I can’t quite grapple with this morning. I am disturbed enough about the events in Iraq that I am having flashbacks to the Ford Administration’s sad end, and then the disaster that was Jimmy Carter.
Some of this current nonsense is directly attributable to a painfully incorrect view of what was happening in Iran, and my entire career in uniform- originally an act of protest- wound up circling around the decision to abandon the Shah and his family to the tender mercies of the Ayatollah.
The Pahlavis now live in Mclean, I think, and they may have got the best deal of all of us.
We have a sort of perfect storm this morning that has me way off track. Apparently last night several dozen former colleagues were informed that their services were no longer required in a spectacular day of “reorganization” that lead directly to the cell phone going off early and often. The torrent of woe has only lately abated.
So it was not until I tried to gather my scattered thoughts that I noticed the date. OMG, I thought. No wonder.
By the time I got back to considering the serial string of frankly amazing stories of late, I found myself considering some other artifacts of the Ford Administration, prompted by News and Weather on the Eights. I heard that Sgt. Bergdahl is owed $300,000 in back pay for the time he was gone. I am not going to characterize what happened to him- I don’t know- and besides, that is a matter for military justice, which often is exactly a variation on the old oxymoron “military intelligence.”
Three hundred grand would certainly provide a useful start to a new civilian life, and I wondered whether he is actually entitled to it. Something nagged at the back of my mind from Jerry Ford’s unexpected time in the Oval Office. I had to look it up. Operation Homecoming brought back 531 personnel- mostly aviators- who had been shot down and held as long as eight years in Hanoi.
Two of them were mentioned frequently as being willing collaborators with their captors, as some have alleged Sgt. Bergdahl to have been; a Marine Colonel and a Navy Commander. Both claimed that they were simply exercising their first amendment rights and had come to the conclusion that the war was wrong.
There was some understandable resentment on the part of other POWS who had been mercilessly tortured, but both were permitted to retire with honorable discharges and nothing was done to them. In fact, Governor “Moonbeam” Brown appointed the Marine to a vacant position on the Orange County Board of Supervisors. He lost in the campaign for re-election, which opened several old wounds, but that is another story.
There the comparison peters out, since both were shot down while serving with honor, if not distinction. Maybe a better comparison would be with Sgt. Jenkins, the soldier who defected to North Korean, or between Bowe and Bob, the Marine PFC who was captured near Da Nang in Quang Nam Province in 1965.
Bob was reportedly released along with the others in 1973, but he did not return to the US until 1979. He was accused of collaboration, working as a mechanic for the Vietnamese. There was controversy about the stories he told of others held behind, but after an extended court marshal at Camp Lejeune, He was found not guilty of desertion and “solicitation of U.S. troops in the field to refuse to fight.”
He was found guilty of violation of Articles 104 and 128, Uniform Code of Military Justice, to wit: “communicating with the enemy” and “assault of an American prisoner of war interned in a POW camp.”
He was sentenced to reduction in rank to Private, a dishonorable discharge and forfeiture of all pay and allowances, which includes any veteran’s benefits. He was awarded no time in the stockade. I don’t know whether that was fair or not, nor do I know what will come out of any court marshal that might be convened for Sgt. Bergdahl.
And really, there is so much going on that has such astonishing strategic implications that I may just go to Willow early this afternoon and let the world mind its own affairs for a while.
I need to process this a little better. The fate of one American soldier is important, and I am glad he is alive and finally home- or at least in Texas, which is no exactly home but beats the hell out of Helmand Province.
Now as to what is happening fifty miles from Baghdad, now that is something that scares the crap out of me. More on that tomorrow.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303