(USS Vincennes (CG-49) launches an SM-1 guided missile on sea trials. She was scrapped in 2006. Photo MSHennessee.)
They would have been playing Bee Gees tunes at La Belle, the nightclub in the former West Berlin that night in 1986. A lot of troopers from the Berlin Brigade were in the crowd, America’s overt military presence in the still-occupied former capital of the Reich, and they undoubtedly would have been playing Donna Summers as well.
It is weird. I mean, Disco still sucks, in the words of Bob Seeger, but the whole 1980s thing is back because of the untimely passing last week of the Diva of the pulsing beat, and yesterday’s passing of Robin Gibb, one third of the Bee Gees yesterday.
This is way too close for comfort. Robin was 62. Donna was 63.
I have one of those small calendar events coming up that will put me in the heart of the envelope that the two inhabited until just a few days ago. It is uncomfortable territory- I mean, the sixties are supposed to be the new fifties, right? I suspect it is all bullshit, and this phase of life does not have a decent name.
“Middle Age” doesn’t hack it. Whatever this is, I don’t think I am on track to be 120. We need a name for it to put it in context, like “The Age of Disco.”
Now, by 1986 you can argue that both singers were over-the-hill already, with their best work was done a decade earlier, but Disco as an institution survived longer overseas than it did Stateside, and I was finishing up a decade out of the country that year. When the bomb went off in La Belle that night, hundreds were injured, and two Americans were killed, with a third succumbing to injuries
Someone else flashed in the news, too, and he represented the dark side of the disco age, and the kinetic war that was being waged on the West. You know, the one the Iranians have been conducting for more than thirty years.
Honestly, they talk about Afghanistan as the nation’s longest war, but that is absurd. There have been Iranians on the prowl to kill innocents for as long as I was in uniform, and loopy Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and I were low-level functionaries of our respective ideologies.
Not that Libyan Dictator Moammar Gadhafi wasn’t in it up to the braided collar of his comic-opera uniforms. He is dead, too, of course, though his death was appropriately not of natural causes. He was a vocal supporter of the terror groups of the time, the Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction and the IRA. The Irish were striking the hated Brits, while the Reds had attacked the airports in Rome and Vienna in 1985.
It was a mess. Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi died yesterday as well. He will never have the lingering legacy of the madcap dictator for whom he worked. But he is the only person who convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland. That incident might have been a big part of what killed Pan Am itself, the iconic airborne face of America shown around the world.
That public face is what made the big Boeing a target for whoever brought it down.
The conventional narrative, the one used by prosecutors in the trial against al-Megrahi, is that the La Belle bombing prompted Ronald Reagan’s dramatic Operation ELDORADO CANYON, the strike against coastal Libyan targets, which in turn prompted the tit-for-tat that brought down the 747.
That was the line, anyway, and evidence was produced to link some electronic components and clothing allegedly purchased on the island of Malta. Personally, I thought the tit-for-tat came from another direction, the nexus of bad stuff that had been happening since the American Embassy was seized in Tehran in 1979.
The Iranians had been using surrogates and cash in their war against the Great Satan, and even if we didn’t know it, they were happy to smack us any way they could. My personal opinion was that Lockerbie was the response for something else altogether- the shoot-down of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 by the famed Robo Cruiser, USS Vincennes.
The Aegis cruiser had been deployed to provide air defense coverage for the removal from the Persian Gulf of USS Samuel B. Roberts, which had struck an Iranian Mine in the tanker war we called Operation EARNEST WILL.
CAPT Will Rogers was the quintessential aggressive ship-driver. The mistaken belief that his SPY-1 phased array radar had detected an Iranian F-14 inbound while in the midst of a running gun-battle with Revolutionary Guard small boats caused him to direct engagement of the target.
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(Impromptu memorial to Iran Air 655 on the beach near the Strait of Hormuz. Photo Sean Hennessee).
A couple hundred civilians died in that incident, and privately, that was the dot I connected back to the Mercedes Mullahs and their campaign against the United States.
The Scottish government released al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds in 2009. Whether it was, or whether it was really about oil and gas issues I will leave to you. Gaddafi eventually came around to the idea that his campaign to acquire Weapons of Mass Destruction was counter-productive, and he paid reparations for everything he had been blamed for in the West, including Lockerbie.
I reached a differing conclusion from the international tribunal that convicted al-Megrahi. I believe it was the PFL-PGC from Syria, in cahoots with the Iranians, who were responsible, and I like the way the colorful bow ties it up in one neat package.
This is about the actions of a state that is at war with the West, has been since 1979, and apparently is determined to acquire their very own nuclear arsenal soon.
Megrahi got a hero’s welcome on his return to Tripoli. The reception irritated a lot of people who thought the victims of Lockerbie deserved better justice than one low-level operative’s eight years in the slammer. His prostate cancer finally ran its course to kill him at the age of 60, with nearly three years home with his family.
But if it was the Iranians who bankrolled the Palestinians who actually planted the bomb, the murderers walked away scot-free, so to speak.
It is all sort of interesting, don’t you think? Particularly this year, when the real target of all this- the State of Israel- may feel like they need to act on their own to derail the Iranian nuclear program. I am not sure that they think anyone “has their back.”
Jeeze, this has been going on for 33 years, and it might just be starting to get really interesting. I wonder what sort of music they will be listening to when it is over? Or if there will be justice for anyone who has died in this war without a name.
روحالل
(Some guy we knew in 1979. Photo Wikipedia.)
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com