Tag Archives: Vietnam

10.29.24
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Honor

Saturday, I will rise at zero-dark-thirty and fly to Washington, D.C., on Badger Honor Flight Mission #57.

Honor flights, in case  you don’t know, are group excursions by veterans to view the nation’s monuments and memorials in a context of pomp, circumstance, and profuse gratitude for their military service.

I never imagined I would take part in such a thing. 

My father, an infantryman in the Southwest Pacific during the Second World War, would have qualified for an honor flight, but it never occurred to me to sign him up; and then he died. 

I was only dimly aware that honor flights were a thing. If I knew of honor flights at all, I had heard of them only as a new thing, a phenomenon of the last twenty years. 

You probably know, Dear Reader, Your New Favorite Writer is suspicious of new things.

I’m also suspicious of events which, and people who, make a big deal of military service. During my time in the Air Force, 1965-1969, I was never an enthusiastic Zoomie. I have not been active in veterans’ affairs since then. 

Going on an honor flight would have been a bizarre thought for me. 

But my friend, the late Jerry Paulsen, went. He was an Army vet. His wife, Mary, also served in the Army, so the two were able to go together on the Badger Honor Flight. It turned out to be a life-changing experience for them. 

After the Paulsens returned from their honor flight, Jerry started hounding me to sign up for a flight myself. 

But I don’t do what people say just because they nag.

So, why did I sign up? I’ll try to explain.

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“Honor” is a conspicuous word. It is the first word in the phrase “honor flight.” Maybe it’s used in the verbal sense, meaning the event is intended to honor the veterans who take part.

But “honor” also has another sense, a noun sense. It’s an old-fashioned meaning we don’t hear much about these days. Honor is a traditional virtue that was thought to be indispensable to a man’s character. 

Honor was applied to women, too, but it accrued on different accounts in the reckoning of the two sexes.

For men, honor was tied to valor and to unswerving loyalty demonstrated in battle. Though honesty and integrity are at its heart, the virtue of honor speaks with a martial accent. War is what commonly delineates male virtue, and our nation has generally provided one war per generation. 

Some men get born too late for one war, too early for the next. But most men get the opportunity to fight for their country. Some live in times when they can hardly escape it. It is not only how they acquit themselves in battle, but even how they meet the routine challenges of military life, that brightens or stains their escutcheon of honor.

Honor used to be a powerful motivator. In the Civil War, men did not rush upon one another in thousands, bayonets fixed, and perish in blood and pain because they wanted to do so or because it was fun. Everyone, as Lincoln noted, would have preferred to avoid war. But when it overtook  them, most able-bodied men found they could not stay out of it and keep their honor intact.

Socrates. Bust by Victor Wager, photo by Greg O’Beirne.  CC BY-SA 3.0. 

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates took death by poison rather than forfeit his honor as an Athenian. Socrates the philosopher explained to his friend Crito that Socrates the Athenian must obey the rulings of the city-state. If he was no Athenian, he could be no Socrates. This, although he does not use the word, was a form of honor.

Portrait of Grant around 1843, from a daguerreotype by an unknown photographer. Public Domain.

The young lieutenant Ulysses Grant, convinced the 1846-1848 war with Mexico was an injustice done to a weaker neighbor to serve the political needs of the pro-slavery Democratic party, nevertheless followed orders and went. He was, after all, an officer in the U.S. Army. To withdraw on the eve of war would amount to dishonor. 

Winston Churchill—a chesty man, never known to back away from a fight—told the boys at Harrow School in 1941: “Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.” (My emphasis.) Honor, Churchill seemed to say, would have you fight, fight, and never give in, except when honor itself happened to require the opposite.

Churchill in 1941. Photograph by Yousuf Karsh. Public Domain.

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Since Churchill’s time, honor has been steeply discounted. 

We no longer covet honor. We no longer talk about honor. We no longer predicate our acts on conceptions of honor.

Still, there is residue. In World War II, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Desert Storm, the U.S. forces were constituted of men who answered to the concept of honor, whether or not it was stated as such. 

By the time of the Vietnam involvement, Americans no longer uniformly believed our national honor depended on fighting a war—at least, not this war—or that it was worth the effort and risk of doing so. Thousands of young men fled to Canada or went into hiding in the United States. 

I had no wish to fight in a war, or even to serve in uniform, but events gave me little choice. I was soon to be drafted, which meant I would serve in the Army or the Marine Corps.

