Comments on: The men of war.

By: Jody

Jody — Wed, 29 May 2013 18:32:10 +0000

Thank you ER!

By: ER

ER — Wed, 29 May 2013 14:10:02 +0000

On a related topic–horny servicemn–do you remember the scene in “Apocalypse Now” where the soldiers at a remote firebase are being entertained by Playboy bunny “dancers”?

Something like that happened to me while I was in the Navy. I’ve posted this essay on the Zone before, but just in case you missed it…

We were only supposed to go through the Canal once, on the way to WestPac, on
the way home we were scheduled to keep going around, with a stop in Australia
and a passage through Suez, followed by a Med cruise and a liberty call in the
UK on the way back. But there was some kind of dust-up in the Middle East, and
when our tour on Yankee Station ended, we were ordered to retrace our route
instead, back to Norfolk the same way we came.

On the Pacific side, we topped up with bunker fuel and our guests came aboard.
As a special treat, the brass had decided to reward us for our exemplary duty in
the Tonkin Gulf with a little skin. There were about 20 of them, a USO dance
troupe: decked out in tight, lowcut red jumpers, very short blue miniskirts, and
dixie cup whitehats, just like ours, except they accessorized precisely their
spotless white panties and sneakers. At first we were truly grateful, the girls
were not just pretty, they were professional hoofers in their teens and early
twenties, delicious perfumed creatures with flawless bodies, faces, hair and
complexions. Every one of them was simply breathtaking, and none of us had seen
a round-eye in months. We suddenly became very conscious of our own adolescent
awkwardness, our shapeless blue dungarees, our zits, and our ridiculous
haircuts. They would remain with us until we reached the Caribbean side, after
which they would go ashore, no doubt to escort another ship transiting the Big
Ditch.

The Panama Canal is indeed a wonder of the world. It takes a ship a full day to
get through it, but the crew has little time or opportunity to appreciate its
natural and technological wonders. The waterway between the seas is crowded,
narrow, and difficult to navigate. Everyone aboard is busy, Engineering, Deck,
Navigation, all divisions get a workout. There are narrow locks that flood and
empty to raise and lower the ship over the spine of the continent, and a long
channel across the great artificial lake that covers most of the route. At
times the jungle is right alongside the ship, at others, the ship glides through
an inland sea dotted with emerald islands. At any moment a tropical squall can
obliterate visibility. For the mariner it’s a white knuckle ride all the way, a
grounding or a collision is simply unthinkable, with potential international
consequences. Everyone is in a foul mood and on edge, from the skipper to the
lookouts.

During the passage, our guests had the run of the ship. Except for spaces closed
for security reasons, or compartments marked off limits as crew berthing, they
were everywhere, in groups of two or three, always accompanied by one of their
own chaperones or some grizzled petty officer pressed into tour guide duty.
They had obviously been instructed to be friendly, smiling continuously and
asking us the same questions, “what’s your name, sailor?”, (even though it was
stencilled on our chambray shirts), or “where are you from?”, (as if it mattered
to a group of identical robots), or “what’s that you’re doing?” (could we
explain it to them in less than 20 minutes?). We knew, of course, that if we
had met any one of them on the beach, even in our best dress blues, they
wouldn’t even have acknowledged our existence, much less any attempt to strike
up a conversation.

A destroyer is a maze of narrow passageways, steep ladders and crowded spaces;
it was impossible to get away from them. If you looked aloft you looked up a
skirt; below, you glimpsed down a blouse at a bit of cleavage; at deck level,
either a bobbing butt or a jiggling pair of breasts. If you got a break from your
duties, you barely had time for a quick smoke and a coffee or a trip to the head
and were in no mood to stop and talk to a woman that, no matter how desirable
she might be, was as inaccessible and distant and impossible as cheap
pornography or a starlet’s pinup on a locker door. We smiled at them and winked
at each other, but we hated every minute of it. How could they do this to us?
How could they have such contempt for us that they would treat us like this?
This was no substitute for time with our sweethearts, or even the brief but
honest comfort of a waterfront whore. This was worse than nothing. It was
agony.

