Weirdness never wanes around the old Warriors CP. One week it's some aspiring rock group that wants us to stage a kick-ass battle as background for their new music video and the next it's a videogame producer looking for advice on the latest first-person shooter that has soldiers battling alien invaders. Once in a while - but not as often as we'd like in these days of economic fear and loathing - we actually get a call to work on a feature film or TV program. Between times there's a regular cascade of requests for us to attend or assist in various military or veteran activities around the country.
That's likely why it was no earth-shaker when we got a call two weeks ago to attend a military support gig called "Sky Ball VII" in Ft. Worth, Texas. No problem to hop a flight and do some glad-handing or speechifying for a good cause. We love The Lone Star State sufficiently to own a little ranchito down in Lockhart and the cause was definitely within the Warriors wheelhouse. At least we thought it was until American Airlines Captain Jim Palmersheim mentioned what it was he wanted us to do at the seventh iteration of the massive fund-raiser staged annually by the airline.
"It would be really cool," said Palmersheim to the Adjutant who was typically multi-tasking between IPhone apps and computer programs, "if Captain Dye would appear on stage as General Patton and order everyone at the Sky Ball to give us money." The Adjutant stopped multi-tasking.
"You want him to do what?" She was now focused and shifting to palace guard mode.
"You know, re-create the opening monologue from the movie." Palmersheim was making a parallel shift into extravaganza producer mode. "We bring him on stage dressed like George C. Scott doing Patton and he does the speech but we modify it to get people to bid high on our fund-raising auction. It will be a killer third act!"
The Adjutant hung up and strolled into my office wearing her familiar "you're not gonna believe this one" look. In about fifteen minutes my actor ego was sufficiently stimulated and I agreed to attempt what would turn out to be one of the most interesting performances I've ever given before a live audience. That decision launched the Adjutant and other Warriors staffers into a frenzy of historical research and e-bay shopping in attempts to recreate the gaudy uniform worn by Scott doing Patton in the opening dialogue sequence of the 1970 Academy Award winning film. My role in all that involved retiring to a dark corner where I tried to channel George C. Scott from The Great Beyond. Scott was a former Marine so I knew the proper wavelength.
Our research library was dominated throughout the following week by a blow-up photo of Scott as Patton in full splendor while staffers tried to match every bell and whistle on the uniform worn in the famous opening sequence of the film. It was a daunting task. Apparently, the costume designers who worked on the original pulled Patton's military record, made note of every foreign and domestic decoration he received over a very long and illustrious career, and just tacked them all on a set of World War II Army officer's pinks and greens. I took one look and asked the same question that had stumped me when I first saw the film thirty years ago: Where's the electrical cord you plug in to make all that stuff light up?
Weird things began to arrive daily from collectors and attics around the country. The Adjutant mustered a working party to resurrect a pair of ratty knee-high leather cavalry boots with liberal applications of saddle soap and Velcro. Decorations, badges and sashes from esoteric orders like the Grand Heraldic Herd of Sea Turtles were tacked, glued and draped over a green uniform tunic. It was ticking along like a Timex until the military jodhpurs arrived and the Adjutant insisted I try them on for size. It was like trying to shove your calves into a boa constrictor's throat. Those old-time cavalry guys may have been smaller and shorter than modern man but you can't convince me they climbed on and off horses wearing those issue jodhpurs without the help of a Bay City crane. Of course, none of that mattered when I caught a look at my military splendor in a full-length mirror. I gave up on channeling Scott and began sending mystic messages direct to General George Smith Patton, Jr. He provided directions to the electric cord as well as some useful instruction on handling a riding crop.
Staff work on the Patton imagery continued at a frenzied pace while I worked on memorizing the necessary dialogue from the speech. That effort seemed easier when I donned the polished helmet liner bearing four stars and the symbol of the 3rd U.S. Army, Patton's wartime command. I eventually got a solid grip on the posture, prose and attitude after three straight days of annoying rehearsals followed by a fat cigar and a beaker or two of bourbon to give my voice the required gravel. It came as no surprise to me that the channel to both Scott and Patton seemed much clearer at that point in my preparation.