I chose to enlist in the Air Force. It seemed like a better deal. 

At the time, widespread public opposition to the Vietnam War was just starting to get organized.

But six months later, while I was still in training at the Presidio of Monterey, California, rejection of uniformed service had become a real thing. One guy I knew lodged a belated application to be treated as a conscientious objector. Another simply ran off—deserted. Antiwar activists hung around military bases, cultivating friendships with young enlisted men and offering options for clandestine flight. 

The opportunity to simply duck out of the war had become real. It could be done. It was an option we all had to address. 

I stayed the course. Not because I was brave. Not because I was patriotic. Because, rather, I could identify with Socrates, who chose to remain an Athenian in good standing. I wanted to keep on being an American. I would not have expressed that as honor, but looking back from sixty years on, perhaps it was.

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The young men who fought the Vietnam War sometimes endured taunts and jeers when they came home. I did not experience such things, but many did.

Previously, when Johnny came marching home, he had been received with honor, even with brass bands and parades. But combatants in the Vietnam War were made to feel like inferior life forms. That war and its consequences undermined the caliber and morale of the armed services. President Nixon reached an agreement with the North Vietnamese which amounted to surrender but was termed “peace with honor.” Everybody just wanted to get the hell out.

Then fifteen years passed—a mere eye-blink—and our nation again needed well-trained, capable, and loyal forces, for operations against Iraq. Our leaders resolved that this time around, the troops would be celebrated, would be given dignity and respect. And so, by and large, they were.

There came a general rise in patriotic feeling and a restored regard for military men. These trends were bolstered by our national response to the events of September 11, 2001. All veterans, not just those of Desert Storm, basked in the elevated profile of military service. 

In 2004, a National World War II Memorial was built in Washington, D.C. Living veterans of that war were getting older, reaching the end of life; so volunteer organizations sprang up to whisk World War II veterans to Washington so they could see their memorial. This project grew into a nationwide network, which is now active in forty-five states. 

As members of the Greatest Generation slipped off to their final rewards, the Honor Flight network began including younger veterans in the trips, Korean- and Vietnam-era vets. 

I was dimly aware of all these things. But then Jerry Paulsen came back from his honor flight and began harping at me to sign up. So one day, I idly went to the Badger Honor Flight web page to see how the whole thing worked. What I saw there transformed my attitude.

The honor flight protocol assigns each honored veteran a volunteer “guardian,” a younger person at his elbow throughout the trip. According to the website, “We do this for the safety and accountability of our Veterans. The most important reason is to ensure each Veteran can enjoy their ‘Trip of a Lifetime’ to its fullest.” Maybe they want to give needed assistance to aged and infirm veterans yet do not wish to create a distinction between those and the healthier vets.

The key fact to me was that the guardian, though he or she cannot be the veteran’s spouse, can be a family member. I thought of our only child—our daughter, Katie. 

Katie is a very bright young woman, now in her late forties, with children of her own and an important job with the State of Wisconsin. Through no fault of her own, she was born after the brouhaha surrounding the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam was all over. She had never lived  in a time of war. The Gulf War and the Global War on Terror had come along, of course, when she was an adult—but they had little effect on her personally. 

If I went on this trip and took Katie as my guardian—I knew she would do that for her old man—she would receive a precious opportunity to mingle for a day, a meaningful day, with a lot of old men all focused on key events of their young lives. These men might tell stories. They might reveal how things were in those old days. 

At the very least, she would experience a certain group reverence and team spirit among a body of men and women who may not all have been in battle, but all of whom have a DD Form 214 in their pockets and know how to use a P-38 government-issue can opener. I thought that when all these guys and gals pay hushed respects at monuments and memorials to their fallen brothers and sisters, Katie might sense that something important was involved. 

She might get a glimpse of honor cherished and salvaged, by being among folks grown old in body but still engaged in vexing moments that once occupied their young lives. “. . . made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

For that alone—to give her that opportunity—it will be worth the trip. 

Have no fear of missing out, Gentle Reader: I’ll bloviate my impressions of the actual thing next week in this spot, Lord willing.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

06.11.24
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Honor Flight

I’m going on an honor flight.

Who? Me? Your New Favorite Writer? 

Who’d-a thunk it? 

Flight of Honor participants in Raleigh, NC are welcomed back by crowds. Photo by Rtphokie, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.

