JACK'S BLOG
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8/19/2012 10 Comments How would you like to multiply your reach on social media to promote your blog?BloggingLAST WEEK I provided an overview of the growth in the number of visitors to my website during a one year period. I attempted to show how I have used content and promotion to build it into a media for advertising my writing. This week, I will focus on one of the tools that has helped promote traffic to my website most successfully: Triberr. By way of background, let me point out that I hadn't promoted my website prior to December, 2011, because I didn't have a product ready for delivery. My first novel, Rebels on the Mountain wasn't published until the end of that month. I knew from my experience as an ad man that teasing a product too far in advance of its availability was a bad idea. Once Rebels was published, I began promoting my website in earnest. Notice on the chart above that visits to my website jumped from less than 1,800 in December to more than 12,000 in January. The only change I made was to join Triberr. Triberr is simple. It is an Internet application program that helps people form a tribe and collaborate. Several times each day it examines all of the blogs that the members of the tribe maintain and places a link to each new posting into the tribal stream. Let's pause here and examine the terms I've used. They sound like standard English words with which you're familiar, but they're used in uncommon ways. Their meanings are slightly altered by the context.
Now, let's revisit that last idea. Triberr automatically builds a tribal stream from the most recent postings in blogs of all members of a collaborative tribe. Members of the tribe can see all of the postings of their tribe mates without visiting all of their blogs. The tribal stream only provides a sample of the posting. Members can see the whole posting simply by clicking on the heading for the blog posting. Triberr also provides automated commands to tweet and share each posting. The tweets will be repeated automatically several times each day. In effect, tribe members are multiplying their power to reach a far larger audience than they could do on their own. For example, when I joined my tribe, I had less than one thousand followers on Twitter and maybe thirty friends on FaceBook. However, as a member of the tribe, potential tweets promoting my blog postings rose to more than ten thousand and shares with Facebook friends rose to several hundred. Today, I have more than three thousand followers on Twitter. However, as a member of a tribe, my potential audience now exceeds 336,000! The secret is that our tribe has grown as well as our individual followings. Is it any wonder that traffic to my website has grown since I joined Triberr? Incidentally, Triberr is free. It only requires an invitation from an existing member to join a tribe. Once established on Triberr, you can begin building your own tribes. If there is a downside to Triberr, it is simply this: The tribe that you're invited to join may not reach the same audience you'd like to reach. For example, I belong to tribes of writers. Almost all of them blog about writing and would like to influence people to purchase their books. It's kind of like a tribe of Eskimos trying to sell blocks of ice to each other. I think it's time for me to build a tribe of my own. I won't quit the ones I already belong to. My tribe mates have become good friends and I owe them a lot for helping me build my website traffic. However, I think it's time for me to reach another audience. I will complete my series of blog postings about my tour of duty in Vietnam in a few weeks and plan on launching another series relating to the coming election this November. I belong to that class of persons who believe that it will be pivotal in American history. Inasmuch as history is my favorite subject, I would like to influence it. There are a vast number of people in the country who want to alter the course of the nation, reduce the size of government, return to fiscal responsibility, and reestablish Constitutional controls, rights, and liberties. Now, I recognize that statement has probably offended some. I also recognize that nothing I say or do will alter your opinion. My objective is to find those who agree with me, and collaborate with them, to make our voices one and participate more effectively in the political process. I have already created the shell for this collaborative effort: The American Conservatives tribe. I'm looking to fill it with like-minded people. Please use the contact form in this website to reach me, and I'll send you an invitation. Update: March 11, 2014 Much has happened in the year and a half since I wrote this. The numbers of visitors to my website continued to grow as I posted more often, almost daily. Then I became tired of "feeding the beast" and dropped back to posting once or twice each week and traffic slowed. I needed time to complete my second novel, Strange Company (to be released later this year).
Now I'm posting four times each week and traffic is growing again, greatly aided by my Tribe-mates. Just last month, more than 22,000 visitors viewed more than 70,000 pages. The American Conservatives tribe was launched just a few weeks ago and its power to multiply our reach is growing. If you're a political conservative or libertarian, please join us.
