Hint: There is no such thing.

The above image contains some of my decorations. I’ll tell you a dirty secret about combat awards- what you get depends on who saw what and then what they wrote down for Higher. The process is not objective, although the army tries.

A lot of what happened was never recorded or memorialized in any form. The ambiguity that lies behind the medals is thick. Depending on who perceived what was frequently the difference between who was the “hero” and who was not.

In extreme cases, command perception decided who went to jail and who got a shiny medal.

It all comes down to killing, and the manner in which it is done.

I will never be able to describe the feeling you have when you are unleashed upon a lawless wasteland with the power of life or death, held in a black package with a magazine containing thirty rounds of M855 ball.

What it is like to hunt men as if they were deer.

What it is like to catch them and shoot them down.

As a civilian you’d go to jail for decades. In the service it is different.

The business is squalid. I’ve described it in my books, most specifically in the first one. This was directly based on my service in Afghanistan.

My final tour ended. I got back to the ‘States a mess.

Physically and mentally I was shot.

Blast exposure. Blunt force trauma injuries. Hearing loss. Loss of consciousness episodes. Uncontrollable shaking of my extremities.

Then there was the psychological stuff. Bad. The worst were the “intrusive thoughts” that would come at wildly inappropriate times, along with emotional extremes.

Of course the Army threw me to the medical board and retired me. I was “old” and “broken” at the age of thirty-seven.

So I read about what happened amongst the ranks of the Aussie SF guys and I wasn’t surprised. Saddened, but not surprised.

I suspect that this was a command failure, period.

A commander worth his salt would recognize what was developing amongst his troops, and he would halt it with prejudice before “it” could happen.

“It” being shooting prisoners, etc. These acts are curses upon the consciousness, deeds that follow the perpetrators all of their days.

Ghosts are real! They haunt, they follow. You never forget the dead, the screams of the wounded, the resigned look of men who know they will die. These are tormentations that stay, planted front and center upon your soul, your consciousness.

There is no helping the dead. They are gone.

Help must be extended to the living.

I don’t know much about what happened with the soldiers in the Australian SF’s Area of Operations. I was not with them, I don’t know their situation. What I do know is that most of them probably served with honor in tough, horrible situations and now all of them will be subject to an Army investigation and some will be punished.

BTW- if the Australian Army is anything like the US Army, being the subject of an investigation is a terrible thing. And then the courts-martial, the sentences for the guilty.

Bad.

And all of this could have been prevented by a sharp commander in the field.

Maybe, that is. Because of the ambiguity.

This makes me want to scream.

OK, so I have a few gongs. Whatever. They have never done me any good. And in any case they do not represent what I perceive to have been my finest hour, followed by the low point of my military service.

You see, I could have let my prisoners die.

It would have been so easy. Simple inaction would have doomed them.

My commander made US Army guidance very, very clear, and I had his stern advice to fall back on. Command policy made all the difference!

What happened.

OK, so we were in a predawn firefight, according to our air cover the first one in all of Afghanistan on that fateful day.

We took casualties.

No one was charitably inclined to the enemy dead and wounded who lay upon the field.

I directed my medic to work upon the captured and wounded enemy after our guys got fixed up. They were a sorry sight. One man was shot seven times, I watched as my medic stuck his entire fist into the hole in his thigh in an attempt to staunch the bleeding.

They screamed. Like rabbits. They flopped. Like fish.

My Afghans decided they needed to finish the job. As the wounded keened, my co-commander spoke.

“We will kill these men.”

I felt the need to piss. I looked him in the eye. This. This was a moment of truth. These were my prisoners. They were under my control, custody and care.

My duty was clear.

“No, you won’t.”

What followed was harrowing. An argument between two heavily armed men who were coming down off of a battle high. The standoff ended with Captain Massood storming away and his men dispersing. The Afghan Police showed up, I handed the bandaged-up and drugged prisoners over to them.

As I watched them being transported away, I felt like a cat losing one of its lives. That was close. Too close.

And then I faced the family of one of the dead insurgents.

Low point.

Especially because I had pulled the trigger.

You fucking monster, was what I thought.

I was within my rights. Those men were my enemy, and they had tried to kill me. I was right!

It didn’t matter. A ghost floated out of one of the leaking bodies and landed in my head.

Within an hour my finest hour mixed in with the worst.

Some would call the fight that morning a meaningless skirmish in a broader campaign. Insignificant. A clash of less than a hundred men. Light casualties.

I would say you should have been there.

It is too easy for heroism to become mayhem.

The line is fine and razor-sharp.

Why did I post a pic of one of my books? Well, I hate to beat my own drum, but I called some recent developments in the field of modern war and combat.

