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 Monday, November 21, 2022

In bed at 9, up at 4, 2 pss, one snifter.  Woke up with thoughts of my old law firm and partner and fellow Leo H. S. alumnus John Finerty.  Warmish out at 31, degrees and high of 39 expected.  Geri let Lilly out at 4:25, I let her in 5 minutes later.

Max Hastings, Vietnam: Epic Tragedy 1945-1975, Operation Starlite

Watching the Ken Burns documentary and spot-reading Max Hastings' book resurfaces some very old memories.   Another memory stirred.  I was the Senior Air Controller for the launch of "Operation Starlite a few weeks after I arrived at Danang.  I remember it being a BFD, and indeed it was.  In the official 250-page USMC history THE U.S. MARINES IN VIETNAM: THE LANDING AND THE BUILDUP 1965, chapter 5 is titled "Operation Starlite: The First Big Battle."  There was considerable excitement around Wing HQ about it.  Maj. DuBois attended the briefings at Wing HQ and then briefed us junior officers who would be in charge of the TACC during the operation.  The Marine ground force commanders considered the operation a success although, according to the official history, the ARVN generals weren't impressed and my best recollection half a century later is that we TACC center officers weren't too impressed either.  Reading the official history now through a 'retrospectoscope,' i.e., with hindsight, is a painful experience.  Starlite was indeed the Marines' first "big battle" in Vietnam and whether it be considered a 'win' or not, the history foretold the ultimate futility of the massive U.S. military effort.  Some telling excerpts: 

"Civilians in the combat zone presented complications.  The first attempts to evacuate them were difficult; the people were frightened and did not trust the Marines.  Eventually, most of the local populace were placed in local collecting points where they were fed and provided with medical attention.  Although attempts were made to avoid civilian casualties, some villages were completely destroyed by supporting arms when it became obvious that the enemy occupied fortified positions in them."

and

"At 0615, 15 minutes before H-Hour, Battery K, 4th Battalion, 12th Marines, which had displaced to firing positions on the northern bank of the Tra Bong River in the Chu Lai TAOR the night before began 155mm preparation fires on the helicopter landing zone.  The artillery was soon reinforced by 20 Marine A-4s and F-4s which dropped 18 tons of bombs and napalm on the LZ."

The Operation Starlite "big battle" receives the following attention in Max Hastings' book:

" . . .Capt. Andrew Comer was executive officer of the 3/3rd Marines during the August 1965 Operation Starlite, an amphibious assault on the Batangan Peninsular near Danang.  Although his superiors reported success, he assessed the battle as a shambles.  He described how the commander of a tank "fired with its machine gun on a boy of about 10 years of age at a range of 75 yards.  Comer ran to the ditch where the boy had taken refuge, "saw that he was unarmed and unhurt and sent him on his way."  Seeking to remonstrate with the shooter, he could not make himself heard above the roar of the tank's engine.

An amphibious tractor driver succumbed to hysterics under incoming mortar fire.  The man repeatedly reversed his vehicle over wounded men, killing five prostrate Americans beneath its tracks.  . . The captain gazed in revulsion at the helmeted head of one of the victims, a man he recognized: this lay at his feet, while the rest of the remains were caught beneath the tractor's tracks."

What fools we were, what deluded lethal innocents, 'young struggling democracy', 'first to fight for right and freedom and to keep our honor clean.'  'Civilians in combat areas presented complications,' 'people were frightened and did not trust Marines,' 'villages completely destroyed,' '10-year-old boy, unarmed'.  Mene, mene, tekel upharsin.  The writing was on the wall already and we junior officers could read it; so could Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, Ho Chi Minh, Gen. Giap. and Le Duan.

