I have known a lot of military and police, and they were all decent - off-duty. But I know enough about the psychological effects of groups and adrelanine to know that is not a reliable indication of how they will behave in action. Ask yourself, were all the people involved in the torture and murder of Baba Mousa utter shits?
Your last paragraph is a disgrace - blaming the ordinary soldiers for the negligence of those in charge. As the Bloody Sunday inquiry makes clear, they were not trained or properly briefed for crowd control and the whole event was a fuck-up.
I notice that you also haven't said what an innocent, severely deaf, but not visually decrepit, person (and there are a LOT of us) should do when we hear a loud shout behind us in a location where there might be armed police.
]]>Nope. Until I read the Savile Report, I would have agreed with you - incorrectly-trained troops, led badly. And I don't doubt that it was a colossal screwup.
I agree that CO 1 PARA did wrong - and disobeyed the explicit orders of the Brigade Commander in doing so. But the other sub-units, and other units, on the ground didn't feel the need to kill rioters and then lie about it.
At some point, however, you have to accept responsibility for your own actions - these weren't "green" troops, they'd faced rioters and shooters before. Some had served in Aden, and other wars. Support Company isn't somewhere that you typically send new soldiers and NCOs, it tends to be more experienced than the Rifle Companies.
From Savile, Volume VI, 112.58: "Our overall assessment of what happened in Glenfada Park North is that the soldiers who went in, led by Corporal E, fired at fleeing civilians, and then, in the knowledge that what they had done was unjustified, proceeded to invent false accounts of what they had seen and done... We repeat that we have found no evidence that suggests to us that any of the four soldiers might have believed, albeit mistakenly, that he had, or might have, identified a target at which he was justified in firing."
From Savile, Conclusions, 5.4: "In the case of those soldiers who fired in either the knowledge or belief that no-one in the areas into which they fired was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury, or not caring whether or not anyone there was posing such a threat, it is at least possible that they did so in the indefensible belief that all the civilians they fired at were probably either members of the Provisional or Official IRA or were supporters of one or other of these paramilitary organisations; and so deserved to be shot notwithstanding that they were not armed or posing any threat of causing death or serious injury. Our overall conclusion is that there was a serious and widespread loss of fire discipline among the soldiers of Support Company."
]]>The few who beat those detainees until one died, were utter shits; there's one who should be serving life, but couldn't be prosecuted successfully.
The ones who stood by while it happened (over days), and did nothing? It's easier to commit a sin of omission, but I hope they regret it for the rest of their lives.
Too many people in that unit knew that the detainees were being beaten, and yet nothing was done until one of them died. They wrote it off to themselves as "harsh", probably not thinking through that it was "potentially lethal". The Padre was specifically criticised, and the Battalion's Medical Officer has been struck off. The Commanding Officer had to leave the Army (not sacked, just...) and the Battalion was disbanded.
On another forum, I read a post by a young officer who had been at Sandhurst with the Platoon Commander concerned; had never perceived him as "that kind of man"; and how it had made him wonder exactly how he would have reacted, and whether he would have been strong enough to say "No. Stop." - because that's the job of an Officer, to do what's right even though it isn't easy.
]]>then clothing is decoupled from routine status displays, and a lifetime later some people start doing dress-up as a subculture thing because it gives them an outlet for non-conformity
Yes and no... clothing is still coupled very, very closely with routine status displays, even here in North America; what's happened is that conventions governing clothing have slipped from the realm of explicit knowledge into the realm of tacit knowledge, where things get a bit more slippery and a bit more subtle, but no less important. We are just moderately smart monkeys, after all, and if nothing else, dropping stuff into the realm of tacit knowledge allows us to still pass status signals while at least ostensibly freeing up some of our explicit social capital to deal with other things.
A good example would be suit colour in the "business world". Brown, checks, or light colours (with some exceptions) usually signal weakness and are good ways to not be taken seriously, dark colours, especially charcoal and black, signal power and confidence, less conservative colours tend to be reserved for persons of colour for a whole whack of cultural reasons I don't even want to try to unravel... It's a minefield, really. And it's an order of magnitude more complicated for women. The uniforms still exist, but they are both class-associated and heavily contextual, with context now vastly more important than class.