Recently I saw an article at cheeseburgergothic.com about the fighting in Armenia, it was frightening in its implications.

Around the same time I saw another article in yahoo news/military.com about how the US Army is once again attempting to field infantry networking systems.

If you combine these two articles together, you come up with the inescapable conclusion that the age of unaided light infantry is drawing, or has drawn, to a close.

In the case of the fighting in far Armenia, the Azerbaijani forces were able to prevail using cheap drones over well-equipped conventional forces. Many, many armored vehicles were destroyed using loitering “suicide” drones. The little flying bombs would simply float over a target area and they would wait until a suitable target presented itself.

Boom. No more tank, command center, etc.

This is one reason I have always hated armored vehicles. They draw too much fire. Apparently nothing has changed. In fact, it has only gotten worse.

The implications for the world’s conventional forces are stunning.

An example would be the US Army’s pride, the M-1 Abrams tank. We have literally thousands of these; each is worth millions of dollars. So much scrap to a drone.

These flying mines prosecute one of the principles of war; MASS.

Massing forces these days will get you killed. All the humans that are in the drone’s decision chains have to do is to determine approximately where enemy forces are massed. They can dispatch the drones and kick back, maybe crack open a beer and watch the footage.

Guys/girls gathered around a tank. A dusty black explosion. Nothing left but the crying.

How do you counter the rise of the drones?

Your own drones, plus you make the infantry harder, faster, and smarter.

The mission is, and will always be, to “close with and kill the enemy.”

Tanks are too big. Too easy to hit. Similar conclusions will soon be drawn about navies, as well.

Drone swarm over a carrier group, anybody?

Ugly. We need to think about this now. The solution is the Armored Infantry on a supersonic troopship. Worldwide power projection within hours, independent of cumbersome vehicles. Tanks and by extension carriers/carrier groups are deathtraps; our forces need to be lethal and agile.

Right now we’re not there, and neither is anyone else. But someone, somewhere is thinking hard about this problem. They have seen Armenia, they understand the implications.

The age of conventional combined-arms forces has past.

If you grab a rifle and you go up against new-style forces, you will die. This is an inescapable truth; ten years ago I saw this over and over again. There is even less reason to believe that its true now. If you think you can take on a motivated government-backed military with courage and an assault rifle, you will fail. Not only will you fail, but you will pay with your life.

(Caveat and glaring exception: The wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. This is like whack-a-mole. Kill all you want, and they just keep coming. They can’t win, but they can outlast. This is the insurgent’s strategy in a nutshell, and it only works against humans. Remove humans from the loop and the insurgencies would fail.)

The machine doesn’t care about whether your cause is just. The machine could give a rat’s ass about your courage. The machine doesn’t grow tired, unmotivated, or hungry. It either works, or it does not. If it does work, you die.

To counter the machines, we must be paired with a machine. A machine that is loyal to us. That aids us. That enhances our fighting ability, our decision making capabilities. There is no other choice.

If we continue to field strictly human armies we invite defeat by those who do not.

Like love and sex, no one ever plays by the rules in war either. Any advantage will be grasped immediately and exploited ruthlessly.

We cannot afford to continue doing what we’ve been doing; shoveling mountains of money into obsolete weapons systems and paradigms.

Think about it. How survivable is a C-5 Galaxy in a non-permissive air environment? Or the vaunted F-35 JSF? The lumbering M-1 tank? The list goes on.

Too big, too slow, to rich a target.

We need the infantry fighting suit, the hypersonic troopship, and the doctrine to match. It would be helpful to have our own hunter/killer mini drones as well.

This is not a wish list. It is becoming increasingly clear that this is a must.

Well, I just spent the last three weeks laying around sick as a dog. For the past three or four days I’ve been recovering, but it’s been a pretty slow process. No, I don’t know what I had other than to say I’ve never had a malady like this. Never. And I’ve also never been sidelined for longer than a week; I ran a fever for nearly two weeks.

This was crazy man stuff. But I’m not going to waste any more breath on it other than to say that it was bad.

Today I actually got out of the house and walked in the crisp fall air; I spent the morning cleaning up the sick room. Washed everything, swept, etc. There’s no way I was going to have another family member do that for me. On the off chance that there are some lingering germs, viruses, etc., this was a job that I needed to do myself.

So I did it.

Now everything is either tossing in the dryer on high heat, or it is freezing outside on the line.

It’s a logical morning to sit and take stock of things.

On the writing front there is nothing new at the moment; as many of you know some of my work has gone into John Birmingham’s World War 3.1 project over on his patreon.com page.

The disease pretty much sucked all of the creative oxygen out of the room; I haven’t done much.

