Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 4

November 18, Email to Chase Untermeyer

Dear Chase, it was pleasant chatting with you just now, though matters of importance are always choking-off our dialogues, making me importunate and you impatient. I suppose I have made an art form of being irrelevant. Fool that I am, I walk about the streets of Houston –barefoot as Socrates – showing respect to the lowest of people, yellow, black and even brown. And what has it earned me except the respect of my neighbors… insignificant folks? For the most part they smile kindly and say “Captain May” with a bit of admiration, whether at my magnanimity or my madness, I don’t know and I don’t care to know. “From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step,” said Napoleon. “No guts, no glory” said someone else, and I hope it was a Southern man like me who phrased it that way.

Mr. Coleman, one of my yin-yang of World War II veterans is in a bad way with liver trouble, and I’ll have to show him the book that you and Lady Diana gave me – to cheer him up. He fades away, resigned to have lasted eight decades and preserved his sense of humor. He bears up bravely, and winks when he tells me that he’s not so sure I’m out of the woods yet with mortality issues, and that the world isn’t either, not by a long shot. We chuckle at heaven’s door as I sit by his bed at his house and read the Chronicle to him. Today I will try to perk him up with the additional treat of a summary of the first chapter of General Caulaincourt’s memoirs, which are – thus far – an amazing example of how a clear-sighted officer can make an assessment of a situation that his boss won’t understand.

Returning from his post as ambassador to Russia in 1812, before the invasion was prepared, Caulaincourt met with Napoleon and told him that he was certain Tsar Alexander didn’t want war. Then he added a caution, given him by Alexander himself: Though the Russians wouldn’t draw the sword first, they would sheathe it last, and not because they could beat the French in pitched battles. No, they would win because they could suffer military defeat and occupation and remain resistant, until at last they could reestablish military forces and fight a French army far from Paris and depleted by harsh conditions.

To his credit, Napoleon heard his general and ambassador through (which is better than some leaders nowadays act when their generals and ambassadors want to talk sense), but then he started drudging up old arguments and causi belli that Caulaincourt recognized for the window dressing they were. The simple fact is that Napoleon had already decided to go to war, and wasn’t listening to reason at all.

Anyway, for whatever reasons, Alexander was right and Napoleon was wrong about how the war would turn out, and clever Caulaincourt who understood the army and the world could see it all coming. I guess my book April Fools, Captain May isn’t as original as I thought, and my level-headed prognosis of the quicksand of war wasn’t the first by a long shot. There are always repressed minority voices of reason in any mad time, it seems.

In Iraq, the public affairs folks tried their best to present a bloodless, utter victory, but on Saturday, April 5, we began the Battle of Baghdad, and they knew that a fair and balanced picture of urban combat wasn’t right for the morale of the American people, so they switched the story to Private Jessica for that day and for Sunday, April 6. (The story was hype, of course.) Monday, April 7 they switched the story to four-one-ton bombs “probably” killing Saddam. (The story was hype, of course.) They completed the toppling of Saddam by…, well, toppling Saddam (the statue I mean) on Tuesday April 8. (And yes, that story was hype, too.)

Anyhow, I’ve drifted into utter hyperbole now, because I’ll repeat my delusion that the Iraqis fought a bit over those four days before they gave up their capital. I must be smoking the wrong kind of tobacco again! Since I’m in the zone of nonsense, I’ll also repeat what I told you when we talked: the prez won’t pull out of the quicksand war because he thinks it’s chicken to back down, no matter how prudent it seems to the rest of us. In his recent speeches he has mentioned the “historic” dimension of our mission in the Middle East, and dimwits who think they’re doing historic things are usually making historic mistakes. Boy George is just temporizing with all that talk of a disengaged future, until he gets the “provocation” you mentioned today – as the only thing that could justify a general mobilization. Chaplain Chase, too much godliness and goodliness has rotted your common sense. Finding (or creating) a provocation to justify war is as old as Cain and Abel, because war is just homicide on a national scale. Ergo, Boy George will claim (or create) a provocation when he’s ready, and the same folks who lamely abided his recklessness will abide it again for the same reason: fear. Hell, getting us into more war would just be a replay of the techniques he used to get us into war in the first place!

I’m playing my special angles on my escalation prediction, of course, ‘cause I never think anything good happens in this war when Bush and Blair get together. The first time they did it was April 5-6, the weekend of my imaginary Battle of Baghdad, and I imagine they got together then to make sure they had a cover-up going to keep public morale behind the war. The second time they got together was July 17. I remember it well because it’s the day I went underground on the strong advice of my contacts. It was the day before Dr. Kelly was found dead in England under mysterious circumstances. It was three days after Valerie Plame had been outed by a Bushling and the same week that a Bushling had tried to out some gay ABC reporter through the Drudge Report for a negative troop-morale story. Yep, my crazed supposition is that Bush and Blair were keeping war resolve high by making examples of a few critics.

Well, the third meeting is the charm, and Captain May sez that Boy George is going to play Henry V (badly) and holler “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” Too bad the fool never learned the next line: “Or close the wall up with our English dead!” I wonder if Blair stayed awake in class while they were reading Shakespeare… Oh well, at least you and I are in the know now: Iraq is quicksand, ain’t it Chase? A lot of American pundits wish they had gone on record with that prediction first – and I wish it had never been predicted.

Captain May

PS for Thom Shanker of the New York Times: Hey little buddy, let me know if they’re going to start up black ops against citizens again. We can talk Russian again if you’d prefer to be discreet. Let’s handle things a little better than back in July, OK?

Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 4