#gunsight jacket

[callmeblake]

INTERVIEW - Frank Iero - MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE/LS DUNES/THE FUTURE VIOLENTS

Uploaded March 25th, 2023

[back-and-totheleft]

"Vietnam as it really was"

Oliver Stone sprang up in bed and found fear staining his sheets. A dream had startled him awake. He was 16 years out of Viet Nam, but in the dream, "they had shipped me back. Somehow they found me at the age of 38 and sent me back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror." That was two years ago. Now Stone, who earned a Bronze Star and a MASH unit's worth of physical and emotional wounds in the jungles of Viet Nam, has transformed his war experience -- the bad dream he lived through for 15 months in 1967-68 -- into a film called Platoon. With craft, crackle, a little bombast and plenty of residual rage, he has created a time-capsule movie that explodes like a frag bomb in the consciousness of America, showing how it was back then, over there.

Begin with a birth: a baby-faced soldier, Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), is delivered from the womb of a transport plane into the harsh light of Viet Nam. He will find death soon enough: four patrols in the film, four wrenching revelations. On Chris' first night patrol he watches, paralyzed with fear, as the enemy approaches and another new boy dies. On a second patrol the platoon enters a village that might be My Lai; anger goads Chris to spit bullets at the feet of a petrified Vietnamese, and before the day is over the group's leader, Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), has seen to the slaughtering of villagers before the entire place is torched. During a third battle, Barnes tracks down a woods-wise sergeant, Elias (Willem Dafoe), who had interrupted Barnes' massacre, shoots him and leaves him for dead. On the final patrol Chris flips into heroism or psychosis, wipes out a nest of North Vietnamese and confronts the demon he has almost become. End with a murder -- the last of too bloody many.

Welcome to the old nightmare -- the one neither Stone nor the 2.7 million American soldiers who went to Viet Nam can shake. Welcome back to the war that, just 20 years ago, turned America schizophrenic. Suddenly we were a nation split between left and right, black and white, hip and square, mothers and fathers, parents and children. For a nation whose war history had read like a John Wayne war movie -- where good guys finish first by being tough and playing fair -- the polarization was soul-souring. Americans were fighting themselves, and both sides lost.

Platoon pushes the metaphor further, thousands of miles away from the "world," into the combat zones of Nam. Platoon says that American soldiers -- the young men we sent there to do our righteous dirty work -- turned their frustrations toward fratricide. In Viet Nam, Stone suggests, G.I.s re-created the world back home, with its antagonisms of race, region and class. Finding no clear and honorable path to victory in the booby-trapped underbrush, some grunts focused their gunsights on their comrades. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army (NVA) were shadowy figures in this family tragedy; stage center, it was sibling riflery. Stone's achievement is to pound and hack this theme into a ripping yarn about a good man, an evil man and an Everyman -- a young, romanticized Oliver Stone -- suspended between them with his life and ideals in the balance. In vivid imagery and incendiary action, Stone's film asks of our soldiers, "Am I my brother's killer?" The answer is an anguished yes.

And a resounding "you bet" to the question, Can a ferocious movie about an unpopular war, filmed on the cheap with no stars and turned down by every major studio, find success, controversy and the promise of an Oscar statuette at the end of the tunnel? In its early limited opening, Platoon is already a prestige hit, and the film shows signs of becoming a blockbuster as it opens across the country over the next three weeks. It has captivated intellectuals, movie buffs and urban grunts -- astonishing, across-the-board appeal for a hellacious sermon. It has ignited a fire storm of debate, from political swamis and Viet vets, on its merits as art and history. It is the fountainhead for a freshet of Viet Nam exploration: We Can Keep You Forever, a BBC documentary about the mystery surrounding MIAs, will be aired Wednesday in 21 U.S. cities, and this spring will see two new movies set in Viet Nam, The Hanoi Hilton and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. In a movie season of Trekkies, Dundees and dentist-devouring houseplants, Oliver Stone has proved that a film can still roil the blood of the American body politic. Platoon the picture is now Platoon the phenomenon.

It is a picture first and foremost, a series of pictures that lodge in the mind with other indelible images of war. The prop wash from a landing helicopter blows the tarpaulins off three bodies, their shrouds torn off, their makeshift graves defiled. In the village, after the slaughter, the soldiers carry Vietnamese children on their shoulders -- G.I. Joes, big brothers to the kids whose village they have just destroyed -- and the soldier who bashed a man's head takes a tourist snapshot of the holocaust. More than any other film, Platoon gives the sense -- all five senses -- of fighting in Viet Nam. You can wilt from the claustrophobic heat of this Rousseauvian jungle; feel the sting of the leeches as they snack on Chris' flesh; hear all at once the chorus of insects, an enemy's approaching footsteps on the green carpet and Chris' heartbeat on night patrol. The film does not glamourize or trivialize death with grotesque special effects. But it jolts the viewer alive to the sensuousness of danger, fear and war lust. All senses must be alert when your life is at stake, and Oliver Stone is an artist-showman who can make movies seem a matter of life and death.

Until Dec. 19, though, when Platoon opened, Hollywood had thought the picture a matter of indifference. It had taken Stone ten hungry years to get the project going. "For two years in the late '70s," says Producer Martin Bregman, "I banged on every door in California to get it done, but at that time Viet Nam was still a no-no." Tom Berenger, the film's showcase psychopath, imagines that "it must have made Stone feel like an old man, carrying the project around for so long. He said it broke his heart." Then something interesting happened: people went for Platoon. Most critics were impressed, many were impassioned, and even those who trashed the picture helped make it the season's top conversation piece. Soon long lines were forming outside the movie's Times Square flagship -- at lunchtime, on weekdays, in the hawk bite of a January wind -- and after midnight in early- to-bed Hollywood. In 74 theaters on the Jan. 9-11 weekend, Platoon averaged more than $22,000, the highest per-screen take of any new film.

In the industry, Stone's old colleagues and fellow directors have laid on their benedictions. Woody Allen calls it a "fine movie, an excellent movie." Says Steven Spielberg: "It is more than a movie; it's like being in Viet Nam. Platoon makes you feel you've been there and never want to go back." James Woods, who starred in Stone's previous film, Salvador, calls him an "artist whose vision transcends politics. Everyone from the ex-hippie to the ex-grunt can be moved by Platoon. And his passion isn't bogus -- he doesn't play Imagine at the end of the film to break people's hearts." Brian De Palma, who filmed Scarface from a Stone script, sees him achieving a volcanic maturity in Platoon: "He has now channeled his feeling and energy into a cohesive dramatic work. He's an auteur making a movie about what he experienced and understands. Seeing Platoon get through the system makes the soul feel good."

With its critical, popular and insider acclaim swelling, Platoon began to shoulder its way toward the front rank of Oscar favorites. By now it would have to be counted as the front runner, and Hollywood is furrowing its back with self-congratulatory pats for making this big bold message movie. To Stone, Hollywood's claim of paternity for Platoon must seem a rich joke. He and Hollywood both know that Platoon -- like The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, The Boys in Company C, The Killing Fields and nearly all the serious movies about the war in Southeast Asia -- secured its major financing from foreign producers. "It was a picture we wanted to support," says John Daly, chairman of Britain's Hemdale Pictures, which also produced Salvador. "We respect Oliver's passions. Besides, he spent only $6 million on Platoon" -- about half the budget of a typical Hollywood film.

The typical film, though, does not provoke a political free-for-all. Many conservatives have taken up arms against Platoon. In the far-right Washington Times' Insight magazine, John Podhoretz castigates it as "one of the most repellent movies ever made in this country." The film, he says, "blackens the name and belittles the sacrifice of every man and woman who served the United States in the Viet Nam War (including Stone)." Politicians are eager to return the salvos. Former Senator Gary Hart, aware of the electorate's fondness for presidential candidates with movie credentials, campaigns for the film by urging that "every teenager in America should see Platoon."

Now ask a man who's been there: David Halberstam, who covered the war for the New York Times and, in The Best and the Brightest, documented two Administrations' slides into the Big Muddy. "Platoon is the first real Viet Nam film," Halberstam proclaims, "and one of the great war movies of all time. The other Hollywood Viet Nam films have been a rape of history. But Platoon is historically and politically accurate. It understands something that the architects of the war never did: how the foliage, the thickness of the jungle, negated U.S. technological superiority. You can see how the forest sucks in American soldiers; they just disappear. I think the film will become an American classic. Thirty years from now, people will think of the Viet Nam War as Platoon."

Neither Sly Stallone nor Oliver Stone can put the whole picture of Viet Nam on a movie screen. There were 2.7 million stories in the naked jungle. Each veteran has his own view of the war, and each will have his own vision of Platoon. More than a few are disturbed by its presentation of a military unit at war with itself. Says Bob Duncan, 39, who served in the 1st Infantry at the same time Stone was in the 25th: "He managed to take every cliche -- the 'baby killer' and 'dope addict' -- that we've lived with for the past 20 years and stick them in the movie about Viet Nam." Says another veteran, Nick Nickelson, 43: "I hope this doesn't bring back those old depictions. God help us, I don't want to go back into a closet again."

Other vets deny the prevalence of dope smoking and the depiction of military officers as either psychos or cowards. But John Wheeler, 42, a veteran who is president of the Center for the Study of the Viet Nam Generation in Washington and chairman of the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Fund, argues that "there were drug cultures; there were green lieutenants. Stone wanted to clean out the festering part of the wound. The next Viet Nam movie may be the one that tells the whole truth: that we were the best-equipped, best-trained army ever fielded, but against a dedicated foe in an impossible terrain. It was a state-of-the-art war on both sides. But Platoon is a new statement about Viet Nam veterans. Before, we were either objects of pity or objects that had to be defused to keep us at a distance. Platoon makes us real. The Viet Nam Memorial was one gate our country had to pass through; Platoon is another. It is part of the healing process. It speaks to our generation. Those guys are us."

Listen to these guys, and you may suspect that Platoon is not so much a movie as a Rorschach blot. But that is part of the caginess of Stone's approach. The French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once wrote that when a good film is also a popular film, it is because of a misunderstanding. Platoon could very well be misunderstood into superhit status. The army of Rambomaniacs will love the picture because it delivers more bang for the buck; all those yellow folks blow up real good. Aging lefties can see the film as a demonstration of war's inhuman futility. Graybeards on the right may call it a tribute to our fighting men, in whatever foreign adventure. The intelligentsia can credit Platoon with expressing, in bold cinematic strokes, Stone's grand themes of comradeship and betrayal. And the average youthful moviegoer -- too young to remember Viet Nam even as the living-room war -- may discover where Dad went in the 1960s and why he came home changed or came home in a body bag.

"In any other war, they would have made movies about us too. Dateline: Hell!, Dispatch from Dong Ha, maybe even A Scrambler to the Front . . . But Viet Nam is awkward, everybody knows how awkward, and if people don't even want to hear about it, you know they're not going to pay money to sit there in the dark and have it brought up." So wrote Michael Herr in Dispatches, published in 1977, a year before the first spate of Viet Nam dramas. (The mid-'60s had offered a couple of World War II wheezes disguised as topical films: A Yank in Viet-Nam, so poorly received that it changed its name to Year of the Tiger, and John Wayne's hilariously wrongheaded The Green Berets, with its famous climax of the sun setting in the east.) 1978 brought three pictures -- Coming Home, The Boys in Company C and The Deer Hunter -- that touched on Viet Nam, and the following year Francis Coppola released Apocalypse Now.

Trouble was, most of these films were not about Viet Nam. Coming Home was a disabled-vet love story -- The Best Years of Our Lives with Jon Voight in the Harold Russell role. The Deer Hunter was . . . well, what was it? An incoherent parable about male bonding through Russian roulette. Bats and beautiful, it stood like Ishmael on the prow of its pretensions and declared, "Call me masterpiece." Apocalypse Now was fine as long as it accompanied its doomed, questing hero (played by Martin Sheen, Charlie's father) upstream on the River Styx; then it fogged off into fantasyland with Marlon Buddha. Only Company C, a standard-issue war film about recruits betrayed by their incompetent officers, spent much time in a Nam combat zone. But it really resided, with The Green Berets, in the twilight zone of World War II gestures and bromides.

