I was sorry to hear the news that my former big boss, 8th Army Commanding General Thomas Vandal has passed away. Shortly after his retirement last September he was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. It is a real shame that after over 40 years of service to our nation he was not able to enjoy a much deserved long and happy retired life. By all accounts he was a great leader, a fine man, and a soldier’s soldier.

One of my favorite memories was when LTG Vandal visited my office to judge our efforts in the 8th Army Christmas decorating contest.

Which thanks to the efforts of my team we won!

Godspeed sir!

We couldn’t have done it without you!

I guess things get to be cliche because they get repeated, well, repeatedly.

I guess it’s become cliche to say those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it (although it wasn’t cliche when George Santayana said it first).

I guess while folks are being distracted about nonsense from the past and frivolities of the present they will ignore the clear and present danger (which I guess is another cliche).

I guess in looking back it will all have been so obvious.

I guess by then it will be too late.

I guess you should read this and understand why 2014 is Asia’s 1937 all over again.

I guess even the President of the Philippines sees the handwriting on the wall.

I guess we’ll continue to downsize our military in the face of this.

I guess we are all fixing to pay a high price for our ignorance.

I guess I’ve said all I’ve got to say about this.  For now.

Kim Jong Un versus Lee Jee Yeun.  I know where I’m placing my bets!

…and the 8th Army takes “a hell of a beating”.

It’s October 1950 in my journey through LIFE.  The troops in Korea have captured Pyongyang.  The headline reads: Hard Hitting UN Forces Wind Up War.  Kim Sung Il has apparently fled to Manchuria.  MacArthur says the war is won.

Alas, it was not to be.

After the election in 1948, President Truman instituted massive cuts to the defense budget to pay for social programs. In 1950 we were totally unprepared for the war in Korea. And we paid for it in blood.

LIFE has the story.

this is now.

Obama is doing his victory dance on Iraq.  Some of us remember the truth.

One of my favorite writers, Pat Conroy, pays tribute to his father, Colonel Don Conroy, aka The Great Santini.  Y’all really need to read the whole thing, but here’s the part that pertains to his service in Korea:

Let me give you my father the warrior in full battle array. The Great Santini is catapulted off the deck of the aircraft carrier, Sicily. His Black Sheep squadron is the first to reach the Korean Theater and American ground troops had been getting torn up by North Korean regulars. Let me do it in his voice: “We didn’t even have a map of Korea. Not zip. We just headed toward the sound of artillery firing along the Naktong River. They told us to keep the North Koreans on their side of the Naktong. Air power hadn’t been a factor until we got there that day. I radioed to Bill Lundin. I was his wingman. ‘There they are. Let’s go get’em.’ So we did.”

I was interviewing Dad so I asked, “how do you know you got them?” “Easy,” The Great Santini said. “They were running – it’s a good sign when you see the enemy running. There was another good sign.”

“What was that, Dad?” “They were on fire.”

This is the world in which my father lived deeply. I had no knowledge of it as a child. When I was writing the book The Great Santini, they told me at Headquarters Marines that Don Conroy was at one time one of the most decorated aviators in the Marine Corps. I did not know he had won a single medal. When his children gathered together to write his obituary, not one of us knew of any medal he had won, but he had won a slew of them.

When he flew back toward the carrier that day, he received a call from an Army Colonel on the ground who had witnessed the route of the North Koreans across the river. “Could you go pass over the troops fifty miles south of here? They’ve been catching hell for a week or more. It’d do them good to know you flyboys are around.” He flew those fifty miles and came over a mountain and saw a thousand troops lumbered down in foxholes. He and Bill Lundin went in low so these troops could read the insignias and know the American aviators had entered the fray. My father said, “Thousands of guys came screaming out of their foxholes, son. It sounded like a world series game. I got goose pimples in the cockpit. Get goose pimples telling it forty-eight years later. I dipped my wings, waved to the guys. The roar they let out. I hear it now. I hear it now.”

Here’s hoping that America will always find “a few good men” like Don Conroy when she needs them.
 

It has oft been said that those who fail to remember history are destined to repeat it.  Or something like that.  So, I’ve been thinking of that bromide recently in the context of appeasement and the treatment of terrorism as a crime rather than an act of war.  Part of what triggered these thoughts was reading comments from Obama’s national security advisor John Brennan regarding the terrorist threat having nothing to do with Islam.  At best, this amounts to pandering, at worst it is willful ignorance.  Given that Brennan supports giving enemy combatants access to US criminal courts and Constitutional rights, I’m inclined to believe it is ignorance.

I challenge anyone to cite even one instance in the history of mankind where appeasement has paid any dividend or did more than prolong the inevitable conflict that must ultimately be resolved between two competing and irreconcilable ideologies.  And we all saw where the Clinton administration’s treatment of terrorism as a crime led us.  So, why are repeating these mistakes now?

I was reading about the first Barbary War and found this factoid fascinating:

In March 1785, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams went to negotiate with Tripoli’s envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman (or Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja). Upon inquiring “concerning the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury”, the ambassador replied:

It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every muslim who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy’s ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.

Sounds pretty damn familiar, doesn’t it?   The point is, our enemies don’t want to kill us because of any wrong we have done them.  It is not about Israel and the Palestinians.  This war has be going on since the 13th century, pretty much like a volcano–sometimes hot and active, sometimes more or less dormant.

Since we’ve been destined to live during an active period, we must once again be prepared to defend Western values like liberty and equality.  Is there anyone who sincerely believes those values are compatible with Islam?

How can you run when you know?

and I feel fine.

In Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s most recent televised speech on Iran State TV, the Iranian President upped the ante on his promised February 11 “telling blow against global arrogance” with his prediction of the “end of American civilization.”

“The arrogant and hegemonic powers, which mankind experienced in the past 300 years – and past 60 years in particular – have been the biggest historical impediment in the face of fulfillment of this goal (worldwide Islamic revolution),” he said, according to the BBC.

I will stay tuned for the BBC expose revealing that Ahmadinejad is just another stooge in league with the CIA.  You know, like that Bin Laden guy.

For an intelligent guy, The One sure seems ignorant sometimes.  Or maybe he was stoned during U.S. history 101…

On another front, asked to “define victory in Afghanistan,” Barack Obama famously said:

I’m always worried about using the word “victory” because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.

(Emperor Hirohito came down?)
Via Althouse