As The Cookie Crumbles: Uniform

Friends, Romans, and Hippies, lend me your ears!

I come not to praise rumors, but to bury them. This cookie will crumble by the numbers.

Despite what you may hear/hope or heard/hoped, THERE ARE NOT GONNA BE ANY ACTIVE-DUTY, UNIFORMED MARINES appearing at ANY demonstrations to SUPPORT the demonstrators, either on Wall Street or anywhere else...Not as DEMONSTRATORS!

Nor will the members of ANY OTHER USer Military service, Army, Navy, Air Force or Coast Guard. Nagahapun! Just ain't. --- Well, unless there's real trouble and they're called in for crowd-control.

I served in the USAF veteran (1964-68), and I want to dissuade the optimistic and the innocent as to that possibility, to disabuse the naive and the hopeful (often the same people, unsurprisingly). I wasn't a combat trooper, never fired the gun at anything other than paper targets. But I did EVERYTHING ELSE soldiers do, and that included learning about the UCMJ. Military "justice" is probably a more egregious oxymoron than military intelligence. The UCMJ is its "code." The Uniform Code of Military Justice...well, yuo wouldn't expect a military code to be OUT of uniform, would you?

US active duty military personnel ARE permitted by the terms of the UCMJ to join any such demonstrations as Occupy Wall Street in civilian clothes--though they are usually sternly, unofficially discouraged from it, and it would probably be worth their careers to be photographed doing so...They are also strictly forbidden to do so IN uniform. It's a courts martial offense.

So, If ANYBODY shows up at Occupy Wall Street in uniform, they'll be veterans, not active duty. (There appear to be exceptions made for officers, the more senior, the more exceptional. What they say in the ranks is: Different spanks for different 'ranks'... No officer would go to Leavenworth for appearing in uniform at a pro-war gathering, but that would surely be the fate of a mere soldier or NCO who attended an anti-war demonstration in uniform.)

Strangely, some people DO seem to believe that like the Russian Army at Petrograd in 1917, ordered to restore order among rioters and demonstrators, USer troops WOULD NOT open fire on their fellow proletarians, if ordered to do so. But that's wishful thinking. They have either short lives or short memories. Remember Kent State, May 4, 1970--Four Dead in Ohio...

I personally have suspected that's one of the reasons the Busheviks--especially Cheney-- ordered up the Guard and Reserves to fight the Iraq war: to "blood" them, to get them used to looking at civilians as 'the enemy'; to teach them the mortal amorality of taking orders and to inure them to shooting at innocent civilians when ordered to do so.

Cuz ANY place CAN be a combat zone, and ANYBODY CAN be a suicide bomber, and NOBODY is to be trusted who is NOT in the Uniform.

Shoot first, and whatever happens later is later: THAT'S the way you stay alive and whole. Whatever else they SAY at Regiment, that's what the Sarge will tell you, down at squad level.

Caveat, hippies:

I don't wanna make ANY pretense about being any kind of grizzled old warrior. I'm not. I was a glorified clerk with an NSA security clearance. But I was in for four years, during a war, made my rank, got my medals and shit. It was almost 50 years ago, but not that MUCH has changed...

Okay,then, hippies: Dis-MISSED!

See ya at the beach...