Hollywood (and not just Hollywood) refused to see that Viet Nam was different. All the old givens -- beau geste, military master plans, unswerving belief in the officer class -- were fatally irrelevant to a guerrilla war. Forget the World War II narrative line of tanks and tactics, which moved with the ponderous sweep of a Golden Age Hollywood plot. Viet Nam, set in jungles without beginning or end, was a flash of episodic, aleatory explosions; it was modernism brought to war. And a new kind of war demanded a new look at the war-movie genre. Platoon fills the bill. It is a huge black slab of remembrance, chiseled in sorrow and anger -- the first Viet Nam Memorial movie.

Though Platoon is a breakthrough, it is not a breakaway. The film is traditional enough to connect with a mass audience. In its story line it holds echoes of Attack!, Robert Aldrich's 1956 psychodrama, in which a World War II infantry company is torn by a mortal struggle between two officers -- one messianic, the other deranged -- while a young man's loyalty hangs in the balance. Platoon's narration, in the form of Chris' letters to his grandmother, is often as stilted and redundant as silent-movie title cards. When a naive new boy shows Chris a photo of his sweetheart, you just know that, in the best '40s-movie fashion, the guy's a goner.

There are darker currents, too, of a passive racism. The black soldiers are occasionally patronized and sentimentalized; they stand to the side while the white soldiers grab all the big emotions. And the Vietnamese are either pathetic victims or the invisible, inhuman enemy. In the scheme of Platoon (and not just Platoon) they do not matter. The nearly 1 million Vietnamese casualties are deemed trivial compared with America's loss of innocence, of allies, of geopolitical face. And the tragedy of Viet Nam is seen as this: not that they died, but that we debased ourselves by killing them.

Of course, Platoon need not be every possible Viet Nam film to be the best one so far. It is enough that Stone has devised a drama of palpable realism that is also a metaphor for the uncivil war that raged in the U.S. and can flare up anytime in any family. Indeed, at the film's molten core is the tug of wills between two strong men, outsize figures of shameless strutting charisma, for parentage of their platoon and for their new recruit, Chris. Barnes, the staff sergeant, could be Chris' legal father; Elias, the romantic renegade, could be a spiritual father, even after his death. They are like Claudius and the Ghost wrestling for Hamlet's allegiance.

Both men are legendary soldiers who have survived long years in Viet Nam -- Elias by a kind of supernal sylvan grace, Barnes by simply refusing to die. Elias is Jesus crossed with Jim Morrison. He will literally take a load off Chris' shoulders, or share a fraternal toke with Chris through the barrel of a rifle, or moon over the night stars, or smile ingenuously at his killer. He is hard to know and harder to destroy, a creature of Stone's wild literary sentiment. Barnes, who says of some fresh corpses, "Tag 'em and bag 'em," has no sentiment at all. When he pulls a steaming metal shard out of a wounded G.I.'s side, it seems as much to display his expertise as to relieve the man's pain. He will do anything to achieve his objective: lead a suicide mission or send his rival on one; murder a village woman in cold blood or taunt his men toward murdering him. Chris, who feels an irresistible kinship to both men, says they were "fighting for possession of my soul." The film's most controversial question is, Who won?

At this point, readers who have not seen Platoon are excused for the next two paragraphs. The others, the grizzled vets, can ponder Chris' motives and actions at the film's climax. He believes (and we know) that Barnes has killed Elias in the jungle. He has already considered taking murderous revenge and been told, "The only thing that can kill Barnes is Barnes." On his last patrol, Chris' suicidal resolve turns him into a mean, obscene fighting machine -- a rifle with a body attached, as reckless as Barnes, as resourceful as Elias -- and he leaves half a dozen NVA in his wake. Now Barnes finds Chris and is ready to kill him when a blast knocks them unconscious. Later Chris revives and finds the injured Barnes ordering him to get a medic. The young man lifts his weapon and, when Barnes says, "Do it," does the bastard in.

In the movie theaters, this illegal shooting usually gets a big hand. Righteous vengeance. Good guy kills bad guy. It is the kind of movie catharsis that may make Platoon a megahit. But can Chris or the audience take moral satisfaction in this deed? Which "father" has he followed? Has Chris become like Elias, back from the grave to avenge his own murder? "You have to fight evil if you are going to be a good man," Stone says. "That's why Chris killed Barnes. Because Barnes deserved killing." Or has he emulated his enemy? Has he become Barnes in order to kill him? Stone has another answer: "I also wanted to show that Chris came out of the war stained and soiled -- all of us, every vet. I want vets to face up to it and be proud they came back. So what if there was some bad in us? That's the price you pay. Chris pays a big price. He becomes a murderer." A good man, and a murderer? It is a tribute to Platoon's cunning that it can sell this dilemma both ways, and a mark of Stone's complexity that he can argue either side and believe both.

The dichotomy was bred in him. Stone was born in 1946, the only child of a Jewish stockbroker and the French Catholic girl he met just after V-E day while serving as a colonel on Eisenhower's staff. Lou Stone wrote a monthly newsletter about economics and politics; his son describes the style as "right-wing Walter Lippmann, a view of the world every month. My father believed that life was hard. The important thing was to make a living." Jacqueline Stone was just the opposite: inexhaustibly sociable, the original bete de fete. "My mother loved movies," Stone says, "and every Monday I'd play hooky, and we'd go see two or three movies. From the start, I had the contradiction in me: my mother's outgoing, optimistic, French side and the dark, pessimistic, Jewish side of my father."

The Stones lived in Manhattan town houses and Stamford, Conn., homes; Oliver went to Manhattan's tony Trinity School and the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa.; he summered with his maternal grandparents and spoke French before he learned English. (From Viet Nam, Oliver would write his grandmother versions of the letters that Chris reads in Platoon.) At five he composed skits for a marionette show, casting his French cousins in the parts. At seven he wrote stories. To earn a quarter for a Classic comic book, he would write a theme each week for his father. And at nine he started work on a book, 900 pages about his family and his life.

Oliver stopped writing the book when he was twelve; the family stopped when Oliver was 16. "The news of their divorce came as a total shock," Stone recalls. "The Hill School headmaster was the one who told me. And when they were divorced, my father gave me the facts of life. He told me that he was heavily in debt. He said, 'I'll give you a college education, and then you're on your own. There's literally no money.' "

Lou Stone never recovered financially. "And yet," his son says, "I think his reversal helped push me to leave my privileged childhood behind. I finished Hill and spent a year at Yale, but I saw myself as a product -- an East Coast socioeconomic product -- and I wanted to break out of the mold. Then I read Lord Jim. Conrad's world was exotic and lush; it exercised a tremendous allure for me." It also propelled Oliver into a teaching job at a Chinese Catholic school in a Saigon suburb. It was 1965, the year a half million Yank soldiers landed in Viet Nam, and Stone was 18 years old. "I woke up in Asia," he says, "and it became an orphan home for me. It was everything I thought it would be: the heat, the green seas, the bloodred sunsets. In Saigon, the G.I.s from the 1st Infantry Division were just arriving. There were guys walking around with pistols, no curfews, shoot-outs in the streets. The place was like Dodge City."

Itinerary for a young wanderluster: on a merchant marine ship from Saigon to Oregon; in Guadalajara, Mexico, writing 400 pages of a novel; back to Yale, then dropping out a second and last time to concentrate on his writing. The book was now 1,400 pages. "It started out as a boy's suicide note -- not that I was going to commit suicide, but I was very depressed. It was Jack London- type experiences in a Joycean style. Totally insane, with great passages of lyricism here and there. I thought it was the best thing since Rimbaud. And when Simon & Schuster rejected it, I gave up. I threw half the manuscript in the East River and said, 'My father is right. I'm a bum.' I felt the solution was total anonymity. I had to atone. So I joined the Army. They'd cut my hair, and I'd be a number. To me the American involvement was correct. My dad was a cold warrior, and I was a cold-war baby. I knew that Viet Nam was going to be the war of my generation, and I didn't want to miss it. I must say, my timing was impeccable." If the young man had failed as Rimbaud, he might make it as Rambo.

Nope. "My first day in Viet Nam," Stone says, "I realized, like Chris in Platoon, that I'd made a terrible mistake. It was on-the-job training: Here's your machete, kid; you cut point. You learn if you can, and if not you're dead. Nobody was motivated, except to get out. Survival was the key. It wasn't very romantic." Each of the three combat units he served in was divided into antagonistic groups, as in the film: "On one side were the lifers, the juicers ((heavy drinkers)) and the moron white element. Guys like Sergeant Barnes -- and there really was a sergeant as scarred and obsessed as Barnes -- were in this group. On the other side was a progressive, hippie, dope- smoking group: some blacks, some urban whites, Indians, random characters from odd places. Guys like Elias -- and there really was an Elias, handsome, electric, the Cary Grant of the trenches. They were out to survive this bummer with some integrity and a sense of humor. I fell in with the progressives -- a Yale boy who heard soul music and smoked dope for the first time in his life."

Most of Platoon's starkest events come from Stone's backpack of Viet Nam memories. "I saw the enemy for the first time on my first night ambush," he recalls, "and I froze completely. Thank God the guy in the next position saw them and opened up. The ensuing fire fight was very messy. I was wounded in the back of the neck -- an inch to the right and I'd have been dead -- and the guy next to me had his arm blown off." He emptied his rifle clip at a man's feet, as Charlie does in the movie. "He wouldn't stop smiling," says Stone, "and I just got pissed off and lost it. But I did save a girl who was being raped by two of the guys; I think they would've killed her. I went over and broke it up. Another kid -- he's like Bunny ((Kevin Dillon)) in the movie -- clubbed this old lady to death and then kind of boasted about it. We killed a lot of innocents."

The battle at the end of the film was based on a New Year's Day skirmish less than a mile from the Cambodian border. "They hit us with about 5,000 troops that night. They laid bombs right on top of us; we dropped bombs right on them. It's possible that our high command was using us as bait to draw the Viet Cong out so we could inflict heavy casualties. We lost about 25 dead and 175 wounded; we killed about 500 of them. Their bodies were scraped up by bulldozers, just like in the movie. For that battle our platoon was on the inner perimeter, but two weeks later we went back into the same area and got hit by an ambush, like the one that gets Elias. We took about 30 casualties, and I don't think we got one of them."

For all the horrors of his season in hell, Stone admits he got what he went for, as a budding artist ravenous for material in the raw: "I saw combat at the ground level. I saw people die. I killed. I almost was killed. Almost immediately I realized that combat is totally random. It has nothing to do with heroism. Cowardice and heroism are the same emotion -- fear -- expressed differently. And life is a matter of luck. Two soldiers are standing two feet apart. One gets killed, the other lives. I was never a religious person -- I was raised Protestant, the great compromise -- but I became religious in Viet Nam. Possibly I was saved for a reason. To do some work. Write about it. Make a movie about it."

It would take Stone almost a decade, until 1976, before he could write the script of Platoon, and another decade to put it on the screen. But first he had to take his high, wired act on the road. The same month he arrived back from Viet Nam, he was busted for carrying an ounce of marijuana across the Mexico-U.S. border, and called his father, saying, "The good news is that I'm out of Viet Nam. The bad news is that I'm in a California jail, facing five to 20." Stone says his father helped get the charges dropped. "That was my homecoming," he says. "I got a true picture of the States. I hated America. I would have joined the Black Panthers if they'd asked me. I was a radical, ready to kill." Back home his mother noticed the change: "As a little boy he was impeccable. He had his valet; his closet was immaculate. But when he returned he was a mess, always leaving things on the floor. He was a different boy."

And now an unsolicited testimonial: "I know it sounds corny, but I was saved by film school." He enrolled at New York University on the G.I. Bill. "To be able to study movies in college, it was any movie buff's dream. It was cool too, like studying to be an astronaut. Martin Scorsese was my first teacher. He was like a mad scientist, with hair down to here. He was someone on an equal wave of nuttiness. And he helped channel the rage in me." Stone made a short film for Scorsese's class called Last Year in Viet Nam, about a vet wandering the New York streets; in another, Michael and Marie, Oliver's father played the victim. "Oliver was alienated, sarcastic and brooding," says his film-school friend Stanley Weiser, who is collaborating with Stone on a script about Wall Street crime. "A real macho man who carried the torture of Viet Nam with him but never talked about it."

