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The Manual Typewriter is Dead! Long Live the Manual Typewriter!
When I was a kid, my mom had one of those traveling style manual typewriters which was kept in a carrying case much like a suitcase. I used to open it up and play with the keys, imagining that I was actually using a computer with the lid of the case serving as my screen. The funny thing is that this make believe computer didn’t have a mouse. It is probably best to remember that the apex of technology at the time was the Atari 2600 and the Apple IIe’s that our schools had. We used them to make simple programs that would draw pictures and play Lemonade Stand.
The Manual always frustrated me, even after I learned how to type in high school. I could never build up any real speed because the keys would lock up with each other. Of course, the machine is specifically designed to slow you down for just that reason.
As for automatic typewriters, I learned to type on IBM Selectrics. For the record, I actually failed the second half of Typing One in High School. Once I learned the basics I found that I wasn’t terribly interested in the other aspects of the course, such as how to type a myriad of business letters. I suspect that I sensed that the need to know precisely how to craft such things would soon fade.
When I joined the Army, I allowed myself to be talked into MOS 31C, Single Channel Radio Operator. It was also known as radio teletypist. No recruiter ever used the second term because I suspect they knew that it wouldn’t appeal to 17 year old recruits. Instead, they showed laserdisc videos of soldiers assembling satellite dishes and fiddling with digital readouts. In my mind, that looked pretty cool. They also showed soldiers carrying radios on their backs with combat teams, a dangerous job but not the one I actually got.
Instead, when I got to Fort Gordon, Georgia in October of 1989, I found a piece of equipment that more closely resembled the props needed for a 1950s science fiction movie than a one set in the 21st Century. Depressed and missing my girlfriend of the time, I signed up for an accelerated typing class in an effort to cut two weeks off my training and get out of there early.
I passed the training with no real trouble. The downside is that the Army kept me for the additional two weeks where I got to pick up trash, move pile A over the pile B and the like.
Fast forward to my year in Korea. I used my paycheck to buy the first and last typewriter I would ever own. I used that Panasonic to keep a detailed journal of my experiences in Korea. In actuality, I used it to vent my spleen about my growing frustrations with the unit I was assigned to. However, even though I have since destroyed the inch and a half thick journal, I did gain from the experience by practicing my typing and my composition skills.
I do not miss typewriters. I don’t miss the need to properly align the page in the machine. I don’t miss losing a page of work because of a series of typos. I definitely do not miss correction tape.
When I got home, I purchased my first desktop computer, a Dell 386 33 mHz computer with WordPerfect 5.1 installed onboard. I hooked an HP 500 inkjet printer (the best thing HP ever made) and saw miraculously clear, clean print materialize with the click of that mouse button I had forgot to imagine as a kid.
I was hooked.
There is a fair amount of modern technology which I find irritating, cellphones, texting, and PowerPoints are three good examples. There is also a fair amount of old, reliable technology which I admire, such as bicycles, horse and buggies, and the landline telephone. That said, I won’t miss the typewriter.
Not one bit.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Twenty years ago this week I was coming to the realization that I had survived my first and last war. In retrospect, that war was a forgone conclusion. Military historians have ascertained that the reasons for the defeat of the Iraqi Armed Forces at the hands of the Coalition Forces of Operation Desert Storm can be traced to poor leadership, poor planning, lack of motivation among the opposing forces, and perhaps an overinflated assessment of the capabilities of Soviet technology.
It was a war that lasted, in terms of ground combat, four days.
It changed everything.
How did I come to stand on the razor’s edge of history? Granted, I didn’t have any effect on it through my personal actions. I was a mere cog, a little tiny bit of the war machine, one that could have been deleted without a second thought. In fact, if I were writing a novel on the Persian Gulf War, which would probably need at least one fire fight to satisfy the readers, I would pick someone other than myself as an example. I saw a lot of things, but in terms of actual battlefield changing actions, I did very little.
I bore witness, and that is about it. As wars go, I got off pretty easy in the initial assessment. So easy that many of my peers, including one particular prick in South Korea, frequently stated that it wasn’t a real war at all.
Tell that to the Iraqis we killed.
I am not a repentant veteran. I never have been. I offer no apologies for my service nor make any excuses. I do not experience any great discomfort at what happened. Perhaps I experience a very real regret that people I bore no personal grudge against were killed and I often wonder about the living that survived the dead.
