If I want girly I'll go somewhere like this.
A girly
-Rustin
Makes me miss the
Of course the tagging experiment (I'm taking the time to tag - are you?) and such are admirable moves in that direction. Maybe my pessimism about
That would be really nice.
-Rustin
P.S. Check out the "Vital Stats" JE with something like fifty
The army response? Since Yon is an embedded journalist, the U.S. givernment can seize any property of his they want, in fact, commit any crime against him they want because the agreement embedded journalists sign holds the U.S. harmless against any form of "injury".
To quote the article:
Army lawyers in the Office of the Judge Advocate General investigated and rejected the claim, arguing that by signing a "Hold Harmless/Release from Liability Statement," Yon agreed to release the Army from liability for any "injuries" -- which the Army lawyers found included the financial injury of the distribution of copyrighted photos.
We are increasingly living under a government that literally considers themselves unaccountable to anybody and entitled to do anything to anybody whenever and however the fuck they please.
There is a word for such a government. Such a government is a dictatorship.
We are deep shit.
-Rustin
A talk with Nir Rosen who just got back from a year there.
-FOREIGN POLICY: What does the current stalemate over the appointment of a prime minister say about the political process in Iraq, and whether the tensions on the ground can be discussed and eased at a political level?
Nir Rosen: I think it shows just once more that events inside the Green Zone have really no relation to what happens on the street in Iraq. They are bickering among themselves about how to create a government. But outside the Green Zone, they wouldn't last a minute, not one of these leaders, they would immediately be killed. Events inside the zone have been a big theater: What it does show is that they can't even cooperate at a political level. Meanwhile, their militias are already fighting each other, whether they are Kurdish, Shia, or Sunni. It shows there is no hope of any political rapprochement. Not that that would have an impact on the ground, because on the ground it is the militia leaders who are in charge. Every neighborhood has its own little army, every mosque has its own little army, that's where the power lies in Iraq, with the guys with the guns on the street.
-FP: Is civil war in Iraq inevitable now? Is there a way out?
NR: People have been asking me that a lot lately. There's been a civil war in Iraq since 2004. It's on a low scale, and nobody has really been paying attention because it's happening at night, away from where the journalists are. The casualty numbers are still fairly low, but they've been steadily increasing. In the north, immediately after the war, the Kurds emptied a lot of areas of non-Kurds, and Arabs have "ethnically cleansed" some areas of Kurds. So it's been reciprocal. In the south, soon after the war started, Shiites were taking over Sunni mosques. In Baghdad, Shiites and Sunnis attacked each other's clerics and mosques starting in 2004. In Sunni-majority neighborhoods, they drove out Shiites with threats and killings. There were population exchanges basically. It was sort of like "Bosnia light."
Militias are getting stronger and stronger. Hatred is growing between Sunnis and Shiites. To Sunnis, all Shiites are Iranian. To Shiites, all Sunnis are Baathists, Saddamists or Wahabbis. Iraq is now not just in a civil war, it's practically a regional war, because you have Iran strongly supporting the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, and Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and individuals from Syria supporting the Sunnis because they're terrified of a Shiite-dominated Iraq. And as the civil war in Iraq escalates, you're going to find that the nation-state concept is sort of irrelevant. If a Sunni tribe is attacked in Iraq and they have relatives in Jordan, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, as many do, those tribal relatives are going to come in at a certain point, too, and it's going to draw in the whole region.
-FP: Are these tribal and sectarian ties stronger than the Iraqi national identity?
NR: This wasn't the case in the beginning. I think the United States contributed to this. There certainly were grudges, Shiites had good cause for that, as they were the primary victims of Saddam. But in 2003, nobody used the words "Shiite" or "Sunni", there was a very strong nationalist discourse. Sunnis and Shiites held joint prayers, and sectarian attacks were rare. [Abu Musab al] Zarqawi's movement contributed a great deal, of course, because his ideology despises Shiites more than anything—even Jews or Christians, in fact. And U.S. policy alienated the Sunnis right from the beginning, dismissing the army and the Baathists for example, which disenfranchised the community and treated it as the enemy. And by apportioning seats on the interim Governing Council according to the faction—Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite—we sort of enshrined sectarianism. And we made the Shiites the good guys, the Sunnis the bad guys, this is a process that Washington contributed to. And it's going to get much worse. I think you're looking at Mogadishu in 1991 or Beirut in 1982. Soon we will stop seeing 50 people dead every day, and start seeing thousands. My friends in Amria, the Sunni neighborhood, tell me that three bodies are found every morning lying there on the main street.
-FP: You favor a withdrawal of U.S. forces. Wouldn't a withdrawal empower Islamist extremists and result in even greater bloodshed?
NR: Islamic extremists took over the country on April 9, 2003. The U.S. military was present, but it wasn't in control. The vacuum we created by dissolving the security forces immediately led to clerics and tribal leaders taking over—the most reactionary, conservative forces of Iraqi society. The country hasn't recovered from that. The looting contributed as well, there was no Iraqi infrastructure left, there were only clerics controlling various neighborhoods, both Shia and Sunni. And one of the reasons why Washington resisted Iraqi calls for elections in the spring of 2003 was because it was afraid that clerics and tribal leaders would win the elections. In fact, they both took over in January 2005. So we basically had almost two years of destruction for nothing. At this point, U.S. forces perhaps control whatever military base they're on, but when it comes to ruling Iraq, the clerics are in control.
-FP: In a recent article, you suggested that Moktada al-Sadr is the only man who can keep Iraq together. How?
NR: I don't think anyone can keep Iraq together at this point. But if you try to think of a leader who is respected by all sides, ironically, it's Moktada, because his rhetoric is Iraqi nationalist and people identify him as an Arab, whereas they view the Supreme Council in Dawa as Iranian implants. Moktada, right from the beginning, held joint prayers and demonstrations with radical Sunnis, he helped them in their fight against U.S. forces. And radical Sunnis have helped Moktada fight U.S. forces in the south. So when I speak to insurgents, Moktada is the only leader they respect. His own men refer to the two intifadas they fought against the Americans in the spring and summer of 2004. His staunch anti-Americanism is actually what unites Sunnis and Shiites. But at this point, I don't think anybody can save Iraq, but at least he is somebody who hopefully will be involved in bringing the tensions down at some point, though unfortunately his men have recently been involved in a lot of sectarian reprisals as well.
-FP: How will the Iraq war impact geopolitics in the long term?
NR: I think we are going to see decades of hostility between the West and the Middle East now. Very well-trained fighters who have gained experience in Iraq can now go to Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East. There have been several attempts in Jordan recently. Just last week they arrested 2 Iraqis and one Libyan, with a lot of explosives attempting to bomb some civilian location. Likewise in Saudi Arabia, in Syria, you are going to see increased sectarianism. I think the Muslim Brotherhood will take over in Syria, and sectarianism is increasing even in Lebanon, where Sunni and Shiite hostility had not been so intense before. There were recently demonstrations where Sunnis where chanting for Zarqawi and threatening the Shiites of Hezbollah. So throughout the region you have a huge civil war. It's looking bad everywhere.
I'm not the first one to say this, but Iran is the big winner in all of this. The United States has no leverage over Iran at this point. If the United States were to strike Iran, Iran could simply support the Shiites in Iraq. And if the Iraqi Shiites start attacking U.S. and British forces en masse, it will make the Sunni insurgency look like child's play.
Since the war, radical Islam has strengthened in Iraq. Hamas won in Palestine, and the Muslim Brotherhood gained strength in Egypt. Throughout the region, political, radical Islam, which might have been a spent force until a few years ago, is only strengthening. This is blowback, just like in the 1980s when a generation of Arab jihadists went to Afghanistan and gained skills. We are now going to have a new generation of young fighters experienced in jihad from Iraq. They're going to lead the fight for the next 20 years. When I was in recently in Pakistan, near the Afghan border, I bought a magazine dedicated to the heroes of Fallujah. I was in Mogadishu this summer, and there was actually a store named after Fallujah, and guys walking around wearing Fallujah T-shirts. Throughout the Muslim world, people actually believe that America is the enemy of Islam and even if this might not be true, they have Abu Ghraib and the destruction of Iraq to point to. We've also given reform and democracy a bad name. Suddenly, the dictatorships in the Arab world don't look so bad, in comparison to Iraq, and people are more suspicious of change.
-FP: Christopher Hitchens has proposed a "Nixon goes to China" approach to Iran. What do you think of this idea?
NR: I think that's probably the first intelligent thing I've heard Hitchens say in the past five years. I think that's very important. Had this happened earlier, perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have not won the elections. The Iranians have been speaking about a dialogue of civilizations for a long time, and Washington has responded only with threats and enmity, really. I think increased business ties would certainly strengthen the U.S.-Iranian relations. I don't think there's any reason for the United States and Iran to be enemies, apart from the Iranian-Israeli hostility. I think they are natural allies. It's about time Washington made an overture to Iran. We certainly don't want to miss the boat and let the Europeans make inroads economically in Iran, a market the United States needs. The Iranian people have no inherent hostility toward the United States. I think such a move would work.
Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New America Foundation. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, and The New Republic. His book on postwar Iraq, In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, will be published by Free Press in May 2006.
Now that I'll at long last have a site for my naked cogitations I need to actually create the muckin' thing. Section heads, topic pages, listings by title and subject and date. Designing a new end-of-page log box, choosing new naming conventions, determining needed graphics.
This is all suspiciously similar to work.
So after sleeping much of the day away and spending yet more hours online, I've been working on that kind of stuff. I suspect that some time soon I'm going to give in on coding by hand and get myself a copy of Dreamweaver or something. Anybody got any OS X, or even better, Mac OS 9 suggestions? I've got about three hundred pages (treating each JE as a page) to review, edit, style, and fit into a uniform schema.
