Category: War

Honoring Our Soldiers

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, War, Wisdom1 Comment

PicForWebsiteApril2007AtlantaAirport
[click for picture credit: JohnnyJet]
Most airlines in the United States allow soldiers in uniform to board along with first class. Clicking on the photo above brings us to a blog post by a traveler who routinely gives up his first class upgrades to soldiers.

We also have a general culture of venerating our soldiers and veterans. We thank them for their service, in public, whenever we can. The video below is an example.

Everyone in the United States, left, right, center, rich, poor, loves their soldiers and honors them. [Except, ironically, the V.A. which for some unexplained reason has waiting lists of years to help wounded veterans with their health problems – but that’s another story.]

I believe we in the United States are unique in the developed world with the way we treat our soldiers. We honor them. That is definitely not the case in other countries. I have first-hand experience with Germany. From a distance, and from popular culture, mostly based on the sick memories of World War II and Hitler’s excesses, one might think that Germans also hold their soldiers in high regard. But that is not so.

I should know. I wore the uniform of the German Air Force for four years as a young man. A German soldier was then, and I would expect this to be still true now, just another “worker.” Being in the military is a job, and often one that is associated with lack of education, lack of ambition and drive, even sometimes laziness. “Oh, you’re in the service?” The implication is that you don’t know what else to do, or don’t have any skills for a “real job.” Nobody would give up an airline seat for a soldier. Nobody would ever walk up to a soldier and thank him for his service. Nobody would applaud a traveling soldier.

Part of that may have to do with the fact that since 1945, German soldiers, with very, very few exceptions, haven’t seen battle. Germans don’t send their young people overseas to fight the fights of other countries. They don’t play world policeman. Being a grunt in the German military means you have a tedious and boring job of going through the motions, and counting the days left in your service. There is no danger of being sent to Iraq or any other place where bullets might fly and you might be killed or maimed in the service of your nation.

I have had casual contact with soldiers of France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, and have observed similar attitudes.

Being a soldier in the United States is associated with honor, courage, service, and duty – and rightly so. I can’t think of any other country that is willing to commit its youth just like we do, for other people’s causes.

Our soldiers deserve and have earned the veneration. I am not sure, however, if our politicians are making the right decisions and choices on their backs.

Germany Welcomes Syrian Refugees

On By Norbert HauptIn WarLeave a comment

In the first half of the last century, Germany has done its share of creating misery, death and destruction in the world  to last for centuries to come. Perhaps the country and its people have learned a lesson?

This is evidenced by the welcome given to a train of refugees in Frankfurt, Germany, a few days ago:

I wonder what Trump and his followers have to say about this?

Book Review: Hawser – by J. Hardy Carroll

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three and a Half Stars, War3 Comments

Hawser

Lieutenant H. Hawes does not like his first name. His friends call him Hawser. He wants to be a pilot but does not make it in pilot school in the military, so he becomes the next best thing: a bombardier.

He is assigned to a crew on the B-17 in World War II. After extensive training they fly bombing missions into Germany.  The odds are that six out of ten will die doing this job. And when they die, there are no funerals. They just don’t come back. Their bunks are empty and the next day new soldiers move in.

Long before he can complete his 25 missions, after which crew members are sent home, he is shot down over Germany and becomes a prisoner of war. When he thought he has seen the worst of the horror at the hands of the Nazi captors, he is crushed by the realization that even worse atrocities lie before him when he ends up behind enemy lines.

I have read a lot of books about World War II. Just recently I re-read King Rat, which plays in a prison camp in the Pacific. Emaciated prisoners live in the tropics, bitten by bugs, suffocated by intense heat, sick with dysentery, abused by the Japanese. At the same time American prisoners like Hawser are kept in camps in Poland, in snow and ice, with arctic winds blowing through the floor board of their huts, where they never get warm enough, where they have to stand at roll call in the snow for hours, some of them without shoes and feet wrapped in rags.

Another World War II book about prisoners, in this case women, was A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. Five Chimneys – by Olga Lengyel is a harrowing account of life in a Nazi death camp. Just recently I read All the Light we Cannot See – by Anthony Doerr.  It illustrates the lives of children growing up in the war in Germany. Then, of course, there is Unbroken – by Laura Hillenbrand, the riveting story of Louie Zamperini, the Olympian who flew in the Pacific and got shot down by the Japanese.

Hawser belongs with these books. The author takes us into the B-17 and we fly the missions with them. We feel the cold of the airplane at 30,000 feet and 50 degrees below zero. The lack of oxygen makes us dizzy. And the terror, the absolute terror of knowing that the next cannon bullet from a Nazi fighter could end it all, right there in the freezing sky high above the clouds, paralyzes us and the only thing we can do is become numb and shoot back with a vengeance. We endure eight hours over enemy land, hundreds of minutes of fear, tens of thousands of seconds of despair.