Thoughts of my father

Watching Ken Burns' segment on the Marines at Con Thien and Marine Harris' comment: "People get blown to bits, literally blown to bits" reminded me of course of my father on Iwo Jima, only 20 years before  Con Thien.  We rarely talked about either Iwo Jima or Vietnam, like millions of other veterans, but he told me once that he and the other Marines on Iwo weren't afraid of getting shot.  They were afraid of getting 'blown to bits'.  He was a radioman in the Joint Assault Signal Company, the JASCO, and spent 27 days  at the communication center on the landing beach.  William Manchester, himself a WWII Marine, wrote a memoir Goodbye Darkness, in which he described the landing beach on Iwo Jima: 

    "It resembled Doré’s illustrations of Inferno.  Essential cargo – ammo, rations, water – was piled up in sprawling chaos.  And gore, flesh, and bones were lying all about. The deaths on Iwo were extraordinarily violent.  There seemed to be no clean wounds, just fragments of corpses.  It reminded one battalion medical officer of a Bellevue dissecting room.  Often the only way to distinguish between Japanese and Marine dead was by the legs; Marines wore canvas leggings and Nips khaki puttees.  Otherwise, identification was completely impossible.  You tripped over strings of viscera fifteen feet long, over bodies which had been cut in half at the waist.  Legs and arms, and heads bearing only necks, lay fifty feet from the closest torsos.  As night fell the beachhead reeked with the stench of burning flesh."

My father told me, perhaps in the same conversation at his kitchen table in Florida where he told me of the fear of being 'blown to bits,' that the Marines didn't want to discharge him when they did, shortly before Thanksgiving, 1945.  The war with Japan had been over for 3 months and 8 months had gone by since he offloaded from Iwo to some amphibious ship carrying Marines back to Hawaii.  He was stationed at  Great Lakes Naval Base north of Chicago.  Though he didn't say it, it was clear that the Marines didn't want to keep him on active duty because he was a valuable or useful Marine.  He had left boot camp at San Diego as a buck private, E-1, the lowest enlisted rank.  He was discharged as a buck private, not even a PFC.  Even after enduring the horrors of Iwo Jima, he carried the lowest possible rank in the Marine Corps.  The government didn't want to discharge him because he was an emotional "basket case," not fit to be returned to civilian life.  But he did return and my 23-year-old mother, my 1-year-old sister, and I lived, as best we could, with the emotional, spiritual wreck the war had left him.  How many times my poor beloved heroic mother said to my sister and me 'he loves you, he just doesn't know how to show it.'  He remained haunted by his service in the war for most, perhaps all, of the rest of his life.  My sister and I carried the secondary effects of his PTSD through our lives, collateral damage.  So when I hear from the Marines at Con Thien (and other battles in Vietnam),  I suffer some with them and with their wives, children, siblings, and parents they came home to.  And I think of all of them every time some politician beats the drum to 'send in the Marines' to someplace on the face of the earth where the type of government or some other condition is thought to be threatening to America's "national security" or "vital interests."   I thought of all of them in March 1991, when just after his victory in the first Persian Gulf War, the offensively ebullient President George H.W. Bush told a group of state legislators, "The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.... By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."  Of course, he was unfortunately correct, as demonstrated by his son in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.   I suppose Ken Burns' might describe each of those misadventures the way he did Vietnam: "It was begun in good faith by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and . . .  miscalculations."

A painting I worked up many years ago of George H. W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher after the First Gulf War.  Barely visible in the white background are the spectral faces of ghosts, those who died in the war, looking on as Bush solicits and revels in cheers from a surrounding crowd.

Webb telescope spots the earliest galaxies yet, and they are cosmic oddballs

The two bundles of stars formed shortly after the big bang, offering a long-anticipated window into the origins of the universe.  One of the two galaxies dates to about 350 million years after the big bang, making it the most distant galaxy ever discovered. . .  Although 350 million years seems an unimaginably long time after the big bang, it is relatively early in the life of our universe.  “The universe is 13.8 billion years old. We’re looking back through 98 percent of all time to see a galaxy like this,” said Garth Illingworth, an astronomer from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Meanwhile, back on Wakefield Court, Village of Bayside, Milwaukee County, State of Wisconsin, USA, North America, Planet Earth, the Universe, the Mind of God, the morning sun drifting further south each day and shining through the window through which I watch the world pass by moves closer to its winter solstice endpoint on our fireplace, when and where it will reliably reverse course.