04 July 2003

A Clarity of Vision

'Easy reading is damned hard writing."

- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Not that what I write is easy to read. I will leave that to the old dead white guys of the pantheon. It is the Fourth of July. It is a magic day in this slow-starting summer season. This feels more like Memorial Day than the heart of the summer, so maybe that accounts for the pent-up energy to get going on the lazy days. The commute was simple yesteday. Many of my colleagues in the Federal Government are already down the big concrete highways, already suffered the merge down by Quantico or up at Gaithersberg. I am traveling today, hoping to leap over the congestion of the National Capital Region. I will fly into Detroit and rent a car and hope that I-75 has been left vacant by those who are already at the grilling pit or slathered with oil and grilling themselves down by the lake. I am up early out of habit and out of anticipation. I have the luxury of screwing around for a few hours before my flight leaves and I only have to take care of myself.

I am giddy and excited about going home. I thought about my sons, both of whom will be students in the State of Michigan this fall. I noted the unemployment statistics on the news yesterday. Highest in nine years. It is going to be tough for the graduates coming out of school,. Launching my sons may be more of a challenge than it was for the last half-generation, whatever it is they call themselves. Uncertain times and tough employment opportunities tends to build a certain conservatism in a generation, a tendency to not take things at face value and to hold on to what they have. A clarity of vision, a focus on rality. We see it in the number and quality of applications for government jobs. It is steady and certain work, even if somewhat colorless. But the certainty has a certain quality of its own. The Government will always be there.

Bill Clinton must be preening over these numbers, confident that the legacy of his boom times will restore the laughing today, it was so easy for him to ride the bubble. A charmed life. It seems like a dream now, all the problems deferred to a grimmer and more business-like Administration.

I was listening to the BBC this morning, more habit. There was a marvelous vignette that got my blood boiling with the coffee on this anniversary of our independence. The World Update featured a young woman who was protesting the American presence at the Royal Air Force base at Fairford, England. Fairford is located near Cirencester, Glocestershire. The "cester" or "chester" which appears as part of many British place-names is a corruption of the Latin word "castra." Or fort, we would call it. So there have been some out-of-town soldiers in the neighborhood for a millenium or so. But no matter. Fairford is approximately 60 miles from RAF Croughton and 54 miles from Bristol. Aerial tankers from the USAF and the Air National Guard rotate to RAF Fairford to conduct air-refueling operations as part of the European Tanker Task Force, and support strike operations world-wide as required.

Fairford began life as a base for the gliders that were filled with Allied troops and towed behind C-47 transports. That was how Senator Strom Thurmond went to the marshy fields behind the beaches at Normandy. The Greenham Grannies are protesting the presence of 14 B-52Gs at Fairford, The bombers were deployed there this time to support operations over Iraq, or Afghanistan if required. The Grannies have a long history of protest. They began about the time I was putting on Lieutenant in the Navy.

Reagan was President and after the sheepish Carter Administration it was a tonic to watch the U.S. stand up to the Russians. A tonic, anyway, to those who thought that communism was an evil, exploitive system that crushed the human spirit. There were those, of course, who thought that it wasn't communism that was bad, it was just how it was practiced by the Russians. If the right people were in charge, then things would work out just fine. It is a bit of a simplification, but I lived all this and made my choices based on what I saw. It is not much of a simplification.

The Reaganaughts saw things with a breathtaking clarity. We did not have enough troops to stop the Red Army in the Fulda Gap on the German central plain. The Russians had their calculus and their system and part of their doctrine was to drive to the English Channel. Now if you did not have the breathtaking clarity of vision this all could seem a little scary. I saw what the Russians did. They declared an "analogous response" to the deployment of nuclear-tipped Ground Launched Cruise Missiles and Pershing II Intermediate Range Missiles. They didn't seem to think of them as defensive systems, lacking a certain clarity of vision, and did what they could with the tools they had on hand. Which was some nuclear submarines, many of which were nearing the end of their useful service lives. The Russians sent them forward where they could hit American bomber bases in the Heartland with little warning. Analogous, they reasoned, to the presence of missiles that could fall on Moscow at the end of gravity's rainbow.

