7/30/24

 Tuesday, July 30, 2024

1945 After delivering the atomic bomb across the Pacific, the USS Indianapolis was sunk by the Japanese submarine I-58. 880 of the crew die, many after being attacked by sharks.

1965 US President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill. 

1967 'Race riot' in Milwaukee (4 killed)

1988 Jordanian King Hussein renounced sovereignty over the West Bank to the PLO, hours after dissolving Jordan's House of Representatives.

In bed at 9 p.m. awake at 12:03 a.m. and up at 12:35, unable to sleep with pain in my right hip, thigh, and knee.  I read the papers and wrote in the journal till 4 when I let Lilly out, awake for 4 hours and operating on 3 hours sleep, pain in knee and hip.  I nodded off for about half and hour between 6:30 and 7 a.m.

Prednisone, day 79, 15 mg., day 1.  The first day the dosage was reduced back to 15 mg. in the morning, and none in the evening.   I took my 15 mg. at 5:15 a.m.   Breakfast was 2 pieces of buttered high-fiber toast.  I took 1300 mg. Tylenol Extended Release at 7 a.m. and another 1300 at 3 p.m.

William Calley.  News has surfaced that Wiliam Calley, the officer in charge of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam on March 16, 1968, died in a hospice in Florida on April 28th of this year.  From the WaPo story:

On the morning of March 16, 1968, the unit was airlifted by helicopter to Son My, a patchwork village of rice paddies, irrigation ditches and small settlements, including a hamlet known to U.S. soldiers as My Lai 4. Over the next few hours, Mr. Calley and other soldiers in Charlie Company shot and bayoneted women, children and elderly men, destroying the village while searching for Viet Cong guerrillas and sympathizers who were said to have been hiding in the area. Homes were burned, and some women and girls were gang-raped before being killed.

An Army investigation later concluded that 347 men, women and children had been killed, including victims of another American unit, Bravo Company. A Vietnamese estimate placed the death toll at 504.

For more than a year and a half, the details of the atrocity were hidden and covered up from the public. A report to headquarters initially characterized the attack as a significant victory, claiming that 128 “enemy” fighters had been killed. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, praised American forces at My Lai for dealing a “heavy blow” to the Viet Cong.

What struck me in reading the story was the similarity between My Lai and Hamas's actions in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. but also what has been happening for the 9 months thereafter in Gaza, i.e.,, the killing of women, children, and elderly noncombatants, although on an industrial scale in Gaza.  I was also struck by how, by the beginning of 1968, less than 3 years after the 3rd Marine Division landed in Vietnam, the military was so hard up for leadership.  Calley was about 5' 3" tall and 130 pounds, child size.  He had to repeat 7th grade.  He graduated in the bottom quarter of his high school class.  He flunked out of Palm Beach Junior College after which he worked as a hotel bellhop and a restaurant dishwasher.  With that background, he was selected for Officer Candidate School where he graduated 120th in his class of 156.  What is most striking about Calley and his men and the My Lai massacre is that these American soldiers were ordered to kill hundreds of Asian civilians - women, children, and old men - and they did it.  They did it, much like the Hamas "terrorists" did it on October 7th, just like the Russian soldiers did in Bucha, north of Kyiv, in 2022, much like the Marines who killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, did it in 2005 - men, women, elderly people and children as young as 1-year-old.  Many thoughts are darting around my brain as I reflect on the military and war and what they do to people but I'm too tired and in too much distracting pain at 6 o'clock this morning as I write to say much about it except for one thought: I wonder how many civilians of all ages were killed or wounded, incinerated or poisoned, by the thousands of air missions we kept track of in the TACC during my time there.  How much did we think of them?  What did we think of them?  How connected to them, spiritually, and emotionally, as nominal Christians, Jews, and people of the Book, were we as we lived behind our barbed wire fencing?  think the honest answer is "Not at all."  What does that say about us?  About me?  And finally, what are we to think of our government's, i.e., Joe Biden's, providing 14,000 2,000-pound bombs to Israel since Hamas's October massacre, knowing their immense destructive power and knowing that they would be used against Palestinian civilians in one of the world's most densely populated areas?