In 1971 Stone graduated and married a Lebanese woman working at the Moroccan delegation to the United Nations; they divorced five years later. He wrote eleven scripts in his spare time, directed a low-budget Canadian thriller called Seizure, and in 1975 got an agent through the graces of Screenwriter Robert Bolt. A year later, as the tall ships clogged New York harbor, Stone sat down and wrote Platoon. "Essentially what I wanted to say was, Remember. Just remember what that war was. Remember what war is. This is it. I wanted to make a document of this forgotten pocket of time. I felt Viet Nam was omitted from history books. Like a battle I fought in during the war: a lot of people got hurt that day, and it wasn't even listed as a battle by the Army, as if they didn't want to admit the casualties we suffered. The script I wrote is pretty much the one I shot ten years later. But no studio wanted to make it; it was too 'depressing' and 'grim.' So I buried it again, figuring that the truth of that war would never come out because America was blind, a trasher of history."

A wild man who becomes a witness: that was Oliver Stone reborn. As he scythed his way through the Hollywood jungle, Stone earned the rep of a specialist with a social agenda. Four of the scripts that bear his name -- Midnight Express, Scarface, Year of the Dragon and 8 Million Ways to Die -- cataloged the seductive evils of the drug trade. Stone's third feature as writer-director (after Seizure and, in 1981, The Hand) laced his usual hip rants on pharmacology with a smart, anguished newsphoto montage of one more Third World nation torn by civil war and shadowed by the looming hulk of American weaponry. This was the gallivanting political melodrama Salvador. Stone dedicated the film to his recently deceased father. "I remember one conversation we had right before he died. He said, 'You'll do all right. There'll always be a demand for great stories and great storytellers.' So finally he forgave me for going into the film business."

In Salvador, Stone was learning to wind the cinematic mechanism until it coiled with productive tension, both on the screen and on the set. "Working with Stone was like being caught in a Cuisinart with a madman," James Woods opines. "And he felt the same about me. It was two Tasmanian devils wrestling under a blanket. But he's a sharp director. He starts with a great idea, delegates authority well, scraps like a street fighter, then takes the best of what comes out of the fracas." Says Dale Dye, the Marine captain who hazed Platoon's actors to firm them up for filming: "Oliver thrives on chaos, throwing together a crew of such diverse backgrounds and ideologies that there's constant friction. It's the kind of energy he thrives on." Platoon's star, Charlie Sheen, 21, found the director "brutally honest. Which is why we clicked. After a scene he'd say, 'You sucked' or 'You nailed it.' That's just my style."

Right now Stone is Hollywood's hot new guy. He is even entertaining the improbable idea of a Platoon TV series. But don't expect Stone to direct Indiana Jones III. Says Stanley Weiser: "Oliver's been around the block ten times and won't be seduced by money. He's not an easy lay." Stone and his second wife, Elizabeth, 37, look the family-album picture of swank domesticity in their Santa Monica home. They swore off drugs a few years ago, and now seem addicted only to each other and their little son Sean. "Success and Sean have made Oliver much mellower," Elizabeth notes. "But he's still a compulsive worker. Always reading or writing, he simply loves ideas. He's filled with them, and he's thrilled with them."

One suspects that the old troublemaker will find new trouble spots in the political landscape; the soapbox spieler will continue his spellbinding harangues. His mind and moral sense are too restless to relax in the glow of celebrity and the promise of statuettes. But for the moment, Oliver Stone has found for himself the one plot twist he would never have put in Platoon: a happy ending to his Viet Nam nightmare.

-Richard Corliss, Time magazine cover story, Jan 26 1987 [x]

[albionscastle]

We’ll Meet Again Pt 3 (A Collins Fic)

This chapter is all Collins.

Note: graphic descriptions of battle. I regret nothing, but I do apologize because this got dark fast.

Part 1 Part 2 

FIC MASTERLIST

SEPTEMBER 15 1940 COLLINS 10:55am

“Scramble, Scramble, Scramble!”

Collins leapt from his chair, hastily shoving his pile of letters into his jacket, heart jumping into his throat, mouth going dry. The loud clatter of men’s boots on the wooden floorboards was punctuated by more shouts as they sprung up from whatever they were doing, rushing for the doors, the barracks room table littered with board games, half written letters and newspapers, all left behind.

The men were all running at full speed toward the lines of Spitfires standing by. Collins clambered up into the cockpit, wrenching his leather helmet from the control column and jamming it onto his head, radio cables and oxygen tubes trailing. He ran through a mental checklist of settings and instruments as proceeding squadrons took to the air around him. An airman climbed onto the wing handing him the straps of his parachute. Muttering a prayer for luck, Collins slipped it on over his shoulders and secured the safety harness.

On the count, Collins turned on the petrol feeds and pushed the starter button, listening to the engine roar to life with a cloud of bluish smoke be fore rolled away and out onto the field.

There were 12 Spitfires in his Squadron, dubbed Oak and they all turned to the wind and formed up, taking off in four sections of three as they had done a hundred or more times in the past two months. Any pilot who wasn’t scared was a fool, and Jack had never been a fool. With a pat of the pocket over his chest he quickly removed her picture, placing it above his instruments. His heart clenched as he took her in, hair lose, eyes wide, a smile on her face. He had never asked her what she’d been smiling at, preferring to think that it was him.

Tapping his gloved hand against her face he smiled beneath his mask. “I’ll be seein ye again soon lass. I promise.”

He was in the last section to take off, just beginning to throttle down the runway when he heard a violent BOOM. Two empty hangars behind erupted in a giant burst of smoke and earth, with two more blasts 30 feet to his right. The shockwave hit his plane like a giant hammer.

“Let’s get out of here!” Harrison Hughes was Flight Lieutenant for this mission, an old friend of Farrier’s.

Collins looked up and saw a massed formation of bombers perhaps 500 feet above, their bomb bay doors open and their wings decorated with the black cross. Bombs were falling all around him and the squadron clawed for enough height to escape.

“Tae the right!” Collins banked as a pair of Messerschmitt 109 fighters screamed into his path, going at least twice their speed. They had no idea, obscured by the bomb smoke, that they had just streaked into the path of a dozen Spitfires.

“Oak 1 do you have them in your sights?”

“Aye Oak leader, I have the one on the left.”

Both fighters blew up mid air as Collins and Hughes pumped out slugs at 160 bullets per second from their wing-mounted guns. The signal was given to regroup, but the armada of bombers had already begun to drop their bombs on the city.

“No ye fuckin dont.” Collins muttered as the other Squadrons joined them, several hundred racing toward the enemy planes.

She was down there somewhere, in danger. He pictured her standing outside the boardinghouse in her blue dress, hand shielding her eyes as she looked to the sky to see the horrors unfolding. His heart wrenched thinking about it, knowing she was beneath this hell somewhere. He had to keep her safe, keep them all safe. It was his job.

Suddenly, a formation of 20 or more ME 109s came diving in out of the sun. They were already firing before Collins and the others even saw them, sliding by underneath them in groups of two and four, passing close enough to see the eyes of the German pilots.

In his experience of the past two years, air warfare felt like a series of illusions and hallucinations. One moment the air was clear, the next it was full of enemy fighters, and then the next they were gone. Trails of tracer fire spat from German guns and remained hanging in the air long after the plane had sped on.

Squinting against the sun, Collins likened them to streaks of death across the sky.

“Jesus!” the air around him was suddenly alive with tracer fire and he turned violently to see two of the enemy planes on his tail, firing. A bomber flew across his sights and he fired, watching him roll over and dive into the clouds below. He banked to the left as the MEs fired again the stick going sloppy in his hand as the nose of his plane dipped vertically down, the ground spinning.

“Shit, shit.” he muttered, able to pull himself out of the spin, maneuvering in behind another enemy plane. The ME seemed to have no idea that Collins was streaking behind him at 450 mph and he stalked it for several minutes before its wings filled the gunsight and he opened fire. Pieces of the plane broke off and Collins watched as the enemy jackknifed into the ground below.

Months of desperate intensity and ‘flying to exhaustion’ had taken their toll, even with the past 24 hours out of the cockpit. Collins could feel his head pounding. The men had been on duty for 20 hours a day, in the air the whole time, with four hours to rest, if they could. And Collins often couldn't. The numbers were against them, the Germans had almost double the planes and pilots, and unlike Fighter Command, they weren't afraid to send them all into battle. “Oak 1, watch your tail!”

Diving under a row of bombers and MEs, Collins executed a steep climbing turn, far tighter than any ME could follow, and came in behind the last bomber in formation.

“Take him, Oak 1, I have his escort!”

The ME to the right banked off, smoke pouring from its engine as it broke up. Collins slowed and nearly stalled as his guns roared, the bomber rolling and vanishing before he homed in on the next, who fell out of sight as the Spitfires dodged and rolled with the MEs. There, suddenly in front of him, was a perfect target, bomb bay doors opening, getting ready to rain hell down upon the innocent civilians below. Bullets erupted from the Spitfire’s guns and the bomber started to go down, falling apart as flames licked through it. Wanting to see it blow up, Collins gave chase, unwittingly showing his tail to a lone ME that had gone unnoticed.

Collins’ eyes widened in sudden fear as he realized what he’d done.

BOOM! Something exploded under his seat, the armour plating barely protecting him and ringing like a bell.

“Shit! No!”

The Spitfire reared up and hurtled into a savage loop before Collins was able to stabilize it.

“Oak leader, I’m hit.”

Petrol sloshed in the bottom of the plane and he knew that one spark from either tracer fire or the exhaust would be the end of him.

“Heard Oak 1, what’s your status?”

“Fuel tank’s been hit, I’ve go petrol in the cockpit.”

Return to base Oak 1, get another plane. Over.”

“Over.”

Collins limped the Spitfire back to base, landing it cleanly, away from the undamaged buildings.

“She can be saved, but donnae let anythin spark near her till ye drain the fuel!” he yelled, sprinting toward the hangar and calling for another plane.

Someone handed him a canteen of water and he waited, several Spitfires from all squadrons limping in, some damaged, some in need of fuel. The armada of bombers had moved off the coast now, over the channel and the exhausted men simply sat and waited. All reports said the Germans would be coming again. The day was far from over yet.

Hot food was placed in front of them and they ate silently, weary and tormented. For all their efforts, the city had still been heavily bombed, though not to the full extent that the Luftwaffe had planned. People were still dead on the ground, and for all Collins knew, she could be one of them. Pulling out her picture he traced his fingers over her face. There was nothing more he wanted than to see her again.

She’d been in his head since that awful night after the evacuation, her gentle kindness as she’d driven him back to the base and the way she’d cried for him and the others. That she was pretty was, at first, merely a bonus. Through the letters they’d sent back and forth something more had developed, but Collins hadn’t truly believed it until she’d been in his arms the day before. The moment he’d felt her arms around him he knew.

Now, they just had to survive long enough for him to tell her, and to ask her to marry him.

“Collins! Mate, I was wondering how you’d got on.”

Hughes pulled up a seat next to him, looking just as tired as the rest of them.

“Warrick and Stevens didn’t make it.”

“Wha abou’ the other squadrons?” Collins asked around a mouthful of bread.

“24 lost total, 36 planes damaged or destroyed.”

“There’s so many of em, so few of us.”

“We have right on our side though, lad. For King and Country and all that.”

“Yeah, but is it enough?” Collins murmured.

“It had has to be.” Hughes leaned over. “That your sweetheart?”

“Yeah. She’s in London, works in a munitions factory there.”

“That’s where you went to yesterday is it? Was it a happy reunion?” Hughes waggled his eyebrows making Collins laugh and blush.

“Wasnae like tha, there was a weddin.”

“Next time you get leave you’re due a few days right?”

Collins nodded, tucking the picture back inside his jacket.

“There’s a place in Cornwall, called the Swan. I took my Sally there for our honeymoon before all this shit started. Lots of beautiful scenery and plenty of privacy, and it's far away from all this.”

“Do ye think she’ll go wi’ me?”

“I do. The amount of letters she sends you, its obvious she loves you.”

Hughes clapped Collins on the shoulder, before turning to his food. Both men were lost in thought, waiting for the inevitable call, watching the flight crews fuel and prep for the next wave.