Remember what I said earlier about weirdness? It didn't stop when we finally arrived in Ft. Worth. In short order as we moved toward the massive hangar at American's Alliance Airport complex to do a lighting and sound check, we were introduced to former Presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, actor John Ratzenberger (Cliff from "Cheers"), retired Army CWO Mike Duran, the pilot who flew the real Blackhawk Down in Somalia winding up as a POW, and Tony Orlando, the rock singer who became famous with the vet-oriented tune "Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree." I wasn't there for Sky Balls I through VI, but clearly VII was going to involve an eclectic mix.
Everyone seemed anxious to keep the Dye-as-Patton deal a surprise and it looked like an easy subterfuge since the U.S. Navy Blue Angels flight demonstration team was in town for a big air show that was tied loosely to the Sky Ball effort. I ran into one of the Blues in the elevator at our hotel and he eyed me suspiciously from behind aviator shades. "You're Dye; right...the guy who's doing the Patton thing at the Sky Ball?" So much for keeping the big finale secret from the three thousand or so party-goers who would fill the hangar that night.
Just before curtain call at around 2200 on the big night I found myself clumping up and down the taxi apron growling my lines at a row of parked aircraft and waiting for a cue. The Patton speech had been modified a bit to urge the audience to be generous at the fund-raising auction rather than simply using an enemy's guts to grease the tracks of their tanks, but I had it all in hand and in mind. And then, just moments before I was scheduled to enter, salute and perform, it occurred to me that I was perhaps groping around way the hell above my paygrade not to mention my talent. At that moment it seemed like the height of hubris to connect any set of dots between me and luminaries like George C. Scott and George S. Patton. Who in hell did I think I was anyway?
Just before I tossed the riding crop and ran screaming across the active runway, that mystic channel opened and I heard a duo of voices, one high-pitched, almost squeaky and the other baritone and full of grit. "It's not about you," those voices seemed to say. "It's about the troops and nothing you try to do for them and their families is misplaced." I marched on and let it rip. And throughout what I'm told was the hit of the show, I was thinking about something else that General George S. Patton once said: "The leader must be an actor."
And after the show when organizers told me they'd raised a huge sum of money that would go to support military families sweating it out here at home while their spouse, son or daughter sweated it out in The Sandbox or The Stan, I reflected on another famous Patton-ism: "You won't have to say...I shoveled shit in Louisiana."

An old and very close Marine Corps buddy of mine writes from the Philippines that we're winning the war over there. Naturally, given the shaky situation in Iraq and the increasing tempo of combat engagements with the Taliban in Afghanistan, I considered retired Gunnery Sergeant Rich Groscost's missive from the PI good news. In fact, I considered his sitrep so encouraging that I sent it along to a bunch of people bitching lately about no visible light at the end of the tunnel we're traversing in the fight to eliminate militant radicals around the world. You know the ones I mean. Those zealots who believe there's never been an infidel who can't be converted by the appropriate application of high explosives?
Responses - particularly from folks who purport to be tracking the conflict with the scuzzbags who want us all living in the shadow of one huge mosque under sharia law - were disheartening. Most ran curiously to type: We've got people in the Philippines? What's all that about? For those who think our military involvement in the PI ended when we mustered the moving vans back in 1991 and hauled ass out of Subic Bay, Clark Air Force Base and a host of other strategic spots in the Philippine archipelago, here's news from the western Pacific that might make you feel a little better about whatever the new administration decides to call our global war on terrorism. And there should be no doubt that's what we're fighting no matter how much they obfuscate, weasel-word, spin and dodge in efforts to convince you otherwise.
Here's the headline: Good Guys Winning in PI War on Terror. And the sub-head: You can do more with less. Now, the rest of the story...
