Groundhog Day

M109 at the Horseshoe

Back in May 1970, I was a reluctant member of 5 platoon, B Coy, 7 RAR, and about one third into my sojourn in South Vietnam which lasted two hundred and ninety eight days.

I had been told that I was there to support a commitment to achieving freedom for the people of South Vietnam.  The fact that back home people were preparing for the Moratorium marches which were about to be the largest turnout of demonstrators in Australian history was a complication to that simple notion.

Another complication was that the people shooting at us, and routinely laying landmines to kill us, were actually Vietnamese. They apparently had a different idea of freedom from ours, and had dug up the mines the task force had deployed from Dat Do to the sea to use them against us.

I was bothered less by these complications than the media commentators. My focus was on keeping myself and my section mates alive, and I worked very diligently at that. Obviously, I was successful.  

The closest I went to being killed or wounded  during my tour was by our own people, in two different "friendly fire" incidents. I think the Americans coined the phrase. It has a similar ring to it as does "collateral damage". We're hearing plenty of US coined rationalised euphemisms at the moment, many of them coming from their president. 

The first friendly fire incident occurred during Operation Finschhafen on Friday 13th March. The second was a bit later, in May, although I can't recall the exact date.

By May, we had been doing heaps of ambushing. On this particular occasion, we set up an ambush on a track junction. It was within artillery range of the Horseshoe where there was a detachment of US mobile M109 howitzers.  These things had a bore of 155mm and a range of 20 kms depending on what they were firing.

We radioed our position (Locstat) back to ATF headquarters who would have notified all friendlies in the area of the grid reference of our location, and set about standing to just as the sun was setting.

We heard primaries at the Horseshoe going off in the distance. This was routine, as the Yanks used what they called Harassment and Interdiction (H & I) to annoy the VC. They would pick what they thought was a likely location for the presence of the enemy, and fire off a salvo or two in the off chance that they might kill someone. Their view of a "likely location", the track junction, coincided with ours. 

What was not routine was the incredible noise these things made as they tumbled over our heads and landed just forward of our position. Next morning we found that the distance they landed from our harbour perimeter was about 75 metres. Given that they were advertised as having a lethal killing effect within 50 metres, that was far too close.  

Our platoon Sig got on the radio without reference from our platoon commander, and called "checkfire all locations". We heard an acknowledgement simultaneous with the sound of a second set of primaries, and understood with terrifying clarity that a second salvo was on the way. The next 45 seconds or so was a very long time.

The second salvo was, if anything, closer than the first, but as the rounds were coming from behind, the shrapnel mostly went forward. We had not dug shell scrapes. The ground at that time of the year was not conducive to quick digging, and the soil rocky with a mixture of clay and granite.

On returning to the Horseshoe at the end of the operation, we would notice the sweet smell of marijuana wafting across from the lines of A Battery, 2nd Battalion, 35th Field Artillery, the unit in question, on many humid evenings. The gunners were obviously seeking solace from time to time. Perhaps there was a distraction which had prevented them from checking for friendlies.

Fifty six years later, the Yanks are still firing off ordnance without, apparently, any clear understanding of the consequences.

In my lifetime, not a lot has changed.

 

Deja Vu

About 56 years ago, four students at Kent State University were shot dead by the Ohio National guard.

I remember it well, as I was at the time a rifleman in 7 RAR and we were patrolling on operation Concrete. The news filtered through to us when we got back to Nui Dat at the end of the operation. The students were protesting the invasion of Cambodia, an event that was happening only 100 Kms to the North West of our location. 

Neil Young released "Ohio" shortly after the massacre, and despite the fact that Nixon was re-elected in 1972, the impact of this song, together with publicity about the My Lai Massacre  (which was in news at about the same time) began to have a profound effect on public opinion against the war.

Bruce Springsteen has released Streets of Minneapolis which is already having an impact given the extent of its shares on social media.

There has been, and always will be, a visceral reaction across the Pacific  to US citizens being shot by uniformed people in their own country.

This incident may represent a turning point in US public opinion.

It's certainly deja vu. 

(The words mean "already seen").

 

History Rhyming

Pic courtesy holocaust encyclopedia.

If you have any interest in history at all, it's not difficult to detect a pattern emerging aligning the current Trump administration with Weimar Germany and from there the rise of Nazi Germany.

The Nazis needed scapegoats. They had the Jews. Now it's completely obvious that undocumented (or documented) immigrants are the scapegoats. They are building internment camps, (called concentration camps until that term went out of fashion).

