the buttons below:

	Donate $50	Donate $100	Donate $150	Donate $200	Donate $300	Donate $500

If you have any problems making your payment, please call us at 321-213-0198.

3. Credit Cards
Please use our secure credit card form to make a direct credit card donation

Extraordinary Times

We’re living in a Chinese curse, for sure. There are few things each of us can do, but the most interesting thing is certainly not the money, but the act of reaching out to others. Imagine with me an autumn when Americans reach out to the people of Beslan and Ossetia and find a way to communicate with them, not about death but about their lives. Perhaps the families of 9/11 victims could do the reaching. Where’s the sister city program when we need it? Where is the web service to make that more than possible–to make it obvious and compelling?

Well one thing we bloggers can do, is hope that people do reach out and, when good news comes out of this tragedy, to make as much of it as possible. Most of the news in the world is good, so why not make the most of it? In fact, could the blogosphere play a role in putting more good news on the front page?

That’s a question worth answering.

We’ve got Bad News and we’ve got Good News

I’ll take the good news.

Aside from the irritant that it doesn’t sell advertising, good news has much to recommend it. Good news is:

A chance to help someone in trouble
A story about heroism or kindness just slightly out of the ordinary
A reminder that there is courage and beauty in everyday actions
An example of a person’s belief overcoming physical limitations
Any story about a young person finding her craft and embracing its disciplines
News reminding us we are more alike than dissimilar
A tip or trick that improves how you do your craft

Discovering good news in scary events is hard work–perhaps the most creative human act after childbearing, which is the essence of good news. It’s hard because we’re not wired to embrace good news if there’s even a shred of bad news to attend to. So, while we’re each yearning for good news as a foil to our sack o’ woe, the payoff to our “content providers” when they deliver what we don’t want to hear is so great that there’s no room for what we don’t want to hear.

Programmers and producers yearn for the good news of more ad sales, which they get by giving us what we don’t want but which our reptile brain compels us to attend to.

At Spirit of America, Jim Hake has carved out a remarkable niche in the good news market space. Not only does Spirit of America receive full funding for our requests for health, school and sports supplies, we received 1500% funding of a $100,000 initiative to deliver good news in Iraq. It was an over-the-top response to a $100,000 appeal that seemed aggressive last April. Clearly, something important is going on here. Spirit of America is an expression of Jim’s urge to do something magnificent in this world, and it’s working. Jim sees the delivery of good news as a humanitarian opportunity, but some see it as a business opportunity.

Good Apples News Service – GANS

Like Jim Hake, Tom Munnecke is a visionary, though he’s not yet as well known. I think his contribution is already true though it hasn’t happened yet. Tom did extremely well in the business world by developing hospital management software, and now he wants to prove a point, inverting an old saying: that a few ~~bad~~ good apples can ~~spoil~~ improve the whole barrel. Tom presented this idea at Jerry’s retreat in July and again at a small meeting here in New York last month, sponsored by the Omidyar Network. The challenge at both was how to make more good news visible, so it can promote and encourage the work of the good apples among us.

I missed the first half day of the Munnecke-Omidyar meeting. As I walked in, I heard Tom mention an idea that had emerged the night before: a Good Apples News Service. Pre-conditioned by my belief in his good apples doctrine, the phrase immediately got traction for me. Wow! Here’s an idea whose time is overdue.

From there, it was obvious what the opportunity is: leverage the collective on-the-ground reporting of the audience that won’t shut up – bloggers – to distribute professional quality content to traditional outlets: the papers and broadcasters who are now hostage to the selective reporting of the established news services: Reuters, Associated Press, etc. This idea has the legs to go far because, like most ‘Net-based disrupters, it has a radically reduced cost basis and a far greater reach.

Cocktail Napkin, meet Business Plan

So let’s game this out a bit. What does a News Service do, what will a new one require and what will those resources cost? Here’s what I think is required:

Content A steady stream of good-news contributed by the blogosphere
Peer Ratification Corroboration, fact-checking and confirmation of a developing thread by the blogosphere.
Professional Ratification Professional journalists “blessing” each story or thread as it develops
Professional Editing Professional editors, paid to tighten, improve and fact-check the copy.
Distribution RSS feeds of each story and category of stories, accessed and paid for, on-the-fly, over the Internet.

That seems straightforward enough, but we’ve left unanswered a crucial question. What’s good news? Like art, we may not be able to define it, but we know what we like. That’s good enough for the readers, but a little weak for a business. Interestingly, Tom Mandel and I separately leapt to the same conclusion:

Good News is actionable.

Now that’s a metric you can build into your mission statement. Some stories may sound like bad news, but if the reader can take an immediate action to improve the situation, then it’s good news.

Hurricanes are bad news but hurricane relief is good news.
Iraq is bad news but Spirit of America is good news.
AIDS i
s bad news but the research it demands is good news.

So what would the business process look like? I think it’s a funnel maintained by professionals, filled with amateur work, lovingly crafted, vetted by other amateurs and professionals, and refined into quality journalism with the speed and competence of a Linux bug fix or a Wikipedia update:

The GANS Blog-to-Journalism Converter Funnel

Well, it’s a start. A few of us will continue to push on this notion and, if it has the legs I think it does, maybe we can turn it into a little enterprise with the usual desired characteristics: vanishingly low overhead, no fixed costs, global potential and unlimited scalability. All that with the purpose, if GANS succeeds, to fundamentally improve the perceptual foundations on which society makes choices.

Other than that, GANS has little going for it.

Dragons of Eden

In 1978, I discovered what made me tic by reading Carl Sagan’s Dragons of Eden. In it I learned that I had a triune brain: 3 layers of mind overlayed on the spinal cord by evolution but, unlike the tail we each sport in the womb, all the pieces are in daily use. In order of their evolution, they are the reptile brain, the mammal brain and the human brain. Some call them the reticular formation, the paleomammalian brain and the neo cortex. Whatever you call these levels, they each have unique biologies and modus operandi.

The reptile brain has no emotions. It takes in all sensory input, makes very rapid calculations and reacts to threat first and opportunity second. This is the mechanism that was designed to detect the difference between the sound of a branch cracked by a 2-ton carnivore from the sound of a branch cracked by a 2-ton herbivore. Conditioned by its environment, it now alerts us to stock market collapses and a slight distancing in our lover’s voice, even over a cell phone. It would be easy to dismiss this most primitive of functions, until we realize that every shred of sensory data is filtered through it, and only the information deemed useful even has a chance for further processing. Also, even though the reptile brain is only about as big as your forefinger, it has 70% of your brain cells. That’s why its bias for threats over opportunities is important to news editors and politicians.

The next layer, added by early mammalian life, is sometimes called the cat brain, because it’s the one they use. It takes the information deemed as useful by the reptile brain and colors it through the use of neurotransmitters and hormones. A reptile is savage, yes, but in a kind of detached way, which the paleomammalian is able to kick up a notch. This brain is what gives meaning to a bitch in heat. If you’re looking for Mr. Hyde, this is where you’ll find him. We’ve all heard the sound of the cat brain at work, under our window on a warm night. Fortunately, this bad boy is only able to act on the information passed to it from the senses, through the reptile brain. In some persons, it’s even moderated by the neo cortex. I’m still waiting for that feature to kick in.