(And refusing to play this game isn't actually refusing to play the game; you're still sending signals, but unless you are phenomenally talented/skilled or phenomenally rich, the biggest one you're sending is "I can be safely ignored in a lot of contexts".)
Playing dress up and the reasons for it are not universal across cultures, of course, even now that we appear to have westernized the bulk of our sartorial status markers. W. David Marks has written an excellent book on the interplay between American and Japanese fashion called Ametora, and one of the more interesting revelations is that a lot of "dress up" fashion subcultures that we would assume are about individuality, given what we in the West tend to think we know about how conformity/individuality works in Japanese culture, are in fact about an obsession with rules. It's not necessarily about avoiding uniforms, but rather it's about having one where the rules haven't gotten muddy and are still laser-precise. (Gothic Lolita, fashion punk, greaser, etc.)
]]>That's actually what got Lee Modesitt writing in the first place, you know.
He'd been reading a David Eddings book and, being an economist by trade, began grinding his teeth when he realized that the army of knights as described would require roughly the land area of Africa under cultivation to support them
Ignoring logistics/economics of this kind of army is the shibboleth that bugs me the most, so it's interesting to me to hear this.
Eddings was my gateway into Fantasy (I tried LOTR but really I wanted something that felt equally epic but where the language was less of a slog and the cardboard cutouts at least had moving parts) and one of the things I liked about it was that, while he probably didn't get the details right, the economic and logistical implications of vast armies being assembled and moved about were explicitly dealt with.
He figures out how to pay them... or what to do when the leaders can't. He worries about how long they take to assemble, how long they take to march, what it take to feed them, what that means for the food stock of the people left behind or in areas they pass through, what that does for the commodities market, etc. There are explicit passages explaining all those things... though in very simple terms, and as I said, probably getting a lot of the details wrong.
]]>Back during the Troubles, my grandfather was in the British Army serving in Ireland. He never talked about it. (Or much about WWI either. We heard lots of stories about his mates during the war, but nothing about the fighting. Ypres, the Somme, Greece, Palestine… the closest to a 'war story' he told his grandchildren was how he hung on a cavalryman's stirrup during the retreat to the Jordan, until the chap's officer rode up and ordered him to leave the Tommy — my grandfather — and save himself.)
Anyway, once the Alzheimers kicked in poor granddad began living in the past. All the horrible memories he'd suppressed came out, in present tense.
During the Troubles his section was fired at from a crowd. The sergeant was down. And they couldn't return fire because it was a crowd of civilians.
Ordinary Tommies. Would they have obeyed orders to return fire, rather than let themselves be shot? I can never know, but knowing my grandfather I doubt he would have.
]]>One of the worst I heard of was someone being confronted with a child pointing a real revolver at them. They watched as the child pull the trigger, and it went 'click'...
Regarding your grandfather, another story was that of the OP pair watching a weapon hide. For some reason, the teenager who had found the weapons (and reported them to the police), went back a day or two later for another look. He picked up one of the weapons, pointed it in the rough direction of the hide; and the OP team shot and killed him. Tragic; and as I heard it, the soldier concerned was permanently screwed up by his choice.
These are instances where soldiers were trying to do the right thing (a US General tried to describe similar behaviour to your grandfather's as "courageous restraint"). Unfortunately, Sp Coy 1 PARA weren't.
]]>http://www.queensroyalsurreys.org.uk/1661to1966/birkenhead/birkenhead.html
]]>Ticket to Ride: Post-Earthquake LA
It was really fun trying to build routes through the city. Rail, road, sea. Special cards included engineers to repair routes, and aftershock cards to damage routes.
As usual with dreams, the memory is too fuzzy to try to actually create the game. For instance, it had a really nice map of LA, and I have no idea what LA looks like but I'm certain it's not like that map :-)
But I'm certain there's a market* for a disaster-recovery game, if it can be fast and fun as well as realistic. (I'm thinking Greg Porter's Black Death as an exemplar.)
*Maybe not a large market…
]]>No idea how they were used, but they were there*. Must have been time travel rules in the game :-)
Why my subconscious include them is obvious, but I'll have to ignore them if I want to turn this dream into a game. Or make a very different game* :-)
**Ticket to Ride: Deep Time?
]]>