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OpinionIN THE ARMY we were taught to salute anyone wearing the Medal of Honor. We weren't saluting the man or his rank. We saluted even if the wearer was of an inferior rank. We weren't saluting the medal. By saluting, we were honoring the act of valor. It's an important lesson even for those who haven't served. There's a risk in honoring heroes. They're fallible. Think about it. Even the Biblical heroes made mistakes. Moses was denied permission to enter “the promised land” because, despite leading his people out of bondage, he allowed his anger to overcome his commitment to carry out the errand God had assigned him. Noah became a falling down drunk after preserving all of God's creatures from the flood. Saints are the heroes of the Catholic church, and everyone of them had feet of clay. Sports heroes? Political heroes? Celebrities? If I have to explain their foibles to you, you may as well stop reading here. You aren't going to understand much of what else I have to say. Thus, there is a certain wisdom in the Army's attitude towards heroes. We would do well to bear it in mind when we choose one. A hero is someone we emulate, sometimes successfully, often not. I've tried to be careful. I grew up with heroic figures all around me. I had war heroes, especially from World War II who committed acts of indescribable valor while saving us from the Axis. I had cowboy heroes, who saved the girl, kissed the horse, and rode off into the sunset. I had my father, a man's man – intelligent, courageous, handy with his fists (he was a prize fighter in his youth), and always ready to help out anyone in need, except his family. That was the rub. My father taught me to be careful in choosing a hero. He was such a good candidate, but seriously flawed. Abusive to his family. Intolerant to anyone or anything “different.” However, he did leave me with a few ideas on what I should look for in a hero. You see, my father was popular, at least outside of his home, and that taught me to distrust popularity. Not only am I not impressed by popularity, it often makes me leery. Indeed, a hero in my world should have the guts to stand up against what is popular. Now, this test is very difficult to administer. There are idiots everywhere ranting against whatever is popular in this moment, and you don't want to end up emulating an idiot. No, they have to be willing to take on the popular cause or the popular personality, and be right. Causes come and causes go. So do popular personalities and ideologies. Thus, if you follow my lead you will find that your hero of one moment may not be heroic in the next. You have to be prepared to choose a new hero at the drop of the hat. It helps if your hero is dead, especially if he or she was being truly heroic at the time of their death. For me, that man was Walt Kelly. “Who the hell is Walt Kelly?” I hear you cry. He's the creator of Pogo. Don't ask. I'll tell you. Pogo was a humble possum, the star creature of a comic strip set in the Okefenokee Swamp during the 1940s and 1950s. Walt was an artist. He worked at the Walt Disney Studios as an animator during the making of Pinocchio and Fantasia. He resigned at age 26, and went to work at Dell comics where he first created Pogo and friends who waxed political and philosophical. I was a very strange child. My sense of humor was very adult. I suppose it's safe to say I'm equally strange as an adult. My current sense of humor is very juvenile. In any event, as a child, Pogo was my favorite comic strip. By that time, Pogo was appearing daily in our newspaper. I was also politically aware as a child and had no problem recognizing the barbs that Walt was casting in the direction of Senator Joe McCarthy, at a time when the belligerent politician was conducting witch hunts to ferret out any communists who had infiltrated our society. Apparently, Joe wasn't as smart as this prepubescent boy and misjudged the damage that Walt was doing to his reputation and status. Senator McCarthy hurt a lot of people. Amazingly, he was correct. Communists were infiltrating our society and working hard to weaken it. Unfortunately, Joe felt that any tactics were fair when pursuing communists. Too bad he hadn't heard the words of Sir Thomas Moore in Robert Bolt's play A Man For All Seasons, written for BBC radio in 1954, when Joe and his Unamerican Activities Committee was doing its damage: "What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ... And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!" McCarthy obviously wouldn't give any man the benefit of the law while pursuing his devil, and destroyed people's lives and careers with rumor and innuendo. He hauled them into public hearings and then used his influence to have them blacklisted so that they couldn't find any work in their industry. Few were ever formally charged, tried, and convicted of any crime other than guilt by association. Ultimately, Senator McCarthy's downfall came when he turned his sights on President Eisenhower and the United States Army. Ike sent word to the Senate to put an end to the hunt for communists, and Edward R. Murrow, a popular television commentator of the time, castigated the Senator in a coast-to-coast broadcast. McCarthy had only one friend left, his fellow Irish Catholics, the Kennedy's, but not even their wealth and power could save him. However, long before McCarthy was censured, Walt Kelly had been going after him. His editors were loathe to publish Pogo comic strips when a snarling bobcat character, Simple Malarkey, an unmistakable caricature of Joe McCarthy, put in an appearance. But Pogo was too popular to be omitted. J. Edgar Hoover was another of Walt's favorite targets. The FBI chief, a man even Presidents feared, went so far as to task his cryptologists with breaking the “code” in Pogo's nonsensical ramblings. He was certain that they contained secret messages.
For his part, Walt Kelly explained simply that he would go after anyone on the extreme right, the extreme left, or the extreme middle. Ultimately, he was extremely funny and extremely brave – good recommendations for any hero. He certainly qualified as a hero of mine. VietnamWE HAD VERY LITTLE contact with our combat units during the first week of the 1968 Tet Offensive. They were busy, very busy. Our work came later, processing the battle casualties and replacing them. Fortunately for the troops in the field, there was a lull in fighting following the battle. It wasn’t until later that we learned why. Like World War II’s Battle of the Bulge, the Tet Offensive was an act of desperation that went very wrong for the Viet Cong. I know that you’ve heard it was their victory. However, it was a victory for them only in the eyes of the war correspondents who hid their ignorance in grand reports of stunning American and South Vietnamese losses. The truth is that the butcher’s bill - the list of allied casualties - was very light. Years later, the architect of the Tet Offensive, North Vietnam’s General Giap, admitted that the Viet Cong lost fully two-thirds of their forces, and the remaining communists were in disarray, their ability to fight forever broken. The war would have to be fought by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) following Tet. Inasmuch as the 9th Infantry Division was in the extreme south, we didn’t see heavy combat until the NVA could infiltrate that far until a few months after Tet. In fact, I was on my way home, sleeping in a transient barracks at Ton Son Huht Air Base in May, awaiting my “Freedom