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Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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That ain’t no messin” around! No high heels noted.
The Ruskies and Ukrainians don’t screw around with their training regimen. Unlike the woke members of ours has become. They don’t have time or the patience to put up with the bullshit. ITR training night infiltration course when I went through 1966 era was the last to use live fire & explosives in the training cause some daisy stuck his ass in the air and got winged, prompting mommy to call her senator on it. The entire training went to shit after that. Now it’s turned into, well if you don’t like it you can just quit. If it’s up to us or the Ruskies or Ukrainians & Cossacks, I’ll put my money on the Ruskies, Ukrainians & Cossacks.
Those live fire drill are designed to get them used to performing under actual sounds and live fire. Not the pretend BS we teach. There is a huge difference.
With firearms, I was repetitiously taught… until I wanted to puke… by the Rhodesian method of ‘Jungle Lane.’ Instructors shooting at you with an AKM or a PPSh and throwing concussion grenades.
You hoped the instructor liked you. But you might still get hit, like my late friend Josh McGrath of Lynn, Mass. did… shot through the ear. Kept his head but lost his eardrum.
Guys were wounded and on the odd occasion had been killed by instructors, which probably upset them, but with no reprimand or discipline. That was part of it… they made certain we knew that we could get killed in a Jungle Lane… and it drastically heightened the reality of the training… especially with them shooting at us.
Our response was to knee-jerk ‘double tap’ flip out targets, dive into cover to sort out misfires and misfeeds from magazines randomly loaded with bad rounds by instructors. Excellent training. Your three-point perspective double tap.
The THREE Fs. When, what is termed “Fight or Flight” is described… I will add a third one… “Freeze.” That is basic paralysis that comes from sudden INTENSE FEAR, APATHY and or DENIAL.
I’ve seen guys whose mind has “Frozen” get killed because in the midst of being shot at, they freeze for that split second. That was almost me the very first contact I got into and the first time I got shot at. I stood transfixed on the muzzle blast from a tree line, while bullets were cracking all around my head. I almost got killed because I was in denial of what was going on. Sounds stupid… but true.
I was saved by Corporal Watson, my quick-thinking Stick Leader, who grabbed the back of my swimming trunks and jerked me back down on my butt behind an ant hill, while yelling… “Bloody hell! Get down, they’re shooting at us!”
Poor guy. Like a mother hen, he had to worry about the Training Troop FNGs (Fucking New Guys) like me, as well as tactically out maneuvering the terrorists and keeping himself from getting killed.
Freeze. The minds of those who ‘freeze’ have ‘flatlined’ with virtually no thought of taking action going through their mind. If you hooked up an electronic oscilloscope to measure and see their brain activity on a visual screen… you’d see a flatline… zero brainwave activity.
They’re scared shytte less with paralysis… or they deny in their mind that they are being attacked… or they’ve seen so much of it… they just no longer care. But the common thread amongst all three of INTENSE FEAR, APATHY and or DENIAL is no formation of thought for a course of action such as to run, fight, take cover, etc. Just nothing going through the brain.
Towards the end of my time in Africa… I no longer cared, but still couldn’t get enough of the action. I was like a heroin addict that heroin had little effect on. I was hardened to it. It was no longer exciting, adrenaline pumping or fun… just fatiguing and boring.
I stood with my group on an external operation inside Mozambique once. We’d just walked out of a treed area and were next to the tree line taking a break.
We gazed down the open area about 300 meters and saw another group of about 30 soldiers. Both we and they were smoking cigarettes and loitering. We thought their uniforms looked a bit odd, but that was all, other than they were ALL black soldiers… not multi-racial like my group of Rhodesian black and whites.
I stood with my hands folded over the muzzle of my butt-on-the-ground FN rifle, cigarette between fingers, my back to the far away group and talking to Pete Binion, an Australian.
I then hear firing and see tracer rounds flying off into the trees just past Pete and me. Binion says in his Aussie brogue… “Look at that focker… he’s firing at us!” Neither one of us did anything other than I turned back sideways to see where the firing was coming from.