You could have assumed the US military command would save the day because they would refuse Trump's illegal orders. They didn't. The motorboat strikes were the litmus test. US military command is getting frog-boiled.

Senator Mark Kelly and Representative Elissa Slotkin saw this coming a mile away. Kelly has been threatened with demotion and loss of his military pension.

Slotkin has received bomb threats at her home, and numerous death threats. The Nazis used intimidation to silence their critics although they were slightly less sophisticated. Remember Trump labelled her actions as "seditious behaviour punishable by death."

The ICE crackdown, is getting incrementally more violent by the week culminating in the shooting of a protestor in Minnesota. Remember Hitler's Brownshirts. Intimidation worked well for them.

That's the domestic stuff. Now for foreign policy.

Hitler first annexed Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland (1938) and Bohemia and Moravia in 1939 on the basis that the populations were German speaking.

Trump has kidnapped Maduro and threatened Greenland, Cuba and Columbia. There have been reasons given which talk about the security of the USA. Hitler talked about Lebensraum.

Without drawing too long a bow, you could say that under Trump, the USA has been Weimar Germany for awhile. The Germans, however had an excuse to feel aggrieved post Versailles, but Americans aren't dealing with hyperinflation.

Pic courtesy Wikipaedia

Perhaps the MAGA cult, spread by oligarchs like Musk, has been a major influence.

Is Greenland is the new Poland?

Wasn't it JD Vance who said Trump is America's Hitler?

We live in interesting times....

A Royal Commission?

Pic courtesy CPA

We're hearing, gentle reader, a clamour for a Royal Commission after the Bondi tragedy.

I have written that this clamour can be classified under the heading of "cashing in" on that tragedy, but beyond that, perhaps the notion has some merit. 

Let's put aside the politics and the ghoulish behaviour of most of the media, (especially social media) and consider terms of reference for a Royal Commission.

The generality of the call is all we're hearing at the moment, not the specificity* of its terms of reference.

Here are my humble suggestions of what those terms of reference should be -

1. Was there a connection between the events of October 7th 2023 on the Gaza/Israel border, the IDF's response since, and an increase in anti-semitic rhetoric and behaviour in Australia?

2. Was there a connection between the activities of Islamic State Franchises in the Philippines and Australia and the radicalisation of the shooters at Bondi?

3. Was the granting of a firearms licence to Sajid Akram an oversight on the part of the NSW firearms registry?

4. Are the various state firearm's registries competent to ensure that militants don't gain access to weapons, and are they sufficiently resourced to ensure this?

5. Are the National Intelligence Community (NIC) agencies competent to cooperate and share information that will prevent a recurrence of this atrocity?

If this is to be a good faith enquiry to prevent another attack like Bondi, these are the factors that need to be examined. The brief of the commission needs to be narrow and specific to prevent it weaponizing the politics of the situation.

A simpler brief will also allow the findings to be expedited. A Royal Commission needs to heal divisions, rather than exploit them, to unify rather than to blame, and to provide a strategy to prevent this obscenity from happening again.

Any outcome that doesn't ensure the last one is futile. 

*With apologies to Kevin Rudd.

 

The Second Amendment

I'm not in the habit, gentle reader, of posting Youtube videos, but this is well worth the watching.

You could reasonably say that this is not an Australian problem, and you'd be correct, but there are political parties and pressure groups out and about in this country, pushing to ape an American style gun culture. 

The Harvard review referred to at 3:20 can be found here.

Australian SLR 7.62 mm Semi-auto

My interest in firearm regulation has a lot to do with carrying one of these things for  ten months in Vietnam. They are, after all, designed and manufactured to kill.

We don't need them freely available in this country.

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A Clear and Present Danger

Pic courtesy APSI

The brutal behaviour of a couple of ferals from Tara has left a deep scar on our national character that will take a long time to heal, if it ever does.

Apart from the shock most have expressed, and the meal the media (as it always does) has made of it, maybe we should pause and reflect on underlying causes.

It was a bit close to home for me, as I've worked at Tara, Mount Isa, Camooweal and my bride's family comes from Herberton. These were all school locations where one or both perpetrators worked at one time or another.

Maybe it's possible to eliminate a couple of the usual suspects already touted by the Murdoch media. There was an inference that one of the perpetrators had a problem with NAPLAN. Perhaps he did, and certainly he is/was not the only one, but those unhappy with NAPLAN don't usually shoot people.

Owning firearms in the bush has also been suggested as an issue. Again, people have always owned firearms in the bush, but they haven't used them to ambush police officers. 

