04/29/2022
THE ELOQUENCE OF COURAGE
"It is better to fight for something than live for nothing,” said General George Patton, Jr. while leading the Seventh Army in World War 2. He also said, “As for the types of comments I make, sometimes I just, By God, get carried away with my own eloquence.” While many argued negatively about Patton’s very brunt way of speech and use of profanity when with his troops, back then, his leadership with the others of that time, bled out the true power of language and roused the troops' passion to wage war consummately. Likewise, the iconic image of Ukraine fighters giving Russians the finger now transcends the history of all of us in a simplicity of conviction and an eloquence of true courage.
The leadership of Ukraine’s people just now, is also epitomizing a transformational pragmatic of other world importance beyond their rights for peace as Ukraine’s agricultural back story is as big as their forthright territorial imperatives. Ukraine soils and it’s routine Agriculture, affects so many nations at the dinner table. It is also a pivotal irony to see images of tractors pulling spent tanks across their border and symbolically conjures that antique icon for turning canons into plowshares. We see the rest of the world glued to this real time underdog good vs evil battle for Ukraine as a shared battle for all civilizations within the universal horror of Russia’s depraved war activities. This war has become a long lasting cry of ‘we the people’ fervently seen everywhere.
It is so special that a Russian military dictatorship could not manage her cowardly strategy for land invasion that the land itself simply swallowed up its tracked vehicles in yards and yards and miles of muck and mud. This most classic failure of the Russian elephants, conjures nothing like Hannibal's elephants crossing of the Alps in 218 BC. That mind’s image remains one of the most celebrated achievements of any military force in warfare, that pivoted Hannibal leading his Carthaginian army up over the Alps and into Italy to take the war directly to the Roman Republic, bypassing Roman and allied garrisons and its naval dominance. Vladimir Putin in these modern times instead, mirrors a villainy of absurdity. It makes one surmise that the Russian people will end up paying for their newest monster for decades to come suffering unnecessary poverty - if the western world wants it so - less the Russian people fail to act against their own Putin or Stalin or Hi**er in comparison.
Like the most of us, I have no war story to tell, except to say that when serving in West Germany in 1968, the Russians took the distraction of a tumultuous U.S. election year at a pinnacle point of a daily waste of lives in the Vietnam conflagration, to summarily invade the former Czechoslovakia. My armored division was on alert there of course, but for the most part, was kept in barracks except for equipment maintenance cadre and special strike forces hidden away. Our German connection within my public affairs assignment serving as translator, had shown me a high elevation cave on private property months prior to the Russian-Czech incursion, so that long ago invasion weekend I went with tape recorder and camera to that cave to spend a few days loitering from a high vantage point with its very wide Czech view, looking through glass for something exciting, should soldiers stray, as in the big one. Nothing to see there, I moved off from being so close to a choke point, returning to my regular duty. Nothing there and then to talk about. Thank you.
Historically, Putin has since made even Nikita Khrushchev's 1962 return of Soviet missiles home from Cuba seem far more courageous for his historical humanity in hindsight having faced the first fear from the nuclear gamble of a stand-your-ground US president. Ukraine’s national sense of courage for winning, is kicking it with such homegrown eloquence, the world is watching, both cheering and where ever possible, helping them. This is so good to see for the ‘Wolverines’ in all of us, throughout the world. Perhaps indeed, Ukraine, Moldovia, Georgia, Latvia, Estonia, Sweden and Finland, and others ought to consider negotiating their own distinct military pact for co-equal protection against the Russian curse after Ukraine by itself, drives Putin back down into his own muddy mess or a well deserved final oblivion. What goes around comes back around or “ it turns out he was a missing person who nobody missed at all.” WGS