I wasn’t particularly eager to go to war either. I was not the kind of soldier who sat around masturbating to the latest issue of Guns and Ammo while whispering sweet nothings to my weapon, named after some woman whose pants I failed to get into. I did not volunteer for Airborne training, in fact I actively turned down an opportunity to go. I did not have any particular affinity for elite infantry units such as the Rangers, who seem still to this day to be not much different than Marines. Technology interested me more than living in the mud and if the Air Force had offered as much for enlistment as the Army had, I probably would have been an airman.
Instead, I joined the Army. Money was part of the motivation, family lineage in the Army was another, and finally the lack of any real prospects was a third. Perhaps patriotism figured in at some point though I can be just as cynical as the next American about my home nation. Lastly, if nothing else, I knew I was a fighter. I had spent my teen years fighting. I would spend my Army years fighting and I’d fight some more after that.
It is perhaps a strange thing then that I was influenced by what is essentially an antiwar documentary which was aired in 1983 on PBS. Each night I would sit down in front of my small black and white television set in my bedroom, which was a big thing in my book, having a television, to watch Gwynne Dyer hold for on the futility of war.
The documentary, entitled War, was designed to educate the public on the futile nature of warfare as a means of resolving differences. Like many products of the Reagan Era, it was designed to scare the living shit out of anyone with an ounce of sanity about the probability of a nuclear war.
Here is the installment entitled The Deadly Game of Nations.
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The music with the intro, along with the images, embedded themselves into my teenage brain. Unlike my peers, I never saw anything you might call glory in warfare. I knew it was a bloody, horrifying, dirty business. I knew it came with horrendous costs, all I had to do was look at my Vietnam Era father to see that. From reading the history books along with science fiction novels, I knew that the next World War, the one we still haven't fought and hopefully never will, was going to be the last.
Dyer's job was to talk me out of enlisting. He wasn't a dick about it. He was a veteran of military service himself steeped in a solid background of military education. He was antiwar without disrespecting, demeaning or insulting the soldiers.
In my case, he failed.
To be fair, my father failed too. So did my mother, at least the first two times I signed an enlistment contract. Each time I managed to come up with sufficient justification for enlistment. Threats to crack my kneecaps not withstanding, I signed the dotted line. I should point out that I nearly did so again in 2004 in order to go to Iraq, not because I felt a need to prove myself, but because I felt a need to back up my support for Operation Iraqi Freedom by virtue of direct participation.
Perhaps some perspective is in order.
In March 1989, when I signed the Delayed Entry Program contract, these facts were known.
1. The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Russia actively targeted civilian population centers with enough ordnance to destroy the planet many times over.
2. The danger of dying in such a war was no less or great at Fulda Gap in Germany than it would be if I stayed in Kansas City, Missouri. What difference does it make if a T-72 gets me, nerve gas or a ten megaton nuke chucked at Downtown KCMO? Dead is dead, no matter where the dying transpires.
3. The two Super Powers had managed to keep the genie in the bottle. I had a belief, perhaps a naive one, that no one would go so far as to chuck nukes around like so many hand grenades.
4. On a personal level, the economy sucked. My job prospects were awful. Four years of active service bearing witness to the failures of my civilian counterparts only serve to reinforce the notion that I had made the right choice.
5. I had to pay for college somehow.
So I signed up, knowing that I was signing a contract. I promised to go fight, and if need be, die. In exchange, the United States of America would feed, clothe and house me. They'd provide a rudimentary if not great medical care program and if I made it to the end of my first four years, they'd give me money for college.
If I could pick up an honorable discharge.
All I had to do was agree to go kill anyone the United States of America declared the Enemy of the Week.
It turned out to be the Iraqis.
If a war was to be fought, I expected it to be at Fulda Gap in Germany. Or maybe, in my wilder moments, perhaps Columbia fighting some Vietnam do over in an attempt to control the drug trade. I didn't expect Iraq and I don't think the Iraqis did either.
Dyer's series is useful for a lot of reasons. Aside from laying out the mindset of a soldier, he captures the attitudes of the early 1980s regarding the military.
1. Soldiers are obsolete.
2. They are preserving an obsolete way of doing things.
3. The equipment they use is expensive, fickle and will probably fail them at the worst possible moment.
4. The Soviets have more of everything, which will lead us to use nukes.
It turns out Dyer was wrong, perhaps sadly enough. He was wrong on every front. We still use wars to solve our problems. We haven't blown the planet up yet (and I probably just jinxed us by typing that). Our weapons are expensive and fickle yet they are also far more effective than anyone could have possibly imagined.