2pm

“Scramble, Scramble!”

Collins jerked awake, neck aching from his position slumped in the chair.

“See you up there my boy!” Hughes called as they ran for their planes.

Men roared around him, a bravado of sorts building to hide the palpable fear. The game was on again.

The battle roared and raged, the skies bruised and scarred with tracer fire and smoke. The armada of bombers just kept coming, no matter how many of them the men shot down. Collins and Hughes spent an hour engaged with a trio of particularly determined MEs, diving and banking, spinning and shooting. Collins’ hands cramped, sweaty in his leather gloves as his body took a beating. Sweat dripped into his eyes as he squinted against the late afternoon sun.

Finally, after hours of it, the German planes began to retreat back over the channel, the RAF chasing them until they began to run low on fuel.

The squadron flew in formation over London, Collins looking down at the damage inflicted by the bombs below. Fires had broken out in several areas and factories had been reduced to piles of rubble. Terror welled in his throat as he thought about Y/N down there.

“Please be alrigh lass, please.”

“Oak 1, this is Oak leader, over.”

“Heard, Oak leader.”

“I’ve sustained some damage to my left engine, I’m going to pull back and beside you.”

Collins looked out as Hughes pulled back to his right side. He could immediately see the heavy damage sustained.

“Oak leader, notin severe damage tae yer fuselage, and it looks li yer landin gears been taken out.”

“Noted Oak 1, land everyone safely. I’m going to attempt a landing.”

“Oak leader, I don’ recommend tha’”

“Your concern is noted, Oak 1. See you on the ground.”

Collins landed his plane without incident, along with the rest of the squadron. They all crawled out of their cockpits to stand with the flight crews, watching for Hughes.

“C’mon man.” he muttered as he watched the sputtering plane line up for a hard landing. There was silence as it dropped ever lower, seemingly like a rock out of the sky. If anything, the Spitfire seemed to be gaining speed as it descended. It was evident pretty quickly that it was going to be a bad landing. Hughes came in almost sideways, one wing clipping the ground, the one good engine shrieking painfully as the Spitfire flipped over, sliding cockpit first down the runway. Collins and the others looked on in horror as the fuselage erupted into flames.

A horrible screaming came from beneath the cockpit hood, muffled by the crackling of flames.

“Someone help him!” Collins cried out, running toward the burning plane.

“Collins no!” men chased after him as he grabbed a crowbar from the ground, shielding his face from the heat.

“Hughes! I’m comin mate!”

Over and over he swung the iron against the hood, barely even making a dent. Smoke poured from the wreckage, choking him, the heat so intense he could feel the skin on his face burning.

“God damnit! Someone help me! I cannae break the hood!”

A set of arms pulled him back, several of the men holding him as she struggled and yelled. He could see the condemned man convulsing and writhing, hammering on the unyielding cage.

“Collins! Please! Do it, please God, do it!”

The despairing cry of his friend carried over the men as they let Collins go. They had all talked about this, every man had agreed on the course of action.

Collins looked down as someone handed him the gun, tears in his eyes a sick, awful feeling filling his chest. He walked toward the cockpit again, flames licking the inside, Hughes barely moving but still screaming in agony. With a deep breath, Collins pointed the gun forward, looking into the eyes of the dying man. Hughes nodded, mouthing the words “thank you” before closing his eyes. Collins sobbed, tears streaming down his soot-covered face before pulling the trigger, shooting Hughes in the head.

The sea of men parted as he turned away from the wreckage, throwing the gun to the side. Hands brushed his shoulders as silence followed him all the way back to his own plane where he stopped, falling to the ground by the wheel.

He couldn’t breathe, no matter how hard he gasped and struggled for air. Men surrounded him, lying exhausted on the grass. He couldn’t get the image of Hughes out of his head, his pleading eyes, the terrible screams. He felt so desperately alone.

Collins sat for a few minutes, head on his knees as he tried to pull himself together. Finally he managed to catch a breath, fumbling in his pocket and pulling out her picture. Choking back tears he ran his thumb over it, leaving a black smear on the corner from his sooty hands. He just wanted her, needed her to hold him and tell him that he’d done the right thing. Ripping a page from his flight manual he scribbled a note with his grease pencil, fingers leaving black streaks across the paper.

Looking about wildly he clutched it in his hand, no envelope in sight, not really seeing what was around him. Panic rose in his throat as he panted and gasped, he had to find one, had to or it would be the end of the world.

A hand came down firmly on his. “Collins, mate.” the voice of his flight crew member was gentle and calm. “Let me, I’ll take care of it ok.”

He gently pried the crumpled paper from Collins’ hand, knowing the man was close to collapse. He knew where the addresses of the loved ones were kept. Looking down at the paper he sighed heavily, feeling the despair of the younger man in every word.

“I’m alive. I love you. Please forgive me.”

Collins was in a daze as the man walked off, not seeing anything of what was around him. A hand came down gently on his shoulder, followed by another and then more as the men all gathered around, huddled together in the cold night air, all looking toward the smoldering wreckage of Hughes’ plane. Their silent support and acceptance of his actions roused Collins. With a nod he turned away, facing the wheel before curling into a ball and weeping like a baby.

[akiko-moons]

Petals and thorns

Bonus 2 - Transactions.

SLBP modern AU fanfic. Explicit language and allusions to sex. 4000 words (given or taken) Not a native English speaker, so please bear with me! Happy to receive suggestions and pieces of advice!

Prologue part 1 - Prologue part 2

Transaction(s)

Five years ago

No one had ever seen anyone driving a motorbike that way. Heads turned when the rumble of the engine hit the street and eyes glued to the black silhouette that danced through the traffic jam like a billiard ball. Singapore was shining wet with western lights and high-tech lifestyle, even more after the evening rains. Away from the streets close to the centre and the docks' entertainment area, the motorbike ran full speed the West Coast Highway, leaving the viaduct by Pasir Panjang wide docking area. The sun was low on the horizon, light glimmering red and orange on a mosaic of puddles studding the wet, uneven ground.  Along the road, tall shadows were falling from the types construction machinery, motionless after the working hours. The motorbike was now moving cautiously, at a much more considerate speed, the rumble quieted to a low hum. It finally came to a stop in front of an old container, once upon a time of a bright azure, now almost completely eaten by the rust. The place seemed abandoned, but as soon as the engine ceased to sing, three red dots flickered on the black leather of the biker jacket and the distinctive sound of unlocked safeties rang clearly in the dense air of the evening, heavy with humidity and salt. The bicker raised both arms above his head. The container doors opened slowly, and a bald man with dirty pants and an even dirtier shirt left the shadow and stood in the twilight, giving a nod. The bicker slowly moved the helmet visor with one hand, and crimson eyes reflected the red sunset. Eye scan lights moved across the exposed features and a voice barked, unknown.  The guards left their hiding places, while Saizo removed the helmet, getting off the motorbike. The smell of the ocean was strong, only slightly lightened by the recent rain, and its sounds were echoing in a distant murmur. The bald man got close, scratching his head and muffling under his breath in what should have been a Taiwanese dialect.

Shit. Can't I have one working day where things go as planned?

"Ah... mister... so... we had a problem." He raised his eyes to look into Saizo's, the hand still moving above his right ear. "We don't have the katana... anymore" The man said, furrowing the brows against the dying sun. He was shining, covered in sweat and dirt, black moustaches visibly wet but a clean bluetooth plugged in his left ear. Saizo closed his eyes and inhaled a deep breath "And why we don't have the katana anymore?" His mouth was arched in a perfectly polite smile, the eyes narrowed to hide the cold light glinting behind. He kept the helmet in his hand, passing the other through his hair. There were five men in front of him, three more nearby, with laser gunsight weapons. On the left side of the road, there was a smaller container and a couple of cars belonging to the building site. Saizo played in his head the sequence of actions: his helmet flying rapidly against one of the guards, the weapons pointing at the moving object, his flip to reach the container on the left, the hidden men moving out of cover.

Shit. Shit. Shit. I don't really feel like killing someone today.

"Well... a man arrived one hour ago." The ringleader was looking at his feet, hands hanging from the belt loop and eyes glancing from time to time to Saizo. "He said he wanted the katana. We told him we had another buyer and we had a deal. But you see... He paid twice the price we agreed upon with Mr Takeda and he paid cash." A single sweat drop ran from the man temple to his jaw, trailing a shining path. "And who was this generous man?" Saizo was rapidly preparing his body. Regular, measured breaths were slowly summoning that inner calm, that liquid state of consciousness he needed to calibrate events, inside and outside. To shrink time inside and accelerate metabolism, blood pressure, adrenaline, reaction times. To spread time outside and enhance perception of sounds, of smells, of movements, of balance. The ringleader reached a pocket and took what seemed a business card. "He didn't say his name." He looked at Saizo and stretched a trembling hand, moving a slow, tentative step forward.

I know you don't want to die, but it is too late now, isn't it?

Saizo took the card with a fluid movement, the eyes drawn immediately on the name neatly printed in a delicate lavender ink, close to the Uesugi Corporation golden logo.

You... Motherfucker...

Saizo turned the card. On the backside, a heart sketched with a pen, and a message: Because I can't draw properly a middle finger, but you know I love you. K. "

Kageje, you son of a nameless bitch...

Saizo took a deep breath. Now, he was pissed off.

Not only we lost the transaction. But we lost it because of them.

Not waiting any further, he took his slick cellphone from the pants pocket. The flash of a picture lingered in the air, now made heavier by the perfect silence. Few seconds and Saizo's phone vibrated briefly. "Yes... Yes... that and twice the price... Understood." He closed the conversation and put the business card together with the cellphone back in the pocket. He exhaled, slowly, and without taking his eyes off the ringleader, he repeated Shingen's order in a low and even tone: "Mr Takeda is clearly displeased. You can pay with your lives, or you can give me the money of the transaction" He tilted his head "Now". Shingen orders were to make clear certain mistakes weren't tolerated: they were not getting away without some weeks in the hospital, and a little longer in a jail. Moreover, Saizo was going to take the money –  transaction cash couldn't run away to a bank account registered in Cayman Island. Not in an hour at least. As impossible as it seemed, the air became even heavier, a net of gazes turning quickly into a hollow maze of fear.