Flight,” when the first NVA rockets slammed into Saigon. I still remember dragging my mattress over me as I rolled out of the bunk and slept the remainder of the night on the floor. If you have been following this series, you’ll know that I was in My Tho hours before the Tet Offensive began, and might have been there when the Viet Cong overran the city. The lieutenant from the Adjutant General’s office who was stationed there was injured in the attack. He donned his steel helmet and flak vest and ran from the trailer he slept in right into the sights of a Viet Cong soldier. The enemy pulled the trigger but his weapon misfired. He then walked up to the lieutenant and punched him in the gut with the butt of his weapon. Fortunately, he ran off without doing any further damage, but the lieutenant still had to spend some time in the hospital with internal injuries. There’s an African proverb that states, “When two bulls fight, it is the grass that suffers.” In this case, the “grass” were the South Vietnamese. Although the Viet Cong inflicted relatively minor casualties on allied forces, they murdered or maimed countless Vietnamese men, women, and children. Upset that the indigenous population didn’t rise up to join them, the Viet Cong political cadre shot many in their attempt to inspire a general revolt. It was a precursor to the mayhem that would follow when the United States abandoned the South Vietnamese in response to pressures from the antiwar movement and their allies. More than a month passed following the Tet Offensive before we allowed civilians to return to Bearcat to their jobs as clerks, janitors, and shop keepers. One in particular, the man who operated a barbershop at the officers club, had lost his home as well as several family members. We placed a five gallon water jug in his shop and began filling it with Piasters to help finance the funerals and pay for the construction of a new house. Our greatest anguish was reserved for the fate of the Catholic orphanage near Ton Son Nuht Air Base that we supported. We had no word of them and no way of contacting them until the roads were opened and we could get permission to go see for ourselves. We were relieved to learn that the nuns who operated the place had evacuated the children to storm drains and hid there during the fighting. Fortunately, their facility hadn’t been heavily damaged and we made repairs pretty quickly. Other villages that I had visited during my tour of duty weren’t so lucky. Many were burned to the ground. The latrine we had built in one was totally destroyed. The Viet Cong didn’t tolerate any symbol of American good will regardless of the fact that they were only harming the people they were fighting to “liberate”. It is interesting that one of the epithets most commonly thrown by the antiwar crowd at Vietnam Veterans was “baby-killer.” It is true that Vietnamese civilians, including babies, had been caught in the crossfire. It is also true that some American criminals, such as the miscreants led by Lieutenant William Calley at My Lai, murdered civilians. Hopefully, most were prosecuted accordingly. However, the victims of their crimes could never approach even a small percentage of the crimes committed intentionally by the Viet Cong. I never heard antiwar demonstrators complain about them. Indeed, one of their most famous, Jane Fonda, visited their bastion to the North and embraced them to raise their morale and continue the slaughter. Meanwhile, Ms. Fonda is a revered icon to many of them to this day. She is certainly celebrated in the entertainment community that continues to extol the same ideology that buoyed the antiwar movement in that time. Every time I think that I am getting a handle on my anger at the news media, another bomb drops into my lap. The most recent one came from the pages of American Heritage Magazine. I have been a long-time subscriber and learned much from its pages. However, they chose to feature The Sage of Black Rock, as Cronkite was known, in their Winter/Spring 2012 issue. I was dismayed to read that the author of this article supported Cronkite in his assessment that the War in Vietnam was unwinnable.
President Johnson, on hearing Cronkite’s assessment, was reputed to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost [the support of] middle America.” Some believe that he famously announced that he would “…not seek, nor would [he] accept the nomination of his party for President of the United States” after hearing Cronkite’s broadcast. However, the American Heritage article goes on to correct that impression by stating that Johnson made that decision on the basis of personal concerns, including his health. There is no doubt that Cronkite’s assessment fueled the passion of the antiwar movement and greatly aided their cause. As a result, some hold Cronkite responsible for the many thousands of Vietnamese murdered by the communist invaders from the north after the U.S. abandoned them. I wouldn’t go that far. Nor do I hold Jane Fonda accountable for her actions. She was, in my estimation, a mere dupe. However, I cannot seem to lay aside my anger at the press corps in general. Without them, the South Vietnamese might have lived in freedom. As North Vietnamese leaders have admitted repeatedly in many interviews and writings, they were prepared to surrender the cause many times, especially after Nixon became President and prosecuted the war into their sanctuaries. But for the influence of the antiwar movement, which still influences American foreign policy to this day, so many might have lived and lived in freedom. Of course, there were surprises. There are surprises in every war. The Battle of the Bulge is one of history’s most famous surprises. Ultimately, Tet was a surprise test, one that the Armed Forces — even the cooks and clerks — passed with flying colors. Shamefully, it was one that the American public failed. Fed by the hyperbole and hysteria manufactured by the press corps, they surrendered, and the war was, at that point, “unwinnable.” How sad. In an earlier time, Americans cheered the courage and fortitude of their sons at the Battle of the Bulge. Cronkite reported on that earlier battle. What happened to him during the intervening years? Tet was a hundred “battles of the bulge,” and we won every one of them. When the smoke cleared, the Viet Cong did not hold one square inch of the land they had invaded and they were decimated. 