libertybelle diaries

After a few weeks of blogging, this medium feels a little more comfortable and who knows, somewhere down the road, I may feel so at ease here that I start each entry as “Dear Diary”, as my blog title denotes.  All the things I’ve written come framed by my life experiences, just as each of yours do.  I am by nature a worrier and a rule follower, two traits that led me to be a voracious reader and to like an orderly daily  life. For me having a plan is nice, but not enough to rest easy.  I much prefer to have  a short-range plan with some mid-range and long-range plans in the works .   And throwing in a contingency plan or two provides optimal comfort for me.  Unfortunately, Army life comes ready-made with a multitude of surprises and unexpected obstacles, so I always worried whether other planners covered all the bases.  I remember when my husband deployed to Desert Storm from Germany, I was reading as much information about GEN Schwarzkopf’s plans as I could find in news sources, as well as looking at maps,  (in addition to scouring German stores looking for some good maps for my husband, because I didn’t have a lot of faith in the Army mapmakers – sorry guys, I didn’t… Grenada memories rippled my serenity).  This same worrying nature had me scouring  maps thinking about what would I do in a NEO evacuation when our oldest daughter was a baby and we were in Germany a decade before Desert Storm. I had just gotten out of the Army, and NEO  was all new to me.   I tried to find out as much as I could about the Army’s plans and then I worried about what  if it didn’t work – how would I get out of Germany if a shooting war broke out with the Soviets.  Such is how my mind works.

As I began writing here, I also started worrying about great phrases finding their way into my stories, because we are blessed with so many great contemporary writers on strategic issues, politics and the culture.  I mentioned to Gladius Maximus that I need to take a break from reading Mark Steyn’s work, because he has so many amazingly good lines that I am afraid I might toss them into my writing without conscious thought.  Over the years I have marched back through time many times, putting in enough miles to qualify as a Roman foot soldier (legionary – really fun book on that here), in pursuit of trying to understand the question: Why war?   My Mom used to throw her hands up in the air, exasperated by my dogged unwillingness to accept answers without questioning “why?”  During my travels, I’ve camped many times with Sun Tzu and Clausewitz , but I also have had really entertaining stays with contemporary writers too, like Ralph Peters, G. Murphy Donovan, Martin Van Creveld, John Keegan  and many others.  I am particularly in awe of strategists such  as Dr. Colin S. Gray, the late GEN William Odom and Stratfor’s, George Friedman.  My journey still continues and if any others’ thoughts slip from my pen, please tell me, so I can attribute them.

This afternoon as I sat listening to music on Pandora,  I took a break from my usual country music fare.  I typed in “The Beatles” for  some good anti-war songs, like “Revolution” and “All You Need is Love”, to serenade me as I pondered  why I love the US Army so much and I thought back to my beginning experiences in the Army.  This will hopefully be a short story about why Napoleon’s footprints give me hope for the future.

Back when women were fairly new to an integrated Army, I decided to sign up.  What possessed me I know not, but reading the Army recruiting brochure, it sounded sort of  like Girl Scout camp……….. learn a new skill, some camping stuff, and while I am scared of guns and being in the woods in the dark ( I’m more the baking and needlework type) , heck, I’d manage.  So off I went, basic training, AIT and then off to Germany.  The start of a grand adventure, except it wasn’t like the movie, “Private Benjamin“, although I did go out on a date with a test driver for Porsche cars twice, but alas that sure wasn’t like the movies.  I digress, back to the story.

I arrived in Frankfurt, with only my duffel bag – my suitcase  still floating around stateside with all my civilian clothes, due to  being placed on the wrong flight.  What is travel without mishaps to provide fodder for boring stories to relate ad nauseum for decades though?  Back then they had formations every couple hours and doled out assignments.  The young sergeant told me about my assignment – Berlin, how exciting.  Then came the  questions….”Do you know anyone in the USSR or Soviet Bloc countries?”.    My pen pal in Czechoslovakia and just like that my assignment crumbled to dust.  As a consolation prize he handed me  a folder with a nice big nuclear missile on the cover.  Without having time to even digest this, I was packed on a bus and off to southern Germany we went.  As the miles passed, I read through my folder and kept staring at the Pershing missile on the cover and I thought, “Oh my God,  libertybelle, what the heck have you gotten yourself into – guns are bad enough, but a nuclear missile”,( pass me the smelling salts, I feel faint *smile*).   What might you ask was life like there for a young woman, placed in a unit with less than a 100 women and over 1000 men?  Interesting, the best diversionary tactics training in the world dealing with that many men targeting you and the stuff of another post sometime later, but for now it’s time to focus on the big picture and how on earth Napoleon fits into this story.