You know what I’m talking about? Maybe not, since honor flights are a recent invention. 

Military veterans from a locality are flown, free of charge, to Washington, D.C., on a given day, ostensibly to view the nation’s war memorials. At the originating airport, on board the plane, and at the destination airport—Reagan, Dulles, or Thurgood Marshall—they are drenched with applause and special treatment. Veterans thus honored are often moved to tears.

The original notion was to honor men and women who fought World War II—the “Greatest Generation.” The National World War II Memorial had been completed in 2004, yet few WWII vets had gone to Washington to pay a visit. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines of that vintage were growing old and infirm. How many would live long enough to visit the memorial expressing the nation’s gratitude to them and their fallen comrades?

The National WWII Memorial. Photo by Duane Lempke, licensed under  Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

The Honor Flight Network, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, was founded by Earl Morse and Jeff Miller, two younger-generation veterans. Wikipedia says it “grew to a veritable forest of volunteerism, fundraising and goodwill toward the Greatest Generation veterans, who had been too busy building their communities to demand recognition for wartime service.” 

Why Me? Why Now?

Since its founding, the progam has naturally progressed to recognizing veterans of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts as well as World War II. 

Although I was involved with the Vietnam War, I never thought of going on an honor flight.   

Those junkets are laid on for doddering old men, I thought. Which certainly does not describe yours truly.

Moreover, I was hardly a gung-ho troop in the first place. In the years when I wore a uniform, bellyaching was the more fashionable posture. I was only too glad to gain separation from the U.S. Air Force 55 years ago. Since then, I have been mostly absent from veterans’ events, organizations, and affairs. 

So why am I listed on the manifest to ride the Badger Honor Flight this coming November? 

One good thing about living so long—I’ll be 79 tomorrow—is that one gains perspective. One mellows. 

Being a Veteran

Though never vocal about claiming respect as a veteran, I have come to realize that there is a point to it. Those who donned the uniform when called upon, whether we endured horrendous combat or performed other tasks, rightly earned our nation’s gratitude.

The historian Steven Ambrose described a particular outfit in World War II using words lifted from William Shakespeare: “band of brothers.” The phrase evokes an intense, unbreakable bond among those who have borne the battle, be they Britons at Agincourt in 1415 or Screaming Eagles at Normandy in 1944. 

King Henry V and his band of brothers at the Battle of Agincourt, 1415. Painting by John Gilbert (1817–97). Public Domain.

The whole corps of us who served, doing any job at all, in the armed forces, may not rate such a heady epithet. The totality of U.S. military veterans, I think of as a “gang of guys with a certain sameness.” 

A Vietnam War-era P-38 can opener, with a U.S. penny shown for size comparison. Photo by Jrash. Public Domain.

We have all been yelled at by noncommissioned officers in boot camp. We learned how to stand up straight and how to salute. Even decades later in civilian life, we align the plackets of our shirts to our belt buckles and trouser flies to achieve a straight “gig line.” Every one of us can still work the official P-38 can opener that was issued with tinned field rations in the days before the introduction of plastic-pouched “Meals, Ready-to-Eat” (MREs). 

These tokens held in common must not be taken lightly.

But, What’s the Point?

Even so, when my late friend Jerry Paulson, a fellow Vietnam-era veteran, came back from his honor flight a couple of years ago and insisted I should sign up, my reaction was skeptical. I am no doddering old man. But then, neither was Jerry, and he’s no longer among the living.

When I learned a bit more about the process, I changed my mind. You see, a veteran doesn’t just go on this trip. A veteran is accompanied every step of the way by a volunteer “guardian.” 

If you need help walking or boarding the airplane, even if you need a pusher for your wheelchair—your guardian is there for that. But what if you happen to be in tip-top shape? You get a guardian anyway! 

It’s right there on the website: “BHF uses a 1:1 Veteran to guardian ratio. We do this to for the safety and accountability of our Veterans. The most important reason is to ensure each Veteran can enjoy their ‘Trip of a Lifetime’ to its fullest.” I suspect they simply don’t want to pick and choose which vets need help and which ones don’t.

The program has volunteers ready to act as guardians. But—this is what snagged me, Dear Reader—you can nominate your own guardian. It can be a member of your family. It can’t your spouse, which would amount to an expense-paid holiday for two. But it can be your son, daughter, niece, nephew, or friend. 

