25 January 2011

Last Dance at Culebra Cut


Goodbye to Panama and All That

Ed Note: I had promised a continuation of the Air War to talk about Collateral Damage, the case in point being the slaughter of innocents at the al Firdos District Bunker in downtown Baghdad in the war before the last one in that ancient land.
 
A pal who I worked with on the Bomb Damage Assessment Team (BDA) in the long-ago war wrote to say that I could spare myself from the hair shirt on that one. It was an Air Force show all the way, from inception to execution, and trying to beat myself up about the ultimately erroneous conclusion of the function of the place as a vital communications hub, and hence the necessity of its destruction, is counter productive.
 
I have to agree. The family members of the Ba’ath Party Officials who took refuge there became collateral damage. If the images from CNN of the big hole in the roof and the neatly stacked victims outside was kind of startling when I arrived for duty at the Pentagon at zero-dark-thirty, then so be it.
 
Collateral Damage. Maybe all the other mass slaughters since then have made me grow numb. The news from Moscow made me wonder about the pure brutalization of conflict. If we got the target wrong in one case, it certainly was not because we wanted to hit women and children.
 
That is quite different from our modern jihadis and crazed lone gunmen.
 
Consequently, finding some of this detritus is sort of a trip to other worlds where evil was not quite so profound, or maybe I was just younger and less attuned to its relentless nature.
 
Remember when computer memory was a big deal, and you had to download stuff to disc?
 
I have a little external hard drive that can take all I have, on dusty discs I failed to mark accurately.
 
This is something from another world. It is the start of a story from 1998, found on discs as I scramble to find all those pictures from years past. I intend to launch a dramatic improvement to the web site, and I am buried in images of times gone by.
 
These are fun, but I am saddened by the number of things that have disappeared, apparently gone forever.
 
I found this fragment from a trip to the Panama a little more than a decade ago. I just copied a book of letters from my Grandfather to pass along to my sons when he was in the Zone, installing the telephone network and exploiting the capabilities of the first Trans-Isthmian cable.
 
It was a hefty thing. I have an inch-long segment with a commemorative plaque that he must have brought back from his service there with Western Electric, the company that brought the telephone to the world.

(Segment of Grand Dad’s Trans-Isthmian Duplex Cable, circa AD 1914. Photo Socotra.)
 
“We could Hold Panama City for fourty-eight hours” (Torrijos) told me. “As for the Canal, it is easy to sabotage. Blow a hole in the Gatun Dam and the Canal will drain into the Atlantic. It will only take a few days to mend the dam, but it will take three years of rain to fill the Canal. During that time it would be guerrilla war; the central cordilleras rise to 3,000 meters and extend to the Costa Rican frontier on one side of the Zone and the dense Darien jungle, almost as unknown as in the days of Balboa….here we could hold out for two years- long enough to rouse the conscience of the world and public opinion in the States. And don’t forget, for the first time since the Civil War American civilians would be in the firing line. There are 40,000 of them in the Zone, apart from the 10,000 troops.”
                                                     - Graham Greene, “Getting to Know the General”
 
Those were the sorts of things we worried about then, and here are the words of a much youngner Socotra:
 
“So, we are giving away a National Monument. I almost said: "giving it back" but I've tried to retrain myself from using the phrase. We may be giving back some land, but what exists there cannot be given back because it did not exist. It is Teddy Roosevelt's Moonshot, the Ditch, the Path Between the Seas. It is America's lifeline of Empire.”
 
“The Panama Canal.”
 
“I got back from Panama last week after an in-depth look at the National Monument we are donating to the Panamanians next year. This may be the last time we can be supported by our military in what used to be the Canal Zone (ARSOUTH is still hanging on, a two star, but the CINC has decamped for Miami, the real capitol of Latin America). There is a palpable feeling of unreality down there. We gained access to Ft. Davis, once gate-guard for Gatun dam and locks over on the Caribbean side….after some travail with a bantam Panamanian gate guard.”
 
“Davis went back to Panama two years ago, and the once pristine facility begin the long slide back into the ooze. We toured the Coca Solo NAS (oops, I mean the Manzanilla Container Facility) and noted that the elephant cage at the Navy Security Group Field Station at Galita Island still stands- and presumably manned- until noon on 31 Dec 1999. The abolished Zone is still discernable as once American soil, but it is softening around the edges, the trash piling up.
 

(Map of the Panama Canal. Courtesy Panama Canal Commission.)
 
“We hit the Summit at Culebra Cut (How much longer will it be Gaillard, after Major Dave?) and a forlorn rail car sits as a sort of monument to the Trans-Isthmian Railway and the ghosts of all the workers who slashed 8.2 miles through a mountain to join the seas.”
 
“The museum, recently opened in Old Town in the hotel which once hosted the doomed French Canal company of DeLesseps, was captioned entirely in Spanish.....like they had something to do with it.....Quarry Heights went back three weeks ago, Albrook Field went back last month.”
 
“Albrook was the symbol of the whole thing. I once flew in on an Air Force jet, checked in at the BOQ and then walked out the gate without ever producing a document of transit. “
 
“Fabulous.”
 

(Colossal Panamanian flag floats over Quarry Heights. Photo Socotra.)
 
“The giant Panamanian flag floats serenely over he CINC's old headquarters. Farewell, Empire. The French cemetery where rest the hundreds who perished is well kept up. I wonder how the American dead will rest? My Grandfather put the telephone system in the canal to eliminate the requirement for signal flags back in the twenties. The works of the locks are still 80% 1914 vintage. There is a 1913 crane floating at Gamboa purchased from Germany. The spare crankshaft still hangs on the wall in case they need it. They were giants, then....”
 
“On the up side, the Hotel was great, no one got robbed, the economy seems to be booming, and who the hell needs empires, anyway? I think we need high-speed container trans-shipment from LA to Corpus Christi and screw the PANAMAX limits. We are abandoning the standard for the Amphibious ships already. The Canal’s width dictated the dimensions of warships for more than a century. “
 
“There were areas of jungle in the Zone itself where the Americans were training their own special troops, as well as troops from other Latin American states, in guerrilla warfare, but he regarded this training, from personal experience, with some contempt. Recently, when the Americans were holding jungle maneuvers inside the Zone they were surprised to encounter a patrol of the Wild Pigs who had penetrated the Zone unobserved because, as their officer explained with courtesy, something had gone wrong with his compass. (Torrijos) added, “I know the Pentagon advised Carter that they would need 100,000 men, not 10,000 to defend the Canal properly.”
-       Graham Greene, “Getting to Know the General”
 

(Culebra Cut being dug, 1913. Photo Panama Canal Commission.)
 
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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