Thanks for having been in the service

The Ghosts of Prior Careers

On a Saturday, while working on my now very long term one of nearly thirty years.

I just ran this item:

A Veterans' Day Essay on Worshiping the Military

It'd be very easy to take it the wrong way.

As noted in that thread, it's common now for people to tell you "thank you for your service!"  Indeed, some years ago I saw a National Guardsman coming out of the barber shop and, out on the street, a woman being arrested for something yelled it out, to his surprise.

I'm a contraran anyhow, and I always feel awkward about such thanks, but this thread is on thanks.

But in another direction.  I'm thankful that I served in the National Guard.

Technically, I served in the Army and the National Guard.  Basic training and AIT were so long for cannoneers that I received an Honorable Discharge from the U.S. Army after AIT.  And FWIW I was activated for summer employment and other active service at the armory that I have more time in active service than some guys who did the short two-year Cold War enlistments do.

I've often regretted getting out.  The end of my Guard career was due to a misconception about how busy I'd be in law school.  I listed to people about law school and how hard it was.  I shouldn't have.

Anyhow, I'm glad I served in the Guard.

The National Guard/Army put me together with a lot of men, and we're talking about the basically nearly all military of that era, who came from very different backgrounds than me and who worked in lots of different occupations, many of them in manual occupations.  I learned from that a lot of them had very common interests with me.  I also learned that a lot of them were every bit as smart as I was.  

This is something I've found that a lot of people who haven't ever been in the service don't appreciate.  Blue collar workers aren't there due to intellectual deficit.  And the knowledge they possess in their fields is both vast, and interesting.  Knowing that has served me all my life.

Getting through basic training taught me that I was pretty tough.  I don't know what basic is like now, but the Army basic training at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, of the 1980s was very close to what was depicted in Full Metal Jacket.  We were told by one of our drill sergeants early on that his job was to make basic training as rough as possible, as combat would be worse, and he wanted those who were going to fail, to fail then.  Quite a few did fail.

That's served me ever since as well.  Indeed, not so much now, but for years decades after Ft. Sill, in times of high stress, things I learned there by memory would come flooding bad to mind.  We'd been so well-trained that it was automatic.

It also made every one "man up", although by that age I was pretty much an adult already.  Since getting out of school, I've been amazed by the degree to which a lot of modern adults never actually become adults.  There's a song out there somewhere called High School Never Ends, and for an amazing number of people, it really doesn't.  Being part of an organization in which you are flatly informed that in the event of certain circumstances you are expected to perform until dead, and that death would come soon and violently, really takes the game playing out of a person in serious settings.

Related to that, I've noted it before, and will again, but the Guard also taught me a system of organization and its stayed with me ever since.  Everything I've learned about office management I learned in the Guard, including that there's different roles and classes in offices, just like in the Army, for a reason.  I've watched over the years as people who don't have that background run around talking about "teams" and "we're all in this together" only to see things fail.    I've seen people make friends in offices they shouldn't have, surrender their efficiency to inattention or whatever, and go into power pouts when things didn't go the way they personally felt they should, or just because they turned out to be serious.  I've avoided all of that, in no small part due to the Guard/Army.

And the Guard gave me a job when I was young, and really needed one.  It helped pay for my schooling and gave me a way to try to do that, for which I remain grateful.

The Guard also blessed me with at least one instance of nearly being killed and not be.  That may sound odd, but only people whom have been exposed to sudden violent death, and then escaped it, knows what that means.  People's plans are always subject to the fickle hand of fate.  One moment you are doing your job, and the next an entire battery of 8in artillery shells are coming right down on you.

And finally, it gave me an appreciation of history in a way which only somebody who has been in a military unit can.

So, circling back to our focus, timewise, in 1916, when troops were being called up and deployed for the Punitive Expedition (was Lex Anteinternet: The Military and Alcohol. U.S. Army Beer 1943-1946). . .

what was the situation?