In one respect, I'm glad he was wrong. If he had been right, I wouldn't be typing this right now. I'd be in a grave somewhere, long moldered away to nothing, the victim of a futile effort to dislodge an invader from another country.
In many ways, Dyer convinced me that it didn't matter where I was. Stay at home and catch a nuke or go for a soldier and take your chances. This series did the convincing.
So it goes.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Operation Desert Storm
Tomorrow, which is already here in some parts of the world as I write this, is 17 January 2011. Twenty years ago on this date, Coalition Forces were directed by President George H. W. Bush to take measures to eject the Armed Forces of Iraq from the Emirate of Kuwait. The Kuwaitis, those would could not flee, had lived under Iraqi military occupation since the invasion on 2 August 1990.
Tomorrow, I suspect, there will not be much in the form of news or commentary on this day. In fact, I suspect the day will be lost in the ongoing news punditry over the recent shooting in Arizona. In Australia they will be rightfully preoccupied with recovering from the recent flooding in Queensland while preparing for more flooding in the weeks ahead.
At footnote at best for most folks.
The Persian Gulf War is a strange thing to ponder on. When the invasion took place most of my peers in the Army were pretty certain that it was much ado about nothing. When the 82nd Airborne and the 101st were sent into Saudi Arabia, we still figured there would be a lot of chest thumping without a lot of action. Vietnam had made the country casualty adverse, fearful of a disaster and we tended to believe the stereotype of a politician who didn’t want to risk their career in a military operation.
So it was somewhat bewildering to hear General Colin Powell give the deployment order to the 1st Infantry Division over CNN’s live coverage of the situation. We sent our vehicles off to get a quick and dirty coat of desert tan to cover up their forest green camo. We went down to the warehouses on the main post of Fort Riley to pick up what would eventually become known as chocolate chip uniforms. We began to load our gear onto rail cars in the driving Kansas snow.
Surely, we thought, it would all be called off. Our leaders would choke, they had been choking since Vietnam. The war protesters would stop things before we got anywhere, right?
I was wrong. We arrived in Saudi Arabia, unpacked our gear and made our way to Tactical Assembly Area Roosevelt. We spent our first few weeks soaking wet, enduring the wettest winter in decades. This is partly due to the fact that our battery commander was a marching moron that didn’t seem to understand the concept of placing our camp sites on slopes as opposed to flat terrain prone to flooding. We were on such a water logged wadi when the war began.
The bombing didn’t impress me per se. I couldn’t see it. We didn’t have televisions and our news coverage was spotty at best. Ever so often we got a newspaper. Maybe someone picked up something on a radio or our leadership finally got around to telling us something. We didn’t even get mail from home until the second week of February because it was more important to ship ammo for the howitzers than it was to send on deuce and a half back to pick up the mail which was piling up in the rear.
What little news we did get we tended to get from Baghdad Betty, the Voice of Peace. When they weren’t playing current Top 40, they spent their time telling us about the protests, “No Blood for Oil,” and the like.
At the same time, we got pretty grim estimates on our chances for survival. We were going up against the battle hardened Iraqi Army. They were armed with the latest in Soviet technology. In turn we were armed with overpriced, technologically fickle crap which would kill the undereducated, lower class, bottom of the barrel soldiers who were too stupid to get a real job.
We were all going to die. That was the story.
Oddly enough, while we believed we were not going to come out of it well, we weren’t terribly concerned. In looking at my personal journals of that time, I spent more time worrying about threats to shoot us for disrespecting non-coms in a combat zone. I spent time watching the crazy corporal who liked to sight his weapon in on my skull at night while I laid my M-203 in his general direction.
I read.
I wrote.
I waited, like my peers.
By March 1991 it was all pretty much over. A four day ground war, minimal losses among Coalition Forces, heavy losses to the Iraqis. There was a lot of screaming about General Rhames decision to use armored bulldozers to clear out Iraqi Trench lines in our area of operations.
The war changed things for the United States of America. At the end of the Cold War, fresh off the success of Operation Desert Storm, many felt the United States should be more proactive in using military force to improve the world. We would use that force time and time again, far more often than we had between the end of Vietnam and 1989, to intervene in the affairs of others. Rather than drawing back to our own borders, we stayed involved.
In my history classes, when asked, I often refer to “my war” was the “one we should have finished or not have bothered with.” I suspect the United States could have lived with Saddam Hussein in charge of Kuwait. I also suspect that Saddam would fail if he attempted to invade Saudi Arabia. Conversely, if we had finished the war back in the early 1990s, we might be living in a more secure, peaceful world. Pundits argue otherwise stating that what we got in 2003 is what we would have gotten if we had gone to Baghdad in 1991.
