Tom,
Well said, as usual.
On another note, I am unclear as to what military unit you were with. I thought that you mentioned in another post that you were not in the military? It seems that you have a lot of inside information.
Other thing - what is “REMFS”?
My entire philosophy can be summed up with two names: Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche. Well, okay, you can sprinkle some Socrates on top for good measure(the good life and such). Whenever I tell people this, they are horrified
They’re right to be horrified. That’s a frightening pair to pull a life philosophy from.
I worry more bout you all the time, jmorrissey.
A “REMF” is a “Rear Ecehlon Mother’s Friend” or something else like that.
They do things like deny mistakes, forget to pick up people they left in bad places, make coffee and tell stories at the bar like, “I remember when I went to rescue Jessica Lynch…”
There are 11 REMF’s in the military for ever one person who stands at the pointy end of the bayonet, and about 15,000 REMF’s for every one who stands right at the point.
THE CODE OF CONDUCT
ARTICLE V
Capt. Lance Sijan had been on the ground for 41 days when Col. Bob Craner and Capt. Guy Gruters took off from Phu Cat AB in their F-100 on Dec. 20, 1967.
Pinpointing targets in North Vietnam from the “Misty” forward air control jet fighter, they were hit by ground fire and ejected. Both were captured and brought to a holding point in Vinh, where they were thrust into bamboo cells and chained.
Reaching back into his memory, crowded with recollections of more than five years as a prisoner of war, Craner told the story:
"As best as I can recall, it was New Year’s Day of 1968 when they brought this guy in at night. The Rodent came into the guy’s cell next to mine and began his interrogation. It was clearly audible.
"He was on this guy for military information, and the responses I heard indicated he was in very, very bad shape. His voice was very weak. It sounded to me as though he wasn’t going to make it.
"The Rodent would say, ‘Your arm, your arm, it is very bad. I am going to twist it unless you tell me.’ The guy would say, ‘I’m not going to tell you; it’s against the Code.’ Then he would start screaming. The Rodent was obviously twisting his mangled arm.
"The whole affair went on for an hour and a half, over and over again, and the guy just wouldn’t give in. He’d say, ‘Wait till I get better, you S.O.B., you’re really going to get it.’ He was giving the Rodent all kinds of lip, but no information.
“The Rodent kept laying into him. Finally I heard this guy rasp, ‘Sijan! My name is Lance Peter Sijan!’ That’s all he told him.”
Guy Gruters, also an Air Force Academy graduate, but a year senior to Sijan, was in a cell down the hall and did not know the identity of the third captive. He does recall that “the guy was apparently always trying to push his way out of the bamboo cell, and they’d beat him with a stick to get him back. We could hear the cracks.”
After several days, when the North Vietnamese were ready to transport the Americans to Hanoi, Gruters and Craner were taken to Sijan’s cell to help him to the truck.
“When I got a look at the poor devil, I retched,” said Craner. “He was so thin and every bone in his body was visible. Maybe 20 percent of his body wasn’t open sores or open flesh. Both hipbones were exposed where the flesh had been worn away.”
Gruters recalled that he looked like a little guy. But then when we picked him up, I remember commenting to Bob, ‘This is one big sonofagun."’
While they were moving him, Craner related, "Sijan looked up and said, ‘You’re Guy Gruters, aren’t you?’’
Gruters asked him how he knew, and Sijan replied, “We were at the academy together. Don’t you know me? I’m Lance Sijan.” Guy went into shock. He said, “My God, Lance, that’s not you!”
“I have never had my heart broken like that,” said Gruters, who remembered Sijan as a 220-pound football player at the academy. “He had no muscle left and looked so helpless.”
Craner said Sijan never gave up on the idea of escape in all the days they were together. "In fact, that was one of the first things he mentioned when we first went into his cell at Vinh: ‘How the hell are we going to get out of here? Have you guys figured out how we’re going to take care of these people? Do you think we can steal one of their guns?’
“He had to struggle to get each word out,” Craner said. “It was very, very intense on his part that the only direction he was planning was escape. That’s all that was on his mind. Even later, he kept dwelling on the fact that he’d made it once and he was going to make it again.”
Craner remembers the Rodent coming up to them and, in a mocking voice, he paraphrased the Rodent’s message:
“Sijan a very difficult man. He struck a guard and injured him. He ran away from us. You must not let him do that anymore.”
“I never questioned the fact that Lance would make it,” said Gruters. “Now that he had help, I thought he’d come back. He had passed his low.”
The grueling truck ride to Hanoi took several days. Sijan–“in and out of consciousness, lucid for 15 seconds sometimes and sometimes an hour, but garbled and incoherent a lot,” according to Craner–told the story of his 45-day ordeal in the jungle while the trio were kept under a canvas cover during the day.
The truck ride over rough roads at night, with the Americans constantly bouncing 18 inches up and down in the back, was torture itself. Craner and Gruters took turns struggling to keep an unsecured 55-gallon drum of gasoline from smashing them while the other cradled Sijan between his legs and cushioned his head against the stomach.
“I thought he had died at one point in the trip,” said Craner. “I looked at Guy and said, ‘He’s dead.’ Guy started massaging his face and neck trying to bring him around. Nothing. I sat there holding him for about two hours, and suddenly he just came around. I said, 'OK, buddy, my hat’s off to you.”’
