Some of Its Meanings and Usages in Foreign Policy, National Defense, Academia, Journalism, and SHOM™

August-October, 2015

Face bait, and you’ll face Vietnam Trauma Fever.¹Described herein.
Do it to save your — the nation’s — strategic soul.

Introduction

As I understand how it works in the worlds of professional make believing²Unconsciously subjective objectifications. analysis and debate, swirlingly less-than-intrepid³To mean PC-conformed. dialogue, and distance-based combat decision making, civilian and even military executives can control the permutations of management reality, in great part, by excluding certain swaths of it, and then filling in with hallucination the blank spots the left-outs have otherwise created. After leaving pretending, though — which otherwise helps out during the formation of theory — we no longer have the spinningly delusory-intellect option. When going there, that is, to the real place of implementation, people are forced, should we fail to hold the line⁴Functioning congruently together and in sync., into slavery, injuriously nearly obliterated, and they are killed in mass. Not necessarily because implementation has gone askew, nor always because of character fallibility that might be hovering in only one place, say for example, like the Oval Office, State Department, Intelligence services, or Pentagon, or even in the minds of the governed, but because of a failure during battle to maintain congruity of thought, feeling, learning and meaning of purpose by the entire defending continuum from the governing polity to its foreign policy implementation component. And that natural vulnerability provides the opposition with its primary target. Strategically applied trauma is the weapon. Fragmentation of the opposition’s, our, decision making / implementation continuum is the objective. Conquering us is the goal.

Exploiting the fear that attends not just the referenced disruption, but the prospects of it, “bait,” a foreign policy management single catchword which has become popular in 2015 — the concept of “bait” explains why some managers fight adversaries like they do, that is in one example by not showing up for the contest,⁵The Harvard terrorism expert, Jessica Stern, and the Brookings Institute’s J.M. Berger explain that approach this way. “Finally, we can offset ISIS messaging priorities by refusing to play into its apocalyptic narrative. As seen in Chapter 10, ISIS wants to enact specific prophecies regarding the end times, such as a victorious confrontation with the “crusaders” in the town of Dabiq. Our policies and military actions should not rise to the bait. For both military and messaging purposes, it is foolhardy to show up at the exact place and time that an enemy most desires. Whatever ambush lies in wait at Dabiq, let it rot there unfulfilled.” From Stern, Jessica; Berger, J. M., 2015-03-17, ISIS: The State of Terror (pp. 251-252). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.  or in others⁶John Brennan, 2011: “Our strategy is … shaped by a deeper understanding of al-Qaida’s goals, strategy and tactics. I’m not talking about al-Qaida’s grandiose vision of global domination through a violent Islamic caliphate. That vision is absurd, and we are not going to organize our counterterrorism policies against a feckless delusion that is never going to happen. We are not going to elevate these thugs and their murderous aspirations into something larger than they are.” disavowing that it exists at all⁷David Remnick, New Yorker Magazine, 2014, ‘Going the Distance,’ quote of the President of the United States, Barack Obama: “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Obama said, resorting to an uncharacteristically flip analogy. “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.” — doesn’t just highlight the challenge, but the added fear of it permeates the whole theory-to-action management chain down to its soul. Nobody wants to take bait, to be drawn in by it, to be manipulated into some massively catastrophic bottomless whirlpooling cauldron of demise, or just be seen as having been snookered. And nobody, probably to include even our most courageously dedicated,  certainly wants to become bait.

So what’s to do? Face those trauma-induced psycho-encumbrances forthrightly by all involved — simplified, rethink today’s official usage of “bait” and the relationship to its trauma undergirding, and then systematically remove that interactional psycho-substrate — lest the system keeps failing to learn how to defend itself.

Disclaimer

Injuries, illness, and now old age have taken their toll on my capacities to tell stories from a half century back. But I’m going to try here because, in part, that era best fits the situation of today. That past defines for a constituency what “bait” in combat means, back then and with the same carried forward to now, and how to even address it without its controlling the overall decision making process.

Summer, Fall, Winter 1965

Holding the rank of PFC⁸“PFC” is the acronym for Private First Class, which is the second lowest rank in the armed services on August 28, 1965, I landed with a newly formed infantry team from a UH34D helicopter at the edge of Chu Lai, a Marine base being carved out of the beaches, cliffs, waterways, mountains, sand dunes and jungles of the Central Highlands of what was then called the Republic of South Vietnam: Also I Corps. We had deployed on the carrier USS Princeton from the Naval base at Long Beach, California, on the same day that the Watt’s riot in Los Angeles erupted, August 10 of that year. We got across the Pacific very rapidly.

For purposes of depicting one of the referenced levels — foreign policy implementation — of managerial reality, rain predominated all experience of existence at the tour’s beginning. The holes we dug were filled with either sand, red clay, or deep rust shaded coral reef and rainwater. When digging down to make way for grenades thrown into the space so that they would fall through the coral and out onto the edges of the cliff — hopefully falling off therefrom — the hardened and reddish tint became darkened, and then embedded into my skin, simultaneously changing its basic color and protecting me from bugs. The good news was that the grenade exit tunnel also drained off the water. Where these tunnels were appropriate, they ended the two feet deep pool effect where we otherwise placed our legs and feet. Really big rats used the tunnel, too, coming in the dark for leftover C rations, when there were some.

For most of that four months, at least through the beginning twelve weeks, the monsoon waters rarely stopped. I had no poncho. It was blown away during an especially intense September storm. My seabag with extra utilities, underwear, socks, a picture of my girlfriend who’d already, and wisely, left me, regular uniforms and civilian clothes for things like liberty at Disneyland and such back in America had accidentally been dropped with a couple hundred other not waterproof bags into a lake of sorts, and never to be retrieved.

Those facts, when combined with the following, are significantly pertinent, I think, to understanding this management experience and today’s concept of bait. No matter whether on day or night patrols, manning an M60⁹A light belt-fed machine gun, sometimes mounted on a tripod, and others on bipods. in open holes throughout the nights, or carrying out any of my part of the implementation component of the foreign policy decision making continuum in I Corps, I never got out of the rain. Where adverse influences of such weather exposure might have contributed to, say, depression for some, as was reported by Marines who fought in the two week neverending rains at Gloucester in the Pacific theater of WWII, I learned to think, particularly when the rain fell for those long hours during the dark of evening and as those times rolled into the early mornings of post midnight. My focus was primarily upon the conscious development of strategies for countering the enemy’s permutations of attack options upon the area for which I had defensive responsibility, and for my team, which of course included me. Survival required constructively focused imagination, which in hindsight I concluded was made less restrictive by the many hours in punishing conditions. They eventually removed, stripped away, those system-based admonitions inherited from mainstream living — “Don’t preoccupy with prospective bad things happening. It’s just not cool” — that I have since learned encumber more socially integrated civil experience and thought when challenged to defend against the otherwise unthinkable.

The experience would carry over to today. Not only do I employ the same threat matrix analysis learned therein, but regardless of any deluge, I won’t wear a raincoat, use an umbrella, or even wait until it stops, in this now peaceful civilian life, still fifty years later. For me, the monsoons and typhoons of that reality would turn out, and second only to the death of Marines, to be the big deal. And worse, albeit parenthetically, at the time I didn’t even know it.

Where I had many jobs during that soaking period, a couple would be thought of today as bait related. In the first, Intelligence (S2) would issue a red alert, no pun intended here, that the Vietcong would likely be coming during the darker hours. I was sent on each of these occasions with another lower ranked Marine, and never to be the same person, to intercept the incoming before they got to the base’s lines providing its defenses. Either we were to kill the intruders or have enough of a fight so that the base managers knew the enemy was on its way. Being comprised only of two man teams, we never thought we were actually intended to overwhelm the guerrilla force. Rather, as I was told several times, we were there to trigger the bigger alarms.

Not exactly bait. But close. However, I never thought of it that way. To me it was a mission. A duty. A part of a team of people who were at war. Instead of a trigger or bait, it was my job to find and kill the enemy, or sound an alarm. And either I did it, or the responsibility would be left to some other person — a concept that for me as a nineteen years old Marine serving my country, and the men of my squad, was intolerable.

In that beginning activity, ambushes from VC-built tunnel complexes set the stage for future strategies, all of them bait related. One of our smaller groups at an outpost would receive fire from someone inside the tunnel. We in turn, knowing of the ambush and assured prospects that it would be used as bait with which to entrap a larger Marine force, to mean us in these specific instances, a squad reinforced with two of our own special ambush teams intended to ambush the ambushers. Leaving at ten in the evening and ever downpouring rain, we traveled to the spot where the VC were suspected to be, because they were there the night before, and we set our own traps, leaving the two fire teams at different intersects with the tunnel complex. The team that was already embedded there the night and day before was the bait, and we were the counter should the VC be so inclined to take it, which at that earlier time they rarely did. 

In the second bait related assignment, which began in December, my squad was strengthened for rapid response deployment. Among other duties and assignments, also called missions, we were flown in and deposited to secure downed helicopters and their crews if yet removed. The idea at the time was said to be that Vietcong or NVA would shoot up one of our planes so that additional Marines would be sent to the rescue. The downed bird was the bait, the trap, and we¹⁰From Marine infantry teams. were supposed to step into it. Someone always did, accommodating the guerrilla teams. But surprising those strategists, once our single squad team was in several of the available MAG (36) group of eight UH34D squadrons loaded a rapid response rifle company comprised of about 207 Marines, who would then encircle the antagonist entrappers.

Although my immediate team remained secure during those activities, death, injury and carnage, which I may imprudently be leaving out of this description, attended the effort for those operating in concert. It was combat, war, and — in comparison to life in non combat zones like back home was supposed to be  and mostly was — horrible. I was in the United States Marine Corps, which I kept silently repeating to myself as, now looking at it in retrospect, provided a mindful adaptation that helped to see me through my contribution to the overall effort.