8/15/2012 17 Comments 1968 Tet Offensive Part 3 of 4: There were surprises & there were disappointmentsVietnamTHE FIRST HOURS of the Tet Offensive passed quietly at Bearcat after our armor departed the camp. I slept through the rest of the night as Duty Officer blissfully ignorant of the battles raging throughout the country, and I was able to report for duty at the Awards and Decorations Branch of the 9th Infantry Division Adjutant General’s Office early the next morning. I was seated at my desk when a blast rocked our two story wood framed building. I walked out onto the stairs of our second story office and looked in the direction of Long Binh to the southeast to see a mushroom-shaped cloud ascending into the morning sky. There were twelve miles between Bearcat and Long Binh, and I thought for sure that someone must have exploded a tactical nuke somewhere between. No, it was the ammunition dump at United States Army, Vietnam (USARV) Headquarters, Long Binh exploding. I spoke with some of our combat soldiers who were nearby at the time, and they were surprised they had survived even though they were in Armored Personnel Carriers (APC) headed for Saigon. One of the true surprises of the 1968 Tet Offensive was the extent to which the Viet Cong had infiltrated Widow’s Village across the road from USARV Headquarters. Widow’s Village was the enclave of the women and children of the Vietnamese serving in the Army of South Vietnam (ARVN). Although most were not technically widows, few ever saw their husbands even though they were still alive. Thus, the name “Widow’s Village” stuck. Viet Cong had taken up residence among the widows and orphans, and tunneled extensively beneath their homes where they stored arms and ammunition to attack the main U.S. base in South Vietnam. They kept the widows silent through threats and intimidation. Some even began to work within the base as clerks and janitors. Thus, it wasn’t difficult for sappers to plant satchel charges at strategic points. Some cut holes in the roofs of homes and began lobbing mortar shells at the American base. When the Tet Offensive was launched, American and South Vietnamese combat troops were scattered around the countryside or rushing to defend key places. Thus, when the Viet Cong charged the base, Rear Echelon Mother F***ers (REMF) took up weapons and defended themselves. Bus loads of arriving Americans disembarking from planes landing at nearby Bien Hoa were hastily issued weapons, steel helmets, and flak vests, and thrown into gaps in the berm surrounding the base. Some died there, only hours after arriving in-country. Other than the sappers who detonated their satchel charges in the ammunition dump during the initial assault, the Viet Cong failed to do any permanent damage. Although they were entrenched within yards of the base perimeter, REMF repelled every attack until combat forces arrived. Back at Camp Bearcat, we began to notice a significant increase in activity at our airbase and I tried to find out what was happening. Unfortunately, the Adjutant General had gotten wise to my little “field trips” and I had to send one of my men. I’m not really certain why he objected to us substituting for exhausted and wounded door gunners (although I’ve always suspected that he was intimidated by our willingness to go in harm’s way). We later learned that most bases were under siege and aircraft couldn’t land to rearm and refuel, so they diverted to Bearcat where not a single enemy was in evidence. Apparently, the arms cache we had captured in October had been intended for an attack on us, and we had left them without sufficient war material to mount an effective assault. All day and all night, helicopters with every imaginable unit markings were landing, hastily rearming and refueling, and returning to the battle. The wounded began arriving from all over the countryside regardless of the unit they fought for.
My base camp reaction force platoon was frozen in place and we were limited in our ability to assist. We couldn’t know that we weren’t going to be attacked, and we had to remain ready to move into defensive positions. I called my sergeants together and had them visit each man in the offices where they worked to make sure they had plenty of ammunition and full canteens, and were ready to move out at a moment’s notice. Surprisingly, the attack never came, although the media announced to the world that Bearcat had been overrun. I received a panicky letter from my mother about two weeks after the Tet Offensive began. She was desperate to know if I was still alive and well. Yes, I should have written to her sooner but I had no way of knowing that American correspondents were spreading misinformation. I became furious when I read the news clipping that she had included. No wonder she was upset. In truth, I have never forgiven the members of the Fourth Estate who put her through that. Their distortions served as a warning, and I wasn’t surprised when I returned home to find that the news media were instigating the antiwar movement there. They were like cowboys, recklessly stampeding the mob with lies and innuendo, to impose their ideology rather than disseminate truth. It is a proclivity that is recognizable in their activities to this day. Thank God, that Internet bloggers and other informal news sources are shining the light of fact and empirical data on their fabrications. 8/14/2012 1 Comment 1968 Tet Offensive Part 2 of 4: Not all heroes wore uniforms & not all who didn’t wear uniforms were heroicVietnamTHE VIET CONG poured into Saigon from the west, through the Cholon district. Cholon was the enclave of the ethnic Chinese who had settled in Vietnam. The Japanese “imported” them to serve as police and petty bureaucrats during their occupation of Indochina, and the Vietnamese harbored great resentment towards them. The French admired the arrangement and continued it when they returned to reclaim their colony following World War II. The scope of the attack on Saigon was unexpected. It didn’t make sense. Whatever success the Viet Cong had enjoyed up to that time had been accomplished in small, hit-and-run attacks and ambushes. Trapping themselves in an urban environment where they would be decimated was foolhardy at best. However, as evidenced in later testimony by General Giap, the North Vietnamese leader who architected the Tet Offensive of 1968, the population was expected to rise up against the Americans and their puppet government when the communists arrived in the city. Thus, one of the first objectives of the Viet Cong assault was to bypass the Americans and South Vietnamese government officials in their residences, and capture communications facilities in Saigon so they could rally the citizens of Saigon to their cause. There were no combat units stationed in Saigon. Unlike the Germans in Paris, the Americans were not occupying Saigon or any part of Vietnam. We were there, not as imperialists, but to halt the invasion of the communists from North Vietnam. Thus, the defense of Saigon fell to the hands of Vietnamese police and American REMF (Rear Echelon Mother F***ers), supply clerks, typists, switchboard operators, and intelligence interpreters. They barricaded themselves in their offices and depots and fought off the enemy until the cavalry could arrive. A small contingent of U.S. Marines and American MPs defended the American embassy against a large Viet Cong force. Logistics personnel fashioned a fortress out of food and beer in storage at the docks along the Saigon River. Clerical staff donned their flak vests and steel helmets and fought from sandbag embrasures outside the doors of their offices while their buddies sniped at Viet Cong from the windows above. There were hundreds of American civilians in Saigon at the time: businessmen and women, consultants, liaisons, volunteers, and news people. I never heard of any tourists at that time but anything is possible. Most hunkered down where they were or escaped to a friendly fortified position. Some participated in the defense. One in particular, Bobby Keith, better known as “Bobby the Weather Girl,” pitched in. Officially, Bobby was a secretary for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) who worked at the USAID Annex at the Mondial Hotel in Cholon. She had been recruited by the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network in Saigon to host weather broadcasts on AFRTN television. She also traveled extensively around South Vietnam, braving gunfire, to visit the troops and boost morale. It’s not surprising that she braved gunfire to deliver box lunches to a group of American engineers at “front lines” defending Cholon during the Tet Offensive.