 Eight months ago

"We need to talk. And where are you running to?" "Remind me: when... or how did we even get married??!" "What?... What are you talking about? We are not married!!" A note of disgust tainted Kanetsugu's voice. Kenshin stopped abruptly, spreading confusion across the court of assistants following him along the Uesugi Corporation corridors. He turned to Kanestsugu and with a very satisfied smile looked down at his Chief Financial Officer "Then why do you insist on talking to me like a disgruntled wife?" A traditional kimono, vivid lavender silk embroidered with delicate dandelions in the same colour, wrapped his tall, athletic body. Kenshin's ash-blond hair glistened under the midday winter sun, the cold light permeating his pale skin and shining in his blue eyes, so dark against the fair complexion. The lavender shade intensified the colour of his eyes, captivating. Amusement played on his lips, and across his features.   "BECAUSE OF THIS!" Completely unaffected by Kenshin's casual indifference and rather upset, Kanestsugo weaved a bundle of papers. "Oh... and what would that be?" Kenshin was as much unappalled, the smile still bright on his face. "THE LETTER FROM OUR NEW TEAM OF EXTERNAL AUDITORS!" Kanetsugu took Kenshin hand and slammed the sheets on the other man palm. He was exasperated. "You were supposed to read this letter two weeks ago!! We need to talk about it now, before it is too late!" Kenshin's eyes became suddenly vague, as trying to remember something. A slender finger reached the beautiful lips, tapping a few seconds. "And who are they, again?". Kanestugu bowed his head, taking a deep breath. His large shoulders were trembling, the hand still fiercely pressing the letter against the other man palm. He was not as tall as Uesugi, so he had to raise his hazel eyes to meet Kenshin's gaze. "They are the ones who will audit our Financial Statements in December. In this letter, they inform us of their audit plans. And more precisely of the investigation, they will carry out on our inventories and purchase transactions of the last five years!" A beautiful misunderstanding was still blissfully illuminating Kenshin's face. Kanetsugu let out a sigh of resignation when, against all the odds, Kenshin expression began to darken, as if a cloud had passed before the sun. His delicate brows knitted and his arms folded "Kanetsugu, you don't mean..." "Yes." This time, Kanetsugu's sigh was of relief "Your treasure." He was going to face a totally different problem, now - a battle, truth to be told, that he couldn't allow himself to lose. "But they can't..." Kanetsugu took a deep breath and raised a hand to stop Kenshin's objections, his body taking a solid stance in the middle of the corridor, the short brown hair glistening in the winter light. And so, it begins... "Not only they can. They will" The court of Kenshin's assistants was looking in astonished silence. "But there is almost one year..." "We need to catalogue all the items, and sell those we can't justify being in possession of." "I can buy..." "No, you can't. Maybe a couple. But you purchasing properties of your company in a substantial amount will look – no, no, no, no, excuse me – will BE suspicious. We need regular, plain, uninteresting transactions. Easy to close. To close quickly." "But you know I can't..." Kanetsugu turned and began to stride along the corridor. "Well then, you'll find yourself another Chief Financial Officer". "Can't we..." "Hide them? How many do you think we can hide considering those in your museums and galleries, the ones you lent for other exhibitions or art catalogues and the ones in the pictures of all those stupid magazines, every time you released an interview?" Kanetsugu stopped and turned to look Kenshin in the eyes. Kenshin stopped. The court stopped, a rustle of costly fabrics and papers. Kenshin was visibly defeated, the brows framing his eyes in a sorrowful expression, the mouth bend in a frustrated line, arms folded and the letter from the external auditors surfacing crumpled from the crinkles of his left sleeve. "I will hire an assistant and will go through it. While we catalogue all that stuff, I'll try to keep what you REALLY hold dear. The rest is out. Gone. Already sold" For a split second, Kanetsugu thought he saw a tear, shyly appearing at the corner of Kenshin eye. The other man took a breath, about to speak... "No" He retorted, resuming the way to his office, a resolute and irremovable expression on his face. Kenshin was following him, in nothing different from a hardly scolded puppy. "But..." "No." "And if... "No." "Please..." "No!" The sounds of Kanetsugu steps broke again, and he turned, snapping at his Chief Executive Officer "Enough, I have work to do. And you do as well!" Kenshin shoulders lowered, together with his beaten eyes. The war was far from over, but Kanetsugu had won the first battle.

  Six months ago The sound of a polite knock reverberated in the office. A pleased smirk bent the left corner of his lips. He kept swinging slowly for only a couple of seconds, eyes fixed on the wide screen behind his desk, then pressed pause and the screen went black, light withdrawing from that corner of the room. He turned to the door. The sun flashed across his face with warm fingers. His hair shone of a red reflection and the grey eyes stood out, framed by long, black lashes. "Come in..." His voice was quiet, with a seductive vibe. Hideyoshi entered, the usual, cheerful grin illuminating his face. Nobunaga knew that smile was genuine. Hideyoshi was blessed with a happy nature and an inflexible will, both outstandingly served by an eclectic, ductile, brilliant mind. The sun touched the man skin and caressed his features, while he moved across the broad office to reach the desk. The brown hair glinted of a gold shade, as well as the wide, warm eyes. Nobunaga laid back against the backrest of his luxurious office chair, observing Hideyoshi's lean body with eyes almost closed. It was not hard to believe the rumours about those many lovers – the man was not simply attractive, he could express surrender and daring pride at the same time. Like his fluid walk, not aggressive and yet not weaken. Relaxed, but still alert.   "Did you call me?" Hideyoshi sat in the comfortable chair before his desk. The voice was excited but positively calm, with a contagious lively vibe. "Indeed, I did!" Nobunaga replied with a cunning smile. There were two sides to Hideyoshi’s honesty as well: he was sincere, but he wasn't always telling everything. Rather than annoying, this aspect was playfully amiable to Nobunaga. He turned a single paper towards Hideyoshi, that took it in his hands, long fingers of a delicate touch. "I see." Hideyoshi smiled "I am sure you approve the contract" "I absolutely do." Nobunaga leaned forward, that cunning smile swiftly turning playful. He placed his chin to rest on the palm of his hand, eyes intent on Hideyoshi's features. "That's a rare combination of different harmonies – Art and Mathematics. Such an unusual yet definitely interesting and extremely appealing combination couldn't pass unnoticed through your fingers..." Nobunaga's smile widened. "Is there anything else that hasn't passed through your fingers… or rather has captured your interest, Hideyoshi...?" "She's undergoing the introduction training to the Nobunaga Enterprise activities." Hideyoshi's eyes were still on the paper, his silky lips curved into a pleased smile. He looked back to Nobunaga "I was thinking to employ her for our non-profit sector, especially for the initiatives of corporate social responsibility, and then to slowly involve her in the end year financial closure process." Flawless, as expected from Hideyoshi. That was a perfect decision and Nobunaga himself couldn't find a better use for the new recruit. He pressed play on his pc keyboard. The screen behind him came to live. The smile rapidly disappeared from Hideyoshi's face, his eyes glittering un unreadable emotion. Nobunaga didn't need to turn to know what the screen was showing – her adorable smile, so earnest and sweet in the beautiful frame of her delicate features.   "She'll go to the Uesugi Corporation." Hideyoshi's eyes moved quickly from the screen to Nobunaga's face, in them clear the light of a discordant surprise. Nobunaga continued "Prepare the usual contract." He leaned further, both hands holding his chin, brows knitted, eyes still in Hideyoshi's. "But be very careful with the clauses - I don't want to lose her. And so do you, isn't it?" He tilted his head to a side.   The paper slightly trembled between Hideyoshi's fingers, his eyes resolutely fixed in those of Nobunaga. You were planning to keep her all for yourself, my little monkey, weren't you? But you see... this is a very special kitten and I can't let you play with her as you wish. Nobunaga smiled. She looked like – and had the same feeling of – a cat: a little thing everyone wishes to touch, with big eyes, dainty pouty lips and a purring voice. He was a dog person, but even someone like him had few exceptions. The interview video showed only her face, but if he ever wanted any other information about the rest of her body, Hideyoshi interest was more than enough to guess all he needed to know. "Why..." The other man voice was calm, curious but also inquisitive. "Uesugi was due to change external auditors' team, and he got one with an uncompromising chief officer. Everyone knows what an art hoarder Kenshin is." Nobunaga moved his head on the other side, resting on the right hand. His eyes followed the left to the zen garden on his desk, where his fingers played on the soft surface of the sand. "Naoe will try to sell all the pieces with doubtful or unproven origin - he needs exactly someone like her." "But why you want to hand her over to them..." The sun was hitting Hideyoshi's face, blazing the golden specks of his eyes and hair. "Because Kenshin is unable to oppose beauty. And Takeda is unable to restrain himself, especially when it comes to Uesugi." He looked back to Hideyoshi. "She is the perfect harbinger of war. The flame of a very interesting fire and I want her to light this boring city. So that while they will resort to the worst they are capable of, we will advance on the market and secure the best deals, preventing our precious kitten to turn to any other competitor we have. For when they will be done with each other, she won't be willing to work with anyone but us. For the rest of her career." Hideyoshi pressed his lips. But those on Nobunaga's face were curved in a mischievous smile, eyes alive with a triumphant light.

  Two months ago

"We need to talk. And where are you running to?"

Kanetsugu heard clearly Kenshin, but he didn't stop: "Remind me: when or how did we even get married?"

Kenshin sighed and mumbled something under his breath.

"I'm sorry, did you say something, Mr Uesugi?" Kanetsugu was smiling cheerfully. Life in his office -  or better, in his department – had never been happier.

"Do we really need to go through this?" Kenshin's voice was boiling in frustration – music for Kanetsugu's ears.

"Sorry, I still can't understand"

Kenshin let out a deep, exaggerated breath, and said plainly "I don't think we are married..."

Kanetsugu stopped, beaming "Then why do you insist on talking to me like a disgruntled wife?"

He turned. Kenshin's brows were knitted, projecting a delicate shadow over his beautiful eyes, and his lips were pressed into a straight line. His body was tense, the arms nervously folded. Kanetsugu could tell Kenshin was about to pout.

He waited in silence.  

Finally, Kenshin gave a long sigh "So..." His eyes suddenly alighted "The room between your office and mine is free. You could have your assistants sitting there..." Now Kenshin was smiling and nodding, his features relaxed.

Oh Kenshin... I will never, ever let you ruin her.

When he hired Akiko, he knew Kenshin would have ended up fascinated, eventually. But he really needed her diversified expertise and substantial experience. And so, he did the best he could to hide her. Successfully, thanks to Kenshin's everlasting lack of interest in financial matters.

For a quite long time, Kanetsugu observed Akiko, undisturbed. Not only her work was accurate and timely, but also reflected her energy and passion.

She was disarmingly honest and unanticipatedly shy. Furthermore, she fought fiercely to safeguard her privacy.

Akiko seemed a very extrovert person. She seemed. She was not.

He saw her evading any possible interference with her private life with the same skilled agility of tightrope walker. Every time a man seemed near to close his fingers on Akiko, she had somehow already slipped away.

That was so reassuring. Like a warm blanket on Kanetsugu's worries. When, finally, Kenshin crossed her in a corridor, Kanetsugu didn't really like what he saw in Uesugi's eyes. But Akiko evasion spell, plus life and needs of the office, played in Kanetsugu's favour. In order to see, meet, come across, talk to, share the same room with Akiko, Kenshin didn't protest – well, he protested very feebly and totally uncertain – when Kanetsugu had him sign many sale contracts of his disputable collection. He had him wrapped around his little finger – well, technically Akiko had him, but she was blissfully unaware.

Kanetsugu smiled back to Kenshin "Oh, but my assistants can't sit there, can they? You see, the three of them are women and your rule prevent women from sitting on the executive floor" the same smile on his face, Kanetsugu proceeded towards his office.

"I will unmake that rule then!" Kenshin's voice, usually so melodious, was powered by frustration and rose in volume.

That rule was THE rule.

The heads of many colleagues peered out just as many open doors.

"Very well, I'll have Tomoko e Nanami move there as soon as possible" Kanetsugu didn't bother to stop flipping through the folder in his hands, resuming the path to his room.

But then Kenshin gabbed Kaetsugu's arm "What about Akiko?"

"Oh, she's a consultant." Kanetsugu stopped "If you undo the rule, many other employees will request a desk on the executive floor – and all of them hold a much senior position". He was unapologetically happy.

Kenshin grip tightened. Too late, Kanetsugu realized that he was talking to the CEO of the Uesugi Corporation, not his old friend. Kenshin eyes have darkened, the flame of an unwavering resolution in the depths of those blue oceans. "Take all my assistants, but give me Akiko".

Kanetsugu's eyes widened.

He's serious. "You mean your court of assistants? Why should I want to take your useless assistants? They wouldn't even know where to start from. Besides, Akiko works perfectly with the rest of our financial team. I have no reason to move her to another assignment."

Kenshin slightly cocked back his head and raised his chin, blue eyes narrowing. His grip on Kanetsugu's arm intensified further, and his voice dropped to a low, rumbling sound "I want her" Kenshin articulated each word, the flame in his eyes underlining the need behind his request. "I need to see her, to breath her, to nourish my muse"

There is a technical limit to how many noes a Chief Financial Officer can say to his Chief Executive Officer. And there was an even smaller allowance for the numbers of noes Uesugi Kenshin was ready to accept from Naoe Kanetsugu before to remind everybody who was leading the company.

Kanetsugu placed his hand on the one gripping his arm "Is this what you think that she wants?" With a firm tug, Kanetsugu freed his arm "She's not a statue or a painting that you move at your pleasure. If you have so much free time to obsess over the idea of her in your mind, why don't you rather discover the real woman? Or are you planning to idealize her and then run away from reality, like you always do?" Kanetsugu matched Kenshin's resolute gaze. "This time I won't let you carry on with your selfish little schemes. Your company needs her – is not just about your needs. And I don't want to see her whiter under the winds of your whims. You want to move on her that badly? Fine, but only after the financial closure. She doesn't deserve your superficial, ephemeral interest"

Kanetsugu wasn't particularly proud of the sorrow glimmering in Kenshin's eyes, but still, he didn't give in to that man, which was enough of a reason to be content. He pressed the folder on Kenshin's chest until the other man took it in his delicate fingers.