The law of the Officer's Club at Ft. Meyer, VA, being mowed by a mule drawn lawn mower.  This photo dates from early in the 20th Century at which time Congress had technically made the sale of alcohol illegal on Army bases, but at which point the Army chose to define beer and wine as not being excluded.

This follows from this post here:

Lex Anteinternet: The Military and Alcohol. U.S. Army Beer 1943-1946: Patrons of a bar and grill in Washington D.C. in 1943.  The man on the left is drinking a glass of beer, and it appears the woman is as well...

Let me explain.

In 1982 when I was stationed as a recruit at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, there came a time when us boots could go to the 1-2-3 Club, a sort of combination cheap fast food/beer/high school hangout, type club.  It wasn't great, but if you had nowhere else to go, and we had nowhere else to go, it was okay*.  

The 1-2-3 Club had 3.2% beer, which I guess actually no longer is brewed by anyone, save perhaps by Guinness, as draft Guinness is only 3%.  Nobody brews it in the context of its earlier days, in which it was brewed in order to comply with certain laws. It's history goes back to 1933 as Prohibition was being repealed.  Prohibition never completely dried up the supply of legal alcohol, contrary to what people imagine it did.  Alcohol remained legal for "medicinal" purposes and extremely low alcohol beer, i.e., "Near Beer" was legal.  In 1933, prior to Prohibition being officially repealed, the legal alcohol limit for beer was increased up to 3.2%.  

Following the end of Prohibition, some states restricted beer sales based on the 3.2% amount, and Oklahoma was one of them.  Generally, if you were below a certain age you could buy 3.2%.  You couldn't buy beer with a higher alcohol content than that.  This was, of course before "Light Beer", which generally has around 4% ABV.  Coors, which is pretty light to start with, introduced Light Beer prior to World War Two, far earlier than many people might suppose, and relaunched it in 1978.  Millers Lite actually came out in 1967, prior to the Coors relaunch, but as Gablingers Diet Beer, a market name doomed to failure. The recipe was later sold to Millers.

I never really did grasp why Coors would market light beer.  Coors is pretty light to start with and there were already all those 3.2% beers around.  Oh well, my view obviously isn't the clever marketing one, as light beers became a pretty big deal.

Anyhow, in 1982 you could buy 3.2% beer at the 1-2-3 Club on Ft. Sill, or 3.2% beer downtown in Lawton, Oklahoma.  Obviously, Ft. Sill also had a NCO Club, or clubs, and an Officer's Club, or clubs.

Camp Guernsey had a NCO Club and an Officers Club as well.  Camp Humphreys, Korea had them as well and I had a nice bulgogi there for lunch while there.

I guess this is somewhat of a thing of the past now, to my surprise.  The Army has completely done away with Officers Clubs and now there are unitized clubs.  Privates can go to the same club that officers can, although 1-2-3 Clubs remain.  Without knowing for sure, I suspect that not only is the culture of such clubs now radically different, but probably a lot of more senior officers and NCOs rarely show up at the club.  This is part of the current culture in which we do not wish to recognize any differences at all in the social status of anyone, but frankly, I think this likely a mistake, although one reflecting the current military culture.   The current military is small compared to the giant Cold War Army that followed the giant World War Two Army, and its much more selective than its been at any prior point in history.  There are certainly problems in the current U.S. military, to be sure, but one current feature of it is that the up and out and selective nature of it means that the guys were sort of fit the definition of a "working man" that were sung about by Tennessee Ernie Ford aren't really in the service anymore.  That may have some negative aspects to it as well, but its a fact.  Anyhow, given the current make up of the currently fairly small army, the traditional separation in all things between enlisted men and officers has been much reduced and the clubs are gone.

So what was the situation in 1916?

Starting in 1890, about the time that the temperance movement was really gaining cultural steam, the Army banned the sale of hard alcohol at military posts that were located in areas that had Prohibition. So, for example, if you were stationed in a county that was dry, the Army post was as well, sort of.  The Army barred the sale only of hard alcohol, so beer and wine was still sold and you could still consume them at the post canteen.