The human neo cortex, in theory at least, calls on prior learning and objective processing to weigh options and make better decisions. Remember this the next time you get into a political discussion. The reason our fancy brain doesn’t work so well in political mode is its amazing lack of evidence, since the reptile brain pays more attention to office and bedroom politics and spun-for-TV sound bites than to news that matters and arcane issues of governance and human potential. Of course the cat brain is happy to provide all the emotion needed to get both parties lathered up over information they don’t have, since their respective brands of disinformation have been packaged and delivered so skillfully by the prosperous fear mongers on the nightly news.

It’s all the dragon’s fault. If something seems scary (suggested by tone of voice, excitement, stridency and sound track), our unblinking lizard brain pays close attention, while ignoring the more relevant news: green grass, skies of blue; people all around us, saying how d’ya do.

They’re just sayin’ I love you.

11:48:15 PM

Democrats for Bush?

A friend whom I respect, because he’s moved mountains for a cause I believe in, wrote to point to a Boston Globe article about Ed Koch supporting George Bush for re-election, Why Koch is on Bush’s bandwagon. My friend writes:

This is what I was talking about re: your prediction that Bush wouldn’t get more absolute votes than last time and I said I knew a number of folks that voted for Gore but were going to vote for Bush this time.

The author of the article, Jeff Jacoby, says that Ed Koch is a one-issue guy this year:

“I’ve never before supported a Republican for president,” Koch told me last week. “But I’m doing so this time because of the one issue that trumps everything else: international terrorism. In my judgment, the Democratic Party just doesn’t have the stomach to stand up to the terrorists. But Bush is a fighter.”

The article concludes: [Koch] is a loyal Democrat. But as JFK once said, sometimes party loyalty asks too much.

Party Loyalty Always Asks Too Much.

Our government is run by people who depend on zealots for their power, since only zealots are willing to do what has always been required: the hard work of beating the streets for their designated egotist. To energize this “indispensable” base, the strategists adopt the extreme positions that you would expect zealots to require. Both my readers know that I believe the Internet creates ways for reasonable people to exert political power, perhaps for the first time in history.

A Lever Long Enough to Suppress the World

Archimedes famously said that if you gave him a long enough lever, he could lift the world. Using the long lever arm of mass media, a tiny core of politically powerful people controls the rest of the population’s choices, economics and future.

Systems design is the study of how to balance inputs into and outputs from a dynamic process so it optimally serves the needs of the highest possible number of users of the process. From a systems design standpoint, American politics is a disaster:

The Data (*official 2000 election)
286,196,812 184,744,527 100,000,000 2,000,000 50,000 2,862	Americans* non-voters* inconsequential voters voters who matter political activists political power elite
About a third of Americans vote, but most vote so consistently that their votes, needs and opinions are inconsequential. Just a few “swing” voters are the target of politicians’ attention and advertising, the only voters who matter. In the 2000 election, Gore received 50.5% of the popular vote, while losing 3 states–41 electoral votes–by a total of 6,611 votes.

Only a sliver of the population is zealous enough to be active in politics. Compared to the general population, it even takes a kind of zealotry to get out and vote. I don’t have the figures, but do any states have more than 1,000 full time activists? I’m not talking about the political hobbyists who will canvass when asked or show up at a state convention and perform as directed, but by activists I mean those who live for or off of politics and do their party’s bidding whenever asked. My working hypothesis is that there are no more than 50,000 active political foot soldiers at any one time, less than.02% of Americans. Even if you think there are double or triple the number, the fraction is still vanishingly small.

In turn, those few activists are manipulated by a tiny political elite which is probably no more than .001% of the population (Joe Trippi says there are a thousand of them, but my math works better if I almost triple his number, to the 2,862 politicians, lobbyists, journalists and business leaders who actually drive the country).

This tiny group of power brokers drives the agenda for a nation which the rest of the world depends upon for its opportunities and constraints. This is a system that no conscientious systems architect would sign off on, but which most Americans meekly accept as how things have to be.

Conservative Koch Capitulates to Crush the Canaanites

The secret of NYC politics is the Jewish vote. Our Jewish friends are otherwise rational people who want us to act contrary to our geopolitical interests to support the Israeli right-wing politicians who are often unloved even in their own country. It’s understandable: if you had relatives in Israel, so would you. But our goal is not beating the Arabs into submission, which is impossible, our target is their hearts and minds.

Secularization is the antidote for most of the world’s woes, both at home and abroad. Intelligence is not just the title of a government activity, it’s also a requirement of any person or group threatened with deadly force. Only our mind can overcome paralyzing anxiety, especially when politicians peddle fear since it’s the easiest way to win. And our mind must rise above the ignorant groupthink that religious fervor forces on otherwise rational people.

New Yorkers understand the code words behind Ed Koch’s position. We embrace our Jewish friends, but most of the people who were actually harmed by the terrorists three years ago oppose the war on Iraq, because they know it leaves unfinished the real business of cutting off terrorists’ air supply. They know this because, unlike most Americans, they’ve been forced to study the real issues and to look past the illusion of cosmetic security.

A Unique Resumé, Understanding Terrorism

John Robb, the only other C-130 pilot I run into at tech conferences, has tackled the global guerilla issue with unique skills and background: Air Force Academy grad, Yale Masters, combat pilot supporting dark ops in Bosnia, Senior Analyst at Forrester, President of Gomez. Now he consults on counter terrorist strategies. It’s obvious that John Robb is not some knee-jerk leftie, incapable of the tough-mindedness required to confront an enemy or build a world-class organization. Since he’s not running for office, he doesn’t need to mouth the platitudes that get ineffective people elected.

Like George H. W. Bu
sh, John understands that our corporate war on ~~terror~~ Iraq is the wrong action at the wrong time. The enemies we need to overcome are the global guerillas, the entrepreneurial thugs who are disrupting our fragile, big-company-designed infrastructure precisely because it’s so fragile. They are engaged in Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW):

4GW (fourth generation warfare) is the term used by military thinkers to describe conflict at the start of the 21st century. In general, 4GW is an extremely effective method of warfare that the US and its allies will find very difficult to defeat (a slow burn, rather than complete eradication, may be the best possible outcome).

John describes the three components that terrorists use to win a 4GW conflict:

Victory in 4GW warfare is won in the moral sphere. The aim of 4GW is to destroy the moral bonds that allows the organic whole to exist. This is done by reinforcing the following (according to Boyd):

Menace. Attacks that undermine or threaten basic human survival instincts.

Mistrust. Increases divisions between groups (ie. conservatives and liberals in the US).

Uncertainty. Undermine economic activity by decreasing confidence in the future.

These are the methods our forefathers used to defeat the greatest, most arrogant empire ever seen, back in 1779 and 1812, and they are the methods now being used against the greatest, most arrogant empire ever seen.

Who’s Boyd, and What Does He know That We Don’t?

