Raconteur Report
"I like a good story, well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself." - Mark Twain
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Squadron Property And Cultural Rubicons
Vietnam was a helicopter war. Amidst the slow-rolling serial trainwreck that was most of the US participation in the Southeast Asian Wargames of 1965-1975, we had a plethora of helicopter squadrons deployed to the Republic of Viet Nam (for Common Core kids, that would be the southern one at the time), and as is liable to happen during such a war, a number of them were battle damaged. Many of them shot to pieces, hauled out, and reconditioned even after being 100% inoperable, to the point that we lost more helicopters in that war than the total we ever built, as some hulks were pieced and patched together multiple times after total loss. And the rest were salvaged for parts.
The apocryphal tale is told of one such repaired helicopter. As a standard procedure, once one puts a non-salvageable airframe back into service, by dint of some hellaciously skilled and dedicated airframe and powerplant mechanics in-country, it was a regulation that the resurrected bird be test-flown to demonstrate airworthiness and safety of operation. War is harsh, but seldom deliberately stupid, at least at the operational level. So it was under these parameters that one such salvaged bird was being test flown.
Given that most of the bases were in the coastal country, and most of the enemy main forces were inland, the best place to test-fly a helicopter and minimize getting it all shot to bits again was out over the South China Sea. This is a double-edged sword, but generally provided benefits that overrode the obvious drawback. Mostly.
But for the pilots and crew of one such helicopter, the law of averages caught up to them, and the helicopter, being test-flown well out over the ocean, disappeared without a trace. No mayday, no clue, just a helo and several souls gone, amidst a war that was eating both like a ravenous beast.
Enter the flexible and utilitarian morals and institutional larceny that allows the best-run military machines to cope with the insanity of war. Because a squadron, roughly comparable in size to an infantry battalion, is several hundred men, and even at 1960s prices, multiple millions of dollars worth of machines, tools, parts, equipment, and miscellany, from nuts and bolts to aircraft engines, and everything in between. Canteens, machine guns, flak jackets, toilet seats, high explosive ordnance, and everything else you can imagine, and a million things you cannot, in quantities normally only encountered at a Wal-Mart or Target store, or aboard a 100-car freight train.
And not to put the point too finely, 8000 miles away from home, in a war zone where things were destroyed daily by tons of bombs, rockets, mines, shells, bullets, and of course, the finest pilfering skills of one of the most thriving black market economies of all time. Anything not guarded 24/7 would disappear in minutes in Vietnam, up to and including entire aircraft and other major end-user items. (Think things like APCs, tanks, artillery pieces, jeeps, etc.)
And senior NCOs and junior officers are responsible for all that stuff, as well as every commanding officer having to personally sign for and accept responsibility for everything down to the last door knob and belt buckle. Which, amidst such widespread theft and combat destruction, was sheer insanity coupled with practical impossibility.
Until the helicopter went missing.
Because after a dutiful search for survivors yielded nothing whatsoever, a report had to be filed, and items accounted for. Whereupon some shifty but brilliant NCO or senior NCO pointed out to a junior officer that it would be rather convenient to cover for all the tons of things blown up, stolen, lost, pilfered, etc., to just include them on the manifest and equipment carried on that now gone-forever helicopter.
And so, in rapid order, every crew chief, maintenance shop, and officer from warrant to XO certified, in detail, the manifest of tools, spare parts, and military miscellany that had been aboard the doomed flight, and the CO signed off on it, immediately bringing the reality of property on hand into line with what was actually able to be found, touched, and wielded by that squadron.
This boon to military accounting had, of course, the obvious flaw.
Someone higher up in the hierarchy, presented with the dozens of pages of missing gear on the missing aircraft, did some napkin math, and observed deftly that the weight of the missing items would be roughly twenty times the maximum lifting capacity of the helicopter in question, and the only way a craft actually so burdened could have achieved aerial flight was if someone had detonated an explosive device under the skids in the mid-teen kiloton range. Otherwise, it would have been like trying to get an elephant off the ground using a pair of hummingbird wings.
But the military being the military, no one wanted to rock the boat, and so the obviously fraudulent work of fiction was funneled right back to the gaping maw of Pentagon reports, where it disappeared like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and the cosmic scales were in balance.
I bring that story up, because with the daily Clown Carnucopia of Fail that is the Noah's Ark of counterfeit accusers of Judge Kavanaugh, and the growing scale of recockulousness that they spiral into with each new fakenews "J'accuse!", it's only a matter of time before some cold-case weenie, or weenies, realize the golden opportunity this circus provides.