He sighed "Besides, how am supposed to explain to Kageie that his sleeping couch has moved?"

Kenshin blinked once, took in a deep breath and almost screamed "What?"

Kanetsugu weaved a hand, while taking up his way to the office "Aren't you happy your watchdog is so compliant?" He couldn't suppress an amused smile. Indeed, it was a very happy and favourable moment for his department.

[mnfrmhmn]

Assassination Attempt On Korotski Province’s First Female Dictator

           I hated how good she looked in that dust pan-grey-with-red-and-gold trim military uniform.  She managed to make it look slimming, I always thought I came off as boxy.  But she was all, “No, no Dear, it really brings out your shoulders.”  Whatever, bitch.  We’ll see how much you like my shoulders in Hell.  Because that’s where I’m sending you.  I won’t be there, so you’ll have to find some sort of vantage point from which to scope out my totally jacked shoulders, even though the supposed geographical location of Hell would probably limit you from achieving that aim, but you’d find a way, wouldn’t you, you cunning cunt.      

           Goddammit.  Even through gunsights, she looked better than I did.  And not just in looks, but just… Goddamn, just in confidence.  She was fully-exposed from the waist up, waving from the hatch of one of the new T-87 Tanks that I had suggested we started developing, what, five fucking years ago?  

           It’s something in her eyes.  That’s what makes people drawn to her.  Weak, wormy people who meet a coldly cute political aide in a snow-caked tavern, strike up a conversation, next thing you know they’re standing at the altar wondering how in the hell they got so lucky, next thing they know, their party comes out victorious in the military coup that happens almost biannually, and the last thing they know is they’re crouched on a rooftop in the middle of January wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a leather jacket staring through the sights of a high-powered Mark 14 Sniper Rifle getting ready to start the process all over again for some poor sucker whose found his soulmate in some other snow-caked tavern and has no idea that his political party is about to go the Cyrillic word for “absolutely fucking apeshit, but not too apeshit, because rebuilding infrastructure takes a lotta money and we don’t have that kind of budget,” when he finds out the loon who got exiled found himself a gun and a rooftop and put two and two together.

           Oh well.  Lucky him.  

[bountyofbeads]

Thanks to Arwa Damon and her team on the ground in Iraq and as the 'Fog Of War' begins to lift in 🇮🇶 Iraq, we are beginning to see the real danger our U.S. 🇺🇸 troops and our Iraqi partners were truly in. PRAISE BE TO GOD none were injured, maimed, or killed. Trump and his minions need to realize that their decisions have real life effects and going to war with Iran 🇮🇷 is a losing proposition for all sides. DIPLOMACY IS THE ONLY ANSWER TO SOLVING THE SITUATION WITH THE LEADERSHIP OF IRAN.

US troops sheltered in Saddam-era bunkers during Iran missile attack (VIDEO)

By Tamara Qiblawi, Arwa Damon and Brice Laine | Updated 4 hours ago Jan 13, 2020 | CNN | Posted Jan 13, 2020 |

Al-Asad air base, Iraq (CNN) - Akeem Ferguson was in a bunker when his team received the bone-chilling radio transmission: Six Iranian ballistic missiles were headed in their direction.

The concrete slab they had taken cover under offered little protection from projectiles that US troops in Iraq were being attacked with.

"I held on to my gun and put my head down and I tried to find a happy place, so I started singing to my daughters in my head," said the six-foot tall US Staff Sergeant. "And I just waited. I hoped that whatever happened, that it was quick."

"I was 100% ready to die," he added.

Ferguson survived unscathed along with other US troops and civilian contractors on Iraq's al-Assad base, after a barrage of Iranian ballistic missiles on the morning of January 8.

The strike was the widest scale attack on a base housing US troops in decades. Troops said the absence of casualties was nothing short of a "miracle."

American troops stationed at the base are helping to counter ISIS and train Iraqi security forces. No Iraqi troops were hurt in the attack.

A closer look at the site reveals a base vulnerable to this type of assault.

Personnel received advance warning of the strike several hours before it took place, enabling them to take cover. Still they lacked the surface-to-air defenses to fend off a ballistic missile assault -- US military did not build structures on the base, one of the oldest and largest in Iraq, to protect against an attack of this kind. They were at the mercy of the downpour of missiles.

Near the airfield, shards of metal crack underfoot as two military personnel take measurements of the gaping crater left behind by one of the missiles. It is around 2 meters deep and roughly 3 meters in diameter -- a burned copy of "Beauty and the Beast" teeters on the edge of the hole. A flip-flop, an Uno card, and a military jacket stick out from the charred wreckage left in the wake of the missile.

This was a housing unit for drone pilots and operators on the base. They evacuated the unit before the strike. Incidentally, the they had nicknamed the living quarters "chaos."

Like most of the US section of the base, they had already been on lockdown at bunkers for over two hours when the first missiles landed.

The strike was an Iranian response to the US drone attack, ordered by US President Donald Trump, that killed Iran's most powerful general, Qasem Soleimani, less than a week before.

After days of anticipation, Tehran's zero-casualty retaliation came as a relief to many. At al-Asad camp, troops could rest easy after days of heightened alert. For countries across the region, it marked a welcome climbdown after the killing of Soleimani raised the specter of region-wide war.

Ten of the 11 missiles struck US positions at the sprawling desert Iraqi airbase. One struck a remote location on the Iraqi military's side.

Roughly one-third of the base is controlled by the US. The Iranian missiles, which used on-board guidance systems, managed to shred sensitive US military sites, damaging a special forces compound, and two hangars, in addition to the US drone operators' housing unit.

CNN journalists were the first to be granted access to the base after the Iranian attack.

ADVANCE WARNING

The first warning came from secret intelligence signals in the evening before the attack. By 11 p.m. on January 7, most of the US troops at al-Asad were sent to bunkers, and a few had been flown out, according to commanders at the base.

Only essential personnel, such as tower guards and drone pilots, would remain unsheltered. They were protecting against a ground assault which base commanders expected would follow the missile attack.

Ground forces never came, and troops would only re-emerge from their shelters at the break of dawn. The strike had ended just before 4 a.m.

Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi has said he was told by Iran, at around midnight, to expect airstrikes inside his country. An Arab diplomat who CNN spoke to said that the Iraqis passed on information about the strikes to the US.

But the US had already received reporting about a ballistic missile attack by the time the Iraqis could notify them, according to al-Asad's Lieutenant Colonel Tim Garland.

The first missiles fell at 1:34 a.m. They were followed by three more volleys, spaced out by more than 15 minutes each. The attack lasted over two hours. Troops on the base described it as a time fraught with suspense, fear and feelings of defenselessness.

"You can defend against (paramilitary forces), but you can't defend against this," said Captain Patrick Livingstone, US Air Force Security Forces Commander on the base, referring to previous rocket attacks by armed groups. "Right now, this base is not designed to defend against missiles."

Ill-equipped to defend against ballistic missiles

As the expected attacks drew nearer, most troops filed into dusty, pyramid-like structures peppered throughout the base. These bunkers were built during the rule of deposed President Saddam Hussein.

The thick, slanting walls were constructed decades previous to deflect blasts from Iran. Baghdad had a bloody eight-year war with Tehran (1980-1988) which ended with a stalemate. It was a time when the new Islamic Republic was beginning to demonstrate its military prowess.

US troops said that they were unsure whether the Saddam-era shelters would withstand the ballistic missiles. But they were more sturdy than US bunkers, made to protect against rockets and mortars.

Relatively light-weight rockets and mortars are typically used by ISIS, jihadi extremists and Shia paramilitary in Iraq, who for years have had US troops in their crosshairs. But Iranian ballistic missiles have a far longer range and carry a far bigger payload of explosives -- estimated to be at least half a ton each.

Footsteps echo in a narrow passageway leading into the Saddam-era bunker. The walls are double-layered -- large holes in the interior reveal the coppery outer wall embedded with fans. Two spacious living areas are filled with folding beds, mattresses, stretchers and lockers. On the night of the attack, one of the rooms doubled as a makeshift bathroom, with cut up plastic water bottles serving as urinals.

Lieutenant Colonel Staci Coleman was one of the US team leaders who corralled troops into such a bunker. After about an hour and a half of being in the shelter, she had doubts.

"I was sitting in a bunker and I was like man, maybe I made the wrong decision [to come down here]," said Coleman.

"About 10 minutes, after I said that to myself, it went boom boom boom boom boom and I said well there's my answer."

"The whole ground shook. It was very loud," she said. "You could feel the blast wave in here. We knew they were close."

She said the doors appeared to bend like waves with every hit that reverberated through the shelter. None of the bunkers on the base were impacted.

Meanwhile, Staff Sergeant Ferguson was in a US-made bunker -- a crammed space held together by slabs of five-inch concrete fortified by sandbags. He watched the attack unfold through cracks between the adjacent walls.

"There's a little hole on the side of the shelter and we saw a flash of orange light," said Ferguson. "After that we figured that every time we see a flash it's just a couple of seconds before it's going to hit.

"It was Flash. Boom. Flash. Boom. We didn't know when it was going to stop. We sat there and waited for it to end."

After the first volley, several went out to look for casualties. When the second volley hit nearly 15 minutes later, some were caught in the open.

Staff Sergeant Ferguson said he was worried about comrades who were trapped outside. "After the second volley was over, I was worried about them being at the gate. So I left and went and grabbed them, brought them back to the shelter with us, and then we waited..." he said.

At the time of the expected ground assault, Ferguson had emerged from his bunker to face off with whatever came next. He described peering into the darkness over their gunsights, worn out by the shock of the missiles. But the attack never came.

"We were so tired. It was the worst adrenaline rush ever," said Ferguson.

When troops had all emerged from the bunkers, many went to work, repairing the damage. They described feeling a mixture of relief and shell-shocked. "It was 'normalish' afterwards," said Coleman. "But we were all looking each other in the eye as if to say 'are you ok?'"

Several troops CNN spoke to said the event had shifted their view of warcraft: the US military is rarely on the receiving end of sophisticated weaponry, despite launching the most advanced attacks in the world.

"You looked around at each other and you think: Where are we going to run? How are you going to get away from that?" said Ferguson.

"I don't wish anyone to have that level of fear," he said. "No one in the world should ever have to feel something like that."

*********

Who Signs Up to Fight? Makeup of U.S. Recruits Shows Glaring Disparity

More and more, new recruits come from the same small number of counties and are the children of old recruits.

By Dave Philipps and Tim ARANGO |Published Jan. 10, 2020 | New York Times | Posted January 13, 2020 |

COLORADO SPRINGS — The sergeant in charge of one of the busiest Army recruiting centers in Colorado, Sergeant First Class Dustin Comes, joined the Army, in part, because his father served. Now two of his four children say they want to serve, too. And he will not be surprised if the other two make the same decision once they are a little older.

“Hey, if that’s what your calling is, I encourage it, absolutely,” said Sergeant Comes, who wore a dagger-shaped patch on his camouflage uniform, signifying that he had been in combat.

Enlisting, he said, enabled him to build a good life where, despite yearlong deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he felt proud of his work, got generous benefits, never worried about being laid off, and earned enough that his wife could stay home to raise their children.

“Show me a better deal for the common person,” he said.

Soldiers like him are increasingly making the United States military a family business. The men and women who sign up overwhelmingly come from counties in the South and a scattering of communities at the gates of military bases like Colorado Springs, which sits next to Fort Carson and several Air Force installations, and where the tradition of military service is deeply ingrained.

More and more, new recruits are the children of old recruits. In 2019, 79 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who served. For nearly 30 percent, it was a parent — a striking point in a nation where less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military.

For years, military leaders have been sounding the alarm over the growing gulf between communities that serve and those that do not, warning that relying on a small number of counties that reliably produce soldiers is unsustainable, particularly now amid escalating tensions with Iran.

“A widening military-civilian divide increasingly impacts our ability to effectively recruit and sustain the force,” Anthony M. Kurta, acting under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service last year. “This disconnect is characterized by misperceptions, a lack of knowledge and an inability to identify with those who serve. It threatens our ability to recruit the number of quality youth with the needed skill sets to maintain our advantage.”

