26 February 2007

A Matter of Understanding



The snow fell yesterday, a piddling amount by upper Midwest standards, but it still pole-axed the city. I expect it will melt soon enough, and this is actually just the mirth of the heavens, giving us this crappy white stuff when we should be looking around for the first daffodils to start poking up from the ground.

Vice President Cheney has just left Afghanistan, where during a visit to Bagram Air Base, he was targeted by a belt-bomber who tried unsuccessfully to breach the main gate. He may be the first senior Executive Branch person to actually hear the sound of an attack since the Civil War.

Mr. Lincoln visited Fort Stevens in 1864 on the western front of the defenses of Washington during a desperate attack by Confederate general Jubal Early. He is the only Chief Executive to be taken under hostile fire, and I think this makes Mr. Cheney the first Veep to join the club.

The Vice President was unhurt, and the itinerary continued with renewed vigor, as the presence of the first flowers will represent resurrection here. It is curious that a completely natural manifestation of the cycles of life should also be posed to roll a grenade into the spiritual underpinning of the West. It seems that science, or bogus science, has presented a most astonishing story that argues that resurrection can be metaphorical.

James Cameron, director of the blockbuster film “Titanic,” just held a press conference announcing that he had identified the contents of a tomb excavated years ago by the Israeli Antiquities Office. He says he has found the bones of Jesus and his wife, Mary.

Such a revelation could be construed as blasphemy, and the assertion has provoked great controversy. I have been a little bit queasy since the matter-of-fact announcement that the ossuary box of the brother of Jesus was found a few years ago.

As it played out, the story revealed biblical truths with which my Sunday School had left me unprepared. It seems like someone was priming us for revelation through ecclesiastical potboilers like “The Da Vinci Code.” Trash, of course, but intriguing.

I recently completed a survey of the overthrow of the Knights Templar organization, which purported to inform me that Grand Master Jacques de Moley was in possession of the real secrets of the last days of Christ when his Order was crushed in 1307. Noted authorities suggest it is all a matter of interpretation, or misunderstanding.

That is the way of things, I suppose. I was pouring over a recently declassified NSA study of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, the one that escalated the civil war in the former French colony into a major conflict.

The issue was the North Vietnamese torpedo boat attack on the US destroyers Turner Joy and Maddox.

The NSA review of the COMINT reporting of the events- I thrill to write something like that in open forum after all those years of skull-duggery- suggests that a botched translation from one of the tactical sites resulted in the issuance of a world-wide flash alert of the attack.

The NSA examiners scratched their heads and concluded that it was just one of those things. The operative declassified paragraph says:
“On 6 August, an uniden¬tified DRV naval entity, possibly the naval HQ at Port Wallut, transmitted to an unidentified sta¬tion a recap of the previous combat with the Americans.... It summarized the events of 2 August and mentioned their boats fighting the "American warship." It also recounted that their naval and air defense forces had shot down some American warplanes on 5 August and had captured one American pilot alive. Yet, there is no mention of anything occurring on the night of 4 August in this recap....The only conclusion… is that there was no attack on the night of 4 August.”

Which is to say that the attacks, and the subsequent Resolution in Congress, were based on faulty translation of routine communications at the time. Nothing intentional, no malice aforethought, just people doing their jobs and not getting it quite right. Things like that are still happening in the wide world, and we have resolved, as we have before, to work on our language skills.

One of the hot topics in the business world is automatic machine translation, which could go a long way to reducing misunderstandings. Or perhaps it will just automate them.

The interesting thing was the downstream consequences of the intercept. As a result of the perception of the Vietnamese response to the presence of the US warships, air strikes were launched the next day, code-named PIERCE ARROW.

The Skyraiders of Attack Squadron 145, along with other aircraft from the embarked air wing, struck torpedo boats and other targets at Hon Gay, North Vietnam. A second sortie of squadron aircraft, along with Skyhawks from VA-144, attacked five enemy naval vessels that were at sea, near the Lach Chao Estuary and Hon Me Island.

The two boats attacked by VA-145 were left smoking, and dead in the water. During the mission, LTJG Richard C. Sather was shot down, becoming the first naval aviator lost in the Vietnam Conflict.

The Skyraider was an amazing platform. It would also be the first aircraft in that war to shoot down a MiG, and at the bitter end, be the last US combat aircraft shot down in the SE Asian war.

So many events, tragic and heroic, all stemming from a misconception of actual events. Or perhaps it was all pre-ordained, and the misunderstanding was inevitable. There was certainly some misconception that justified the start of the Iraq conflict.

I am a jaundiced enough professional to know that the first reports of anything are incorrect, even if they are new reports of something very old.

Consequently, I am going to reserve judgment on Mr. Cameron's reports from his latest film documentary, regardless of how sensational. I'm sure it is part of some sort of misunderstanding.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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