Editor’s Note: In following the traffic from several old pals and shipmates, I have an increasing certainty that the civil war some people mutter about has already occurred. We just missed it, because we were intimately familiar with how all this stuff works. The cognitive process doesn’t recognize that it doesn’t work that way any more. It is funny, this temporal dislocation, and it pops out in different places. Point Loma shares his observations about an old friend apparently on the rocks. I suppose every generation must feel this way as their world recedes and another replaces it. But if asked how this circus is going to work out, I would have to respond that this is all sort of nuts.
– Vic

Tone Deaf

SECDEF Esper – Defender of Free Speech?

After Jimmy Carter was elected, my stepfather said that he could now die happy knowing that he would have been as good a President as just anybody off the peanut farm. Well, here is the latest casualty of mediocre social instincts, and he is running the department. Of course, I mean his decision to shut down the Stars & Stripes (S&S) and then in the face of criticism from members of both sides of Congress, he has the wrong-headed gumption to double down on that decision. I mean, where do we find such men?
You never give your foes a weapon with which to beat you – because they will.

This is disturbing on many levels – when you can’t take criticism from the ranks, as the S&S is perceived, then you have no business running things in Washington or anywhere for that matter. He looks like a tough enough guy, and I appreciate the fact that the man has a lot on his plate; but squashing what is rightly perceived as the 1st Amendment rights of his own constituency – the US military and defense establishment, is way beneath his office.

Well, it has turned personal, so if he wants to act like a stupid ass, then who am I not to flame him? If he means to squash dissent, then he is picking the wrong fight with the wrong people – his own troops. What did Sun Tzu say – “don’t go to bed at night with more enemies than you started the day with?”

His obtuseness has made him about 200 million new enemies – good move, comrade Esper. Hope you like who you see in the mirror tomorrow morning, as you scrape the stubble off that manly jaw. I predict that you will cave – and you could have spared yourself the humiliation by tossing the assclowns who suggested this out of your office. Your job is to figure out how the execute the National Defense Strategy and beat the Chinese and Russians, not act like the $15M or so that it costs the Department to subsidize the publication of S&S each year will even approach the cost of one F-35 engine, which when you do this math is therefore more critical to national defense than troop morale?

This must be what it felt like living in the old Soviet Union, where there was no truth in Pravda, or news in Izvestia. I know that when I was in Europe in the 1980s and Japan in the 1990s, it was our go-to news. The S&S has a somewhat checkered past, but who among us doesn’t? They picked on everybody, as any good journalistic endeavor worth a shit could, and should do.

S&S – A Typical Headline from more Heady Days
Historically, the S&S was briefly produced in 1861 during the Civil War, and began consistent publication during World War I. When the war was over, publication ended, only to restart in 1942 during World War II, providing wartime news written by troops specifically for troops in battle. It has been in publication ever since.

A lot of great military writers, photographers, and cartoonists (e.g., Bill Mauldin) got their start, or in some cases met their end while chronicling the front-line experiences of US troops in combat. When I was in Germany back during the Cold War’s heyday, we eagerly read the S&S to see how the latest insult or scandal involving general and flag officers was proceeding – yeah, there was a bit of National Enquirer going on with the editorial staff; but, that was to be expected. At that time, there was another publication produced by ex-GIs that was even more reviled by the brass – Off Duty.

Off Duty in the 1980s was like an American version of Charlie Hebdo, replete with its own classic cartoon pairing of Fred & Frank, an unapologetic rip-off of Mauldin’s Willie & Joe. Off Duty was run by a bunch of ex-pat retired or former US troops, and relations with the Army leadership, in particular, were bad. Since we at HQ EUCOM were ostensibly Army claimants for our support, it was entertaining to see the lengths the leadership in Heidelberg, Frankfort, and Stuttgart would go to quash Off Duty – which only made them re-double their biting efforts.

The favorite targets of official ire were Fred & Frank, published for 20 years by active duty and then retired Air Force Captain Charles Kaufmann, who were famous for their bad attitudes about being GIs in Germany, and the 100-day “short-timer’s calendar” which was the countdown to one’s rotation date back to the States. The kicker was when those were banned in all work and living spaces, as they were deemed to be “detrimental to morale, good order and discipline.” Really, whose morale were they talking about? Of course, you know the result – the number of Fred & Frank calendars multiplied faster than the COVID-19 virus.

Well, they fucked it up by doing that. One of the first things you should learn about leadership as an officer in the military is to never issue an order that you know won’t be obeyed, or even makes sense to the rank and file soldier. That is just as true today, as it was in yesteryears. Esper was an Army guy growing up and had a good career going before he turned into a designer soldier, and now uses it as a resume bullet along with being a lobbyist, but obviously that experience didn’t really register, did it?

Fred & Frank

Okay, so it was a lot more poignant 35 years ago or so and Kaufmann has wisely put the collection in a book for sale so this was the best I could steal off the Internet that isn’t copyrighted. Back then, there were still relics of WWII and the occupation around, like ration cards for smokes, booze, and coffee, and then there were the gas coupons to offset the cost of German gasoline, which was roughly something like $4/gallon.

There were no real speed limits on the autobahn back then, but there are now, and photo and radar enforced. On my last trip to Germany in 2012, my friend and the CEO of the company I worked for as a consultant took my dare and rented us a Porsche Panamera, which is a beautiful beast of a car. Since I had “autobahn cred” I claimed the keys, even though I was not on the approved driver’s list since he had rented the car at the Frankfurt Airport before my flight landed.

We flew low level down to Stuttgart and then back up to Ramstein a couple of days later, averaging over 100 mph and higher. About three months afterwards, the speeding tickets started to arrive at my friend’s company out in San Diego – something over $2000 worth – ouch.

Yeah, that Germany is gone forever, and soon they will move EUCOM to Belgium, where it probably should have been all along, not in Rommel’s old wartime Kaserne. But it was fun while it lasted, and there we lived and sometimes wasted our lives, worked hard, drove too fast, drank lots of beer, swapped girl and boy friends, and skied our asses off without fear of censure, or censorship. Our favorite movie was The Big Chill, and for a couple of three years, we had that vibe going on amongst us 20-somethings. We were tuned in, and S&S was part and parcel of the experience.

The President has now intervened in the S&S episode for a variety of reasons but one is apparent – the US military civilian leadership in the persona of the SECDEF has grown tone deaf and has presidential egg on his face, even though he is a smart guy who should have known better. Now he has a choice – suck it up, or quit. Can you hear us now?
I remain your faithful servant.

Copyright 2020 Point Loma
www.vicsocotra.com