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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.
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 ThingI 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 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 WebThe 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 |
Category: Uncategorized
Get Over the Rainbow
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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 AgePatronage 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.
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 ObligationBut is there more to such insights? OK, you’re a clued-in dude with the means, the insight and, possibly, the ambition to com 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.
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.
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
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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:
“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
WHAT
WHERE
WHEN
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.
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 CNNI 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:
Cheap printing and Deep Conversation, ReduxOne 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.
FootnoteHere 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: 5:07:41 PM |
Birth of A Beno
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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…
Duty Above & BeyondWhat 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 |
Open Sores
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Dave Winer and Tim Bray clearly get on each other’s nerves. Some would say that’s understandable….;-). Yesterday resurrected an old disagreement over RSS (of course). By way of background, Dave mentions today:
Actually, the comment was more general, and even more generous. I told Dave that Mitch had said that the software industry has spent the last 10 years following the trends that Dave Winer starts. It’s not about competition, but leadership. 2:58:07 PM |
The Killer Web App
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I’ve been buried since my visit with the Spirit of America people in L.A. 3 weeks ago. I wanted to understand what the most interesting pressing concerns are and whether I might be helpful. I mentioned before that SoA connects the needs of people in Iraq and Afghanistan with willing donors in the US. Jim Hake, SoA’s Founder, Angel Investor and CEO, calls it “entrepreneurial humanitarianism”. The people of America are calling it good sense. Explaining it to a bunch of smart, tech-savvy people last weekend, the best description occurred to me: Spirit of America: just-in-time peer-to-peer foreign aid I’m taking on a full time involvement with Spirit of America to see how killer a web app we can put together. By killer, I mean a site that collects and catalogues all requests and exposes the needs and responses to all interested parties. SoA has two very talented programmers working on contract, Donovan Janus in L.A. and Rhesa Rozendaal in the Netherlands. Donovan is also Dutch, but has lived in the US for four years. Donovan is candid about their respective roles, “I’m a really good programmer, but Rhesa’s a great programmer.” They built and manage Exposure Manager which, it turns out, is a unique set of services to host digital photography, present galleries, and offer prints (yeah. physical product) for sale, through a commercial processor. It’s received raves from Glenn Reynolds, which never hurts business. Instapundit’s gallery is here. Naturally, I’m encouraging Donovan and Rhesa to develop a blogger program, so that people who’ve archived history or art can make a buck or three without leaving the comfort of their den. Hell, people would pay big money for a print of Jeff Jarvis’ classic golf swing! Tiger by the TailSpirit of America had quite a roller coaster ride in April. After posting a request for a $90,000 project, several newspapers described the project and the web site’s switchboard lit up to the tune of $1,300,000. Well. Is this, like, even legal? I mean, isn’t this what government is for? Don’t we have to carefully weigh the various demands and study them in committee? And make sure we don’t move too quickly? It turns out we don’t. Here again, the web is disintermediating something that seemed like it was locked up in an “official” function forever. As a cyberlibertarian, this is how I think the world should work, P2P good works. It took just 21 days from the time of the request to equip TV stations in Iraq’s Al Anbar province to delivery of the equipment. The great story though, is what happened about 6 weeks later when Spirit of America delivered 50 commercial sewing machines to a new sewing cooperative set up in Ramadi by “The Organization of Creative Women in New Iraq”. Here’s the report from one of the soldiers working with Spirit of America, Major Holden Dunham, USMC:
This works on so many levels. It’s a women’s organization. The women are gaining economic clout. Individual American citizens, their empathy and abundance leveraged and focused by the Internet, have reached out to touch individual Iraqi citizens with new jobs, new opportunities and a newfound enthusiasm for economic freedom. Yep, Spirit of America is a collection of disruptive technologies. It’s especially gratifying that the local TV station that covered the story used equipment donated by the same SoA Iraqi fans who sent over the sewing machines. In fact, the TV stations exist only because of the equipment sent by Spirit of America. Re-purposing the fundsWhat, you ask, happened to the $1.1 million that SoA didn’t need for the Al Anbar TV stations? We sent out a mailing to ask what we should do with the excess. The options are to 1) use the money for any Soa purpose, 2) limit it to any support of populist media (or refund the excess), 3) use it only to support the Al Anbar TV stations (or refund the excess); 4) refund the excess. Here are the responses as of Sunday noon, EDT:
Party opportunity lost: This response, which came in the Thursday before July 4th, was typical. Atypically, we didn’t follow this donor’s directions. There are limits to our responsiveness:
DICEGuy Kawasaki, the magnetic personality who rose from jewelry salesman to Apple’s Mac evangelist to venture capitalist, once said that there are four criteria of great software. It must be:
