Editor’s Note: Marlow hits head on a subject something the rest of the Writer’s Section at Socotra House has tried to dance around. We are all products of the agglomeration of our collective pasts. Like Marlow, most of us had professional lives that were ordered in tempo with the Defense Condition of the moment. Splash said it in a way many of us understood. He grew up in Downriver Detroit in the times Marlow engages with this afternoon. He said he has that feeling of dread he remembers when civic conversations included the question of which Airborne Division would be shortly arriving to augment the national guard and Motor City police. Some us are remembering those feelings now.
– Vic
Author’s Note: For many, many months, there have been occasional but strengthening Asian zephyrs signaling that the world is seeing the early indicators of a catastrophic world destruction event.
Hence these long-ago, loopy remembrance fragments started surfacing which begin with the time our former War Department issued its first DEFCON 3 readiness alert on October 6, 1973, during the Yom Kippur war after Syria and Egypt launched an attack on Israel. The Strategic Air Command, European Command, Sixth Fleet, and the rest of the US Military were all raised to DEFCON level 3 for a few days after receiving reports that Soviet Union had a ship on its way to Egypt carrying nuclear warheads.
My prior DEFCON experience had been as a civilian with the first-ever Level 2 declared during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Subsequent military service experience at the 3 and 2 levels were in 1976 (Korea) and 1991 (Gulf War 1). We all remember the 911’s “3.”
The world thus far has avoided the rock and roll Level 1 since the DEFCON system’s 1957 creation.
– Marlow
P.S.: Never mind the current Ukraine thing.
Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable and conceive the inconceivable. Stories provide meaning, texture, and layers of truth. So, it seems that one of the most vital things we should teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are insistently, beautifully, and believably true.
Every now and then my inner wiseass would surface during my meeting attendance in the Pentagon during the early 90s. Being such in a groupthink environment was like throwing an egg at a bulldozer. The effect was similar to spitting into the wind. As my face was repeatedly wetted, I realized it was time to retire.
More deeply than political or religious opinions, our senses of humor define us as individuals. While performing life’s everyday tasks, I found that opinions were easy to set aside. The folks with whom I shared a sense of humor were my close, if not closest friends. They made a big difference in my life and had the greatest influence, even after they passed.
Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
Back during the summer of 1973 when the world almost blew itself up, there was a blood red storm that spread from the east to the west and then back to the east across the Mediterranean. Presently it sat just off the Armageddon Central coast. It was borne of several less than constant winds from Africa, Asia, the Levant, the New World, and Europe.
This super-storm’s winds came from all points of the compass, were hotter and colder than hell. It occupied all levels of altitudes, contained multiple colors of dust and dirt and were reported in their individual source countries as plucking the feathers of domestic and wild fowl, peeling paint, and traveling along the ground like a flood, and being foul, flowery, spicy, and poisonous in fragrance.
The Air Force base I was on at the time was electric and scared sh*tless at the same time. Our Navy instructors were discussing plans behind closed doors to send us out as thirty-day schoolboy wonders to fleet units.
A few western news organizations briefly broadcast foreign film clips that captured these whirlwinds downing telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads, entering and coagulating inside car ignition locks. Mediterranean mariners called these winds during filmed interviews a sea of darkness.
Some say that earth’s end time was avoided when the American and Soviet politicians talked to each other on their red phones. I still hold to the discredited and oft denied claim that the generals on both sides told their politicians that they would not lead their armies to an area thus beset by these weather furies only to be engulfed and then rapidly and completely interred by these rainbow-colored death-storms.
Yeah, I know, foolish me.
—-
By the time I was in my early 30s, I was not in possession of exceptional intelligence or experience. I do know that at times I suffered from a strange sense of detachment from myself and the world about me. At these times, I was briefly able to see things from the outside, from somewhere remote, out of time-space, out of the stress and sadness of the events being observed. These feelings came very strongly upon me at night, when I was working the mid-shift, or on Sunday mornings, when the rest were at church or in bed.
This skill came to the attention of my superiors when rumor warfare’s projected elite mind control tactics (aka perception management) were being further perfected and tested during the Cold War. We knew this could be a fast-spreading social cancer that would be difficult to impossible to contain. It would quickly rot the brains of the targets. However, the real dangers were that they would spread back to us and that so many on both sides would find what was being spread enjoyable to the point of passivity.
That was where I came in. I was asked to pinpoint when and where things started to go bad during one of the early beta tests. I – there others unknown to me at the time but about whom I learned later were also these tests’ evaluators – was able to do so but the moderate collateral damage or feedback seen was deemed acceptable by those way above our meager pay grades. These tests were during the hierarchical communications and media times of the last century. It was so pre as in pre-social media, pre-mobile device, pre-app du jour, pre-deep and dark web, pre-network(s), pre-internet, pre-anarchy, pre-fake news and on and on and on.
When the medium became the message and rumor, control, and the ability to know and foresee with any precision what was happening or about to happen were irretrievably lost.
All outcomes were now equi-probable. Low probability outcomes now were not just conceivable but more and more likely as time sped up and by us. Big data’s promise of prescience was muted by the invisibility and anarchic unpredictability of single individuals. We then were living in a forever age of “shit happens.”
It was like the tech world had released an ever-mutating infection into the infosphere. No longer were we able to pinpoint when a fact was indeed a rumor only partially made of truth. It was between difficult and impossible to pinpoint in a timely fashion where the factual information may have been infected/contaminated. Bad gouge was passed on and on until some brave analytical soul questioned its validity, refused to bite the apple and let the apple eat him. Forced to start from scratch for the sake of purity and truth, this brave analyst, figuratively speaking, fully amputated the information in order to protect his personal judgment. In other words, analytical ignorance was valued more than the lie believed to be true.
Weird, eh?
—-
“Peace be with you, Salam alaikum, our berobed Saudi allies said in supplication after 9/11. We should have responded under our breaths “and an ass-kicking be with you.”
War destroys men’s creativity, wisdom, and joy. What it leaves and cherishes is their utility.
I remember with prurient interest in the days that followed 911 certain multi-course meals in the Imperial City. There was much wine, a loving and cozy ambiance, and a feeling of things coming that were ineluctable. Under the wine I lost the sad feeling and was happy for a brief moment. It seemed that since we were such nice people that nothing bad would disturb our future. Sheesh. Missed that one, didn’t we smart guys, eh?
Maybe we oughta come inside when they’re ready to
But we got no chance if they gonna wanna dance
We’re like a four-letter worded when they’re ready to
But then we won’t ’cause we know that we can dance
If we want to
We got it
But are we getting it?
We’d like to say that peace is won when we got some
But their ignorant fingers will paw-trigger the gun…
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