One of the other group… now obviously to us our enemy the Frelimo… was smarter than us and figured out we were the enemy first. He was still firing… incredibly he never hit a one of us. Hans Close, one of our gunners, ripped into them and leveled most of the group off with his MAG, including the guy firing. The few remaining who were not hit or killed ran off.
Point being… I had been shot at so much that I think I really believed puny man and his weapons could not kill me. Or, who knows… maybe the elephant hair wrist bangles I wore made me bullet proof, just like Mashona folklore said they would. Positive thought… another subject. But, I just fucking didn’t feel the fear anymore… like a calloused hand doesn’t really feel the shovel… but just holds it.
That’s when you usually got killed… when you lost all fear. So, you need some of it.
Jack Lawson
Associate Member, Sully H. deFontaine Special Forces Association Chapter 51, Las Vegas, Nevada
Author of “The Slaver’s Wheel”, “A Failure of Civility,” “And We Hide From The Devil,” “Civil Defense Manual” and “In Defense.”
“As we fought for the ideals of freedom and for those on the left and right of us, we judged each other only by the most important of characteristics… nerve, courage and the willingness to stand in harm’s way for others… those abstract values that transcend the color of skin or the shape of eyes. During this respite from human pettiness, whatever our race, creed or ethnicity, at that time we were one.” – An anonymous Special Operations soldier
My compliments, Jack.
Does it feel any different when you realize the other guys fires are missing you? As in: his aim is shitty.
When I was in basic training 1964 live fire over you as you crawled through the mud under the barbed wire. You mean they don’t do that any more?
They did in 74 at Ft Knox but the fire was high, no way you’d get hit.
When we did the grenades the Drill Sgt held his hand over your throwing hand until right before you threw it. Embarrassing. Apparently there were dumbasses out there that couldn’t even throw a gd baseball. In basic they needed a temp driver and they asked a show of hands for people that had a drivers license. Out of 200 only about 5 had a license. I was one of the 5 and drove the IH truck out to the field to deliver lunch on one of the training stations. Oh yeah, of the 5 that had a dl I was the only one that could drive a stick. Pathetic. And that was in 74. Imagine what it’s like today. A green day care center full of over size crybaby’s.
I, too, crawled under the wire with live fire (and tracers to let you know it) at Camp Bullis in Texas in the 60s. In addition, they set up explosives in pits to simulate grenades. The trouble with that is that rattlesnakes would sometimes make their home in these pits and the explosives didn’t always kill or stun them.
Since I was USAF, some of the classes ahead of us clued us in to by Kotex at the BX. If you taped these feminine pads to your elbows and knees, you kept your blood on the inside of your body while crawling through the rocks.
Nothing like errant tank rounds blasting rocks and debris in your bunker door to make a man out of you. But, this vid looks a bit like Monty Python to me.
I’ve probably forgotten some of the live fire training, but I do recall being in a wide, square trench, sitting on a railroad tie, and listening to 7.62 rounds from multiple M-60s at various points of the clock as they snapped overhead. Being run over by an M-60 tank as training, and watching 155 mm artillery rounds splatter shrapnel on a 5-layer bullet proof glass embrasure. It’s loud, and violent.
But none of it directed at me was ever in anger. I think my dad was most impressed, in WWII, by being put through the gas chamber with mustard gas, instead of the tear gas all of us experienced. It’s attention-getting. The worst thing is direct fire 88mm air bursts, and white-phosphorous rounds. Also, try being on the receiving end of .50 cal. MG fire.
looks a bit like Monty Python to me.
========
Me too.
I don’t understand the purpose.
If I was out in the open like that and needed to go from A to B I’d be on my belly crawling like 4 mf, maintaining cover best I could the whole way.
At the very least, if I was running I’d be flat out hauling ass AND laying continuous fire in the direction of the enemy. That video doesn’t make sense. Unless, you think of it as cheap propaganda to twist the knickers of the candy asses.
By 1980, at Air Force basic, it was the “confidence course.” The live rounds over the barbed wire crawl were pops of compressed air. And, we fired a grand total of 50 rounds of .22LR on the range.