Yankee and Delta-class ballistic missile submarines of the Soviet Strategic Forces deployed to the waters off the east and west coasts of the United States. It was not widely reported, but they were there in truly scary numbers if you had the clarity to see through the waves. Which we did. But it was hard to protest them, or chain yourself to the conning tower, or bang hammers on the hatches of missile tubes. So the Grannies at RAF Greenham Commons got the ink, and the virtue and the moral high-ground. And then we won the war and the evil empire disintegrated and blew away in the wind. Which is a bit of a simplification, but we lived it and how else can you describe what happened?

Anyhow, the Grannies are back at RAF Fairford. The story on the radio was priceless, and so was the protagonist of the piece, a woman named Brenda. She is just as sweet as that lunatic British bus driver the BBC featured before the commencement of hostilities in Iraq, one of the many who traveled to Baghdad as a human shield for Saddam Hussein. I wonder where that bus driver is now, and what he thinks after they have continued to dig up the nameless dead from gardens all over Iraq. This morning Brenda contended in soft vowels that "We have to learn our lessons from history...our Imperial History."

Indeed!

It is so easy to make up your history rather than learn it. Brenda went on to say that her father went to Korea, which she announced had been a commercial and imperial adventure. That tore it for me and I grabbed the keyboard and began to pound away. I have walked the ground in both North and South Korea. I have lived in Seoul and stayed in the Spartan quarters of what passes for Presidential luxury in Pyongyang. I can truthfully and objectively tell her Brenda and the Grannies she is with that life is better in every category in the South. Brenda lives a pleasant fantasy in her English green fields.

The Greenham Grannies have taken on Fairford as a cause. I think they have perhaps convinced themselves that it was their goodness and courageous vigil against the Ground Launched Cruise Missiles that brought about the liberation of Eastern Europe. Or maybe some of them are sentimental for the loss of the KGB and the Stasi. If only the great experiment had been run by the right people….

Being a Soviet dupe has a long and honored place in the Loony Left of the Labour Party. And the Grannies are sweet and who can't want peace? It is paradoxical, I grant, that peace is sometimes what we have to fight for. Last night another American soldier was shot dead by a sniper as he tried to guard the Iraqi national museum's treasures from being despoiled by the Iraqi people. Eighteen more solider were injured in a mortar attack. It is the Fourth of July, and I am proud of our kids and Iam proud to be what I am. A veteran and a citizen who can be just as loony as I want. Because our kids are out there holding back the thugs.

One of the lifeguards at our pool is an athletic young man with a short haircut and a prominent goatee. The other evening he was wearing a sweatshirt with the letters "USMC" across the front. I asked him if he had been a Marine and he looked back at me with a certain clarity. He said he had, assigned to the Marine Barracks at the corner of Eighth and "I" streets. An 8th-and-I Marine. He had been one of the kids who marched in the parades and buried the veterans of the Corps at Arlington. Forty-eight months of service, showing the public face of the proudest group of warriors in the world. He did his time, and he was proud of his service. And he was going to get his citizenship soon, and make his parents proud. I asked him where he was from, and he said he had started on this road in Caracas, Venezuela, and would work two jobs until everyone was taken care of. He is a proud kid, and in his duty as a ceremonial guard, the best turned-out kids in the Corps, he had met the President.

He gave the picture to his folks. I thanked him for his service to our country, since it is his now, too. Regardless of where the paperwork is.

It is about clarity of vision, this Fourth of July. It always has been. The framers had it right. Sometimes you have to sacrifice for the greater good, and you must have a certain clarity of vision to see what that is. We will make Iraq a freer place when we are done, and we will leave them in peace. Brenda and the Grannies lack a certain clarity to see things that way. I think they suffer from a pleasant cognitive dissonance that blocks uncomfortable facts. They will never connect the dots and admit to themselves that it was the introduction of the GLCMs to the green fields of England's unsinkable aircraft carrier that made the Russians realize the Cold War was too expensive to continue. And the missiles, having served their purpose, are gone. So too the bombers will depart when their work is done.

It will just take a moment for the situation to clarify.

Happy Fourth!