I think that in general my delectable distancing from technology is going to have to retreat. Probably should get a laptop (adzooxs! paging adzooxs!), a Zodiac or other large PDA, and a current legal copy of some web-oriented image editor. Damn, the money goes fast.
Also, since this is, after all, going to be the site for Deep Geek, I think I'm going to have to join the nineties and design this site with rollovers, some forms, eventually some databases. I should even implement RSS.
Double damn. I like ASCII.
Oh, poor baby. Has to sit around and build a huge site as an extention of his grotesquely large ego and desire for self-promotion. Awwww!.
But it's still annoying.
Postscript: As of Tuesday morning, I've got the first few pages up. Primitive formatting but better than an empty site. I wonder how soon the results will turn up on Google.
Pages so far are:
the home page
an essay on why English is the best choice of international languages
a proposal for additional "green" NYC taxi medallions
and a refutation of the idea of NYC seceding from the U.S..
In other words, pretty much what you guys are used to from me, but now being put into a setup where they can be properly accessed by subject, date, etc. -Rustin
After all, it would run on biodiesel.
And then I could buy my own launchpad from Vandenberg AFB to park it next to.
Rustin
OTOH, the bumper stickers and ADD mug are sweet as a summer day. A geeky, easily distracted summer day, I guess, but, well, hey. I've been told that the ADD shirts and Reed&Wright shirts came out well too. Beowulf cluster buttons crop a bit so I'll be redoing those. And, of course, I need to fix the typo on the Sneakers shirt.
Soon. Maybe Sunday.
Well, it's still progress.
-Rustin
And so on. Seems to me that the cost in equipment of starting a manufacturing company, one that can do it's own metal and plastic castings, precision parts, and so on, has fallen below one hundred thousand dollars.
Seems to me that a bunch of ten techies, half working in their spare time, with three or four hired hands and a big garage (say, 3,000 square feet) to work in could start a real manufacturing company able to do a remarkable percentage of the things the big boys do, just not in such volume.
And with modern drill bits and modern mold release compounds and all the other products of the age, the labor per item made would be a fraction of what a low-tech shop would use up or of what a high tech shop could manage as recently as twenty years ago. Any machinist will tell you the same. Add this to the huge quanitities of unused and underused machinery sitting under blankets of dust in the U.S., Canada, and plenty of other "modern" countries, most available for sale absurdly cheap, and the possibilities are mindboggling.
So, since HP doesn't make their own engines anymore and their quality keeps going down, I'm asking you, what would it take to start a bespoke laser printer company?
Since everybody seems to agree that the ATX form factor is a dinosaur, what would it take to start selling something completely new?
Since
Now, I haven't included insurance, so that's about five thousand a month right there. And I haven't included rent, though in some parts of the country, rent on a space like that would run maybe five hundred a month. Heating and air conditioning, on the other hand would probably average out to two hundred a month or more. Add in pay for the extra "hands" who, admittedly would come in later, and we'e now looking at a burn rate of about ten thousand a month. A year of that adds another sixty thousand in the first year, maybe a hundred thirty thousand in the second year.
But in a nation about to do a reality show about inventors, with vast amounts of industrial legacy sitting idle, the idea that a serious manufacturer could be founded for a half a mil and, according to the general circulation stats, almost nobody in this country is doing it, is absurd.
-Rustin
Of course, we did this before in the last election cycle but sometimes it's important to freshen things up a bit.
My platform is:
Plain Speaking, Deep Geeking, Encourage Idleness, Weirdness Is A Strategic Asset
And one more thing. Taxes. It is so much fun to talk about how to spend money, I wanted to be damn sure I included a few ways to raise it. You're not going to like some or all of the means I propose. Thas' cool. But if so, please suggest other ways to generate the needed revenue.
Plain Speaking - Our government, bureaucrats, elected officials, and all, have developed a great skill at doublespeak, obfuscation, and a thousand other forms of hiding the truth. No more. It's time for clarity, brevity, and transparency.
- First the Bush programs to increase the number of classified documents gets cancelled, the Gore declassification program gets reinstituted, and an aggressive program is instituted to create open government across the board.
- ALL electoral districts get redrawn with a mathematical limit to how far they can deviate from the border to area ratio of a square. (Thanks to Pythor for the link.)
- All bills must be under fifty pages long, must be submitted to review at least a month before they are voted on, must be made available on the congressional website as soon as they are submitted. And just like the old days, a printed and complete copy of each law in sixteen point type is to be posted in a major public place in every city or town of more than five thousand residents including jails, hospitals, and so on.
- No government entity can suppress court records as part of settling a lawsuit, require that anybody else do the same, or participate in a settlement that requires sealing any court documents that describe actions of the government or government employees acting in a manner related to their jobs. No more cops strip-searching innocents and then hiding the evidence.
- ALL government programs must submit public itemized budgets. ALL OF THEM. The idea that nobody will know that we might be spying on them in this day and age is utter horseshit. The only exceptions will be ten percent of the War Department budget can be confidential for five years and one percent for twenty and that our intelligence services will have two hundred million dollars a year to spend in ways that will remain confidential for twenty years.
- Did anybody not catch that up there? The "Department of Defence" gets renamed "The War Department".
- The Congressional Record will contain nothing but actual statements spoken aloud to the room on the floor of the Congress. Appendices and such can be made available on a GPO site but will not be equivalent to actual CR statements.
- The word "Homeland" will be replaced in all government names. This isn't anybody's fucking homeland but the Indians.
- "Unemployment statistics" will be redefined to count all people NOT EMPLOYED.
- Whenever possible without infringing on content currently available for sale, all documents used in government hearings will be copylefted and made available on a GPO website.
- I will raise private funds to create a private organization whose job is to document every law in the U.S. into one publicly available, all pdf data archive. One year after this project starts they will move on to their real job. Teams of four will sit down with a given body of law and look for ways to replace long text with short text. They will institute a public bounty system for the discovery of conflicting rules and laws. Once a candidate for simplification is found, the team has one year to get that change on the ballot.
Deep Geeking - The clueless now run things. Brains are considered an embarrassment, actual serious thought even more so. No more. We will bring a systems approach to governance.
- All people elected to congress have for years been taking unofficial classes, usually paid for by lobbyists and organized by subsets of their political party. From now on anybody elected to any job must take a one month course in the structures, history, vocabulary, and instrumentalities of that job. Oh, and two days on statistics, the difference btween precision and accuracy, and how to judge bias in the media. Then another week on economics with a focus on the concept of utility. And rounding out the second month of training is a week on foreign culture and a week on world current events. The test taking and test scores will be public and no staffers are allowed to attend. Classes will be confidential.
- All American junior high schools and high schools will be required to give an exam that is a tougher superset of the one given to people applying for U.S. citizenship. Flunk the class, you flunk the grade.
- All government-funded jobs will be required to spend on each employee an amount at least equal to five percent of annual salary. The nature of that training will be subject to public review every five years. The materials for said training will, whenever possible be open sourced.
- A comprehensive review of electronic balloting will be carried out with the goal of reinstituting paper ballots.
- All government software and hardware usage will be reviewed and at best practical speed all government agencies are to convert to open source applications. Any agency wishing to be exempt must submit a public explanation of why they are continuing to use commercial software for any use beyond fifty seats and ten thousand dollars.
- All government agencies using or considering open source software will be given a budget equal to one tenth of their software expense in each of the past ten years. This funding will be used for bounties on improvements to OSS.
- A tax of one tenth of one percent will be assessed on all software costing over one thousand dollars or contract programming purchases above five thousand dollars. Half of this money will, as a "luxury tax" go into the general pool. The other half will be used to provide scholarships for U.S. citizens to study engineering.
- A five dollar tax will be assessed on all professional, legally required certifications, including MDs, licences to practice law, P.E.s, C.P.A. and notary licences, and so on. One third of this money will go into the general pool. One third will be used for creating and distributing open source educational materials on those subjects. One third will go to high school classes in those subjects.
- All government-owned and/or government-occupied buildings will be reviewed by the LEED Standard and will be given a budget equal to two percent of their assessed value to increase their LEED rating. Facilities managers will be given one week of training in green building practices and a reference library of books on the subject. Facilities managers will be encouraged to be experimental in their purchases and to use local suppliers. As better standards and better techologies become available, further iterations of this funding will be made available.
- An adjunct to the Peace Corps will be created with a highly specialized mandate. They are to do nothing but civil engineering. They will go to the worst pestholes in the world, drop in (with military support), build roads, bridges, toilets, water treatment systems, and homes. BUT all with local labor where possible, NO final systems that include machinery, electronics, most plastics, rebar, or any other things that require the existence of industrialized infrastructure to keep working.
We've discussed this before. No fifties-inspired superhighways. Five meter wide roads four meters deep built to last a thousand years. No complex engineering wonders requiring half the staff of Parsons-Brinkerhoff to make work. Twenty meter long bridges built of girders so huge you could park a row of tanks on it and surfaced in asphalt over steel plate over plastilumber planks with walkway built by local craftspeople. No fancy machines. No breakable parts. No megaprojects. Get in, build it in two or three months, get out.
If it can be done with local materials, good. Cob construction is our friend. Strawbale is our friend.
And the punchline of all of this? All of this is to be documented as they go to create open source techniques for civil engineering. It cost ten million dollars to build a footbridge over a highway near where I work. That is horseshit. With modern materials costs most government construction should cost far less than it does and if the techniques for doing this get documented, then the current Skidmore,Owings&Merrill/Halliburton/etc. bullshit will be shown up for the criminal fraud that it is.
- Provide a one billion dollar per year fund to buy rights of way, any rights of way, with an additional hundred million dollars a year to be used along those rights of way to build utility tunnels as specified here. (Same "Space Age Roman" link given above.)