When we finally got our intelligence poop in a group after 9-11 and realized that the threat was a whole hell of a lot more than one whacked-out Saudi and a gaggle of his suicidal minions somewhere in Afghanistan, analysts began picking up their crayons and drawing big red circles around other places such as Iraq, Pakistan, India, The Stans in Central Asia, Somalia, Yemen and a bunch of western European countries with large and devout Moslem populations. Then one particularly perceptive wonk - I like to believe he was a former military guy who had pitched a king-hell liberty or two in Olongapo - remembered the Philippines. Wasn't there some sort of ongoing struggle with radical Moslem separatists down that way? Oh, yeah, those nasty little guys down around Mindinao, Sulu and Samar who like to lop off heads with razor-sharp machetes as evidence of their dedication to Allah and their disdain for infidels of any stripe. What did we call those guys? That's right, Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah.
Out came the crayons and a big red circle appeared around the Philippines from Luzon in the north to Mindinao in the south. And shortly thereafter in early 2002, the first U.S. special operations forces arrived in the area. The military footprint in the Philippines has remained so small relative to efforts in the Middle East that it's nearly disappeared from the major media radar sweep. Various Filipino nationalists, liberals and anti-western elements whine about U.S. imperialism and demonstrate regularly but not much of that turmoil ever makes it over the South China Sea horizon. Having been to the Philippines fairly recently and observed the vast and pitiful wasteland that's encroached on what used to be one of the Pacific's most vibrant economies - especially on Luzon - I'm prone to believe much of the Filipino bitterness comes from sour grapes. They wanted us out of there back in 1991 until they got a taste of what things were like without the major military bucks that put a chicken in every pot, kept the jeepneys rolling and the souvenir shops solvent.
But I digress - as I'm wont to do when I reflect on those great liberty runs I had while stationed in the Philippines. The real news is that the Philippines may well have become a model of how to fight modern terrorism for anyone with enough perception to look at what's going on in that country. Ever since some unconventional military thinker - probably wearing a green beret or a SEAL trident - decided to form a U.S. joint special operations task force and partner up with the Philippine forces, we've had the bad guys in that area doing the rope-a-dope and bleeding from some serious body blows. In fact, if you're desperate to find a clearly successful battle in the war on terror, just look to the Philippines.
More than one hundred Abu Sayyaf terrorists were killed in 2007, including the group's leader. Dozens more have been captured. Their operation is rapidly being shattered into cells so small as to be insignificant or just locally bothersome at best. And it's not just a matter of playing whack-a-mole with operational fighters. In the Philippines we're finding ways to strengthen that weakest link in the counter-insurgency fight, that old purported oxymoron - military intelligence. We've teamed up with Filipinos who best know the area and the people to create "joint intelligence fusion centers" that keep the good guys on the offensive and the bad guys on the run. We've also established a coast watch program to monitor and disrupt terrorists in the area who reinforce and re-supply all along the archipelago's vast sea coasts. And we've done all that with a relatively tiny force of special operators advising, guiding and training local military and police forces.
This whole success thing in the Philippines might be esoteric and small potatoes to people focused on the larger fights in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it has not escaped the attention of observers in the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. As soon as it became abundantly clear that we could do more with less people doing the right things at the right times, DOJ and DHS piled on in a hurry. Justice sent advisors who have trained 5,000 Philippine police to deal with the law enforcement aspects of domestic terrorism. Those local officers are a very effective amalgam of beat cop with SWAT capabilities who are taking the streets and the villages of the southern Philippines back from the terrorists. And while most of us think of Homeland Security as those brain-dead druids who piss us off at airports, in the Philippines DHS experts have created a "biometric initiative" - things like retina scans, rapid fingerprint verification and computer facial modeling - to defeat disguises and give Philippine National Police a big leg up in hunting down suspected terrorists.