In 1901, however, Congress entered the picture with the Canteen Act of 1901 which prohibited the sale of any intoxicating beverage including beer and wine.  This was pretty clearly intended to make all alcoholic beverages a thing of the past on post, but in practice the Army simply chose to define "intoxicating" beverages to mean those having a pretty stout alcohol content.  So, once again, no Kentucky bourbon on post, but beer was probably okay.  

This continued to be the practice up  until May 18, 1917, when the Selective Service Act stretched the military prohibition beyond the base to include a five mile alcohol exclusion zone and, moreover, it was made a crime to sell alcohol to a uniformed soldier anywhere.  Congress, recalling the end run the Army did with the 1901 act, defined "intoxicating" to be anything containing 1.4% alcohol or more, a very low threshold.

To complete the story, when Prohibition ended the 1901 statute remained in effect and the Army, at this point, continued to enforce the 1.4% limit.  Halfway through the Second World War, however, the Army changed this allowed 3.2%, the figure that had been created earlier when Prohibition was lifted.  This standard remained in place until 1953 when a legal ruling determined that the entire Canteen Act of 1901 had been repealed by the 1951 amendments to the Universal Military Training and Selective Service Act.

So, going back to our query about 1916, in 1916 a soldier stationed almost anywhere in the U.S. was probably able to buy beer at the post canteen.  Beyond the post fence, there would have undoubtedly been saloons catering to soldiers that sold everything.  The scene of a night of leave in 1941 Honolulu depicted in From Here To Eternity in that regard was likely pretty accurate on occasion.  And at that point, in some of the US, the "saloon trade" was unrestricted.  Having said that, in some locations Prohibition had already come in.

Footnotes

*There were other places to go, to be sure. Ft. Sill had a swimming pool open to privates, but I never went there.  The one time I had on base free time when we could have gone, I had a horrible case of progressing pneumonia and no interest in going to a pool.

I did once go to the library, as odd as that may seem, simply because I was sort of tired of the intellectual quality of my stay at Ft. Sill and because I hoped it to be quiet.  It was quiet, and very nice.  I looked like a fish out of water there, however, and I simultaneously froze and fell asleep there.  The freezing due to my having acclimated to the 100F+ Oklahoma summers and the sleep due to simply being exhausted. 

The Liberator

Division insignia of the 45th Infantry Division

.

An email list group I'm a member of was discussing this movie recently and therefore I watched it.  It frankly exceeded my expectations quite a bit.

The Liberator is a feature length animated movie based on the memoirs of Texas born Felix L. Sparks who joined the Army in 1936 during the Great Depression and served for two years as an enlisted man. The film doesn't go into his prewar history, but just to complete that after Sparks was discharged he went to the University of Arizona and then reentered the Army at some point as an officer.

I'm not personally familiar with Sparks' story.  It appears that he was stationed for a time at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma (which is something I share in common with him) and that he may have been an artilleryman at one time who moved over to infantry.  On that I'm not sure, but he did end up a commissioned officer in the 45th Infantry Division, which was a National Guard Division heavily made up of Oklahomans, including a fair number of Native Americans, but also including other National Guard units in its make up that came from the Southwest.  Famous cartoonist Bill Mauldin was in early in World War Two, having joined a New Mexico National Guard unit that was folded into it just as it was being called up, something that was fairly common in World War One and World War Two.  Mauldin started off his cartoon career with the 45th Division News.

At any rate, the film portrays Sparks as being assigned a group of hard luck soldiers in a fashion that's heavily reminiscent of The Dirty Dozen.  It follows them through the war, starting off with combat in Italy (in reality Sparks was taken from Oran Algeria to Sicily in Operation Husky aboard the USS George Carroll, which was the ship that my coworker who had the office next to me for many years was on during the war).  The combat scenes thereafter strongly recall the film The Big Red One, including combat in Italy and later in Germany, featuring the liberation of a concertation camp.  Along the way Sparks is given a double barreled Lupara, a sort of short barreled Sicilian shotgun associated with the Mafia.  In real life, Sparks was apparently nicknamed "The Shotgun".