I was brought up in a household which always had a firearm available. Admittedly, it was an old 310 gauge shotgun my dad kept to save us from snakes. Back then there were nasty ones (Taipans and the like) in abundance, and the shotty was the quick and efficient way of dispatching them. There are pellet holes in the old toilet roof at Carmilla school as evidence. With that thing you had only to aim in the general direction, and there must have been climbers about.

It wasn't humane, but there were no registered snake handlers about, and we lived a long way from medical help.

Then we read that this kind of thing is essentially a transPacific problem, and if you look at the statistics, it certainly is. 

But there is another factor. 

Click to enlarge

There have, for a long time, been any number of feral blogs festering in the USA. They have a few common characteristics. Their authors are usually anti-government,  pro-gun, and on the extreme right of the political spectrum. They frequently advocate violence, usually involving firearms.

The lunacy that inhabits these sites has begun to seep across the Pacific. Locally, we have New Catallaxy, Michael Smith News, and Cairns News, to name a few. I have occasionally called out the rubbish I read on these. It's a waste of time, I know, gentle reader, but one has to try. I have been banned from the first two, and haven't ever posted on the last one.

I post (when I'm allowed) on sites like these for good reason. Apart from seeking out ideas that are different from mine to challenge my beliefs, rather than finding those who agree with me to consolidate them, I have always harboured the naive notion that facts are useful. This leads to disappointment of course. Facts are optional in echo chambers, but I've always had a problem with the publishing of egregious rubbish.

One of the perpetrators of last week's tragedy was an occasional poster on Michael Smith News, and a more frequent visitor to Cairns News.

Do you reckon Michael will post this?

To my way of thinking, anybody prepared to publish ideas promoting and suggesting violence as a solution to political grievances, real or imagined, bears a responsibility if said posters act on them.

It will be interesting to see if anything changes as a result. Based on past events, it probably won't, but perhaps a national registration scheme for firearms would be the next logical step. 

The National Firearms Agreement (1996) recommended that New South Wales, Queensland, and Tasmania immediately establish an integrated license and firearms registration system. The remaining jurisdictions were required to review their existing registration systems to ensure compatibility so that the databases could be linked.

We do have a national firearms agreement, so the various state governments getting their ducks in a row to the point of establishing a national database should not be too expensive or onerous. It hasn't happened yet.

Your average cop on the beat would probably welcome it.   

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The Shotgun Amendment

 

Image courtesy tvtropes.

Maybe, in light of the recent SCOTUS decision, it's time for the US to consider a 28th amendment to their constitution.

After all, they regard their constitution as sacred, and those celebrating the recent decision claim the preservation of human life as their major rationale. 

They use the same logic to justify access to firearms through the second amendment. The most common justification is that possession of a firearm guarantees the individual protection against attack from somebody or something evil. That evil could be construed as a lifetime of poverty and suffering for mother and child as the consequence of this Roe v. Wade reversal.

The SCOTUS decision, as well as protecting the rights of the unborn child, also impinges on the rights of the mother. Unless immaculate conception is possible in the US, that unborn child will always have a father.

That father, in a moral world, has the same responsibility for the life of his child as does the mother who will, under this decision, be forced to bear that child. One very simple question should be asked. Why should the total responsibility for the well being of that child be vested only in the mother? 

Currently in the US, maternity leave, public support for single mothers, and services such as child care, kindergarten and preschool are patchy at best, and in some neighbourhoods, almost non-existent. These are the neighbourhoods where access to contraception for the disadvantaged segments of the population is also difficult. It's a self-perpetuating problem and this decision will ensure it continues.

The upshot of this situation is that the mother's life is fundamentally changed, her access to an income jeopardised, and when the child is born, she assumes total responsibility. 

By any measure, this is simply unfair, and now that the state has decided that abortion is no longer an option, the situation has changed utterly.

If the state can decide what happens to a woman's body, it would seem only reasonable and just that some kind of caveat be placed over the conduct of the other partner in the creation of that baby, its father.

The amendment (hereafter called the Shotgun Amendment) would go something like this -

Once paternity is established (and that is not difficult) the father would be compelled to contribute to the support of the child. This could be organised at a local level through paternity courts which would be established for the purpose. There would be debate about how the nature and duration of the support would be established, but working that out would not be rocket science. A contribution code could be established.

And of course, it would be called The Shotgun Amendment.

With the introduction of a firearm metaphor into the title, the NRA would love it....

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Matthew McConaughey's Speech

This should be required viewing for all NRA members, and in this country for the people who advocate slackening our National Firearms Agreement.

It's powerful stuff....

