George Patton and Donald Rumsfeld, Horse-Drawn Carriages and Armored Humvees

General George S. Patton and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Horse-Drawn Carriages and Armored Transportation Vehicles

Several years ago I had the opportunity to have a conversation with the head of one of America's intelligence agencies. It was a fairly long conversation, at different times both one-on-one and with a few others present and contributing, at a cocktail party/reception at an academic conference following the Keynote Speech he had just given for the conference. I won't mention his name, although the conference and the reception were both advertised to and open to the general public (to the extent that academic-types would qualify as general public) and the topic of his speech and at least the part of his previous career experience that dealt with that talk's topic were public knowledge. [My guess is that the heads of our agencies are such public figures that *they* aren't the ones who "do not exist" to our society; those people are likely in lower rungs than the Directors of those agencies.]

I took this opportunity to ask him a question the answer to which I believed I already knew, but which I would have liked to have had the confirmation of someone in such a position as his. The question concerns a scene in the movie "Patton," which incidentally is one of THE most historically-accurate war movies (or movies of any type) of all time. To remind you of what was happening in 1944, the Allied armies were preparing to invade France at Normandy, with Patton and his army being used as a decoy to get the Germans to believe that the invasion would actually take place somewhere other than Normandy. Several months after the June 6, 1944 D-Day invasion, and after huge numbers of Allied forces and equipment had been moved into Normandy, Patton's decoy was no longer needed and they brought him into France to spearhead the American Third Army's advance across the center of the country. This breakout from Normandy, followed by the Third Army's dash across France, was and is one of the most remarkable achievements in military history, with units advancing on occasion over 100 miles in a day slicing through whatever minimal resistance the Germans were still offering. Within several weeks, all of central France had been liberated and Patton's Third Army was coming up to the German border--far more quickly than either the Germans or the Allies had thought possible.

Patton's advance across central France, however, was not equaled by the British and Canadian armies along the Channel coast nor by a second American army coming up from the Mediterranean coast. In other words, Patton was racing far ahead of the other Allied armies. He insisted that he be allowed to continue, that he be given the gasoline and supplies needed to continue his advance into Germany, but Eisenhower and other Allied leaders were worried that he had gone too far ahead, that he would outrun his supply lines and get cut off way ahead of the other Allied armies. Patton wasn't worried about that, and he argued--begged, pleaded--to be allowed to continue. He was shut off of the supplies needed to do so, however, and his advance ground to a halt at the German border.

[After the war it was determined that, yes, had Patton been allowed to continue, he easily could have gone into central Germany unopposed and in a matter of weeks possibly taken enough of central Germany to have ended the war in October or November of 1944. At the time, however, Eisenhower's restraint did seem like a reasonable--and safe--thing to do.]

Now enough of this history lesson and back to the movie "Patton":
There is a scene in the movie right after he is told that he will not get the supplies he needs to continue his advance. Out at the head of his army,a lead tank company encounters a German patrol in the middle of the night, of course Patton's tank company runs out of gasoline, and they both fight it out all night long. In the morning Patton comes to the front to survey the damage, look with his own eyes at this battlefield along with many others, cursing his absence of fuel and still believeing that with the fuel known to be available to the Allied armies being given to his Third Army he could win the war in a matter of weeks. He seems to be alone in that belief, as evryone tries to dissuade him of it, even members of his own staff, but Patton knows that he is right. Here is the line from the movie where he wins his argument with any who would hear it and listen to the power of it: (Patton) "You know how I know that the Germans are finished out there? The horses, it's the horses, that's how I know that the Germans are finished. The horses kept coming to me in my dreams and I couldn't figure it out, I couldn't figure out what they meant. Then it hit me--I realized that the German Army, the mighty Wehrmacht, the war machine, instigator of the "lightning war," the Blitzkrieg, the terror of all of Europe just three years earlier, has sunk so low that they've had to resort to horsecarts to move their troops and their supplies around. They're finished, I know it, and all I need is a couple of miserable gallons of gasoline to end this war right now."

[I'm sorry, I still can't watch that scene without crying; I can't even type it with a dry eye. What if, huh, what if; how many people's lives would have been spared? We can only hope that, like with all war casualties, it will mean something good someday, and that maybe it already has. What if, what if.]