Another distraction has been the US election. This is not a political page; I won’t go on about this at length. Suffice to say that after much turmoil the system appears to have worked as intended and the President is obliged to make room for his successor.

I’ve watched the whole spectacle from my fever-bed; my phone did a yeoman’s work keeping me entertained in between bouts of staring at the wall or sleeping.

So yeah, it’s good to finally be able to sit up and type without feeling the need to go lay down for a few minutes… which always seemed to turn into hours or half a day.

Feeling better just in time for Thanksgiving. I got sick shortly after the election; probably got infected on the weekend before we all went to vote.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, we are keeping it simple this year. But then again we’ve done so since the death of my Grandma, she was the glue that held the family together. But this year there will also be no visiting friends or close family- it’s inadvisable.

This will be a nuclear family only type of gig this year. Just the four of us. I wimped out and ordered a complete traditional meal from a local grocery chain; it might not be gourmet cooking (or Grandma’s!) but it’ll probably do.

All that good American ethnic food. Turkey and stuffing. Gravy. Cranberry. The works for 69 bucks!

For that type of money, why should we kill ourselves?

Maybe it ain’t the best Thanksgiving ever, but you know what? I don’t care.

Let me tick off what I’m happy for.

Solid family. Good friends. Roof over my head. A full belly. Reliable cars.

The list goes on. You know what? When I started compiling this list, I realized that I’m a pretty lucky guy surrounded by pretty lucky people. Yeah, it’s super easy this year to be pissed off at everything, but why be that way?

If you are reading this, you are already a step ahead of the game.

The other day I had a tele-meeting with my TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) group up at the VA, and we were talking some stuff over. All of us are combat veterans. Someone brought up how the villagers in Afghanistan would perceive Corona.

It didn’t take long for us to come to the conclusion that the pandemic probably doesn’t mean much to them. When you are worried that the Taliban will come to take your sons in the night, or that your daughters will be kidnapped by the neighboring village boys while doing their farm work, a little disease doesn’t mean a whole lot. When you can lose a child in an instant to cruel and capricious violence, not much else holds the power to frighten.

The conversation was helpful; although I was still weak and sweaty it made me think of the basics.

Life. Liberty. Cleanliness. Reliable food supply.

So yeah, Happy Thanksgiving, indeed.

May we be thankful and not pissed off, this rough November is nearly gone.

Good.

Here I go, off onto another wild goose chase occasioned by a simple question posed on another website, John Birmingham’s cheeseburger gothic.substack.com.

He was doing a mini-review of a Netflix series called “The Liberator.”

Here was his question:

He was “exploring why men would fight for a country that wouldn’t extend them the basic courtesies, let alone the same legal rights as their white officers and squad mates.”

It occurred to me that I might have some extra insight into this question, having grown up somewhat mixed, and definitely military.

The photo above is all that remains of my uncle Dick, who was killed in Korea a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday.

The woman below was his Grandma.

She was born on a reservation in the 1870’s in Minnesota, shortly after the greatest one-day execution in US history, when 38 men from her tribe were hung for rebellion.

Surely she heard something about this growing up. How could you not? You would think that she would never have a single thing to do with the US Army or government; but this was not so.

At the tail-end of the Indian Wars, along came a blue-coated soldier. The details are vague, but he and Great-Grandma got along fairly well and when he finally got out of the Army they had a son.

The Indian Census of 1910 was coming, and Oatszela, Matilda, didn’t want her son to be officially marked down as a “native.”

So they moved. Back to Ohio where her ex-soldier man came from, to a place where no-one would recognize them.

Of course, you can tell all of the stories you want, but there are some things you just can’t hide. Such as an imperfectly white shade of skin. “Matilda” could squawk all she wanted to about being “French,” but did anyone believe her?

No. Her kids tried the same game, but it didn’t matter. My Grandpa got in trouble with the law (his first offense? He stabbed a fellow with a pitchfork while attempting to steal raccoon skins.) and stayed that way for a while. Eventually he ended up in a Wild West show as a horse handler.

Up until the Second World War, it would be fair to say that my Grandpa had a pretty tough time- yeah, it would be easy to blame all of it bigots and jerks but part of it was some pretty poor decision making on his part, too.

But the Army didn’t care that he was a jail-bird. Not during the war. He and his brother answered the call. His brother Russell was an infantry NCO and a hard-bitten man; his war ended at the doorstep to Japan. Luzon, 1945.

My Grandpa? He started as a private and finished that way. The A-bomb saved him from Operation Downfall, 1945.

What I’d like to point out is that both men were willing despite their backgrounds. Neither cared about the decidedly unfavorable aspects that the US Army had played in their ancestor’s lives.

