Lynch pin of the whole thing was the KATUSA clerk we had in there, who I’m convinced was engaged in a complex fiddle with the Korean civilians over at the turn-in point. There was stuff he’d handed out to the other KATUSAs that wasn’t accounted for, there was paperwork that had vanished, and it wasn’t until the new, real supply sergeant showed up that anyone could make sense of whole mess. He’d had experience cleaning up a bunch of really big messes, and knew all the ins and outs of what had likely gone on, so when he got all his ducks into a row, he left an extensive documentation packet laying out on his desk, with a cover memorandum addressed to the Defense Investigative Agency that handles things like that. Missing paperwork suddenly started appearing all over the place over the next week as I suspect that our little fraudster began unwinding his peculations. You wouldn’t think that a humble company supply clerk could finagle something on that scale, but holy hell… He had to have either been heavily involved, or he had some pull with whoever was really pulling that crap off at the turn-in points.

In any event, had that fire occurred a few weeks earlier than it did, after the crisis was over? LOL… Friends, I’d have been out there locking the motor pool gates to keep the fire department out, and defending them with an axe or something, until that entire building was ashes. I wouldn’t have started the damn thing, but I can about guarantee you that once I saw that, the fact that it would have been my salvation would have flashed through my mind, and I’d have been out there cutting firehoses and beating up the fire department… Anything to make sure that damn supply room and all of the paperwork went up in smoke.

Which was, to be honest, the real reason that whole absurd situation was so damn funny to me… “Fire, you bitch… Where the hell were you when I really needed you…?”.

The whole thing just struck me as typical… After we solved the problems that the fire would have fixed, then the damn place wants to burn down. Outrageous, that…

That’s a pretty good story also. I’d pay good money to see that one live.

Lol.

I mean, yeah… I’ve got an eye for the absurd, but I’m almost always able to find things laughable that other people just do not think are funny. One of my bosses once made the comment that the scariest thing he ever heard was me laughing at something, because he knew that if I found it funny, we were probably pretty deep in the sh*t, and that he’d be answering questions to someone later on. Hopefully.

If you can’t laugh at it, well… What’s the alternative? Tears? Curl up in a ball?

At least, that’s the way I’ve always looked at it. Which, generally isn’t appreciated when the subject of said laughter is an ongoing unavoidable disaster…

Couple of times, though, it has gone a bit far, and even I have to admit that. I once got stuck in a job as an acting supply sergeant in Korea, because I was the only available E-6. Supply was not my MOS, but, hey… I could read, write, and find the “on” switch for a computer, so I was qualified. Due to the fact that the “real” supply sergeant was back in the US on emergency leave, and we were undergoing the last stages of a complete MTOE rework, there was a lot of crap that was left undone. One of those things was a huge loft over the supply room, which was in a building about the size of a city quarter-block, and where we had our company offices, motor pool work bays, and all the rest. I had that supply room for about three months, and between all the thieving KATUSA BS and trying to get gear turned in for the MTOE change, I about to lost my mind. After about 60 days, they figured out the real supply sergeant was never coming back, and they got a replacement for him requested. He showed up, and never was anyone greeted more happily or taken to my heart as a boon companion. I got him in-processed and handed that supply room over as quickly as I could, and we managed to get a bunch of stuff straightened out, between us. He’d never been in Korea before, and did not know the ropes, at all, so without me there to backstop him and show him where the bodies were buried, he’d have had a rough go of it all.

Anyway, about a week after I was done turning that supply room over to him, I’m walking out of my platoon offices to go out to formation, and I look up at the interior of the building. Rather a lot of smoke up there, says I to myself, and then I trace it back and note that it’s not coming out of a truck exhaust stack, but out of the supply room loft. I trip the fire alarm on the way out, but that thing is anemic as hell, and you can’t hear it outside the building. Anyway, fire department is literally the next building over, so I make sure everyone knows to unass the building, see that they’re responding, and I walk out to formation. On the way to my platoon, I pass by the Headquarters platoon, and I tap the new supply sergeant on the shoulder… “Hey, dude… Your worries are over… Your supply room is on fire…”, and I guess my delivery and accompanying laughter made him think I was joking. I wasn’t. He took it as “Yeah, right… Pull the other one…”, and a few seconds later, here come the fire trucks in the motor pool gate. He gets all wild-eyed, and grabs me: “You’re bullsh*tting me, right? Right…?”. Few seconds after that, the commander comes running out, screaming, because he’s just noticed what everyone else did about ten minutes earlier, and he’s reacting to it all.