The lake that comprises the bulk of the Canal is fresh water, and when in
transit, ships take advantage of the limitless supply to clean out their
plumbing and to flush out the salt. The Deck Force holds a “Fresh Water
Washdown” using fire hoses to wash away the accumulated salt of months of sea
spray and fresh water rationing. When one group of USO lovelies and their Chief
Petty Officer bodyguard turned a corner on deck a Bosun’s Mate manning a nozzle
could not resist “accidentally” drenching them with a full blast. It was one
minor victory in a long, humiliating day, a brief interruption of our emotional
rout.

They went ashore at the Caribbean side. It had been a long day and we were glad
to see them go. For a few days after, even after we were underway on the long
trip home, we were quiet and introspective. No one spoke much about the girls,
in fact, we spoke very little at all.

By: ER

ER — Wed, 29 May 2013 03:19:54 +0000

Its an education. Unless you’ve been there, you have no idea, you may spend your whole life not realizing what the “average man” is really like. They aren’t all like the people we meet in church, in college, at home or at the office. A hitch in the service leaves you profoundly changed, for a variety of reasons, even without the stress of combat and multiple deployments.

As for domination and control, I can’t think of any group of people more dominated and controlled than the military, except for prison inmates. I know I resented the discipline and regimentation, even though I was perfectly aware that it is absolutely necessary under those circumstances. I can imagine the reaction of those who cannot understand that. I did see a lot of resentment and anger, repressed violence, and an enormous amount of alcoholism. (I just missed the drug era.) Adolescents repressed by military discipline are in a constant state of tension, and the military exploits that tension.

I saw no evidence of rape while I was in the military, although aboard ship, in those days, the opportunity for that crime simply did not exist. We didn’t spend enough time in our home port to get a feeling about how things were ashore, at the home and family level.

By: Jody

Jody — Wed, 29 May 2013 02:17:47 +0000

Well…I found a photo album with a few pictures of what my father thought was important while he was stationed in Guam.

Pictures of topless native women.

By: Jody

Jody — Wed, 29 May 2013 02:14:53 +0000

I have a friend who was in the military. Viet Nam Era. I don’t know her rank. She was gang raped by her fellow military persons. Ten of them….against one.

Testosterone.

Facebook is, as we speak, dealing with hate speech and jokes with rape punchlines. They are trying to develop a system of weeding this vile filth out before it ever sees the light of posting.

The rapes of war is a symptom of what is epidemic among men who want to dominate and control.

By: FrankC

FrankC — Tue, 28 May 2013 21:41:55 +0000

I am repulsed by incidents like that but I hope I don’t sound crass when I say that slaughtering innocent women and children has a greater impact on me.

Historically rape has been considered an almost acceptable spoil of victory in war, on a completely different level from ethic cleansing.

As an example, at the end of WWII, the Russian Army raped more German women by half than Jews who were killed in the holocaust. The holocaust is probably one of the top ten events in human history while the rapes are hardly a footnote. Perhaps as many as a million women committed suicide following their rape. No war crimes trials were held and to my knowledge not one offender was punished.

The guy you spoke to probably has justified his brutal act by seeing the girl as being associated with the VC and the fact that they didn’t kill her. The same guy might cringe at the idea of killing women and children.

My comments are not to excuse the inexcusable, they are just thoughts on the historical human mindset on war and perhaps even an unpleasant side of our genetic makeup.

By: ER

ER — Tue, 28 May 2013 19:29:37 +0000

Everyone knows it happens, but nobody knows how often, or how much, or how bad. Again, I make no moral judgements here, this is war, brutalized young men under immense stress, and although that doesn’t excuse pointless atrocities, neither does it mean they were ubiquitous. It also varies with the circumstances. British troops were the first to point out how Rommel’s forces in Africa treated their POWs and wounded with great charity, and both sides held each other in high regard and mutual respect. The Wehrmacht had a totally different reputation on the Eastern Front, and even on the Western Front after D-Day.

I did have one ex-Marine friend who was not hesitant to describe his heroic exploits in Viet Nam. He won a Silver Star for his desperate defense of a firebase machinegun nest after the NVA made it through the wire. He singlehandedly turned back the attack, killing forty of the enemy while wounded himself, both his gun crew dead, and probably saved the lives of an entire company of US artillerymen. I was inclined to take it all with a grain of salt until I saw the medal and read the citation from the Navy Department.