We have a habit of leaving unfinished business in various corners of the globe and I felt, as we were leaving the region in May of 1991, that this was a perfect example of that. We promised the Shia and the Kurds our assistance if they rose up against Saddam Hussein. They did and we didn’t. The refugees of those crushed revolts came streaming across our lines at Safwan, terrified, starving in some cases, beaten in all cases.
Australian writer John Birmingham, in some of his interviews for the Without Warning trilogy, often points to the weeks before March 2003 as the apex of American Power and Respect. As I ponder this day, I must respectfully disagree with my friend and colleague.
I think March of 1991 was the apex of American Power, full of potential in a new era. I think our greatest mistake, aside from not finishing the Persian Gulf War in the first place, was not having the sense to draw back from the world.
Become isolationists again? Is that what I am arguing? No, the planet is too small for that. However, we could have taken a giant step back away from some of our post World War II obligations. We could and should have given the rest of the world an opportunity step up and fill in the voids we had covered since 1945.
Perhaps if we had done so, we would be in better shape today.
Things to ponder.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
My reply? “Duh, fucker.”
Check this news article out.
In addition to getting rid of bayonet training, the Army has decided to replace long distance formation runs in basic training with sprint training instead. In other words, train the soldiers for combat.
Well, far as this Army veteran is concerned, this change is about twenty-one years overdue. I remember asking, repeatedly, over my four years of active why we went on long distance runs. None of us were planning on reenacting the Battle of Marathon near as I could tell. The only instance I knew of from recent US History where running for distance was required pertained to Task Force Smith in the early dark days of the Korean War. In fact you could argue that US Forces Korea and the 2nd Infantry Division still have institutional PTSD as a result of Task Force Smith since running was the Big Thing when I was in Korea and probably still is.
To me, it just seemed fucking stupid. It seemed even more stupid once you consider how you are supposed to shoot, move and communicate on the battlefield. Worse, running, for some screwball institutional reason, seemed to be the primary measure of a decent soldier. A soldier could be a complete and total fuck up in every other regard and yet if he or she could run a ten minute two mile then they were golden. Conversely, you could be tactically and technically proficient, know your shit backwards and forwards but if you had trouble with running, then you were a dirt bag in the eyes of many.
On a personal level it was not only stupid but painful. I have chronic shin splints which seem to defy any remedy known to medical or sports science. Stretch ‘em, ice ‘em, heat ‘em, etc, etc, it didn’t seem to matter. After about a hundred yards of running, it always felt as if some asshole were driving an ice pick into my shins with each passing step.
The other aspect of this article is that the soldiers interviewed pointed out that the soldiers needed improved core body strength in order to carry the body armor and gear. Again, duh. I lost track of how many soldiers I heard whining and crying, the ones who could do that ten minute two mile run, bitching about how heavy all their gear was.
“My ruck is hurting my back,” they’d cry. “My body armor is too heavy. Oh, hold my hand, wipe my ass and help me breathe.”
Funny thing. I had no problem humping my load. Never had any back pain. Never had any problem shootin’ and scootin’ from one bit of cover to the next under a full load. In fact, here is a scary thought.
Though I may have been slower than my peers without a combat load, I was actually FASTER than many of them WITH a full combat load. When I went to Infantry School I heard it over and over again, “Wow, that Murphy guy is fast.”
Really grinds my gears that it took ten years of warfare for the United States Army to finally wake up to the clue bat which has been cracking them in the institutional melon for quite some time now.
On the other hand, I’m glad things are changing, in this case, for the better.
Hell, if they had made this change in 1993, I’d probably still be on active duty. Jesus, I hated this Jimmy Fixx running bullshit.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Today is the fortieth anniversary of the first manned lunar landing and most folks will be observing that.
However, today represents something else for myself. Twenty years ago I got up early in the morning and waited to be picked up by my recruiter for basic training. My father shook my hand (one of only three times he has done so) and off I went.
I hated boot camp as much as I hated high school. I proved to have a certain proficiency at certain tasks but I hated the hazing aspect of boot camp. I disliked the ever present screaming (which seemed a very poor copy of what I had tolerated out of my father for years) and the lack of sleep never set well with me. And it is probably no real surprise that I was not popular with my platoon. I couldn’t march for one thing (which immediately singled me out) and worse, I had trouble running.
For some reason, and the Army still operates this way, a soldier’s value seems to be derived from their ability to run. They can be a complete and total fuck up in every other respect, but if they can run, then they have potential.