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Home of the Craven, Land of the Shooting Spree

 

One representation of the problem. (Image courtesy gunviolencearchive.org)

Again, or still, kids are being slaughtered across the Pacific in their classrooms.

This, in what the conventional wisdom regards as a civilised country. If this is "civilisation", I shudder to think what an uncivilised community would look like.

These events are now routine, and I find it incomprehensible that US lawmakers allow it to happen. 

The lawmakers who continue to allow this to happen are craven cowards. Their constituents want tighter regulation, but they are terrified of the NRA.

We are reminded, gentle reader, of the cliches wheeled out after these events. It happens so often that I know them by heart -

Violence is as American as apple pie.

And

A good guy with a gun will always stop a bad guy with a gun.

And 

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.

And on it goes....

Meanwhile, the governor of the state where since 1966, twenty-two of these massacres (two of them in schools) have taken place, will address the NRA convention on Friday. Ironically perhaps, this convention will be a gun free zone.

He will speak on the same platform as the last President of the US, who on seven occasions during his administration intoned the "thoughts and prayers" cliche after similar massacres. That was all he did...

Image courtesy The Guardian

On a personal note, I find these events completely horrifying. As a lifetime teacher (and school principal) and a short time soldier, I probably have a unique perspective.

In Vietnam many years ago, I saw what rounds from a high powered long barrelled rifle do to the human body. That's what automatic rifles are designed to do, of course. They are, after all, killing machines. I carried one from February to December 1970.

I carried a rifle, because I was trained to kill enemy guerillas. I fervently hope the few shots I fired in the only major contact I was involved in didn't kill anyone. I'll never know. 

A soldier a few metres from me was wounded in a friendly fire incident on 13th March 1970. I know what it feels like to have 7.62mm rounds whistling around your ears. I shudder to think what small children would make of this. Those who survived will be changed for the rest of their lives.

Years later, as principal of a special school in North Queensland I was threatened with shooting by a grieving parent. He owned a rifle which was confiscated by the police when I reported the incident. At the time, I was grappling with the confronting possibility that myself and my staff would find ourselves in a situation where we were trying to protect a school full of children, most of whom were in wheelchairs.

In this country we confronted the problem in 1996, and semi-autos were removed from circulation. The sky didn't fall, and we continue to live in a free country. If I wanted to own a firearm (and God knows I don't - I was very happy to hand my SLR back to the armory in Nui Dat on 10th December 1970) I could, but I couldn't go down to my local gun shop and buy an AR-15 off the shelf.

In many states in the USA, once you are 18, you can.

I've spent time in the USA, and learned from that experience that in most respects, their culture is not dissimilar to ours. The one exception is their gun culture, which viewed dispassionately,  is a complete anachronism. The result in 2022 is that there are more guns than people in the USA.

That is the essence of the problem. It can be solved. Short-term, by a tightening of regulations so that all weapons must be licensed and all purchases are screened. Long-term, an amnesty (perhaps lasting at least years) should be implemented, with consequential amounts paid to gun owners. The USA also needs legislation resembling our National Firearm Agreement. Without it, the states whose culture remains bogged in the 1700s will always be feral. 

Perhaps, the best path to a solution lies in the highly developed plaintiff law structures in the USA. That has, in a small way, already commenced.

In the meantime, all we can do in Australia is watch what is happening across the Pacific, understanding that it represents a kind of cautionary tale. 

God help them...

Update - This is from Commonweal Magazine. It provides a balanced and Catholic perspective, and was written by someone whose life was changed through gun violence.

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A Very Bad Example

Pic courtesy CNBC

I've always believed that watching what is going on across the Pacific is a pretty reliable way of predicting the future of this country.

This rule of thumb has held historically for a wide range of cultural phenomena, including media trends, music and changes in lifestyle. Note I wrote "changes", not "improvements". 

Recently in the USA, we've seen the election in 2016 of a populist one-term POTUS, who effectively destroyed whatever remained of his country's unity in his term, and then refused to accept that he was defeated at the election of November 2020. His break with the democratic tradition has plunged his country further into the pit of division that he exploited to get elected in the first place.

As part of the exploitation of this division, the Republicans (or at least some of them) instituted an audit of the presidential vote in Maricopa county in Arizona, the state which, when called by Fox News for Biden, broke the news that Trump was a one-term president.

The goal of the audit was to prove fraud in order to get Biden elected. It was not an objective exercise.The results of that audit have finally been released, but without the blaze of publicity that was associated with the announcement of the audit in the first place. The report can be found here. 

An extract - 

What has been found is both encouraging and revealing. On the positive side there were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official election canvass results for Maricopa County.

