{"id":28947,"date":"2003-07-03T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-07-03T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.feiraodelandingpage.com.br\/picketts-charge\/"},"modified":"2003-07-03T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2003-07-03T03:00:00","slug":"picketts-charge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/picketts-charge\/","title":{"rendered":"Pickett’s Charge"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

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It is drizzly in town this morning, which is the way we could sum up the
\nspring. It is not cool, but it is definitely not hot. This is almost the Fourth
\nof July and we have had exactly two days that got into the nineties. Tom Cruise
\nis 42 and Dave Barry is denying that he is four years older than I am. I keep
\nvowing to write something commemorating the battle of Gettysburg, which 140
\nyears ago was coming to resolution today, the day before the Fourth. I will be
\ntraveling tomorrow, heading home, the same thing Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia
\ndid on the Fourth. This is what happened on Day Three in a field near a little
\ntown in southern Pennsylvania:<\/p>\n

“At l:00 p.m., Longstreet opened the great bombardment of the Federal line.
\nThe Federal <\/p>\n

army replied with approximately 80 cannon and a giant duel ensued which
\nlasted for nearly two hours. After the bombardment subsided, the Confederate
\ninfantry went forward. This attack is known to us as “Pickett’s Charge.” Federal
\nartillery and musketry cut their formations to pieces and inflicted devastating
\nlosses. A small Confederate force made one small penetration of the Federal
\nline, but was overwhelmed. The attack ended in disaster, with nearly 5,600
\nConfederate casualties. Meanwhile, three miles east of Gettysburg, J.E.B.
\nStuart’s cavalry was engaged by Federal cavalry under Brigadier General David
\nGregg. The cavalry clash was indecisive, but Stuart was neutralized and posed no
\nthreat to the Federal rear. The battle was effectively over. Federal losses
\nnumbered approximately 23,000, while estimates of Confederate losses range
\nbetween 20,000 and 28,000. “<\/p>\n

A century and a half later, more or less, eight U.S. soldiers were injured
\novernight in Iraq, but none were killed. There will be some hamburgers and
\nhot-dogs grilled in Iraq this holiday, but I suspect that everyone will be
\nlooking over their shoulders while they are doing it.<\/p>\n

It was a good morning for BBC correspondents. Right after Vicki signed off
\nfrom London, Carl Castle of NPR brought on Chris Morris from Berlin. He finally
\nexplained the furor I had been hearing about but did not understand on the World
\nUpdate the hour before. I was a little foggy, having a hard time getting with
\nthe program. I had a couple drinks on the way home from the office with Paul, an
\nold buddy from my middle Pentagon days. We met at what had been the Gangplank
\nRestaurant on the DC Waterfront. It is something else now, but that scarcely
\nseemed to matter. We sat under the awning near the bar on the dock just across
\nfrom where the former Presidential yacht Sequoia is docked. The brass gleamed on
\nthe rich wood of the upper decks and I marveled at the youthful good looks of my
\nfriend. He looked much younger than when I worked with him in the five-sided
\nadult care facility. In those days we were busily dismantling the Cold War
\nmilitary that had been so successful in the Gulf, working on the Clinton
\nAdministration’s assumption that we wouldn’t be needing it again. My friend and
\nhe secretly was attending the GW Law School at night. He had become a
\nclandestine lawyer, a remarkable achievement, considering how hard I thought we
\nwere working at the office. I remarked that he must have a portrait in a closet
\nthat was aging because he seemed to be going backward while the rest of us
\ncontinue to disintegrate. <\/p>\n

This morning the drizzle continues. I heard about the controversy but did not
\nunderstand what the new President of the European Union had said to provoke it.
\nChancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany is in high dudgeon about what was said,
\nobviously thinking there is some political mileage to be gained at home over
\nwhat the rotating six-month President said. Apparently Sylvio Berlisconi made
\nsome remarks suggesting a German Member of the European Parliament (a MEP, a new
\nacronym I dutifully copied down) could play the role of a concentration camp
\nguard. The Germans have hurt feelings, part of the whole victim thing they have
\nbeen practicing so artfully of late.<\/p>\n

Then WDET linked the theme with a report claiming a 77-year-old man was found
\nhiding under the stairs of his suburban Detroit house. He fled the jurisdiction
\nin 1987 for Canada, at the height of the Justice Department’s hunt for Nazis
\nabout to be eligible for Social Security. They managed to garble his service,
\nobviously not understanding what it meant to be a Totenkopf SS-mann, or who he
\nworked for in the Black Legion of the Heinrich HImmler. The man is accused of
\nbeing a guard at the Malthausen concentration camp, an ironic coincidence
\nconsidering what the President of the European Union is saying. The arrest of
\nthe SS-mann is an oddity, a sort of last hurrah for the Nazi hunters. The
\nfugitives who came to America have their catch 22. They can’t have citizenship
\nif they are convicted of crimes against humanity. One of my buddies in high
\nschool discovered on his summer job that was an entire Waffen SS unit that
\nworked at a steel fabricating plant in Troy. They minded their own business and
\nkept to themselves and never were heard singing the “Horst Wessel Leid” over
\nbeers at happy hour.<\/p>\n

Vicki introduced a bit on the American flag and the National Anthem this
\nmorning, facilitating a short story by Steven Evans that she said was going to
\nlook at the unique relationship of Americans with one of the most potent symbols
\nin the world. Steven Evans was the correspondent, and I cringed a little,
\nwaiting for the snide remark about our patriotism. Goodness knows we wear our
\nhearts on our sleeves, or the flag in the case of our uniformed personnel.
\nSteven started out with a long sound-bite from Ollie North on an incident he
\nobserved in Iraq. Or claimed to. I don’t trust Ollie any further than I can
\nthrow him. But he told a touching story about a tough Marine Sergeant Major who
\nwas nearly reduced to tears when presented a hand-drawn flag by an Iraq girl. He
\nclaimed some sand had gotten in his eyes. Then the story wound through its way
\nthrough Johnny Cash and Jimmi Hendrix and the antiwar movement. Then he quoted
\nsome academic who said that New Yorkers don’t show the flag because they are not
\nas bellicose there as they are out in the country. Vicki finished by playing a
\nlittle of Marvin Gaye’s version of the Star Spangled Banner. I kept waiting for
\nthe irony and it never came. <\/p>\n

I was pleased. I have a flag in my window, and I don’t for an instant believe
\nthe words of that moron from New York.<\/p>\n

Remember the guys who walked across the Emmetsville Pike, carefully reforming
\nthe ranks that had been shot to pieces. Remember the boys in the soggy woolen
\nBlues that waited to greet them with steel. Mostly our great-great grandfathers
\ndidn’t run.<\/p>\n

Except toward one another.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra<\/p>\n

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It is drizzly in town this morning, which is the way we could sum up the spring. It is not cool, but it is definitely not hot. This is almost the Fourth of July and we have had exactly two days that got into the nineties. Tom Cruise is 42 and Dave Barry is denying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}