To be sure, the idea of joining the military has lost much of its luster in nearly two decades of grinding war. The patriotic rush to enlist after the terrorist attacks of 2001 has faded. For a generation, enlisting has produced reliable hardship for troops and families, but nothing that resembles victory. But the military families who have borne nearly all of the burden, and are the most cleareyed about the risks of war, are still the Americans who are most likely to encourage their sons and daughters to join.

With the goal of recruiting about 68,000 soldiers in 2020, the Army is now trying to broaden its appeal beyond traditional recruitment pools. New marketing plays up future careers in medicine and tech, as well as generous tuition benefits for a generation crushed by student debt. The messaging often notes that most Army jobs are not in combat fields.

But for now, rates of military service remain far from equal in the United States, and the gap may continue to widen because a driving decision to enlist is whether a young person knows anyone who served in the military. In communities where veterans are plentiful, teachers, coaches, mothers, uncles and other mentors often steer youths toward military service. In communities where veterans are scarce, influential adults are more wary.

That has created a broad gap, easily seen on a map. The South, where the culture of military service runs deep and military installations are plentiful, produces 20 percent more recruits than would be expected, based on its youth population. The states in the Northeast, which have very few military bases and a lower percentage of veterans, produce 20 percent fewer.

Top Counties for Army Recruitment(SEE MAP ON WEBSITE)

Each map shows the 500 counties with the highest recruitment rates in a given year as a percentage of population, excluding counties with fewer than five recruits.

The main predictors are not based on class or race. Army data show service spread mostly evenly through middle-class and “downscale” groups. Youth unemployment turns out not to be the prime factor. And the racial makeup of the force is more or less in line with that of young Americans as a whole, though African-Americans are slightly more likely to serve. Instead, the best predictor is a person’s familiarity with the military.

“Those who understand military life are more likely to consider it as a career option than those who do not,” said Kelli Bland, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Recruiting Command.

That distinction has created glaring disparities across the country. In 2019, Fayetteville, N.C., which is home to Fort Bragg, provided more than twice as many military enlistment contracts as Manhattan, even though Manhattan has eight times as many people. Many of the new contracts in Fayetteville were soldiers signing up for second and third enlistments.

This was not always the case. Military service was once spread fairly evenly — at least geographically — throughout the nation because of the draft. But after the draft ended in 1973, enlistments shifted steadily south of the Mason-Dixon line. The military’s decision to close many bases in Northern states where long winters limited training only hastened the trend.

Today, students growing up in military communities are constantly exposed to the people who serve. Moms pick up their sons from day care in flight suits. Dads attend the fourth-grade holiday party in camouflage. High schools often have Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs in which students wear uniforms to class once a week and can earn credit for learning about science, leadership and fitness through a military framework.

Many schools encourage students to take the military’s aptitude exam, the ASVAB, in the way students nationwide are pushed to take the SAT.

That exposure during school is one of the strongest predictors of enlistment rates, according to a 2018 report by the Institute for Defense Analyses.

In Colorado Springs, the high schools with the highest number of military families are also the biggest producers of recruits, Sergeant Comes said, adding that parents aware of the military’s camaraderie, stability and generous health, education and retirement benefits often march their children into his office and encourage them to join.

“We just tell them our story: ‘This is where I was, one of six kids living in a trailer. This is where I am today.’ Good pay check. Great benefits,” he said, adding that even in good economic times, it is an easy sell. His recruiting station made its goals handily this month.

His biggest challenge is finding recruits before they are scooped up by recruiters from the Air Force, Navy and Marines, who work the same fertile neighborhoods.

The situation is markedly different in regions where few people traditionally join.

In Los Angeles, a region defined by liberal politics where many families are suspicious of the military, the Army has struggled to even gain access to high schools. By law, schools have to allow recruiters on campus once a semester, but administrators tightly control when and how recruiters can interact with students. Access is “very minimal,” said Lt. Col. Tameka Wilson, the commander of the Los Angeles Recruiting Battalion.

Predictably, enlistment rates are low.

In 2019 the Army made a push to increase recruiting efforts in 22 liberal-leaning cities like Los Angeles.

As part of that, Army Secretary Ryan D. McCarthy visited officials from the Los Angeles Unified School District in December to push for greater access.

“He was doing a sort of listening tour,” said Patricia Heideman, who is in charge of high school instruction for the school district and said there was a perception the military preys on disadvantaged students. “I told him from the educator perspective, we sometimes feel they are targeting our black and brown students and students of poverty,” she said. And therefore they are less likely to push enlistment.

Recognizing it cannot sustain recruitment numbers by relying only on the South and military communities, the Army has tried to broaden its appeal. Slick ads on social media offer less of the guns-and-grunts messaging of decades past. Instead they play up college benefits and career training in medical and tech fields.

Even within one state there are striking differences in how communities view military service. Colorado Springs produced 29 times as many enlistments in 2019 as nearby Boulder, a liberal university town.

“I grew up in Boulder, and the military appealed to me but it was just not in the culture, or my family,” said Brett Dollar, who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. “The conversation was not ‘What do you want to do after high school?’ but ‘Which college are you going to go to?’”

She attended Middlebury College in Vermont before becoming a police officer in Fort Collins and, eventually, a law enforcement dog handler.

This fall, at age 32, she decided to enlist in the Army, drawn by the chance to work with dogs in security, bomb-sniffing and rescue missions around the world. She ships to basic training in about a week.

“I’d always had an itch to serve in the military and be useful,” she said. “I think it took me being on my own for a while to realize it was a possibility.”

She said she was going into the work knowing she could soon end up deployed to a combat zone.

“The Army is ultimately a war-fighting organization — you go in knowing that,” she said. “I guess I really didn’t see that as a downside. It’s a core value of mine to try to be of service.”

______

Dave Philipps reported from Colorado Springs and Tim Arango from Los Angeles.

*********

A New Nuclear Era Is Coming

We’ve gone from the first decade since the advent of the atomic age to not yield a new nuclear-weapons state to the brink of war between the U.S. and Iran.

By Uri Friedman | Published Jan 9, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted Jan 12, 2020 |

Iranian missile attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. Deadly chaos in Iran. A sudden halt of the fight against the Islamic State. Utter confusion over whether U.S. troops will remain in Iraq, and even whether the United States still respects the laws of war. The fallout from the Trump administration’s killing of Qassem Soleimani has been swift and serious.

But one potential knock-on effect may not come into clear view for some time: the emergence of Iran as the next nuclear-weapons state, at the very moment when the world appears on the cusp of a more perilous nuclear age. It’s possible that the Reaper drone hovering over Baghdad’s airport last week destroyed not only an infamous Iranian general, but also the last hope of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Before he’d even said “good morning” during an address to the nation yesterday, Donald Trump vowed that Iran would “never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon” as long as he’s president of the United States. Yet as he urged other world powers to abandon the nuclear deal that they and the Obama administration negotiated with Iran, and that Trump withdrew the U.S. from in 2018, he offered no details on his plan to obtain a better deal.

When the Iranian government announced that it would suspend more (though not yet all) of its commitments under the nuclear agreement, in a move made after Soleimani’s death but planned beforehand, I recalled something Richard Burt, the U.S. diplomat behind the largest nuclear-weapons reduction in history, told me back in 2018. He noted that in the ’80s, when he negotiated the START I treaty with the Soviet Union, people were acutely aware of the existential dangers of a nuclear conflict. That’s no longer the case, he warned.

“No one is focusing on the fact that the existing framework for nuclear control and constraints is unraveling” and giving way to “unrestrained nuclear competition,” Burt observed. What we’re witnessing, he argued, is not some sort of creative destruction, in which an outdated Cold War framework is being discarded in favor of a more modern one. It’s “just destruction.”

Indeed, we’ve gone from the first decade since the advent of the atomic age to not yield a new nuclear-weapons state to, in the first days of 2020, the brink of war between the world’s leading nuclear power and a nuclear aspirant. The Trump administration is now poised to face at least two simultaneous nuclear crises along with an escalating and unprecedented tripartite nuclear-arms race, all of which will threaten the miraculously perfect track record of nuclear deterrence since 1945. Even if there are no nuclear tests or exchanges in the year ahead, the systems, accords, and norms that have helped mitigate the risks of nuclear conflict are vanishing, ushering in a more hazardous era that the United States won’t be able to control.

Consider what has transpired in the past year alone:  

A newly unconstrained Iranian nuclear program: Iran has gradually cast off the shackles of the 2015 nuclear agreement following Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the pact, though it is still cooperating with international inspectors and leaving itself space to return to compliance if the United States lifts sanctions against Tehran. Experts estimate that with the recent steps away from the deal, the time that Iran would need to generate enough fuel for a nuclear bomb could decrease from roughly a year to a matter of months.

An emerging North Korean nuclear-weapons power: The North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed over New Year’s to further advance his nuclear-weapons program, which is already likely sophisticated enough to threaten the whole world, after nuclear talks with the United States fell apart. The targeted killing of a top Iranian official, just a few years after the Iranians struck the nuclear accord with the United States, will probably only reinforce Kim’s belief that the only way for his regime to avoid a similar fate is to cling to its nuclear weapons. The former North Korean diplomat Thae Yong Ho told me he’s concerned Kim could go well beyond that in the coming year, perhaps declaring that the U.S. economic blockade of his country has left his nation no choice but to survive by selling nuclear and missile technologies to other parties, including U.S. adversaries.

The specter of other countries going nuclear: Failing efforts to denuclearize North Korea and broker a better nuclear deal with Iran, coupled with concerns among U.S. allies about Trump’s commitment to providing for their security against these adversaries, have generated talk of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Saudi Arabia exploring nuclear weapons of their own rather than relying on America’s nuclear deterrent. In a forecast of possible geopolitical risks in 2020, published a couple of weeks before Soleimani’s killing, two scholars at the Atlantic Council predicted that South Korea and Australia, “already pondering nukes, may move to the next stage of actively considering them in 2020, as may Japan. If the Iran nuclear crisis is not resolved, expect the Saudis to buy or rent a nuke from Pakistan.”

Emboldened nuclear states in South Asia: Clashes between India and Pakistan in February 2019, sparked by an attack on Indian security forces by Pakistani militants in the disputed territory of Kashmir, didn’t go nuclear. But they did escalate to an Indian air strike on a terrorist training camp in Pakistan—an act the nuclear experts Nicholas Miller and Vipin Narang have described as “the first ever attack by a nuclear power against the undisputed sovereign territory of another nuclear power.” These were nuclear powers with growing arsenals, no less.

The demise of U.S.-Russian arms control: Blaming Russian violations of the agreement and the unfairness of China not being a party to it, the United States officially withdrew in August from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned an entire class of ground-launched nuclear weapons. The Trump administration has also signaled that it may not renew New START, a 2010 successor to START I that’s due to expire next year and limits the number of nuclear warheads that the U.S. and Russia can deploy on longer-range missiles. The hope is that this will free up the United States to reach a more comprehensive deal that includes China, but so far that idea seems fantastical. A New START lapse would do away with the only remaining nuclear-arms-control treaty. It would also mark the first time since 1972 that America and Russia, which together account for more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, haven’t had any legally binding restrictions on their nuclear forces.

The outbreak of great-power competition: The collapse of the INF Treaty coincides with heightened rivalry among the United States, China, and Russia, threatening to accelerate their budding nuclear-arms race. They’re already investing heavily in modernizing their nuclear arsenals and in new technologies such as hypersonic glide vehicles, which evade missile defenses; cyberweapons against command-and-control systems; and artificial intelligence to incorporate into those systems. Meanwhile, the U.S.-China trade war hacks away at the economic interdependence that has helped deter conflict between the two nuclear-armed superpowers.

Read: Inside the collapse of Trump’s Korea policy

These dismal circumstances follow substantial advances in halting the spread of nuclear weapons. In the ’60s, the decade in which the most new nuclear states emerged (France, China, and, unofficially, Israel), John F. Kennedy predicted that there would be “15 or 20” nuclear powers by 1975. Today there are nine, a rate of about one to two entrants into the nuclear club per decade, with the latest being North Korea in 2006. The nuclear-security scholar Jim Walsh has noted that three-fourths of countries that were once interested in developing nuclear weapons ultimately chose not to do so, and that since the ’90s, more states have given up nuclear weapons than acquired them.