The film concludes, fwiw, in a fashion that's very reminiscent of Band of Brothers.

I'll be frank that I was prepared to dislike this film, but I liked it. The animation is very realistic, so after a person gets used to it, it's not distracting.  It's pretty clear that real actors were used for the characters movements, and it'd be interesting to know the background reason for that.  I suspect that either COVID 19 prevented filming with actual actors, or budgetary concerns simply made this a cheaper option for a film that didn't have a large budget.  Another factor may simply be that the plot, while based on real events, is somewhat "light" and it tracks pretty closely to plot elements found in other films, which might say a lot for them actually, as it would tend to show that those details were generally fairly accurate.

All in all, it works.

In terms of historical accuracy, while I've noted several other films that this film seems to lean on, it seems that it tracks pretty closely to Sparks actual history during the war, but with clear exaggerations, particularly as to the origin of his initial company.  While I haven't looked into it, the "hard luck" nature of the initial infantry company is a little too close to The Dirty Dozen to really be fully believable, but perhaps I should read the memoir and see if Sparks recalled in that fashion himself.  Sparks did command troops in the noted unit during the war, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel by the war's end.  Locations seem to be based on actual ones as well.

In terms of material detail, this film is remarkable for an animation.  By and large most of the material details are correct, showing that somebody had done a fair amount of research in order to get such details right even though the number of people who would pick up on them is slight.  There are a few errors, but they are not numerous.

FWIW, in real life Sparks left the Army after the Second World War and went on to law school, graduating from the University of Colorado's law school in 1947.  He stayed in Colorado thereafter and ended up being a Colorado Supreme Court Justice.  He retired from military service with the Colorado Army National Guard at the rank of Brigadier General.  

The film is well worth watching.

Count cadence, delayed cadence, count cadence count.

It's odd what gets stuck into your subconscious when you are young, and just stays there.

Even now, if I'm really stressed for some reason, the Army cadences I learned in basic training come back to me, more or less at random.

Ft. Sill, April 2, 1918

Some days things just don't go well.

Brunton Compass

Brunton Pocket Transit, folded for carrying.

This is a Brunton Pocket Transit.  Probably most people who know of them just think of them as the Brunton Compass.  It's an old, old design, having been first made in 1894, although the patent date on the compass references 1896.  I'd be curious to know when  they really started to be common, if we can consider a specialized instrument like this as ever having been common.

I ran across my Brunton compass recently as, for some reason, I'd taken it out of the carrier this fall in order to use it for something.  At this point, I frankly don't know what that something was, as I very rarely use it anymore.  I have a nice Garmin GPS with the topographic map software loaded into it, and I use that now, even though its a model that's now discontinued, and the last software up data makes it a little slow

Brunton Pocket Transit, opened for use in the geologists fashion.

I sure remember getting the compass, however.  It was in 1986, during my last year at the University of Wyoming, when I was a geology student. We had to buy them for our summer field course, which took us all over Albany and Carbon counties, mapping, and all the way down to New Mexico, where we did field work, as well.  At that time, having a compass of this type was an absolute necessity, and they saw 100% employment by geologists who did field work.  I'm told that at one time, graduates of the mining engineering school at the Colorado School of Mines could be identified by the short brim Stetsons they all acquired upon doing their field work (back in the sensible headgear days).  If so, graduates of any geology program anywhere could be identified by the fact that they all owned Brunton compasses.

Brunton compass opened up with mirror facing to catch the sight, in the fashion used by geologists in the field.

The reason for this wasn't fashion, it was necessity.  The compass is a precision instrument, and the official name of "transit" is accurate.  A transit is a surveying instrument, and so is a Brunton compass.  Extremely precise, the location of about anything can be accurately determined by triangulation or even just flat out using it in concert with a drawing compass (the plastic device) and a topographic map.  But we made topographic and geologic maps with them, which requires not only the compass, but more work.

