Man Down

On September 13, 1968, Major General Keith Ware, commander of the 1st Infantry Division, was killed at Loc Ninh, Vietnam when his helicopter was shot down. Along with Ware, his three command staff and the four-man crew also died. Ware, 52, was the highest ranking American officer to die during the Vietnam War.

Ware was the first WW2 draftee to become an Army general and received the Medal of Honor in recognition of his actions in 1944. 

The 25-year old Ware was drafted in July 1941.  Sent to Officer Candidate School he initially served as a squad leader, seeing action in the 1942-3 Tunisian campaign, the July 1943 invasion of Sicily, the January 1944 assault at Anzio, and in the August 1944 landings in southern France.

His leadership qualities were quickly recognized and he was promoted several times, eventually commanding the 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Division.  He received the Medal of Honor for his actions on December 26, 1944 at Sigolsheim, a small town, near Colmar in the Alsace region of France.  The most decorated American soldier in the war, Audie Murphy, served under Ware, receiving the Medal of Honor for his actions in January 1945.

Ware decided to stay in the military after the war, eventually rising to be assistant commander of the 2nd Armored Division and then becoming, in the mid-60s, the army's Chief of Information.  He volunteered for service in Vietnam, arriving in early 1968, just in time to face the Tet Offensive. 

According to an article in HistoryNet, at the Battle of Loc Ninh, though Ware knew the North Vietnamese Army "had anti-aircraft weapons on the ground but ordered his helicopter to fly at low altitude despite the risk to allow him to pinpoint enemy positions and more effectively coordinate the battle".

Medal of Honor citation:

Commanding the 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry, attacking a strongly held enemy position on a hill near Sigolsheim, France, on 26 December 1944, found that 1 of his assault companies had been stopped and forced to dig in by a concentration of enemy artillery, mortar, and machinegun fire. The company had suffered casualties in attempting to take the hill. Realizing that his men must be inspired to new courage, Lt. Col. Ware went forward 150 yards beyond the most forward elements of his command, and for 2 hours reconnoitered the enemy positions, deliberately drawing fire upon himself which caused the enemy to disclose his dispositions. Returning to his company, he armed himself with an automatic rifle and boldly advanced upon the enemy, followed by 2 officers, 9 enlisted men, and a tank. Approaching an enemy machinegun, Lt. Col. Ware shot 2 German riflemen and fired tracers into the emplacement, indicating its position to his tank, which promptly knocked the gun out of action. Lt. Col. Ware turned his attention to a second machinegun, killing 2 of its supporting riflemen and forcing the others to surrender. The tank destroyed the gun. Having expended the ammunition for the automatic rifle, Lt. Col. Ware took up an M-1 rifle, killed a German rifleman, and fired upon a third machinegun 50 yards away. His tank silenced the gun. Upon his approach to a fourth machinegun, its supporting riflemen surrendered and his tank disposed of the gun. During this action Lt. Col. Ware's small assault group was fully engaged in attacking enemy positions that were not receiving his direct and personal attention. Five of his party of 11 were casualties and Lt. Col. Ware was wounded but refused medical attention until this important hill position was cleared of the enemy and securely occupied by his command.

 

Monument

 From 1935 by artist Kwase Hasui.  Via Alexander's Cartographer. 

 

Kwase Hasui (1883-1957) was considered Japan's leading printmaker and became very popular in the United States during the 1930s.  Some other examples of his work, from Wikipedia.

 

Not All Disrupters Are The Same

It's said at the end of this post from Assistant Village Idiot, one of the few long time bloggers who has not gone off the rails over the past decade. AVP also makes an astute observation about what might explain the findings he refers to.

RFKJr, among many other myths that he believes*, thinks psychiatric meds are contributing to the high-profile shootings we've been seeing, and thinks we should "look into it." Well, this is only one study in Sweden, but it does have an N=247,420 with robust results. Prescribing ADHD medication resulted in lower adverse "real world outcomes" such as self harm, traffic crashes, and crime. Interestingly, the effect seems to be weakening over time as the number of prescriptions increases. 

In this longitudinal population-based study of 247 420 individuals using ADHD medication between 2006 and 2020, we consistently found ADHD medication to be associated with lower rates of self-harm, unintentional injury, traffic crashes, and crime across all analyzed time periods, age groups, and sexes. However, magnitude of associations between ADHD medication use and lower risk of unintentional injury, traffic crashes, and crime appear to have attenuated over time, coinciding with an increase in prescription prevalence during the same period. The weakening trends for unintentional injury and traffic crashes were not fully explained by changes in age and sex distribution of the medication users, whereas the trend for crime was no longer statistically significant. These findings suggest that the declining strength of the associations of ADHD medication and real-world outcomes could be attributed to the expansion of prescriptions to a broader group of individuals having fewer symptoms or impairments.

My guess on this reveals one of my biases, but it may turn out to be true in this case. A broad range of interventions pick off the low hanging fruit at first, whether this be in medicine, education, economics, or crime. As this success is experienced by the doctors, politicians, or teachers, they try the solution on a wider group that less-obviously fits the the category and surprise! It doesn't work as well on every Tom, Dick, and Harry. The Law of Diminishing Returns. I used to see this in mental health, where an intervention like ECT's would work spectacularly well on some people with depression, but treatment-refractory patients of many diagnoses would eventually end up at the "shock treatment" door, because patient, family, and prescribers were all frustrated and willing to try less-likely interventions.