When the time came, my Grandpa allowed the false enlistment of his oldest son, Dick, who left for service with the 3rd Infantry at the age of 15 (!).

Grandpa isn’t around to ask, but I have the idea that allowing his son to follow the warrior’s path was an acceptable solution for a difficult relationship.

Dick’s luck ran out in Korea. He never came home.

The years went by, the stories were told and re-told. Some left for Vietnam, the Gulf, Africa, Europe, Asia, to all corners of the globe. Where America stood, we went. Where America fought, we fought.

Hearing my elders talk as a kid I had the idea that yeah, we had some hard times; prosperity didn’t truly come until around when I was born, the 1970’s.

No silver spoons here; just dozens of flat, brass, complimentary VA markers.

So let me return to the original question- why? Why would you do it? Why would you risk your life in someone else’s war?

First, let me say that none of us ever deserved the title “sucker.” I don’t think a damn one of us was fooled into service. I think it is a real thing, from time out of mind, that when the tribe said “you must fight,” that we fought. There’s not really more to it than that.

Second, my family always had a strong oral tradition, a real sense of family and an unbroken line of ancestors, many of whom were soldiers. Long-time readers may have noticed that I speak of Uncle Dick quite a lot. There’s a reason for that! His death went off like an A-Bomb in the family; he was mentioned quite a lot when I was a boy.

A secret, and this will come off a bit odd. As I fought through those windy, craggy valleys I always had a feeling I was watched. That my actions were judged. By whom? A long line of ancestors, starting with Dick.

Crazy? Illogical? A construct of a mind under extreme stress? Yes.

But pretty damn real, nonetheless.

Finally, I guess the racism, the bigotry, just didn’t mean all that much to my family in the end. That it was there was plain to all. That the US isn’t a perfect country would be <zero> surprise to any of us.

Maybe the reason we picked up the sword, tomahawk, assault rifle, etc. was as old as time: our (place relevant name here) tribe was threatened by outsiders; we offered our lives in our children’s defense.

Not because we were suckers, and not because we were saints, either.

Why? Because it was the right thing to do.

OK, Maybe you all remember my write-up about Amazon Prime Day. It may have escaped you, but somewhere in the list of things important and frivolous that I bought that day was a dog DNA testing kit.

If you are interested, you can buy one too.

I would definitely list this as a frivolous purchase. However, all of life can’t simply be necessity; this would make for a pretty dull existence.

So let’s get down to the brass tacks. Why am I writing today. Pretty easy. I’ve gone through the entire dog DNA testing process, and I am ready to display the results. This was particularly interesting as I could compare it to 23andMe, the human DNA testing service.

The first thing you do after receiving your kit is to collect the sample.

See the swab above? This is after the sample has been taken. To get the sample, you take the swab and jam it into the saliva pouches in your dog’s cheeks. Some dogs react better to this than others!

Dixie wasn’t pleased.

She got over it, though. After the sample has been taken, you stick it into the provided tube and mix it with the preservative fluid in there. This differs with the 23andMe sample process a tad- probably because it would be difficult to get a dog to neatly spit into a tube.

BTW- same as with 23andMe no eating for an hour or so before sampling.

After that’s done, put the sample in the postage-paid envelope. Somewhere around this time be sure to register the sample on the Embark website, then put the sample in the mail and wait.

In my case it took about two weeks. Not long at all.

Here is what I found out.

It turns out that Dixie really is 100% Aussie Cattle Dog- of course, by definition that breed is super mixed, anyway. So purebred Australian mutt? Guess so. It was a surprise that she was purebred- I always had the idea that where we got her from was pretty dodgy.

Guess they were legit, though.

Nice that they gave percentages- although Dixie’s was pure and mine was not. Pretty fascinating stuff.

There was more, though.

There was a family tree.

Then there was a chart showing worldwide where her genes came from. This was accompanied by a description of where her genetic markers were often found, which I thought was interesting in its own right.

23andMe has something similar; for example, my maternal haplogroup was passed down by the Saxons. Dixie got something like that, but for dogs. Pretty cool.

And then another feature similar to 23andMe, but a LOT less fraught.

Dixie’s relatives!

Pretty cool, and as I said a lot less controversial than the human version. Mine ended up snagging me in a minor family dispute, even though that too was a learning experience.

This was a window into who Dixie’s “family” was, and other dogs that shared her traits.

So that was about it. Was it essential? Did it need to be done?

NO.

Was it cool and fun?

YES.

So the choice is really yours, readers, as to whether you want to throw some money away. Personally I would recommend to wait until Black Friday, Prime Day, etc., so you get some money kicked off. But then hit the “buy now” button and give it a whirl.

Geeky fun, right up my alley!