The number of nuclear weapons in the world, moreover, has dropped from more than 70,000 in 1986 to fewer than 14,000 today because of arms-control efforts. (That’s still enough, of course, to kill billions of people and envelop the world in a nuclear winter. When it comes to nuclear nonproliferation, progress is only heartening when expressed in relative terms.)

Most of the reductions in these weapons, however, occurred in the ’90s, and the pace of cuts has slowed ever since. We now live in a period when the barriers to acquiring nuclear weapons, a 75-year-old technology, are much lower than they once were. It’s also a time when, as James Holmes of the U.S. Naval War College once explained to me, there are more nuclear-weapons states “of different shapes and sizes … [and] different trajectories,” making the “geometry” of nuclear deterrence “far more complex and harder to manage” than during the comparatively symmetrical Cold War.

Add to that the fading memory of the Cold War and fiercer competition among the great powers, and it’s no surprise that the guardrails on the world’s most destructive weapons are disappearing.

The past year may be remembered “as the turning point from an era of relative calm” to “the dawn of a dangerous new nuclear age,” Miller and Narang wrote last month in Foreign Affairs. The consequences could be “catastrophic.”

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The Race for Big Ideas Is On

The United States faces genuinely new global challenges—but tries to understand them using outmoded theories from a bygone era.

By Amy Zegart, Contributing writer | Published January 13, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted January 13, 2020 |

In the past two weeks, escalating hostilities brought the United States to the brink of yet another conflict in the Middle East—this time with Iran. But such a conflict might not look much like the others that American forces have fought in the 21st century.

Tank-on-tank warfare this isn’t. While crises are inherently unpredictable, Iran’s decision on Tuesday to lob missiles at bases housing American troops in Iraq might well be the last of its conventional retaliation for the American air strike that killed General Qassem Soleimani. Future hostilities are more likely to occur in cyberspace, not in physical space.

The Soleimani strike is a harbinger in other ways. Historically, targeted killing has been rare as an instrument of war because it has been so difficult technically. The last time the United States killed a major military leader of a foreign power was in World War II, when American forces shot down an airplane carrying the Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. These killings are unlikely to be so rare in the future. Because drones allow constant surveillance and can strike precise targets, states may credibly threaten so-called decapitation attacks in ways that nobody imagined possible short of all-out nuclear war.

When battlegrounds are growing invisible and leaders can be killed by airplanes without pilots, it’s fair to say that conflict is not what it used to be. The rise of cyberaggression, information warfare, autonomous weapons, and other technologies all require a thorough reevaluation of the coming era, what geopolitics will look like, and the kinds of capabilities that will give nations a strategic advantage against their competitors. Yet the United States still lacks the sort of dominant explanatory framework that can guide American policy regardless of who the president is.

It’s not for lack of trying. Many people have been grappling with how to strengthen America’s national security in an uncertain era. The far-flung outposts of these efforts range from conference rooms on Capitol Hill and offices in suburban-Virginia strip malls to hotel ballrooms and slick boardrooms in Silicon Valley. There are new Pentagon units to harness technological innovation and bipartisan national commissions on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. (I am an expert adviser for the AI commission.) There are intelligence studies to identify baseline trends and megatrends driving the future of international-security challenges, and think-tank reports and academic workshops on the future of just about everything.

All of these initiatives are seeking to look beyond the anxieties of today to understand the threats of tomorrow. And nearly all of them start with two insights: The first is that we face a “hinge of history” moment. Emerging technologies are poised to transform societies, economies, and politics in dramatic and unprecedented ways. The second is that we need better ideas to make sense of this new world so that American interests and values can prevail.

When one of the big ideas involves calling for more big ideas, you know it’s tough out there. The technological race is challenging, but it is likely to be the easy part. It’s the ideas race—who best understands the levers and opportunities presented by technological disruption and shifts in the world’s political geography—that will determine geopolitical winners and losers. Some strategic insights provide competitive advantage; Russia recognized well before the United States did, for instance, that the rise of social media magnified the impact of information warfare.

Other strategic insights, if widely shared, become invaluable guides to democratic policy making and cooperation, enabling like-minded states to thwart repression and aggression of authoritarian regimes. How are military strategists and average American voters alike supposed to understand the world now confronting them—and decide which conflicts to undertake and how?

In unsettled moments like the current one, the cost of a conceptual mistake is high. At the end of World War II, the U.S. found itself locked in confrontation with the Soviet Union, a former ally that sought to export its own revolutionary ideology, communist economic system, and repressive governance around the world. American strategists built a foreign policy for the next half century around the strategy of containment developed by George Kennan in his famous 1947 “X” article. A career diplomat and Russia expert, Kennan believed that winning the superpower conflict required, above all, patience. The United States, he argued, should use every element of national power—including economics, diplomacy, and military force—to contain the spread of communism. Eventually, he predicted, the Soviet Union would collapse from its own weaknesses. Every president from Harry Truman to George H. W. Bush pursued containment in various ways. Not every policy worked, and some, like the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War, failed disastrously. But Kennan was fundamentally right, and his ideas provided the North Star for Republican and Democratic presidents alike.

But when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, policy makers were suddenly left without a conceptual blueprint for navigating global politics. In the place of containment, a gauzy optimism took hold. Major threats were considered passé: The end of history had arrived, and democracy had won. Declaring a “peace dividend,” policy makers slashed defense spending and cut the CIA’s workforce by 25 percent, hollowing out a generation just as a terrorist threat was emerging. In the post–Cold War decade, the United States focused its foreign policy on nation building, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief. The Pentagon even created a new acronym for its operations: MOOTW, or “Military Operations Other Than War.” Nothing says strategic drift like focusing America’s warfighters on jobs other than the one they were hired and trained to do.

Today’s conceptual struggle is harder because the threats are more numerous, complex, varied, uncertain, and dynamic; because all of them are being supercharged by technological advances that will work in ways no one can fully fathom; and because two of the most widely discussed concepts so far have been force fits from a bygone era.

The notion of a new Cold War with China is all the rage. It’s a term that provides a strange sort of comfort—like seeing a long-ago friend at your college reunion—and yet no great insight. The U.S.-Soviet Cold War was driven primarily by ideology. The current competition with China is driven primarily by economics. And while the Cold War split the world into two opposing camps with almost no trade or meaningful contact between them, the key feature of today’s Sino-American rivalry isn’t division by an iron curtain but entanglement across global capital markets and supply chains.

Deterrence is another Cold War oldie-but-goodie. It sounds tough and smart, even though, in many circumstances, nobody is really sure how it could ever work. It has become a hazy, ill-formed shorthand policy that consists of “stopping bad guys from doing bad things without actually going to war, somehow.” Russian information warfare and election interference? Let’s get some deterrence for that. Iran? Maximum-pressure deterrence. Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people? Deterrence with clear red lines. China’s militarization of space? Cross-domain deterrence.

Deterrence isn’t a useless idea. But it’s not magic fairy dust, either. History shows that deterrence has only been useful under very specific conditions. In the Cold War, mutually assured destruction was very good at preventing one outcome: total nuclear war that could kill hundreds of millions of people. But nuclear deterrence did not prevent the Soviets’ other bad behavior, including invading Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan. The key Cold War takeaway isn’t that policy makers should use deterrence more. It’s that some things are not deterrable, no matter how much we wish them to be.

For all the talk of deterring cyberattacks, for example, the reality is that successful deterrence requires three conditions that are rarely all met in cyberspace: knowing the identity of the adversary, making clear what behavior you will not tolerate, and showing the punishment you could inflict if a Rubicon is crossed. But cyberattacks are frequently anonymous. No one knows who the bad guys are, at least not easily, so miscreants of all types can act with little fear of punishment. And there’s a reason no country conducts public cyberweapons tests or showcases its algorithms in military parades: Once a cyberweapon is revealed, it’s much easier for an adversary to take steps that render it useless, turn it against you, or both.

Using familiar ideas like the Cold War to understand new challenges is always tempting and sometimes deadly. Analogies and familiar concepts say, “Hey, it’s not so bad. We’ve been here before. Let’s consult the winning playbook.” But in a genuinely new moment, the old playbook won’t win, and policy makers won’t know it until it’s too late.

In today’s genuinely new moment, the biggest conceptual challenge is the profundity of paradox: Seemingly opposite foreign-policy dynamics exist at the same time.

Today, for instance, geography has never been more important—and less important. Sure, geography has always mattered. The Portuguese built an empire by claiming colonial territories along the maritime route Vasco da Gama discovered to reach India. But questions of who controls the physical landscape, and who lives in it, are now shaping global events in unpredictable ways and on an unprecedented scale. According to the UN, more than 70 million people were forced from their homes last year, the highest number on record. Of those, 25 million had to flee their home country, driven by violence or persecution. Separatist movements are stirring from northern Spain to the South Pacific, part of a secessionist trend that has intensified over the past century.

Meanwhile, global climate change is transforming the landscape itself. Australia is on fire, with flames already ravaging an area the size of West Virginia and choking millions of residents miles away with extreme air pollution. Experts predict that global warming will make massive fires more frequent in more places. Scientists also estimate that rising seas could threaten up to 340 million people living in low-lying coastal areas worldwide. All of these trends, along with old-fashioned territorial aggression (Russia in Ukraine, China in the South China Sea), are searing reminders that physical spaces and borders drawn across them still matter as much as they ever have.

At the same time, the virtual world has never been more global and seamless, with individuals and groups able to connect, transact, cooperate, and even wage wars across immense distances online. The percentage of the global population that is online has more than tripled since 2000. There is now Wi-Fi on Mount Everest, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, promises to use balloons to bring the Internet to remote parts of Kenya. Facebook in 2019 drew 2.4 billion active monthly users—that’s a billion more people than the entire population of China. All of this connectivity makes it possible for Russian operatives to reach deep inside American communities and spread disinformation, influence what we believe, and tear us apart. Cyber capabilities also reportedly enabled Americans to sabotage North Korean rocket tests from thousands of miles away. Artificial intelligence is compressing time and distance—making it possible for information analysis and military decisions to move at machine speed. Even the borders between war and peace, combatant and civilian, are becoming increasingly blurred in cyberspace. In the old days, military mobilization took months and involved large logistics operations with heavy equipment that was hard to hide. In cyberspace, mobilization is literally at your fingertips.

In a related paradox, the United States is simultaneously the most powerful country in cyberspace and the most vulnerable country in cyberspace. This, too, is new. In the military’s traditional domains—air, land, and sea—countries with more capabilities were typically more powerful. Want to know who will “own the skies” in a conflict? The answer is easy: the side with better aircraft and air defenses. The Pentagon likes to talk about domain “dominance” because the term used to mean something. But it doesn’t in cyberspace. In the virtual world, power and vulnerability are inextricably linked.

As my Stanford cyber colleague Herb Lin has noted, connectivity is an important measure of strength and influence. From enterprise computing to industrial-control systems to the Fitbits on our wrists and video doorbells in our homes, information-technology-based systems are crucial for exploiting information to achieve greater efficiency, coordination, communication, and commerce.

But greater connectivity inescapably leads to greater vulnerability. The internet puts bad guys in distant locales just milliseconds away from the front door of a nation’s important information systems, such as those at power plants and major corporations. And as Lin notes, the more sophisticated our computer systems are, the more insecure they inevitably become. Increasing the functionality of any system increases the complexity of its design and implementation—and complexity is widely recognized as the enemy of security. “The reason is simple,” he told me. “A more complex system will inevitably have more security flaws that an adversary can exploit, and the adversary can take as long as is necessary to find them.”

Beyond recognizing the fact that seemingly paradoxical dynamics can exist at the same time—that digital technology multiplies America’s power and weaknesses; that physical geography is irrelevant and more laden with peril than ever—I don’t have a unified working theory for global affairs. That one has yet to develop is not surprising. But the effort is essential.

Containment and deterrence were bold and counterintuitive ideas when they were first formulated. Theorists of the mid-20th century, such as Kennan and Thomas Schelling, who articulated the theory of deterrence, started with one essential advantage: The atom bomb made it viscerally, horrifically clear just how much the coming world would be different from the past. It also drove home the point that the go-to ideas of yesteryear would not be up to the task of guiding American foreign policy in a new age. That point is no less urgent now.

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