- A tunnel will be built under the Bering Strait, allowing freight rail direct from Florida to Moscow. (This idea stolen from Stargoat.)
- A subscription to NASA Tech Briefs will be given to every high school, college, and engineering firm in America.
Encourage Idleness - Contrary to current public propaganda, the U.S. has a huge unemployed population. They just are considered invisible if they have some sad-ass part-time make work job, if they aren't "actively seeking work", or any of half a dozen other bullshit rationalizations. But this won't change. In fact, with robotics and off-shoring that number will probably increase. Fine, just get 'em the fuck out of the way of those of us who want to work.
Let's start with a link to the Big Dole JE.
- A tax of one half of one percent will be assessed on all "poured" beverages (sold for immediate consumption) with a per serving price above two dollars. One third of this revenue will go to the general pool. Two thirds will go to provide tax rebates for all restaurants, parks, cafes and other hangout spots open a median of thirty hours a week or more and providing customers, regardless of purchase, with seating, a free water fountain, and access to a bathroom.
Weirdness Is A Strategic Asset - It used to be that America took pride in the range of our opinions, took pride in the range of our behaviors. Not anymore. we live in the age of Standardization, and specifically in the age of government enforced standardization. That's certainly got its good side (things like nutrition labeling on food) but a lot of it is, as the politicos like to say, burdensome.
- All government regulations will be reviewed by a team modeled on Gore's Reinventing Government teams, but this time their job is to find every single government category of spec and make them available in one massive pool. These will then be reviewed for internal conflicts and all that conventional jazz but also, whenever possible replace performance-based specifications with results-based specifications. To those of you out there beyond our clueless shores, I'm proposing a shift from the America approach of absurd micromanagement to one closer to the German approach of far less detail and a more fluid, case by case approach. Simplify not just for the sake of clarity but to allow leeway for those who have found new or simply locally more appropriate ways to address their concerns.
Obviously one starting point for this is the building codes. Another is encouraging things like pollution credits.
The government needs to do its best to get out of the business of telling people what to do and focus more on why we wanted it done.
- Back in the sixties and early seventies a bounty crop of new colleges was created all over the industrialized world. Most of them failed, though some after flaring brilliantly. A few are still with us and now respected.
Any ten or more professors at any accredited college or university will be able to apply for a half million dollar grant to found a new college on the terms that they must be truly independent of existing schools, more than ten percent and less than fifty percent of hours of for-credit instruction must be done by instructors who in the previous ten years have not worked primarily as college level instructors, and the college must generate one open-source term-length curriculum per year.
Such colleges will qualify for $5K per-student-year subsidies for up to twenty full time students and $3K per-student-year subsidies for an unlimited number of full time students. All of this will be conditional on the created institution applying for and receiving accreditation within five years. Subsidies can be portioned out proportionately to part-time students instead of full-time ones.
Other Policy Positions:
- Institute a 0.2 percent Tobin Tax.
- Cut all funding to PBS, NPR, and other general audience content creation.
- Add a ten thousand dollar fee for any copyright extended more than thirty years after the death of the creator.
- Any U.S. battleship that can be brought back into service will be up to a maximum of five. This includes all new engines, gut rehab of the interiors where this rehab will not create major new running expenses or dependencies, and the filling of half of the newly-freed belowdecks spaces with bouyant solids. There are certain things that no weapon can do as well as a battleship and it is appalling that they are being allowed to rot.
- A fleet of twelve pykrete ice warships will be built, five aircraft carriers, five supply ships, two cruisers.
- Half of the nuclear missile sub fleet will be decommissioned with the goal of reducing our nuclear missile arsenal to fewer than one hundred missiles. After all, if everybody is so damn sure that terrorists can reach anywhere in the world with suitcase nukes, why can't we and what are we spending all those billions of dollars on?. And further, if everybody knows that nukes are insane then WTF is with our still going along with a MAD strategy anyway.
As the wargamers have long said, no nukes; make the world safe for conventional warfare.
- Each decommissioned sub will be stripped of its reactor and military-specific equipment. The resulting post-subs will be grouped in sets of four in undersea locations where they will be connected with tunnels, covered in several feet of high-strength concrete, and used as the core of undersea research facilities.
These facilities will be open to researchers from around the world, both to encourage science and to make sure that there are plenty of witnesses to a slow but steady ripping out and restructuring process meant to make them better buildings and ever less capable of being turned back to subs.
- Half of the staff of naval electrical storage contractors will be offered funding for three years to create new civilan battery companies on the condition that their work must not be classified. (For those of you who don't study these things, the batteries in torpedoes and other naval hardware have long been state-of-the-art. We're spending a fuckload of our best engineers in a crucial field who could be designing batteries for cars, laptops, off-the-grid systems, etc.)
- The V-22 program will be required to provide complete plans and access to teams from ten engineering schools, the European Space Agency, American Chopper, and Metric Revolution. Each team will prepare a report of suggested changes and the V-22 team will be required to defend. They've had twenty goddamn years to get that bird stable, it's long overdue that they stop for a year and spend some time going over their result.
And that's how we start.
-Rustin
Of course I've written about them here before but how could I resist another chance to promote such a, erm, spirited musical experience?
And yes, I admit it, part of the appeal is that some of them are frighteningly cute. You can't tell from the pictures but let me assure you that Marianne DeMarco makes Joey Lauren Adams look like Marty Feldman. I'd damn near marry that girl if I could ever get more than two successive sentences out of my mouth in her presence without sounding like a complete doofus.
-Rustin
p.s. Did I mention that she's a filmmaker? Or that she cofounded and ran my favorite film festival? or...
We've gotten things donated (more to go; anybody wanna buy a Rollei slide projector?), gone through about forty bins of papers, reorganized all of the furniture in her office (that means two desks, one work table, fourteen file cabinets (now ten left), three small tables, a huge packing chest...), reorganized her computer setup (how the fuck does Gateway get away will selling two thousand dollar computers with PCI slots that don't work?), redone her hall storage (about half as much stuff as the office), and so on. And on. And on.
At one point Maggie was sorting through papers, a friend of mine was there to look at some closets and walls that need to be redone (my friend knows a relevant carpenter), two pissant high school kids were moving furniture (I didn't hire them - it's a long story), another friend was wandering around and asking questions, and I was trying to coordinate this whole megilla. Too bad I couldn't use cattle prods on the high school kids.
So after all of this I felt justified in going out and buying a few, as Interrobang would put it, "pieces of kit" lost in the fire that I still haven't replaced.
And I have done a scary thing.
Ya see, of all the stuff lost due to the fire, near the top was my beloved and indestructable messenger bag. I loved it. It could survive anything. It was huge, comfortable, looked neither cutesy-flashy (I hate all that brightly colored crap with three hundred useless buckles and pockets and whatever) nor hyper macho (see above but with ten pounds of "ballistic nylon", reliably in all the wrong places) nor the pathetic little toy bags sold by places like The Gap that are barely big enough for four or five reference books. Also no visible logos allowed and it has to look appropriate in a design office, a squat, and yuppie political meeting.
And no thick vinyl liner. Those things always crack, they weigh a ton, they're usually in violently bright colors, and they just feel ooshy. (It's a word if i say it's a word.)
So I've looked all over New York. I've looked online. (Did like these guys.)
So the day before yesterday I went out to buy some or all of what I'm still doing without and found an excellent bag. Cheap (seventy five bucks), huge, comfy, no gee-gaws. I bought it and am very happy.
There's only one thing. I didn't exactly find this at Tenba or a bike shop. I found it at, well, erm, uh, J.Crew.
And the bag? Well, it's, uh, plaid. A really dark plaid. But if you're within twenty feet it's unmistakably plaid.
My preppy childhood is coming out to haunt me.
It's just that, well, it's a really kickass bag. Huge, tough, light, everything I was looking for and more. I even had been hoping to find something with tasteful leather trim.
It's just that while part of me feels that what could be more geekish than to choose the right tool and completely dismiss social conventions as foolishness for mundanes and lusers, a bit of me can't believe that I've now got a bag bought right by the display of cashmere sweaters with frilly trim, just past the rep ties and linen pants.
Am I betraying the geek tribe?
Now, as it happens, there's a warped subtext to all of this. Ya see, that previous paradigm of kickassosity that served me so well? My hand-sewn, ultrablack, perfectly sized wonder of a bag? As it happens I bought it off of a former bike messenger back in '94 while we were chatting in the photo room. While we were both procrastinating instead of working at our jobs in the design department of
wait for it.
J.Crew.
Yep. Seems that good ol' Crew is my bag supplier of record.
Oh well.
Rustin
I suspect that you'll actually far prefer the geek stuff at my Zazzle store, especially, duh! the "/. addict" t-shirt. After all, you can spec whatever color, clothing type, etc. suits you. Only problem is that I haven't seen any of their product in the real world yet and I'm not sure how the printing will come out.
But hell, after all the promises I'd made back in '04 to do t-shirts that said, for example, "geeks: I want a beowulf cluster of those.", "ADD: I think about more things than you do.", and "yes, I am smarter than you." I decided to get my act together in late January and finish the PShop work, then create the sites.
General rule, btw, the screen shots suck nuclear rocks. Please do look at the largest view to get some idea of how these actually look. On top of that, the free version CafePress and Zazzle UIs are pretty doggone lame so, yeah, you've gotta scroll *way* down to find some of the best stuff.
I just ordered myself a Deep Geek messenger bag. Should be fun to have at trade shows. The CafePress Reed&Wright logo t-shirt (with the logo in the square) actually is very purty indeed. If I had the cash I'd print up fifty and send one to each of ya. Someday.