As remarkable as it is that I would assume a full time commitment, what may be more remarkable is that we at SoA have a real opportunity to develop a DICE-y suite of tools for organizations that want to engage, seduce and bond with its stakeholders. Here’s how. Every time a person hears about an organization, they usually check out its web site. As we have all learned, the site can be seductive or sucky. Interestingly, that’s a choice that the organization makes. The principles are fairly obvious, but the will to stick to obvious principles is not common. Do we care enough to draw out the new visitor and engage her in the promise and thrill of our work? Or do we simply mimic our competition? Every organization wants its visitors to register at the site and to share as much information as possible. Then the organization instinctively seeks to keep asking for more from the new member of the site: more sales, more attention, to put up with more annoyance. At the Dean campaign, we discovered quickly that an email that’s welcome on Monday is spam by Thursday. How can an organization optimize the sales or support it gets from its members without pissing them off doing it? Excitement First there must be a reason to share more than a modest bit of registration data. That requires an exciting product or cause, a Howard Dean, Spirit of America or, some would argue, a Mini Cooper or a Macintosh. (Wendy’s, much though they might yearn for an unofficial spokesman, just look silly when they show actors doing it.) So the first step after getting some snippet of registration info is to establish a meaningful connection with your new member. Connection to the Cause is the precursor to “stickiness.” There must be a two-way connection between the member and the site. The member is there because the product is, as Alan Kay used to say of the Macintosh, good enough to be worth criticizing. Criticism is a blessing: customers willing to invest time helping design the next rev of your product. The way to connect to your members is to know they have important wisdom to add to the community surrounding your worthwhile effort. Armed with that internal conviction you need to exhort your members to not hold back their suggestions. Here’s where you list what you already do and the next obvious things you haven’t done yet and seek real ideas from the huge brain trust surrounding the meager set of ideas at the home office. Pop-up lists of unrealized possibilities and probing questions seeking fresh ideas, if you’re skilled and lucky, can convince people to spend time telling you what to do. As the member invests this time, you can often get more personal information from him. Connection with Other Believers is the blessed event where one member reaches out to another in an authentic, unexpected and welcome way. In the case of a cause like a political campaign or Spirit of America, the members are enthusiastic until your web site bores them, or worse, drives them away. Having discovered where the new member lives and what parts of your cause she likes, you can encourage other members to initiate that connection. (Obviously, you cannot give a new member’s email address to another member. You must forward the message much as UserLand does when you click on that little envelope on the left of this page:
Pull is the reason to return to the site after the first flush of enthusiasm. If the product or cause is exciting, it’s probable that it’s touching people’s lives. In that case, the stories need to be collected and posted often enough that there’s a reason to return. Obviously, the centerpiece of any web site is the official blog. This is where you post the news that’s actually news. If there is no actual news, then you don’t have a cause – game over. Hyper-Connectivity is what happens when the members start connecting and doing real things together in the real world. User groups, clubs, support groups, volunteers – however they express their collective enthusiasms, this is the tipping point for any organization. It’s what happened spontaneously with the Dean campaign and Spirit of America, but it needs support and encouragement from the web site. At Spirit of America, we’ll provide a collaboration module, called Teams, where any member can invite others to join up for anything ranging from a cuppa Joe tomorrow morning to a 3-year campaign for reliable drinking water in Iraq. Friends don’t let friends not register As I’ve suggested before, each member needs a convenient way to upload a list of their contacts to the site and to invite them, in a secure and respectful way, to perform a one-click registration. (Heh. Mebbe I oughtta patent OneClick registration…;-). Acts II and IIIRegistration is where most web sites stop, and rely on spam and the magic of their “content” to increase membership and skyrocket their company into the stratosphere of fame and fortune. Well. We’ve seen the future, and it isn’t that. Stopping at registration is like inviting friends over, only to leave them in their dripping raincoats in the foyer, holding their hats and umbrellas, wondering what’s next. Where’s the love? In this ideal registration sequence, this cause needs as much direction and wisdom it can get from newbies, who look at the organization with beginner’s mind and can teach us so much more than we can teach them. By asking which of our activities are most exciting, we’ll hope to get more information about the newby, not to spam her and impose broadcast techniques, but to discover who else in our community shares her interests, and to connect her with like-minded people. But the communication is among them, with just a bit from us. Insert Picture, Cut 1,000 Words
This is what I’d hoped to inspire at the Dean campaign. It’s not clear that it would have made a difference, but it’s a chance for the world to tell this dilettante to go back to the bat cave. Although I was happy to put my money where my mouth was up in Burlington, this is even more of a commitment to testing these ideas in the public laboratory. 12:20:15 PM |
Can DoorAt Jerry Michalski‘s retreat this weekend, I received a book from Jerry’s lovely wife, Jennifer. It’s called Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and it’s supposed to be about writing, but I think it’s about life. |
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The inspiration for the title is a lesson on writing from Anne Lamott’s father, a professional writer, like Anne:
She tells a story about her own son.