The rains became more sporadic — less monsoon — in the latter half of November and even much of December. But the holes remained the same, except with less water in their bottom. And with the new conditions, the process of baiting and counter-baiting eventually accelerated at the beginning of 1966 and marked the way we fought the war most successfully. But I had changed jobs by January of that new year. And, it gave me a broader perspective, which for bait definitional purposes I also share with you here.

January to August 1966

The helicopter group’s commanding officer, Colonel, and eventually to become Major General William Gentry Johnson was shot down twice in the fall to winter of 1965. He required someone with both machinegun and grunt skills to be his body guard, particularly when in zones where he liaisoned with the infantry. I got the job and provided that protective function, along with some aviation operation clerking duties I learned via OJT, until August of 1966.

Starting with Double Eagle One, I made every operation in I Corps, participating in both amphibious and helicopter landings from the northern tip of Quang Ngai Province at Binh Son, Quang Ngai City, itself, and south of it, and then up to Tam Ky, a village halfway between Chu Lai and Danang. The efforts, which progressed inland into the hills of the more mountainous areas, are documented in Vietnam literature as Operations Double Eagle One and Two, Utah, Texas, Indiana, Mississippi, Kansas, and some others, the names of which I no longer remember. But my view was an extraordinary one for a person of my rank. I saw those implementations from several perspectives.

Here’s the way it went. Each contestant baited the other, and on increasingly bigger scales.

Intelligence would report large NVA and Vietcong troop movements. Our top managers, including this MAG’s CO, planned combined amphibious and  air insertion assaults, coordinated with the intent to trap the opposition in sizeable force within our circles. Where that model worked well at the Battle of Chu Lai back in August of 65 — the forces sealed a peninsula and then killed most of what presented for the fight — as we went south into Quang Ngai Province, the larger groups of antagonists disappeared, fading into the countryside, mountains, and large caves/tunnels.

But sometimes the opposition responded differently, and when we were not always planning for it. A Vietcong group would track intelligence gathering recon teams, each comprised of eighteen members. When ready to start the battle on antagonists’ terms, they would shoot up the oversized squad, which in turn would call for emergency medevacs. In the operations tent, which was put up either back at Chu Lai or when in forward (the field supporting the infantry activities) locations over a crater of a hole the size of a small swimming pool, I and LCpl Wolf would take their call and alert the medevac crews, almost always UH34Ds from HMM360 to 368 squadrons, consisting of eight helicopters each. Engines would start for warming and Wolf or I would plot the zone coordinates and deliver it to the pilots, and they would launch within eleven minutes, the time required before those planes could safely get up.

A Navy Corpsman¹¹See a tribute to Navy Corpsmen. would attend the flight, with its crew being comprised of a Crewchief, often a sergeant who manned the M60 swivel pedestal-mounted on the starboard side’s open hatch, a port gunner who was also a helicopter mechanic doing additional duty as a machine gunner through a port 2 x 2 foot square opening cut out of the bulkhead, and the pilot and copilot who sat higher up in the cockpit. The planes left in pairs, one being the medevac and the other serving as a chase bird. Its function was to retrieve the crew and machine guns of the first plane going into the zone if it were to go down.

More and more frequently, they did. The medevac was setup by the Vietcong as bait, which no matter the prospects the crews went into the zone to get the wounded. Then, the first bird would be shot down, and the second swept in for the crew, or if not able to get in due to the intense fire from the enemy now surrounding the zone, the air crew would join the recon team, if possible. The downed craft was immediately noted by radio through calls to Wolf and me to a standby larger group of helicopters in various sizes, one to several squadrons, each consisting of seven or eight thirty-fours.

On notice, they would fly three miles to pick up emergency response and always ready Marine infantry, seven grunts per plane, and then head for the cyclonically-styled fight developing at the downed helicopter(s), crews and reconnaissance team.

In that it was their plan, the NVA were always ready, too, the bait now being the downed medevac and recon Marines taking the original beating, usually on a hill somewhere. No matter that everybody involved knew what was coming and the meaning of themselves as not just attacker, but as the about to be new bait, they went straight in, surrounding both the opposition and the recon team with MAG36 medevac crews now with them, if that was the way it worked out. The responding thirty-fours would glide in, almost, and with the grunts departing on the run, usually emptying the carrier before its wheels touched ground or even the tops of high grass. As they would slide in, then out and up, streams of tracers filled the starboard side hatches, passed through bulkheads, and walked along the path of the charging Marines, hitting some as they sprinted into the fight. More of them would go down as their company encircled the NVA.

Starting at the time of the original call regarding the downed medevac, UH1E gunships from VMO6 lifted from either the pad at Ky Ha, Chu Lai or if we were in the field participating in a lesser active operation, providing gunship air support quickly to those on the ground and in the center of the forming circle of rescuers, who were just as quickly becoming bait themselves, as larger NVA forces in division strength supported by anti-aircraft twenty MM auto canons poured from the underground. They would after waiting there and until our insertion was done moments before, circle our emergency responding infantry company, who were now the new bait.

But the enemy, too, would succumb to the bait modality, as after having done these kinds of battles through that spring of 1966, and learned how to fight the bait strategy, our group of eight squadrons of troop carriers were launching already to pick up an emergency response Marine infantry battalion, carrying them in waves of forty helicopters to and then into the zone, encircling the NVA division. It would take at least two trips to put in the larger force. From the time the first medevac call came in, till the last battalion level grunt came off the plane, it would take approximately six to eight hours for all the baits to be set, taken and engaged.

Battles were characterized by constant fire from all locations inside the concentric circles of opposing forces, and supported from the air by Phantom F4 fighters and always the gun ships. Mortars, applied with the same precision expertise against the ground mobile French units twelve years earlier, did their damage on the inner rings of Marines. When the battle went into the nights, very light and extremely slow moving, as if a kite flying completely exposed/unprotected in the sky, two wing planes circled overhead, dropping parachute flares.

Although standing orders precluded helicopters from entering unsecured zones, they flew in anyway against orders to retrieve badly wounded, or to kick out must needed ammunition. More helicopters would be downed and their crews, wounded, killed or rescued.

Where the fuller search and destroy kinds of operations were extended to weeks, the bait-generated tornado to hurricane fights, presenting as I recall at intervals of weeks to months, would last between two to three days. The enemy were killed by the hundreds, and in one case thousands. Our losses would rise to between one to two hundred men KIA, more wounded — one thirty-four could and would carry a maximum of seven grunts suffering major injuries like body cavity carnage, limb injury and full displacement, to mean arm, legs, hands, and feet having been shot, torn apart or blown off — and several destroyed helicopters. Our crews flew as many as twenty-four emergency medevacs per day, and an uncountable number not qualifying as “emergency” status. It meant that the wounded would die and soon if not extracted immediately. It was that work, and similarly done by Army, Air Force and Navy teams during the Vietnam War that established the timing requirements for biological trauma management on the highways of America starting in the late 1970s¹²See the book Trauma, 1979.

I mentioned earlier that, given my rank and while performing body guard tasks, I was accorded an unusually varied perspective of this process. The views were taken from the top, which refers to the flight pattern overlaying a battle zone, to the bottom, which included performing ground level jobs. One of them was to accompany the CO or his replacement authority, on one occasion (for about ten days) the FMF PAC inspector and for the same amount of time another Marine, General English, who was the commander for operation Texas, and each of them as they walked the battlefield and discussed with all involved, particularly the grunt commanders, helicopter and other air participation.

That Colonel served as the Tactical Air Control Coordinator (TACA) for all operations. He flew in a slick (an unarmed UH1E) above the entire action making command decisions pertaining to each of the battles. In that capacity, I watched insertions of troops occur simultaneous with ammunition resupply, extracting medevacs, water runs, and later, Graves Registration missions when they could be made. The concentric rings of opposing combatants was in every sense of the word, in this instance of writing certainly inadequate to the task, a melee of hard fighting by extraordinarily and courageously competent people. Pilots would send their machines, which were like open boxcars when they plunged into the arena from higher flight patterns and then down through overlaying and enfilade automatic and tracer lit trajectories. The scene was like a crisscrossing laser light show one might watch in today’s world of play and entertainments. Except, of course, the metal between every fifth glowing round comprising those streams was real, not of imaginatively emulating digital or older celluloid fighting fantasy.

From another perspective, the same pilots would present at the start and during the operation at the map boards, receiving their orders and loading onto their craft to begin, usually again, and then again. They were methodically stoic in their presentations, whether getting their orders or speaking on the radio to either the squadron leaders, the TACA (Colonel Johnson – nailfile 6), with the infantry on the ground, or just Wolf and me at different times while manning the operations S3 radio, and while they headed into the zones.

From another perspective, still, of the same pilots and crews, when serving TAD as a crew replacement, I listened to them talk on the intercom to each other in moderatedly calm voices, describing the location, direction and kinds of incoming fire, and then determining where to direct our own. And I could barely speak. At the same time, and intermixed with that appearance of intense control, for example during strikes — the first insertion of a wave of thirty-four Ds carrying Marine infantry into the zone — fixed wings would roar if not seemingly flash down and past either the starboard or port openings, and to me apparently having no where to go lower than this plane but straight into the ground, although that never happened. They knew what they were doing in adapting to the various strategic contrivances: bait.