In the meantime, hey, George, sounds like you've a damn shitty week. Fuckers. Could the Howell household gain from a Reed&Wright t-shirt or whatever? Choose a thing, any thing, from one of the three sites, and it'll go your way, on the house.
Btw, thanks to all of you who were in those discussions way back when and especially to the inimitable Interrobang for staying on my ass about it and helping to perfect these little bits o' text.
Happy days,
- Rustin
Anybody who comes up with a really good suggestion gets a case of the beer of their choice.
Have fun.
-Rustin
Reed&Wright's Combat Chronology.
This chronology lists hundreds of times that the United States military has gone into combat. We have gone over every time a U.S. soldier has stood with hand on trigger and orders to shoot if opposed. Guard duty in "enemy" countries are included. Hurricane relief efforts are not.
Rebel Uprisings
-For decades before 1776, colonists rise up in periodic rebellion, repeatedly defeating small forces of British soldiers and controlling massive stretches of land, as well as courthouses, tax collection, and armories for years at a time. Many also serve as soldiers in the various Frenh-Indian Wars, gaining military experience and a pretty dismal view of life under close British rule.
American Revolutionary War
1775 to 1783 : The United Colonies, Caribbean, and British Coast
Originally hoping to find a compromise, quickly realizing that this will be as total a war as the respective forces can manage, The War of American Independence changes the world, showing for the first time in the modern world that a group of rebels can hold off a great empire and then successfully declare themselves independent.
With fronts reaching well into territory held by others, from contested Indian lands to Spanish Florida, to Canada, the war is intermittent but bloody.
-1775: Bermuda - U.S. ships seize New Providence island, headquarters of the British forces in the Caribbean. They seize supplies and arms, including cannon, that prove crucial to early battles of the Revolutionary War. Later in the war they go back and do it again.>
1775: - riots graduate to combat as the rebels organize under the Continental Congress and formally create a military.
After several confrontations are resolved without bloodshed, the battle of Lexington and Concord
1775: First large scale combat of rebels against British troops, including the siege of Boston
1776: Crossing of Delaware River-Christmas 1776-Washington captures Trenton on December 26th
1777: Princeton-Washington defeated Brits on January 3, 1777.
Saratoga-British Burgoyne was defeated and surrendered on October 17.
Oriskany-British St. Leger was defeated on August 6.
France recognizes the 13 colonies. An alliance with France in 1778.
1778: Brits capture Savannah on December 29, 1778.
1779-Spain joins American Revolution vs. England. September 23,-Benedict Arnold’s plot to surrender West Point to the Brits was revealed.
1780:
1781: British Cornwallis surrenders on October 19 in Virginia.
1782:
1783: Treaty of Paris signed-September 3rd.-
Quasi-War with France
-1779 to 1802: Caribbean and Atlantic
-As a result of the ongoing Napoleonic Wars, France declares that all shipping worldwide must declare its allegiance to France or be declared pro-British and subject to seizure. France then seizes all U.S. ships in French ports, sells their cargoes, and begins to attack American vessels wherever they find them. The U.S., having disbanded its navy at the end of the Revolutionary War, has no way to fight back, thereby resulting in the first Congressional debates about defense funding and the creation of the Constitution-class warships.
To everybody’s amazement, U.S. ships proceed to engage and frequently defeat French vessels, both merchant and military, winning scores of naval battles and seizing over 80 vessels before the French apologize, pay damages, release the ships they hold, and back down.
1786: United States
-Shay’s Rebellion
Fundamentally a fight about what the U.S. government would be, pitting U.S. troops against anarchists and other libertarians, this rebellion has attained a repute disproportionate to its size.
1794: United States
-Whiskey Rebellion
-Considered by many the final confrontation between believers in a loose confederacy and backers of a strong federal government, this series of pitched battles, mostly in the Pennsylvania hills, is led personally at some points by George Washington and involves as large a uniformed U.S. military force as the War of Independence. This rebellion got its name from local fury at new taxes on whiskey, which, for backwoods folk, served less as drink than as currency. After all, carrying a grain crop out to market from the deep hills was ruinously expensive; converted to mash and sold by the jar, the same crop was transportable, storable, and more valuable.
First Barbary War
1801 to 1805 : Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco
See our note on piracy.
-Since the days of the late Roman Empire several city states along the coast of North Africa had demanded that all shipping passing their land must pay them heavy, or even exorbitant duties. All major trading nations reached accommodations with each local ruler, paying tribute directly to each and everybody in authority.
After the Revolutionary War, U.S. ships are subjected to raiding, including not only cargo, but also entire ships being seized and crews held for ransom, or, in some cases, sold into slavery. U.S. diplomats, amateurs all, try and fail to figure out who and how to pay in the every-shifting regional mix of brothers, viziers, and “people with influence at court”, in the process spending millions of dollars and never long achieving protection anywhere for U.S. ships or even the return of hostages.
Finally, using the experience not only of combat with France and England, but just as importantly, a hundred and fifty years of smuggling past British patrols, U.S. forces go to war with Libya.
TK
1806 to 1810: Gulf of Mexico
-Various combat actions are carried out against privateers, including one platoon crossing the Rio Grande, where they are captured and later released.
In colonial days people spoke of “the Floridas” since the territory was considered so fragmented. Under first Spanish and then briefly French rule, what is now Florida, as well as the area around New Orleans, and what is now southern Georgia, was a patchwork of fiercely-held Seminole territory, settlements of Europeans, enclaves of fugitive former slaves, and pirate bases. No area on the east coast saw so much combat or had it last so long.
1810: Florida
-U.S. troops occupied Spanish territory from the Mississippi to the Pearl River.
1812: Florida
-Amelia Island and other territory occupied by order of President Madison. Later irregularities by troops caused Madison to disavow their actions.
War of 1812
-With the United Kingdom having never entirely accepted the separation of the United States, and the U.S. at war with British-supported and having territorial aspirations on the lucrative resources available in Canada, periods of cool interspersed with small acts of hostility finally became full-fledged war in 1812. Officially, with the end of the Napoleonic wars, the U.K. ended impressment from American ships, the ostensible reason for the war in the first place, though a great deal of time was actually spent in the U.S.-U.K. negotiations on agreements on arming of and trade with Indian tribes.
1813: Florida
-Mobile Bay seized by U.S. troops, thus advancing to the territory sought in the 1810 fighting.
1813-14: Marquesas Islands
As a part of the War of 1812 a small squadron of ships of ships was sent to patrol the Chesapeake Bay and oppose British vessels where they found them. Their orders said that if they missed their rendezvous they were authorized to go further in search of opponents. So they did -- much, much further. In fact, all the way to Asia. So they pretty much went from Maryland to Delaware by way of Indonesia.
After much hard voyaging, they stopped at the Marquesas to finally recuperate and rebuild their ships, working well with one local society but staving off periodic attacks from another by beaching one of their ships for use as a fort. Most of the naval group then left to pursue and attack British shipping. Holding their ground for about a year and briefly declaring the island to be American territory, the remaining sailors were eventually reduced to a force of seven men, who made their desperate way 2,500 miles to present-day Hawaii, where they were seized by British forces.
1813, 1814: Chile
-Sea battles between British and American forces off the Valparaiso coast result in the eventual defeat of U.S. forces.
1814: Florida
-Hostilities between natives and U.S. troops worsen.
1814-25: Gulf of Mexico
-Assorted incidents between pirates and U.S. ships (both merchanters and military).
1815: Algeria
-A fleet attacked Algiers and then carried out a show of force at Tripoli - both local governments capitulated and paid indemnities for earlier actions.
In other words, while the U.S. was busy with the War of 1812 the pirates of the Barbary Coast stopped keeping the terms of their treaty and went back to stealing and pillaging. So once things settled down the U.S. sent a force to *ahem* remind them of their promise.
Note: Seminoles: Every time that you see incidents of U.S. actions versus the Seminoles you should keep in mind that the Seminoles had long since provided refuge for runaway slaves, not only allowing them to stay, but intermarrying and bringing them into the culture. If you look at images of the Seminole leaders of this time and later a good many of them look considerably more like Kofi Annan than Geronimo.
This being the case, the fierce and bitter fighting, endorsed by the federal government, was in a very real sense, a United States military effort to preserve slavery, as well as a continuing effort to seize rich farmland then in Indian lands.
-See our note on Indian wars.
1816: Florida
-U.S. soldiers attacked and destroyed Nicholl’s Fort, known as Negro Fort, on grounds that it had served as a base for raiders.
1816 to 1818: Florida
-First Seminole War
-A full-scale war including the only naval attack by Indian tribes against a U.S. military force. A force of 3,000 U.S. soldiers marched into Spanish territory, Amelia Island, Pensacola
-See our note on Indian wars.
Note: Beginning of west coast activity Russia had ships going as far south as present-day California while Spanish ships went as far north as Washington. Local Indians dealt with both. Our childhood tales of Lewis and Clarke raised us on the false premise that they were the first “civilized” people ever to voyage out west. In truth, once out of the interior, their trips had a lot more in common with Marco Polo then they did Neil Armstrong.
1818: Oregon
-The U.S.S. Ontario sailed to the base of the Columbia River, contesting Russian and Spanish claims to the region.
1822 to 1824: Cuba
-The U.S. navy repeatedly lands on the northwest coast in pursuit of pirates . Just in 1823, actions occurred on April 8th and 13th as well as October 23rd and 24th.
1824: Puerto Rico
-U.S. forces land at Fajardo, where a force of 200 men attacked the town to reach pirates and force an apology from the town for having insulted U.S. officers.
1825: Cuba
-U.S. and British forces land together at Sagua LaGrande to capture pirates
1827: Greece
-In October and November, the U.S. landed forces on several Greek islands in pursuit of pirates.
1831 to 1832: Falkland Islands
-Repeated landings during an investigation of the capture of three U.S. sealing ships in the area.
