I Could Have Been a General.

[jimboloco]

This is a letter I composed today for my father's brother, also a WW2 bomber pilot like my long gone but not forgotten dad, as I have been troubled lately with visions of glory, fame, and money, I could have been a general. If I ever write my auto-biography, this will be the title. Instead I became a beat dharma bum, lonesome traveler without a poem till I found my home. Ah, above the clouds, with weapons and speed and power. Not there, no, way down below, tai chi poems and humbled charms.

Hi Drew

I've been haunted lately by thoughts about how things would have been different had I stayed in the Air Force. Indeed, I could have easily chosen another path with far more rewarding circumstances.

I was troubled by a melancholy spirit and the root cause was a terrible lack of self esteem, even a basic self awareness that I had a choice about my life as a boy. This was kept apart from me so clean that I never was able to make a firm mental picture of what my destiny could become. I clearly was destined to fly B-52's in the Air Force all along. There was no vision, no build up of confidence.

When I managed to graduate from college and got my commission, my step-dad Harold told me "You don't look like a Lieutenant." Right there I could have left home, not gone to Holland for sister Kathleen's glamorous wedding and my strutting about in my dress mess. I could have spent the month of May, 1969, in Shreveport and Blanchard, getting myself steady before going into active duty and pilot training. I could have set my intent and gone forward, done that year in Vietnam, which I did, then choose B-52's for a career.

I could have been flying out of Barksdale AFB, bombing Hanoi in the closing days of the war, before the POW's were finally released. Might even been shot down myself, a real fulfilling of my intended destiny. The familial love and respect would have been enormous, a wonderful glad life, likely with family and children as well.

Here I am, 62, having traversed a troubling route,, simply for the opportunity to stand at the gates of the Republican Convention in 1972, with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. We formed a cordon where the delegates walked through and we held the line, as red shirted protesters behind us tried to break through. I threw one kid back and turned around to shouts of "right on!" from my band of brothers. All the while a large contingent of uniformed riot squad ready police stood in formation behind the gates at parade rest. Some sort of harmonic convergence was there as they waited until all the delegates had arrived then moved forward to close the gate and we were dispersed with tear gas and some fighting. My Shreveport Marine friend, Robert McClain, stayed after "to fight the police." I left and came back to Detroit with a wounded veteran, "Detroit" Bill, a double amputee, arm and leg. He got around well with a long arm brace. He had been HALO jumper high altitude low opening over the north. There were others also, lots of anti-war veterans, a great experience.

Then the whole sky and nothing.

So yeah maybe spending time with grandmother Truth in Blanchard would have calmed me. Maybe I would have felt an opening to talk. It would have been better if I had changed my home base to Shreveport long ago when I first left home. I suppose so. I could have said I was gonna fly to win the cold war anyway. And the B-52 is such a terrible and magnificent bird. Wonderful flying I am sure. Great glory as well.

They say the Lord works in strange ways. This is true in my case. Now I am 62, in decent health, planning for many more years of living. I have a humble yet well paying job and great circumstances, save for the annual Air Force pension. So I have to keep working in order to maintain a decent lifestyle for my wife and our cats. I now have grandkids and a a son-out-law, what I call him. My wife and her daughter are best friends, a truly beautiful life for them.

I am an active member of the VVAW, have submitted an article I wrote with a high school history student. It will hopefully be included in the Fall 2009 Veteran. I am also blessed with a Tai Chi group that is world class, Taoist Tai Chi Society of St Petersburg. I have a great counselor, a zen practitioner, also a cyber friend lady in Israel who left a prayer for me at the Wailing Wall this summer. I also am a sustaining member of www.wmnf.org community radio Tampa Bay and have been a caller there on numerous occasions for many years now, Rob Lorei's Radioactivity show at 1 pm weekdays. Plus I also call in afterwards and leave messages on his recorded line about controversial topics. There are of course edited and chosen, but I got a 500 batting average there and have learned a lot about talking clarity and developed communication skills thru that show.

Nothing would have really changed. I don't think I could have won the Vietnam War had I really tried. But I did have an impact towards a more rational and indeed restrained usage of the US military with a clearer and moral intent, as we are now seeing inside Afghanistan, with clear limits on the efficacy of tactical airstrikes and collateral damage, the killing of civilians which turns the populace against us, an unbridled anger.

I have to turn it over to God. I weep over my lost affection with Truth, who I know sufferred a lot because I failed her expectations and values. I am sorry for this yes. Had I realised a deeper bond with her, I might have looked to her for a more hawkish view.