Finally reaching Hanoi, the three were put into a cell in “Little Vegas.” Craner described the conditions: “It was dark, with open air, and there was a pool of water on the worn cement floor. It was the first time I suffered from the cold. I was chilled to the bone, always shivering and shaking. Guy and I started getting respiratory problems right away, and I couldn’t imagine what it was doing to Lance. That, I think, accounts ultimately for the fact that he didn’t make it.”
“Lance was always as little of a hindrance to us as he could be,” said Gruters. “He could have asked for help any one of a hundred thousand times, but he never asked for a damned thing! There was no way Bob and I could feel sorry for ourselves.”
Craner said a Vietnamese medic gave Sijan shots of yellow fluid, which he thought were antibiotics. The medic did nothing for his open sores and wounds, and when he looked at Sijan’s mangled hand, “he just shook his head.”
The medic later inserted an intravenous tube into Sijan’s arm, but Sijan, fascinated with it in his subconscious haze, pulled it out several times. Thus, Craner and Gruters took turns staying awake with him at night.
“One night,” the colonel said, “a guard opened the little plate on the door and looked in, and there was Lance beckoning to the guard. It was the same motion he told me he had made to the guy in the jungle, and I could just see what was going through the back reaches of his mind: 'If I can just get that guy close enough. . . .”’
He remembers that Sijan once asked them to help him exercise so he could build up his strength for another escape attempt. “We got him propped up on his cot and waved his arms around a few times, and that satisfied him. Then he was exhausted.”
At another point, Sijan became lucid enough to ask Craner, “How about going out and getting me a burger and french fries?”
But Sijan’s injuries and now the respiratory problem sapped his strength. “First he could only whisper a word, and then it got down to blinking out letters with his eyes,” said Gruters. “Finally he couldn’t do that anymore, even a yes or no.”
With tears glistening, Bob Craner remembered when it all came to an end. They had been in Hanoi about eight days.
"One night Lance started making strangling sounds, and we got him to sit up. Then, for the first time since we’d been together, his voice came through loud and clear. He said, ‘Oh my God, it’s over,’ and then he started yelling for his father. He’d shout, ‘Dad, Dad, where are you? Come here, I need you!’
“I knew he was sinking fast. I started beating on the walls, trying to call the guards, hoping they’d take him to a hospital. They came in and took him out. As best as I could figure it was January 21.”
“He had never asked for his dad before,” said Gruters, "and that was the first time he’d talked in four or five days. It was the first time I saw him display any emotion. It was absolutely his last strength.
“It was the last time we saw him.”
A few days later, Craner met the camp commander in the courtyard while returning from a bathhouse and asked him where Sijan was.
“Sijan spend too long in the jungle,” came the reply. “Sijan die.”
Guy Gruters talked some more about Sijan:
“He was a tremendously strong, tough, physical human being. I never heard Lance complain. If you had an army of Sijans, you’d have an incredible fighting force.”
Said Craner:
"Lance never talked about pain. He’d yell out in pain sometimes, but he’d never dwell on it like, ‘Damn, that hurts.’
“Lance was so full of drive whenever he was lucid. There was never any question of, ‘I hurt so much that I’d rather be dead.’ It was always positive for him, pointed mainly toward escape but always toward the future.”
Craner recommended Sijan for the Medal of Honor. Why?
"He survived a terrible ordeal, and he survived with the intent, sometime in the future, of picking up the fight. Finally he just succumbed.
THE CODE OF CONDUCT
ARTICLE VI
I will never forget that I am an American fighting man, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free. I will trust in my God and in the United States of America.
If you want to read more about Lance Sijan, read Into the Mouth of the Cat, by Malcolm McConnell.
Great book.
No need to worry. Just because my thinking is different, and my opinions are rarely popular, doesn’t mean that I’m an off-kilter psycho. Indeed, if you were to meet me, you’d find that I’m pretty well-balanced, with a penchant for ranting.
Although, I’m not sure what the problem you have with Ayn Rand is. Her philosophy makes a lot of sense. It’s not all touchy-feely, for certain, but much of what she says is true, at least in my experience.
I don’t believe a lot of what Nietzsche says, but like many philosophers, he has some good ideas and some bad ideas, and I freely take what I like and throw away the crap.
What I take away from both of these people is a message of self-empowerment, and the belief that you have to make your way in life standing on your own two feet, not standing on someone else’s back. I find that this jibes very much with my largely libertarian sensibilities.
No need to worry. Thank goodness!
Just because my thinking is different, and my opinions are rarely popular, doesn’t mean that I’m an off-kilter psycho. No, not necessarily. I would like to know how a follower of Nietzsche and Rand *would *seek to act.
**Indeed, if you were to meet me, you’d find that I’m pretty well-balanced, with a penchant for ranting. **Penchant for ranting? I can’t relate. (I don’t even have to meet you, you already seem pretty well-balanced, FWIW)
Although, I’m not sure what the problem you have with Ayn Rand is. Her philosophy makes a lot of sense. It’s not all touchy-feely, for certain, but much of what she says is true, at least in my experience. My problem with Rand is the same as my problem with Nietzsche- I think her starting assumptions are flawed. Though I find that her philosophy is much less profound than Nietzsche’s, and therefor lots less dangerous and scary to me. She’s a minor thinker.
**I don’t believe a lot of what Nietzsche says, but like many philosophers, he has some good ideas and some bad ideas, and I freely take what I like and throw away the crap. **Well, that’s cool. Which ideas do you keep?
What I take away from both of these people is a message of self-empowerment, and the belief that you have to make your way in life standing on your own two feet, not standing on someone else’s back. Not possible.