Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving menu: salad, chauteaubriand, chauteau potatoes, sautéed Brussels sprouts. Our friend Mary Anne is bringing an appetizer platter, and later today Donna’s going shopping for a fancy prepared desert. I’ll be in charge of the deux châteaux; Donna the Brussels sprouts.
Which, in their natural state, look positively prehistoric, and bring to mind Peter Graves’ immortal line from Airplane!
Reminding service members they swore an oath to the Constitution, not to any particular president and commander-in-chief, and that they shouldn’t obey illegal orders, can get a little tricky. This’ll come across elitist as hell, but by going public with a video addressed to military members in general, those six senators and representatives could rightly be accused of stirring up troops to oppose the commander-in-chief, their ultimate civilian master. It’s officers, senior officers in particular, who are most responsible for considering whether orders from on high are legitimate or not. In our classless, democratic society, it’s impolite to draw this kind of distinction between troops and their leaders, but it’s nevertheless there, and the military could not function without chiefs, warriors, and the implicit understanding that orders will be obeyed.
About ten years ago, while on a flight safety teaching trip to USAF bases in South Korea, I turned on Armed Forces Radio Network and heard Rush Limbaugh ranting that Barack Obama wasn’t a legitimate president and that any orders from him should be questioned, literally fomenting disrespect and resistance toward the commander-in-chief. In my view, broadcasting Limbaugh’s show to overseas troops made AFRN complicit in undermining good order and discipline in the military. I was so enraged that on my return I wrote letters to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the USAF chief of staff, and my senators and representatives, demanding Limbaugh be taken off AFRN. My then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (wife of the same Senator Mark Kelly who participated in the recent illegal orders video), wrote similar letters to military authorities on my behalf, and I’ll be her number one fan to the day I die. We didn’t win our case, but that’s another story. In any case, what I accused Rush Limbaugh of doing back in 2015 is not that different from what these six Democratic senators and representatives are accused of today.
Not that they’re wrong, mind you!
As for Senator Kelly’s medals, I have no idea if they’re correctly arranged or not. There’s an eager army of military decorations experts out there, spring-loaded to pounce on errors, but I will say this: once you have more than than three or four ribbons or medals, you quit trying to arrange them yourself and hire someone to do it for you, normally a third-party vendor, who’ll mount them on a backing and guarantee they’re arranged in the correct order. Everyone I knew in the military did this — it’s not worth the hassle of trying to get individual decorations straight and neat, or the strong possibility you’ll screw up the order of precedence. These are my ribbons and medals, by the way, and you can damn well bet I paid a vendor to arrange and mount them — as I’m sure Mark Kelly did his:
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A couple of things to know about ribbons and medals for non-military readers: ribbons are worn on regular uniforms; medals on formal, fancy-dress uniforms. Many decorations consist of just a ribbon; the more significant and meritorious ones consist of both a ribbon and a medal. As for order of precedence, the most important ribbon or medal is the one on top and closest to the heart, the lesser ones are toward the bottom, The little pins and whatnot attached to them are called devices, to indicate the number of times you’ve won a particular decoration or if there’s an act of valor associated with it, etc. If you want to know more, you can find an expert on almost any street corner.
As for Secretary of Whatever Pete Hegseth and his threat to put Senator Kelly back on active duty and then court-martial him … bring it on, you drunken pipsqueak. You may well be going after the next president of the United States.
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It’s amazing to me that governments and kings can get people to fight and kill each other over colorful bits of cloth and metal, but there it is.
Well, that and the draft.
They gave me a few medals after Vietnam which I’ve never had the chance to actually wear since I never dress up or go anywhere.
Most people don’t know that you have to buy your own medals and ribbons. And no brass hat officer pins the thing on your ‘blouse’ (military nomenclature for shirt) in a solemn ceremony.
I’m proud of my Expert marksmanship medal on the M16 and believe I could have shot better than Sharpshooter with the antique, plastic stocked, semi-auto only, M14 battle rifle in basic training- if it had been in better shape.
The M14 had the shortest career of any US service rifle, even the Jrag-Jorgensen, being shuffled off to warehouses when the M16 was adopted.
The M14 was basically a silly updating of the M1 Garand with a slightly different cartridge length, full auto fire, and a higher capacity magazine.
It was incapable of controlled automatic fire, therefore at Basic Training at Fort Puke, Louisiana, the armorers removed the full auto switch.
(Ft Polk- named after a Confederate traitor: renamed in 2023 after an actual loyal MOH winner, then switched back to the traitor Polk name by the traitorous trump administration.)
A few years back I came across my DD214
only to discover that in addition to the standard, red, National Defense medal (the Fire Guard award), and the yellow and green Vietnam service ribbon, the Army had also awarded me the green Army Commendation medal (ARCOM-‘For Meritorious Service’.
I laughed over that and went out to a local antique shop and bought myself an antique ARCOM metal for $26 in the original case with both ribbon and medal. Then I solemnly awarded it to myself. And giggled.
Now medals, ribbons and awards didn’t necessarily mean much in Vietnam since majors and light colonels routinely gave each other Bronze Stars for flying over some firefight in a lifer bird or Loach to observe through heavy lenses.
I got the ARCOM during the battle of Song Mao, my only real combat, and I got it through a series of fuck-ups of monumental scale involving me inadvertently taking our radar offline before the battle.
So, just like in Catch 22, I fucked up so hard the Army gave me a medal. I still laugh thinking about it.
Luckily nobody got hurt during our shelling and my unit more or less covered for my incompetence.
So instead of my being court marshaled and sent to LBJ (Long Bien Jail- the Army’s Vietnam stockade) or Ft Leavenworth, I was awarded a medal. You can’t make this shit up. Read about it here: https://todgermanica.com/2016/03/12/song-mao-fire-base-is-shelled-on-my-watch-i-almost-get-bronze-star/
So I could have gotten the Bronze Star if I’d had the cojones to write myself up for it and lie my ass off. But I felt lucky not to be doing hard time at LBJ.