What is impressive about that scene, assuming that there's some level of historical accuracy to it, is this: Here is George S. Patton, three-star general commanding hundreds of thousands of United States troops as they advance across France. All of the information that he has at his disposal, all of the secret and intercepted enemy communications and the data that comes across his desk every hour of every day about "gallons of fuel used per hour" and "number of enemy units operating at 80% capacity or above" and "ratio of bullets rationed to front-line American soldiers vs. front-line German soldiers," tank production per month American vs. German, number of pilots lost per strafing mission as a ratio of available fighter pilots, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, all of that bureaucratic information compiled for and available to him and that he looked at every day--with all of that, what meant most to him was seeing with his own eyes how desperate the German condition truly was. And it was the horses that meant the most to him--hundreds and hundreds of pages of numerobureaucratic information were necessary and valuable, yes, but didn't mean as much to him as watching with his own eyes the desperate German Wehrmacht sink to the level where they needed to use horses.

So gee, that's really interesting--but what does this all have to do with my conversation with the head of one of America's intelligence agencies????!!!!! :-) Well, actually, it's not all that hard to tell where this is going. I reminded this gentleman of this scene from "Patton," the "horses, they're finished" scene (I didn't need to remind him of the Third Army's dash across France in 1944, he knew more about that than I ever will!), then asked him if in all of his years in the intelligence business he had ever had that type of experience, that experience of seeing with his own eyes something that finally to him helped him to make sense out of all of the data that had come across his desk. He said yes, oh definitely, yes, this has happened to me, and he obviously didn't mention anything in particular but it was very clear that both he and others like him in those positions had all had that very same kind of experience at some point somewhere sometime in their careers. No, it wasn't memorialized for the ages on celluloid, however it was there and it was something that they all knew all so well.

Now, here's the less obvious part: What does all of this have to do with Donald Rumsfeld and armored personnel carriers!?????!!!!!!

?

First of all, let me say that what I am about to get to is in no way a NECESSARY indictment of Secretary Rumsfeld. In no way am I joining any chorus (month-old now) of his critics, some (many?) of whom were merely looking for an opportunity to bring him down a peg well before the now-famous "armored vehicles" question of early December 2004. I most certainly am not calling for his resignation; with all that has gone on, goes on, and will go on I simply do not know enough to make any sort of intelligent statement on something so far above my head. That is not what I am trying to get at in any way whatsoever.

However, I *am* saying that there is something wrong when in a system people at or near the top do not have enough real personal firsthand knowledge of what is going on at or near the bottom, of the IMPORTANT matters that are going on at or near the bottom, to be able to answer a question about those matters or even to indicate that they know what those problems are. No, not every trivial matter from the bottom can be dealt with by the top--most shouldn't even reach the desks that are located at the top. American servicemen's casualties, however, are NOT the type of trivial matters that are best left out of the loops of the those at the top--indeed, they are precisely the types of things that need to be placed regularly and significantly front and center onto those desks at that top!!!! No doubt they are--I am not denying that they are so placed. As are, also without a doubt, various and sundry other numericobureaucratic papers containing pages after pages of data on number of convoys undertaken per IED attack, temperature of and pressure in pounds-per-square-inch of commonly-designed Iraqi IEDs, average age, country of origin, length of service and amount of training of average Iraqi insurgent (subdivided by region of country, probably), strength of steels used in American escort vehicles on sides, bottoms, and tops, etc. etc. etc. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. No doubt this is being done, every day many times over.

What seems to have been lacking, though, is a real and serious attempt to link all of that data with what can be seen with one's naked eye when one visits the front, at least from those people at or near the very top. Someone needs--needed--to walk up to a typical Humvee, armed previously with all of the aforementioned numericobureaucratic data burned into their brains, and ask the simple question "Knowing what we know, knowing all that we know, how can we run one of these things down a typical Iraqi country road without having one of our soldiers lose his left leg if one of those fucking IEDs goes off under right his car?" Maybe in Rumsfeld's presence they could throw a grenade under a Hummer and show him what damage it does--and what damage it wouldn't do if the undercarriage were armored. Certainly the casualty figures--sitting on desks right next to the strength-of-steel figures, strength-of-IED-explosives figures, miles-traveled-per-casualty figures, number-of-skilled-rebels-per-km2-per-region figures--ought to have raised a flag with someone who was reading them. No doubt they did. Why didn't anyone go out and look at a Humvee with his own eyes to see where the discrepancy was coming from, throw that grenade under there and see what damage it caused? By "someone" I mean "someone at the top," of course, someone who could actually do something about it. No, in Iraq we were never at the point where we had to resort to use horses, figuratively or most assuredly literally--it's an insult to think about it in those terms if your mind wandered in that direction, that we ever sank THAT low. We were to the point, though, where we needed to look into what exactly we were doing, and look at it very very seriously--and it shouldn't have taken the Rumsfeld press conference to bring that about.