Unfortunately, the Vietnamese who couldn’t reach safe havens were gathered up by the Viet Cong and given the choice to take up arms against their government or face execution. Many were simply executed without the benefit of a choice. Few took up arms, and the Viet Cong political cadre were confused. American war correspondents appear to have hunkered down in their hotel rooms and filed stories based on rumors and innuendo. Most proved to be false. The ones who ventured out with cameras and recorders to capture the action, weren't able to see much that made sense to them. They asked questions that no one could answer, so many resorted to fabricating their own. They didn’t realize that American and Vietnamese forces were fashioning a trap. The First and 25th American Infantry Divisions formed a wall to the north and west of the city that began to close on the Viet Cong like a hammer. The 9th Infantry formed a barrier along the east and south. They formed the anvil. The Viet Cong were trapped between. Urban warfare is vicious. Combatants have innumerable places of concealment and attackers must move slowly and methodically to insure that they don’t accidentally bypass any. Every building, every room, every closet, every cabinet must be cleared. Just entering a doorway is a supreme act of courage. An enemy may be waiting on the other side and you are already a target before you can bring your weapon to bear. Tossing in a grenade before entering may help, but not always. We didn’t have “atomic grenades” like those you’ve seen on television and in the movies. Ours couldn’t always be expected to kill or wound every soldier inside. In time the Viet Cong were driven from the city towards the trap waiting at the Saigon River. There was no refuge awaiting them there. There was no Dunkirk-like fleet waiting to transport them to safety. Many took refuge in warehouses by the docks and died when tanks blew out the walls after they refused to surrender. It took the better part of February to retake Saigon. It was a large city. 8/13/2012 7 Comments 1968 Tet Offensive Part 1 of 4: It began with a celebration and ended with four liesVietnamEVERYTHING I’VE WRITTEN in this journal of my tour of duty in Vietnam is based on personal experience and observation with the exception of my comments about Jane Fonda. Those were gleaned from extensive research. My recollections of the Tet Offensive of 1968 are a hybrid of the two — personal experience and research. No one could have been everywhere when all hell broke loose in the country, especially not the journalists who reported the events so badly. I’m sure you caught the gist of my feelings about Vietnam war correspondents in that last phrase. They reported that the 1968 Tet Offensive was a surprise. That it was a major victory for the Viet Cong. That the U.S. commanders in Vietnam and at home had been lying about the conduct of the war. Walter Cronkite, the most revered news anchor on television, declared that the war was unwinnable. “Surprise?” “Victory?” “Lying?” “Unwinnable?” None of it was true and yet these reports served to inspire the antiwar movement in the United States and materially undermine its foreign policy to this day. More importantly, they emboldened the communists to continue their invasion of South Vietnam and ultimately murder and enslave its people. In October, 1966, less than three months before Tet, elements of the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Armored Cavalry Regiment, attached to the 9th Infantry Division, and the 9th’s 1st Brigade, uncovered a massive arms cache in an extensive system of tunnels and bunkers 13 miles southeast of the division headquarters at Camp Bearcat. It was the largest cache uncovered during the war. In addition to more than a thousand rifles, the cache included tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, mortar rounds, and recoilless rifle rounds as well as four 75mm howitzers, the first found in South Vietnam. It was clear that this cache was intended to arm the civilian populace that the Viet Cong expected to join them during the Tet Offensive. How did we know that the Viet Cong would launch an offensive during the Tet holiday celebration? Simple. They had broken every Tet cease fire in previous years. Every year they agreed to an armistice during Tet, Asia’s most celebrated holiday. And, every year, they broke it. The only surprise was the scope and intensity of the offensive planned for 1968. However, U.S. intelligence had significant grounds to suspect that it would be far greater than previous offensives and were prepared for it. January, 1968, was relatively quiet throughout South Vietnam, especially in the Mekong Delta where we were operating. It was the quiet before the storm, and the longer it lasted, the greater the storm we expected. I had to run to the city of My Tho (pronounced “Me Tow”) on January 30th. I hitched a ride on a helicopter from Bearcat to the headquarters of our 3rd Brigade, Dong Tam, home of the Mobile Riverine Force. From there I caught a ride to My Tho, about five miles east of Dong Tam. My business there took longer than expected and one of the battalion staff officers offered me a bunk to stay the night, however I was expected back at Bearcat. I was scheduled to be the Division’s staff duty officer that night. A staff duty officer is the commanding general’s representative during off-duty hours. It’s not really as important as it sounds. It’s a lot like the people who sit in the seats of celebrities at the Academy Awards while they are on stage to present or accept awards. (Apparently the show’s producers don’t want empty seats to appear on screen when cameras sweep the audience.) It wasn’t much of a job, and I could have called on one of my friends to cover for me, but I didn’t want to have to pay the price they would ask for the “favor.” There weren’t any helicopters scheduled to fly out of My Tho that late in the afternoon, and I couldn’t expect a passing one to drop down and pick me up by waving a towel as instructed in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I had to get back to the airfield at Dong Tam and that wasn’t easy or comfortable. The only vehicle headed that way was a U.S. Army Engineer’s dump truck, and I had to ride in the back. It didn’t have a load to soften the ride and there wasn’t anything to hang on to, so I bounced around like a BB in a tin can. I know that the driver, his assistant, and his gunner were enjoying themselves imagining the ride I was having. I ran limping onto the airfield as soon as we arrived at Dong Tam and found my old friend, “Jack” Spratt, lounging by his OH-25 observation helicopter. Luckily, he was just about to take off for Bearcat and didn’t have any other passengers. (This was the flight I had mentioned in an earlier posting where he uncharacteristically flew “high” so I could take pictures of the clouds with his camera.) As we approached Bearcat, I saw armor — tanks and armored personnel carriers (APC) — parked along the perimeter road just inside our protective berm. The line stretched almost all the way around the camp, about five miles. Their crews were camped out alongside their vehicles, relaxing, smoking, playing cards, gossiping. They were like arrows in a bow, just waiting to be sent flying at the enemy. I barely had time to report to the division Adjutant General on my mission to My Tho, before running to the division headquarters to report for duty.
