Sipsey Street Irregulars: "In this world are tigers." Anniversary: The opening tragedies of the Korean War.

Monday, July 13, 2015

"In this world are tigers." Anniversary: The opening tragedies of the Korean War.

I gifted a fellow writer at the Alabama Gun Collectors Association show my copy of This Kind of War by T.R. Fehrenbach. I grew up with several Korean War veterans as neighbors and used to listen to their stories late at night as they swapped reminiscences at my old man's Saturday night beer parties that he would host on our carport. There was this storage place without a door that I used to hunker down in, out of sight, and just listen. It was there that I first heard about the Chaplain–Medic massacre and the Sunchon Tunnel Massacre.

Fehrenbach's book should be required reading for all Americans and there is one particular passage that is lodged in my memory:

None of them had been told why they were in Korea, or why the U.S. was fighting North Korean Communists. None of them cared. They only wanted to get back to Japan. Instead, they were headed for the Naktong River Line, there to make a final stand. There they would realize that their government had no intention of withdrawing them; if they wanted to live, they would have to fight. They were learning, in the harshest school there was, that it is a soldier's lot to suffer and that his destiny may be to die. They were learning something they had not been told: that in this world are tigers . . . They had been raised to believe the world was without tigers, then sent to face those tigers with a stick. On their society must fall the blame.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: My ex's grandfather was a WWII and Korea vet, he was a chaplain. In one of his yearbooks about a unit he was with there was a photo of his boss, I think a colonel, also a chaplain, chatting with a GI in a foxhole in Korea. Grandpa had circled something in the photo that his boss was holding, and drawn an arrow to it and exclamation points. That something was an M2 carbine with a 30 round magazine.; July 13, 2015 at 6:55 AM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Monday, July 13, 2015

"In this world are tigers." Anniversary: The opening tragedies of the Korean War.

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