Learning from and by Studying, Taking, Becoming and Creating Bait

The indefatigable communist war correspondent Bernard Fall spoke of the unable-to-defeat military and political methods used by the Viet Minh against the French during the preceding French IndoChina War 1946-1954. They would be played out equally successfully against the Americans, he theorized in an epilogue added in 1964 to his most famous and earlier published book, Street Without Joy. And both those eight year efforts were about bait, which our entire S3 Operations section — The Exec Lt. Colonel Zitnic; our in-house connection to the infantry, Major Dooley; the indomitable Captain Downy who frequently came over from VMO6; the ever dryly and intellectually hilarious Top Sergeant Thompson and his replacement Gunnery Sgt Gratton; LCpls Wolf and the other fellow whose name I cannot recall; and for a while TAD from his job as the new CO of VMO6, Major William Goodsell, who would receive posthumously the Navy Cross; and the almost always present Group CO, Colonel Johnson  — studied by reading that book in the winter-spring of 1966. At the same time that we were sending direct “lessons learned” correspondences back to Robert McNamara and then president Lyndon Johnson, nobody missed a chapter of Fall’s work. And we each understood the challenge. How to fight and win against one of the already proved to be best bait-setters in the world, General Vo Nguyen Giap.

He had a four part plan. In it, each phase was initiated for him to learn how the opposition responded, in particular how its combatants and leaderships at home fought. He purposefully would set increasingly larger traps by providing his own troops as bait with which to lure in the adversary.

Although both the French and Americans learned well at the combat level, they failed to pass on those lessons to the hierarchies, and particularly the tops of the totem poles, the people comprising the governed. Or at least the methods for passing those understandings on were inadequate.

And those management shortcomings were not just interceded upon, to also mean exacerbated by the Comintern of the 1930s gone legal freedom of expression at Western universities in the 60s, but by what I’ve always opined was the biggest American management wartime challenger: individual and systemically manifesting psychological trauma. Giap excelled at its facilitation, making him in the world’s view, the greatest Offensive Trauma Manager (OTM)¹³For descriptions of OTM (“Offensive Trauma Managers”), see Guerrilla, Terrorism or Asymmetric Warfare’s Pathogenesis and Cure, Jesse Collins, 1991, and updated 2003, 2010. of the last half of the twentieth century. For that title, he was so good at timing of start/stop of all levels of combat-trauma-imposed-for-political-purposes/-effect with French and American polity — and all that was augmented with back home pronouncements of drug-undergirded-futility-based and hysterically psychobabblelized quagmires; apparently coincidental parallel internal oppression claims by the ever downtrodden; proofs of Western imperfections like prejudice, unfair white male domination, bigotry and income inequality; fun campus-to-street enemy-supporting protest rallies; blown up places; some of the most highly intelligent cowards to ever grace the Pacifism movement; complete defamationally-styled shaming of the adult, parent and grandparent classes not to mention their poor ancestors; burned downed cities; the murdering of the foremost eloquent of our civil rights leaders; and the immorality of thinking differently from ever strengthening academic or entertainment aristocracies  — that he would have challenged even Lenin, had he lived in the later years of his visions’ outcomes.

Back in the USA, I was transferred in the fall of 1966 to work again in my pre combat tour MOS as a driver for the newly reactivated 5th Marine Division. But promotion to NCO rank combined with the previous Southeast Asia tour experience resulted instead in my predominantly becoming a trainer of new Marines heading into that region. The subjects were guerrilla and counter-guerrilla warfare, land navigation, automatic weapons, amphibious and air assault operations, and “Why we were fighting in Vietnam.” The latter lecture was supposed to have been delivered by officer level trainers. But by that time, 1967-1968, we didn’t have anybody at that level — from the new higher ranked and academically advanced during the mid sixties’ incomings from civilian America — who knew “Why.” Declining Officers Candidate School, or becoming a DI at the Grinder in San Diego, in 1968 I instead left the Marines as a Platoon Sergeant at the end of active duty to get an education.

Significant to this story, I returned home on an early release at the end of May in that year for the purpose of attending summer session classes at the University of Houston. There, I came face to face with the “left out” parts of the war combat story in which I had just been involved for the previous four years. It wasn’t even on the civilian, in particular academic dialoguers’ menus.

After getting through some of the shock attending the reality differences, but still not in that new beginning being politically astute, I tried to introduce the other, hmm . . . narrative with which I was familiar, some of the facts also of which have just been iterated above. But it had become, regrettably in these new surroundings — America — inappropriate. Studying it, now for nearly fifty years, there was a clash of realities that pitted the beginnings of the 1960s’ thinkers’ realities against the endings’, which has yet to be concluded going on a half century later. Interpreting it for myself and now SHOM for this discussion regarding America’s decision making continuum when addressing combat/war, causes of the clash and thus the epistemologies of the differences were varied to include

1. Organization/employment structural matters like “What’s the (your) job and its goals, and the paths both navigated and in the current required to travel in order to achieve them?”
   1. Career governing manager with also varied expertises attended by equally many-presenting philosophies, ideologies, academic and professional specialties.
   2. Political appointees with the same or similar personal and professional influences. 
2. Mental illness pertaining to obsessive compulsive behavior-based aberrancies.
3. Drug/alcohol addiction, or if not that far along only so called heavy use of available psychotropics¹⁴Although drug use has myriad differentiations — legal to non, by varied interactions with neuro, liver and other organ bio-psycho-sociological influences — in this trauma related use “psychotropics” is intended to reference general drug, e.g., from alcohol to marijuana to prescription medication applications, and with the commonality that they are and function as exogenous variables relating with and to human ontology. All or almost any of the drugs act, albeit often even differently, in concert with the traumatic condition as medicators of it. Anything influencing that ontology inevitably influences decision making, in this case referring to politics..
4. And consideration of contrivance issues, for example, “Whose side are you really on?”
5. Generalized individual versus mob-based thinking influences — the right to existence of individual thought.
6. And my speciality of interest and which did roll comorbidly or even effectuatingly into the others, war-caused systemic traumatic effects — attackees are prospectively, if the trauma targeting them is not resolved Etiotropically, spun out into politically demonstrable categories of symptomatic systemic response:
   1. Denial
   2. Fighting
   3. Supporting or outright joining the opposition — so called for identification purposes, Stockholm Syndrome

Where “a” through “e” should be the ordinary address of and by bureaucratic management, and I’m sure they at least probably are working on it, “f” opens another door altogether. That is, trauma and its individual and systemic consequences then and now are turned into a political model, which has, or can have its epistemology in either the Nosotropic or Etiotropic approaches to its address.

Nosotropic (symptom*-focused) vs Etiotropic (etiology-focused) Trauma Management of Foreign Policy, National Defense and Bait

*Before starting this section, a general clarification of this essay’s use of traumatic “symptoms”¹⁵For symptom examples, see Appendix E: After-Trauma Individual, General Systemic, and even Nationally-/Globally-Presenting Symptoms; as reprinted from Guerrilla, Terrorism or Asymmetric Warfare’s Pathogenesis and Cure 1991, 2003, 2010, Jesse Collins might be helpful for readers who are not ETM TRT SHOM trained clinical and management personnel. Post-traumatic stress disorder, originally entitled “Post Vietnam Stress Disorder” before being codified in the DSM (1980) under the current identifier is characterized by “symptoms” that occur in individuals so affected. The list can be restricted to observations made or recorded in very controlled settings where the presenting thoughts and behaviors as responses to earlier traumatic activities or experiences are accorded clinical analysis, say for treatment planning and such. There are even forms and softwares that can tell the viewer if enough of the symptomatology is presenting and as well in the designated disposition required for diagnosis of the malady. But symptoms can be viewed in their broader context as peoples’ general and even specific functionings that are although reactive to psychological trauma, not necessarily so as a disorder (PTSD). In ETM TRT SHOM we call these reactions “survival responses” because they are numerous, presenting in repeating patterns, and even occurring less codifiably as inevitably having their locus of initiation in trauma’s retained neuromolecular source, etiology¹⁶Where other essays published in this SHOMblog address and describe trauma etiology, the Glossary 4a and 4b provides a standard definition. Since originally writing this article, I’ve added an Appendix B to this series that summarizes trauma etiology for the, usually, non ETM TRT SHOM trained reader..  In addition to those two categorizations, symptoms also present systemically as noticeable responses to shared trauma etiology in families, groups, teams and organizations; and there are certainly no formal DSM clinical designations — albeit self-help groups and systems-oriented therapists have codified for their helping identifier purposes systems-based adjustment reaction as “dysfunctional families,” “Chemical Dependency’s Family Disease,” and “Codependency” — for those presentations within the collective. Those system perspectives have since been carried over to many kinds or sources of trauma, for example child sexual abuse occurring in and affecting families as a whole to combat to criminal assault. In our own clinical analysis matrix, we note at least forty¹⁷Here is an intaking clinical ETM assessment form/worksheet from the online ETM TRT (1994) Tutorial and originally published between 1984 and 1986 in the ETM TRT Professional Training and Certification Manual, that identifies twenty-six sources of trauma typically presenting in our trauma care clinical environments from 1979. such causes and sources of systemic elements of trauma. And there are even more identifiers not categorized in these groupings. Now for purposes of interpretation of political process affecting a nation’s foreign and defensive policy decision making, I’ve shown in this series¹⁸See “Islamist Terrorism’s/Violence’s Primary Cause: You Decide,” Part Two, section I.A “Trauma’s Generic Effects on Politics.” and will again here refer to individual and systemic “symptoms” or “survival responses” as they manifest as I think they do in that political process. That is, post-traumatic symptoms and survival responses to previous trauma work their way out to expression in the social collective as political interpretation, theory and sometimes even eventually to become embedded as policy shaping, even steering an organizational view as how to see foreign affairs and what to do when implementing that perspective¹⁹Two sections in this article address those manifestations: this one and that entitled “National Trauma Politics and Intelligent Foreign Policy Management Merged with Vietnam Trauma Fever.“, as especially does regard the address of the concept of “bait” in combat. 

