I Told You Wrong

In thinking about it later, I realized that I told you wrong last night. I understand that a certain amount of memory loss is normal at our age. John Huss was burned at the stake in 1415. Not long after that, his followers, the Hussites, launched a rebellion against the Holy Roman Empire that lasted about 30 years. The Hussites disbanded after their leader, General Ziska, was killed in battle, but others took up the cause, and Bohemia fought a defensive war against the Empire for two centuries. The Empire finally prevailed at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. After that, the Czechs were forced to either convert to Catholicism or leave the country. The Czech and Moravian United Brethren was a religious sect that pioneered the concept of the separation of church and state. They went into exile after White Mountain, and some of them ended up in Pennsylvania. It is believed that our founding fathers got the idea of a constitutional freedom of religion from those guys. I'm not familiar with the Free Thinkers, but I'll take your word on it. I'm not familiar with the wreck of the Eastland, unless that was the one that sank off Milwaukee, or maybe the name of the ship was "The Milwaukee", I forget.

There are three classifications of rank in the army: enlisted, commissioned officers, and non commissioned officers (sergeants). Each rank has a pay grade associated with it, the officers are O1, O2, O3, etc. For this purpose, the NCOs are grouped with the enlisted, so it goes from E1 to E10. You start out as a Private-E1 and you are promoted to Private-E2 after a couple of months. Private First Class-E3 comes after that and you wear one stripe, actually a chevron, on your sleeve. Corporal-E4 with two stripes used to come after that but, sometime before I enlisted, it was changed to Specialist-E4, with a picture of an eagle instead of the two stripes. A specialist is an NCO for all practical purposes but, technically, it's different. The next step up is Sergeant-E5, with three stripes. The parallel specialist grade is Specialist-5, commonly called "Spec-5", a bird with one rocker underneath. Then comes Staff Sergeant- E6, three stripes with one rocker, then Sergeant First Class-E7, three stripes with two rockers, then Master Sergeant-E8, with three rockers. Then there is First Sergeant-E-9, three stripes, three rockers, and a diamond in the space between the stripes and the rockers. There is only one of those in a company. Last but not least is Sergeant Major-E10, with a star instead of a diamond. There is only one of those in a battalion.

There are four ways to become a commissioned officer: ROTC, officer's candidate school (OCS), West Point, and battlefield commission. The ROTC we had at Gage Park was actually a junior ROTC, which gets you a PFC grade in the National Guard. It takes four years of college ROTC to get you an officer's commission in the regular army. OCS is a six month crash course that used to be 90 days when they needed officers in a hurry. Hence the term "90 day wonder". West Point is a four year military college. All officers start out as 2nd Lieutenants-O1, but a West point officer has way more prestige than any of the others, and will likely get promoted sooner rather than later.

There must have been more than one busing plan in Chicago over the years because the book mentions a plan they had in '67 that was intended to spread the Black students over all the schools, with no school having more than 25%. The civil rights people were not pleased with this one, and I don't know how long it was in place. This one was not court ordered, the Board came up with it on their own, which is probably why the civil rights people didn't like it. If they wanted true integration, this would have been it, but they said it just reinforced segregation.