The Boyd whom John quotes in his three components of the terrorists’ playbook is Col. John Boyd. Often called America’s greatest fighter pilot, Boyd transformed the way military aircraft – in particular the F-15 and F-16 – were designed with his revolutionary “Energy-Maneuverability Theory,” fighting the Air Force’s entrenched ideas every step of the way. He then dedicated lonely years to a radical theory of conflict that at the time was mostly ignored, but now is acclaimed as the most influential thinking about conflict since Sun Tzu (from Amazon’s description of Robert Coram’s Boyd biography).

John Robb embraces Boyd’s systematic thinking:

Col. John Boyd (he died in 1997) is considered one of America’s best military thinkers. His thinking dramatically influenced the plan of attack in the first gulf war. Boyd’s thinking also serves as a good basis for a deeper understanding of 4GW (fourth generation warfare).

Grand strategy, according to Boyd, is a quest to isolate your enemy’s (a nation-state or a global terrorist network) thinking processes from connections to the external/reference environment. This process of isolation is essentially the imposition of insanity on a group. To wit: any organism that operates without reference to external stimuli (the real world), falls into a destructive cycle of false internal dialogues. These corrupt internal dialogues eventually cause dissolution and defeat.

The dynamic of Boyd’s grand strategy is to isolate your enemy across three essential vectors (physical, mental, and moral), while at the same time improving your connectivity across those same vectors. Here’s more detail

Physical isolation is accomplished by severing communications both to the outside world (ie. allies) and internal audiences (ie. between branches of command and between the command organization and its supporters).

Mental isolation is done through the introduction of ambiguous information, novel situations, and by operating at a tempo an enemy cannot keep up with. A lack of solid information impedes decision making.

Moral isolation is achieved when an enemy improves its well being at the expense of others (allies) or violates rules of behavior they profess to uphold (standards of conduct). Moral rules are a very important reference point in times of uncertainty. When these are violated, it is very hard to recover.

Robb doesn’t think we’re doing very well in combating the forces that isolate us from each other, from our former allies (far more experienced than we in fighting terrorists), from our mental discipline and from our moral compass. His scorecard of our so-called war on terror follows the above list.

The Great Disconnect

Every one of us is forced to be disciplined in our profession. We understand that the devil is in the details, that what matters are the non-obvious disciplines that our customers and our investors really don’t understand. In short, we look beyond the surface in order to succeed.

But politics embraces PR, not operations. Politicians love cosmetic security. By declaring war on the enemies we can defeat impressively (the false internal dialogues Boyd cautions us against), they ignore the tough-minded, politically more difficult operations we must undertake to be secure.

Global Guerillas is a crash course in the details that matter, and a bibliography of the books that treat terrorism seriously rather than politically. If you’re willing to have the discipline of an insider, start there. But if you want to follow the herd over the cliff, just keep watching TV. Here’s John Robb’s prescription:

A vision statement for this conflict

From this analysis it is clear that the US is, as the result of this war, more isolated than our enemy. However, Boyd suggests that the best corrective action is for the US to articulate a grand unifying vision for this war. A “with us or against us” approach and unilateral military action is not productive (it drives isolation). A better vision statement:

The United States will commit all of the resources at its disposal to help nations everywhere preserve those values that we all hold as vital to our future success.”

I don’t fault our political elite for being strong on terror, I fault them for being ineffective patsies: they’ve taken the coward’s way out by choosing to attack their political enemies rather than the enemies of the noble American experiment in freedom of individual thought and action.

Robb’s Roost

For those willing to master the real issues facing us, here’s a list of John Robb’s compelling analytics:

10:20:52 AM

Spirit of the Heartland

There was a Spirit of America meeting at the Heartland Brewery on Manhattan’s Union Square Tuesday evening, organized by Sean Doherty, Richard Vermillion and Peter Anderson. If you have a chance to go to an SoA event, don’t miss it. They attract some smart, dedicated, thoughtful people.

Richard Vermillion, one of the fundraiser’s organizers, counting the take for SoA’s Iraqi clients

There were several themes expressed. The first was that this is the most important thing we can commit ourselves to. After all, is there any urge more basic than for our life to be of consequence? No matter how we define consequence, most of our instincts and actions seem aimed towards it.

This imperative seemed to motivate many of the people there, who have reacted as I did, saying that this campaign of ours is the best chance we have to win the hearts and minds of people who only know America through our misleading broadcasts and the propaganda they are fed by their rulers.

A part of this spirit is a yearning to do something, felt since the afternoon of 9/11/01, and still not satisfied. On 9/12/01, Americans woke up determined to do something – anything – to put the world back the way it had been. It’s understandable but unfortunate that the government failed to harness the awesome collective force of the American people. It was a bureaucratic failing, since government has no way to engage people spontaneously, assuming wrongly that government IS the people.

We wanted to give blood, haul trash from Ground Zero, donate blankets, etc. Instead we were told to go to Orlando. That may have been sound economic advice, since it was our economy that needed a transfusion, but it didn’t satisfy the part of us that yearns to reach out to neighbors in need.

Bureaucrats don’t inhabit the web, so they have no way of knowing how people can reach across geographical and ideological boundaries to lock arms and do amazing things. To be fair, the power of the web to gather and focus people power was less clear three years ago.

Spirit of America uniquely scratches our itch to be useful. By an incredible stroke of luck, it appeals equally to people who support a pre-emptive foreign policy and to those who oppose it.

Most of the people at the meeting had contributed and are keen to do whatever they can. Two people said that Spirit of America is the “something” they’d been looking for – I got the sense from some that this was a contrast to their job which is, well, merely their job. One person said that when the Spirit of America weekly newsletter hits his inbox, he stops everything and reads it through.

The Vision Thing

I had a pleasant walk down from 2nd & 38th with Robert Tolmach, Founder and CEO of Glasses for Humanity (GfH). Kerry Dupont, Spirit of America’s Logistics Goddess, and Robert and I have been structuring a way to distribute used eyeglasses in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we feel it will be a straightforward project to put into place.

Esther Dyson, who serves on Robert’s impressive Advisory Board, sent her regrets from Colorado. She had realized there’s a natural fit between SoA and GfH even before introducing us at Jerry Michalski‘s weekend retreat in Toronto six weeks ago. It took Robert and me a while to see how to make it work, but Esther probably had it figured out last month. After all, she’s Esther.

Lt. Col. “Rudy” Rudolf gave Avery Stirrat a private briefing

Lt. Col James M. “Rudy” Rudolf, USMC, told us how vital the Spirit of America is becoming for the troops who can deploy its benefits: how it’s saving real lives by moderating the passions that define the Iraqi experience. Rudy’s totally committed to advancing the SoA initiative. He reports that all the Marines working the far end of the SoA supply chain are convinced that this system can have huge benefits. Now that it’s been working for over six months, They are dedicated to stepping it up a notch. Part of that means refining the granularity, exposing the troops at the unit level so they understand how to spot needs and file project requests.

Taking it to the Web

The organizers of the event were glad to hear that Spirit of America’s new web site, to be rolled out in early September, will give them a powerful suite of tools to form teams, coordinate their efforts, schedule events and issue invitations to SoA members, organized by ZIP codes within a desired radius. They felt it would have been useful to have an announcement on the SoA web site, so people would know there was some relationship to the organization. Next time they will.