While this is the point I set out to make, and while I am at the point where I have made it and where you now see the similarities or lack thereof between George Patton and Donald Rumsfeld and their views on the issue of troop transportation, I believe it best to add two follow-ups without which this blog would be very unfair to very many which I hope it is not going to be. One is that the Patton approach of seeing-with-ones-own-eyes-and-ears was not in any way unique to him. He may have been very good at it, but he was not alone. Dwight Eisenhower himself, in the weeks and months leading up to D-Day, spent many hours that his staff wanted him to have devoted to bureaucratic administration instead with the troops, the foot soldiers, the GIs. Good PR? Well, yes it was, but the answer that Eisenhower gave to his staff was something like "Purchase orders and Invoices aren't going to win this war, those guys out there who have to hold a hill that they've been sleeping on for six weeks without having had any hot food or baths are what's going to win this war." And he was right. Outside of the military, too, many CEOs of major corporations are known to walk in to their companies' fast-food restaurants or hotels or manufacturing plants unannounced and unrecognized just to see what's really going on without anyone knowing that they're there. (My guess is that that happens less and less today, but it still happens). Also, we know that the head of at least one of our nation's intelligence agencies knows the power and importance of this approach. So it is not unknown, historically or in the present day, inside and outside of the military, to do this.

Nor would it be fair to the military to say that they haven't already done this in Iraq. They have done so, and probably much of the time it has worked out well (just not anywhere nearly up to the standards that I believe we have a right to expect). Furthermore, after the famous Rumsfeld press conference, the Pentagon--Rumsfeld himself-- seems to be taking this whole approach far more seriously. I read that a reasonably-high-level assemblage of brass--generals, even-- is heading to Iraq to do just that--I'm glad to see that, and I just hope that they're not *so* highly-ranked generals that it'll all be a PR stunt (I hear it's a one-star General, so maybe that's at the right level). Some of these people need, NEED to be people with experience in guerilla warfare--while jungles aren't deserts, one would like to think that some people brought back from Vietnam some sense of what it's like to fight against a guerilla insurgency and what all that entails no matter what type of insurgency it is or what type of topography it is fought on. Maybe some of the people who were in Vietnam right after Tet in 1968 could go along, too, the people who saw with their own eyes what the face of a defeated insurgent fighter looks like, the post-Tet point when the vanquished and defeated Viet Cong brought out their horses in their desperation. (For those of you who don't remember the rest of the story, Walter Cronkite bailed them out by announcing our country's surrender on an Op-Ed on the CBS Evening News, and the then-President, Lyndon Johnson, wasn't strong enough to prevent him).

This hands-on, eyes-on approach wasn't--and likely never will be--Rumsfeld's style. Still, it needs to be done, it NEEDS to be an INTEGRAL element of our overall approach in Iraq. We need to have people there who can see BOTH the numerobureaucratic data AND the "see-it-with-their-own-eyes" facts, AND, we need to have leadership at the highest levels (Rumsfeld basically or whoever's Secretary of Defense) who can appreciate that type of approach. Patton? No, he's long-since died and I don't think we need anyone over there who is so totally lacking in diplomatic skills that his biography could still win an Oscar 25 years after he died. Looks like that is being done over there, finally, in major quantities, wish only that they had given those guys who are doing that the fuel and gasoline that they needed much much earlier than they have done so.

Then maybe we can look forward to the day when someone, maybe some General, maybe the head of one of our intelligence agencies, maybe even Rumsfeld himself, is riding through Iraq in his armored Humvee and he sees with his own eyes the insurgents in their desperation revert to bringing out their horses. Only this time we'll finish it then and there.