The story is reminiscent of the plot of the 1990 movie Memphis Belle. It’s the same plane. If I remember right, there was a scene where the ball (the bubble on the belly of the plane where a gunner was sitting) got jammed, and the landing gear was broken. The gunner could not get out because the ball was jammed, and the belly landing would surely crush him. What to do? There is an identical scene in Hawser, which prompted me to wonder how common this situation was in the war.

The title of the book does not do it justice. It tells the prospective buyer nothing about what a ride he is in for. But don’t let that deter you. The author has researched the subject meticulously. It feels like he was a B-17 bomber pilot himself, even though that’s unlikely. He knows what life was like in a German prison camp. He knows how the country came apart at the seams in the last few years of the war. He shows us Germany from the inside, and how the Nazi machine not only ruined the lives of all the people it conquered and tortured, but also those of the Germans themselves. Generations were devastated, and Hawser tells the story about it.

After I finished the book, I researched maps of England and Germany and checked out locations. I pulled up diagrams and photographs of the plane.

Stories like this one, playing in Germany in WW II, bring home my ancestry. My father was nine years old in 1945. He hardly knew his father, who was a soldier stationed in Italy. He only came home for a few days of leave every year or so.

When the Russians overran Poland and eastern Germany in 1945, they raped women and girls indiscriminately before they killed everyone. To get away, my father, his mother and siblings left their home in Breslau, Silesia as refugees, heading for Bavaria.

Had that not happened, my own parents would never have met, and I would not be writing this book review. Hawser brings that time to life.

Rating - Three and a Half Stars

 

Women in Burqa – Oppression in the Open

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, Political, Religion, WarLeave a comment

 

This short video is disturbing in many ways. Don’t even think about looking at the comments in YouTube below. Incidentally, what is it with YouTube comments? Why are they always puerile, offensive, disgusting or idiotic?

It starts with the title: Arab Woman in Burqa Eating Spaghetti – Hilarious!!

I don’t think this is hilarious at all. It illustrates like a caricature the systematic and humiliating oppression of women in Islam as it is supported by governments and monarchies all over the world.

We will never know how these women really feel. But I cannot imagine they are enjoying themselves in this role of non-personhood.

And we, the United States, stand behind a number of such oppressive, sick governments with our money and our soldiers.

American soldiers went to war on behalf of Kuwait. KUWAIT! One of the most repressive societies in the world. G.H.W. Bush sent 425,000 American soldiers to liberate Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm in 1990-1991 and 383 Americans did not come back. The U.S. Department of Defense has estimated the cost of the Gulf War at $61 billion, of which Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states covered $36 billion and Germany and Japan covered $16 billion. More than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed. While the U.S., for a change, didn’t pay the majority of the cost, we sent 425,000 of the 670,000 troops from 28 countries. That means we brought in two thirds of all the soldiers.

And what did we get from Kuwait in return?

What did the wives, parents and relatives of the 383 American soldiers who died there get for giving their lives for KUWAIT?

Our friends, the Saudis, are the other most oppressive regime on the planet.

Obama with Saudi

What compels us to keep courting Middle Eastern countries? What do we get in return?

Cheap oil? – Not.

Money? – Not.

Thanks? – Are you kidding!

On this issue I am – and I hate to say it here – with Donald Trump. Our leaders don’t know what they are doing. Our so-called allies are laughing all the way to the bank while the American public is told our soldiers are dying for our freedom.

It’s a disgrace.

All that from watching a poor woman try to eat spaghetti.

 

 

 

David Horowitz: You Don’t Get to Make a Speech

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Religion, War1 Comment

Radical Islam is alive and well right here in our neighborhood. This video is about five years old, but the story has not changed. David Horowitz is a Jewish writer and professor.

The Craze of Defunding Planned Parenthood

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, Political, WarLeave a comment

The “defunding” word is all over the news these days, with the Republican field trying to outdo each other to get the attention of the national media.

I found this article about Craig Conner, a pastor at First Baptist Church in Panama City, Florida, who lamented about the government taking away money from his paycheck and sending it to Planned Parenthood, this evil organization. He says if we just stopped sending Planned Parenthood money, we’d wipe out the national debt instantly.

Hmmm. Planned Parenthood received about $540 million in government grants in 2013. The national debt is about $18 trillion. It would take about 33,333 years at 540 million, if the debt didn’t grow and there was no interest on it, to pay off the national debt from what we didn’t issue in grants to Planned Parenthood. I wonder how much credibility a pastor has that can’t add simple numbers and present them so they make sense.