The motivation to proceed forward either comes from outside or from within. In the absence of an external motivating personality, I wandered forward listening to my inner voice, had A Good look at the EARTH, found a deep anger and an immediate mission, and we marched as war veterans, the first contingent in US history to march against an active war. Veterans have marched to protest benefits since the Civil War. Now we also have an active contingent of Iraq Veterans Against the War. We generally have supported fighting Al-Quaida in Afghanistan, and I have been vocal and written about this.

So here I am and there you are, still watching the world turn, knowing there is a God and wondering, feeling both pain and humility, and goodness and lovingkindness. We are humankind, all of us oneday to be sisters and brothers. This is our destiny. May we be strong enough to make this happen.

Jimbo #2

[stilltrucking]

I could have been a doctor. Maybe a proctologist.

Still don't know my destiny jim,
this is it I suppose.

just don't know
I am not bored at all anymore
Except when the electricity goes off.


I have not seen izzy around in a long time,
miss her.
I wonder what she did about the rhino in the room?
I will always think of this as her board. Doreen and perezoso and Izzy had a discussion about a post that was moved from the creative board to the "fireplace board" if you remember the previous name for this board. So izzy said if we called it the "creative complaints" board would that make you happy.

where is #1

[jimboloco]

hi buddy, I tease the guys at hospital, say I am not a proctologist, whilst am putting on my gloves.

back yard taichi now, we are leaving tomorrow for tenth anniveraary marraige vacation, octoberfest at EPCOT.

love ya my friend.

So izzy said if we called it the "creative complaints" board would that make you happy.

IZZY is number one young woman, she be my sister-brother too yes we all gonna be sisters one fine day.

This is really a creative usage of neurotic troubles. I am clear manmmm, don't need no Scientology.

[stilltrucking]

Want to play Stratego?
Mr. Obama"s War

what ya think about that?

you know when somebody asks my brother what he thinks
he say
"as little as possible"

[jimboloco]

well it's easy enough to leave well enough alone
zen stupid i ain't
i have to heal my ancesters
like malidoma some from burkino faso
the african ancestors of black americans
were something to be ashamed of
according to the demeaning treatment sand subjugation of the
dominating eurocentric culture
ad these ancestors needed to be recalled
and understood and revered and there fore healed in
african contemporary psyche
http://www.cultural-expressions.com/diaspora/msome.htm
my ancestors were the opressors
and resisted change and were condemning
the revolutionary cultural-social-world view
that we the dharma poets and the civil rights and the anti-war movement
brought about

as well as bering revolutionary citizen-participants in the
extension of our global military power
to proclaim restraint please
man

damn right
that's a copout
yer brother better start thinkin
unless he likes fixin all those
new ptsd types

[jackofnightmares]

It amazes me that you called me a latent racist jimboloco.

[jimboloco]

that wasn't you
that was the other guy
i don't know you very well
as indeed i didn't know that other guy very well either
and i was better informed
and actually rescinded the accusation

ha ha

[jackofnightmares]

I don't know what Obama's race or your race has to do with the war in Afghanistan.

[jimboloco]

obama has a more humane idea about the actual living beings in afghanistan and is able to communicate thhis demeanor to the military and civilian advisors especially since he has called a halt to air strikes' excess
i do believe and they are redefining the role of our forces there to protecting kabul and chasing the al quaida
as well as letting the warlords and the taliban seperate themselves from the international terrorists who primarily recruit from pakistan and north africa
and actually we are calling once again for m0ore international help


oh i had a kind response from my elder sister kathleen
who posted me a poem that i will also post here

Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

[jimboloco]

younger sister della, who ran away at 15, but alas she had two daughters
one lives in india and california and is rich
the other lives in north carolina and is also a single mom, much kinder as was della

Hi Jimmy - cool, very well written, an insight into my brother's mind, and heart. I love you more than you know. Della

interesting response from my mother

Dear Jim, Believe it or not every life is remembered with could a should a would a. I have always liked the following little gem of philosophy: If I had of knew what I ought to of knew, I'd never of done what I did. Don't look back, look around at what you have for family and accomplishments. You should hear what Della says about her thirty years serving Krishna: what a waste it all was, what a doormat she was, and why? I say to you now, as the French soldier says to his comrade, Courage, mon ami and no regrets. Love, Mom

well that's about as tough as it gets

don't look back
look around

well golly, i think i can do both at the same time
and beau geste had no regrets
but france refused to support america when we invaded iraq
as they had quite a history in north africa and southeast asia
fighting angry anti-colonialists
soldier mom

well that's about as tough as it gets

don't look back
look around

well golly, i think i can do both at the same time
and beau geste had no regrets
but france refused to support america when we invaded iraq
as they had quite a history in north africa and southeast asia
fighting angry anti-colonialists



and i do have regrets

but not about refusing duty



i have regrets about not being able to know that
i had no home to return to
and was unable to stabilise in one place
until i went to shreveport for those five years
talking at the vet center, meditating with a group i found
and being gainfully employed

i have no regrets about my journey from shreveport through texas to florida
as i was able to find real community here

i also know that harold did continue to grow and had he lived, we would have grown in relationship to him
i know that

you need to know that we really do love you
it is important
we are all healing each other

jimbo

[jackofnightmares]

Thanks jimbo
I was interested in what you might have to say about Afghanistan.
It is so amazing to me that the guys who were all for the pullout and sending the trops to Iraq are now the wisemen telling the public what Obama should do.