Thanks, guys for putting this one together, even though you had to use duct tape and baling wire. We’re getting the new model ready and we think you’ll like the way it flies.

8:25:04 AM

Get Over the Rainbow

The Democrats have had a nice ride with the rainbow coalition. It was brilliant to build such an open tent and to thereby gain the political clout carried by the real majority in the US: its minorities. But a new golden coalition is waiting at the end of the rainbow: those connected by even more than mutual self-interest: the continuous dialogue of the ‘Net, serving up tangible-seeming communities forged from ephemeral TCP/IP packets.

Like the eye fooled by 30 fps film, thinking it’s watching reality, our brain eagerly maintains the illusion that on-screen traces of keystrokes are a tangible community. So pervasive is the illusion that people act on its imperatives, so the community is as real as any has ever been. Perhaps more real, since through it we embrace the best of our collective thinking and orphan our lesser inclinations.

Are We There Yet?

Since the future’s unevenly distributed, we might test new political possibilities earlier in some venues than others. Take New York City, for example. This is probably the most connected and forward-looking city on the planet. Is it possible that the next election for Hizzoner da Mayor could be driven by connectivity in ways that the moneyed establishment cannot imagine? If so, how might it happen?

Patron Age

Patronage was the most powerful lever of the old politics, the source of most political power until usurped by broadcast politics. Especially in a place like New York, politicians and their ward bosses and precinct captains made sure that voters got a free chicken every once in a while. Everyone knew that such favors were to be repaid on election day.

Imagine you’re a well-connected, reasonably prosperous, politically-oriented New Yorker who “gets” the ‘Net (that ain’t me, babe, not even for the purpose of this mind game). You might glimpse an opportunity to engage the best of the old and new politics in ways others cannot comprehend.

Instead of buying chickens to compel voter loyalty, politicians now buy TV slots. I assume that’s based on the belief that it’s better to hypnotize a voter into acquiescence than to do some small thing of real value for a real family. But might the ‘Net empower politicians disproportionately, delivering real value to voters as a scaffold for actionable loyalty–not with poultry but with the fruits of online community? Imagine with me a few expressions of web services as patronage writ large.

NYCskills.com
This would be an extension of the deanforjobs.com project we noodled with last winter. It’s purpose is to bring together and energize three kinds of people:
   • Under-trained workers
   • Skilled professionals
   • Employers seeking skilled, motivated workers

You could probably build a political machine based on this web service alone. At NYCskills.com, you connect people seeking new skills with people pleased to demonstrate and coach them in anything from network administration through HTML coding to Word tables, business letters and the 500 courses that MIT offers online. As work skills have become more technical and specific, jobs have become a series of tech-based procedures strung together like pearls on a string, a tight coupling of skills with income.

The key to NYCskills.com is the participants’ required reporting of each hour of skills training–mentor and student describing their session together. If the model spreads, it’s not hard to imagine the get-togethers growing to thousands of hours per week, all provable and quantifiable.

This is heady stuff for politics. Imagine reporting to voters that your web service has inspired a quarter million hours of skill training in the year before the election. Imagine further that you’re able to reach those engaged participants directly, to leverage your web service and promote the proven benefits of your proposed administration. When that happens, the candidates’ debates feature a guy who does business as usual, with the usual suspects, and a guy who’s not just promising improvements, but who’s delivering them to real people, by the thousands, every day.
NYCyounglions.com
A cohort you should reach out to is the vibrant community of bright young New York professionals who spend their days working for dead white guys. This may be the best-educated, well-connected demographic on the planet, but no NYC mayoral candidate has made a coherent effort to reach them. Since so many of them are already prosperous, it’s harder to entice them than people looking to upgrade their skills. But one thing’s certain: they want a voice in the future of this great city and a sense of their collective power, whether they know it or not.
My tactic would be to challenge them to build and maintain a virtual city government. Invite tham to engage the issues the city government is facing and stir up a messy and passionate debate about better ways to discuss things, think of things, run things. Expose these young lions to the public and find out how many of them have a future in governance.

Simply by hosting the community of young professionals, you’d demonstrate that it’s a community worth hosting. It’s probably a genie you’d never get back in the bottle.
NYCnewunions.com
New York is a Union Town. Union members, like it or not, do most of the work and collectively enforce the work rules that empower and constrain the Big Apple’s progress. Union members are outspoken but their passionate voices are filtered through union management’s alternate agenda. What if a private citizen with an eye on Gracie Mansion decided to sincerely embrace unions and their members’ personal and family challenges?
What kind of a union-oriented web service might one commission? It would surely chronicle and celebrate the history of unions and their real but camouflaged contribution to our way of life. It would probably invite union members to speak out in their own voices, to mentor each other through comments and blogs, and weave a fine-grained tapestry of mentors’ and apprentices’ skills, voices and hopes.

We might discover that union members’ emphasis on skills and solidarity resonates with geeks’ emphasis on working code and rough consensus; that people who believe that skills trump suits have a natural bond, regardless of the hue of their collar. Once you engaged that synchronicity, you might fuel an engine that could transform even a tradition-bound city like this.

You get the idea. Just by hosting disparate communities, one has the potential to engage and energize voters as free chickens never could. Once glimpsed as a campaign tactic, the failure to do so looms as a colossal oversight.

Opportunity, Meet Obligation

But is there more to such insights? OK, you’re a clued-in dude with the means, the insight and, possibly, the ambition to com
mission these web services. Do you go ahead with them?

Turn it around. If you glimpsed that vision, how could you fail to deliver these services? Whether or not you were jonesing for the Office, if you have the vision and means, what keeps you from offering the services? They are obvious, straightforward and powerful. Would a modern-day Carnegie, possessing a fraction of the means and vision, shrink from the possibility, once glimpsed? That would be the equivalent of ignoring a person lying on the track of the A Train, with five minutes before arrival.

So possibility segues, compellingly, into obligation. The coincidence of insight and near-zero costs make the unthinkable proximate and the grand gesture quotidian.

It’s a strange reality we’ve built. The sweeping ambitions of statesman are overlapping the incidental expressions of enlightened citizenship.

10:46:25 PM

War Can Be Fun

Waiting for John Kerry to speak at the Democratic Convention, Chris Matthews just now talked about the reality of war, quoting Kerry from a few years ago:

“When there was no shooting, and the rock music was playing, steering up the river, It was pretty nice.”

Viet Nam is a beautiful place. Kerry’s Mekong River is probably also a beautiful place, but though we often flew over it, the ocean captivated us, and we speculated that some day its amazing beaches would be lined with resort hotels and the Viet Cong guerilla soldiers’ kids would be on staff. It was a shallow and elitist vision, but also optimistic and prophetic.

nhatrang
Nha Trang Beach, Viet Nam, today. You oughta go.

