ON A VOLUNTEER ARMY:An Encounter with Political Reality
Wellesley, Sir Arthur
INCITES BY GEORGE NATHAN Mr. Paul Harvey recently commented that, according to his extrapolations, human filth in New York will have risen to such density by 1970 the city will be...
...Legislation now must cross a torturous obstacle course of conflicting yet unyielding voting blocs—now petrified into interest groups...
...Often quoting Churchill, the author reveals a deep reverence for the man and, lest anyone doubt Macmillan's estimate of Churchill, he sedately avers "We were inspired by the greatest Englishman of all time...
...The eminent Theodore White has suggested that—in a final, sublime, display of merriment—New York secede...
...Harper & Row, $11.95 Recently Harold Macmillan visited his mother's childhood home in Spencer where he stayed with acquaintances of mine...
...and 2) by restricting our own military forces, we are inhibiting a victorious solution to the war...
...Occasionally even the dullards appreciate the merry chaos of Fun City...
...Verily New York defies the lewdest metaphor...
...The students of military strategy, the men who have come here to rain destruction on the enemy...
...Any benighted fellow straggling across this page and harboring even a slightly rosy vision of Homo sapiens must tour New York...
...eluded: "These men in Vietnam know what the situation is there...
...Interestingly, this sheds more insight onto Harvey's vision of the habitable than onto the development of New York into a dung heap...
...The men who can see all this are leaving...
...Ultimately garbage pyramids in the streets, faucets cough dust, traffic becomes immobile, the atmosphere approximates that of Saturn, and public morale declines to such a ON A VOLUNTEER ARMY: An Encounter With Political Reality BY SIR ARTHUR WELLESLEY The time for daydreaming about Vietnam is long past, and we must expose any false issues obscuring the facts of this fiasco...
...Wilson recalled, ". . .one mission of three aircraft on which we were directed to make three passes each to destroy two small water wheels on a stream in the middle of nowhere...
...Writing with extraordinary taste Macmillan's work matches Churchill's war volumes in eloquence and insight...
...Why else would crowds giddily anticipate the seasonable bunglings of the New York Mutts...
...the men who seek a pride in their job...
...these men are leaving the service in ever-increasing numbers...
...Garbage has collected on the sidewalks of New York for years...
...Where in the Supermarket Republic does man appear so puny and naked, yet where in America do more of these critters dwell on top of each other...
...Who would have guessed Harvey could actually find contemporary New York occupiable...
...In his conclusion, the pilot writes: Here in Vietnam, and in much of the rest of the Air Force, the true professional soldier is dissatisfied with his job...
...The Alternative's calls for ending the draft and converting-at this time-to a volunteer army are particularly pernicious...
...The Blast of War represents the second volume of Macmillan's memoirs...
...In its present state they can take only so much of the blundering and as the author said '. . .those who can see all this are leaving.' " "The politics of it all has made them sick, and the services are facing a critical shortage for good men...
...We may also expect a continuing need for a military draft to fill the ranks vacated by those who know what the facts are in Vietnam...
...It will be worse...
...The Soviet Union and its allies agreed at the conference of their leaders in Moscow last week to grant North Vietnam assistance in material and money amounting to about one billion dollars...
...even optimists like Paul Harvey feel an autopsy will be performed by 1970...
...The draft is necessary, because the Johnson Administration's shameful conduct of the "Viet Cong Insurgency" is driving professional military men out of the service, making conscription all the more necessary...
...The creatures defecate right on the walk in spite of the mayor's signs exhorting the pooch population to avail itself to the curb...
...Rubber, paper, fertilizers, metal ores and scrap, petroleum and gas, chemicals, plastics, machinery, and scientific and professional instruments were included...
...He con8 THE BLAST OF WAB by Harold Macmillan...
...Both reasons contribute to the exodus of professional soldiers from the service and aggravate the need for conscription...
...Shortly later, the same magazine published a letter from former Vietnam pilot Norde Wilson, a Navy flyer based on the carriers Enterprise and Banger...
...it will make him blush...
...He fully corroborated the Air Force pilot's report, saying: "He has expressed the general attitude of nearly every military man with whom I was associated, right on up to the Flat War Room...
...What delight the civilized few must have had when the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid the near record sum of $1,411,200 for an early Monnet (La Terrasse a Sainte Andresse), which upon soberer inspection was exposed as a mere pubescent doodling, no more indicative of Monnet's art than Wellington's Victory was of Beethoven's and hardly worth a book of green stamps...
...We may expect this shortage to continue until the Johnson clique vacates Washington...