He Would Have Been 70 Today :(

He Would Have Been 70 Today :-(

He would have been 70 today, had he lived :(

Yes, today, January 8, 2005, Elvis Aaron Presly, "Elvis," would be celebrating his 70th birthday. Wow, hard to imagine The King Of Rock 'N Roll turning 70. What would he be doing with himself? Would he still be overindulging in the pleasures of cars, carnality, and cuisine, or would he as so many well-to-do members of the entertainment world have done have moved on to the "spiritual" riches of personal yogic guidance at the very unmaterialistic price of $500/hour with equally-priced nonmaterialistic incense and crystals to boot? Would he have been involved in last year's Presidential race as so many fat celebrities were? ...hmmm, would he even be President by now??? Music, no doubt, but what genre? Old time rock 'n roll or that post-grunge, hip-to-be-square old-timer hooks up with Gen-X/Gen-Y newbie to hear what comes of it? Would he--could he--still be swinging those hips??? With contemporary pharmacology, yes, age 70 is no longer much of an issue. As the old-timer retorted back to me when I was razzing him about the decline/disappearance of whatever meager performance skills he may have at one time had, "Kid, after Viagra, we're all equal." True, and he had a bigger wallet. So the drugs of today could keep Elvis swinging that pelvis...but, could any of us really imagine Elvis Presley taking drugs?????

(wait--scratch that last line)

Well, all of the above is speculation--we will truly never know 'til Kingdom come [maybe there's a pun in there]. As the rhymster says, "Of all sad words of tongue and pen/None are sadder than 'What might have been.'" His death in August 1977 prevented him from reaching even his 43rd birthday, much less his 70th, and all we have right now is speculation.
Well, no, not really. In fact, no, not at all, that's not true, not true at all, we have more than just mere speculation, FAR more than merely that. We have memories, memories, tons and tons and tons of great memories of him as a person and a persona and that always-refreshing still-extant recorded work product of dozens and dozens and dozens of first-rate popular songs (and a 1968 TV special, too--we can forget about the movies). Yes, memories, and a permanent place in our collective American culture and history. Wow, what a legacy he has left us!!!! What a huge mark he has left on our lives and on our radio stations!!!!! A truly remarkable achievement in the all-so-brief span of a human lifetime, in his case far too brief.

My personal testament to Elvis Aaron Presley b. Jan. 8, 1935 --d. August 16, 1977 will begin with that element of persona, the personality he presented out to us and that we projected back onto him. That's because that's how I knew him first, as a persona, a personality who was just kind of out there somewhere and who showed up on the radio or on TV or in the news from time to time. He was just another celebrity to me, not even as big (not nearly as big) as some other ones of my early years. Tacky, very tacky, corny almost, and well over the hill by the time I first knew of him. That's all--no big deal, I really didn't think or know much about him.

It was only after his death that all of the news items that came out about him made me realize that the surface appearance of tackiness and corniness was merely the cover for a real, true-to-his-being type of tackiness and corniness that the public version of which was merely a small-scale model. The Cadillacs, the personal rentals of amusement parks, the velvet suits, all were the tackiness of his (and our) cultural milieu at their peak. Has it ever been exceeded? No, many have tried but none, NONE have come close. Not anywhere NEAR Elvis, nowhere close, forget even trying. He was and is THE King of this domain, if no other.

Of course, we cannot leave this point without mentioning the drugs. Wow, could that man take the drugs!!!!! Whew, what a superstar!!!! I mean, I take drugs, every day, and what I take I take a lot of, but I can control it and when I feel like I might be taking too much I just drink tea or pop instead of coffee (decaffeinated in all forms, but I don't lie and tell myself that there still isn't a lot of caffeine in decaf). While maybe five or six cups/glasses of decaf coffee or tea a day might be something I have to watch, Elvis was in a league of his own. What I heard was that he was up to 100 prescription drugs per day by the time he died. Makes me and my five or six cups of drugs per day look like I'm completely dry. Furthermore, while I don't really put a whole lot of thought into whether I'm drinking coffee or tea and if so how much of it I drink (I just drink it when I'm thirsty), Elvis put an amazing amount of thought and work into his drug consumption. Not just the effort that it takes to take 100+ pills per day, but even moreso the effort that he put into getting himself exactly the type of drugs that he wanted. I heard that he had gotten himself a copy of a thick, dictionary-sized book called the Physician's Desk Reference (PDR). It is a compendium of all available prescription drugs and what conditions and symptoms they can be used to treat. Apparently Elvis would read and study it, memorize the symptoms of the conditions for which his desired drugs were prescribed, then go to his doctor and say "Doc, it hurts when I go like this..." BINGO!!!! His doc would dial up those symptoms, see that drug such-and-such was available for it, and in came the drugs!!!!! All his hard work paid off.

