armies and the game of life

What Smitty said reminded me of something I heard some years ago.  Way back in the day the Vietnam war was described as the white man using the black man to kill the yellow man to defend the land he had stolen from the red man.  It had a ring.  During the Vietnam war I believe more blacks were killed proportionally than whites.  The explanation was that since the blacks didn't go to college they couldn't avail themselves of the college deferments and draft counselors and fancy lawyers that the white kids did, and proportionally more of them were drafted and died.

During World War 2, the army was segregated, but I believe Truman desegregated it.  And you know I am always bad mouthing the army, but because of their authoritarian structure when they do something they do it all the way, unlike civilians who drag their feet at every opportunity.  So black people began to see the army as a way they could get ahead the way they couldn't in the civilian world.  Then you had the volunteer army so the only white guys to go into the army were volunteers.  They did a study sometime around the gulf wars and came up with surprising discovery that compared to their proportions in the army more white guys were dying than black guys.  How did that happen?

Well the explanation was that the black guys saw the army as a career and they put in their time, and built up their rank, while the white volunteers were guys who wanted to kick up their heels a bit before becoming execs in daddy's mill, and have some adventure so they became the airborne rangers while the blacks became the supply sergeants.

The Vikings were like freebooters.  I don't think they were actual armies, they were just a bunch of different groups of guys who got together and got a boat and set out to plunder.  The huns and mongols were real armies I think, maybe too top down because when their kings died or got into trouble back home all that raiding stopped.  They did pretty well in the middle east, but stopped short of most of Europe because the terrain wasn't suited for their short horsed armies, and there wasn't as much to pillage there back in that day as there was in the mideast.

Now the Ottomans, there was an army.  I remember reading a book about them some years ago and it began by describing a single soldier and how well muscled and trained he was, and then it was revealed that this guy they were describing was the guy who who wielded the fan that cooled the sultan.  The point being that they were all like that, tough motherfuckers.  They weren't deep thinkers or craftsman or traders or artists, they were soldiers and they lived to plunder.  They were like the Romans, in that their income depended on conquest, and when they conquered they were relatively benign, they kept the same local leaders and all they asked was tribute, and of course they could not continence rebellion.  But as they conquered they tended to take on the ways of the conquered and grew soft and corrupted.

This cruise, quest, battle, climber thing of mine is not very rigorous.  Not the sort of thing to be debated in the halls of logic, more like something to talk about after a few beers, but I will elucidate.

The cruisers see life as a pleasure cruise.  They don't know why they got here, and don't think they are really going anywhere, they just find themselves on the pleasure cruise of life and they want to have as good a time as they can.  The questers are looking for the secret of life.  They want to know why they are here and maybe where they are going, and their life is devoted to finding that out.  The battle guys see life as a battlefield, primarily good vs evil, though good vs evil is largely in the eye of the beholder.  Their goal is to further their cause, and in the end they judge themselves on how far they have advanced it.  The climbers are guys who want to get to the top of the heap, riches, power, fame.  There was a game, popular in our youth, called something like the game of life where you rolled dice and went around a board and piled up hearts for happiness, diamonds for riches, stars for fame, and maybe something else, and the guy who accumulated a certain amount of these first won, and I think the climbers are basically playing this game in real life.

I'm off on another trip to Missouri, to eat and drink with old Champaign buddies.  I will be leaving Friday morning and come back Sunday evening so I will probably be missing a post or two in this time.