I’m watching the run-up to Kerry’s acceptance speech and Max Cleland is describing April ’68, when he was headed home from Viet Nam on a stretcher and John Kerry was requesting transfer to Viet Nam. Max describes a moment I roughly quote: “I pressed a small bible into his hand. I knew he would need it.” This is an interesting dilemma for the aggressive Christians of the right. Every patriot and amateur soldier subscribes to and celebrates the adage that “there are no atheists in foxholes.” Combat service softens their skepticism of Kerry’s occasional reference to God. People who recommend war for others’ children but who don’t, like, actually serve, can’t claim that particular connection to the Almighty.

Viet Nam in the spring of 1968 is probably not on the tip of your mind, but it’s burned into mine. We C-130 airlift crews were unlike other aviators and soldiers:

We flew the length and breadth of Viet Nam every week–circuit riders of the Viet Nam zeitgeist–unwittingly gathering material for a story told 3-1/2 decades later.
Like fighter pilots, we went home every night to a hot shower and a cold cocktail next to the beach at Tuy Hoa.
Unlike fighter plots, we flew into and hung out in places that fighter pilots would never visit for more than 8 seconds.

Here’s the reality Lt. John Kerry chose to engage, while others chose to stay home.

Command, Control & Connive, a war story
Kham Duc, 12 May 68: What combat enthusiast Rumsfeld reminds me of.

On May 12, 1968, I flew the most harrowing mission of my Air Force career. It was more impressive in some ways than being shot down six weeks later, because it had more of the dramatic elements you expect in wartime: a major battle, hundreds dead and wounded, and the constant of combat: not just the fog of war, but also the FUD of command.

Those were the forces at work around Kham Duc, RVN, 10 to 12 May, 1968.

Make no mistake, it was an authentic shitstorm. Losses were tallied by one of the Army CH-47 helicopter pilots, Larry Busbee:

With the Air Force, Marines, and the Army trying to evacuate Kham Duc in an “at all cost” operation, it looked at times like a Chinese fire drill. Every man for himself.

There were 259 civilian killed (plus 100 more that were on the C-130 crash) 25 – U.S. Army troops, 2 – CH-47 Chinooks, (AC’s 475 and 469) 2 – Marine CH-46’s, 2 – Air Force C-130’s, 1 – UH-IB Army Huey helicopter, and 1 – 0-2 Air Force Light Air Control aircraft destroyed that day.

Think of the families devastated by that list. The “100 more on the C-130 crash” is understated. The next week, Time Magazine called it the worst single aircraft disaster in history, about 200 souls on board.* The sad part is that many of them had been landed there just the day before, because a General promised something to “earn” his 2nd star and couldn’t deliver.

Here’s the description by Sam McGowan:

Although very little has been written about it, the events of May 12, 1968 are among the most heroic of the Vietnam War, in fact of any war. On that day, a handful of American US Air Force C-130 and US Army and Marine helicopter crewmembers literally laid their lives on the line to evacuate the defenders of the Civilian Irregular Defense Corps camp at Kham Duc, an outpost just inside the South Vietnamese border with Laos.

For years, the camp at Kham Duc had served as a base for intelligence gathering operations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and in the spring of 1968 the Communists decided the time had come to take it out. By early May Allied intelligence sources realized that a large number of North Vietnamese were gathering in the mountains around the camp. On May 10 the camp was reinforced with members of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade who were flown in from their base at Chu Lai. The following day an outlying camp at Ngoc Tavok was attacked; apparently some of the Vietnamese troops in the camp turned their guns on their American allies. That evening General William C. Westmoreland determined that the camp was indefensible and, wishing to avoid the headlines of a camp being overrun, decided to evacuate the camp, beginning at dawn the next morning.

Well, I don’t know about that “most heroic” part. Fortunately, we were not one of the two C-130’s lost, though we were the last fully loaded C-130 to leave, carrying 150+ people, including, significantly, the Camp Commander. We were supposed to be the last aircraft out, which was why the commander was on board. A Special Forces Commander doesn’t leave unless all their men do, and this guy was no wimp.

Background

It started two days earlier. With the buildup of regular North Viet Namese forces around the camp, Brig. General Burl McLaughlin promised General William Westmoreland that, By Gawd!, his airlift operation could reinforce that little base with men and material so fast it would withstand the war’s first major assault by North Vietnamese uniformed regulars. This is how one-star Generals earn their second star, promising the impossible, but his was a short-lived hope and a dangerous hype. By the following night, it was obvious that this was not to be an emergency resupply, but an emergency evacuation. All the reinforcements flown in on 11 June were added to the evacuation requirement on 12 June.

General McLaughlin was, I am sure, a fine officer and soldier. He was Commander of the 314th Tactical Airlift Wing with C-130 detachments in Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan and the Philippines. All of us spent 15-day tours in Viet Nam, then went home about long enough to do our laundry.

One of our missions was to fly a C-130 Airborne Command & Control Center (ABCCC) for 12 hours at a time, filled with radios and radar and staff officers directing air strikes. The ABCCC over “I Corps”, the north part of South Vietnam, was call sign “Hillsborough”. It was manned by professionals, captains and majors, and there was never a reason for a General Officer to be on board. But it was a bully grandstand, so I guess it would be a good place for grandstanding. Too bad I wasn’t flying Hillsborough that day, as I had so many times. No, Tex Wallace and I were just flying around South Viet Nam, “hauling trash” as we usually did, when we got two pieces of bad news in the same radio transmission from Airlift HQ in Saigon; Call sign “Hilda”, the wheedling bitch who never had good news.

There was a humongous emergency evacuation in progress at Kham Duc in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam, right on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, hard by Laos and surrounded by hills and triple canopy jungle. We were to divert to Kham Duc, circle over the field and wait for orders from Hillsborough.
By the way, fellas, this operation is being directed personally by Brigadier General Burl McLaughlin.

The General had ordered Hillsborough to divert from its vital mission to pick him up in Saigon so his name could be stamped on this glorious moment in military airlift history. Or maybe he was concerned about the fate of the troops he had sent in there, unnecessarily, the day before. You decide.

We didn’t hear the back story to our drama until later. Here’s Sam McGowan again:

“During the morning a C-130A flown by Lt. Col. Daryl D. Cole and his 21st Tactical Airlift Squadron crew landed at the camp with a load of cargo, apparently not knowing that it was to be evacuated. A flood of Vietnamese civilians rushed aboard the airplane, so many that the loadmaster was unable to off-load the cargo. The airplane was shot full of holes and a tire was flattened, but Cole attempted a takeoff. The overburdened airplane would not fly, so they returned to the ramp, where the Vietnamese leaped off and into ditches. Cole’s crew worked feverishly to cut away the remains of the tire with a bayonet and a blow torch. While they were working, a C-123 flown by Major Ray D. Shelton came in and picked up a load of Vietnamese and US Army engineers. Cole loaded all remaining Air Force personnel at the camp on to his badly-damaged C-130 and managed to take-off, and flew to Cam Ranh Bay. There the members of the 3-man airlift control team who were aboard were told that they should have stayed in the camp. They were put on another C-130 and sent back.