If the former (Nosotropic), symptoms are thought of — particularly by political science, a few psycho-history-interpreting majors, and even some poli-psych clinicals — as not just bad, but making the bearer immutably irredeemable. Paul Kattenburg²⁰Paul M. Kattenburg, The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945-75, Transaction Publishers USA and London, 1979 begins The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945-75 with some Vietnam trauma symptom examples. He prints several family members’ discussion of the futility they felt in losing their sons to the Vietnam War, demonstrating the raison d’etre for his book and thus the rationale for the title. The deep grief and discussion classically expressed as traumatic symptoms for virtually all, maybe only most, family members during their experiences of profound loss. With the sudden death of their loved ones, there was nothing left for them.

Much later, 2006, a documentary demonstrated the influences of various protests on the then headlined “Great Shootout: Game of the Century” (1969)²¹Great Shootout: Game of the Century” (1969 between the nation’s number one collegiate team, my alma mater the University of Texas, and the number two rated school, University of Arkansas. Showing the confluences of several factors affecting the times and thus adding both stress and drama to the game, the filmmakers interviewed a noted chaplain who acknowledged being depressively overwhelmed by his job, eventually questioning, of course, the mission. As the Vietnam war raged, he was the first to notify family members of their husbands’, fathers’, sons’, and brothers’ deaths in combat.

And listening to him describe the difficulties and pain took me back to my own short-lived ecclesiastic inquiry at Tam Ky, a village between Chu Lai and Danang, where during the morning following a night battle (February 28, 1966) I carried bodies to places for their disposition. Blown through the air myself, but living, clearly I was in severe shock, albeit I didn’t know it. We weren’t taught to interpret ourselves psychologically in those days, at least in the Marines. However, hindsight would tell me that my recollections were that I walked across a muddy watered rice paddy as if my feet floated six inches above the surface. As I aligned the manican-like looking bodies of the now deceased Vietcong, one of whom would come by during the previous day to as an insurgent spy share a canteen cup of coffee prior to this fight — simultaneously marking the zone for the night attack to come — I looked down into the once friendly coffee-drinking man’s and previous night enemy’s brain, the top of his and others’ skulls having been furrowed by members of a platoon from 2nd Battalion, Seventh Marines. Or sometimes, portions of the head were just blown completely away. I did this with each body’s disposition for which I was the person responsible for toting the corpses to the place for organizing the carnage into manageable rows. I remember always asking myself the same question, whether or not Vietcong or Marine dead. “What happened to God?” I would think “when the thing, the exposed pink and gray matter that thought about such spiritual basics was blown into fragments? Did that obliteration also obliterate God along with the loss of the brain, itself?”

A chaplain walked by while I was dragging one fellow across the water and mud of a partially submerged rice paddy; and I suggested to the still live holy military man that he might want to get down off the dike, lest he be more easily shot away by remaining VC possibly taking cover in the treeline a couple hundred yards away. Surprised at his vulnerability and seemingly dazed, he jumped into the water, thanking me for reminding him of the situation. And then I asked him, a man of high rank, “Chaplain, what does all this mean?” “I have no idea, private.” I thanked him, responding also that I was a PFC (private first class).

Twenty years later, in 1986, I was fortunate to be able to pose a question to a panel comprised of Senator Edmund Muskie and Madeleine Albright, then one of the NSA’s managers who ten years later would become the first woman Secretary of State. They were the investigators of what had gone wrong during the Reagan Presidency when scandal related to mismanagement had erupted. Being a trauma management man, I asked what methodology the Executive used to address the influences of terrorism trauma on the hierarchy. Ms. Albright responded that that was a VERY good and equally VERY serious question, to which there was no apparent answer. But Senator Muskie would say that he guessed “The president and the people who worked for him just had to be tough.”

Following that a little later, the president’s wife, Mrs. Nancy Reagan would give a speech about a problem for the executive. She had been the only person to provide a management response for her husband who had been, apparently, overwhelmed at the kidnapping, torture and murder of one of his close associates, William Buckley²²Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1986, “Agency Watched Helplessly: CIA’s ‘Private Hostage Crisis’ Over Buckley Told,” November 25, 1986, | Bob Woodward and Charles Babcock | The Washington Post. She would opine that the shortfall was a management issue for the executive that someone might like to eventually address.

Not many examples of trauma symptoms are described better — and more rightfully honorably — than by combat veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. “Restrepo,” Chris Kyle’s American Sniper, a wounded Marine Sergeant’s story in “To Hell and Back, Again,” and The Reaper describe traumatic symptoms in these more current campaigns. Moreover, each work shows rational cognitive defenses intended to strengthen control against the trauma’s accelerating symptomatic influences. I’ve studied no better example of personal character and professional dedication than Nicholas Irving’s account of his combat tours and attempts at self psych evaluation to ensure that no one would be hurt due to his performance, and that he would continue to do his job with a measure of courage rarely equaled for a combatant. No matter the strength of that extraordinarily well trained and disciplined Army Ranger sergeant, the traumatic symptoms would eventually impose their changes even upon that epitome of stalwartness:

“To say that I was starting to feel disillusioned is pretty accurate. I still believed that we were doing the right thing by being there and taking on these forces, but the toll was climbing. I’d lost some good friends, and I knew that it wasn’t just the fact that my resistance was low due to the food poisoning that had me thinking that there was something rotting away in that country. I’d felt the same way in Iraq, had begun to question why we were putting in so much blood, sweat, and tears in a place where people didn’t seem to want our help or care that we were losing lives in the process. I think that for most of us, you could only go out there and put your head down and just do your job and not question anything for only so long. It seemed like more than in Iraq, the strangeness of my experiences in Afghanistan threw questions into my face so that I couldn’t ignore them anymore.”²³Irving, Nicholas; Brozek, Gary (2015-01-27). The Reaper: Autobiography of One of the Deadliest Special Ops Snipers (pp. 270-271). St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition.

Over time, symptoms change. Futility, depression, temporary psychotic manifestations of shock, depreciation of capacity or willingness to perform tasks, adaptation of opposites in core attitudes regarding mission, become surrounded on all sides by the classics: massive denial, profound fear, outrage, recurring nightmares, real life flashbacks and even expressions of complete surrender to the once believed to be enemy. And all of that can stop in different psychologies over different periods, and then reappear in other presentations years, or a decade, two or three, later. Medications, whether applied in prescription or street (alcohol or marijuana) form, postpone the various effects’ fullest manifestations, and as well their prospective more complete resolutions.

In my view, one can’t, in that Nosotropically shaped problem-address/-solving epistemology — whether it’s being administered in a clinical setting or in dialoguers’ management meetings held at the WH, State and Defense Departments, intelligence gatherings, or all echelons of the implementation application — the Nosotropic influence restrictively imposes do anything about symptoms, except maybe learn to think differently so that feelings change²⁴A basis of Rational Emotive Therapy, which too is an integral component of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)., or just force/impose stoicism/toughness, both of which are only coping²⁵For definitions and detailed explanations of ETM TRT SHOM interpretations of “Coping” vs “Curing” concepts as applied to psychological trauma, see attendant papers, essays and books: “Psychological Trauma (PTSD); Cope or Cure?”; “As Related to ETM’s Address of Psychological Trauma (PTSD), What does ‘Cure’ Mean and Why do we Employ the Term”; “Focused Care- and Cure-Based”; The Great Evidence-Based, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Self-Help, and Government Merger: Monopolistic Cultural Infusions of Pharmacological and Behavioral Whack-O-Mole, and Combat Psychological Trauma, Cope or Cure?. methods that suppress into repression the individual and collective etiologies²⁶Where other essays published in this SHOMblog address and describe trauma etiology, the Glossary 4a and 4b provides a standard definition. Since originally writing this article, I’ve added an Appendix B to this series that summarizes trauma etiology for the, usually, non ETM TRT SHOM trained reader. of the trauma. Absent other than superficial answers, the symptoms have to be — again for emphasis, whether trying to intervene on an alcoholic/drug addicted perpetrator-abused family, or an OTM from the Islamists’ ranks who takes heads on TV in order to establish the trauma-control effect on their opponents — accommodated by catering/surrendering to, or otherwise being managerially cowered by them.

That accommodation, particularly in the world of aggressor-versus-target/-victim, provides a transition to political action which changes defense-/survival-based policy, narrative, direction and will. To take one example of the referenced change: the trauma affected will and do divert attention from the perpetrator, to instead condemn the fighting of it. Trauma category one (above in “f”), denial, rolls over category two, quashing defense, and into category three, becoming Stockholm Syndrome-based suicide, mass homicide in the targeted indigenous polity, or caving to slavery: the so conquered polity gives up thinking and doing for itself and adopts what it is told to think and do by the new leaders in charge. Consensually managed societies are converted into totalitarian ones.

As experienced during development of that skewed takeover-supporting trauma symptom prism, a phenomenon attended by and often recognized as the so called victimization mentality, the otherwise once defensive process of standing up for the pre-trauma reality is presumed to be all responsible for the presenting painful mire. Don’t fight for anything lest somebody gets traumatized, and to which there is no management answer other than, first, ever-tightening Behavioral-to-Systemic²⁷For details of the Behavioral-to-Systemic management conceptualization — Behaviorism is integrated with systemic perceptions — see from the series of essays provided at Will Western Civilization’s Freedom Survive, “Part III (conclusion) The Good Rebel in Most of us; Distinguishing Good from Bad Rebels; and How to Strengthen the Former against the Latter.” controls eventually to go amok, i.e., wind down into group interactional coverup-styled rigidity — also framed by journalists and management hierarchies as declining transparency — and then, second, the always inevitable capitulation which may only be psychologically assuaged with some rhetorical upbeatedness spooned out to the masses on the way to the finale.

The Nosotropic trauma management modality is not new. It is only a return to elements of pre 1945 Judaism philosophy that passively crippled unto death²⁸When the Jews living in 1929 Hebron were warned by Haganah that an Arab pogrom was imminent, the residents, sixty-four of whom would be dead through mob mutilation the next day, refused weapons with which to fend off the killer crowd known to be coming. The community leadership’s rationale held that their religion’s tenets required that they not fight. Jewish thinking and life (thus providing one of the Pacifism pillars for Western civilization’s formation) before the advent of what the formerly believed-to-be-leftist-oriented Zionism historian Benny Morris²⁹Benny Morris is the author of Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, Reprint Edition, 2001 has called the new Jews’ Eleventh Commandment: “Don’t get murdered.”