...Aside from sharing characteristic urban weaknesses for filth, congestion, and ochlocracy, The New Yorker inevitably surrounds himself with ludicrous canine companionship...
...National Review has officially pronounced it dead...
...some of it has even been elevated to public office...
...These observations concur with other reporters' descriptions of Macmillan, for he has always aloofly resisted convention...
...Is it a week...
...They are tired of flying their aircraft for minimum effect...
...However, New Yorkers actually revel in this congestion...
...Truly this is Fun City...
...is Short 17,000 Pilots...
...He concluded, "The Secretary of State is now reviewing the possibility of easing the burden of Polish debts to the U.S...
...In short, said the October 13 New York Times, "Poland and Rumania have been given special treatment, and in general, the result of today's measure will be to extend such treatment to the Soviet Union, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, and Mongolia...
...And, "I feel that the only way to improve an unsatisfactory situation such as exists is to be certain that the proper individuals know and realize the...
...Last month alone, the Soviets shipped nearly 25,000 metric tons of gasoline and oil into Haiphong...
...With what relish civilized man must greet the sunrise in a town whose sanitation department advises the grieving owner of a recently deceased dog to, "Put it in a metal or plastic container, sit it on the curb, and wait...
...Though most live in New York from inexorable stupidity, some suffer residence here as the reasonable cost of Poland, and Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia...
...If ever the tourist encounters a familiar American hound he can be certain the idiot at the other end of the leash is a recent immigrant from Kansas who, if he intends to reside permanently amongst the nation's eoanthropics, will purchase an escadrille of Botswanese Tulip Hounds...
...Paul Harvey recently commented that, according to his extrapolations, human filth in New York will have risen to such density by 1970 the city will be uninhabitable...
...Ten million dollars in equipment and six highly skilled aviators, being utilized for a valueless target of this nature...
...The military can see this just as clearly as civilians-though the military's view is often from the jungle...
...New York is the perfect site for a resumption of nuclear testing...
...The reason we have not defeated the North Vietnamese is that we have not chosen to do so...
...The Poles receive the wheat (from the U.S...
...The Vietnam war is the most shockingly politicised war ever fought by this nation...
...The ridiculous scene of New Yorkers prancing along leashed to blooded peacocks is even more amusing when one considers the setting, for the dolts walk along sidewalks where there exists not a blade of grass...
...When government becomes a vending machine, voting blocs multiply, the effluvium of their increasing selfishness toughens the will of competing voting blocs, and the flow of legislation is inhibited...
...The first volume, Winds of Change discussed his life to 1939...
...It is not the problem of pay or advancement, but rather the manner in which he feels he is being used...
...News and World Report of January 30, 1967, reported "The North Vietnamese war machine runs almost entirely on Russian oil...
...Most dramatic, however, was the report of the Chicago Tribune, December 26, 1966: Weapons of the Polish armed forces are being shipped from Stettin harbor in Poland in ever increasing quantities to North Vietnam habors...
...Though a shrewd diplomat, sagacious adviser, and efficient administrator Macmillan's penchant for gaudy vests, baggy pants and sherry with breakfast would, in normal times, disqualify him from public office...
...Regarding the second factor working against us in Vietnam:, it is also a fact that American professional — Continued on Page 8 7 ON A VOLUNTEER ARMY - Continued from Page 7 REVIEWS -Continued from Page 5 soldiers, angered over how they are being senselessly wasted, are leaving the service in large numbers...
...Soon forsaking the obscurity of Parliament's back benches, Macmillan acquired cabinet rank in Churchill's government, successively becoming Churchill's political minister in the Mediterranean, assisting Churchill at Casablanca, and helping create provisional governments in Italy, Greece, and France...
...You would think a man would writhe in shame from living amongst so many disgusting bipeds in such squalid proximity...
...He extended commercial credits to "four additional Eastern European countries6 not curious that they seem so agitated over their recent "garbage crisis...
...With New York developing as it is, America will soon have its own mins matching those of decadent European civilization...
...Then again this is yet another indication of New Yorkers' stupidity—the Mutts never win and New Yorkers never leam...
...As if to counterpoint these letters, the Indianapolis Star of September 14, 1967, headlined "U.S...
...Since garbage has been piling in the streets citizens' dietary inadequacies have all but vanished, supermarkets have, perforce, lowered their exorbitant prices—the streets even smell better...
...Has he failed to observe that New York is the domicile of cockroaches and the domain of wash-room attendants...
...Frederic Bastiat concisely diagnosed this disease a century ago...