I thought of our only child, Katie. Suddenly the project became compelling. 

My Guardian

Katie was almost fourteen when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The First Gulf War, which soon followed, happened when she was a teenager, far removed from any concern with world affairs. By September 11, 2001, she was 25—old enough to fight for her country in the Global War on Terror which followed. But military service, whether compulsory or voluntary, has always been a predominantly male thing. She did not enlist, nor did anyone expect her to.

Though women today serve in all branches, they do not generally grow up with a sense of their own eligibility, vulnerability, or destiny of military service. But young men do.

Historically, our country has provided about one war per generation, and the young men are expected to fight it. Not all of them, but some of them will surely go. The rules of the game—the degree of compulsion or free choice—vary by national policy and historical circumstance. Some are born too late for one war and too early for the next. But all young men live in the shadow of the next war. 

War for men is like motherhood for women. We don’t all experience it, but its very possibility shapes our lives. Those who go through it are formed by it. Those who escape it may feel they have missed out on something, even if it is something better avoided.

I have no memories of real combat, thank God, to haunt my days and disturb my dreams. In those days when battle was a live possibility for my generation, I could have burned my draft card and fled to Canada. A lot of men did. The reason I didn’t was not that I was a super patriot or convinced of the need to fight the Communists in Southeast Asia, but only that I wished to continue being an American, subject to our nation’s laws. 

(If you want the full rationale, look up Socrates’s conversation with his friend Crito. It’s filed under Plato’s Dialogues.)

Crito Closing the Eyes of Socrates, bas-relief by Antonio Canova  (1757–1822). Public Domain. Image file by Fondazione Cariplo, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.

Katie is still a young woman. She’s had no opportunity to understand the nature of the experience her father went through more than fifty years ago, or the resulting bond among a gang of guys with a certain sameness. 

But come November, she’ll accompany me as my volunteer guardian on what amounts to a road trip with a random sampling of that gang of guys. I don’t know who my fellow Badger Honor Flight veterans will be, but I reckon we’ll have a few things in common. Maybe Katie and the other guardians will catch a whiff of what our sameness means to us and therefore to them.

That’s reason enough to go.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

03.26.24
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Holy and Unholy

We are in Holy Week, the name Christians give to the time between Palm Sunday and Easter.

Your New Favorite Writer was going to expound on holiness but found he is not yet grown-up enough to write on that subject in a sensible way. 

So, maybe next year. I’ll be 79 then.

But now, for Something Completely Different:

Meeting Steve Canyon

We turn a page from the sacred to the profane.

I have just read Meeting Steve Canyon . . . and Flying With the CIA in Laos, by Karl L. Polifka. It’s a memoir of a particular time and place in the Vietnam War.

Thinking men, in war, may notice a discrepancy between facts and ideals. So it was with Polifka. A U.S. Air Force pilot, he was assigned as a forward air controller, or FAC, in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969. 

A Cessna O-1F Bird Dog takes off in South Vietnam, 1968. This aircraft was later used by the Ravens in Laos. USAF Photo.

Polifka’s job was to scout enemy assets and troop formations from a slow-moving, propeller-driven aircraft—an O-1, a U-17, or a T-28—to mark enemy positions with phosphorus-tipped rockets, and to direct fighter/bombers to attack the places marked by his rockets.

Sounds simple, right? In reality it was a severe task, which called for technical skills, sharp reflexes, steel nerves, and iron resolve in the face of physical and psychic trauma.

A T-28D Trojan trainer of the Royal Thai Air Force waits for takeoff beside a U.S. Air Force F-4D Phantom, 1972. The T-28 trainer is like the ones used by the Ravens. Public Domain.

Polifka believed in the cause. He appears never to have suffered the deep doubts developed by some fighters in the long Southeast Asian war.

But the job required mental toughness and gave many opportunities for an intelligent observer—which Polifka clearly was—to question the utility, even the sanity, of operational tactics. 

Flying out of Gia Nghia, in the Central Highlands, Polifka ran afoul of “pre-plans,” operations concocted by shadowy experts at Seventh Air Force headquarters. He often felt the pre-plans were not informed by good knowledge of actual conditions on the ground. 

Steve Canyon, as drawn by Milton Caniff. Fair use.

When Polifka grew tired of the routine at Gia Nghia, someone suggested he tell his supervisor he was “interested in Steve Canyon.” Uncertain what the phrase might imply, he did what was suggested. His supervisor frowned but in due course of time a transfer came through. “Steve Canyon” turned out to be an unofficial cover name for a clandestine project in Laos.