During the morning, a battle had raged around the airfield. Several airplanes and helicopters had been shot down, including an Air Force Foward Air Controller, who managed to crash-land his shot-up O-2 on the runway. In the early afternoon General Westmoreland notified Seventh Air Force to commence a C-130 evacuation. The first airplane to land was a C-130B flown by a crew from the 774th TAS, commanded by Major Bernard Bucher. Major Bucher landed and loaded his airplane with more than 200 Vietnamese, mostly civilians. As his airplane lifted off, it flew through the apex of fire from two .50-caliber machine guns, trembled, then crashed into a ravine and exploded. A C-130E flown by Lt. Colonel Bill Boyd landed behind Bucher. Boyd took off in the opposite direction and, in spite of more than 100 hits, managed to make it to safety. The third C-130 was an A-model from the 21st TAS, commanded by Lt. Colonel John Delmore. The airplane was hit repeatedly by automatic weapons fire that ripped out the top of the cockpit and shot away the engine controls. Delmor had no choice but to feather the engines – he crash-landed the shot-up C-130 and managed to steer it clear of the runway. Meanwhile, airstrikes had been directed at the guns that brought down Bucher’s airplane and other strikes laid down protective fire alongside the runway. The fourth C-130 crew got in and out safely, and was followed by three others.

Would this have happened if General McLaughlin weren’t micro-managing the evacuation? I have no idea, but it’s the kind of thing that happens when people with creases in their trousers try to run a combat operation.

Here’s a drawing of Joe Jackson’s C-123 on the airfield at the end of the day, pretty much as I remember it. Behind it, you can see a burning C-130, one of two lost that day. But it wasn’t our turn yet.

Keith Ferris "The Miracle at Kham Duc"

Here’s the sanitized description from the Air Force Association:

“In May 1968, the special forces camp at Kham Duc, South Vietnam was tucked away in the central highlands, 16 kilometers from the Laotian border. After the fall of Camp Lang Vei during the Tet offensive in February, Kham Duc was the only observation camp remaining in I Corps, the northernmost military district in South Vietnam. When Kham Duc came under heavy mortar attack on May 10, Army Gen. William Westmoreland ordered it evacuated. On May 12, Mother’s Day, a heavy fog hung over the camp, obscuring enemy movements in the surrounding hills.

Bingo Fuel

Bingo Fuel is the fuel level that’s just enough to return to a safe base and land. You never declare bingo fuel if it’s not true, and no one responds to the declaration with an order to not return to base. The military doesn’t like to risk men or machines.

When we got to the Kham Duc area, it was a dismal sight. Overcast, with low hanging clouds to dodge, helicopters and fighters everywhere, lots of ground fire and the saddest-looking Special Forces base you can imagine.

There were about seven other C-130’s circling, waiting for orders, because the General would brook no shortage of resources. Never mind that there was no way that we would all be used. At the time, we didn’t realize that another C-130 was inbound, carrying the Airlift Control Element assigned to bring order to this “Chinese fire drill,” as Larry Busbee described it.

This was nothing like the elegant choreography you might hear on United’s air-to-ground Channel 9. There was no radar control in Viet Nam. You landed when you could see the runway, more or less, and when there were several of us waiting to land, we worked it out among ourselves.

“This is Homey 305, what’s the plan?”

“We’ve got seven aircraft, stacked with a thousand feet separation. You’ve got 11,000 feet”

High and Mighty

“Roger.” Well at least we were well above the action. It was pretty clear they wouldn’t need us today, and from the look of things, that was good. Now we started discussing our options. If we waited until we hit bingo fuel, we’d have to return to Danang, refuel, then head for Tuy Hoa, on the beach, where we would indulge in our little ritual: a hot shower and a cold cocktail. We trash haulers led an ignominious existence, but it had its rewards. Back at the bar we’d hang out with the F-100 jocks who’d regale us with tales of their derring-do, having hurled their pink bodies at the earth at prodigious speeds, making things go boom. Impressive, but they’d freely admit that they’d never, under any circumstances, land an airplane on one of those godforsaken strips, no way in Hell.

So why should we circle around here uselessly when we could leave a little earlier and proceed direct to Tuy Hoa? There we could enjoy the sunset on the beach, and relate yet another narrow deferral from duty above & beyond? We just needed to be diplomatic to pull this off.

Great plan, lousy outcome.

I wasn’t lying about our reserves and we never declared bingo fuel. I waited until the fuel was just about right to avoid the Danang detour and calmly announced our status. Things definitely looked bad down there, so, to paraphrase Mel Brooks, it was good to be number eight for landing. Here goes.

“Ah, Hillsborough, This is Homey 305. We can hold for maybe 15 minutes more, then we’ll have to declare bingo fuel.”

“Roger, 305, stand by.” Heh. This was good. It was unthinkable to pluck the top airplane off the top of the overpopulated stack and drive it through all those other equally useful aircraft. Especially when the others were so much closer and surely more willing.

“Homey 305, You’re now number one and cleared to land.”

Whatthefuck?!

What had gone wrong? How could they do this? Why hadn’t we waited and declared bingo fuel? What evil force was at work? Professionals would never do this! You’d have to be an idiot to send in…… Aha! That’s it! General Burl McLaughlin, The sanctimonious author of the “From the Left Seat” column in Airlift Times! Only an operational amateur would do this to us!

“Roger, Hillsborough, Homey 305 commencing approach.” Understatement. The junior officer’s only ally.

It was a wild ride. We dropped the flaps and gear and flattened those four huge props, each of the 16 blades the size of a Cessna’s wing. Our stock in trade was not what you’d expect from a big transport. It was the Assault Landing, by which you maneuvered like a fighter plane in a tight steep spiral to stay as close to the runway as possible. It seemed impossible until you’d done several hundred. Miraculously, we didn’t take a hit.

The C-130 that took off before us was our pal, Bernie Bucher’s–shot down on takeoff, killing 200 or so passengers and crew. The one behind us belonged on The Twilight Zone – three people flying toward Kham Duc!

“While the C-130s were landing, Army and Marine helicopter pilots took advantage of the distraction – the Communists were concentrating their fire on the larger transports – and got in to make pickups of their own. Within a few minutes, some 500 of the camps defenders were evacuated, although the bulk of the Vietnamese were left to attempt to exfiltrate through the enemy forces. But as the last C-130 came out of the camp with the staff of the US Army Special Forces team, another C-130 was landing with the three members of the airlift control team who had been brought out earlier. Here’s more from the Air Force Association description:

An Army CH-47 helicopter and two Air Force C-130s tried to land and takeoff with personnel, but were disabled by enemy fire. One C-130 burst into flames at the end of the runway, killing the crew and more than 150 Vietnamese civilians. Finally, a C-130 was able to land and takeoff with some passengers.

That would be us. Funny, the Kham Duc partition in my brain is much larger than those 12 words suggest. “Some passengers”, my ass. There were 150-200 people left in camp, half of them Vietnamese. I later discovered that, as we landed, the North Vietnamese owned about half the base. As we touched down, the ammo dump blew up on the starboard side of the airplane–fire and smoke everywhere, shit falling on top of the airplane. These are the details they never talked about in training.We took out everyone with the moxie to run to the airplane: U.S. Marines and Army troops and Vietnamese men, women and children, 150 or more, but who was counting?

