Shadow's taxicab reports 5/23/06 - Democratic Underground

shadowknows69

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Wed May-24-06 07:29 AM
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Shadow's taxicab reports 5/23/06

Edited on Wed May-24-06 07:31 AM by shadowknows69

Not much to report lately from the younger soldiers but I had an interesting customer in the cab tonight. No insight to report on upcoming events I'm sad to say but he fascinated me none the less. He was probably in his early 60's and we had a 40 minute ride together so we talked. Got on the subject of the military somehow and I learned he was a Vietnam Vet but it sounded like he was in covert communications and intelligence work and he said he spent a good part of the war in other places. In particular he mentioned he was in Korea near the DMZ when N Korea shot down one of our AWACS planes. 4/14/69 I think the date was. He said that "The balloon almost went up that day" and we were pretty close to the 2nd Korean war right there. He was in Seoul at the time and they were getting ready to mobilize him to Japan. Apparently for the sole reason that he knew too much about our Korean defenses to risk being captured. Pretty cool huh? I smell bullshit pretty well too and this man didn't stink of it. He was pretty hawkish about a lot of things. Made mention how protesters really hurt the war effort although he was referring to Vietnam mostly I think. Told stories of protesters really mistreating a lot of the vets coming back then. Maybe some DU vets can confirm or deny this. I told him I thought that was a lesson that the new anti-war movement definitely learned and we never hate the warrior, only the war. You can be proud of me DU in that I didn't take my usual semi-neutral stance on things and we had a nice respectful debate about a few things. Asked how he thought Iran would pan out. He made some semi-sweeping generalizations about his experience with muslims. Not overtly racist but stereotypical. He said you can never be sure about them or something. That they do things without thinking. Ok I guess that is pretty racist. Whatever, just relating details. My point is he didn't seem to say these things with the malice I sense from some.

Anyway Iran. he said he thought the leader was crazy. I made mention that ours doesn't seem especially stable at times (ok I was a little diplomatic)he concurred. He agreed that the army is pushing soldier too hard and I related some of my experiences to him. He said that if Iran's people wanted to let their leader take them back to the 16th century then we'd probably oblige them. Pretty creepy. I said we should be equally wary of lunatics like The Phelps clan and he knew who I was talking about and agreed that Phelps would probably use a nuke if he had one. One more interesting tidbit. He claimed he used to run an early warning radar system that use to be on a local water tower near me. He said it was setup that if an unknown threat came into range it would immediately send a signal to a local airbase to scramble ready 5 fighters. No human input necessary. Makes you wonder how we missed those off course airliners huh? All in all a very cool talk. Gives me hope that people with some essential differences can come together on other things and important things. Anyhoo another small adventure in the nights of The Shadow.