My buddy Rich who married and settled in the Philippines when he retired from the Marine Corps says it's all working like a charm relative to the problems we had in Iraq and are facing in Afghanistan. Having served in both the western Pacific and the Middle East, I tend to agree with him. And I don't believe we're comparing apples and oranges by speculating that a lot of what's worked in the Philippines would work in an expanded or modified form in Afghanistan. If it were up to me - and thank God it's not - I just might modify the travel itinerary for special operators heading for The Sandbox; routing them into Kabul or Baghdad via Mindinao. It couldn't hurt.

It's a hell of a note but there are way too many dependent Americans on this American Independence Day. Maybe it's just me being cantankerous. Maybe I'm letting my inner curmudgeon override my normal warm and fuzzy persona but I believe there's more than a little irony in celebrating our independence with great hoopla when so many of us are happily reliant on someone or something besides ourselves for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Thomas Jefferson and his cohorts on the Committee of Five from the Continental Congress would be crapping little blue BBs if they fell through a wormhole in the space-time continuum and found themselves observing American society circa 2009. Advances in technology and sheer mind-boggling culture shock aside, guys like Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin would swear King George was still issuing oppressive fiats from across the Atlantic. These guys - and most other colonial types who supported independence from absentee dictatorship - were all about freedom of choice, individual liberty and less is more when it came to central governance of any sort. So that must have been what was on their collective minds when they drafted the Declaration of Independence and elbowed it through to ratification back in July 1776. Granted a whole lot of water in the form of sweeping societal change has passed under the bridge since 1776, but I'm of the opinion that most Americans would still opt for a little more individual determination and a lot less government intervention in their day to day existence.
Of course, I could be wrong about that. God knows it wouldn't be the first time. I distinctly recall coming back from Vietnam gleefully anticipating a homecoming parade or at least a hearty handshake from my fellow Americans who did not have to go to war because a whole bunch of other folks like me went in their place. Missed that one by a mile and I could be just as mistaken about attitudes today. Maybe most Americans do want to be told what to do by Big Government on one level or another every day of their lives. Maybe they think choices about stuff like what car to drive, what doctor to consult, what schools they can attend and what work they can do should not be personal choices based on what they want and what they can afford. Maybe most Americans think rugged individualism and independence are concepts that have no meaning or place in modern society. For all I know there might be a majority of people out there claiming American citizenship who believe it's best to just turn over all their disposable income to local, state or federal governments and accept what the bureaucrats say is best for them.
Maybe that's the way it is but I hope not. What I hope is that a lot of those Americans will take a moment or two on this Independence Day 2009 to ponder the slippery path on which we find ourselves embarked these days. We are a nation of multi-cultural, diverse individuals and from our individuality comes our strength as a nation. When Big Government turns up the heat beneath our melting pot we become weak, soggy, limp, flavorless and bland. Our founding fathers would gag down about one spoonful of that mess and puke all over their buckled shoes.
And here's another thing that's on my mind this time of year around Independence Day when I contemplate the very foundations of our society, our individual liberties and our freedom of choice. A whole hell of a lot of military folks from Valley Forge on through to Baghdad and Kabul thought enough of those concepts to believe they were worth fighting and possibly dying for; even when it wasn't necessarily their own freedoms at stake. Those are my kind of people, men and women who understand individual freedoms are not bestowed by government decree. They must be established, obtained and retained by individuals willing to risk their lives by picking up a flintlock, an M-1 or an M-4 and fighting for them if necessary.
Of course, if those individual freedoms weren't being threatened or impinged upon by various forms of oppressive governments, all that fighting and dying wouldn't be necessary for the most part. But that's not the way of things in our world and as long as human beings are disposed to tribalism, it won't be that way anytime in the near future. None of that is going to be challenged or changed by the intervention of Big Government in our lives or in the lives of people around the world. It's been tried before and it inevitably results in revolution or war. You don't have to take my word for it - and if you're disposed to Big Government running your life you won't anyway - just ask Thomas Jefferson when he blows through that wormhole. And if he's carrying a flintlock, stay out of his line of fire.