If the name doesn’t ring an immediate bell for you, Steve Canyon was the hero of an Air Force-themed adventure comic strip drawn by writer-artist Milton Caniff from 1947 to 1988. Steve Canyon the action hero was very well-known, but the program in Laos that bore his name was hush-hush.

A Fine Mess

The Kingdom of Laos, officially neutral, was used by North Vietnam as a conduit for troops, arms, and provisions bound for South Vietnam, where the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and its allies the Viet Cong fought the South Vietnamese Army and its allies including the United States. Other players in Laos included Communist Pathet Lao guerilla forces interested in overthrowing the royal government, plus both left-neutralist and right-neutralist armies. 

It was a mess created by a major power vacuum in close proximity to a hot war.

Because of the theoretical neutrality of Laos and the desire to appear righteous on the world stage, U.S. operations in the kingdom, though undertaken to support our official and public Vietnam war effort, were partly dissociated from regular military channels. 

Polifka and the other Steve Canyon controllers, known as Ravens, got their targeting priorities from CIA case officers on the ground and from General Vang Pao, an ethnic Hmong in the Royal Lao Army leading his people against the Communists.

Gen. Vang Pao is the face in center, under a tan cap, behind the shoulder of King Savang Vatthana, the big guy in tan uniform, shown at a 1968 royal visit to Sam Thong, Laos. Photo by NruasPaoYPP, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Officers at U.S. Seventh Air Force resented these arrangements. A conference had to be called to allocate air strikes in Laos. The conferees decreed that sixty percent of ordnance dropped would be directed by Ravens and the remaining forty percent by Seventh Air Force controllers. 

The Nitty Gritty

These matters of protocol and bureaucratic infighting are only the background. Most of Polifka’s book is a retail account of dozens of deadly fights in the hills and valleys of Laos, centered on the plateau known as the Plain of Jars—Plaines des Jarres in French, abbreviated PDJ. 

On one level, Polifka’s narrative is a persistent justification of the tactics developed by the Ravens, the CIA, and the Hmong fighters and their work as a successful team defending the Hmongs’ lands and villages, as well as a condemnation of unsuccessful and ham-handed operations undertaken by higher headquarters. 

More basically, it is a tale of merciless slaughter. The telling is cumbered with a heavy load of jargon—CBU-24s and PTs and T-76s and 12.7s in bewildering variety—which the reader must struggle through to get the story. It’s a tough go, even for a reader with a military background. 

But the reward for coping with all the acronyms and terms of art is a story that is steeped in authenticity. There can be no doubt that with minimal exaggerations and simplifications, this narrative presents the day-by-day reality that the Ravens and their comrades-in-arms lived. Getting that story is a fairly grim reward, yet it’s an important story, told by a combatant who had both a bird’s-eye and a worm’s eye view. 

Memories Triggered

These events interest me because during this period, 1968 and 1969, I was immersed in the same war—mercifully for me, at a greater level of abtraction. 

While Karl Polifka and his cohorts felt the heat of anti-aircraft and mortar fire zoomed through at tree-top level, I and other members of my squadron soared blissfully overhead in RC-130 and 135 spy aircraft, intercepting radio signals at altitudes of 30,000 to 39,000 feet. 

We flew some missions from Cam Ranh Bay up and down the Mekong River for several hundreds of miles. Where Polifka and his fellow Ravens kept constant lookout for 12.7mm, 14.5 mm, and 37 mm anti-aircraft fire, we had no worries except the remote chance that the NVA might bring in 85mm or 100mm cannons somewhere along our route. Even the 57mm artillery they did have spotted along the Mekong could only reach 28,000 feet.

So Polifka’s war and mine were the same war. But the nature of my mission and the organizations that oversaw it placed me in a different context than his. My role was the bland gathering of intelligence, little of it related to immediate action, most of it valued for long-term analysis of enemy capabilities and intentions.

EC-121 aircraft on the ramp at Korat RTAFB. USAF photo.
An F-4 Phantom jet releases its bombs. USAF photo. 

Polifka mentions with admiration F-4E pilots out of Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base who could shred ground targets with great finesse. There were times I flew out of Korat on EC-121 airborne control platforms, and when near the flight line I saw fully-loaded F-4s screaming off with a great bang of their afterburners. Some of these must have been the same guys Polifka worked with over the Plain of Jars. 