I wish I could reproduce the look on the new supply sergeant’s face–He was usually unflappable, and had spent the entire transition in a state of trying to talk me down from a nervous breakdown due to being on the hook for literally millions of dollars of unaccounted for property, which he managed to figure out. So, when I told him the supply room was on fire, with all his work in it, well… Yeah. Plus, I’d been joking for weeks about burning the place down to hide the fact that the records were that messed-up, so he half-way thought I might have snapped and really done it.

That may be one of those things you had to be there for, to see the humor inherent to the situation. Still makes me laugh, though, thinking about the look on his face… Priceless. Well worth the preceding weeks of grief, to get to see that on someone’s face.

They did get the fire out, thank God, and well before the records were even at risk. Turns out, old canvas tents that some idiot soaked in a mixture of linseed oil and wax are not the ideal thing to leave under a hot light… Who knew?

between this

>I’m sitting there enjoying a snack, reading the material, interested in how they’d identified the blood proteins from the coprolites, and asking questions, because the instructor had done similar work in forensics…
>Meanwhile, I’m getting open stares from some of the people around me, and I’m looking back at them, trying to figure out what the hell the problem was. I guess the rare roast beef sandwich was a bit much…

and your rabbit story, I laughed for a solid couple of minutes.

Maybe I just have a sick sense of humor.

When it comes to blowback, I’m OK with it in principle. Sometimes to defeat the enemy of the hour you call forces into being that become the enemy of the next week. Russia for the Germans, Muslims for the Russians. Also, China for the Russians. I’m not sure which of the latter will ultimately prove to be the worse of the two, for all the Muslims scored a terrible wound on 9/11. You don’t always get lucky and manage to arrange the world to advantage by yourself or with only like-mindeds on side.

SO I’m OK that the US propped up the Mujahidin parties to gut the Russians, and I’m even OK that they then “abandoned” Afghanistan [a common complaint, as though more was owed], to settle itself and the mujahidin showed their criminal side badly enough to birth the Taliban. It didn’t quite need to lead to a successful AQ strike on the US, nor did the response in 2001-3 need to produce 18 years of failed nation building.

These problems were never slippery slopes without possible stopping or deviation points. Pop journalists insist on treating them that way, though.

With Yugoslavia, I am on side with your comments. Those aspects are wildly underappreciated to say the least. Given how much Tito himself had been a bit of a deviant from the Soviet bloc from early on, undermining his country concept as a way of hitting at the Soviets seems like a lack of nuance terribly shocking from the State Department’s e-lite cadre of diplomatin’ men.

And letting the Saudis in even back then. Hoowee. There was too little coverage of the role they have played even since 1990. Digging back a further generation really clarifies the picture.

I can’t think of any American geopolitical error that would have seemed more necessary in the 40s-80s that has borne more bitter fruit since than the alliance with Saudi. I’m OK with propping up their regime, selling them AVs, and so on. I don’t need a crusade for democracy and women’s rights there. But the US’s indulgence of their enormous ideological/religious and geopolitical ambition is way out of control.

Back in 1991, I assume because it was the summer after Desert Storm, the Saudi government was pulling out all the stops in PR. I don’t know how this manifested elsewhere, but in Toronto they took over a large exhbition space at the Canadian National Exhibition during that two week fair [it was the Ontario Government Building that at that time had long been also known as the Carlsberg pavilion, after the beer brand]. If that was gratis by the CNE board or the government, I am retroactively outraged. I assume the Saudis payed. If so, that would likely have cost a bundle. It was full of displays extolling their economic and technological development, construction programs, their affinity with western peoples, and so on. And tons of swag.