Usually, I spent the night on staff duty with my feet up on a desk, fast asleep. (You learned how to sleep anywhere, anytime you could in the Army.) However, I wasn’t going to get much sleep that night. The telephone rang sometime after midnight and the caller began shouting a codeword at me before I could even identify myself. He was attempting to reach the Division Tactical Operations Center (DTOC) which was located in a bunker to the rear of the headquarters building. I suppose it was easy for an Army operator to confuse the two. As soon as I convinced him he had reached the wrong phone, he pleaded with me to relay the “message” to the people in the DTOC. I wandered in to the DTOC moments later and simply asked, “Does anyone know what [codeword] means?” The result was similar to dumping a basket of live crabs onto a picnic table where a group of wealthy dowagers were seated, busily gossiping. (I chose that image because I had seen it actually happen once when I was a Sea Scout cruising with the Baltimore Yacht Club.) Within minutes, there was a roar of engines firing up and tracked vehicles quickly filing out of Bearcat and headed for Saigon and other pre-assigned strategic points. As the days passed, there were surprises. That is the nature of warfare. The test of an army, its men and commanders, is how well they handle those surprises. However, the correspondents used “surprise” as a charge, as though we were incompetent or had bumbled some how, and the American public bought it. Didn’t they remember the Battle of the Bulge? That was the greatest surprise in modern warfare, and they didn’t castigate the Army for that one. Indeed, they celebrated the allied victory on that occasion. Were we less worthy? Of course, our victory wasn’t reported. In the end, the press corps would announce the Tet Offensive as our defeat, the first lie. BloggingIT APPEARS TO ME that two factors drive visitors to a website/weblog: Content and Promotion. Now, this is just my opinion and I don't have any empirical proof to back it up except for analytics that I have kept on my own website/weblog. It would be interesting to compare my experience with others to see if my hypothesis is correct or not. I setup JackDurish.com in March of 2011. It wasn't my first website/weblog, but it was the only one that I created to promote myself as an author and hopefully inspire sales of my books. In effect, I have created my own advertising media and have placed ads for my books with links to the retailers where they can be purchased. Thus, my marketing strategy is similar to a manufacturer that advertises its products features and benefits, and allows retailers to run local advertising focusing on availability, location, and cost. Unfortunately, the retailers of my product – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Itunes, etc. – won't run advertising for my books until sales reach a point where they can reasonable expect to recoup the cost of retail advertising.
To be effective, my website/weblog needs visitors. Just as traditional advertising media price their ad space based on the number of viewers or readers they can deliver, my site is only as effective as the number of people who visit. Thus, my success will depend on doing whatever attracts visitors which brings me back to my hypothesis. I must promote my website to attract visitors and provide them with content that will keep them coming back. It is common wisdom among marketing experts that the impact of advertising messages is cumulative. A person may need to be exposed to the advertiser's message many times before they are motivated to make a purchasing decision. Advertisers who place an ad once and quit because they are dissatisfied with its results, are wasting their money. Thus, anyone who hosts a website/weblog for the purpose of motivating purchasing decisions must be concerned with the number of return visitors as well as the total number of visits. I assume that growing my website/weblog visitor traffic from a couple thousand per month to more than 20,000 per month is an indicator of success. It would be nice to be able to compare my results with others (see comments below). However, it is troubling that that growth has leveled off after spiking to almost 30,000 visitors in March. Inasmuch as I have not diminished my promotional efforts (Twitter, Triberr, and StumbleUpon), I suspect that visitors were more interested in my stories of Sea Scouting than in my experiences in the Army. It will be interesting to see the results when I complete my Vietnam stories and begin a new series sometime near the end of this month (August). Of course, there are artifacts to deal with:
Have you noticed the pattern here? I approach weblog content thematically. It is my opinion that visitors will not be encouraged to return if there isn't a consistent stream of content. If a blogger posts random thoughts on random topics, the visitor has no expectation that the next one will be as appealing as the last, and there are far too many bloggers, far too many webpages for visitors to waste time checking back to see if you have something interesting for them this time. For example, I'm guessing that you have read this far into this posting because you have an interest in blogging, that you may be attempting to improve the success of your own website/weblog. Well, this is just one of several postings that I've published on the subject. You can see the others by clicking on “Blogging” in the list of Categories on the right side of the screen. This series will continue next week with more details of the systems that I've been using to promote my website/weblog – Twitter, Triberr, and StumbleUpon – as well as the new one that I've recently added. OpinionINSULT COMICS ruined comedy. There, I've said it. Yeah, I guess they're sort of funny if you aren't their target du jour, but I never understood it. I grew up with Jack Benny. He made himself the butt of his own jokes. So did Bill Cosby and Tim Allen. I suppose it takes a special kind of person, a confident one, to stand up in front of an audience and make fun of yourself. I also think that it takes talent. Making fun of other people doesn't require talent. It only requires a mean spirit, or an ability to dehumanize the target before launching a weapon of mass invective at them. These days the genre has become the weapon of choice for comics who are determined to punish anyone who questions or contradicts the progressive ideology. It's called snark. Sadly, their assaults have all but destroyed civil discourse in politics. Sure, snark is thrown from every side in politics - left, right, and center - but the preponderance seems to come from the left where so many pseudo-intellectuals have come to roost in the entertainment community. I pine for another time when satirists pointed their barbs at the rich, the famous, and the powerful regardless of their ideology or politics. Anyone in the ascendancy knew that they would be targets as soon as they rose above their