I worked for a battalion commander, who was an old-school officer – a gentleman, a scholar, and what I wish more Army officers were like today.   He and some of the other officers patiently explained our mission.  My battalion commander took time to explain the local history, he inspired in me a life-long love of learning about the US Army and even other armies too.  Our barracks were old German barracks and after he told me that WWII Field Marshal Rommel had been stationed there, every time I walked down those halls, I would think, “Rommel walked here, isn’t that amazing!”, as my footsteps echoed off those tile floors.   Often on travels about with him, he would have his driver stop and he would show us the sights, explain German history to us and he always stopped at great German guesthouses for meals, where he patiently explained the menu choices and ordered in flawless German, always insisting  on buying the driver and my meals,    My first sergeant and many other NCOs taught me about being a soldier, as we trudged through endless field training exercises in the German woods (thankfully the Army likes the buddy system, so I had someone to keep me from the goblins in the dark.  We were too busy watching out for those opposing forces anyway, no time to worry about goblins…….

In addition to my close up and personal Cold War warrior training in a Pershing unit, the Army used to send soldiers to Hof, a small outpost  town located on a desolate stretch in Bavaria near the Czech border, so we could see the Iron Curtain….. alas another bus trip.  Many thoughts crossed my mind that day.  I thought of my pen pal somewhere beyond that fence.  I thought about how stupid communism is.  I even thought only men would think up something as stupid as war, such was my naivete about national defense.  And mostly I accepted this Iron Curtain as an insurmountable obstacle.

A decade later, we were living in Germany again when the Iron Curtain fell.  With little warning and little more than a few moans, an empire crumbled and an obstacle that had preoccupied decades of strategists, military planners and national security experts  rolled down the chute into that proverbial dustbin of history.  After a decade of being transfixed by this Islamist Ascendancy, it is very easy to become discouraged and overwhelmed.  Here again, we are facing an obstacle that seems almost insurmountable.  I imagine the British felt this same weary resignation dealing with the plague that was Napoleon as he wreaked havoc from one end of the continent to the other.  But Napoleon knew something that it is wise for us to remember:

“Impossible is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools.”  – Napoleon Bonaparte

After more than a decade of being in this struggle, battle, war, clash or whatever other terminology our brave strategic “experts” decide to term this ominous Islamic Ascendancy, these folks still keep patting themselves on the back for refining the terminology.  Behold, (here) they think they’ve finally got it figured out now.  Punch me once and I didn’t see it coming, paint me slow on defending myself.  After a decade of being attacked and still parsing terminology, instead of fighting back, well, I think the correct strategic term is “emboldening the enemy”.  You can paint me as an old lady, set in her Cold War ways.  But not to worry none of these strategic “experts,” safely ensconced in their cushy think tanks jobs, will shed one drop of blood – that’s left to the poor kids we’ve sent over there with a mission that has taken so many turns that who knows, maybe, we’re almost right back to where we started over a decade ago (aha, the Back To the Future Mission, that’s it)  Yes, it infuriates me to read this tripe.  We’ve gone through all four seasons in the Arab democratic rebirth (ok, I can’t help myself with the sarcasm), and we’re almost back to Spring again……… a time for every purpose under heaven it seems, except for identifying the enemy.  It’s all fine and dandy to go through theoretical debates about the “ideology”, but here’s a rule of thumb for the real world – enemies are “people”, no matter what windmill belief system drives them.    How about we start focusing  more on what these “people” are doing that poses a threat to us than on all this hand wringing about what to call it.  Just my opinion here.

This post will be a long one, because I plan to span the globe and many years  in this story.   So prop up your feet and have the No Doz handy.  As most journeys start at home, so must this one…. back to my PA childhood once again.   Reading about people around the world in our set of World Book Encyclopedias just wasn’t enough, I wanted to meet people from all over the world.  I pondered this dilemma, with not a single clue of how to do that from whence I sat looking at the lonely woods and fields around me, from a rock perched  half-way up the mountain, which served as my thinking spot.  Providence or luck, depending on your viewpoint, comes in many ways and mine arrived in the form of  my junior high school German teacher.  What an amazing teacher:  a retired soldier, who had served as a translator in the Army, trained in both German and Russian (which he later began teaching when I was in high school and I added to my German classes), and possessor of what I often thought must be every piece of WWII film footage in the Army vault ( he showed them all and explained them in detail).   I could hardly contain my joy when he passed out a little form one day with information on how to get a pen pal.  I quickly filled out my form and mailed it off to Finland, of all places.

I started with a pen pal in India, but quickly added many other friends over the next few years. I longed for friends in China and the Soviet Union though.  One thing stood in my way of achieving my goal – communism.   I mentioned my disappointment to our pastor’s wife, the lovely Jewish lady from my previous post.  Months later, she handed me a name and an address of a girl in Czechoslovakia, whom she had located through some friends of friends in their missionary work. It wasn’t Russia, but at least I had broken through the Iron Curtain.   China proved a bridge too far and I settled for corresponding with a boy from Hong Kong or Taiwan (I forget which), who lived in England.  He showed my letters to his best friend in England.  Next thing I know, his friend wrote to me wanting to correspond with me too.  Who knew our boring little life in the backwoods could be so entertaining……..  And I had several more pen pals, missing only Antarctica ( laugh, that’s supposed to be amusing).

