This (the title) is a phrase that I have heard so many times I have lost count from wimminz, and never ever from a man. It’s actually a quote from Mae West
(“A hard man is good to find.” & “It’s not the men in my life, it’s the life in my men” are others of “hers”)
One of the interesting things about Mae West is to my knowledge no nude photos of her exist anywhere, apart from a few infamous fakes, and of course the rumour is that “she” was actually “he”, to be specific a TV…. in fact it was allegedly the fact that she was actually a he that formed the foundation of the 1926 obscenity conviction that launched “her” career.
And so via Stan Boardman and the germans bombing our chip shops, I want to relate the story of two men I knew personally, now dead.
What they had in common was they both hated yanks.
The first guy was an RAF pilot, flying Mosquito’s in the pathfinder squadrons.
The way he told it, the yanks helped the war effort by sending over thousands of untrained young men in B17 Flying Fortresses to bolster Bomber Command, the problem was, these young yanks literally were in his eyes totally untrained, they lacked even basic skills and they lacked all forms of experience under fire.
This meant that their navigation was crap (no GPS back then, it was all dead reckoning and navigation by stars, the ground was blacked out, so if you couldn’t do that you flew by day) so the first few missions each new squadron of B17’s was sent on, Bob was sent in the Mosquito and the yanks played follow my leader to the target.
Of course all the Germans knew this so they tried to shoot him down, and the yanks knew this, so the forward gunners would try to keep the Germans off him, and often their .30 cal rounds flew straight through his plywood plane without even slowing down.
He was the only one of his pathfinder squadron to survive that tour, he lost two copilots and three navigators, two of them to .30 cal.
The second guy was in Korea, the French hadn’t quite left, and the yanks had only just arrived, of course this became “vietnam” later, but after his squad had been decimated several times over, his lasting and repeated memory / nightmare was the yanks on the flank opening up on full auto, cries of “more ammo” and that followed by “fall back”, meanwhile he and his lads with their single shot weapons still had ammo left, but had to fall back with exposed flanks, hence the regular decimation.
I was reminded of this because I met a chap who has been a professional soldier and then a professional merc for all his life, just back from afdiggastan, and he was basically telling the exact same story, the yanks sending in green troops and treating them as being as expendable as the ordinance they carried… which reminded me of the two chaps above and their stories… but this chap went on to say that the British Army troops he was assigned to were just as green and treated as just as expendable by their brass as the yanks.
He’s now been hired by the Chinese to go to north east Africa….
Like many professional soldiers he is very much the military historian, and says it is no coincidence that the lessons of the first world war were learned by the brass, officers no longer lead from the front and stand in front of “anonymous” ranged weapons held by the troops… at least in the west, he notes that many of the people he is fighting have an “officer” cadre equivalent that does indeed lead from the front, and has no fear of being shot in the back.
The difference between this chap, and the two above, is this chap is far more cosmopolitan, far less insular, than they ever were. When he was a boot he hated the French for selling effective weapons to the “enemy” he was fighting, and what changed wasn’t that he got older, he just got a lot more experienced and wiser.
You see the parallel here to the Mae West quote, the good girls did not go bad, they just got found out, and only a more experienced man who has taken the red pill is capable of finding them out.
In my own family we still have someone who hates the Japanese, only in the last 10 years he has allowed any Japanese electronics in his home, we had aa family friend who felt the same way. Our family member was ordered to stay behind when Singapore fell and report on the Japs activity, the family friend just didn’t get out, and was sent to the Burma Railway, where he had an especially humiliating experience, being a 6 foot 6 blonde… he was paraded around and used as an example.
The only time the family member got REALLY angry with me was when I, as a small boy, asked him why he stayed behind, after all it wasn’t the Japs that caused him his suffering (he was listed as MIA presumed dead for a year) but his own brass who basically handed him a suicide mission, stay behind and report as long as you can.
He flew into a rage about duty and honour and obeying orders.
Again, parallels to myself when facing an FRA and child custody battle with the psycho skank ho ex, basically we were both reacting with anger in preference to questioning the nature of the blue pill we had been eating quite happily up until that point.
It’s a bit like the video above, once you realise (it is a true story) that the Polish air ace whose life was being honoured (This Is Your Life) may well have spoken English with a foreign accent, but when he said Fokkers he meant Fuckers, because he had been there and knew the difference between a Fokker and a Messerschmitt, after all he had been shot at by both, it makes the misconceptions of the presenter of TIYL plain as day blue pill lack of experience.