Most of them had hunkered down in the ditches on either side of what was left of the runway. We taxied down the strip with the rear ramp down as people sprinted to the “safety” of our light-gauge aluminum tube. We had our cockpit windows open, waving at shell-shocked troops to run to the airplane. The Camp Commander, a Special Forces Lt. Colonel looking like death warmed over, clambered up to the cockpit and ordered us to take off. There were still 2 or 3 dozen soldiers lying in the trenches, heads down, not going anywhere. The Commander said to take off and save the ones on board: if the stragglers wouldn’t run to the airplane, that was their problem. We had taxied back to our landing point, over pieces of quonset huts and holes in the runway. F-4 Phantoms were strafing both sides of the runway, keeping everybody’s head down. We gunned it and took off for what should have been our last departure.

The hills around Kham Duc are 1,000-1,500 feet higher than the base. The NVA gunners were firing down, as they had been all afternoon at targets just like us. It was a frickin’ shooting gallery.

We were overloaded and we lumbered out on takeoff leg. We expected more performance, since the C-130 is an eager and powerful airplane, even with so many scared people on board but lighter by the fuel we didn’t have. Surprisingly, we didn’t take a single hit. As we climbed through 6,000 feet, a safe height, I looked down and saw that the gear lever was still down!

Well. For professional aviators, this was an embarrassing moment. We left the gear down? WTF?! That’s a student pilot error! Had we lost our heads? We just laughed, put the wheels up and headed for the safety of Danang. We still couldn’t figure out how we got off scott-free. Why should we be the only aircraft in and out of Kham Duc to take no hits? Surely it was because of the intense fighter support, but there was more to it than that. Because the gear was down, our takeoff climb was flatter–lower–than if the gear were up and we had less drag. If the NVA gunners had locked in so skillfully on the previous C-130s, maybe they were firing above us, like a hunter leading the last duck, missing a lower-flying duck. Whatever the reason, it was a great escape.

We thought that was the end of it. We felt badly about the guys left on the ground, but the Camp Commander was right in saving who he could. Later we got the full story about how they got out of there.

The camp had been evacuated, or had been declared so by the Special Forces team, at a cost of two C-130s and several other aircraft and helicopters, seven in all. What happened next is the event for which Kham Duc is most remembered, although in reality it was but a footnote to the day’s events. The eighth C-130 flew into the camp and off-loaded the three men, Major John Gallagher, a C-130 pilot from the 463rd Tactical Airlift Wing, and Sergeants Mort Freedman and James Lundie, both combat controllers with the 8th Aerial Port. The three men ran off the ramp of the C-130 and into the camp; the pilot, Lt. Col. Jay Van Cleef, waited several minutes then when no one came aboard his airplane, took off again.

Jay Van Cleef was from our home base at Ching Chuan Kang, Taiwan, and the version I heard was slightly different, that he took out the people we left hiding in the ditches, dropping off three guys who had no reason to be there except that someone was paying more attention to procedures than to reality. And that they drove their radio-festooned jeep off the ramp, spiked it into a ditch and assumed the stance of the conquering hero: face down in the mud, arms over one’s head.

As he was climbing out he heard someone report that the evacuation was complete. No it wasn’t! Van Cleef protested into his radio that three airmen were still on the ground. Those present later reported that there was a dead silence in the airways afterwards.

Hostile forces had overrun the forward outpost and established gun positions on the airstrip. They were raking the camp with small arms, mortars, light and heavy automatic weapons and recoilless rifle fire. The camp was engulfed in flames and ammunition dumps were exploding and littering the runway with debris. In addition, eight aircraft had been destroyed by the intense fire and one remained on the runway, reducing its usable length to only about 2,200
feet. To further complicate the landing, the weather was deteriorating rapidly. As the last C-130 was about to takeoff with the last of the men on the ground aboard, the airborne commander ordered jet fighters circling overhead to descend and destroy the camp.

It looked as if Jackson’s aircraft wasn’t going to be needed in the rescue attempt. But then the radio crackled, informing them that the three-man combat control team, in charge of directing the evacuation, was still on the ground. As they searched the camp for anyone who had been left behind, they realized they were the only ones left.

Ah, the endless stream of FUBARs that is the wellspring for the black humor that sustains combat troops everywhere. A management fuck-up in the Fortune 500 is a sad waste of human potential and an inspiration for Dilbertian farce. A management mis-step in war kills hard-working young Americans and maims ten for every KIA. Joe Jackson had to rescue the three poor SOBs who never should have been there in the first place. A testimonial to a management fuck-up.

The rest is an Airlift legend. Joe Jackson drives his C-123 through a withering hail of fire, rescues the ACC Team, takes a zillion hits and gets the hell out of there. Joe and his crew deserve every honor heaped on them, which, for Joe, includes the Congressional Medal of Honor, the only airlift crewmember so decorated in Viet Nam, and deservedly so.

Am I a cynic to wonder at the irony of Joe Jackson’s celebrity? That there was no reason to risk six lives and an airplane because of hardening of the regulations? Might I be so cynical as to observe that we patriots, inspired and moved by Joe Jackson’s authentic heroism, are less likely to dig below the surface, into the failures of ego and logistics that have defined war through the ages?

These are the reasons that people with a memory–like Dwight Eisenhower–are slow to go to war. Combat is always a sad, desperate monument to man’s inability to get it right, either diplomatically or tactically. The wise but uneducated people in a culture generally clean up the messes created by the over-educated fools who just know they can manage a war better than the similar idiots who screwed it up last time.

*”Souls on board” has always seemed to me a quaint way to describe passengers and crew. Inherited from the Navy, it’s the count of people aboard a craft, usually in the past tense.
3:22:28 AM

Empowering the Blogarazzi

I mentioned last Sunday that the talented guys programming the new Spirit of America web site, Donovan Janus and Rhesa Rozendaal, have a web service called Exposure Manager, and that I was encouraging them to create a set of tools for bloggers. Well, you never know where a conversation with smart programmers might lead. In this case, it turned out to be Election Photos ’04 (EP04), built during an extreme programming conversation that ran well into Monday morning.

Here’s the description at the EP04 web site:

PHOTOBLOGGING ELECTION 2004: DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
Leveling the playing field for grassroots convention reporting
– Free image storage and blog services for convention bloggers –

About ElectionPhotos04
Blogging this year’s political conventions may be the most exciting news about those staged events. Imagine the stories we might witness!

We launched ElectionPhotos04 to make it easier for convention bloggers to do some of the things that professional journalists’ companies do for them: index and archive images and retrieve then quickly for publication. Over the next few days the functionality of this site will be expanded to include searching by keyword. If you are attending the convention and you would like to apply for a free account, drop us a line at blogger@electionphotos04.com.

• 1 Gig of space for your convention images
• Easy single or batch upload to your personal gallery: web/ftp/email [phonecam]
• Easy-copy html strings to insert images in your blog (200 or 400 pixels)
• Keywords and descriptions for searching
• Who, What, Why, When, Where & How metadata tagging

Plus optional participation in the BigPub Photo Pool (offer your images to “the media” for $100 one-time use)

Your free account will remain live through Election Day 2004.