...Few doubt that the United States possesses enough raw power to destroy all of North Vietnam in Breathtaking New York City Skyline dingy nadir the citizenry forlornly casts its fate to a sempiternal slobbering jughead like John Vliet Lindsey...
...This is not idle speculation, nor politically-motivated hyperbole...
...Picture the idiot New Yorker detachedly standing by while his quadrupedal companion elegantly lifts a leg beside the cockpit of a parked XK-E...
...Presentiy New York is the entertainment capital of the world with its spectacular slums, hilarious racial conflicts, uproarious air- and water-pollution, slapstick economy, humorous crime wave, waggish union leaders, farcical government, enormously funny mayor, and let us not forget the federally subsidized glass zoo on the East river...
...New York Times, October 27, 1966) U.S...
...cians, manning Russian rockets, or Russian-trained Vietnamese, in Russian fighters are shooting down American planes over Vietnam...
...Needless to say, Russian techniunending amusement...
...Exhibiting trenchant insight, impeccable research and the majestic prose of a man possessing a magnificent sense of history The Blast of War must take its place beside Churchill's five volumes as one of the great histories of war...
...In traversing the east coast's Death Valley one will encounter the most esoteric of the canine species, for proud New Yorkers daily plod foolishly behind sniffing curs who generally resemble leashed cigar boxes, bedroom slippers, angel fish, and rock Cornish hens...
...While on one side of the Stettin harbor American wheat is being unloaded from freighters, on the side of the same harbor weapons are loaded which are being used against American soldiers...
...Government burdened by such inertial forces merely pantomimes governing...
...What a waste, for in the 'seventies New York could serve an even greater purpose than it has in the past...
...Regarding the first charge, it is a fact the United States is actually paying most of the costs of both sides in the war...
...Why is it that we have not won the war after six years of "trying...
...He announced he was removing trade restrictions on over four hundred different categories of goods exported to European satellite nations...
...Such demands help bog our already plodding effort in Vietnam...
...They are sick of a military service that beat the best the German and Japanese could throw at them...
...When so afflicted, government must rule by slogan or the gimmick with all the drama and gas of a Tennessee revival...
...Further, Viet Cong are killing GIs on the ground with Russian rifles, mortars, and rockets...
...They found him affable, witty and possessing a poise that allowed for what, in lesser men, might be considered awkwardness...
...Americans must face the question of how to dispose of such a vast ghost town...
...today too timid to even state that the "people's choice" is not necessarily a military leader in theater operations...
...It is the opinion of military men themselves, as expressed in a letter from an Air Force pilot in Vietnam, to Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine, September 19, 1966...
...apparent incompetence prevailing in upper echelons ofWashington's civilian defense experts - Defense Secretary McNamara being number two on the list...
...But Winston Churchill had a taste for such fellows (though he preferred brandy with breakfast) and the war allowed both to ascend to the loftiest realms of British government...
...In his letter the pilot (whose name was withheld to protect him) describes the shortage of bombs and ammunition in Vietnam whichhas existed despite McNamara's denials, and which greatly inhibits the effectiveness of our air power...
...on credit and they in turn ship their weapons to North Vietnam on credit...
...In the past eighteen months the Russians shipped in 300,000 tons...
...tired of self-styled experts, such as political appointees, college professors, social do-gooders and college students, trying to dictate basic military policy and succeeding...
...New York is no sicker than democracy, which is to say it lies spread eagle, helplessly awaiting rigor mortis...
...He describes how money, ordnance, aircraft, and the lives of pilots are needlessly wasted on useless missions—in order to achieve a greater number of sorties for propaganda purposes at home...
...Speaking to the National Conference of Editorial Writers on October 7, 1966, Johnson asked for extending "mostfavored nation tariff treatment to European Communist states...
...Only by means of the draft, will Johnson get enough troops to fight the war he is not trying to win...
...In his present volume the author discusses the war years and his part in them...
...The reasons are essentially twofold: 1) by trading with the Soviet bloc nations we are helping sustain the Communists' war effort...
...Even more curious than New Yorkers' feverish concern over garbage is the fact that even the New York Times failed to record the garbage strike for the boon it was...
...But relentless reality will overtake even the sugar plum paradise of New York, and its hilarity will eventually destroy it...
...As expected, the Soviet Union and her satellites used much of this aid to bolster the North Vietnamese army...
...He describes how time after time, pilots have watched fighter-bombers taxiing for take-off, carrying only a pair of small bombs—one-tenth or one-twelfth of the number they could carry to the enemy...
...The democratic process instinctively congeals when willful men, seeking to maintain themselves, use their offices to shower manna on voting blocs...
Vol. 1 • April 1968 • No. 5