1832: Sumatra
-Four days of assaults to punish the town of Quallah Battoo for their support of pirates.
1833: Argentina
-A force landed at Buenos Aires to protect U.S. interests during civil disorder.
1835 to 1842: Florida
Second Seminole War
-Five thousand Seminoles, fighting from the protection of the deep swamps and with the support of many non-Seminole locals, fight off the U.S. Army, Marines, and Navy. This battle is noteworthy for such unique ventures as the only naval assault by an Indian force against U.S. troops. Eventually the U.S. forces break the tribe and three thousand Seminoles are forcibly moved to Oklahoma, enduring terrible conditions as they create their own Trail of Tears. Many refuse to surrender and move to Mexico, where they remain for generations but eventually mostly emigrate back to the United States. The U.S. spends over forty million dollars on this war, which played a large role in American perception of Indian resistance at the time.
-See our note on Indian wars.
1835 to 1836: Peru
-Marines are posted in Callao and Lima to protect U.S. interests during a period of civil disorder.
1836: Mexico
-U.S. forces occupy disputed territory around Nacodoches during the Texas War of Independence, with orders to attack south in the event of any Indian attack
1838 and 1839: Sumatra
-More attacks on Quallah Battoo and Mukki in retaliation for local pirate activity.
1839 to 1842: U.S.-Canada Border
-From the days of the War of Independence on, questions remain about the location of the U.S.-Canada border. In 1839, debates gets hot on both sides and the Maine government raises money to pay for ten thousand troops to hold the line. The British start to post redcoats on their side while the U.S. sends federal troops backed by Congressional approval. Things don’t settle down until the Webster-Asburton Treaty is signed in London, settling the eastern section of the border once and for all. (The western border dispute, over cosovereignty with the British Empire over the Oregon Territory, is settled at last in 1846, with the Oregon Treaty. This territorial squabble gave rise to James K. Polk’s campaign slogan “54-40 or Fight!” in 1844.)
1840: Fiji Islands
-Retaliation for attacks on U.S. exploring and surveying parties.
1841: Pacific Islands
-Landing and assault to avenge the killing of a U.S. sailor by locals; this incident followed a landing on Upola Island, Samoa.
1842: Mexico
-A squadron patrolling the California coast occupies first Monterey and then San Diego, in each case in the mistaken belief of an ongoing war.
1843: China
-Marines and sailors land after a conflict at the Canton trading post.
NOTE: Chinese combat: From this period forward we see repeated brief landings, postings, and “retaliation”. This is in large part due to two accelerating phenomena -- the rapid increase of American trade, and a steady influx of missionaries. Seeing locals as “degenerate heathens” and religious institutions such as temples, ceremonies, and monks as “pernicious servants of Satan”, missionaries regularly assault priests, break up funerals and weddings, burn down temples, and bludgeon locals who are considered “insolent.” When this activity exists side by side with American traders actively encouraging the opium trade, it is not difficult to see how American citizens frequently get themselves into situations requiring the U.S. Marines to prevent their death by mob assault, if not summary execution by local authorities.
Over the next hundred and ten years our soldiers, in particular our Marines, who are almost always vastly outnumbered and trekking deep into territory unknown to them, compile, by the standards of the time and place, a record of honor, stalwartness, and bravery. Unfortunately the citizens and officials they are defending do not.
1844: Mexico
-U.S. forces used to bulwark Texas against Mexico. Irregularities of the action later lead to a Senate inquiry.
1845: Vietnam
-On a regional goodwill tour, the U.S.S. Constitution stops in Da Nang, loading supplies and meeting with local rulers. The captain, informed of an imprisoned French missionary bishop, demands his release, shelling Da Nang, taking three local mandarins hostage, and sending troops into the city. The government stands firm and when Vietnamese troops arrive, holding the high ground around Da Nang harbor and pointing heavy guns at the lone American warship, the mandarins are released and the Constitution sails off.
Years later the U.S. government apologizes and pays reparations. Meanwhile the bishop’s efforts are the key to the French government’s decision to undermine and eventually overthrow the Vietnamese government, creating the harshly exploitative regime of French Indochina, whose ruthless behavior eventually leaves us back there defending the French after World War II.
First U.S.-Mexican War
1846 to 1848
-From the founding days of the United States on, there was always debate about how far U.S. boundaries should extend and how aggressively these boundaries should be moved. In fact, (former Senator and Vice-President) Aaron Burr’s real offense, in the eyes of many of his contemporaries, was his role in an attempt to create another nation along the borders of “Spanish Florida”.
When the United States government declares Texas independent of Mexico, supporting a claim that Mexico considers utterly invalid, war is inevitable. Over the next year, both the U.S. and Mexico move forces into position, staking out claims to not just Texas, but all of what is now California, New Mexico, Nevada, and, in fact, much of the American southwest.
1849: Greece
-After extensive attempts at negotiations, a naval force rescues Martin Koszta, a naturalized American seized by Austrians for political crimes.
1851: Johanns Island
-An attack in retaliation for the imprisonment of a U.S. ship’s captain.
1852 to 1853: Argentina
-A Marine presence is maintained in Buenos Aires during a period of civil disorder.
1853 and 1854: Japan
Admiral Perry’s mission
-Long held off and limited to absolute minimal interactions, the U.S. becomes ever more determined to open Japan to Western ships, not only for trade but to get coaling stations for the new formidable but voracious steam ships. Admiral Perry’s show of force followed by negotiations includes building not only a telegraph system but an entire small railroad to show the court both our military might and the advantages of our trade. The Shogun eventually concedes but it will take decades of shows of force and military action to turn this treaty to reality.
1854: China
-Presence in various locations during civil disorder for about two months.
July, 1854: Nicaragua
-San Juan del Norte razed to avenge an insult to the U.S. Minister to Nicaragua.
1855: China
-Troops posted during civil disorder in Shanghai as well as multiple encounters with pirates near Hong Kong.
1855: Fiji Islands
-Troops land seeking reparations for attacks on U.S. citizens.
1855: Uruguay
-Forces are posted in Montevideo during civil disorder.
1856: Panama
-Forces are posted during another civil disturbance.
1856: China
-Marines are posted for two months at Canton during civil disturbance as well as retaliation for an attack on a U.S. vessel.
1857: Nicaragua
-U.S. Navy and Marines protect the retreat of William Walker, the Vanderbilt-backed, would-be absolute ruler of Nicaragua. Later U.S. forces intercept Walker’s second attempt.
1857 to 1858: U.S. Territories
Utah (“Deseret”) Occupation
See our note on occupations.
-After years of mutual disregard and growing U.S. rhetorical belligerence, U.S. troops occupy the territory claimed by the Mormons as their sovereign nation of Deseret. Many Mormons retreat out of Salt Lake City and other centralized areas, destroying their own farms as they retreat, leaving U.S. troops occupying mile after mile of abandoned, smoking ruins. The U.S. enforces laws against polygamy and other “blasphemies”, U.S. and Mormon forces each engage in occasional small raids, and after a year the Mormons concede conditional defeat and U.S. troops withdraw.
1858: Uruguay
-Marines are posted in Montevideo during civil unrest.
1858: Fiji Islands
-Troops land and attack in retaliation for the deaths of two U.S. citizens.
1859: Mexico
-200 U.S. troops cross into Mexico in pursuit of Cortina, an outlaw.
1859: Paraguay
-A show of force to get redress for a U.S. survey vessel attacked in 1855.
1859: China
-One month posting near Shanghai during a civil disturbance.
1860: Zaire
-An anti-slave trader patrol seizes several ships.
1860: Angola
-A brief posting at Kissembo during civil disturbance.
1860: Colombia
-Postings at the Bay of Panama during a revolution.
The Civil War
-(Sometimes called The War Between The States)
1861-1865: United States, U.S. territories, and along shipping lanes worldwide
-Long foreshadowed, in 1861 the southeastern U.S. states declared themselves no longer a part of the nation. This set off the most lethal conflict ever to occur on American soil.
While fought primarily on U.S. territory, the sea battles of the Civil War stretched all over the world, exhibiting the truly cosmopolitan nature of U.S. interests.
1862: United States
-Sioux (Santee) Uprising (Minnesota)
-See our note on Indian wars.
After decades of yielding and agreeing to ever more extreme treaty terms and the hunting out of their remaining lands, the Sioux, near starvation, rose up in lightning-fast rebellion, themselves slaughtering settlers all across their territory. Settlers fought back and U.S. troops moved in. For a few weeks Sioux fighters aggressively attacked farms, columns of soldiers, and several forts. At first Indian forces won battle after battle but soon government forces overwhelmed them. The entire war had lasted forty-one days.
303 Indians were sentenced to death in the following procedings, in trials lasting from one to fifteen minutes. President Lincoln stepped in and only 38 were actually executed.
1863, 1864: Japan
-Retaliation at Simonoseki for forts and ships having fired upon a U.S. vessel, then a further show of force so that the Prince of Nagato would allow the usage of the Shimonoseki Straits by Western vessels as specified in earlier treaties.
1864: United States
-Sand Creek Massacre
-See our note on Indian wars.
About one hundred Cheyenne families camped near a U.S. fort during extended negotiations are massacred by eight hundred troops, killing everybody they can, mutilating as they go. Perhaps a fifth of the Indians escape. The rest die.
The commander of the attack becomes a local hero, giving speeches at which he shows off trophies, including pubic hairs of Sand Creek dead. He is stripped of rank, forced to resign from the cavalry, and summoned to testify before a congressional commission that declares the attack planned, unmerited, and unjustified. However nobody is ever charged with any crimes. The massacre and its aftermath would serve for decades among native tribes as justification for war.
1865: Colombia
-A posting during a period of civil violence.