opponents. They took it like gentlepersons or were swept away in a tidal wave of laughter. Last week I spoke of Will Rogers. He was a Democrat. It didn't matter. He pointed his barbs at any politician who "got too big for his britches." That seems to be the folly of members of every party once they get elected. Satire wasn't reserved for personal attacks. Any group or cause that dominated the political landscape could feel its sting. One master of the craft was Tom Lehrer, a lecturer in mathematics at Harvard, who could play the piano and compose merry minuets of mayhem. Take for example this lampoon that he aimed at the folk song army that had risen in popularity during the late 1950s. Lehrer recognized that those championing egalitarianism were becoming arrogant. Indeed, I wonder how he feels if he reflects on them today since they have come to dominate the American political landscape and seen the rise of a government that has grown far beyond the Constitutional limitations that had been designed to restrain it. More importantly, his song strikes out against the hubris that assures progressives that they are, in the words of Thomas Sowell, author of Intellectuals and Society, “on the side of angels,” and that anyone who opposes them obviously “doesn't care” about the things they care about like “peace, justice, and brotherhood.” I was reminded of this the other day when a “friend” posted the following image on FaceBook. The intent of the message is obvious. My friend cares and anyone who doesn't share the posting on their “wall” doesn't care. Obviously, my friend is a progressive though not an intellectual and, just as obviously, I am not.
Does this mean that I don't care about “peace, justice, and brotherhood?” You may think so. She thinks I'm a Neanderthal. The truth is that I simply believe that progressive methods of attaining these things are counterproductive. Unfortunately, progressives ignore the lessons of history. Just as Harold McMillan appeased Herr Hitler to promote “peace in our time” thereby encouraging the Germans to enslave and massacre millions, today's progressives bow and scrape before the sponsors of terrorism attempting to appease them with similar results. Meanwhile, comics and comedians who should be helping us see the folly of these efforts, are insulting those who oppose them. They depict opponents of the progressive ideology as racists, xenophobes, and (gasp!) right-wingers, and fabricate evidence proving their assertions. They are, in effect, propagandists for progressivism. The only ones laughing are the progressives themselves. VietnamTHERE WASN'T MUCH time to sit around and mope. Either you were fighting for your life or you were in the rear with the gear, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. What little time you had was spent coloring in the spaces on your short-timer's calendar and counting the hours and days to DEROS (Date of Expected Return from Overseas). But, the holidays were different, especially Christmas. As soon as Thanksgiving passed, one of my fellow lieutenants proposed that we make Christmas gift stockings for the children at an orphanage near Ton Son Nuht that we supported. We wrote home for toys and clothing and began stuffing it into stockings together with fruits and candy that we purloined from mess halls and the PX. Of course, it became a competition to see who could stuff the most into a GI wool sock. You have no idea how far you can stretch wool, do you? Ours grew to about four feet in height and maybe eighteen inches in diameter. I couldn't imagine how one small child could hold one upright even if it were sitting on the floor. After the fiasco at Thanksgiving (we ran out of turkey at the 9th Admin Company and I ran around Bearcat looking for scraps from other mess halls to make sure our men got theirs - I didn't) I wasn't going to let my men miss another holiday dinner. The parents of one of my men owned a restaurant in Indianapolis and his father shipped several packages of food and decorations including centerpieces, table clothes, silverware, candles, and serving pieces. The son, who had grown up in the restaurant business, took over the set up. My sergeant requisitioned two GP (General Purpose) Medium (sized) tents to create a “banquet hall.” I donated the beer and booze and the main course that I requisitioned from the ration breakdown point in Long Binh. I signed out a jeep and trailer and took off for Saigon the week before Christmas with a driver. We stopped first at the docks on the Saigon river and picked up several cases of beer and Coke as well as a few bottles of Seagram's Crown Royal and real French Champagne. How did a mere lieutenant afford all this? Easy. The Coke was three dollars per case and a case of beer and liter of champagne were a dollar-fifty each. Go figure. On the way back we stopped at Long Binh when I saw a refrigerated semi being unloaded at the ration breakdown point. The KP's were off-loading seventy-two pound cases of steaks into a refrigerated warehouse. I had my driver remove his blouse so that he would look like every other KP and he joined the line. He made two trips into the warehouse, but on his third trip, he detoured to the jeep and we sped away before anyone noticed. We had the main course. Two days later, I stopped at the main mess hall at the division base camp and bartered for the rest. The mess sergeant wanted one of each medal to make a display for the dining room. I called my office and had my sergeant fulfill the request. The sergeant then entertained me in the dining room while his staff loaded my jeep. When I finally left the mess hall, I could not believe my eyes. The jeep was buried in cases of food. Fresh baked bread. Canned corned beef. Five pound bricks of cheese. Half gallon cans of condiments, including ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, pickles, relish, and olives. I can't remember what else. The laterite roads in the base camp had been recently oiled and we slipped perilously close to falling into a drainage ditch several times as we made our way back to our company area and loaded every available refrigerator. Our Christmas dinner was an unparalleled success, I think. Some of details are hazy. However, I remember a chugging contest with my division head, Major Rome Smyth. We used champagne. I didn't make it very far before he finished, drinking that is. He spent the rest of the night belching. We didn't waste a single bit of the carbonation. The left over food (and there was a mountain of it) was shipped off to the orphanage near Ton Son Nuht that we helped support, together with stockings that we had filled with small gifts and treats that our families had provided. Baby killers, yeah, that was us. Oh, I almost forgot. Bob Hope was there. I'm sure you saw it in the news. I'm somewhere in the crowd, playing cards. The view wasn't all that great, nor was the sound. It was rumored that someone was arrested for wandering into Raquel Welch's dressing room by mistake. Yawn.