In the latter Etiotropic paradigm, those symptoms are seen as natural biological outcomes that can be strategically addressed so that they dissipate, and thus no longer influence actual will — also said here to be non-trauma-fettered decision making. Resolve the trauma³⁰Resolving trauma means to reverse its etiology. “Reversing” etiology in this expression also means to facilitate culmination of the process of molecular extinction of the substrate hosting existential elements of identity. See additionally from this author the ETM TRT SHOM Glossary for definition of trauma etiology; and in the ETM TRT SHOM professional training tutorial a summary of ETM’s structure as applied in the address of trauma’s resolution — “At ETM TRT SHOM’s Core is its meaning to and of Structured and Strategic Psychodynamic; and the book Neurobiology of Psychological Trauma Etiology and Its Reversal with Etiotropic Trauma Management for a full explanation of trauma’s Etiotropically administered resolution. individually, systemically and most importantly SHOM-based existentially so that it doesn’t tie causally to symptomatic hysterics, in this instance to emphasize intellectually-/philosophically-manipulated determinations of the wrong source of the trauma — blaming an otherwise innocent self or a target for the incursion/invasion — and THEN continue implementation of the fight IF survival is still, now absent the trauma’s deleterious skewing effects, seen as advisable, warranted or desired.

Worse, if you focus politically on traumatic symptoms, you always get not just whack-o-mole³¹When trying to stop trauma symptoms from presenting before the underpinning trauma etiology’s reversal, other symptoms will continue to manifest in the form of ever presenting and often new aberrant thought/behavior. Moreover, the symptom-focused or Nosotropic corrective method will become incorporated into the originally presenting psychopathology, adding to the etiology’s suppression/repression and inuring self addressing activities to the more profoundly introspective perspicacity required to achieve the goal. See The Great Evidenced-Based, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Self-Help and Government Merger: Monopolistic Cultural Infusions of Pharmacological & Behavioral Whack-a-Mole; Or Psychological Trauma — Cope or Cure?! by Jesse W. Collins II, now available in electronic publication, 2007 — which means that when helping behaviorally, after you’ve identified and put one symptom down another pops up to take its place — but blinded analysis and reasoning, too. Just as traumatic symptoms affect individuals, families, organizations and local communities, nations and civilizations are influenced virtually the same, and even with additional depreciations of decision making capacity. That is, individual and systemic symptoms  will manifest in the oft referenced collective conscious as a veneer whose layers are intended only to protect the attendant trauma management reality, itself — reinforce/support themselves, to mean in this instance the Nosotropic reality’s conscious thought and behavioral representations comprising the current tool set for managing the affected intellect — against all other things/considerations/analyses/reasonings³²The referenced survival protection reality presents enmeshed with trauma symptomatology and is the quintessential non linear influence of psych trauma on control. This influence, which I’ve simplified in ETM TRT SHOM professional training by calling it the Survivor, is represented in the post event (post-trauma) control activities by dichotomy. On the one hand, the Survivor sees itself as the person, and the primary duty to it to maintain that Survivor-self at all costs — without this protector Survivor even in post-event security, the person would be extinguished, it (incorrectly) believes. On the other and opposite hand, the unconscious countering part to the Survivor knows that the trauma has occurred and is still retained in memory as the cause of the division of and to the whole person. That survival element will attempt to resolve the trauma that has effected the dichotomy by doing everything possible to become whole/complete again. Thereafter, the trauma affected individual exists in a tug-of-war with him or her self where resolution of the trauma is thought to mean ending of the controlling protective self or conscious — again experienced incorrectly as the person’s demise. So to both the trauma affected and non ETM TRT SHOM trained professionals, the resolution of the trauma is seen not just as a difficult process, but one where the goal may be impossible to achieve. Magnify that problem by extrapolating or expanding the division into the collective/group/polity or nation, and the divisiveness attending traumatic symptoms seems unmanageable, except maybe through exploitation to achieve a particular political end. by precluding focus on that which would dissolve it, trauma’s etiology³³For additional perspective of trauma etiology, see this series Appendix B “Trauma Etiology Correlated to Psychological Sequela and TRT’s Application.”.

Hence, through its now increasingly internally-retained, pain-obfuscating politicized controls, the Nosotropic approach inevitably leads to — because pain is both retained and tied almost always unconsciously to the initial reality’s extinction — and will even become vested in, quitting the original existence within that original reality, to not just possibly but more than likely mean in the end giving up the right to exist physically, depending on the mindset and prisoner disposition narrative of the oppositional perpetrator’s dictates. In absolute contrast, the Etiotropic approach strategically removes the etiology first and thus thereafter the adverse symptomological aspects of the traumatic influence so that decisions continue to be made based upon whether or not survival is still deemed to be appropriate.

Interpreting combat demands as “bait,” and then declining to engage just because of the prospective difficulties presented by the psychological trauma that would attend the conflict, is a Nosotropic approach to trauma management. Using that symptom-focused trauma management model’s principal application, Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)³⁴See the blog associated with this SHOMblog.com. It is entitled Will Western Civilization’s Freedom Survive? Essays from the Heartland on How To Make it Do So, Appendix A: The Genghis Khan of Psychotherapy: Behavioral Therapy and its Reformation — Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)., it tries to control the likelihood of trauma by simply using a word, in this instance “bait” turned into a trope, to avoid the prospects. The decision making, i.e., political, narrative flows therefrom. That is, we keep avoiding bait until we have no place else to shrink into. Surrender, convert or die, assuming the antagonist — who is not just multiculturally different, but psychopathic — keeps coming on.

Moreover, the Etiotropic approach to trauma allows you to learn from it, not just run and hide every time some bully confronts you. People who believe only in their ways of worshipping and just otherwise thinking day-to-day, and then act upon that belief to conform or transform you and everybody around you into the same, are bullies, as well is also anybody who uses violence, to include psychologically invasive identity-stripping individual and group shaming tactics, as a political weapon intendedly applied to change you. Use SHOM to send them on their way, instead of supporting those who are crying, whining and cowering about bait, and then calling its avoidance, intelligence.

Apply the Etiotropic — SHOM — approach to trauma incurred during battle to survive. Respond to bait with all the faculties provided us by removing the adverse individual and systemic influences of trauma before they fragment the entire theory-to-implementation defensive continuum. Learn from baiting tactics and prepare for them not just with the souls of the fighting men and women at the front, but with those attending the consciousnesses of the rest of the management class. Protect all of those hearts and minds; restore them when being lost due to what during the experience presents as seemingly overwhelming pain; bring them back from what they believe is the unendurable by deeply, to mean strategically Etiotropically, caring for them; make them whole, and our lives-protecting defensive line from top to bottom, will be, too, the same — whole.

Nui Vu, the Banjo Strumming Band in the Club at Richmond Avenue – 610 loop, Houston, Texas, and the Night  Western Civ Changed

At about 10:45 on the night of June 15, 1966, an emergency medevac radio call came in from a reconnaissance team to the S3 Operations hut. Being encircled by a combined Vietcong and NVA battalion sized unit, five hundred fighters, the eighteen Marines on the hill, named Nui Vu or Hill 288³⁵Now the location is identified as Hill 488., had begun to run out of ammunition. NATO 7.62 rounds carried in magazines for the automatic M14 were down to eight bullets remaining between the members who were still alive.

No alert³⁶Two descriptions of the Battle that night were provided in “Howard’s Hill,” by a Captain West who later interviewed combatants involved in the fight; and a government U.S. Army training article on how small teams could pull together to defeat increasingly larger forces when fighting within the context of guerrilla warfare applications. In both, however, the writers did not know why there was a delay between the time of the battle’s onset at 10:15-to-10:45pm and midnight. This description provides that explanation. was signaled by the night operations clerk on duty from the time of the first emergency medevac call till an hour and fifteen minutes later because standing orders precluded sending night medevacs into the dark. But this fellow on duty was new, replacing one of ours  who would have understood the deeper meaning behind the radio request. Fortunately, the relieving S3 clerk coming on at midnight, and checking the pink radio messages stabbed down in layers onto a nail-like device, had spent much time working with Force Recon insertions, extractions, emergency medevacuations, and had participated over the previous six months in the always bait setting, taking and smashing operations described above. He had learned from fighting within the combat bait modality.

Upon discovering the earlier medevac request, which happened immediately following the shift change, his first action was to wake and alert the operations exec, Major William Goodsell, who would then order the clerk to notify the MAG CO, and then the squadron leaders for both the thirty-fours and Huey gunships. The latter would be on station immediately, making repeated passes on the ten yard corridor now lit by both tracers and flares. The sixties and even rockets continued to kill most of the enemy as they tried to pour through the corridor and over the top of the hill. Out of ammunition, nearly, the now also all wounded Marines who were still alive began to throw rocks instead of grenades, making the Vietcong/NVA think they were still armed.

Back at Chu Lai, the map board was surrounded by the UH34D squadron leaders, about fourteen men — copilots had already left for the pad to wake and ready the crews and warm the engines. One light hung over the half circle of pilots as Major Goodsell briefed the leadership on the battle then ongoing about twenty five miles away. The CO stood to the side as his plan was translated. Hueys were already out and making their passes over the zone, flying only ten feet off the hilltop ring of dirt, rock and grass that separated the two forces. And as some of the opposition would make it over the no man’s zone, they would go hand to hand with the Marines who were still alive.

