Subj : The War Has No Clothes To : Angus McLeod From : Frank Reid Date : Sun Oct 02 2005 04:10 am Re: The War Has No Clothes By: Angus McLeod to Frank Reid on Sun Oct 02 2005 01:39 am > > BTW, what's it like to live in freedom without having to do any of the > > heavy lifting? > > What's it like to live in freedom at the expense nations around the globe > that you brutalize and subjugate to fulfil the political fantasies of your > intellectually sub-normal leaders? Ooh, I was so hoping you'd give the only correct answer of "It's fine, my friend!" We do value our OAS friendships. There's no need to apologize for having rich and powerful friends who happen to share an ideology of inalienable human rights and are also willing to commit large chunks of their GDP on the firepower to defend that ideology. Because you know damn well you had an "almost as rich" and "almost as powerful" enemy of that ideology sniffing around your backyard for many decades. The Magna Carta is a fine document, but it would have been kindling for the book-burnings had it not been for American intervention and power projection throughout the Caribbean and Central America during the last half-century. Let me tell you a boring war story that's probably of not much significance or interest to anyone other than a couple dozen "Cold War dinosaur" families, like mine... My first exposure to "terrorism" (before the word was in vogue) happened in your neck of the woods in 1979, while assigned to a small communications facility near San Juan, Puerto Rico. I'd been living in the local community for two years, where my Puerto Rican friends and neighbors valued not just my personal friendship, but the friendship of America, in general. There were certainly those who grumbled about the environmental impacts of the Naval gunfire support training range on the eastern island of Vieques, but living next door to Cuba, most clearly recognized and appreciated the difference between the two ideologies. Despite, Fidel had been financing terrorist operations under his General Intelligence Directorate, through groups like MIRA (Los Macheteros) and FALN, to disrupt our presence on the island. Until then, they had been responsible for a few low-level bombings against hotels, local airfields and some low-value military targets. Then, on the morning of December 3rd, they ambushed a school bus (yes, a big yellow school bus) as it carried my unarmed co-workers, friends and future bride to work. For a few brief seconds (which seemed like an eternity to its passengers), a handful of killers sprayed the bus up and down both sides with AK-47 and handgun fire with the obvious intent of killing everyone inside. My wife was quick enough to hit the rubber matting when the shooting began, and she was among only five who were uninjured. Well, physically uninjured... to this day, an unexpected fireworks burst and even a bug-zapper brings on a cold sweat. I doubt one can ever really forget carnage of that level. My close friend, Emil White, was killed by a bullet through his skull. He was a native of Saint Thomas in the adjacent U.S. Virgin Islands, where we often hopped a puddle-jumper together and stayed with his very proud mother on the island. The bus driver, John Ball, who had several young children, was torn to shreds being the initial target. In total, a dozen were injured, and many of those permanently disfigured and disabled. I had the dubious distinction of being the on-duty supervisor when it occurred. (They discouraged assignment of "couples" to the same work section.) When the time for my wife's arrival and shift-change came and passed, the only information I could get from the base was "there was an incident". My initial realization that there had been violence came about an hour after, when I saw a story on the 100 word-per-minute UPI news wire that I routinely monitored... I still distinctly recall reading the word "AMBASH" in the ticker line, as printed teletype characters were often garbled by the interference on shortwave radio frequencies. Ambush? We certainly didn't think of ourselves as a high-value military target. We had no armament or defenses, and we had just a single Marine who monitored automobile traffic flow into the "elephant cage" antenna arrays. We did have sensitive electronics monitoring missions, facilitated by the relative calm in the local electromagnetic spectrum, but we were also a benign communications hub and distress monitoring station for all merchant shipping from Curacao to Capetown, South Africa. As a naive kid in my early 20s who had joined a post-Vietnam "peacetime" military, this just didn't make sense. It also didn't make sense to the Puerto Rican community. We were their neighbors, friends and family, and not some interloping military force. Ironically, that attack quickly eroded what minuscule community sentiment existed beforehand for the Communist political splinter party agenda. Oh, we went through a few weeks where uniforms were restricted off-base and the like, but I was back at my rented home and among my friends in Levittown within just a few days. So, life went on... for some of us. As a footnote, they never caught the triggermen. The groups ultimately fractured and scurried off to far-flung parts. Some surely made their way to Cuba, and others landed in New York, Chicago and elsewhere. The FBI rounded up about a dozen with admitted ties to planning the attack during the late 80s and early 90s. We were living in Alaska at the time, and the FBI had been in contact with my wife as a potential witness at their trials. Coincidentally, the 11 who were convicted were pardoned in September 1999 by President Clinton during in his pre-departure clemency spree. Don't read more than intended into that... I mention it only to make the story complete. I admit I don't exactly understand that particular dimension of "executive privilege" that allows commutation for convicted felons, but every president exercises it. It as easily could have have been a Republican president whose wife's political ambitions were in need of favor from the New York Puero Rican community. I expect these terrorists now understand what freedom means, at least. Okay, so what's the point? Wouldn't the easy thing have been for the U.S. to walk away from its Caribbean friends when the going got tough? I mean, sugar cane and rum aren't so important that we should have to let innocent Americans be ambushed, right? If we had, Angus, do you think you might today be grumbling about more pressing issues than the high Barbadian tax rate? I spent too much time bouncing around Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama to believe any country in that region could have withstood the Soviet political onslaught had it not been for the continuous and dominant American military presence in the region. Your flag would now be adorned with a hammer and sickle, and your tourism industry would be an occasional Krivak or Sovremenny! However, if you think communism would have afforded you an acceptable quality of life, beyond the lack of technical innovation and the paucity of shoes, then you don't need to be appreciative. If not, I'll remind you again that freedom isn't free, and you can thank my wife directly for yours! --- þ Synchronet þ Ultimate Geeks - Upper Marlboro, MD .