It would really be unjust to this greatest-American-persona of his genre--and to the person behind it and to those who loved him and knew him well--to leave this topic without mentioning the greatest achievement of his persona, the crowning glory of this BY WAY FAR greatest American icon of his genre, the few brief moments and that one great photo that says it all about this persona. Yes, you all know what I'm talking about. It was that day in December 1970 or thereabouts when he, Elvis Aaron Presley, real man and mythical persona all simultaneously in one, in Washington, DC, our nation's great and good capital, drove up unannounced to the White House, the home and office of the President Of The United States, went up to the entrance, and asked to see the United States President. How could anyone refuse to meet with a King? Of course he could meet with the President, who is the President to refuse a King? (Richard Nixon is who it was, and for those of you who might not know, no, he did not refuse a King). With all that must have been going on in President Nixon's office at that moment, all of the coverups and coup plannings and wage and price controls and the war in Vietnam and the planning for the 1972 re-election and the geostrategic arms control negotiations and the collapse of the lira, the Italian currency (well, Nixon didn't care much about that), with all of that to worry him, the President Of The United States, Richard Nixon, took time out to meet with a King. There is that all-so-famous photo of the two of them, standing side-by-side in the Oval Office, smiling and shaking hands, Richard Nixon in his uniform a business suit and tie and Elvis Presley in his King's gowns some god-awful (leather?) body jumpsuit that was just SOOOOO tacky, there they are, side by side, smiling and shaking hands, a King and a President. Elvis walks into the Oval Office with his pistols, who's going to stop him?, were they loaded or who really cares?, Nixon covers over the coverup papers on his desk to greet the visitor, wow, what it must have been like to have been there!!!!!!! President Nixon even gave him a badge and deputized Elvis Aaron Presley as a Federal Special Agent to investigate and enforce United States laws regarding--you guessed it, drugs! Does anyone out there in Blogosphere know how to put pictures onto these Blogs??? I'd really like to put a copy of that right here, right at this spot, so web readers can see for themselves the sheer and sublime majesty of that moment, that photograph of all that those two men ('s personas) stood for at that time. I would like to put that photo right here and put a caption underneath it, a caption that would just read, "America." No, that would not capture all that that word means, nor can any single picture do so and fastidious critics of picture-captioning might insist on "America 1970" but even then there would be no signs of hippies, wars, or ghettos (but one can see the Brady Bunch in it), but to those two men, in that undated photo the date of which is immediately apparent to anyone who sees it, to those two men at that time, what else could you say but just, "America." To think that some people still diss Richard Nixon for inviting Ray Conniff to perform in the White House, to think that some people think that Elvis Presley lacked good sense, hey dudes, look at that picture.

(this is from the website http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/elvis/elnix.html :

"Of all the requests made each year to the National Archives for reproductions of photographs and documents, one item has been requested more than any other. That item, more requested than the Bill of Rights or even the Constitution of the United States, is the photograph of Elvis Presley and Richard M. Nixon shaking hands on the occasion of Presley's visit to the White House.")

So that's the persona that I grew up with. That is the Elvis Presley I learned as a child and teenager. Funny how thse things you learn at those early ages stay with you for years and years, and you accept them uncritically as if they were permanent facts of the world. You can doubt the existence of God, but such simple facts that you learn as a child are simply true. Takes a while to un-learn them, if indeed you are lucky enough to do that!!!! I was one who was so lucky.