In comparison, our country will spend almost $1 trillion on defense and related expenses in 2015. Is Craig Conner not worried about his paychecks being raided to send killer robots to the Middle East and Africa to hunt terrorists and send rockets indiscriminately into civilian neighborhoods, not just killing embryos, but real-life women, children, grandparents, along with all the terrorists? If he was, his argument would even hold water. We could wipe out the national debt in 18 years by defunding defense.

In the case of Planned Parenthood, $540 million is about 45% of the organization’s budget, and none of the government grants are used to fund abortions. Yet, the organization is vilified for its work and its role in preventative female health care and human reproductive rights.

I want the politicians to stay out of our health care, out of our reproductive decisions and, please, out of our bedrooms. Fortunately, I think, our country has come around this bend, and the more the candidates salivate over this stuff, the less electable they all become.

Movie Review: Good Kill

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Movies, Three Stars, WarLeave a comment

Good Kill

Imagine you are playing a video game. You hunt down bad guys and blow them to pieces with missiles. A few minutes later, the rescuers come from all directions with shovels to help any possible buried survivors. For good measure, you fire another missile into the rescue mission. You call it a follow-up. You just killed more than a dozen people, seemingly by just moving objects on a screen.

But it isn’t a video game. Your shift is over. You get up from your chair, unplug your headset, and someone else takes over. You get out of the air-conditioned trailer on an airbase in Nevada, get into your car and drive home to Las Vegas, to your wife and kids. Backyard barbecue tonight.

Good Kill tells the riveting story of modern-day warfare. “Pilots” sit safely on the ground in trailers in the U.S. flying killer robot machines over targets anywhere in the Middle East, on the other side of the globe. The killer robots can circle for many hours and practically fly themselves. They are so high up, they cannot be seen from the ground. But the “pilots” have high-resolution cameras. They get a laser fix on the target, pull the trigger, and a Hellfire missile is on its way. Time to impact, 10 seconds. Hopefully no kids or other innocent victims walk into the “theater” within those 10 seconds. When the missile hits, there is a cloud of fire and destruction. Another $64,000 of American tax payer money well spent.

Major Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke) is a former fighter pilot with 3,000 hours in an F-16 and six tours of duty in the Middle East. He considers himself a pilot. Playing video games, albeit deadly ones way beyond what an F-16 could do, is not his idea of warfare and he yearns to get back into the cockpit of a real plane. When the CIA takes over and directs his crew and their missions, the psychological impact of those orders, which often kill innocent civilians simply because they happen to be around a “high value target,” is demoralizing to the crew. Egan has a hard time going home to his wife and family and playing father and husband. He is distant and deeply troubled. He is part of a killing machine in 21st century warfare.

Good Kill is a fictional account of supposedly true events. We will never know how true. We have all learned about drone strikes and their impact on terrorism. I believe that this type of warfare simply is a terrorism breeder. You want more terrorists, send more Hellfire missile out of the blue sky into civilian neighborhoods in Yemen and Afghanistan. It works perfectly. Every boy who sees his father blown to pieces grows into a fiercely dedicated combatant within just a few years. The Middle East we have created is a petri dish to grow terrorists.

If Good Kill only approximates what is really going on, even if it is a fictional exaggeration, it exposes a frightening reality that we, the American tax payer, must become aware of. Bush started the war on terror, but Obama refined it and sanitized it. We’re not seeing the body bags coming off airplanes anymore. But we know the killer robots are out there, looking down from the blue sky.

Good Kill tells the story of what our government thinks is okay to do in our name, to the people of the Middle East, and to our own soldiers.

Rating - Three Stars

 

Buying the F-35

On By Norbert HauptIn WarLeave a comment

The U.S. military is planning on buying 2,443 F-35 jets. Since the pricing of each jet is not clear, because they are sold in “batches” where the costs of development are sometimes wrapped into the planes, I find it difficult to figure out how much individual planes actually cost. I have come up with up to $200 million each, but on the low end around $100 million each (source).

If you paid using one dollar bills, and you paid out a bill every second, all day and night long, it would take more than three years to pay for one single plane.

And we’re buying 2,443 of them. Maybe we could live with 2,442 of them, and use the $100 million for something useful and good?

Santorum Suggests Bombing the Middle East into the 7th Century

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, Political, WarLeave a comment
Santorum
Source: Scott Olson/Getty Images

 

Rick Santorum said that the threat of the Islamic State should be countered with a more aggressive U.S. mission:

If ISIS wants to establish a seventh-century caliphate, let’s oblige them by bombing them back to the seventh century.