Anniversaries thoughts: First, The Indianapolis.  I have taken to taking note of certain anniversaries in this journal and ignoring most.  The reason is that I feel some connection, historically or emotionally or otherwise, to some though not to most.  My connection to the Indy is through Iwo Jima where she was one of the many ships providing naval gunfire in support of the Marines onshore, including my father, and through Hiroshima, where I visited in 1965 before deploying to Vietnam.  The Indy was the ship that transported the uranium and some other vital parts to Tinian Island in July 1945 to be incorporated into the atom bomb that leveled Hiroshima on August 6th.  For reasons that are not at all clear to me, there seems to be some cosmic significance to the fact that, after delivering the deadly uranium to Tinian, the Indy was torpedoed on July 30 by a Japanese submarine and sank in 12 minutes in the Philippine Sea.  Of 1,195 crewmen aboard, approximately 300 went down with the ship. The remaining 890 faced exposure, dehydration, saltwater poisoning, and shark attacks while stranded in the open ocean with few lifeboats and almost no food or water.  Only 316 survived.  The sinking of the Indianapolis was the greatest loss of life from a single ship lost at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy.  On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's unconditional surrender.

The ship's history in the Pacific Theater of WW II is extensive and the story of the hundreds of sailors cast adrift after the ship sank is dramatic.  Indeed, it is mentioned in the movie Jaws and is the subject of two documentary films.  The experience of those sailors and naval officers reminds me, though I need no reminding, that it isn't just soldiers and Marines who endure tremendous hardship and risk injury and death in war, but also sailors and air crews.  And of course, as I remember from my days as a CACO in Philadelphia, there are those loved ones  back home who each day dread the knock on the door.

Second, Medicare was created 59 years ago today and whether and now it may continue is still uncertain  today.  The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 is widely, and accurately believed, to be a blueprint of actions to be taken if and when Donald Trump becomes president again next year. “In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem,” the Project 2025 proposal states.  Project 2025 proposes making Medicare Advantage, the bundled alternative to Original Medicare, the default enrollment plan for Medicare beneficiaries. Medicare Advantage is offered by private insurers with federal government contracts to individuals who qualify for Medicare. It functions similarly to health insurance plans offered by private employers, in which policyholders have a set network of providers they can visit. About half of Medicare recipients are currently enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans.  Medicare Advantage is basically an HMO plan, i.,e. it largely privatizes Medicare by relying on private insurance companies to provide care.  Although Trump himself has taken a 'hands-off' position on changes to Social Security and Medicare, and Project 2025 does not propose abolishing either, Republicans have always been on the warpath against these 'socialist' programs (like the VA's health care program) and if Trumpsters take over the government, watch out.  They are 'standing back and standing by.'

 Third, Milwaukee's 'race riot' in 1967 stirs memories.  From my memoir:

On Monday morning, July 31st, your mother and I were sleeping in the bedroom of our new home, a fifth floor apartment in the northernmost Juneau Village building at 1129 N. Jackson Street.  The phone rang between 5 and 5:30.  Half-asleep, I dragged myself out of bed to get to the kitchen and answer it.  It was my father who responded to my croaky “Hello?” with a worried “Are you alright?”  I said “We’re fine.  What’s wrong?”  (My Dad is an early riser, but he was not in the habit of calling at daybreak simply to inquire about our general well-being.)  “There’s a riot up there and they’ve closed off the city.”  That was how I learned that Milwaukee had joined the list of the other cities in having what was called either a “civil disturbance” or a “race riot,” depending on one’s purpose, one’s level of excitability and one’s tendency to look at the world through race-tinted lenses.  I woke up your mother and turned on the Channel 6 news which confirmed my father’s report.  