As Close As I Care to Get

Sometimes I did glimpse the grim realities of the war. 

One night after dark, riding at 30,000 feet back to Cam Ranh Bay from one of our Mekong River flights, white flashes splashed into our compartment from outside. Crowding the side window, we saw what looked like an intense thunderstorm over central Laos. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of white flashes, closely spaced, at intervals less than a second.

“Those are ARC LIGHT sorties,” said our pilot. “Buffs dropping their payloads. Each flash is a 500- or 750-pound bomb exploding on impact.” 

How could anyone, or anything at all, live under such a heavy rain?

At Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, we used to watch B-52 Stratofortress bombers—“buffs,” in Air Force slang. They were something beautiful to see—ungainly yet graceful at the same time—slipping down over the ocean, crossing the shore on final approach.

B-52 landing at Guam. U.S. Air Force photo.

Each buff carried fifty or more bombs. “Between June 1965 and August 1973, the Strategic Air Command scheduled 126,663 Stratofortress combat sorties, of which 126,615 were actually launched. The number of aircraft reaching the target area was 125,479 with 124,532 successfully releasing their bombs on the targets.” (https://media.defense.gov/2017/Mar/28/2001722969/-1/-1/0/04-ILL_HIST_CH08-CH10_(PAGES149-200).PDF, Ch. VII, “B-52 Arc Light Operations,” p. 167.)

It’s enough to give an old airman pause.

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Hoping for better times and the joy of Easter,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

06.23.20
by

Police

In the spring of 1965 I flunked out of Knox College. The timing of this was pretty spectacular, as there was a war on. 

I lost my student deferment and went to the top of the Draft Board’s list for two years’ service in the Army or Marines. Instead I volunteered for a four-year hitch in the U.S. Air Force. They sent me to Monterey, California, to learn Chinese. 

After learning Chinese, I spent a year on a Taiwan mountaintop, monitoring Chinese Communist radio communications; then spent about fifteen months flying out of Okinawa, grinding away at the Chinese Problem from recon aircraft over Southeast Asia. 

RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft. Photo by Tim Felce, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

I completed my service in September 1969 and came home to a land I barely recognized. Gone was the familiar America of Walt Whitman, singing its varied carols. In its place wallowed a society designed by, or for, Saul Alinsky and Howard Zinn.

The culture shock was starkened by my having gone immediately from military service to the University of Wisconsin campus at the height of its anti-war, revolutionary, zeal. The serious leftists in Madison, some of whom I got to know pretty well, were dedicated, if mostly amateur, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist agitators. 

Revolution

Turned loose by Uncle Sam, I sought now to redeem myself as a student. This time around, I promised myself, I would shun all-night poker parties and all-day Frisbee flinging. I would hit the books with righteous fervor. Admitted to the university on academic probation, I was determined to clear my name in one semester. 

Meanwhile, the campus of 35,000 students seethed with anger, revolt, socialist machinations, and broken windows.

On the twelfth floor of Van Hise Hall, East Asian and South Asian language students gathered to read, translate, argue, and kibbitz. From a perch nudging the stratosphere we gazed down on ant-like protesters surging at straight lines of National Guardsmen and police. Puffs of white smoke plumed the ground here and there—signs that our homeward treks at day’s end would be tinged with tear gas.

“The Pigs”

One day a young man whose name I no longer recall complained about the police—whom he called “the pigs,” in the argot of the day.

Pig. Photo by BadgerGravling, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

“I wish you wouldn’t call them pigs,” I said.

He frowned. “Why not? That’s what they are.”

“No. Pigs are animals; police officers are people. They may not share your ideas, they may be ranged against you in a riot. But they are human beings. If you call them pigs you deny their humanity and make it convenient to disregard their human attributes. They may have a viewpoint  of their own, but you will never bother to consider it, because they’re only pigs.” 

For me, this was a long speech.

Policeman. Photo by rocor, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

The young man gazed at me for a moment and said, “You’re right. I hadn’t thought of that. From now on I will not call police officers pigs.”

A transformative moment, in the midst of the Revolution?  Fat chance.

If this young man was changed by my earnest entreaty, then he was the only one. I soon figured out that I was not made for political battles, or any other kind of battles. I gave up trying to engage intellectually with my friends on the left and shunned politics from that day to this. 

