24 April 2009
 
Boots, Boots, Boots

(Boots)
 
We are still at war, as best I can determine. There were suicide bombings in Iraq this morning, and ambushes in Afghanistan, and the Pakis appear to be folding in the face of the Taliban. The fundamentalists have spilled out of the Swat Valley and have not put down their weapons as promised. They are consolidating the reign of Sharia law just up the road from the capital of Islamabad.
 
I don’t know whether to be more concerned with that- the consequences are dire, of course- or about the war at home.
 
Here in Washington the tone has increased to a shrill tenor, screechy as a Chinese opera to which I was forced to listen. I am starting to lose track of which war is being fought. Iraq, for good or ill, is moving to the back burner. The conflict now appears to be about the treatment accorded some very bad people who had nothing to do with Iraq at all.
 
I am dumbfounded that the debate appears to be about whether Al Qaida should be accorded the protections of the Geneva Convention.
 
I know how that is supposed to work, and no one labors under the illusion that it does. That is how I found myself designated War Criminal #5, in the order of my capture, and abused without visible bruising, and placed in a line of wooden boxes on the dusty grounds of the Warner Springs Satellite Training Facility in the mountains above San Diego.
 
The Navy wanted us to be ready to understand what would happen to us, and how weak the reed of resolve can be if you are not prepared for the worst. Not that they could do the worst; the tactics employed were calculated to be unpleasant without leaving permanent damage.
 
That is probably why what the government did to several generations of us was adopted to be used against our sworn enemies. We do not decapitate our captives, as did our Japanese adversaries in the Pacific War, or the preening fanatics of this latest multi-faceted fight.
 
The box was not a place of comfort. It was too small to do anything but crouch awkwardly. Eventually, after a few hours in the darkness, I found a position on my back that permitted me to wedge my legs above me. It was OK, in a way, since with the door to the packing crate shut, the guards could not get at me.
 
That did not mean that someone would not periodically club the side of it, as I waited my turn with the interrogators, the slaps and being hurled against the sheet-metal wall that made such an impressive sound, or the eerie mass session of re-education with the nice Rebel leaders.
 
The sound was a huge part of it, since the box could not stop the sounds of the shouting and the boom of the metal wall as my fellow detainees were thrown against it.
 
The scratchy penetrating sound of the camp PA system was like the scraping of nails on a chalk-board. There was the keening of a Chinese Opera, alien in its high volume, and then some madman reciting some gibberish:
 
“We're foot-slog-slog-slog-sloggin' over Africa -
Foot-foot-foot-foot-sloggin' over Africa -
(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again!)
There's no discharge in the war!”
 
I can write it down now, since the cadance of the words haunted me for weeks after the time in the camp. Boots, Boots, Boots. I discovered it was a poem by Rudyard Kipling, Poet Laureate of the Empire that died in the fields of France, though it shambled along, stiff upper lip, through the second brawl with the Germans.
 
It was boots and Chinese Opera all through the night, that and the sessions with the interrogators. This was the key teaching moment in the three weeks at SERE school. The first week had classroom sessions about the Code of Conduct, which was problematic. The start of it was not, since the words go like this:
 
“I am an American fighting in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense…”
 
Well, that bit was true enough. People died with depressing regularity in the big industrial process of operating high-performance aircraft in the Fleet, and that was absent any active interference by an armed foe.
 
It had not been a tremendous issue in the Second World War; The Germans generally followed the precepts of the Geneva Convention, or at least the parts that dealt with Allied airmen who were shot down and survived the first encounter with those on the ground.
 
Evade if possible. Only when evasion was impossible was surrender an honorable course of action.
 
It helped, of course, if you were not Russian, or involved in messy ground encounters in which summary executions were not uncommon on either side. There is a provision in the Code that we were all obligated to try to escape.
 
You may have seen the account flying around the web of a long-delayed award given to the Waddington board-game company in the UK. During the war, the company inserted silk maps and real cash and compasses into pieces of specially-marked Monopoly game sets. The prisoners of Stalag Luft III used some of those materials in the real "Great Escape" of April, 1944.
 
The Luftwaffe had generally followed the rules for the treatment of prisoners- they had skin in that game, since their aircrew were equally liable to be captured by the Allies. The escapees entered the real world when they were on the loose. The Nazis recaptured all but three of the seventy-six officers who broke out.
 
Hitler personally ordered the execution of fifty of them.
 
In one of the dark hours in captivity, I was ordered to pick up rocks inside the barbed wire in the camp, and slowly sidled toward a gap in the fence, looking for the moment I could break into the darkness that never came.
 
Back in the box. The obligation to escape was one of the teaching points in this strange drill, though the Navy knew full well the likely consequences. LCDR Jack Graf was one of us, a Spook assigned to the field. He was shot down, and later shot dead by his Vietnamese captors when he made a break for it. It is what you are obligated to do.
 
Don't-don't-don't-don't-look at what's in front of you.
(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again)
Men-men-men-men-men go mad with watchin' em,
An' there's no discharge in the war!
 
The Chinese Opera went on through the night, and the boots marching, and it never would have occurred to me then that what they were trying to teach us would pop up again, so strangely inverted.
 '
I’ll tell you about the other parts of the Code they tried to teach us tomorrow.
 

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com