My father, not a notable geopolitical sophisticate to be sure, was pretty cynical about it.

I’d like to remember Chretien fondly in some ways. Liberal, and liberal, not progressive. Paul Martin, of all people, as a mentee of Maurice Strong, struck me as the thin end of the progressive wedge among senior Liberals.

Also, JC was an authentic working class French Canadian Quebecer type, a Canadian archetype I can have a fair amount of time for even if I don’t really have any connections to that identity. And even though he spent most of his working life in elected office and got rich as a patronage lawyer during his brief stint out of office. It’s all good.

Plus, only Canadian PM in my life to basically get away with manhandling and slightly choking a protester, and laughing off the RCMP pepper-spraying protesters with joke about putting pepper on his plate. He also, after power, several times spoke some home truth about the problems of Canadian Indians.

I think he’s finally gotten the memo now, but he was OK at times back in the day.

Smart enough not to back the Iraq war, too, whichever his reasons.

Terrible on defence, but what Canadian PM is not?

Justin, I have little to say in his favour save that he landed himself a beautiful wife. A talent of value.

The big thing to know about the former Yugoslavia is that it was essentially willed into existence from among a welter of really damaged people. Between all the various ethnic groups which made up the country, there are no really innocent parties. Each and every one of them is guilty of doing something to someone else somewhere along the line–And, with the numbers of clashing empires and nations that have washed over the territory, what you’re basically dealing with are a bunch of historically traumatized PTSD victims, in cultural terms. Just like the Russians, as an example, the Serbs have earned their paranoia and self-labeled victim status the hard way. Same as everyone else… I honestly think the Slovenes may be the closest to “sane” in terms of culture, but the rest…? Hoo-boy.

What Tito wrought was this: He welded together this marvelously fractious collection of ethnic groups, mainly by brute force. For awhile, after WWII, everyone was exhausted, and the message he sent was “Hey, we’re screwed alone; let’s gang up and get big enough to make a go of it…”. That happened to be in alignment with a bunch of Serb thinking, and the rest of the groups were just tired and cowed enough to go along, for awhile. Dubiously, but they did go along. Mostly out of fear, and remembering what life was like before Tito. That lasted as long as Tito did, and then the cracks started appearing in the facade.

Izetbegovic was one of them, consciously or unconsciously. The thing with him wasn’t necessarily that he was advocating for a Muslim resurgence, but that he didn’t get crushed when he did. Unlike the other groups did, he had an external constituency and paymasters–The Saudis and the US State Department. Money was flowing to the Muslims from the Arab world back when, and from what I understand, some of it was predicated upon Yugoslav military sales in the Arab world, which weren’t small. So, the other groups like the Serbians saw Izetbegovic getting away with his revanchism, and their finely-tuned instincts took over. It seems a small thing, but it wasn’t to the locals. Tito was dying, and everyone knew that once he was gone, there was no telling if the truce would hold.

If Tito had managed to outlive the memories of pre-WWII Yugoslavia, maybe things would have worked, and Yugoslavia might have come into existence as a real nation. As it was, though? It fell apart when he died, and a big chunk of that I have to lay at the door of outside influences. The idiots in the US State Department had no idea what the hell they were doing, back in the 1970s, or ever.

With Izetbegovic, they saw a pious, Allah-fearing man, someone who wasn’t a Godless Communist (TM) like the others, and they thought it was a good idea to support him and others like him. What the rest of the ethnic groups saw was quite different–They saw the Muslims lining up outside support, getting it, and the rest followed. Had the US State Department had the wisdom to say “Meh.” when the Yugoslavian government went to deal with Izetbegovic, I think things might, with much emphasis on the “might” have worked out differently. All the other groups in Yugoslavia would have looked at that, and said “Oh, ethno-nationalism isn’t a thing, any more… OK, we can live with that, so long as it’s evenly applied…”.

It manifestly was not, so the dancers on the ballroom floor spun up again. Took another 20 years for the whole thing to get going again, really, but the roots are there.