Remember, that is a summary of the major findings of the Trump-inspired exercise carried out by his supporters - exactly the opposite of what it was intended to find. So the official results stand. In fact, the audit found that Biden actually won by 360 more votes than the official results, winning the state by a margin of 45,469 ballots.  You get the best reporting by reading the local non-aligned media. 

So in the washup, the audit was an exercise in maintaining the rage and frustration felt by Trump supporters with the goal of keeping his run in 2024 in the news, and maintaining a fund-raising base. It had absolutely nothing to do with election integrity.

In other words, it's now OK across the Pacific, that if you lose an election, to simply deny the fact, put it down to fraud, and throughly weaken your country's confidence in the democratic process as you go along. That is obviously extremely dangerous, and throughly immoral, and reminds me of Abe Lincoln's speech in which he quoted Matthew 12:22-28 - 

A house divided against itself cannot stand. 

So we should look across the Pacific, note the mess the USA is in, and use it as a reminder not to follow down that road. There are so many examples of this in terms of firearms legislation, a largely non-existent health system and the USA's dysfunctional electoral process itself.

The Americans could do with our independent Electoral Commissions, both state and federal, and our system of compulsory voting. They could also do with our NFA, our public health system, and our largely non-partisan judiciary.

Never take your own country for granted.

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American Policing

 

 Pic courtesy Wikipedia

The picture above is relevant in terms of the ongoing debate about policing across the Pacific.

It was taken in Brisbane in early 1942 about the time of the Battle of Brisbane which resulted from tensions between Americans and Australians in general, and American MPs and Australian soldiers in particular.

The swaggering pose, and the behaviour that went with it, is what irritated military Australians, particularly those who were stationed in Brisbane at the time.

Now I'm no expert on the US, but I did spend some time there a few years ago, and what made a lasting impression was the contrast between Australian and American policing.

First up, there were so many different police forces on the streets of both Washington and New York, where I spent the bulk of my time. No doubt the big cities aren't representative of the whole country, but it's fair to compare what is obvious on the streets of say Sydney and Brisbane with what observable in New York. The first impression is of the noise they make. Sirens are everywhere, and each police force seems to have its own dedicated siren tone.

It was not unusual to see two or three different police squads, from different jurisdictions, on one street block. This is unsurprising when you understand that there are over 500 different law enforcement agencies in that state. 

They also wear different uniforms, although all are militaristic in appearance.

But what is immediately obvious to a visiting Australian is the swagger and intimidation generated by their presence. They appear to intentionally promote an image of power and force which is unique to the metropolitan USA.

I have no doubt that this swagger and intimidation is what got under the skin of Diggers in 1942. It hasn't changed and is obviously cultural.

It is easy to understand the current controversy when you compare. Our coppers can be arrogant and intimidatory, but I have seen little of that, even though sidearms, uniforms, and demeanour have changed enormously here in my lifetime.

I guess if you are plod in the USA, and you know that every punter could be carrying a concealed firearm, you'd be toey.

The Americans, with their insane gun laws, have made their bed, and I guess they'll have to sleep in it. 

Let's hope we maintain the NFA.

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An Epiphany

                                                        Image courtesy of Getty Images

What we witnessed in Washington last Wednesday is an epiphany, a wake-up call..

We saw a mob ransacking the Capitol, after a pep talk from Donald Trump, who had addressed them, urging them to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to prevent the certification of the Biden presidency.

Such an assault hasn't occurred since the war of 1812, but that incident involved British troops, not American citizens.

What has created a situation where American citizens feel that it's OK to attack their seat of government and prevent the democratic business of the day from being conducted?

To understand the origins of this behaviour, which is cultural, rather than political, you need to examine the digital environment surrounding individuals who behave in this way. Whilst many of them are complete lunatics (obvious from the images), many of them aren't. Many of them are otherwise solid citizens who believe they are doing the right thing.

Voltaire is quoted as observing - 

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

He's on the money.

Here are just a few absurdities believed by many who ransacked the Capitol last Wednesday -

Members of the alt-right and many conservative journalists, spread a conspiracy theory on social media outlets such as 4chan, 8chan and Twitter contained coded messages that connected several high-ranking Democratic Party to child trafficking. A number of pizzerias were named including the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington.

Then there is the meme claiming that the pandemic is a hoax, or if you don't like that one, that it is a CCP plot.

Then, if we read Qanon or 4Chan, we hear that 5G carries the Covid-19 virus, that lizard people have infiltrated all levels of the US administration (except for Trump of course) and that Pearl harbour and the Oklahoma bombing were false flags operations.