The protesters of 1969-70 opposed the police not only in practice but in principle. Policemen enforced the law. Thus they were tools of the Establishment, defenders of the status quo. The enemy.

Kent State, Sterling Hall

On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard members killed four students at Kent State University. Then on August 24, here in Madison, revolutionaries planted a huge bomb that demolished Sterling Hall, a large academic building, and killed a physics researcher.These grim events took steam out of the anti-war movement; but only in January 1973—when President Richard Nixon pulled the U.S. out of Vietnam, the South Vietnamese government collapsed, and Ho Chi Minh’s communists took over the whole country—did that movement end.

Pre-Vietnam normality began to seep back into the United States. But the gaping wound in our national fabric did not heal. Fifty years later, we remain mired in distrust of one another, of our government, and of authority in general.

Today’s Crises

“Authority” can mean two different things. Let’s call them “intrinsic authority” and “conferred authority.” 

Intrinsic authority speaks for itself. Jesus was said to have taught “as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” When you have a knee replaced, you may rely on the surgeon’s medical diploma; but your go/no-go decision might be based on your gut’s  confidence in the surgeon, not on his formal qualifications. That’s intrinsic authority.

Conferred authority is legal, or legalistic. It is the authority of a city clerk to license a couple for marriage. It is the authority of a president to okay the launch of nuclear-tipped missiles. 

When intrinsic authority and conferred authority coincide, one of the results is a high-trust society. Unfortunately, such coincidence is becoming a rare thing. We give little obedience to conferred authority because we discern no intrinsic authority within it. We jeer our leaders; we defy those to whom they delegate power, including the police. 

Then and Now

The long-drawn-out war of our present day, being fought in Afghanistan since 2001, does not attract the intense interest that the one in Vietnam did fifty years ago. Fewer American troops are involved, none of them are draftees, and Southwest Asia seems even farther away now than Southeast Asia did then. 

Today’s great controversy is not war but race—racism, racial discrimination, white privilege, and the oppression of blacks. But in one way our time does resemble the past: Police and policing stand at the center of the conflict.

I have not heard the term “pigs” applied to police in recent years—not even in the past two or three weeks. They are still regarded as humans, which is good. Recent events, however, paint them as racists—which may be worse than pigs.

Because of this, people keen on public order rush to point out that “most police” are dedicated, overworked public servants and should not be tarred with the brush of racism.

Defunding

But people keen on social justice assert that racism is systemic in our society. They profess that “defunding” the police would be a good step toward redressing the balance. The general public views this concept with horror, so the would-be defunders belatedly explain they do not mean complete defunding but only partial defunding. This satisfies nobody, because some folks really do want to abolish the police, while everybody else thinks the police need more funding, not less.

In all this palaver, what gets lost is any mature reckoning of the unique position that police occupy in our society. 

Mao Zedong in 1963. Public Domain.

The late Chairman Mao got at least one thing right: Political power does grow from the barrel of a gun. That is true always and everywhere. In a free society, we place that gun in the hands of a police officer and expect that officer to exercise conferred authority within limits prescribed by law.

George Orwell in 1943. Public Domain.

George Orwell said, “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.” Police are the people we hire to do violence on our behalf.

Protectors

What I am getting at is that, while police officers are humans, they are humans of a special kind.

Most of us fall into the category of the Protected. Police officers are the Protectors.

My wife’s cousin was a police officer in a Chicago suburb. He said that within a few weeks of putting on his badge, he had learned to lump people into two categories: good folks and bad guys. And he made this distinction within seconds of entering a situation. Such swift decisions must have included a large reliance on intuition. Was he ever mistaken in his assessments? The conversation did not extend that far. 

Those who have the “take-charge” kind of personality that leads them into law enforcement, and who need to survive in potentially hazardous situations, will most likely develop the same reliance on snap judgments that my wife’s cousin described. 

So when we, the People, lay plans to send out social workers in place of cops, let’s get real. When we modify police training and rules of engagement, let’s remember that police will need to translate their instructions into action in fluid situations. We should not be surprised when they find their powers creatively enhanced by statutes that we had thought would curb their power.

Remember that we license the police to use violence—brutal acts labeled as “authorized use of force”—on our behalf. If we do not wish to confer this authority, perhaps we should completely defund the police; abolish the departments. 