[stilltrucking]

Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco
By FRANK RICH

THOSE of us who love F. Scott Fitzgerald must acknowledge that he did get one big thing wrong. There are second acts in American lives. (Just ask Marion Barry, or William Shatner.) The real question is whether everyone deserves a second act. Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great Afghanistan debate is the Beltway credence given to the ravings of the unrepentant blunderers who dug us into this hole in the first place.



Let’s be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 — when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq — bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued. Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess — even though the number of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to fewer than 100, according to the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones.

But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was “the central front in the war on terror” when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.

To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.

Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.

He takes no responsibility for any of this. Asked by Katie Couric last week about our failures in Afghanistan, McCain spoke as if he were an innocent bystander: “I think the reason why we didn’t do a better job on Afghanistan is our attention — either rightly or wrongly — was on Iraq.” As Tonto says to the Lone Ranger, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page to assert that “we have no choice” but to go all-in on Afghanistan — rightly or wrongly, presumably — just as we had in Iraq. Why? “The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse,” they wrote. “The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again.”

This shameless argument assumes — perhaps correctly — that no one in this country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003 — and we did so at the Three Amigos’ urging. Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 — even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we’re being asked to pay for their mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country where Al Qaeda has largely vanished.

To make the case, the Amigos and their fellow travelers conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda much as they long conflated Saddam’s regime with Al Qaeda. But as Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post reported on Thursday, American intelligence officials now say that “there are few, if any, links between Taliban commanders in Afghanistan today and senior Al Qaeda members” — a far cry from the tight Taliban-bin Laden alliance of 2001.

The rhetorical sleights of hand in the hawks’ arguments don’t end there. If you listen carefully to McCain and his neocon echo chamber, you’ll notice certain tics. President Obama better make his decision by tomorrow, or Armageddon (if not mushroom clouds) will arrive. We must “win” in Afghanistan — but victory is left vaguely defined. That’s because we will never build a functioning state in a country where there has never been one. Nor can we score a victory against the world’s dispersed, stateless terrorists by getting bogged down in a hellish landscape that contains few of them.

Most tellingly, perhaps, those clamoring for an escalation in Afghanistan avoid mentioning the name of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, or the fraud-filled August election that conclusively delegitimized his government. To do so would require explaining why America should place its troops in alliance with a corrupt partner knee-deep in the narcotics trade. As long as Karzai and the election are airbrushed out of history, it can be disingenuously argued that nothing has changed on the ground since Obama’s inauguration and that he has no right to revise his earlier judgment that Afghanistan is a “war of necessity.”

Those demanding more combat troops for Afghanistan also avoid defining the real costs. The Congressional Research Service estimates that the war was running $2.6 billion a month in Pentagon expenses alone even before Obama added 20,000 troops this year. Surely fiscal conservatives like McCain and Graham who rant about deficits being “generational theft” have an obligation to explain what the added bill will be on an Afghanistan escalation and where the additional money will come from. But that would require them to use the dread words “sacrifice” and “higher taxes” when they want us to believe that this war, like Iraq, would be cost-free.

The real troop numbers are similarly elusive. Pre-emptively railing against the prospect of “half measures” by Obama, Lieberman asked MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell rhetorically last week whether it would be “real counterinsurgency” or “counterinsurgency light.” But the measure Lieberman endorses — Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s reported recommendation of 40,000 additional troops — is itself counterinsurgency light. In his definitive recent field manual on the subject, Gen. David Petraeus stipulates that real counterinsurgency requires 20 to 25 troops for each thousand residents. That comes out, conservatively, to 640,000 troops for Afghanistan (population, 32 million). Some 535,000 American troops couldn’t achieve a successful counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, which had half Afghanistan’s population and just over a quarter of its land area.

Lieberman suggested to Mitchell that we could train an enhanced, centralized Afghan army to fill any gaps. In how many decades? The existing Afghan “army” is small, illiterate, impoverished and as factionalized as the government. For his part, McCain likes to justify McChrystal’s number of 40,000 by imbuing it with the supposedly magical powers of the “surge” in Iraq. But it’s rewriting history to say that the “surge” brought “victory” to Iraq. What it did was stanch the catastrophic bleeding in an unnecessary war McCain had helped gin up. Lest anyone forget, we still don’t know who has “won” in Iraq.

Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is poorer, even larger and more populous, more fragmented and less historically susceptible to foreign intervention. Even if the countries were interchangeable, the wars are not. No one-size surge fits all. President Bush sent the additional troops to Iraq only after Sunni leaders in Anbar Province soured on Al Qaeda and reached out for American support. There is no equivalent “Anbar Awakening” in Afghanistan. Most Afghans “don’t feel threatened by the Taliban in their daily lives” and “aren’t asking for American protection,” reported Richard Engel of NBC News last week. After eight years of war, many see Americans as occupiers.

Americans, meanwhile, want to see the fine print after eight years of fiasco with little accounting. While McCain and company remain frozen where they were in 2001, many of their fellow citizens have learned from the Iraq tragedy. Polls persistently find that the country is skeptical about what should and can be accomplished in Afghanistan. They voted for Obama not least because they wanted a new post-9/11 vision of national security, and they will not again be so easily bullied by the blustering hawks’ doomsday scenarios. That gives our deliberating president both the time and the political space to get this long war’s second act right.

[jimboloco]

oh absolutely
cheney is lucky i am civilised

and the general who wants a troop increase in afghanistan
needs to talk to queen lizzie
an chancellor of germany
an presidunce medyavivo
for help

and o'bama needs to make like jfk who was standing up
to the generals who wanted a troop increase in vietnam
once he realised the folly of the bay of pigs
so then lbj got the best and brightest
to affirm the tactical blunder of enmeshing us into that war
and they still did not wanna give up even after we abandoned three corps and loc ninh to charlie, inserting more american troops into an overrun
deserted artillery base about 90 miles north of macV headquarters
but nixzon was the prez by then

no we do NOT need more troops in afghan wool
kabul is corrupt like saigon was
hopefully they will be able to maintain kabul
but the rest of that country is uncontrollable
and is also not a threat to us

limiting our intent to al quaida and rebui9lding an international coalition to help us is better yeah

mccrystal general needs to retire and go play paintball
with some wounded veterans

obama needs to stand up against these types and
draw down our mission in afghanistan to less of an occupation
and more of an outpost to fight al-quaida
(which we do need ta dooH)

you are right
this impending morass
has the smellof death

where is wilifred owen when we need him?
where is horace when we need him?

how can i get the president's ears. man


i love my mudder

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:
mors et fugacem persequitur virum
nec parcit inbellis iuventae
poplitibus timidove tergo.

"How sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country:
Death pursues the man who flees,
spares not the hamstrings or cowardly backs
Of battle-shy youths."

wikipedia dulce et decorum est an willfred, man

[stilltrucking]

You got to believe that you do have his ear
And write what you do.


What are the odds on Obama visiting the Creative Complaints board on Studio Eight?
Or the St. Pete paper?

I am statistically challenged; I even buy a lotto ticket now and then.


Listening to the early news today, now a Buddhist center at the Air Force academy after the brew ha ha over the bible thumpers trying to indoctrinate the cadets into Christian jihads. A step in the right direction I hope.

Speaking of JFK
They say he read seven papers everyday.

like jfk who was standing up
to the generals who wanted a troop increase in vietnam
once he realised the folly of the bay of pigs

I am trying to sort that out
The dots that connect Vietnam and the bay of pigs.
I guess I am trying to think what the folly of the bay of pigs.
That he cut the air support? That he got bad advice from his generals?


A fellow attacked my patriotism the other day. I am trying to think of what I said that triggered his hostility. It could have been the word "bastard" maybe he was born out of wedlock.

dulce et decorum

My father's war
That is how he got his citizenship.
Came into the country at immigration station in Galveston Texas in 1915
Moved on to the east coast
I could have been a natural born Texan

[stilltrucking]

I am happy at least one of us is civilized man jimboclo

You wrote a very clear and concise synopsis of our armed forces. It kind of stunned me it seemed so obvious and I never saw it that way. An enlightning moment for me, an Aha, ah so
kind of thing. If I remember the gist of it our military power for all it's lethalness was not doing much good around the world.

I never been able to find it again
but I been thinking about it on and off for a year or more
we have the most lethal military in the world still
what has it done for us latelty
good men are dying
so we have not been attacked on our homeland since 2001

not to be disrespectful jim
probably only a four f hippy like me would even think such thoughts
I am not looking for a fight jim
or a debate
I am just saying
I am interested in your thoughts
on these things.

not the same war but the echoes of "escalation" being spoken by talking head pundits on tv.

just don't know
don't want to study war no more
but now quotes from The Art Of War are showing up on Christian Zionist websites.