Considering the present state of the world, I wonder how  parents would  react today if their daughter started writing to two boys in the Arab world.  I had a pen pal in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.  The boy in Saudi Arabia came to the US to attend college in 1978 (ouch, I’m dating myself).  During his first year of college he wrote to me from the Mid-West where he was attending school and at Christmas time he described his plans to stay there, but the dorms were closing.  I immediately called my mother and she agreed, we must invite him to come to our house for Christmas; no one should be alone for Christmas.  I arrived home from college and my busy mother hadn’t had time to bake Christmas cookies. I agreed to stay home and bake cookies with one of my sisters, while our parents drove to the nearest city to pick him up.    It was a wonderful visit and this boy really liked my Dad a lot and over the next few years he called my parents to see how they were doing.  I left college and went off to join the Army.

I only served in the Army a short time, deciding to hang up the combat boots and leave the soldiering to my husband, which worked out well, as I sure was better at being a homemaker than at soldiering and he liked doing crazy things like jumping out of airplanes and screaming, “Airborne!’  In that short time I learned more important things about myself and the world than probably at any other time in my life.  Aside from learning about things like nuclear deterrence  and what national defense really means, I learned some simple things that seem to be in sore need in our society today.  I learned about setting goals (mission) ,  being part of  a team, the importance of planning and planning ahead,  how to face challenges when things don’t go easy, among many others.  And on top of that, I developed my world view.

Over the years I’ve watched this alarming trend of our American efforts in the world to fall flat, despite our best intentions.  As we fixated on “multiculturalism”, we seemed more and more tone-deaf about other cultures or ran off  organizing aid efforts that didn’t  reach those they were intended for or didn’t fit the needs of those we wanted to help.  Much of this I attribute to relying on shoddy “experts” in academia, who spend most of their  time projecting their radical politics on their judgments and assessments of what’s going on in the world.   Repeatedly I saw TV reports or read accounts about American efforts at helping in the world, both governmental and private, ending up unwanted, unneeded, or unable to reach the hands in need, due to failing to understand the basic ground truth of the situation we were dealing with.  We often short-shrift considerations of corruption  and civil strife, which dramatically impede our effort, yet  we rush to get rape or grief counselors on the ground.  In the process we often seem to throw away opportunities and much-needed basic aid that could meet basic survival needs.

Admittedly, I am just an observer from the cheap seats here at home, watching this game play out in the world arena.  And I’ll toss in this truth in advertising message, for the sake of honesty, I am a staunch conservative, so that means anything I’ve said will be completely ignored, mocked, ridiculed or otherwise discarded by the elitists on the left.  Additionally, I’ve spent most of my life as a homemaker and what would I know beyond the confines of my cozy country kitchen (where I plan to get some split pea soup going in the slow cooker as soon I get done solving this world problem blogging).   But wouldn’t it make more sense to talk to people actually in these places where we want to help or send out some emails and say, “hey what can I do to help you”, than to rely so heavily on “experts” in academia or pop culture mouthpieces.    A small bright spot of someone in the media doing something to help that struck me as sensible and practical is liberal news analyst, Ellen Ratner, who started “Goats For The Old Goat”(here) , a relief effort to raise money and awareness to fight hunger in the South Sudan, one goat at a time.  In our interconnected world, it sure seems like we could do a better job at lending a helping hand and figuring out more efficient ways to help.

To wrap up my pen pal saga, over 30 years later, my very first pen pal in India located me shortly after I set up a facebook page.  She remembered the names of my brothers and sisters and located me through one of my sisters, because she didn’t know my married name.  With the next generation being so much more adept at using technology, let’s hope they still remember that personal connections matter more than  being an “expert” and getting to know people personally always trumps getting to know “about” people.  And if you’ve survived this meandering post, please do check out Ellen Ratner’s website – it really is a worthy cause

1845 Print of Arab trader using cowry shells as money (from Wikipedia)

Where our Libya epitaph could certainly be, in Hillary’s words, “We came, we saw, he died.”, on more than one level,  where “leading from behind” left us stranded in our Mid-East policy  without a camel, goat, ” , nor even a cowry shell left  to trade (see above), the press now keeps reminding us that she has logged more miles traveling than any other Secretary of State in history.  As the world’s “smartest woman in the world”, Gallup Poll’s perennial “most admired woman in the world”,  how hard can it be to list some concrete foreign policy wins under her watch.  Here is the typical piece that has followed her greatness……. champion of  “smart power” (is there such a thing as “dumb power”), champion of women everywhere (except the ones she will crush if they get in her way),  this article meanders along offering bits like this, “Clinton has orchestrated some of the most tactful diplomatic successes the department has seen in a while, and she’s looking to make changes for the long-term“.  It lists two  smashing successes: her Libya triumph ( Ode to Benghazi isn’t the one) and isolating North Korea  (hey Japan,  just duck when the next long-range rocket  (here)comes your way, North Korea knows  it’s place).  In the world where a words’ meanings should depend on more than “what is, is”,  it shouldn’t be too hard to list just a few.  Alas, with her present head injury she has the perfect excuse at the ready to silence any who dare question, “I can’t remember.”  Oh, libertybelle, just hush, you “hater”, everyone knows she’s gone further than any woman before us……….. didn’t they just tell you that ……………. “more miles than any other Secretary of State in history”………