VietnamWE'RE FAMILIAR WITH famous generals who rose to great office, Grant and Eisenhower being notable in that group. But, did you know that a REMF (a Rear Echelon Mother F***r) also rose to President. William McKinley was a commissary sergeant who delivered coffee and meals to the men on the firing lines at the bloody battle of Antietam? A MODERN ARMY cannot move, shoot, or communicate without a dizzying array of intelligence, planning, and logistics. Along the way, it creates a mountain of paperwork to document, authorize, and memorialize every aspect of its operations. Every combat soldier has many needs that must be met for him to fight effectively creating a need for at least three or four soldiers to support every one in combat. Every recruit takes the same battery of tests to measure vocational aptitudes as well as general knowledge and intelligence. The results are used to place each in a Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) to which they are best suited. The MOS list for the Army resembles a telephone directory for a large city. Other branches of the armed services have far smaller MOS listings simply because their missions are not as broad as that of the Army. Of course, errors are made in assigning recruits to an MOS and these are the stuff of legend (and jokes). However, the system works, in most cases, and those who are not tapped for one of the myriad occupations collect in one of three combat arms MOS; infantry (grunts), artillery (canon cockers), and armor (tank crews). To these men, all others who serve in the “rear with the gear” are REMF -- Rear Echelon Mother F****r.
The prejudices of combat soldiers towards REMF resemble those applied to soldiers of African descent in all wars. Despite the fact that African-American soldiers served with distinction in every American war beginning the the Revolution, they have been derided as either too inept or too cowardly to fight. Time and again their actions belied these prejudices. The exploits of black volunteers led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, documented in the motion picture Glory, proved their courage. General John J. Pershing earned his nickname “Black Jack” leading negro soldiers during the Cuban Insurrection where they were eclipsed by Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders in the press only; they were not eclipsed on the battlefield. The Tuskeegee Airmen memorialized in the motion picture of the same name, won the admiration of even the most diehard bigots during World War II. However, in every instance, they were still blacks who ultimately were treated to the same discrimination when they returned from war. So too, REMF are considered less than real soldiers and cowardly for being assigned to the rear with the gear. And, like the blacks who served in other wars, these prejudices followed them home where combat veterans continued to deride them. Most REMF hide their service while combat veterans parade with their medals and their memories. Is it envy; REMF won the MOS lottery, and the combat soldier lost? In all honesty, the REMF cannot claim an equal share of the glory of war, but neither are they deserving of the derision they receive. One of the itinerant combat infantry captains who came to babysit the 9th Admin Company for a while had lost half of his men in a battle with the Viet Cong. Before you judge him too harshly, let me add that the fault was not entirely his; his battalion commander had decided to deploy his entire command on line to reconnoiter an enemy deployment that turned out to be an ambush. “On line” is an attack formation usually reserved until you know your enemy's location and disposition. This captain, like most other combat veterans, had no regard for REMF and treated them with derision. I was passing his office one day and was attracted inside by the sounds of confusion. A company vehicle had broken down on the road somewhere south of Camp Bearcat in the late afternoon and the men riding it would be in peril if left there overnight. The VC often traveled the roads under the cover of darkness and mined them in anticipation of the next day's travel by American and ARVN forces as well as civilians. Engineers swept the roads clean of mines each morning before they were “opened” to traffic. The motor pool did not have a vehicle to retrieve our truck before nightfall and it appeared that someone would have to secure it until the next day. The captain was frantically calling for help, but no one seemed available. He laughed when I suggested that we could do the job ourselves. His scorn was clearly evident as he laughed at the idea of clerks and cooks going out on a combat patrol and he dared me to even try and find volunteers for such a mission. I sent runners around the company area to find anyone who was willing to go out with me to secure the truck for the night. I told them to meet me at the company HQ and bring their weapons, flak vests, and steel helmets. Within a half hour I had almost every off-duty member of the company lined up, ready to go. Cooks were armed with butcher knives as well as their M-16's. Clerks were cleaning and checking their rifles and grabbing loaded magazines of ammunition from a footlocker to stuff into their pockets. The captain stood transfixed. It was a sight beyond his imagining. As we prepared to exit the base camp, another unit arrived towing the disabled vehicle we were on our way to defend. They had come across it by accident. There was a general sigh of disappointment from my impromptu command. Unfortunately, the change in attitude towards the REMF was short-lived as the captain was rotated to another assignment and his replacement arrived with the usual attitude that all had come to expect from combat veterans. Combat veterans deserve all the glory, and REMF deserve equal respect. Unfortunately, we were equal when we got back home; we were all baby killers... |
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