1866: China
-An action in retaliation for an attack on the U.S. consul at Newchwang and as a “protective force” during unrest. Forces land three times this year, at Chwang, Tung Chou Foo, and Shanghai.
1866: Mexico
-100 troops cross the border to obtain the surrender of Matamoras (an outlaw). This act was later repudiated by the U.S. government and an apology tendered.
1867: Nicaragua
-U.S. forces occupy the cities of Managua and Leon.
1867: Taiwan
-A attack in retaliation for the suspected killing of the crew of a U.S. ship.
1868: Japan
-Extensive postings during the revolution that raised the emperor over the Shogun, creating the Meiji power structure later to rise to nationalistic heights in the overrunning of much of Asia during World War II.
1868: Uruguay
-A posting during a civil disturbance.
1868: Colombia
-Posting at Aspinwall during civil disturbances after the death of the Colombian President.
1870: Mexico
See our note on piracy.
-U.S. forces travel 40 miles inland along Rio Tecapan in pursuit of and assault on outlaw ship Forward.
1870: Hawaii
-Troops are sent in to reach the local U.S. consulate to ensure the lowering of the flag to half-mast after the refusal of the local consul to do so.
1871: Korea
-Korean Expedition
Eleven years after the crew of the merchant ship General Sherman was seized and killed for trespassing, a squadron was sent. Landing under fire, 684 U.S. soldiers marched inland, taking 5 coastal forts and seizing arms and supplies, sustaining 3 U.S. deaths, and causing 243 Korean.
1873 to 1896: Mexico
-Numerous border crossings are made in both directions in pursuit of outlaws. These actions are legitimized by both sides after a 1882 treaty.
1873: Colombia
-Several postings at the Bay of Panama during civil disturbances.
1874: Hawaii
-A posting to protect U.S. interests during the coronation of the king.
1876: Mexico
-A very brief posting to maintain control of the town of Matamoras.
1877: United States
-Nez Perce War a.k.a. Chief Joseph’s War
-See our note on Indian wars.
After gold is found on Nez Perce lands, the U.S. yet again “renegotiates”. A number of bands, led by the twenty-three year old Chief Joseph, declare that they were not aware of the latest treaty talks, were not represented there and are not bound by the new terms. When told to comply anyway they take up arms and soon resolve to travel to possible allies and, men, women, children, and all, engage in a 1,300 mile journey, fighting periodic battles with intercepting forces of cavalry and civilian volunteers.
They do remarkably well but thirty miles south of the Canadian border they are caught by surprise and decimated by an assault by the combined forces of the several cavalry troops. Promised the chance to return to near his homelands, Joseph surrenders, citing the risk the tribe's vulnurable position, and they spend the rest of the century in exile, first at Leavenworth, Kansas, then in dry eastern Washington, only a few hundred miles from their lush former territory.
1877: United States
-Federal troops combat strikers against railroad companies and attempt to quell associated riots. The first combat, in Pittsburgh, leaves 26 demonstrators dead.
1882: Egypt
-A posting (primarily at Alexandria) during civil disturbances and warfare between Egyptians and the British Empire.
1885: Panama
-Extensive military presence throughout the country to guard valuables in transit across Panama and on Panama Canal Co. grounds during civil disturbances.
1888: Korea
-A posting in Seoul during an expected period of unrest.
1888 to 1889: Samoa
-A four month posting during a civil disturbance and to counter a potential German seizure. Tensions rise and U.S., German, and British fleets increase in both size and beligerance until a hurricane comes and destroys all three fleets, leaving only one German and one British ship afloat. This disaster brings all sides to their senses and, hence to the treaty table.
1888: Haiti
-An action to force the Haitian government to free a U.S. ship seized for violation of an ongoing blockade.
1889: Hawaii
-A posting during a revolution as forces hoping to preserve Hawaii’s autonomy battle forces, funded and supplied by large growers, backing a more commercial orientation and more U.S.-looking government.
1890: Argentina
-A naval force lands at Buenos Aires to protect the consulate.
1891: Chile
-Forces land at Valparaiso during civil disturbance surrounding a United States ship Baltimore.
1891: Haiti
-Posting to protect U.S. interests at Navassa Island, a source of guano used as fertilizer.
1891: Hawaii
-Marines land to support the “provisional government” under control of Sanford Dole (yes, of Dole Fruit), fronting for a coalition of American and British agricultural interests angry at the “uncooperative” attitude of the Hawaiian monarchy - an action later repudiated by the U.S. government.
1891: Bering Seas
-Three U.S. warships with sizable Marine detachments patrol the region to prevent seal poaching by ships from several countries, most notably Britain.
1892: United States
-Johnson County War
Conflicts between an alliance of large cattle ranches and various independents, rustlers, and “troublemakers&rdquo builds until a three day battle between the outlaws and a three hundred man army is broken up by the arrival of the 6th Cavalry, sent to intervene by President Harrison.
1894 to 1895: China
-Marines land at Tientsin and advance all the way to Beijing under light fire during the Sino-Japanese War. A naval ship is beached and used as a fort at Newchwang.
1894: Nicaragua
-A posting in Corinto during civil disturbances.
1894: United States
-Troops occupy Chicago as the city collapes into near anarchy, working with local police and militias of irregulars during rioting surrounding the Pullman railroad strike.
1894 to 1896: Korea
-Marines are posted at the U.S. legation for the duration of unrest surrounding the Sino-Japanese War.
1894: United States
-Marine and Army troops guard the Southern Pacific Railroad during a strike.
1894: Nicaragua
-U.S. forces land at Bluefields (a strategic port) during a civil disturbance.
1895: Colombia
-Troops land to protect U.S. interests at Bocas del Toro during an attack by outlaws.
1898: Nicaragua
-A posting during civil disturbances at San Juan del Sur.
Spanish-American War
1898-1902: Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines
See our note on occupations.
-Seeking to flex new military might, eager to fulfill its “Manifest Destiny” of bringing modern Christian democratic principles to the world, the U.S is eager for an excuse to attack the remaining territories of a Spanish Empire many Americans had long considered to be decadent, slothful, not to mention Popish,” and fully in need of a strong, firm American hand up. Several years of increasing rebellion within the Spanish territories raise the level of Congressional debate about what form U.S. involvement should take.
When the U.S.S. Maine explodes while anchored in Spanish waters (for reasons still unproven, though current evidence suggests a coal explosion) the U.S. promptly declares war and sets out to correct what is seen as a long-standing and eminently fixable problem.
1898: Cuba
-The U.S. has considerable trouble taking Cuba, losing more troops to disease then combat. This part of the Spanish American War is best known as the site of charge of The Rough Riders, Teddy Roosevelt’s famed collection of heroes and oddballs. More recent analysis suggests that much of the record of this invasion was grossly distorted, including the Rough Riders’ charge.
1898: Puerto Rico
-Taken by American forces and a U.S. protectorate ever since.
1900 to 1916: Philippines
-Philippine Campaigns
-Promising to back Philippine independence during the Spanish American War, the U.S. reneged after Spain’s defeat, provoking fierce resistance and widespread U.S. opposition. Over 70,000 U.S. troops endured intense jungle combat, mostly in Muslim Mindanao, which did not taper off until 1916, and continued with flare-ups until the 1930’s.
1898 to 1899: China
-Four months of postings at the legation in Beijing and at the consulate at Tientsin during a power struggle between the Dowager Empress and her son.
1899: Nicaragua
-Soldiers posted at San Juan del Norte and later at Bluefields (a key coastal area) during civil disturbances connected to an uprising led by General Juan Reyes.
1899: Samoa
-Posting during a civil disturbance due to a struggle over the throne.
1901: China
-Troops move in during a period of unrest.
1901 and 1902: Colombia
-Postings at Bocas del Toro, with the U.S. military used as armed guards for two months on all trains crossing the Isthmus, and other postings during a civil war.
1903 - 1904: Ethiopia
-A force of twenty-five Marines act as a guard and escort for the Consul during treaty negotiations.
1903 - 1914: Panama
See our note on occupations.
-Ostensibly to protect U.S. concerns during the war of independence from Colombia, U.S. troops also serve as support for Panamanian forces, preventing any significant actions by the Colombian military. With the entire independence movement coordinated from the White House and a declaration of independence and constitution both written in Washington D.C., little attempt is made to portray the action as anything but a seizure of the region by the U.S. after decades of failed negotiations relating to the building of the Panama Canal.
Years later the U.S., under President Wilson, eventually pays a twenty-five million dollar compensatory claim, but, of course, keeps the canal.
1903: Dominican Republic
-Posting during a civil disturbance.
1903: Honduras
-Postings to create protected zones at the U.S. consulate and steamship wharf.
1903: Syria
-Posting during a civil disturbance.
1904: Algeria
-Show of force to obtain the release of a U.S. citizen held by local outlaws.
1904: Dominican Republic
-Postings at Puerto Plata, Sosua, and Santo Domingo City during civil disturbances.
1904 to 1905: Korea
-A twenty-three month posting at the U.S. legation at Seoul during the Russo-Japanese War.
1906 to 1909: Cuba
See our note on occupations.
-A major U.S. intervention and three year occupation following local civil disturbances.
1907: Honduras
-Three months of postings throughout the country during a war between Honduras and Nicaragua.
1910: Nicaragua
-A reconnaissance mission to Corinto during the civil war, later postings at Bluefields.
1911: China
-Brief postings at the Hankow consulate, Shanghai cable stations, and assorted other locations as the nationalist revolution begins.
1912: Honduras
-U.S. troops land during and after the civil war to prevent the seizure of a U.S.-owned railroad by the government. Troops pull out when the action is disapproved by the U.S. government
1912 - 1941: China
-U.S. forces are maintained at numerous points during the Kuomintang-Imperial and Sino-Japanese hostilities. With a peak strength of over 5,700 soldiers and 44 vessels, major postings included the route from Beijing to the sea, Beijing itself, and treaty ports. In several cases U.S. forces take fire from Japanese aircraft and troops.