I never understood that, which is probably why I am no longer a soldier.
Turns out I did have some talents. After a very rough start, I qualified expert with every weapon they put in my hands. I seemed to have a knack for weapons even though my father militantly kept me away from them as a kid. Map reading was another knack and they soon learned that while I could not run or march, I could carry a heavy pack and go for hours without any need to slow down or rest. My Drill Sergeants soon learned it was unwise to make me the pace setter. I tended to wear the platoon down.
Must be all those long walks around the Northland when I was a kid.
Eight weeks later I graduated, made my way to Fort Gordon (I did basic at Fort Jackson, South Carolina) for training in an obsolete MOS (didn’t know that at the time). By the time Bush I invaded Panama, I was more or less finished with my training.
I avoided airborne school (felt no need to do that) and I was never offered air assault training (that I would have done).
I’m proud to have served, in spite of everything, yet I know that getting out in 1993 was probably the smart thing. I had a job in the US Army Signal Corps that I loathed with a passion that is hard to match. I hated working with radios and despised dealing with cantankerous equipment. Worse, I hated taking the time to camo the rigs, bury the ground rod for the generators and keep the fucking things fueled. By Korea I grew to have a deep dislike for the average Signal Corps soldier, who seemed to be fit for use only as a sandbag.
I probably got that attitude by virtue of serving in an artillery unit before I went to a signal battalion.
Maybe they are different today and maybe I was just in a bad unit. In any case, becoming a National Guard Infantryman in 1993 was the smart move.
My only regret is that I didn’t pick up my ROTC scholarship to KU and become an officer in 1997.
As it stands, if I had reenlisted in 1993 on active duty, I probably wouldn’t have made it. I hated my job that much. To this day I still experience a primal sort of hatred that builds when I have to deal with telephones and radios. I really fucking hate the god damned things.
So today is not the best day for me. I think I’ll hit the gym as a way of dealing with it.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
New Readers
Seems I have new readers. Ah, such is the danger of hotlinking to my blog.
Anyway, I’m Steve Murphy. Here is a list of labels that apply.
1. Honorably Discharged Veteran, US Army
2. Unrepentant Veteran of the Persian Gulf War
3. Published Writer (two stories to date, both with honorable mentions)
4. Research Consultant
5. Historian
6. College History Instructor
7. Missourian (while I don’t like the state per se, I’m unrepentant about my Midwestern roots as well).
8. Decidedly NOT politically correct.
9. Definitely NOT a liberal.
Just a few things. If you are looking for examples of my writing, you can find both of them at Apex Online Magazine. Tearing Down Tuesday originally appeared in Interzone Magazine, Issue 210 back in June 2007. Apex picked her up for republication. The Limb Knitter appeared in Apex Online back in September 2008 and was recently converted into a podcast at Paul Cole’s Beam Me Up Podcast. You can buy a print edition of The Limb Knitter when she appears in Descended from Darkness: Apex Magazine Volume One. Just click the link over to the right.
Finally, I usually do not discuss it much, I am the research consultant to John Birmingham. I have two novels to my credit on that front, Final Impact and Without Warning.
Umm, I know a thing or two about science fiction. Some detractors do not care much for that.
So, welcome to the Pondering Tree. Assholes really aren’t tolerated and if you’re all about political correctness then you are probably in the wrong place. But otherwise, folks are pretty well tolerated around here.
Research Project Number – 04
While Trinity was sleeping last night I completed one chapter and got half way through another. This leaves me with two and a half chapters in the hopper to polish up.
For the benefit of the new readers, just what am I doing? My primary job is to work on the military, historical and tactical issues in this project. However, over the course of time, my role has evolved. I will make editorial changes, add details (especially if I have been to a particular place but the client has not) as well as modify dialogue to a degree. The relationship I have with my client is one akin to the apprentice working under a master. I’m very fortunate to have this relationship and as such I generally tend not to toot my horn about it. These RPN updates are more for the client’s benefit and my own than the general reader who might drop by.
But my basic job is to make sure everything is dress right dress. And when in doubt (which happens) and I can’t find answer(that happens to) I blur things just enough so that most readers won’t be able to tell the difference.
Details can be a double edged sword, I find.
Other Fronts
Pretty lazy day yesterday. Trinity and I went to see the latest Transformers movie with her ex-husband (who seems nice enough). The film was okay I suppose. An enjoyable way to spend a cloudy Fourth of July.
We had dinner at the Pod and a quiet night after.
So it goes.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri
Those that done said stuff