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Angry Staff Officer

@pptsapper

Jan 17,

Chinese takeout and The Longest Day. Haven't watched it in years, should be entertaining.

I forgot that literally everyone is in this movie.

I love that you don't see a single American for the first ten minutes. Everything is in French or German.

And then you spend the next five minutes watching everyone be miserable in the rain. An accurate picture of England at war

John Wayne turns around and goes from LTC Vandervoort to John Wayne in .01 seconds

It's a remarkable skill

Read 21 tweets

Angry Staff Officer

@pptsapper

Jan 17,

Look at this utter BAMF. Cpl. Clarence van Allen, Boston, Massachusetts. Peep that ribbon rack. Stacks on stacks on STACKS. There's a Distinguished Service Cross, the Croix de Guerre with Palm, and the Medaille Militaire (France's 3d highest award). Don't mess with this dude

Clarence van Allen was part of the Massachusetts National Guard, Company L, 6th Infantry. When WWI was declared, the 6th MA got organized into the 26th Division. All but CO L, which became part of the 372d Infantry in the 93d Division

Fighting alongside the French, the 372d fucked up the Germans something bad. The French 157th Div commander wrote to the 372nd, "'The Red Hand,' sign of the Division, thanks to you, became a bloody hand which took the Boche by the throat and made him cry for mercy"

Read 8 tweets

Angry Staff Officer

@pptsapper

Jan 14,

Have been thinking a lot recently about the US Army after Vietnam, as we look to see what the Army after Afghanistan looks like. There's some disturbing trends and parallels, obviously not all the same because of time, situations, cultural shifts, etc but...it bears thinking of

The Army emerged from Vietnam utterly broken. The service was a disaster. Drug use was rampant. As Atkinson writes about in "Long Gray Line," it got so bad in US Army Europe that officers and NCOs didn't visit enlisted barracks for fear of violence. Racial violence was common

One battalion commander was literally shot at by one of his soldiers as he walked by the barracks. The moral and physical losses from Vietnam, the effect of the draft, and a shifting cultural tide led to an Army that was in a shambles. It took decades to rebuild it.

Read 11 tweets

Angry Staff Officer

@pptsapper

Jan 9,

Ben Butler, man. Saving thousands of lives from an epidemic. Between this and his advocacy for USCT, it might be time to revisit his historiography

(An Environmental History of the Civil War, 32)

Good note here: smallpox vaccinations were also enforced in the US Army in the Civil War, beginning in 1861

This is the kind of nerdery I live for. The effects of weather and geology on the Peninsula Campaign of 1862.

Read 7 tweets

Angry Staff Officer

@pptsapper

Jan 3,

At the dawn of the new year, I'm realizing a never did a rundown of the top five posts from the blog in 2021. It was really guest writers who kept the thing afloat, as we can see with the 5th most read piece from 2021: Howard Zhou on China

wp.me/p4QlZL-2cq

Coming in at number four, I look at Baron Harkonnen's exceptional tactical victory on Arrakis, and his subsequent strategic failure, in #Dune

wp.me/p4QlZL-2fx

Number 3 is a piece showcasing the, uh, "angry" part of my moniker.

This still plea is still in effect in 2022, btw.

wp.me/p4QlZL-2av

Read 7 tweets

Angry Staff Officer

@pptsapper

Jan 1,

One bottle of champagne down

Now where's that pesky gin got to

Well well well well well well well

Well

I found the gin, so don't be worried. Yo, remember that time when the US almost took Canada in a snowstorm but didn't because of a lack of gin? Ok, well not that, but gin probably would've helped.

So it's 1775, like it often is in my stories. Convenient that way. Here's the sitch, frens. Shit is Poppin all the fuckin way off around these here colonies. Like. Poppin. Off. There's all this talk of liberty and shit and someone's like, "yo, do you think Canada wanna join?"

Read 22 tweets

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