Various factions vied for legitimacy from the populace, determined in large part by effective opposition to “treaty ports”. Meanwhile the US decided they were willing to negotiate the treaties, but only once one had emerged and was stable.
1912: Panama
-U.S. troops oversee a local election, including troops on the stand during the later swearing-in.
1912: Cuba
See our note on occupations.
-When a revolution sweeps the country, U.S. Marines move in and garrison twenty-six towns around Guantanamo and Santiago, as well as serving as railroad guards. Postings in Oriente and Havana complete the steps to restore order. All Marines are withdrawn within three months as the area quiets down.
1912 to 1925: Nicaragua
See our note on occupations.
-Troops are posted during an uprising. A small part of the U.S. force remains until 1925 in periodic combat (including air sorties and regular use of artillery) against the forces of General Sandino.
1912: Turkey
-A brief posting at Constantinople during the Balkan War.
1913: Mexico
-Marines land at Ciaris Estero to cover evacuation of U.S. citizens and others from a civil disturbance in Yaqui Valley.
1914: Haiti
-A posting during a civil disturbance.
1914 - 1917: Mexico
-Extended hostilities along the U.S.-Mexico border are set off by the overthrow of the government by General Huerta, whose regime the U.S. refuses to recognize. Combat includes raiding by Pancho Villa, U.S. capture of Vera Cruz, and a march by Pershing well into Mexico.
1914: Dominican Republic
-U.S. naval vessels fire on local forces to halt the bombardment of Puerto Plata and maintain Santo Domingo as a neutral zone.
1914: United States
-A seven month coal mine strike in Ludlow, Colorado had included small pitched battles between strikers blockading the mine and state troops. On April 20th, militia and company-paid irregulars assault the striker’s camp, killing 33. After ten days of widespread fighting, federal troops move in and enforce order.
1915 to 1934: Haiti
See our note on occupations.
-When violence again swells up, putting U.S. citizens as well as U.S. owned businesses at risk, the U.S. military moves in in force, occupying the country, and reorganizing it to a considerable degree. Reducing the local government to a puppet status, the U.S. does not withdraw until President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy declares a less hands-on approach.
In the years of the occupation, U.S. troops fight an increasingly organized resistance with expeditions out into the hills, during which U.S. forces and forces of locals under U.S. command engage in banditry, summary execution without trial, and looting. Later court inquiries disavow the actions but allow the primary U.S. commanding officer to remain on active duty.
World War One
1918: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy
See our note on occupations.
-Starting as the “War to End War”, the pomp and glory of the vast new armies was quickly eviscerated and dropped into blood-soaked trench mud. In a time when guns could reach far but troops could not, the combat soon ground down into a war of sheer bloody-minded refusal to give in as hundreds of thousands of soldiers at a time were torn to pieces across lengthy, ever-shifting front lines.
The U.S. came in late in the war, initially active only as a naval force protecting convoys, then bringing fresh but undertrained troops who first joined existing battle lines and eventually helped lead the advance against German forces. The only combat on American soil occurs when a German sub lays mines along the coast of Long Island, one of which sinks the cruiser San Diego, killing six.
With the war over, U.S. troops occupy parts of Germany, an occupation that did not entirely end until 1923.
1918 to 1920: Panama
-Troops act as a stabilizing force at Chiriqui during rioting and disorder linked to local elections.
1918 to 1920: Russia
-Opposing the communist Russian revolution
-Following the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, U.S. troops joined English, French, and others in fighting Red forces, both through direct combat and in support of Czarist, Kerenskyite and other indigenous factions. Combat initiated from bases at Archangel (past Finland) & Vladivostok (north of Japan), pressing in from the Northern regions of both the Atlantic and Pacific borders of Russia. With over 11,000 U.S. soldiers, U.S. combat actions continued for over 2 years.
1919: Dalmatia
-Troops act as a neutral force during unrest at Trau between Italians and Serbs
1919: Honduras
-Marines posted at neutral zone during an uprising.
1919: Turkey
-Marines serve as a guard at the U.S. consulate during the Greek occupation of Constantinople.
1920: Guatemala
-Forces are landed to protect the U.S. legation and trade-related assets such as the telegraph cable station during civil disturbances.
1920: United States
-In a far larger repeat of the Ludlow violence, West Virginia miners and company men engage in ever more deadly confrontations including over a hundred small skirmishes and several battles, peaking in the four day Battle of Blair Mountain, as thousands of rebels face off against 1,300 militia and irregulars. 2,100 federal troops move in and the rebels fade back into the hills.
1932: United States
-As the Great Depression worsens, protests by the unemployed occasionally turn violent, but the military plays no role until troops led by Douglas MacArthur and including a unit led by George Patton, attacked an encampment of 20,000 WW I veterans demonstrating for early payment of the Bonus previously promised to them by Congress.
-NOTE: The Phony War - -During this period, though Germany had declared their intent to conquer Europe and establish a thousand year racialist empire and reduce much of Europe to client states, in fact they had merged with Austria, seized Poland, and then stopped. For most of two years the nations of northern Europe crouched behind their defenses and waited, debating more and more about whether or not war would even come. All while the Soviet Russians were waging a brutally violent war with the Finns and the Italians continued their gruesome fighting in Ethiopia.
In Asia, the situation looked much the same, as the Japanese, having declared their intent to create a massive thousand year empire, waged a nightmarish campaign in China, occasionally threatening and very occasionally shooting at U.S. troops who might be in the way.
1940: Antigua, Bahamas, Bermuda, British Guiana, Jamaica, Newfoundland, St. Lucia, Trinidad
-Troops are posted at air and naval bases, known as lend-lease bases, transferred to U.S. hands from Great Britain. One issue is possible assault of U.S. territories being mounted from Vichy-controlled French Caribbean territory.
1941: Greenland
-Taken under U.S. protection against possible Axis attack, keeping it from being used as a forward base by the Nazis.
1941: Iceland
-A sizable force, including 4,000 Marines scheduled for Pacific combat, are sent here to protect against Axis attack.
1941: Germany
-Starting in July, U.S. warships convoyed merchant ships in European shipping lanes, first firing on German subs in September.
1941: Dutch Guiana
-Occupied by U.S. troops, by agreement with the Netherlands government in exile. The U.S. also worked with Brazil to protect the aluminum ore supply from the Suriname mines.
World War Two
-The largest, deadliest, and broadest period of open combat in the history in the world, World War Two was the first truly worldwide conflict, stretching from the North Sea to some of the smallest islands of the Pacific.
While the Pacific and Atlantic campaigns are thought of as events far from our shores, in truth the Japanese seized and held a large chunk of the Alaskan islands for much of the war, defeating U.S. troops to take them and defeating more to hold them. In fact, warfare did reach the forty-eight states, including waves of balloon-mounted bombs dropped into Washington and Oregon states by the Japanese. Only a flawless maintenance of secrecy kept the Japanese from discovering that their bombs were reaching U.S. soil.
A major aspect of the war was the frequent and gruesomely brutal use of amphibious assaults. Wading ashore from unstable, pitching landing craft, frequently in foul weather, in the face of massive enemy fire, U.S. troops took heavily defended positions and then fought their way, a yard at a time, across innumerable Pacific islands and up the beaches of Normandy.
Technology defines every stage as fortified bunkers are assaulted with compact explosives and flame throwers while both sides use radios to swiftly coordinate strikes at any vulnerable spot. As deadly as trench warfare, as unforgiving as Vietnam, called “the meat grinder” by many, it was also the only effective way found to take back territory held not county by county but nation by nation.
1932-1940:-Germany, hit hard by a worldwide depression and demoralized by both defeat in World War I and the punitive terms of their loss, comes under the grip of the Nazi Party, and under Nazi control remilitarizes. The new regime, through a series of astounding pressure plays, manages to take over parts of Poland, then Czechosovakia,
Japan's hypernationalist regime, having taken Taiwan way back in 1895, defeated the Russian Navy in 1904, taken Korea in 1905, and gained control of several Pacific islands, begins a bloody advance into Manchuria in 1931, then China by 1937. By 1938 they have taken Shanghai, Beijing, and Nanjing and announced their intention to conquer all of Asia.
1941:-On December 7th Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, crippling the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and swiftly overruns every U.S. base east of Midway, taking all China bases, the Philippines, and pretty much the entire Pacific island region north of Australia. Through May of 1942, Japanese forces advance and advance and advance again. But on May 4th U.S. and Japanese fleets
1942:- With the war in the Pacific centering on “island-hopping”, the U.S. fights its way closer to the Japanese home islands, with each battle meant to take ground for the airfields and bases needed for the next advance.
1943:-
1944:-Among the actions in Asia, our Marines have considerable success training rebels in Japanese-held territory to fight the Japanese. A particular success is a former academic called Ho Chi Minh.
Normandy Invasion:- U.S., British, and Canadian troops wade ashore
1945:-
Aftermath:-With the war over, the United States emerged as the world’s strongest military power, a condition never truly matched in the sixty years since. As the war drew to a close, enormous attention was paid by the U.S., Soviets, and remaining European powers to who would advance where, not just on grounds of military advantage, but to determine who would control what territory when the war ended. This played a key role in the monumental decision to use nuclear weapons in Japan, thereby not only preventing a land invasion but forestalling a massive imminent Soviet invasion.
1945 to 1947: China
-Fifty thousand additional Marines are sent to bolster the sixty thousand man existing U.S. force in North China as they assist in demobilization and repatriation of Japanese forces and providing extensive support for various non-Communist factions, primarily those under Chiang-Kai Shek, in the fast reigniting civil war. Repatriation is surprisingly peaceful but otherwise the venture is a humiliating failure as Nationalist forces are driven back and back by the canny, persistant, and locally-supported communists.
