Redgum, Or More Aussie Rock Courtesy of YouTube

Here're another couple of cool songs from Australia that I found via YouTube. The first is "I Was Only Nineteen," by Redgum.

I'd known that there were Australian soldiers who'd fought beside Americans in Vietnam since I read Peter F. Hamilton's second Reality Dysfunction novel in high school. That one featured a dead Australian Vietnam veteran possessing a living convict in the distant future.

(It's a long story.)

Something notable about this song is that the Australian protagonist has an experience very similar to that associated with American Vietnam veterans (and veterans in general, although Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder became more well-known in the Vietnam generation). He can't sleep at night due to the nightmares, the news helicopter frightens him, and "the rash that comes and goes" might be caused by Agent Orange.

And thanks to "I Was Only Nineteen," I found "Poor Ned," which is about the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.

The song conflates Kelly with the Eureka Rebellion ("hoist the flag of stars"), in which a bunch of Australian gold miners rebelled against the unpleasant British colonial government. Imagine the Battle of Bunker Hill, only if the Patriots got crushed immediately after inflicting little damage on the enemy but were found innocent of any crime due to jury nullification and ended up getting into elected into the government.

Eureka was many years before Ned Kelly, but Kelly did release a manifesto denouncing the government and calling for justice for the Australian poor. The song lyrics tie in heavily with the manifesto, including defending his shooting of some police (he claims self-defense) and claiming mistreatment of his family by the police. I haven't read Eric Hobsbawm's Bandits, but I do know what a "social bandit" is and Kelly seems to fit the description.

Suggestions To Improve "Battleship" (SPOILERS)

Since I don't like criticizing without offering helpful suggestions, here's something for Battleship.

Many critics have pointed out that Liam Neeson, who plays Admiral Shane, does not do a whole lot in the movie.  One of the few scenes he has in the middle of the film is when most of the fleet is trapped outside of the Hawaiian Islands by the aliens' energy field.  It does not appear they're doing very much to try to break through.  There's a federal VIP (Secretary of Defense?) who is pushing Shane to try to probe the field, and after being pestered about it one too many times, Shane tells him he'll order another plane at the shield when the VIP is co-piloting it.

(This is based on a real incident when a Clinton Administration official suggested to General Hugh Shelton that the U.S. could allow an aircraft to be shot down over Iraq in order to have the pretext for war.  Shelton got really angry and said he'd order the mission when the person who made the suggestion--they're not named--was trained to fly it.  That shut them up real fast.)

Although the force field took an aircraft flying into it without being overly affected, it doesn't seem like anyone made any effort to break it afterward.  Given the amount of firepower a carrier battle group has at its command, one doesn't necessarily have to risk the lives of pilots to do this.

While Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) and company are busy fighting the alien invaders inside the energy field, Shane could pull the fleet back and try to breach the field by firing on it with the conventional missiles the fleet's aircraft and missile boats carry.  If that fails to breach the force field, Shane could then request permission to use nuclear weapons.

Given how close the fleet was to the force field--the three destroyers leading the group were cut off when the shield went up--the fleet would need to pull back even farther before even a tactical nuclear device could be used.  And tactical weapons are relatively small as far as nukes go.  The W70 variable-yield bomb could go as high as 100 kilotons, over five times higher than the Hiroshima bomb, while the Tsar Bomba was 50 megatons, 1,400 times the combined destructive force of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and around a quarter of the explosive force of the Krakatoa volcano.

(Since I assume the force field works by dissipating kinetic force all over the entire surface much like how a bulletproof vest does, and the force field is large enough to enclose the entire Hawaiian chain, it would take some serious nuclear firepower to breach it.)

So we cut between Hopper and his destroyer playing cat-and-mouse with the alien invaders inside the force field and Shane pulling the fleet back a safe distance before he begins nuclear bombardment of the energy field.  Just when the nukes are about to fly, Hopper and the U.S.S. Missouri manage to destroy the emitters on the alien flagship and the force field collapses.

Given how the general public irrationally fears nuclear energy and nuclear weapons (I've seen people suggest using a dozen WWII-era nuclear weapons could cause a nuclear winter when you'd need many, many more powerful modern devices to even get that in theory), this could be a means of building suspense.

It could also get more out of Liam Neeson.  We could see him agonizing about the use of nuclear weapons and perhaps even flashing back to the death of a relative from cancer as a result of exposure to nuclear testing or being part of the American force occupying Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings.  If he's an admiral now, he might be a Vietnam veteran, which would mean his father and uncles would be the right age to be WWII veterans or in the military in the early Cold War, when radiation dangers were not as well-known.

(It would need to be made clear that even if a hole were blown in the force shield, the fleet would need to rush through the blast zone, where the radiation is most severe, in order to have a chance of getting through before the aliens seal the breach.  Thus there's great risk of radiation exposure to the crew.)

Hugh Thompson: A Belated Memorial Day Post

This is David Rovics' "Song for Hugh Thompson." Hugh Thompson was a warrant officer in the Vietnam War who interrupted the My Lai Massacre in part by having soldiers under his command point helicopter-mounted machine guns at fellow American soldiers who were murdering Vietnamese civilians.  Although most of the killing had already taken place, his actions saved around a dozen lives and may have forestalled later massacres.

My actual Memorial Day post included Billy Ray Cyrus' song "All Gave Some Gave All," which commemorates the physical courage of soldiers who went to war and those who did not return.

This song commemorates courage of a different sort.  Thompson certainly had physical courage--he returned to the military because he wanted to fly helicopters, even though there was a war on--but he had moral courage as well.  He ordered the soldiers under his command to fire on fellow Americans in defense of South Vietnamese villagers who might well have assisted the enemy and then walked out in front of them to confront  commissioned officers--who outranked him--over the massacre.  Not only was he going against the chain of command (something that military training is intended to prevent), but he risked being shot by his own men who might be outraged at what he asked them to do.

And Thompson's courage continued.  He threw away the citation the local military commanders gave him as part of the cover-up and testified before the Armed Services Committee, one of whose members actually tried to have him court-martialed for threatening other Americans.  He got all kinds of crap from ordinary people, including hate mail, death threats, and dead animals on his doorstep.

And although ultimately Thompson received the praise and medals he was due, all too often the good people do goes unacknowledged.

Another News Article Round-Up

It's been a long time since I've posted some news articles with commentary, so here goes....

http://www.mdjonline.com/view/full_story/11004674/article-Church--family--rally-for-mother-with-brain-injury?instance=home_news_special_coverage

Those of you who are interested in helping someone out, here's an opportunity to do so. 

The above link is old and apparently things are going better.

http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/victoriamoon/journal
http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/dpp/news/cobb-mother-hurt-in-fall-recovering-021111

However, with these kinds of things, recovery takes a long time and they're not out of the woods yet.

And fie on the insurance company for not doing what the family was paying them for.  The purpose of insurance is to pay into the system so that, in the event of trouble, the system can help you.  By not helping at all, the company showed its value--or lack thereof.

A pity the company isn't named in the story so I can exhort people to get coverage from someone else.

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/mourners-salute-beloved-hmong-827589.html

This smells.  Why did the military panel unanimously decide to deny Pao an Arlington burial?   He was part of a CIA force, not the army of a sovereign state.  And given how the Laotian Communists are still in power, it's not like they'd give him an honorable burial over there.

Good for the two California Democrats for pushing for him to get an Arlington burial though.