The important thing to take away from all this is to not accept without reservation all the tales of the nobility of our boys, or the utter depravity of their enemies. That kind of talk always makes me cringe.

The story I heard from my neighbor yesterday was of the gang rape and sodomy of a teenage female VC suspect by the 5 man crew of a helicopter that was transporting her to HQ for interrogation. Each pilot, both Warrant Officers, took turns flying the chopper while the other took his turn with her.

I have no way of knowing how frequently this sort of thing happened, or even if it happened at all the way it was described to me. The only thing I know for sure was the relish and delight this man (who is about my age) displayed as he was gleefully recalling the stomach-turning details of this incident. I have no way of knowing how accurate his story was, but there is no doubt in my mind he felt absolutely no remorse about it at all. I guess he felt she wasn’t a civilian.

By: FrankC

FrankC — Tue, 28 May 2013 17:38:51 +0000

None were inclined to talk about their battle experience but spoke freely about the drugs and their off duty experiences. The camaraderie was strong. The story I remember most is a friend who would get strong cravings for chicken feet when he was in Saigon.

As for the drugs, I had a close friend who went to VN as a clean cut preppy and returned as a hopeless heroin addict. He died from the addiction before he was 35.

I have read about atrocities committed by our troops but the only first hand story I have heard was from an Uncle who fought in WWII in the Pacific. He alluded to Japanese prisoners being executed frequently and he had no remorse. He never said that he participated personally and I got the impression it was mostly hearsay. No doubt it did happen often. This is not a good thing but quite different from atrocities involving civilians.

By: ER

ER — Tue, 28 May 2013 05:31:23 +0000

I’ve heard accounts of fraggings, torture, and other horrors. THere were a lot of Viet Nam vets where I went to school, and you would hear stories. I learned many years later that a girl friend of mine was brutally raped by one of my racing buddies, a vet, when she was a freshman, just out of high school. He threatened to kill her if she said anything, and she believed him. We suspect he eventually killed himself. He was a fanatic about using his seatbelt, but he wasn’t wearing it the day he drove his Healy into the bridge abutment at Cowhouse Slough.

Of course, there is no way of knowing whether these stories are true or not, and even if true, you can’t conclude they are necessarily representative. But we do know that those things happen in war, and its safe to conclude they’re not just the “other guys.”

War dehumanizes people, they do terrible things, and they probably witness many others. And I don’t doubt that the survivors of combat aren’t always proud of what they did, or didn’t do, in action.

I had an uncle who served at Anzio and at Monte Cassino, and he had terrible PTSD. He would go beserk at night and beat up my aunt in his sleep. He was a kind and gentle man, but something terrible must have happened to him in Italy. One night, while on a long car trip with my mother (his sister), he woke up in the back seat and attacked her while she was driving, almost killing them both in an accident.

He told us one night he had one of his blackouts while sleeping in his foxhole and started making so much racket his own comrades almost bayonetted him because they were afraid he would give away their position to the enemy.

Maybe that’s why I was so outraged when I heard about those sexual assault reports coming out of our military. The ones in a combat zone are unnaceptable. The ones in the service academies are much, much worse.

I did my service on an air-conditioned ship, with three hot meals a day, and a warm clean fartsack to crawl into at night after a hot shower. I wasn’t aware of any of these things happening to my shipmates, but then, compared to the infantry, we had it easy. I was never scared, hungry or in pain even once the whole time I was aboard, and I slept like a rock, 20 miles off the coast of the DMZ. Vietnam was the central fact of my generation, and it did not affect me at all. I still have issues with that. I came so close to the war, but somehow I managed to miss it.

By: Jody

Jody — Tue, 28 May 2013 04:38:12 +0000

OMG ER…that is unspeakable.

I walked out on a guy that started bragging about how he abused his dog…and slammed the door in another guys face when he told me he abused cats when he was a teen ager.

I don’t know how you were able to remain calm. I am so sorry.