[lbo-talk] Hersh on Bush & Iran

[Carl Remick]

>From: andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
>
>My late father in law, one of the most honorable,
>gentle, and decent men I have ever known -- and
>utterly respectful to women -- was a Marine in World
>War II. He'd volunteered before the war for the same
>reason that kids volunteer now, because he was poor
>and the service was a job. His unit was the first
>posted to Pearl Harbor aftyer the attack. He fought
>through some of the worst battles of the Pacific, and
>never talked about it. I have no doubt that he saw and
>maybe did things that were unspeakable; he had
>nighmares about the war until he died a few years ago.
>I have never known anyone who hated war more than he
>did, and he wasn't a pacifist either. But he was
>always proud, for all that, to have been a Marine --
>prouder of that than to have been the first in his
>family to go to college or to have been one of the
>first Jews at Princeton -- the Marines sent him there.
>Assholes? Sadistic temperments? I've seen lots of
>those in university professorships and big law firms.
>Don't talk to me about the Marines.

You're wasting your time practicing law. With such Semper Fi grandiloquence 
you should really be writing recruiting posters.

Actually, your blast reminds me of Lt. Barney Greenwald's tirade at the end 
of Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny."  Greenwald was the successful defense 
counsel who got the charges of mutiny dismissed by proving that the USS 
Caine's captain, Lt. Cmdr. Philip Francis Queeg, was a paranoid lunatic.  At 
the party to celebrate this victory, Greenwald gets drunk and throws a glass 
of champagne in the face of Lt. Tom Keefer, the Caine's executive officer -- 
a would-be novelist -- who masterminded the mutiny by planting doubts about 
Queeg's sanity in the rest of the ship's officers' minds.  Greenwald says 
he's disgusted by his victory and by Keefer, whom he accuses of driving 
Queeg mad by undermining his authority by rumor-mongering.  Greenwald says 
that Queeg -- a professional naval officer unlike himself and Keefer -- may 
not be the brightest or most capable individual, but that Queeg and the rest 
of the professional officer corps were the unsung heroes who'd kept the 
country from being taken over by Nazis.  (BTW, this scene is *much* more 
graphic in the novel than in the movie.)

It's a very powerful scene, but nonetheless I think Wouk was basically full 
of shit -- the forerunner in many ways of today's neocons.

IMO, the military are the scum of the earth, and the Marines, the scum of 
the scum.  Marines seem to have fragile personalities, to have an uncertain 
sense of their masculinity and quite often to be alcoholics.  I believe the 
Marines recruit people with serious pyschological problems and proceed to 
make those people much worse

Carl