— Rick Santorum

This is the kind of person that bubbles to the top of our political spectrum. I have a number of questions for Santorum:

  1. How does one bomb a “state” that doesn’t exist on the map but rather only in the heads of its self-appointed criminal leaders?
  2. How does one bomb a state into the 7th century, if that were even possible, without killing thousands of innocent people, and then starving out the survivors, since we know that the 7th century wasn’t very good at feeding millions of people?
  3. How does a Christian like yourself rationalize that it’s ok to kill innocent civilians by the thousands in the name of ideology?
  4. When was the last time in our history when bombing a state in the Middle East actually solved a problem?
  5. And finally, Mr. Santorum, do you know anyone in the Middle East? In Iran, Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan? Do you personally know and are friends with just one single person who lives there? Because if you did, I don’t understand how you could suggest to indiscriminately bomb the Middle East, knowing you would obliterate that person, their family, their loved ones and the entire future of their offspring.

Some Christian, you are.

World’s Top 100 Arms Producing Companies – and Countries

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, War1 Comment
Arms Producing Countries
[click for source and more detail]

Looking at this chart, it’s obvious why we’re starting wars all the time.

Our Unsuccessful War on Terror

On By Norbert HauptIn WarLeave a comment

The American taxpayers have spent almost $1.7 trillion on the “war on terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

De-Rugy-war-funding-chart-v1_0
source mercatus.org

Looking at the chart, it strikes me that most of the money, of course, went to the Department of Defense. Very little, the green bars, went to the Department of State and to aid. And the VA Medical bars are not even recognizable on the bottom.

Looking at the chart, I also notice that expenditures kept going up year after year during the Bush years, and down during the Obama years.

The “war on terror” was supposed to get rid of terrorism, or at least the threat of terrorism.

Yet, there are more terrorists now than ever. ISIS is trying to build a nation state based on terrorism. That’s far worse than anything we have ever had before. Some say we have created this situation with our war on terror. I don’t know if we did. But I do know there are now more terrorists, there are more attacks, and there are more terror-related atrocities than ever before.

We have gotten a very lousy return on our investment. I would venture to guess if we had spent $1.7 trillion in our own country in the last 14 years we’d be vastly better off today, and there would be less terrorists out there. We should have minded our own business.

I think about that as the warmongers (like McCain) are eager to get us militarily involved with the Russians in Ukraine.

Do we ever learn?

Movie Review: American Sniper

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three Stars, WarLeave a comment

AmericanSniperI always find it most difficult to review a movie when everyone knows the outcome, pretty much everyone has seen it, and everyone has an opinion about it – worse, when it’s been discussed on the News for weeks.

American Sniper is the Clint Eastwood directed movie about Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history. He was a Navy SEAL and became a living legend during his four tour of duties in Iraq for saving countless American soldiers through this amazing marksmanship. In the end, he died a tragic death back home in Texas, while he was trying to overcome the demons of war that would not leave him.

Chris could only do what he did because he first believed that it was his duty to protect his comrade soldiers, and because he believed that he was protecting his country – and therefore essentially his family.

American Sniper was portrayed by some critics as a glorification of war. Others said that it didn’t question the legitimacy of the war sufficiently. That may be true, but I don’t think Chris with his book and Clint Eastwood with the movie tried to moralize about the war. They both wanted to tell a story that needs telling, over and over again.

I am lucky, because I never saw war firsthand. I never saw a man killed. Watching the scenes of urban battles, with soldiers going from house to house in Iraq, kicking in doors just to find an Al Qaeda leader, brings to light the insanity and uselessness of the war in the first place.

I found myself sitting in a theater watching American soldiers getting killed and maimed, watching Iraqi children getting tortured by their own countrymen, and I questioned why the whole thing was going on. I may be completely mistaken, but by doing what we were doing in Iraq we fanned the flames that cause extremists to rise up against us. We basically shot their country to pieces, created a power vacuum, so they themselves could descend back into ethnic and religious strife that has been raging for centuries before us. How an American soldier, like Chris Kyle’s own brother, reconciles this with protecting his own country, is beyond me.

I know that in the above two paragraphs I have not reviewed a movie, but moralised and stated my own opinions.

American Sniper is the kind of movie that makes me think about these things, and I think it will make every viewer think about them. Is it really worth it to do this to our young men and women in uniform?

For what?

American Sniper brings these questions to the forefront – and that alone is worth it.

Rating - Three Stars

 

Jürgen Todenhöfer on ISIS

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, WarLeave a comment

The ideology of ISIS requires that every human converts to Islam or dies. It’s that simple. These guys believe this, it gives them purpose, satisfaction and success. So they can come into Mosul with 400 people and beat out 30,000 Iraqi soldiers.