The frightening element of all this is that polling indicates that many of these conspiracies are believed by a significant proportion of Americans.

Absolutely no evidence is presented for these narratives, but that doesn't seem to matter. In any case, even if there is no evidence, an avalanche of blurry videos which are interpreted with no context are substituted.

The most heinous of these memes, and the most dangerous, is the election fraud fantasy. It's heinous because it has been comprehensively debunked by electoral officials (many of them in Republican administrations), dismissed in the courts (often by Trump appointed judges) and the recounts and audits that have been conducted have shown all results are valid.

It is dangerous because as David Kilcullen noted, it has white-anted the trust that many citizens have in their government. This trust is essential for democracy to survive. A few thousand of those citizens marched on the Capitol last Wednesday, and a few hundred broke in, attempted to harm their elected officials, and trashed the building. Some carried zip ties (apparently to kidnap congress members or senators).

Last Wednesday's event, instigated by a pathological liar, are deeply troubling.

But the most significant factor which brought the US to this point is the proliferation of dangerous online garbage. It needs to be cleaned up.That is the challenge for not only the US, but free countries worldwide. 

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Taipans

                                                    Pic courtesy Queensland Museum. 

Taipans (Oxyuranus scutellatus) had a fearsome reputation when I was growing up in North Queensland.

I had a close encounter with one on our school's pineapple project garden when I about eight. I was weeding pineapple plants with a hoe, and blundered across a large and healthy specimen curled up against the row.

I'm not sure who got the biggest fright, the taipan or me, but it uncurled itself in a flash and began to chase me along the row. They move very quickly.

I threw the hoe at it which distracted it somewhat, and took giant steps, not looking back until the pineapple patch was more than 100 metres behind. I reckon I was hovering most of the way.

The snake had disappeared by the time my father, responding to my pale face and eyes like saucers, turned up with his dilapidated shotgun.

The only time we ever saw the shotgun was when snakes were about, but there are still holes in the roof of the school toilet where dad dispatched a snake with it in the 50s. I know this because I went back to the school years ago, and found them - the holes, not the snakes.

This was sugar cane country, and there were snakes of all kinds in the area.

We used to get regular visits from a snake expert called Ram Chandra, an Indian chap who made a reasonable living out of touring schools with boxes of snakes and giving informative talks about reptiles. He was one of a group of pioneers who helped develop an antivenene.

Years later, when I was teaching kids with disabilities in Townsville, we were taking a group of these children on a bush walk in coastal scrub not far from the CBD. One of the boys, a lad with Down Syndrome kept lagging behind, and I had, on a few occasions, to leave the main group and check to see if he was OK.

Towards the end of the hike, when everyone was getting a bit tired, he was behind again, so I called his name. His response as I heard it, was "Taipan, taipan!".

I ran back at about the same pace I had used when chased by a taipan as a kid, frantically trying to recall the first aid techniques for managing snakebite that I'd learnt to keep my St John's certificate current.

When I reached him, he was sitting on the track, looking a bit flustered, but showing no symptoms of snakebite.

It turned out that what he was actually saying was "Tight pants", not 'taipan".

The pants were what was slowing him down.

In hindsight, it's funny, but at the time I was far from amused...

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Danger Close - A Review

Pic courtesy Sydney Morning Herald

This is my attempt, gentle reader, at a movie review.

Back in the day, we called them “pictures”, but that was a long time ago.

The movie is Danger Close, the recently released account of the Battle of Long Tan on 18th August 1966.

The story resonates with me for a number of reasons.

I went to school at Downlands with Frank Topp, who was killed in the opening few minutes of the battle. He is represented by a few seconds of footage when he is marched into D Company as a reinforcement on the morning of the 18th August. In the movie, he's one of the two diggers given a briefing about the reputation of Harry Smith's crew as he arrives.

I copped a bit of bullying at Downlands in 1961 when I started as a skinny fourteen year-old. I was a schoolies son from North Queensland, not the offspring of a wealthy land holder from the Western Downs, as a fair proportion of my school mates were at the time. Frank, for reasons I’ve never really understood, acted frequently as my protector.

He was well built and burly, so they left me alone. Perhaps the fact that his old man was a small crop farmer from Helidon, rather than a cow cockie from a big holding helped. We were both on the outer.

Frank left Downlands (as I did) at the end of 1962, and joined the army as an apprentice in RAEME. He became fascinated by the warries he began to hear about Vietnam, and transferred to Infantry. He arrived in Vietnam on the 16th July 1966, and was marched into D Coy 6 RAR on the morning of the battle. He didn’t have time to get to know the diggers he died with.