*The current fallback argument by his supporters are that the CDC and the medical establishment badly needs disruption and he is supplying disruption, so shut up, you liberal weenie. I find this unconvincing. Just because an institution needs to be disrupted does not mean that any particular disruptor is on the right track. Not all disruptions are equally valuable. Saruman wanted to disrupt Mordor, after all.  

RFK Jr is very glib, a plaintiffs personal injury lawyer, and a believer that conspiracies underlay every aspect of society.  There are no honest disagreements.  You are either good or evil.  Observing his technique in interviews over the decades you see him deploying the same approach against interviewers who don't know the details about which he is speaking.  He overwhelms the interviewer by spewing out a long list of studies and findings.  The problem is he starts by fairly accurately referring to two studies, then cites 3 more where he misstates the conclusions, and wraps it up with 4 studies summarized accurately but where there are a dozen other studies with better methodology that reach opposite conclusions none of which he cites.  He does this over and over again. 

The agency he oversees needs disruption and reform but he is the wrong person to do it.  He is not about open scientific inquiry.  When appointing committee members or authorizing studies they are designed to reach the conclusion he wants.

UPDATE:  In a September 5 piece in the Wall St Journal, former CDC Director Susan Monarez (hand-picked for the role by RFK Jr, who fired her after 29 days), writes that at a August 25 meeting with the HHS Secretary:

 I was told to pre-approve the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled
with people who have publicly ex-pressed antivaccine rhetoric. That panel’s next meeting is

scheduled for Sept. 18-19. It is imperative that the panel’s recommendations aren’t
rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted

or rejected.

A Congressional committee should ask Monarez to testify under oath in more detail about her assertion. 

La Roque Gageac

La Roque Gageac is a small riverside village along the Dordogne River which we first visited in 1977.  Our most recent stop was in 2022 and we hope to return next spring.  We stay in the bastide town of Domme on a cliff on the other side of the river, about a 10 minute drive away (which you can see center-right in the first photo below).

La Roque has only one street on which you can find restaurants, gift shops, and a hotel. Behind are a couple of rows of houses with narrow pathways and all back up by a cliff, pockmarked with caves used as a refuge by the inhabitants during the Viking raids of the 9th and 10th centuries and when other disturbances occurred during the following centuries.

 

The Cisco Kid Goes To War

The Cisco Kid was a half hour TV series broadcast from 1950 to 1956 of which I have a vague recollection watching as a youngster.  Starring Duncan Renaldo as the Kid and Leo Carrillo as his sidekick Pancho, as Robin Hood-type outlaws, it was based on a 1907 short story by O. Henry.  Apparently it was the first TV series to be filmed in color though, at the time, I didn't know it because we, like everyone else, had a black and white TV (I never owned a color set until the mid-1980s).

The Cisco Kid is also the title of a million selling hit song from 1973 by the band War, which commenced with these lyrics:

The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine
The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine
He drink whiskey, Poncho drink the wine

 

War began as a group of musicians in Southern California.  Linking up with singer Eric Burdon (formerly of The Animals) they produced the hit, Spill The Wine, in 1970.  Splitting from Burdon the following year, War went out to have a series of hit albums and singles during the 1970s.

The Cisco Kid is from The World Is A Ghetto, the best selling album of 1973, which also contains the beautiful title song.  War had a very tight rhythm section, which with catchy melodies and lyrics, resulted in a lot of chart success.

Other songs worth a listen by War include Slippin' Into Darkness, Low Rider, and Why Can't We Be Friends (with the immortal lyric, "I know you're working for the CIA/They wouldn't have you in the MAF-I-A").

A lot of the riffs and rhythms in War's songs have been covered and sampled by many other artists and used in movies and other shows. 

Outback

Chris Arnade writes of his travels, mostly walking, through the world, with a focus on avoiding downtowns and tourist spots, observing how life is lived for "regular" and particularly in the U.S., by those who are struggling.  His substack is Chris Arnade Walks The World.  It provides a very different perspective than your usual travelogue.  He's also the author of Dignity: Seeking Respect In Back Row America.

Chris recently returned from Australia and just published Alice Springs, Townsville and Crossing the Australian Outback.

The outback is like an extreme version of America's flyover country, and most Australians literally do only fly over it. When I announced my original Sydney-to-Townsville-to-Alice Springs bus route, I was struck by how many people had strong negative opinions about both places, especially Alice Springs, despite never visiting them. I began jotting down their responses, and by the time I left Sydney, over a hundred people had warned me against going, about ten were neutral or positive, and only five had actually been to the outback.

This was like the cartoonish US stereotype of an out-of-touch coastal urban elite, but in this case, the opinions weren’t confined to the elite, but to almost everyone of every class who lives within fifty miles of the dense (for Australia) southeastern coast.

On Alice Springs:

Since everything I was told had been proven wrong, including that the bus ride would be a little slice of hell, I arrived in Alice Springs close to convinced it would be a little slice of heaven, a festival of desert felicity, complete with kumbaya circles of Aboriginals dancing and singing with their now reformed and newly tolerant colonial masters. Or maybe I was going mad, and delusional, from thirty hours without sleep in the unforgiving landscape.

It however wasn't a little slice of heaven, at all, and by the end of the first day I realized that the only thing that everyone who had warned me, had gotten completely correct, was that Alice Springs is, to use Australians favorite vernacular2, a shithole. A shithole of majestic landscapes, and wonderful people, but still a shithole. 

Read it to find out why.