It's hard to be a ACLU hating, philosophically Libertarian, socially liberal, fiscally conservative, scientifically grounded, agnostic, porn admiring gun owner who believes in self determination.
Chuck, we miss ya man.
كافر
Experience is a cruel teacher, gives the exam first and then the lesson.
Experience is a cruel teacher, gives the exam first and then the lesson.
The Short Timers and The Phantom Blooper respectively by Gustav Hasford.
Kubrick tried to totally displace billing with more acknowledgment to Michael Herr who only contributed to apocryphal bit about the 60 gunner shooting women and children.
It was intended to be a trilogy where Joker gets sick of the America he’d come home to and how changed he’d become. He was approached by CIA spooks in the VA hospital and decided to give his backpay to his kid sister and use his press pass before they expired to go back to Vietnam and see if he could find the young Vietnamese girl teacher he’d become infatuated with and see if he could “make sense” of it.
Like the Star Wars of Vietnam (my analogy, not his)
He had a lot of angst but not in an Oliver Stone way.
Another notable line was where he took the Tokarev pistol out of his AWOL bag at home and said “It’s good to have a friend again”
In fact earlier in the book Phantom Blooper he uses the Tokarev to mozambique drill an NVA charging him with a spiker he quick draws from a chinese made shoulder sling.
I wish he would have lived to write his last part. He was a smartass and a sartrarian and had a sick sense of humor.
It's hard to be a ACLU hating, philosophically Libertarian, socially liberal, fiscally conservative, scientifically grounded, agnostic, porn admiring gun owner who believes in self determination.
Chuck, we miss ya man.
كافر
There was not a lot of equipment change in twenty years.
If you were in Ranger Bn, SF, LRSS, Pathfinder Platoon, etc. you had the same M16A1s, CAR 15s, M1911A1s, M60s, jungle fatigues, jungle boots, Bonnie caps, Load carrying equipment, etc. as someone in Vietnam.
In that era, Battalion Commanders were likely 101st Airborne Division, or other still existing unit, veterans from Vietnam. Your senior NCOS, or less senior NCOs if they had a break in service, were LRRP/Ranger Company and SF vets from Vietnam.
Being in a Ranger or other similar unit post Grenada and pre Panama sucked because there was no war on. The way crye wearing, ball cap sporting, sneaker bootie, bearded operator types is the current coolness,
Was the the way nomex clad, big porn stash operators were the coolness prior to that,
Is how the cool factor was then for fatigue wearing jungle warrior types.
It may be hard for many to get,
But some SOF type in the 1980s in his jungle fatigues and boots with his M60 or CAR 15 was, well, jealous of not having a war in the jungle to go to for a year like Vietnam.
“Where weapons may not be carried, it is well to carry weapons.”
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President... - Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln and Free Speech, Metropolitan Magazine, Volume 47, Number 6, May 1918.
Every Communist must grasp the truth. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party Mao Zedong, 6 November, 1938 - speech to the Communist Patry of China's sixth Central Committee
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