It took some imagination to characterize the trouble in Milwaukee as a “riot.”  The disturbance was pretty much restricted to a 5 hour period on the night of July 30-31.  Starting at about 9:45 p.m. on Sunday, the 30th, a group of young blacks went on a vandalism rampage on North 3rd Street, starting north of State Street and proceeding up to the Center Street, Burleigh Avenue area, breaking windows and raising hell, but without gunfire or arson or significant looting.  As the vandalism on Third Street raged, Father Matthew left the St. Francis rectory at 4th and Brown and tried to calm down the vandals.  He came close to getting beaten by one of the participants, but others protected Matthew, whose peacemaking efforts proved inadequate to the challenge of what was occurring.  A few blocks north, on Center Street, a white yahoo drove up and down the street, calling the on-looking residents “niggers” and, according to some witnesses, shooting a weapon out the car window.   One of the residents, a 55 year old man of limited mental capacity named John Oraa Tucker, a janitor at Shorewood High School, went into his house at 134 West Center Street, grabbed his shotgun, came back outside and shot at the white provocateur, who drove away.  A short time later, however, another car with 4 white men pulled up and, when the riders started to get out of the car, Tucker believed them to be threatening troublemakers.  He discharged his shotgun at them.  As it turned out, those men were plainclothes police officers.  In what quickly became a shootout between Tucker and responding police officers, one officer was killed by a shotgun blast, 6 others were wounded, and a bystander was killed by a police bullet.  Two of the injured officers were to become my law students later: John Carter, who was blinded, and LeRoy Jones, whose torso was peppered with birdshot.  Mayor Maier got governor Warren Knowles (of Dick Cheney internship fame) to call out the Wisconsin National Guard, who set up their headquarters at Garfield Avenue School. Chief Brier established his tactical headquarters in the Gimbel’s-Shusters building across from the school.  Maier declared a state of emergency and put the entire city under curfew.  None of us was permitted to leave his or her home on either Monday the 31st or Tuesday, August 1st.   On August 2nd, the curfew was eased to 7 p.m. to 5:30 a.m.  It stayed in place through August 8th.  In the days immediately after the disturbance, Maier also quarantined the city, permitting no one in or out.  (This was to keep out those ubiquitous fomenters of urban uprisings, “outside agitators,” i.e., Chicago blacks.)  

The Aftermath

Milwaukee has yet to recover from that one night of vandalism and violence four decades ago.  The black uprising was followed by open housing marches led by the increasingly-in-your-face Father Jim (I’m No Martin Luther King) Groppi and his NAACP Youth Council “Commandos.” I haven’t checked the census data, but I suspect that white flight increased after the uprising, and spiked after the school desegregation decree in 1976.  The 3rd Street shopping area, the North Side equivalent of the once-thriving Mitchell Street area on the South Side, has never regained the vitality it had before the uprising.

The uprising, the state of emergency, the curfew, the National Guard troops patrolling the city, the quarantine or blockade: such was our welcome back to Milwaukee.  It would be too much to compare it to life on the airbase in Danang, of course, but there we were, confined to close quarters at night for fear of encountering hostile forces, with the area occupied by armed troops (the equivalent of about 2 ½ Marine infantry battalions), access controlled at check points, and a sense of fear and anger and resentment and distrust and suspicion afoot throughout the city.  It wasn’t all that different from Vietnam.  So much for gemeutlichkeit.

Fourth, Jordan ceded sovereignty over the West Bank to the PLO in 1988.   It was never clear that Jordan had legal sovereignty over the West Bank after Israel's War of Independence.  That Jordan occupied and controlled the West Bank was clear enough, but most of the world's nation-states did not recognize its claim to legitimacy and sovereignty.  Everything was complicated by the long history of Ottoman rule, WW II, the British Mandate, and the creation of the State of Israel. From Wikipedia:

 "In 1974, the Arab League decided to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The decision forced King Hussein to relinquish his claim to speak for the Palestinian people during peace negotiations and to recognize an independent Palestinian state that is independent of Jordan.

On 28 July 1988, King Hussein announced the cessation of a $1.3 billion development program for the West Bank. He explained that the aim of this move was to allow the PLO to take more responsibility for these territories.  Two days later the king dissolved Jordan's lower house of parliament, half of whose members represented constituencies in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

For the last 57 years, Israel has occupied the West Bank, reminding me of Br'er Fox's tar baby.