Then all of us, including those who “abjure” violence, would need to become the Protectors for ourselves and our families. Thirty-one states allow firearms to be carried openly. I suppose a general defunding of police departments would bring us back to the old Western ambience of Dodge City. Is that the outcome we seek?

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What we face, in practical terms, is a need to improve the way we confer authority upon our police officers.

But the greater issue is seldon spoken of. It is simply this: Unless those who wield conferred authority combine it with intrinsic authority, our problems will continue, will intensify, and will multiply.

Intrinsic authority = character. 

There is no substitute for character. Its short supply, in the police and in the whole population, is our real problem. 

When can we start working on that?

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

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Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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(History is not what you thought!)

03.12.20
by

Wuhan that Aprille . . .

We’ll be having an unusual spring.

When vast public ills descend on us, usually we can pinpoint the moment, or the day, when they became manifest.

In the case of sudden events—the eruption of Vesuvius, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, etc.—the time of their occurrence, even to the second, is obvious to all.

John Martin’s 1821 painting Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Public Domain.

Other disasters roll out more slowly, and the precise moment we later remember is really an instant of realization, a time when the nature and dimensions of the threat suddenly crystallized. Thus it was at the Battle of Shiloh—April 6-7, 1862—when the emergence of forty thousand yipping rebels from the woods near a Tennessee River landing destroyed the wishful Northern hope that the Secession had almost run its course. Likewise, in the spring of 1965, the Students for a Democratic Society’s march on Washington served notice that the Vietnam War would not be, like previous wars, supported by most of the American public. 

The Slow Roll

So it is with the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been raging, in China, since 1 December 2019. On 7 January 2020 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a travel notice for travelers to Wuhan, relating to “the cluster of cases of pneumonia of an unknown etiology.” On 9 January the World Health Organization confirmed the existence of a “novel coronavirus,” and the first death occurred in China.

On 19 January, cases began appearing in areas of China outside Wuhan. 

On 21 January, the United States reported its first laboratory-confirmed case, in the state of Washington. 

Li Wenliang. Fair use.

On 28 January, China’s Supreme People’s Court ruled that whistleblower, Li Wenliang, had not committed the crime of spreading “rumors” when on 30 December 2019 he posted to a WeChat forum for medical school alumni that seven patients under his care appeared to have contracted SARS. In their ruling, the Supreme People’s Court stated, “If society had at the time believed those ‘rumors’. . . perhaps it would’ve meant we could better control the coronavirus today. Rumors end when there is openness.”

On 6 February, Dr. Li died of the coronavirus illness.

By that time, there were thousands of cases in China and many cases in other countries of the world and certain cruise ships at sea or quarantined in ports. 

Since then, we have had daily reports of new illness and deaths in many places around the world, and in the United States. America’s and the world’s financial markets have crashed as airlines, cruise lines, and many other business have seen their customer streams and supply chains badly affected.

Moment of Truth

Yesterday—Wednesday, 11 March 2020—is when this illness became real to most of us: 

Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump. Photo by lakesbutta. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • Tom Hanks caught it. And his wife, Rita Wilson. They have been diagnosed in Australia, where they are making a film.
  • The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced that their annual basketball tournament would be played with practically nobody in the stands. (Today, they canceled the event entirely.)
  • The World Health Organization officially declared a global pandemic (as if we didn’t know already).
  • Donald J. Trump made a speech from the Oval Office. Whether you liked it or not probably depends on what you think of Trump generally.
  • Norway closed, for crying out loud!

Now that Tom Hanks, our national Everyman, has caught the corona bug, and now that one of our great national festivals, the NCAA Tournament, has been canceled—COVID-19, overnight, has become dire in a way it was not before.

The Upshot

Classes, events, gatherings everywhere are being canceled or rescheduled. My own life has been affected: The University of Wisconsin Writers’ Institute, an event many of us look forward to all year long, is suddenly off the books. We await, with bated breath, the new dates.

It’s most frustrating. But it really is necessary. A full-court press, in the realm of what we now call “social distancing,” is probably the greatest weapon we have to “flatten the curve” of the coronavirus. It will save lives—mine for sure, maybe yours, too.

I have no advice for you, Dear Reader, any better than what you can get elsewhere. As Abraham Lincoln said in a much different context, “With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.” 

Please do your best to stay healthy. I need all the devoted readers I can get. 

Blessings and best wishes for a long, long life,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer.

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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(History is not what you thought!)