This is also another example of my message/signal theory on display: The message was, we’re all Yugoslavs together, forget your ethnic heritage… Signal? Yeah; except for you lot, over there… Go ahead, keep being Muslim, and in the pay of outside interests…

The Bosnian Muslims are basically the residual left-overs of the Ottoman Empire. They were the local Quislings, the turn-coats, the rat-bastards who went out for the Enemy, and did their dirty work. Also, the majority of them were the “townies”, who’d been lording it over the Good Country Folk (TM) since forever, running the taxes, being the landlords, all that sort of thing. The Serbs hated them with a passion that’s reserved for race-traitors, and you’ll often hear the Turk excoriated, but still somewhat admired for their strength and ruthlessness. You will never, ever hear the Bosnian Muslim described in the same terms by the same men. The Muslims are traitors who went over to the other side, in the long ethnic strife that is Yugoslavia.

Memories are long; the Serbs remember how the harems were filled in Istanbul, how the Janissaries were created, and by whom all that was administered. You start talking about Islamic renaissance to a Serb, what he remembers are those tales about Great-Great Grandmama’s baby sister being sold off to pay rent or taxes, and never seeing her again. In the Balkan stewpot, it does not pay to forget, because those that forgave and forgot wound up as the next set of victims.

So, whether or not he knew it, whether or not the State Department knew it, we lit the match on that whole cluster-f**k. Having done so, and not meant to?The lesson should have been “You’ve no idea, whatsoever, what you’re doing… Stop.”.

A sorry truth, but a truth nevertheless. I think the same is true of a lot of European armies as well. Ignore the conscripts, and the national ROE B.S. A lot of the European contingents did good work in Afghanistan, and ironically, some of the Scandinavian contingents were serious and useful contributors.

We tend to conflate country and its military with its government. The US Army wasn’t responsible for Obama, and the Canadian military certainly didn’t vote for Jean Cretien or Trudeau the younger!

Most of the guys I knew who served there, and one was a guy who was quite famous in Canada for a while, being wounded and decorated for an incident, all had pretty identical attitudes:

1. Cool! We get to actually do out real jobs for a change, and we might ACTUALLY get to kill people and break things! They absolutely LOVED being involved in a “real” operational tasking.

2. This is f’ed up! There is no good solution, and no good guys. Put a perimeter around the place, give succor to any refugee who reaches said perimeter. As for the rest, shovel surplus ammo over the wall/fence, till the noise stops. Let them kill each other, as it seems to be their national sport.

One Canadian General who ran UNPROFOR in Sarajevo, gauged his job performance by the death threats and denunciations. If he got an equal number from all the various factions, he was obviously doing his job properly.

Incidentally, Kirk mentioned Isebegovic, (not sure if my spelling of Kirk’s is the correct one). The State Department, and a bunch of other big organizations and NGOs, basically picked a side, because there has to be a white hat, and a black hat, and the black hat, and the consensus is that the Serbs were the black hats.

In reality, there WERE no good guys. Some were worse than others,(and the Serbs, or at least the Bosnian Serbs, probably were the worst), but there were no angels.

Isebegovic was playing the game of trying to depict himself as the victim and martyr, hoping to get western intervention for his side. It didn’t work, because a lot of the UN troops and staff, kept to their ethics of strict neutrality, and saw through his attempts at manipulating the situation.

The General I mentioned earlier, got a lot of denunciation in the international press, for being more even-handed than the narrative called for. He is famous for saying, after an infamous mortar attack on a civilian market, that he would make more progress in his ceasefire negotiations, if one of the factions would stop “shelling their own people for coverage on CNN”, or something like that.

Some of those guys are quite certainly sociopathic loons who should have been summarily executed, and in a sane country, would have been. We’re not that country.

Others of that group are men who the Army screwed up with, big-time–Case in example would be Staff Sergeant Bales and the massacre he conducted near Kandahar. Bales was a multi-tour veteran, had TBI, and was on a number of psychotropics treating him for all of that. His doctors had advised his commander not to take him on that deployment. Commander thought Bales was fine, took him. Bales loses his shit, Army blames Bales, bang, here we are. Bales should never have been put into that position. Institutional-level f-up, and the people that were really responsible for it happening were never prosecuted. Bales should have never been sent back to combat.