“I Got the Details, Chief!”

That last bullet point refers to one of EP04’s nifty features: convenient tagging with the classic “5 W’s & H” journalistic metadata. In addition to typing a description of each photo and keywords, the rushed photoblogger can click on a few check boxes to easily answer the questions the editor wants answered, like:

WHO

John Kerry	John Edwards
Teresa Heinz Kerry	Elizabeth Edwards
Bill Clinton	Hillary Clinton	Howard Dean

WHAT

Formal staging	Candid moment	Delegation	Blooper
Other

WHERE

WHEN

Pre-opening	Opening ceremonies	Floor demonstrations
Acceptance speeches	Press interviews	Other

WHY

HOW

Never Metadata I Didn’t Like…

EP04 needs some help from convention-savvy folks. The above categories are off the top of our heads and need to be improved and expanded upon. Who else should be listed? What Whats are missing? Where are the other wheres, etc. If you have a suggestion to enrich the convention bloggers’ metadata check boxes, please send an email to metadata@electionphotos04.com.

In reviewing this site in alpha, Dave Winer suggested that the bloggers will be busy and that there should be a way that the blogger’s reader’s can help classify images. While not in this version, I trust that each blogger will designate associates to login and add this info. We’re all fact-checking each other’s ass here in the blogosphere, so we might as well do something useful while we’re at it.

Start Spreadin’ the News…

The folks at EP04 are attempting to contact all known bloggers, but please contact anyone you know who wants to use the free service, asking them to get their login here. Convention bloggers not on the list should apply using this form.

Heh.
I see that Glenn Reynolds has already blogged EP04. He’s already big Exposure Manager user.
And we all know he’s a big fan of Democratic Conventions!

As a co-designer, I know for a fact that EP04 is not a bait and switch deal, and that there’s no adware or other drek, just a tasteful link to the host, Exposure Manager.

The Blogification of CNN

I went to Micah Sifry‘s booksigning party last night, introducing his and Nancy Watzman’s terrific Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? (Washington on $2 million a Day). It was held at a great spot in Hastings-on-Hudson with a pretentious name: 19 Main Street. Understatement is good…

As most of us know by now, Micah is Dave Sifry‘s older brother, and Dave is the guiding genius behind Technorati. I was pleased to meet their mom last night, ’cause Mrs. Sifry didn’t raise no dummies. As I left, Micah whispered excitedly, “You can’t say anything yet, but Dave and Mary Hodder will be on CNN from the convention floor, describing the blogosphere’s take on the convention.”

Like, maybe somebody on the train would know what that phrase means? Sheesh, by the time I got home, There’s an email from Dave announcing the quite thrilling news, and within minutes, it’s all over the blogosphere. This morning, even the CNN site has the announcement. This somehow relates to the EP04 project: We can collectively build and apply tools between free and cheap, and put a lot more brainpower behind our talking heads than the networks can put behind theirs.

Micah reflects this morning:

Or maybe we’re at the beginning of a new synthesis? Top-down capital-intensive broadcast journalism (thesis) meets the bottom-up people-intensive blogosphere (anti-thesis), resulting in a new hybrid form. Not MSNBC, where the merger between old (NBC) and new (Microsoft) was solely at the corporate, not creative, level. There are lots of valid reasons to worry that here, too, capital will triumph. Except that now we don’t have to be passive consumers of news anymore…

Cheap printing and Deep Conversation, Redux

One of my favorite themes is that our nation was borne out of the Age of Enlightenment, which itself was the result of technology-based discussions: prosperity initiated by the moldboard plough, inexpensive printing presses and the introduction of coffeehouses into Europe.

And here it comes again. technology has enabled new voices and their amplification. As Jay Rosen and others have said so well, the dialogue on conventions in the press is about as useful as the dialogue about governance at the Sun King‘s court. With technology, we’re creating new modes and forums, and Micah is as insightful as usual: It’s fascinating that major networks might nurture this cute little furry species called blogging.

Footnote

Here are the known convention bloggers, who have been listed at Election Photos ’04. DNCC bloggers can set up their free account by emailing EP04 here.

Jerome Armstrong:
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Atrios:
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Dave Barry:
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Tom Burka:
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Natasha C.:
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Erik Cornelius:
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Michael Feldman:
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Taegan Goddard:
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Matthew Gross:
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Rick Heller:
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Aldon Hynes:
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Gordon Joseloff:
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Kirk W. Johnson:
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Byron LaMasters:
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Allen Larson:
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Joshua Micah Marshall:
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Paul McCullum:
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Jeralyn Merritt:
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Karl-Thomas Musselman:
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Alan Nelson:
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OxBlog:
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Nathan Paxton:
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Dave Pell:
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Christopher Rabb:
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Cate Read:
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Brian Reich:
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Greg Rodriguez:
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Jay Rosen:
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Joe Rospars:
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Peter Rukavina:
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Bill Scher:
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Eric Schnure:
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Kabir Sehgal:
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Matt Stoller:
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Jesse Taylor:
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Zephyr Teachout:
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Alison Teal:
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Zoe VanderWolk:
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Dave Weinberger:
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Matt Welch:
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Jessamyn Charity West:
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Dave Winer:
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Wonkette:
<!–gallery–> blog
Stephen Yellin:
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Markos Moulitas Zuniga:
<!–gallery–> blog

5:07:41 PM comment [commentCounter (309)]

Birth of A Beno

Aviation is an aggregation of millions of “benos”–the detritus of all lapses in procedure, attention and skill that cost money, time and lives. Each makes someone declare, “There’ll be no more of this!” -or- “There’ll be no more of that!”

When Doc‘s plane was just about to leave England…

The pause that depresses

So here’s a pic of the aftermath of the encounter between the United 777 I was going to fly from Heathrow to JFK last Wednesday, and the Air Jamaica plane that was the other party to the incident.

We were told that the tips of the two plane’s wings nicked each other somehow. From the looks of the picture, there wasn’t much wrong with the 777. The Air Jamaica plane, which appears to be an Airbus A320, seems to be missing the lower half of winglet (that little fin at the end of some wings). Hard to tell, though.

While I’m sure it caused lots of head-scratching (and worse) for the two airlines, for most passengers the cost was a night in a local hotel and other inconveniences — in my case, missing my AlwaysOn panel. Thanks to J.D. for filling in there.

Duty Above & Beyond

What Doc isn’t telling you is that United Airline’s insistence on total wingtip integrity cost him dearly. He had qualified for an upgrade to the 777’s Business class, and was settling into the lap of high-mileage luxury when some dumbass ran his plane into some other dumbass’s plane. After the plane change, he ends up in seat 43E next to a guy with altitude-related gas issues. Their new airplane took off 4 hours late, including 2 hours on the tarmac with the engines and A/C shut down.

Any aeronautical engineer would tell you that the pilot probably would not even be able to tell the wing tip had a ding in it. One thing’s certain: the severity of an imperfect wing tip varies inversely with the frequency of incoming mortar rounds.

11:45:07 PM