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Hard Landing
The worst moment in my life was a hard landing at Danang, Vietnam in early 1968. On a normal day, the only bad result would have been my obligation to pick up the bar tab at the Tuy Hoa Officers Club that night. But this was a special trip. We were carrying wounded GI’s from Dong Ha to Danang.
Dong Ha was a postage stamp strip just 5 miles from the North Vietnamese border. That area of Vietnam is oddly like an English moor, rolling grass plains and few trees. At night, they lit the 2,600 foot strip with those little round kerosene lamps they used around construction sites through the early 50’s. Dong Ha was a place where a wounded soldier, minutes from the field, would be transferred from a helicopter to a C-130 rigged to carry 72 litters, plus medical staff. We could get them to Danang in 15 minutes and the worst cases would be put on another chopper for a three minute trip to the hospital ship in Danang harbor. That afternoon, I was told as they loaded on the litters at Dong Ha, we carried a kid with a sucking chest wound.
I normally had no trouble landing the C-130 – John Robb will confirm that it’s a tractable, responsive and forgiving aircraft. But every pilot just gets it wrong once in a while, and we typically made a dozen landings a day, so the law of averages caught up with all of us every month or so. But at Danang? Jeezus, the runway’s 2 miles long and 300 feet wide and it was broad daylight. It was just a bonehead mistake. The landing was really hard. Not a bounce, there was no airspeed left to afford that, just a crunch that would make you wonder if the gear was OK, if you didn’t know how tough these planes are. Normally, the crew would have burst out laughing, having a good-hearted guffaw at my expense – just one more of the many delights of hauling stuff around Vietnam, since most of our cargo was things, not people.
But today no one said a word. No doctor running to the flight deck to yell at the miserable clod who just jarred the teeth of all the people in back who still had a face. No conjecture on how was the kid with the sucking chest wound. I’ve done a lot of things to regret, but nothing as irredeemable as that hard landing at the wrong time.
The Kids Matter
I was reminded of that moment when I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 this weekend. Michael Moore’s purpose is to shock us with the images of our guys and their people maimed and killed by the carnage of war. He’s been criticized by those who think he went too far. Those of us who’ve witnessed the combat know that Moore understates its effects. If he aired more extreme footage for three hours, he’d still understate the horror of those scared, confused and suddenly mortal 19-year-olds, whose lives will never be the same.
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
– Dwight Eisenhower
That is why combat veterans don’t talk much about their experiences. Only distant observers like me, witnessing the action from on high or the results lying in the cargo bay, can even broach the horror. We’re silent not because we’re strong but because we cannot comprehend how stupidly the inexperienced bulk of society speaks of war as a rational option that we’re entitled to use on people the way a company might launch a hostile takeover: Boys with tin soldiers, attempting to seem grown up.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
– Dwight Eisenhower
Ah, some say. You’ve been scarred by an unfortunate personal experience that blinds you to the necessity of expressing America’s rights in the global arena. We honor your experience but not your conclusions. Like history’s great leaders, we must wage foreign policy with the objectivity demanded of real adults like us. Why else would we be in power, if we were not a better judge of international realities?
You do not lead by hitting people over the head-that’s assault, not leadership.
– Dwight Eisenhower
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
– Dwight Eisenhower
We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.
– Dwight Eisenhower
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
– Dwight Eisenhower
Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they never existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…
– Dwight Eisenhower
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
– Dwight Eisenhower
I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.
– Dwight Eisenhower
Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.
– Dwight Eisenhower
No easy problems ever come to the President of the United States. If they are easy to solve, somebody else has solved them.
– Dwight Eisenhower
12:51:35 PM ]
Escapable Logic 