-NOTE: -1945 to 1989 Cold War Actions: Europe and Russia
While thought of as a period of war by proxy between the NATO Powers (The U.S., England, France, etc.) and the communist bloc (the Soviet Union, China, and their dependencies and satellites) occasionally open combat would occur, or at the least shots would be fired. Best known of these was the continual efforts of Soviets to shoot down U.S. surveillance planes, with the bringing down of Gary Powers’s U2 being the best known. Occasionally shots would be fired across various East-West borders, which resulted in casualties and, rarely, deaths.
1945-47: Italy
-In the poverty and turmoil of post-war conditions, the local communist party, with some help from Russia, seeks to get elected as or simply take over the possible government. The U.S. takes a very active hand in preventing this, including covert actions.
1945-48: Germany
See our note on occupations.
-Though it later settled into the serene peace we now know, the occupation of Germany initially involved periodic violent skirmishes with resistant groups of fascists and others. It took years for the new structures to take hold and prosperity to begin to return.
1945-48: Japan
See our note on occupations.
-As in Germany, the first months of the occupation saw periodic acts of resistance. U.S. forces quickly allied themselves with a number of nationalist factions, working with those factions, later the core of the Yakuza, to impose order in populated areas, obviating the need for “mopping up” in all but the most remote areas.
1946 to 1949: Greece
-United States troops and intelligence take an active role in the Greek civil war, seeking to prevent the establishment of a communist government - the first example of Truman’s “Containment Doctrine”
1946: Philippines
-After the withdrawal of Japanese troops, there was a period of considerable reshuffling of powers. Our troops strongly backed the right wing factions who eventually created the totalitarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos.
1948 - 1949: Germany
The Berlin Airlift
-When Soviet forces seal off Berlin, Western nations create an unprecedented air supply system, bringing in food, medicine, and everything else needed to keep the city running. Operating on short, improvised runways with heavy loads and terrible weather, pilots risk death with every load, with thirty-one U.S., thirty-nine British, and five German pilots dying.
1950: Latvia
-A U.S. Navy privateer airplane flies from Wiesbaden, West Germany, to spy over the Soviet Union with ten people on board. Soviet reconnaissance spots the plane over Latvia and shoots it down.
1950: Puerto Rico
-Jayuya Uprising
See our note on occupations.
-Expecting a crackdown, nationalist forces strike first, seizing a police station. Fighting spreads quickly across the island. Local forces declare martial law and attack Nationalist strongholds but it takes U.S. troops to suppress the rebellion.
Korean War
1950 - 1953: Korea and China
-Responding initially to internal fighting and going in under the United Nations flag, almost six million U.S. soldiers are involved in a bloody yard-by-yard campaign fought mostly against Chinese troops. Pitting relatively small numbers of formidable U.S. soldiers against “human wave” attacks by literally millions of North Korean and Chinese, the UN forces at first are overwhelmed, losing ground until most of the country is in communist hands.
Fought under brutal conditions of cold, lack of supplies, and endless waves of hand-to-hand fighting, this may have been the most nightmarish war for its combatants, communist or Western, since World War I.
The tide turns with the second landing at Incheon (also spelled Inchon), as U.S. forces press back to the Demilitarized Zone and establish the separate nation of South Korea. At the DMZ, intermittent sniping across boundaries continues to result in periodic casualties and deaths right up to today.
1951 - 1956: Latvia
-The U.S. for the first time drops armed agents into a Soviet bloc country with the express mission of undermining the government. Due to intelligence failures, the agents are expected by the Soviets who track them down or lure them in, swiftly killing all of them. Only after five years of failures do the U.S. and Britain determine that their entire intelligence network in Latvia is dead or subverted and shut the project down.
1952: China
-Two U.S. agents are shot down while attempting to retrieve another agent. One is a POW until 1971, the other until 1973.
1953: Nicaragua
-A protective force is posted during yet another civil disorder.
1954: Southeast Asian Islands
-As the posturing between the Maoist government and the United States continues, periodically each side comes right to the edge of open conflict. In a rare case of actual combat, Chinese aircraft fire on U.S. planes searching for survivors of a passenger plane shot down by the Chinese two days earlier. The U.S. craft return fire and down both Chinese planes.
1954: Guatemala
-In May the U.S. Navy stops the Dutch ship Alfhem and forces it to Florida to search it for arms - this was in truth retaliation for the Alfhem having just delivered heavy guns and machine guns to the Guatemalan government the week before. In June the CIA begins small-scale bombing raids in support of a CIA-backed “revolution”.
A CIA pilot is shot down and has to crash land in Mexico. Another U.S. plane bombs and sinks the British freighter Springfjord, for which the U.S. eventually pays 1.5 million dollars to Lloyds as an apology.
1956: China
- A U.S. military reconnaissance plane is shot down by the Chinese while flying over international waters.
1956: Suez Crisis
-When the battle over the Suez breaks out, pitting Middle Eastern hopes of self-determination against the forces of the fast-fading British Empire, U.S. forces move in and evacuate over two thousand Americans from Egypt, Syria, and Israel.
1957-58: Indonesia
-When PEMESTA forces plan a revolution to overthrow their socialist government, the CIA funds and organizes an air force and army, providing transport planes, 15 B 26 bombers w/ 50 caliber guns, 300-400 mercenaries (from the U.S., Taiwan, and the Philippines) and help with logistics. All of this is backed by two U.S. Navy destroyers & several submarines.
1957: China Coast, Quemoy and Matsu
-Chinese forces start to subject the Nationalist-held islands of Quemoy and Matsu to artillery barrages. Eisenhower treats this as a major test of U.S. anti-Communist (resolve and sends the Seventh Fleet to interpose, providing a six carrier battle group that has orders to attack with force to defend any further action against the islands. The Mao government ceases the attacks.
1958: Lebanon
-As the factionalism that will eventually destroy Lebanon first breaks down into civil war and surrounding countries threaten to invade, the local government seeks and gets U.S. assistance. Moving in with three Marine battalions, an airborne brigade, a strike group, and three carriers providing close support, the U.S. creates a show of force that stops the civil war and buys some more years of peace.
The War in Indochina
(Including the Vietnam War and warfare in Laos, Cambodia, and the surrounding region)
(1959-1975)
See our note on occupations.
-Starting with a small-scale and utterly secret war in Laos, the U.S. moved into Indochina gradually, expanding time and again the fight to prevent communist forces from seizing the area.
Until the shocking defeat of elite French forces at Dien Bien Phu, the focus continued to be on support of the French. After that, training and support of forces of the South Vietnamese regime. U.S. soldiers do not take a significant combat role until
Combat does not end in Laos until TK, in Cambodia until 1974, in Vietnam until 1975.
1960: Zaire
-Joseph Mobutu launches a coup backed by the United States government. U.S. military forces provide key assistance.
1960: Guatemala
-A rebellion by the local military is suppressed by Camp Trax (Bay of Pigs trainees) troops backed up by a U.S. helicopter carrier, 5 destroyers, Amphibious Squadron 10, and 2000 U.S. Marines.
1961 - 1963: Cuba
-After the totalitarian Batista regime was overthrown, U.S. forces, mostly by proxy, attempted to set off a counterrevolution, most notably with the famously fumbled Bay Of Pigs landings. These actions faded down to periodic harassment as it became clear that a direct military assault was not considered a viable option.
With the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles being based in Cuba, the U.S. demands the removal of the missiles and institutes a blockade. This blockade continues until June of the next year.
1964: Panama
See our note on occupations.
-Massive riots cross over into the Canal Zone as Panamanians protest U.S. dominance of the area -- later negotiations set the stage for the eventual transfer of the Canal Zone to Panama.
1965 - 1966: The Dominican Republic
See our note on occupations.
-U.S. forces invade and seize control during “civil disturbance”, in reality preventing an election expected to result in victories by leftist candidates. These occupation forces are later reenforced because of claims that locals are Communist-dominated.
1965: Laos
-First bombing is done to protect reconnaissance flights.
1967: Congo
-Three transport planes provide logistics support to the local government during a period of increased unrest.
1967: Israel
-Intelligence ship U.S.S. Liberty is attacked by off the Gaza coast by Israeli gunboats and aircraft on the fourth day of the Six-Day War, killing 34 Americans and injuring 171 others. The reasons are disputed to this day.
1968: North Korea
-North Korea troops attack and seize the intelligence ship U.S.S. Pueblo, holding the crew for over a year and torturing some. To this day the Pueblo is held by the North Koreans as a museum of “anti-imperialist warfare”.
1969: North Korea
-North Korea shoots down a U.S. Navy surveillance plane, killing all 31 crewmen aboard.
1970 - 1975: Cambodia
-As an adjunct to the Vietnam war, comprehensive military activities, eventually to include saturation bombing, spread to include most of the country, leaving a ruined society unable to defend itself from the Khmer Rouge.
1974: Cyprus
-The U.S. Navy evacuates U.S. citizens during Greek-Turkish Cypriot hostilities.
1974 - 1977: Korea
-Increased hostilities along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) with frequent shots fired across the border, including two soldiers shot while attempting to cut down a tree (‘76), which then resulted in an increase in U.S. forces.
Founded by a couple of Silicon Valley folks who'd moved to Portland, it always had a wide range of geekish coolness but never quite found traction. Especially given that a friend of mine has been coding for them, this really sucks.
Bu u u u t. . . . .
Since they're going down for what looks to be the third time anyway, now's the time to drop by and buy stuff. everything of the site is thirty-five to ninety percent off.
Happy shopping!
-Rustin
"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight
