On Wednesday, December 19, 2001, at 11:01 , Ted Morgan wrote:
> Following up (thanks drieux), I'm also going to be using Fred Turner's
> Echoes of Combat.\
> Ted
http://communication.ucsd.edu/fturner/index.html
should help those not as familiar about the general outline of this book.
Which of course leads me to 'wander a field' a bit to recommend that
the several chapters in bill mauldin's 'brass ring' be reviewed to
notice that even after 'the last good war' we went through the usual
process of the american media FREAKING about 'war damaged vets' doing
things that 'civilian punks' did - but of course no one ever puts up
the banner headline:
"No-Prior-Military-Service-Civilian involved in single car drunken
driving..."
whereas selling
"Combat Veteran involved in single car...."
is a Mondo Seller....
So you might want to see about using James William Gibson's "Warrior
Dreams:
Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America" - which does a reasonable
study
of the transition of the 'civilian side' of the game into the whole 'john
wayne/
johnny rambo wannabe syndrome' - which of course annoys some of us, as
there is
stuff in there that we look at and go
"Uh, so?"
{ Amazon.com tells me that its got 14 used copies @ $3.95 }
To balance that 'Uh, so?' problem out - there is this little sea story
from when
I was living on Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor - and as the VP
of our
Community Association was 'working the crowd' on the Ferryboat Home, and
found
myself trying to explain to the Wife of one of the Folks, that her husband'
s
apparently 'bizarre' behavior made sense if she put it back into the
context that
he had trained himself to never take the same route to work at the same
times,
even if that meant that with only two liberty launches and one ferry boat
off
the island he had his work cut out to NOT make a 'trackable pattern'. At
which
point she stopped 'worrying' since his behavior was a 'survival skill'
when one
can be a target for Hostage Taking....
While on the Flip Side of that, one of my RecoveringTScleared friends
asked me
why I kept a 'trackable behavior' - an old 'ritual for luck' - and I
pointed out
that it was my little 'self affirmation' that I CAN have 'trackable
behaviors' -
sort of the 'quiet protest' that only former members of the family would
notice.
I mean, how many folks consciously are aware of which styles of using a
set of
knife and forks are more likely to indicate that a person had been raised
in
'america', the uk, slavic nations, or ....
Watching the Wannabe's NOT GET it can be fun....
ciao
drieux
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