Judge Kavanaugh is about to find himself blamed for the Black Plague, the Chicago Fire, the Lindbergh Kidnapping, the Great Depression, being D.B. Cooper, causing Three Mile Island, Apollo XIII, the Exxon Valdez, turkey burgers, and the designated hitter rule. Then Interpol will pile on and tag him for annexing the Sudetenland, the Jack the Ripper murders, Vesuvius consuming Pompeii, setting Rome ablaze during Nero's reign, putting three seconds back on the clock in the 1972 Summer Olympics basketball finals, and the continued high regard in France for the films of Jerry Lewis. They may even drag the pope into this, and blame him for publishing Galileo's Dialogue, reconvening the Inquisition, and burning Kavanaugh at the stake for rank heresy. At this point, it's all simply the next logical step.
The serial lunacy of vague, obviously fabricated, and totally preposterous stories coming out hasn't merely jumped the shark; they passed jumping some days back, and are now strapping JATO bottles on that bitch, and trying to traverse the Grand Canyon, lengthwise, or possibly skipping straight to a low earth orbit.
And it would simply be desperate farce, except for the actual toxic and corrosive damage these asstards are doing to the country. Senators with the IQ of houseplants are literally setting the Constitution on fire in pursuit of a momentary partisan advantage. The only step lower than this is actual open hostilities.
They've finally gone full-on Captain Ahab barking lunatic batshit crazy, in their ceaseless pursuit of overturning an election whose simple reality they cannot rationally process.
"And he piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his heart's hot shell upon it." - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
They have casually trashed the sterling reputation of a sitting judge on the DC Court of Appeals, on the word of drunks, whores, and psychotic sociopaths (besides the former who are already in the Senate itself). After more than half a century of looking the other way at philandering, murder, and a presidential rapist and serial sexual predator while on duty in the West Wing, they have decided that only now, lacking anything else to try to stop the president from executing the duties of his office and filling a Supreme Court vacancy, this is the time to go all-in on gutting eight centuries of jurisprudence in place since Magna Carta, and doing it overnight.
There are at least four sitting senators who should not simply be censured, they should be impeached for breach of oath, and kicked right the f**k out of the Congress, and then prosecuted to maximum extent of civil and criminal law. So too the slanderous accusers in this ongoing epic charade.
And worst of all, they've happily set lying whores, and their baseless allegations, above the actual damage done to the nominee's family, a wife and two daughters, and irreparably harmed the cause of women who've suffered actual assaults, by reducing them all to the same calculus, in tarring them all with same presumption that every allegation is just a cheap stunt for political gain. And the defective delusional leftard harpies of the chorus, who couldn't get laid at a nerd conference even if their tits were Xbox controllers, are happy to sell their shriveled carbonized souls for the merest whiff of a chance to derail a slam-dunk SCOTUS nominee who doesn't share their beliefs in the disposability of unborn babies, whose antics can provide them the fifteen minutes of fame they treasure above actual accomplishment, and the attention they could never get from a lifetime of fatherless upbringings.
We're witnessing the destruction of the entire rule of law to salve the tortured psychoses of sluts with daddy issues, and to pander to their impotent ravings.
The only way this stops is to stop catering to it, and failing that due to a surplus of invertebrate RINOs, this is going to be rectified in the traditional manner.
When a man's reputation is sullied so casually, it ends with someone's teeth on the pavement, or a bullet hole in their liver on the dueling field.
Dulce et decorum est.
When you try to do the same thing to half of society, expecting it'll stop anywhere short of heads on pikes is a pipe dream. And I'm not speaking metaphorically in the slightest.
Because this is no longer just about Kavanaugh and his confirmation, though even Bitch McConjob finally seems to have found his voice - and spine - over this latest outrage.
This effort is nothing less than the permanent Othering of the entire species of soy-free meat-eating conservative males.
This is the Left finally working themselves up to the frenzy of a Kristallnacht.
And there's only one answer to that sort of cultural jihad: Challenge accepted.
We wanted fair play.
The moonbats want to play Cowboys and Leftards.
As Timothy Turtle told ChuckU Schumer when the Senate dropped the bomb on cloture: "You're going to regret this. And soon."
Aesop at 12:14 AM
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2018/09/squadron-property-and-cultural-rubicons.html?m=1