The 34s attempted a first for us. A night insertion of a company of infantry on a side of the hill that was thought less occupied by the enemy battalion. But it failed. The planes pulled out without being able to insert more troops. My understanding was that the combination of intense fire and steep slope made the maneuver impossible. So it was daylight before that group was put back in. Major Goodsell, who left the operations unit after the first briefing in order to pilot a gunship from his squadron hovered at about fifty feet over a twenty mm cannon to mark it with smoke for the fixed wing planes. While dropping the cannister out the window, he was shot directly through the deck of the cockpit and killed. The plane went down in an adjacent valley and the crew was rescued while carrying him out. A crew-chief in another plane was killed as well.

The dawn insertion landed a company of Marines who destroyed the opposition by fighting them in their trenches dug during the night battle. One fellow from the NVA and fighting from a hole, managed to damage our teams with a heavier automatic weapon. No amount of fire could stop him. A Marine assaulted the man head on as he came up again to apply his machine gun. The grunt stabbed the fellow in the chest with a rifle affixed bayonet, finally killing him. Med evacs worked with arriving infantry to take out the remaining eleven wounded and seven dead. One recon team member was found lying under an NVA soldier with his knife planted in the dead Marine’s body. And the recon Marine’s entrenching tool, partially folded to resemble a pickaxe, was buried in the other man’s spine, and who too was dead.

The Staff Sergeant in charge of the recon team was Jimmie Howard. When he was carried from the planes to the Med hut at Chu Lai’s surgical station, he would not accept credit for his part of the fight, which had been grandly leadership brave. Major Goodsell, for whom I clerked when we were not at forward operations positions, was accorded the Marine Corp’s second highest award for valor, the Navy Cross, only surpassed by the CMH. It, the Congressional Medal of Honor, was rightly given to Sergeant Howard for his life saving work that night. And in honorable fashion attending the US Marine Corps’ members with whom I served in the Vietnam War, he kept saying over and over that he and the living men were only that way because of the team actions of the helicopters, and particularly the gunships of VMO6.

All of the other men on the hill were accorded the nation’s near highest awards for bravery, some presented posthumously. The Lance Corporal who acted in contrast to the standing orders was masted to the CO, who told him that had he not done what he did by alerting the command, instead of waiting till dawn as was the standing policy, all those men on Nui Vu would have been dead when the sun arrived. The young man was accorded a special awards two day R&R flight on a B26 to Thailand, where upon leaving the plane he rode with Major Goodsell’s copilot, Lt. Butler to the waiting accommodations, which were provided by the Erawan Hotel in downtown Bangkok. Apparently now deceased, I think it is appropriate to say that he was badly shaken, barely able to speak.

The Marine’s learned, as did probably the Army, Navy and Air Force personnel, how to adapt to every challenge it met. Giap’s traps and bait, about which Fall had spoken so glowingly, were enjoined, engaged, learned from in the rigors/stress of combat, and defeated. And in all of my life of competing academically and in business, and then even pursuing goals in less competitive both religious and clinical settings, I’ve never seen the likes of those men of strength, character, and honor. To my memories of your valiant and selfless dedication: Semper Fi.

A little bit later, at the end of August of the same year, 1966, I made one more operations-forward effort, putting me again in a water filled hole in a rice paddy ten miles east of old Nui Vu. Straight out of there, I then departed for home along the way borrowing a summer uniform in Okinawa, and then flying to Houston over a period of about two more days. The first night back I accompanied a friend to a party of my high school classmates who were now in college and meeting at a club in southwest Houston. The band played banjos and sang much like the Kingston Trio. It could have been the same as far as I knew. Beer, music and beautiful Texas women were plentiful. The old use of “surreal” fits best the experience.

Then everything, including my life thereafter, and as I’ve argued for the world, too, changed. A fellow of apparent good character and who’d played on my football team stood, raising his beer mug and clamored for the room’s attention, which he got. And even though there was silence, his toast was shouted across the tables and for everyone to hear. “To all of you boys fighting in Vietnam, kill one for me!” The room erupted into loud applause, raucous laughter, cheers and explosions of celebration of the new cowardice,* the new cool for the managers of the home-front.

*Cowardice, Courage, Honor

I knew about incapacitating cowardice, maybe more so than many. Post “blowed-up”³⁷A purposely inarticulate expression by people blown up by explosive ordinance and who after surviving try to fathom the experience upon one’s sometimes event-shattered psychology. fear could present so pervasively that its manifestation transcended psychology, inhabiting every body cell with tremors that reduced the organism to a vibrating mush of a once former steadfast self. I could forgive it when its temporary unrendering-of-performance happened in others near me, and for myself — it came from beyond conscious control of one’s life. This passage was akin to being forcibly and completely strained through a multi-layered and finely constructed wire mesh, and then attempting, as if mechanically, to put the fragments back into a  task-oriented functionallity. That survival of rapidly-obliterated-by-explosion-into-Hell and then, as the expression has gone in the entertainment industry, back-again, would be thought of by an objective third party observer from today’s professionally called safer spaces, probably as a challenge. Despite the horror’s influences, though, many of us did return from their encumbrances — often within only seconds to minutes, but as if they had been pressed into an immeasurable blur of a seemingly longer time’s passing — to live, to even fight for that living, to right one’s self, and to do our jobs. Witnessing the phenomenon at such an early age defined for the entirety of my life, thereafter, what would become for me a truer meaning — within the sequences of the event, a seemingly self-exceeding organism(s)-protecting continuum — of related experience: cowardice, courage, honor.

I have not forgiven, however, neither cowardice’s intellectual rationalization — distancing from truth — nor its comorbid celebration, by non combatants.

From the throng, I was the only person to walk away, and I did so alone passing through the two mile walk home in the dark. But, being still young in part, I took with me no rational cognitive or conscious understanding of what had just happened. The implementers of national defensive policy had now been separated by trauma and the fear of it from its upper management counterpart, the people of the United States, and most of those inhabiting Western civilization as well.

National Trauma Politics and Intelligent Foreign Policy Management Merged with Vietnam Trauma Fever

And that was the beginning of trauma politics for this new and as called by some — depending on whose side one was on — either forward progressing or declining American era.

As the change started, there were still people watching TV in their living rooms who remembered the nineteen-thirties, Munich, the Great Terrors described by Kravchenko³⁸Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom – The Personal and Political Life Of a Soviet Official, Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1946 and later Robert Conquest³⁹Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, 1969, 2007 update, WWII, the Iron Curtain, Korea and the Chinese at the “Frozen Chosin”⁴⁰The Frozen Chosin was a nickname given by Marines, people who trained me and with whom I served in Vietnam, and who fought that Korean battle at the Chosin Reservoir against the overwhelming numbers of Chinese., the Truman Doctrine, and even containment — before it was delinked from the 1940’s-to-early 1960s concept of International Communism, and relegated as it is for the new history readers of today only to Soviet Bloc Expansionism in Europe, we and the opposition agreed to slug it out in fields of small and edge communities with the proxies of our Cold War adversaries. That was better than  trading nukes* between the primary homelands. We knew THAT idiosyncrasy about the oft referenced “stalemated” approach to the Vietnam War even at the rank of private first class, and probably to include some of the lowest ranked in the power structure, “private,” where the conflict was being most conclusively argued and before it was altered to no longer being part of that cold stuff. And thanks to the war trauma’s influences also on all segments of the collective’s decision making continuum.

*Getting to the big question plaguing the first quarter century of the nuclear arms race, “Why did fifty-eight thousand of us have to die way over there?” The trauma-obfuscated answer — that most segments of decision making from even some OTM-targeted implementers to guide-ons to the masses forgot once the new reality removed “containment” from the Asian-China-Vietnam lexicon — was to slow down the more global spread of Vitya Kravchenko’s and Whittaker Chambers’s⁴¹Chambers, Whittaker (1978-07-25). Witness. Perseus Distribution-A. Kindle Edition. reported versions of Uncle Joe’s⁴²Even though looking remarkably the same in Uncle’s Mao, Ho, and Po’s, respectively, China, Indochina, and eventually People’s Republic of Kampuchea implementations; nevermind the fight in Korea and less than a decade later takeover of Big Sugar in Cuba. USSR approach to socialist management while simultaneously keeping fifty-eight millions plus of us from being blown to smithereens back here, and the rest of the world’s living things shrouded in that dark likelihood of an overly radiated death. Today, “containment’s” been re reformed and then reapplied to provide a shortcut explanation to most any attempt to hold the armed psychopaths in check without anybody’s getting, officially, hurt on our side, nor getting too psychologically bogged down back home while making the particular stand. 

In concert with that forgetting, repression, or other trauma altered aspects  of the often called collective consciousness in transition, and like an all enveloping sandstorm rolling itself across the desert and onto an unsuspecting, unprepared city, the new age of television terror was developing a nation-crippling philosophy targeted for a whole ready made constituency: us youths. The transforming storm passed through that young consciousness like a spreading fever, “Better someone, anyone other than myself being on that screen’s stretcher, or being loaded wrapped in gauze onto the helicopter, or coming home in a casket, even or now especially if flag draped.” With the exceptions of those stalwartly brave young men who did go fight, attended by the forty-five thousand women who as nurses went with them, it just wasn’t cool anymore in the increasing mass of Hadleyville-styled⁴³“Hadleyville” was the name of the town in the 1951 motion picture “High Noon.’ civilian ranks to do so, much less die for your or whose? country. Even chastising them for their contribution, honor was kaputted by cowardice shared, again, so eloquently that the always declaiming preacher-like exclaimers  seemed to believe their own expressions regarding Stockholm Syndrome-imbued non resistance to and even outright support of an enemy, and the intergenerationally social separating⁴⁴Mob mentality was held together by old and worn late nineteenth and early twentieth century cultic-initiated fairness-equalizing admonishments to withdraw from the historic reality, first intellectually condescending to it, and then second, trying to cancel its vote. Show commitment to the bigger cause by destroying everything ancestral that otherwise brought you to the party. deprecations applied not just to our fighters, but to the new believers’, “fellow travelers’,” own moms and dads, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, and anybody who didn’t think like the new and now more edified social justice warriors or their also newly transitioning fellow ideological cult- and mid-to-late 1960’s class-mates.