Turns out, I learned, that there was another side of Elvis. There was more to him than just tacky suits, drug use, Cadillacs, more than just "America." Found out later on that he (and his persona, too, but he) had been a singer as well. That was a real revelation!!!!!! What a wakeup call!!!!! It was so stunning to me, so important in my understanding of Elvis Presley Man And Myth, that if I tell the story of "America" I have to tell the story of the unlearning of merely "America" and the learning of this at-the-time strange and news-to-me side of this King. I don't think that any story of Elvis can be told without mentioning that he was a singer too !!!!!!! It hit me one night, late at night, several years after graduating from college (no, you don't learn everything there is to know in college, and I missed this one), 3:30am or so, some freinds were in from the West Coast for Christmas week. A late-night munchie run had me seated in the back seat while my friend and his designated-driver younger sister ("Little Sister"!!!! -- just hit me now---no, that wasn't it), who had the local oldies station on the radio. They're both musical. I'm seated right in front of the speaker. It isn't on very loud, nor too quiet--just right. On comes "All Shook Up." I start to go along with it, in the parody-like sense that so many do when Elvis comes on. Then as I'm doing that, I realize, it hits me, I un-learn so much of what I had thought to be true--this is good!!!! He is a good singer!!!!! I mean, no he is not, but he is!!!!! What is in that song? Virtually nothing!!!! A piano, a bass, and a voice (Elvis is the one playing that voice instrument). What do they create? A virtual mini-orchestra, with drums & percussion, a rhythm section, a melody section such as it is, a full-blown song. Beginning to end no breaks except for an occasional VERY-well-timed one to allow for a grunt. HELLO !!!!!!!! And, this is Elvis!!!! There's no "America" in there, there're no cameras recording the event like many musicians do today in the studio, there's just this Elvis singer already a pretty big legend but no one knows anything about what's goin' down in the studio over there. He wore tacky suits and also made good songs--how many can do both????

Of course, after this revelation, I realized that there were other Elvis songs. Ones that I had heard hundreds of times before, but "Love Me Tender" and "Jailhouse Rock" and "Hound Dog" and "Little Sister" sound so much better when you listen to them. I had always liked his later songs (earlier, too), "Kentucky Rain" and "In The Ghetto" and "Suspicious Minds" (his last #1 song and the one he had the most input into), but after I learned what I had learned I could hear even more in them. Elvis The Singer !!!!!! What a revelation !!!!!!!! I am so glad that I learned something about that person(a), the other one I knew about wasn't really all that much to waste time on.

So, to me, this is he. This is what Elvis Presley means to me, at least right now, at least 'til I learn (or un-learn) more. Not that I care to do so all that much, but if a TV show comes on about him & if nothing else is going on, I'd watch it. Maybe learn something more, maybe not. To me, he's Elvis Aaron Presley, "America," and Elvis Aaron Presley, singer. Man & Myth all rolled into one. (also husband & father & friend & whatever else but I know nothing of that person(a))
The King Of Rock 'N Roll. Usually shortened to just "The King." I used to think I knew which one was more accurate, but now I'm not so sure. For now I'll just call him" The King" and if someone gives me that look like "and the rest of his title?" I'll quickly recover and add on "Of Rock 'N Roll." Whatever. The King

With all of that, it's easy to see whay so many people believe that he is still alive. I mean, he is still alive, The King Lives, in terms of having achieved--in memories--a certain kind of "immortality" of the kind that Egyptian pharoahs (Kings) like King Tut have achieved in their elegant tombs. He is not alive in a bodily sense, though, and that is why we are saddened on his "would have been" birthday. Yes, yes, there are from time to time reports that he is living, but all of them have proved to be false. The latest one involves the fact that he, Elvis Presley d.o.b. 01/08/1935, voted in the Washington State Governor's race, but the fact of having voted in the 2004 Washington State Governor's race is rather specious evidence to use to prove that someone is in fact alive. No, Elvis is not living today as he once was, but that doesn't mean we can't celebrate his life on his birthday. We can speculate on what he might be doing today but, no, screw that, let's just celebrate what he did when he was alive (and do something about that voting problem out there alongside Puget Sound, guys--Richard Nixon didn't become President just so he could get his picture taken alongside The King he also did it so that we could live in a country where elections couldn't be fixed. Get that straightened up for "America," ok???)

Had he lived, he would have been 70 today. May he rest in peace. May we remember his life and his work.


copyright 2005 J. G. Yoest