I was first in Long Tan in April 1970, when as a member of B Coy 7 RAR and a Nasho on his second operation in country, we were trucked there and harboured up near that famous rubber plantation until dark. Then we moved on foot through the night into our AO along a dry creek bed called the Suoi Lo O Nho. It was a bugger of a trip.

I also visited the site as a tourist in 2007 with my two sons. That was a much more rewarding experience, But it’s a sombre place.

The movie was well worth watching, irrespective of my experience of the history. It's production is slick, and the cinematography is first class.

The narrative is obviously based on the record, but there were a few incidents written in that, as far as I know, never occurred. There is a short cameo about a VC sniper in a woodcutters hut, as well as another involving two Vietnamese women which I doubt ever happened. It doesn't matter. They don’t detract.

The performances were generally pretty good, especially that of Travis Fimmel who played Harry Smith (OC D Coy) and Daniel Webber who played private Paul Large. There is a back story involving their relationship which may, or may not be accurate. Again, it doesn't matter and provides some diversion from the heavy themes of endurance, courage and loyalty in the face of impossible odds embedded in the narrative. 

The sound and fury of the artillery which was the conclusive element in the outcome is well conveyed, as is the on-the-ground minute by minute ordeal of the diggers.

The production team did a good job of reproducing a rubber plantation (a paulownia plantation at Wooroolin near Kingaroy) and the background landscape captured the Long Tan area pretty well, although I reckon the soil wasn’t quite red enough. Maybe they should have done some shooting on the Atherton Tablelands, where the contrasting red soil and green vegetation mimic Phouc Tuy.

It's very much a Queensland product. Apart from the rubber plantation scenes at Kingaroy, filming was also done in the Gold Coast hinterland near Nerang and at the Village Roadshow studios at Oxenford.

I could carry on about the authenticity and accuracy of representations of kit such as weapons, webbing, packs, but I won't. The weapons were spot on, as far as I could tell, but we never carried F1s. This was set four years before my time, and perhaps they were phased out by then.

The choppers confused me a little. They looked like the UH-1B, shorter than the UH-1H that I was familiar with. Perhaps the B series were replaced by the H series between 1966 and 1970. I'd welcome any guidance from chopper nerds on that. 

Again, it matters not. They made all the right noises. 

Apparently getting the movie going financially was a close-run thing.  It has that in common with the battle, which could have ended in complete disaster.

I'm glad it was made. Kriv Stenders (director) deserves kudos for actually getting it to screen.

It's a story that had to be told.

And that is was made in Australia, by Australians, is gratifying.

Deadly Dave

Pic courtesy Australian

Senator David Leyonhjelm is making a prize goose of himself (again).

This is nothing new, of course. He does this with monotonous regularity. Usually the issue relates to firearm regulation. He advocates deregulation, which has proved so successful across the Pacific.

Leyonhjelm is a contrarian, only because that behaviour gets him noticed. He is largely irrelevant in terms of political clout, which is fair enough, given that his election was largely accidental, and partly a result of the carelessness of many of those who voted for him. They were confused by the term “Liberal”.

If he had any integrity, he would substitute “Libertarian” for “Liberal” in the title of his party of one.

Thinking about it, perhaps “Glibertarian” would be a more accurate label. His depth of understanding of the concept is shallow to say the least.

The incidents in play involve some pretty childish behaviour. He had a verbal stoush with a female colleague which degenerated into his referring to her sexual activity. That is not on - whether it happens on the floor of the senate or your local workplace.

Later, he doubled down by reporting “rumours” about her behaviour on the echo chamber called Outsiders.

A producer got the chop for that, whilst the Senator and his two sidekicks got off scot free.

Since then, the female senator has begun to consider her legal options, a number of parliamentarians (of both genders and both sides of the chamber) have strongly suggested he apologise, and Qantas who airs the show on its in-flight entertainment, has been criticised for doing so.

Leyonhjelm has a problem.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke......

RFK

Today is the 50th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's assasination.

I remember it well, because it happened on my 21st birthday. At the time I was in my first year of teaching at Goondiwindi State School, with my year 5 class of 44 students.

My teaching colleagues had taken me to one of the local pubs and shouted me many beers. In those days, drinking in pubs was not allowed until age 21, so these were my first legal drinks.

The news of the assasination came as I was dealing with my first real hangover. It shocked me into alert sobriety immediately, and also into deep sadness.