Neither the olders nor replacement foreign policy and national defensive decision makers ever knew what hit them. Aiding hysteria/chaos’s induction, a few revelational books and lots of clarifying articles were  being produced during the ending years, depicting our uppers’ inabilities to perform at the Messianic Management levels of Behavioral perfection while engaged in what I still thought was the “Cold War.” That was a descriptive term, by the way, that I never quite understood, as my experience of it had been anything but “cold.” Even “cool” didn’t work. According to Kattenburg, everybody just zoned out, that is, played like it, the Vietnam experience, never happened. And although we may not have gotten it intellectually-interpretively at the time, as anyone who watches TV today knows, mass zoning is a sure sign of the beginnings of mass trauma onset.

Slowly, some war movies began to paint a different picture from the anti-war side’s views. Considered by those an-ties to be counter revolution entertainments — which by the end of the 1960s to mid 1970s reality change were called reactionary — for example, “The Deer Hunter,” (1970s) and then later (1980s) “Hamburger Hill” showed the strengths of the implementation system, and what it was like for it to become disenfranchised from upper management. Still, every policy position taken from then on was based on avoiding the trauma of fighting war where containment or its confused revisionist like was otherwise, or in particular being seriously challenged.

Although the criticisms were stringently detailed and well so when demonstrating deceptions by the upper, and massacres by the lower, level implementers, as occurred in the latter at My lai, the commonality of left-outedness was that nobody from the critical classes did any academic studies of the influences of contrived attempts by the opposition’s allies to undermine the polity at the home-front level, and then turn it against the undefended implementation, as had already been described as the cornerstone of victory by Fall. He showed how that homefront sandbagging approach had pulled the plug on the French Legionnaires going against the Viet Minh, particularly in the later years, 1952-54. That, and what I’ve always thought was a glaring failure strengthened my view that the trauma was the primary problem, rather than its being a whole bunch of suddenly characterless thinkers falling, diving or some how or another just ending up in the tank for the opposition.

Objectivity by academes and their extensions into government management? How could there be? There wasn’t any such thing in this view, mine, because the dispassionate scholarly appraisers were as students mostly scared out of their wits and then, too, out onto the streets protesting as vigorously as possible to, like everyone else who’d caught Vietnam Trauma Fever, avoid either confronting, taking or becoming bait. Rationalizations of everything previously thought of as American, and augmented by heavy duty fear-medicating psychotropics⁴⁵Reminder regarding this essay’s use of “psychotropics:’ Although drug use has myriad differentiations — legal to non, by varied interactions with neuro, liver and other organ bio-psycho-sociological influences — in this trauma related use “psychotropics” is intended to reference general drug, e.g., from alcohol to marijuana to prescription medication applications, and with the commonality that they are and function as exogenous variables relating with and to human ontology. All or almost any of the drugs act, albeit often even differently, in concert with the traumatic condition as medicators of it. Anything influencing that ontology inevitably influences decision making, in this case referring to politics., supported the so called new consciousnesses of the intellectual class, spiraling their ontologically suppressed thinkings like an ever expanding holograph straight into the stratosphere of early transformation and change. Anything. ANYTHING, but face the oncoming demon perp head up.

There’s lots more to how the trauma of war altered the minds and will of the polity. However, this subject is supposed to only be about bait. So I’ll try to stick with it by not going out much further into the full ramifications of trauma’s controlling all the decision making of its future. Except . . .**

**When one of the primordial like changes, for example, when the thought model that defends you with visceral experience is relegated by the new civilization to non allowance or eschewed existence⁴⁶That is, intellectually obfuscating dissemblance of the courage to fight., its imposition forms the core for and of future abstractions that inevitably fall apart. Like a ball of both loosely and tightly wound yarn, non adequately or realistically defended identity eventually collapses into a clumpy unmanageable mush, inevitably then unraveling in all directions the whole that has become the new reality/constitution, the trauma underpinned and imposed transforming change.

Dennis Ross, and I don’t think he realized it in recording a history⁴⁷Ross, Dennis (2015-10-13). Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. of the Israeli-American (the Executive branch of the federal government) last seventy years of interactions, told the story of one president’s recognizing the new Zionist state within minutes of its birth, and doing it from the heart — Truman was opposed by his complete advisory staff. And with only periodic other heartfelt motivated assistances by another president, Lyndon Johnson, the stratagems opted always to protect our strategic interests, oil and our Cold War competitive position with the Soviets, by preventing Israel from “overreacting” to the four national existential-level invasions by their neighbors occurring during the first twenty-five years of its new existence.

And that’s just the set piece-supported absolute plans and efforts intended to reinvent the holocaust from Germany into the tiny territory on the south east shore of the Mediterranean.  That narrow, even miniscule strip of land was plagued, and also long before its official inception in 1948, with constant OTM applications of local trauma assault with ever and continuing terrorists-styled murders. Ross highlights President Carter’s quick chastisement of the Israelis immediately following the infamous 1978 “Coastal Road Massacre” where Palestinians operating out of southern Lebanon’s near border region with Israel murdered thirty-eight innocent Israeli civilians, thirteen of them children. Almost immediately following the mass murder, President Carter is said to have taken (and supported at the UN) rapid, harsh, condescending and punitive action against the Israeli cross border reprisals. Ross referred to Carter’s actions:

“his special revulsion over the Israeli attack into Lebanon— less so the PLO terror attack into Israel— is unmistakable.”⁴⁸Ross, Dennis (2015-10-13). (Kindle Locations 3655-56) 

That trauma inspired and victim-blaming approach to reasoning in foreign policy and relations has continued until today. And I think that the repression-of-courage-through-rationalizing-intellectualization approach began for those matters Jewish-related to the ending of the Great Shoah, then for ALL matters foreign policy-related and compounded with the now identified (previously in this article) and hopefully soon to be dreaded Vietnam Trauma Fever, has led and carried over to these later years. To give what I wish was a culminating example from the current, as reflected in the controversy of President Obama’s drawing the Redline, and then, instead of responding — after its having been crossed — with thunder, lightening, and hellfire as promised, the White House (WH) asked the Russians to use their influence to make everything right.

“President Obama repeatedly spoke about how he had succeeded with his redline. His threat to use force had led the Russians to agree to the joint initiative to get the Assad regime to turn over their CW for destruction— and it was a model, in his words, for his larger aim of having international norms respected: ‘The fact that we did not have to fire a missile to get that accomplished is not a failure to uphold international norms, it’s a success.'”⁴⁹Ross, Dennis (2015-10-13). Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama (Kindle Locations 7803-7806). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.  

However, as Ross would point out a couple of sentences later and referring to the problem of “subjectivity” influencing the matter, the diplomatic maneuvers did not make it right. The world required a punishing mad-as-hell justice-merged-with-vengeance make-the-point-that-CW (Chemical Weapons) -are-REALLY-bad approach to offset the feelings of dismay and horror the civilized part of the gobal felt when Assad dumped some on a village, killing fourteen hundred of its civilian citizens, one third of them children. The Russian deal to knock back the CW capacity so that they might not be used again, maybe or hopefully, left out the world’s call, for that matter demand for the reaper.

In the end, the lack of courage to fight in Syria or anywhere else was — after elevating it up to WH wisdom — analogized back to anti bait taking. We were too smart for that: being drawn into a “non strategic” (no oil and the Soviets were gone) conflict in Syria.   

The big news for the bait-dodgers of the 1990s was that, at least according to Richard Clark’s work⁵⁰Clarke, Richard A. 2009-10-13. Your Government Failed You. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition., nobody in even the Clinton Democrat administration could get the military to show up to fight some of those edge-country styled battles when needed. Clark and as told by Clinton staffers/writers⁵¹Benjamin, Daniel; Simon, Steven, 2002-10-01. The Age of Sacred Terror. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition., said that the President wanted to send in some larger than commando, anti-guerrilla or counter-insurgency styled American fighting units to uproot the growing Islamist force operating under the Afghan Taliban merged with Al Qaeda’s Bin Laden, instead of just trying to get off some Tomahawks. They took too long to both warm and target, and Bin Laden moved around too quickly. Moreover, our Cruise firing subs’ sailors were said to be getting tired of hanging on station so long with nothing technically definable to do.

When the top generals for Clinton’s army refused to produce a non Gulf War styled (overwhelming force) invasion machine, Clark looked it up to find out why. Lo and behold, he discovered that immediately following the end of the Vietnam War, the military, too, said “No more Vietnams!” They had decided, and even not withstanding the Constitution’s appointment of a civilian authority, as early as the 1980s not to go in unless they could take the whole place, like the tiny island of Grenada, or in Panama, and do it with later termed Powell Doctrine big forces attended by a well tied together Cognitive Behavioral-reinforced bunch of smart counter-trauma-turned-political terms: “Exit strategies.” The first President Bush would exclaim immediately following the end of the hundred hour long Gulf War “We put an end to that Vietnam thing!” Moreover, the military didn’t have serious counter-insurgency warfare capacity, or apparently even training according to Clark because they didn’t want to get pulverized, not necessarily by the opposition in the field, but the trauma exploiters joining Pacifism’s political hit parade at home, and who he and everybody who’d shared the woe-is-Vietnam view while vociferating during protest for what the antis would anoint to be “the American people,” to mean themselves. The once so called “silent majority” weren’t part of those peoples, apparently, anymore. And after the losing at the beginning of 1965 the West’s statesman architect of post WWII international standupedness, Churchill, the once majority Greatest Generation certainly didn’t have any serious, other than Buckley, opinion-offsetting conservative talk radio or television supporting those silents’ thoughts.

