t’s hard to have a serious conversation about America’s drone assassination policy when no one seems to have a basic grasp of recent history. This cultural amnesia epidemic is starting to get me down— which is partly my fault for paying more than two minutes’ attention to Twitter at a single go.

The problem starts with Reagan, as problems so often do. Most people on the left take for granted that Reagan’s executive order 12333 “banned assassinations” — which is not just a false interpretation, but really awful mangling of one of the dark turning points in modern American history.

It’s been nice to see the exiled folks rally and regroup as nsfwcorp, they were starting to get stale and I had to resort to Moe Tkacik’s twitter feed for quality Ames.

My father was a paratrooper lieutenant in the early ‘60s between Korea and Vietnam. He got into it by way of a skydiving club at college (Cornell, same as me, I was actually 3rd generation) that existed for that exact purpose. Did his time in the guard, I think the only fieldwork he ever did was to suppress a black riot that from what I can tell was probably Newark '67. They were ordered to go in with unloaded rifles but everyone said fuck that, his platoon heard gunfire and shot out every streetlight for better cover. Turns out the gunfire was the platoon next street over doing the same thing for the same reasons, which I guess is why they gave that order in the first place.

Anyway, he tells me he knew this guy at jump school down at Benning, real smart all-American type that just vanished one day, no one knew what happened to him. Few years later ran into him again, dude said he’d been in the Peace Corps, which was suspicious, I think they and the military are supposed to be mutually exclusive, membership-wise, to keep it pure. Few years later, meet up again, guy’s an executive for Coca-Cola, working on foreign markets in the developing world.

Then at some point in the '70s or '80s there’s a coup down in South America somewhere, and watching on TV my dad sees, behind the new president reading his proclamation, this guy is one of the dudes in shades holding a SMG. Met him again years later, still claiming Coke, dad didn’t bring it up.

The CIA’s cool, real cool. I’ve said before that it shoulda been the natural home of the more ambitious counterculturalists of the '60s - like, you like LSD, overthrowing governments through guerrilla warfare, nihil a me alienum puto cosmopolitan liberalism, personal glory? Come on down, we will pay you, back you, and immunize you to play Che. From the sound of what they’re saying here about the WU, some of them did and good for them.

Maybe I should’ve thought to go CIA. Maybe better I didn’t, I hear SOCOM stole their thunder in the decade after I graduated. Which is true to form, the Green Berets were originally formed to give DoD a wedge to claim Vietnam back from CIA jurisdiction. Maybe I should’ve gone Green Beret. (They’re not woo Rambo badasses, that’s the Rangers - the Berets’ special abilities are multilingualism and in-depth cultural understanding. Their job is more to start brush wars than fight them.)

I was thinking about that, when I was thinking of going Army two or three years back, but from what I understood officers spend more time on training rotations than fieldwork, and as for enlisted, well on the SF enlistment option if you wash out of training even because of like, injury you get sent back to be standard infantry and it would really suck to, break a leg and then get stuck as a grunt for 5 years.

Now that I know more I realize that’s probably bait-and-switch for gung-ho 18 year olds who Want To Be Heroes, and a politically clever genius who’s already been through part of a Category IV language program might be able to find his own way.

Hilarious true fact: as part of their training, the Green Berets are constantly infiltrating North Carolina.

My dad had another story about a training exercise where he played the infiltrating side. He had his men just walk right up to the defending HQ pretending to be defenders, entered the command tent, and pulled guns on the enemy commander. He got bitched at for that - fair enough a team that could mimic Americans perfectly wouldn’t be wasted on a nowhere outpost, but dudes shoulda used a passphrase. He also got chewed out for smashing store windows to resupply - too much verisimilitude. But officers only avoid getting chewed out by being unworthily boring, which is why Picard never made it past ensign with an intact heart.

Other dad Army stories:

Training paratroopers for the South Vietnamese Army. Says the men were impressive, doing full runs in full gear even though they topped out at 5'2", but the officers were fat fucks who rode alongside in jeeps.

Stealing the company commander’s jeep from the motor pool, going off for drunken joyriding, getting it stuck in a ditch in the woods, stealing the next company’s jeep and restencilling it as a coverup.

Testing a prototype of the Scorpion airdroppable tank with a frame but no armor - his managed to land with the frame around a tree, and they had to march 8 miles back through the forest at sunset.

Sitting on a reviewing stand as said tanks were demonstrated being dropped for the brass, one tank’s parachute tangling, said tank very nearly landing on the reviewing stand, instead merely smashing just in front and spraying rivets everywhere.