Bobby Kennedy was for me, a symbol of hope and optimism. I knew enough about US politics at the time, to harbour the hope that if Kennedy got into the White House, maybe my impending national service would not eventuate.

I had already been called up in my second year at Kedron Park Teachers' College. As a teacher in training at the time, I had been deferred to allow the completion of one year of teaching. I had plenty of time to contemplate American politics and how they were likely to effect my future. The letter from the Department of Labour and National Service said I had a "liability to serve", wording that I found completely bizarre. Looking back on it, they were pretty bizarre times.

Kennedy had just won the Californian primary, and was gathering momentum over the establishment Democrat nominee, Hubert Humphrey. Nixon went on the win the election in 1968 after Humphrey became the Democrat nominee when the Chicago convention imploded..

Jack Newfield, writing in Robert Kennedy : A Memoir. (1969) believed RFK had the potential to create a different future -

He was 42 when he was killed. He was just finding his own voice... I think he would have been elected in '68. And I think Robert Kennedy in the White House, instead of Richard Nixon, is day and night. We would not have had years more of death in Southeast Asia. We would not have had  Watergate. We would not have had a crook as vice president, like [Spiro] Agnew. We would not have overthrown the democratically elected government of Chile. The world would have been very different, if not for the veto of a gunman.

And maybe 200 Australian Nashos wouldn't have died in Vietnam.

With Kennedy, died the hope and optimism of a generation of Americans and the future of many young Australians.

Compare the grace, dignity and compassion of  Bobby Kennedy with the behaviour of the current incumbent in the White House. 

We will not see his like again.

Home of the Brave - Land of the Free

A very young Abe Lincoln

Australians looking across the Pacific right now can’t believe what they’re seeing.

Our long-time ally, and a country which we always believed shared our values, is slowly but surely destroying itself.

Mind you, we've seen it all before.

I saw a similar phenomenon when serving beside Americans in Vietnam in 1970. Back then, American servicemen were killing their junior officers at an alarming rate. The preferred method was to put a hand grenade beside the sleeping victim, pull the pin, and run like hell.

Nine hundred died in this manner from 1969 to 1972. It was so common that it produced its own jargon.

The Yanks called it “fragging”.

The violence was a symptom of a deep national malaise in 1970, relating to the lack of support for the US military in Vietnam at home, and a growing understanding by those at the sharp end of the conflict of the sheer futility of it all.

In 2017, we are seeing similar violence, most recently the slaughter of 58 people at Las Vegas.

There seems to be a chilling inevitability about this, and the impotence of the US law makers to deal with it.

It is also a symptom of deep national malaise. The country should probably be renamed "the Disunited States of America", when you observe the quality of the hyper partisanship that has developed in the last decade.

That division in public opinion also reminds me of Vietnam.

When he was asked to put forward reasons why the US should continue to fight in Vietnam, in a memo dated March 24, 1965, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton writes to his boss, Robert McNamara, that America’s end goal is “70%” to avoid humiliation.

The “dignity” of the USA held sway over everything else. It wasn't about defeating Communism, or saving the Vietnamese. It was all about the self-absorption of the body politic in the USA.

So, the prime reason was about symbolism – saving face. We saw how that worked out.

In many ways, gentle reader, this same symbolism is at the root of the current malaise. A naïve observer is prompted to enquire why the most powerful nation on earth lacks the capacity, and apparently the will, to protect its own citizens.

And, on the face of it, if you listen to the NRA, it’s all about the symbolism of the Second Amendment.

This clause is held up as an inviolable symbol of freedom, expressed as the right to self-defence.

Now forgetting about the obvious and inevitable outcome of the practical expression of this cultural symbol (a rate of mass shootings unrivaled anywhere else on the planet) it’s important to examine the historical perspective.

You need to go back a lot further in time than Vietnam or Las Vegas, to understand that this thread of the threat of self-destruction runs through American history.

The following is an extract from an 1838 address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, by a very young Abraham Lincoln. He was talking about existential risk to the Union - 

How then shall we perform it? --At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? -- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! --All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

I’ve bolded Lincoln’s answer.

It’s pretty obvious that he saw self-destruction as the greatest threat. Twenty three years later the threat was realized.

We’re seeing this same threat now, in the context of a President who gained power by dividing his country, and surfing into office on the fear and resentment created by that division.

As for the line in the anthem – Home of the brave – land of the free.

The gun culture fostered by the NRA is not an outcome of bravery, but of fear, or more accurately paranoia.

And the country which characterizes itself as a bastion of freedom, has the highest incarceration rate in the western world.

The irony is stark and inescapable.