Bales was also not, apparently, a danger to anyone before the Army broke him. Is he responsible? To my way of thinking, if the doctors treating you advise against your deployment, then that pretty much means that you’re no longer fully responsible for your actions, especially when you start talking about TBI and other brain issues.

Pardon Bales? Absolutely. Then, lock his ass up in a nice, comfortable treatment facility until he is either back to normal, or dead. Concurrent with the pardon, court-martial the dumbass commissioned jackass that decided to ignore the doctors treating Bales.

The freaks involved in the Mahmudhiya deal, where some privates decided to rape a girl and kill her family to cover it up? All of them should have been summarily executed at the scene. The screening process that missed the ringleader, and the leadership that knew of his issues (guy got discharged for what I remember as “Inability to adapt” and sent home mid-tour), and still took him on deployment needed to be held accountable for that whole thing.

There’s still another bunch of these guys who got prosecuted because JAG and some staff weenies decided they’d committed crimes, which they were sometimes complicit in. Case in point here would be that of Lieutenant Behenna. You examine the particulars, there, and the question becomes “What the hell did they expect…?”. Behenna’s platoon had been hit by an IED ambush, two of his soldiers were killed, several wounded. Then, the geniuses on the staff decide “Oh, let’s task the LT with picking up the guy we think did it, and let’s also tell him…”. So, Lieutenant Behenna goes out, captures this guy along with a cache of ammunition and a light machinegun (AKs were like household appliances; everyone had them–The LMG was not legal, and an indicator of “involvement”), and brings him back to the FOB. That alone was a miracle, because most folks would probably have evaluated the reality of things, and just made sure that guy was killed in the course of capture. Behenna did the “right thing”, though, and took him in. Then, two weeks later, the MI assholes are like “Oh, we can’t prove a thing, now… Take him home, please…”.

I can’t prove it, but I think that the staff was playing games, and wanted that guy dead, but didn’t want to take responsibility for it, so they outsourced it to Behenna situationally. When it got reported, rather than admit that they’d basically used Behenna to kill him, they preferred charges.

And, you say, all simon-pure, that Behenna should have been a saint and foregone killing the guy, if that’s what happened. Here’s the reality, though: Behenna is a platoon leader over a bunch of guys with guns in an environment where they’re all fighting for their survival. In the dynamic, if Behenna had “done the right thing”, one of several outcomes would have probably ensued–His platoon, perhaps rightly, would have evaluated Behenna as a leader that didn’t care about them, and that would mean that the LT might take a bullet in the back, or just find himself going through a door alone some night, with no backup. Either way, those MI assholes put the LT in an impossible situation with his platoon. They never should have been tasked with going after someone that had killed their own, and they sure as hell shouldn’t have expected that that guy was going to make it home safe. They created the situation that led to the crime, and did so with either such malice as to be culpable, or they were just too stupid to be doing what they were put in charge of.

War is basically controlled sociopathy. That’s what the military is, in essence. That’s what all the traditions, regulations, and disciplinary structure are there for–Control. The problem is that you have to have a balance: Too little sociopathy, and you’re not going to have effective soldiers, unless your root social structure is already sociopathic. Too much, and you get things like My Lai.

You really can’t avoid it, when you ask men to go to war. Things are going to happen, and there are things that are going to look awfully ugly in the rear view mirror, like all those Japanese skulls sent home as souvenirs. In the final analysis, you’re going to have issues and errors, mistakes and tragedies. The trick is, you have to do a bit of a “dial-a-yield” on what you’re doing, and ensure that you’re making the troops sociopathic enough to survive and win, and not so deranged that you have to put them down once the war is over.

Professional soldiers are not people you want to take home to mama, in most cases. Offer them the right stimuli, even well after their military careers are over, and you’re going to see things happen that you really wouldn’t expect from a civilian. The majority of us are fairly good at keeping the beast leashed, but the odds are pretty good that you’ll be in for an unpleasant surprise if the leash ever snaps.