Compass opened, showing the interior device for measuring angles, for determining elevation.  This one is not set, as the level clearly shows.

The reason that the compass can do this is that it not only features the typical magnetic compass feature, but it also has the ability to sight elevations with the use of an internal scale.  And when set on a Jacob's staff, a pole of a known size, distance on the ground may be measured over any sort of terrain while using that feature, with the compass attached to it, while the mapper walks over the ground.  A marvelous instrument.

My first exposure to this instrument didn't come in a geology class, however.  It came at Ft. Sill Oklahoma.  The Brunton Pocket Transit, to soldiers, is known as the artillery compass, and that's where I first learned how to use it, in basic training.

Compass set to site in the Army fashion.

I was actually surprised to learn, while a geology student, that my old friend the Brunton Compass, was used as a geologist's tool.  I just thought it was a marvelously precise Army compass.  Adapting to geology use was, therefore, very easy, even though the Army uses the sights differently.

Compass set to sight in the Army fashion.

Artillerymen used the compass as it is so much more precise than the conventional infantry compass, and artillery needs to be spotted accurately.  Even so, we never used it to the same degree of precision that geologists did.

Combined geology use and artillery use made me glad to have one, even when it turned out that I was never going to be a field geologist, that occupation having entered one of its cyclical slumps at that point in time at which I graduated from the University of Wyoming.  It's just been a field companion since then, which I used for many years when out in the sticks.

But not so much lately. As noted, I've gone to the GPS, although I was a late adapter of that technology.  Indeed, I hadn't looked at the compass for quite some time.

In looking at it, and then determining to post, I thought that it was probably a thing of the past now, but I see that this is one of those many things to which Yeoman's Second Law of History apply, they're still being made today. And they're still pretty pricey, although all in all I actually think they aren't as expensive in real terms now as they used to be.  Indeed, my recollection on this may be inaccurate, but I think the Classic model with the Aluminum body is now cheaper than the plastic cased variant shown in these photos.  It pleases me, frankly, so see that such a useful item is still in use.

I don't know if they're still in Army use or not, but I did learn the following, thanks to Gordon Rottman who sent me the text from his book on World War Two equipment:

M1 and M2 compasses with M19 carrying case This sophisticated compass was based on the William Ainsworth & Sons-made D. W. Brunton’s Pocket Transit dating back to 1894, but adopted by the Army in 1918. The M1 designation was assigned in the 1930s. The “artillery compass” combined a highly accurate surveyor’s compass with a clinometer (for measuring vertical angles and slopes), tubular horizontal level, and circular bubble plumb (vertical level). The circular level was for leveling the instrument before the azimuth values were read and the tubular level for measuring horizontal angles. There was an angle-of-site mechanism and an azimuth scale adjuster assembly making this a complex instrument requiring specialized training. It was used by artillery forward observers. It had a dustproof and moisture proof, dark OD-painted brass case (smooth or crinkled finish), squarish in shape with rounded corners, 2-3/4 x 3in and 1-1/8in thick; 5-7/8in long when  opened exclusive of the sights. A mirror was fitted inside the lid with a black sighting wire. The mirror also proved useful for shaving. There was a black folding front sight on the lid’s top edge. On the rear was a black hinged rear sight holder with a folding sight on top. The compass card was black with white markings. The M1 compass was graduated in degrees only and was phased out before the war by the M2 graduated in mils. M1s may have seen limited use. The mil scales was graduated at 20-mil intervals with 10-mil intermediate tick marks divided into 1-mil ticks. The angle of sight scale was graduated in mils in the same manner, 1200-0-1200 mils. On the compass card, north was indicated by a star and the other cardinal directions by W, S, and E. The radium-painted white end of the needle indicated north. The light brown leather M19 case had a rigid rounded pocket with a snap-secured lid and a trousers belt loop on the back. The rigid dark OD  plastic case (10543560) is post-WWII. Today it is known as the “M2 unmounted magnetic compass.” 0.5-b.

Pretty impressive.  Showing that the test of a tool is its usefulness, not its age.