If you’ve been involved in live fire exercises, “ fired at” you don’t forget,,,,,,, There is nothing like bullets lots of bullets impacting around you, cracking by one’s ears, impacting in front of you, behind you, to your sides.
Early 90s, thru the 90s,,,,,, Australian crawl face first 70/80 ft Cliff, engaging targets with a pistol, all the while the “ others” are firing into the bank both sides of you, as you run down the face of the cliff. Intense training. After the first exercise, you no longer hear their bullets impact, your focus is the target.
These trainings are multi task related. The drive is to finish what you started. You shoot until the bad guys a non issue, your hit, you push thru, medical is always secondary. If you are hit, get your legs between you and the shooters. The legs can absorb and incredible amount of punishment, not so the torso.
Once things settle down assess, address, wounds in chronological order, breathing blood !!!. Work quick! It’s in your best interest.
One should understand it is YOUR responsibility to survive, I’ve seen many a man lay their awaiting a team medic, or other trooper to come patch him up. Utter nonsense. All the while their bleeding out, are frothing.
You start quickly, if a medics available, allow them to take over, but keep communicating, I can’t breath, I’m shot in? My legs won’t work, airway, always first then plug, holes, move as you can.
Pro tip. You can never have enough tourniquets, your blow out kit is your, not for anybody else. Their down, use their blow out kit.
Irk
Irk
Back in the mid-80s me and another guy were canoeing down the Whitewater River (big mud creek) and someone started shooting. Scattergun shot patterns started hitting the water well in front of us, walked toward us and then we both hunkered down and got sprayed. Stung pretty good. Never saw the shooter. You would have thought that canoe had a 100HP Mercury on the back. Snaked through the river a couple hundred yards then went to the bank to listen to hear if anyone was following. We repeated that a couple times. Nothing more. I will learn the whole story in the afterlife.
I pulled a stint in the US Army, so saw those very same tracer rounds zipping right over my face a foot above me. It was cool! .. So they stopped doing that because … it was too traumatizing?! Even tho the trainee knows there is zero chance the bullets will hit him
Geez I wouldnt want to share the same hole with that guy, especially when bullets start flying from people who are trying to kill him
Why are they stopping at some random rifle fire? If they really want to prepare they should include some machine gun and mortar fire. Throw in some artillery and some aircraft strafing and bombing.
If they make it through that then it’s mustard gas while they go hand to hand with lunatic convicts hopped up on methamphetamine with bayoneted rifles, knives, trench tools, etc.
Then, if they make it through that then some incoming incendiary tank fire while running through a field of booby traps and claymores as hand grenades are tossed at them.
Lastly, with a leg tied up underneath them they are consigned to a wheelchair for a month was they simulate navigating through life while trying to get all their just above poverty level benefits from the VA.
Pussies.
Tim, assume you’re the gent you speak of above. Thank you for your service. What’s seems to be the problem with the VA?
Just assisted an 83 yr old marine cannon cocker achieve his Va benefits. The key is finding the right VRO to work with. I’ve got friends who are “raters” in Reno Nv, Who taught me wording is so so critical. VA uses an official language, and odd rating system.
For example I’m actually 160% disabled when it only takes 100%. A strategy is involved. If I can help. Let me know. We are big into helping our vet brothers and sisters.
Again thank you for your service.
Dirk
Dirk,
Appreciate your offer but none needed, I was merely trying to make a point about “realistic training”.
I have nothing against the VA, I just got signed up @ a year & half ago and everything is great.
Sorry for any confusion I caused.
No worries, seems like we meet an awful lot of Vets, whom are having a time cracking the system.
Believe it is our duty “ All Vets” to assist others into the system if they rate it. Many simply don’t understand the rules, or are so pissed off at the system, they walk away. Huge mistake.
Glad to here its working out.
God bless.
Dirk
Just trying to communicate with the VA is gargantuan. The most inaccessible place I have ever encountered. It’s also inundated with diversity hires whose main concern is what the special of the day is in the cafeteria. Walk through any VA hospital and the smell of food is everywhere. It’s like the states biggest restaurant where some medical people like to hang out.