Category: wargasm

21st century fox. more than war, making the grand plan for man without ever being

A Fellow Named Joe

Posted on Posted in fitz stop, warriors

I have respect for Joe, this GI from long ago. I know, I know. But it wont continue so. Joe was a pilot for the Marines, as I was soldier. He flew over head, my head. Our enemies head. Those of us on the ground always looked up. We looked up as we ducked, jumped to the ground. The fighter jets were gone sometimes before you heard them. Not like the bombers. You knew they were coming minutes before they arrived. Their sound pounding you into the ground. the ground that then bounced, jerked you up and down, like a coin on a barracks bed. But that is not what this story is about. Not about those memories, instead about a question. One I hesitate to ask, in deference to Joe. Joe I do not know, or so this story goes.

One day Joe’s jet was shot down. Flopped to the ground. Actually into a lake. Flopped like a dying fish. Like a deadly great white shark into the shallow water. Fallen, like an angel of war, rage, anger. But Joe did not die. He was saved. He says captured. I do too.

War is fought on orders. It is not orderly, but it is by order, by command. Many of these are standing orders. The things you are supposed to know, follow, do, when no commander is around. Many of these are common sense, so are commonly disregarded. Our defense would be the “traffic light” defense, “but no one does.” We are all law breakers, we law abiding citizens of cane. Solders in war are ordered not to surrender, but if they are captured they are to fight on. Joe couldn’t do much fighting. He was a pilot without wings, with broken arms, legs. You can guess what a plane crash does.

But now comes the odd thing. Odd to me, perhaps since I was enlisted, not an officer. Enlisted, even though I think of my “enlistment” as imprisonment for protesting the war. I was told that I was supposed to fight or escape. The reason for the escape was so that I could return to fight. I could return with information. Stuff such as, how well fed. What type of weapons. How dug in. Where were the guns. How fit were the soldiers. How many prisoners did they have. That type of thing. Stuff that might be of use in fighting an enemy. Stuff that the enemy would not want you to leave knowing. Now comes the odd thing. Joe was told he could go. Go, why no, said Joe. I will not go. I will stay. Stay this day. Stay that day. I will not go, no way. I intend to stay, said Joe.

I do not know why, but to this day still, Joe stays. Joe stays. We salute him still. Maybe he stayed so he could not kill. If so I salute Joe now.

Local Liquor

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, warriors

Odd numbers: a point revealed by beer and spirits sales. You can locate large universities or military bases by the spiked volumes consumed per population. Soldiers and students drink alcohol in distinctly larger amount than the baseline population. We can also locate military retirees from other retirees by the type of booze sold to a region. Now this is having fun.

Attack

Posted on Posted in bead game, wargasm

How you see the problem limits you. That is the point of the “out of the box” puzzle. You set your own limits. You use the limits set on you when you were younger, is what is at play in that example. The way you attack an enemy is a blended, or rendered vision of what you know of him, what you think of yourself, what you think he knows of you.

Appropriate barracks games seem at first to be, chess, rock-sissors-paper, arm wrestling, perhaps poker. None of these games teaches how to understand beyond the strength of the key military weapon. Things that go boom. Our form of attack is limited to boom and zoom scenarios. More limiting to our options than a date on a calendar.

let us take on the “date certain” uncertainty. See how certain it is at producing our assumed goal, say in Iraz, a fictional state of your mind.

Suppose we begin with two general choices that expand on the broad principle that “we will leave Iraz.” This principle applies to our military forces, and everyone knows this. Those who want us to remain, those who want us to leave, those who don’t know or care. All groups know that we will leave. The only hedge being that we say “militarily” and that the terms are unspecified.

There are those, the ones that hold power over us, hence prevailing opinion is that if we tell the enemy a date of our “military” withdrawal, our enemy, “they,” wins. These elite militarists must hold this opinion based upon some prior knowledge, education or experience, since they don’t expand on their reasoning. They don’t even try to explain to us, since we are supposed to see this through their eyes. Such is the case of most players of “the game.” They play their side, their part, their role. It is difficult for these players to win against a player of new games requiring new roles and rules. Who would think of attacking a destroyer in a dinghy? Thinking goes boom instead of zoom.

Grant that our enemy knows this predicament. I suggest that they even count on it. Maybe they didn’t at the first round of the game, but they seem smart enough to understand the basic principles of this round of this game. Asymmetry rules in a disorderly world. War is high disorder, dare I say “elite.” Advantage goes to the patient gamer in a multiple play world. That’s the “elite” way of saying “we can’t give up.” By staying you continue playing this game. Change the game is a better choice. Use another means to gain advantage. Zoom instead of boom.

Play the other side of the board. You have the advantage of knowing this side for a very long time, so playing your opponent should be easy. A no brainer. With a condition certain what do you do? With a date certain what do you do? they are probably the same thing. Conserve your forces. build upon your strengths. Shore up your weakness. These are of course relative terms. they are understood as terms of comparison to the US /us/ forces.

Date certain or condition certain provide the enemy the same result.

You assume that our enemy is small and shrinking, if you believe that an insurgent force is our enemy. The insurgency is supplied by the population. The population is supposed to provide our reason for being there, for staying there. They are the measure of success. They are also the means to success.

Perhaps you can’t set the circumstance, the condition. Then the enemy does. Suppose you can’t set the date. Then the enemy does. If the likely results are the same, the winner is the one who chooses first. Perhaps you can’t set the condition, since you are uncertain. You hesitate to tell anyone, even yourself. Uncertainty in war is a necessary condition, but it is also the losing stance. Set the condition of your choice. Define how you leave so that you can define how you return. Take over the game. The enemy wins by draining our key assets, by pinning us down. Our key asset is not our military, it is our national drive. Our enemy has diverted our attention.

Delay Us. Play Us. these are better for the weaker force, not the stronger.

Set date or conditions, if you set neither, you never leave. You remain, stranded, stuck in an endless losing game. Tic-Tac-Toe or Tick Tock Go.