It was because of that transitional constituency’s trauma repressed freaked-outedness that foreign policy decision makers from the trenches to the White House wanted missions to be clean, to mean with nobody back here feeling badly, at least for very long. In National Insecurity: American Leadership During the Age of Fear, the author, David Rothkopf, knocked the whole Vietnam Trauma Fever syndrome down simply to the “ghosts of Vietnam,” and then adding-on the obvious for today’s trauma massacre of logic and reason, “ghosts of Iraq.”⁵²“another affliction— ghosts. Not just the ghosts of Alexander and the others who stalked the graveyard of empires but also those haunting American planners— the ghosts of Vietnam and later, for Obama, the ghosts of 9/ 11 and Iraq.” Rothkopf, David (2014-10-28). National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear (Kindle Locations 2823-2825). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. On this new trauma ebullating management horizon, relative levels of straightforwardness once at least hoped for by the masses were out. Manipulation was now in so much so that it was also becoming the new expectation.

After a guerrilla, now terrorist action killed a bunch of our people, mostly men as they did in Beirut and Somalia, the first response was “Whups. We’ve taken the bait again, and we’ve gotta get out of this place, fast.” Pretty soon, acts of war like wiping out our embassies, blowing up our ships and innocents-carrying commercial airlines and murdering/slaughtering Americans, even for added effect on TV, were knocked down to, hmm . . . “Tragic.”

That anti-bait-taking-based, “Don’t-over-react,” proportionate response-evaluating, courage-strangling thought model would produce the terrified Ten F⁵³“Ten F” refers to “Flake-to-Fake, Fluff-to-Frivolity, Flim-to-Flammed, Fopped-to-Fooled, and Fraud-to-Fecked.” It is intended to mean what it sounds like. And its purpose is to provide the nonlinearally savvy during managerial conflict with rigidly opposing epistemologies a more appropriate expression  for confronting, criticizing or otherwise condescending in a professionally acceptable manner  to the arrogantly unreasonable, instead of calling them that, or saying something even harsher, like “dangerously-out-of-touch morons,” for example. The idea is for professionals who have to function non linearally so much of the time to be able to say something bad about somebody they don’t like without feeling as if they are becoming vindictive. ever always unknowingly intellect-corrupting management dullards of today. I don’t mean that they are stupid people in and of themselves. They are not. But their model precludes addresses of high trauma-producing activities, which exclusion prevents them from accessing and then applying all of their resources, and particularly those generating visceral applications of stress to the learning process.***

***Parenthetically for those who do not understand that to which I am speaking herein, instead of trying to control through condescension of and to the visceral instinct, learn instead — which is one of the benefits of ETM TRT SHOM’s structural application to individuals and systems alike — to existentially feel the experience precipitating the stress response, staying with it in parallel until it completely passes, and in such a manner that the whole continuously draws from that effort the clarifying import of what is being learned. That is the simple description of one of the most important differences between Nosotropic and Etiotropic approaches to not just trauma management, but learning in general.

Always attempting, first, to avoid discomfort, the bait-warners of this decade have tried to grab the standard-bearing mantel of evolutionary advancing civilized notion of intelligence by referring to themselves as the non-hysterically-affected epitome of dispassionate brightness⁵⁴Academes and politically affiliated government employees/consultants/advisors who voiced considerable opposition to both the Iraq and Vietnam wars frequently define their management approach as being based in true objectivity-modeling decision making. The self definitions use comparison, then, for defining what that/their higher intellect means. That is, when it comes to managerial REAL thoughtfulness and control, they are the opposite of George Bush’s blunderingly ever-too-emotional, always over-reactive, and bungling neoconic construction-contracting and big-oil imperialists. The comparison attends the discussion about the definition of intelligence and professional intellect, with also almost always copious analogous-styled reminders about bait.  — which from the SHOM counter perspective is the opposite of what is actually happening in this (their) decision making reality, with one exception. Their fear of fighting and maybe dying, even, functions unconsciously, thereafter adversely influencing judgment. Not  knowing that cripples what they otherwise believe is their primary strength — because they never know what they are missing.  

Paper thin righteous indignation defending the gaps turns their beliefs in their intellects into their principal weakness. In this view real, or the most profoundly workable intelligence comes not from an abstract blocked off from HAPA’s influences, but from inclusion of all elements of the psych, to particularly reference the ontological component. Its essence is best learned from when under serious stress — facing difficult life matters forthrightly. Where solitude of peace and internal reverence strengthened with scholarly thought and study adds meaning, even if functioning as repressives, they are never, or at least rarely, as impacting, to mean growth producing, as is repeated traumatization by near death combative experience, especially when followed by the trauma’s fully completed resolution.

Perps surf the unresolved trauma’s symptoms like a beamreaching⁵⁵A “reach,” and particularly a “beamreach,” refers in sailing terms to the wind’s coming from a direction which is perpendicular to the craft. It comes over the one of the either starboard or port rails (sides) of the boat. Catamarans are multi-hulled craft that move more rapidly over the water than monohulls. The multis draw less water, need less ballast, and can be sailed, depending on conditions, very fast when compared to the single hulled competitions. And on smaller boats (say under twenty-two feet) the crew can hike out on cables over the waters to keep the sails full of air and the speedster moving at its maximum gate. In ocean racing, the experience can sometimes even be akin to surfing. wind hurls a racing catamaran along its fastest part of the course. Nosotropic applications MUST keep the focus off the culprit and on themselves, their own lacks, so that the current defense/controls do not bubble over into visceral experience. It might evoke the trauma induced by the attacking events and still retained etiologically in  unconscious memory. While such prey are paralyzed by obfuscating fears of what has and is to come, violent perpetrators race in for the slaughter. Contrasting the Nosotropic management calamity, the Etiotropic approach addresses trauma directly, reversing its cause, the trauma’s etiology. With no etiology, there’s nothing left to fear from the past, and no wind to carry the once skating perp to its destination — causing death of the naive: that which once unsuspectingly was.

Furthermore, perps and trauma etiology hosted in the target are linked. Addressing the perpetrator head up unleashes a natural entry to the etiology’s full resolution (and vice versa), which outcome is otherwise not available through Nosotropically-focused clinical/management — and as extrapolated to this perspective as perpetrator enabling trauma politics — applications. With the antagonist’s psychological ploy stopped, the seemingly undefeatable villain can, does and naturally will become the new target of the previously victimized, instead of themselves.

To take an example within the political currency, national defensive models that try to solve the problems of citizenry conversion to the attacking cult’s cause by focusing on the targets/radicalized instead of the OTMs/radicalizers, are Nosotropic and thus a waste of management resources. Past trauma’s effects on managers, in this instance occurring during the most recent Iraq campaign and thus not just (or also likely)  archetypically from Vietnam, are at the root of this diversive approach. Remove those traumatic conditions Etiotropically and the no longer trauma encumbered management will apply its resources where they can do the most good, directly against the hoopla’s source: the perpetrator and the cultic modality directing his thoughts and actions.  

But now still even as late as twenty-first century times, and during this current opposition’s purposefully strategic slaughter of the world’s essence, its goodness, our side’s bait-avoiding managers, and thinking of themselves as superiorly emotionally controlled, spin trauma-underpinned whimsical conjurations from the abstract into downwardly spiraling and rapidly escalating trauma symptoms of managerial impotence:

• Instead of going to war directly against the initiating antagonist, they invoke an unenforceable world legal authority which seeks proof of individual wrong doing by masked mass head choppers, rapists, man-burners, mano a mano child killers, slave merchants, extemporized embassy attackers carrying automatic weapons and mortars, and general psychopaths using equally psychopathic religious doctrinally motivated fighting-murdering modalities;
• Boots-on-the-ground obsessive compulsive public opinion pole watchers;
• Deflections to economic causal notions related to inadequate anti-jihadi jobs programs; and
• Non support, if not outright condemnation of private citizens who’ve had to go off at their own expense to either win/buy back their loved ones because they are about to get their heads removed on TV in Syria, or fight the villains presenting in Dallas, Texas, on passenger trains in France, at freedom of expression near-seances by a cartoonist lecturing in Copenhagen, by spontaneously falling-in for the citizen/veteran defense of our military recruitment centers in America, and by deploying to in-country units waging ground war at the front in Kurdistan.

To keep from responding to the challenge with serious force to stop the murder of innocents, our guys through the auspices of official intellect just keep referring to the catastrophes as bait, which they argue is only an attempt to suck our emotionally uncontrolled idealists into a fight they can never win. These unwitting thinkers-in-charge, now not just ensnared, but fully controlled by the systemic trauma’s grip on judgment, then move on to solve the country’s also bigger problems, euphemistically called “issues”: global warming; always internally oppressive⁵⁶For an excellent definition of one and the original meaning of “internal oppression,” see Fonte’s interpretations of Gramsci’s arguments in this essay Why There Is A Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America by John Fonte. racism in Missouri, Maryland, New York City, and at Bernie Sanders political rallies in Phoenix, Arizona; evidence-based epistemically secular ideological wedding cake-baking training for the new misfits — Christians; and the American civilization’s transformational changes pertaining to multi-trans-gendered-use of communal restrooms in Houston, Texas.

SHOM Phase Two Recommendations: If you’ve not read Note 5 (So that you don’t have to scroll, here⁵⁷Note 5 is reprinted here. “The Harvard terrorism expert, Jessica Stern, and the Brookings Institute’s J.M. Berger explain the anti-bait-taking approach this way. ‘Finally, we can offset ISIS messaging priorities by refusing to play into its apocalyptic narrative. As seen in Chapter 10, ISIS wants to enact specific prophecies regarding the end times, such as a victorious confrontation with the “crusaders” in the town of Dabiq. Our policies and military actions should not rise to the bait. For both military and messaging purposes, it is foolhardy to show up at the exact place and time that an enemy most desires. Whatever ambush lies in wait at Dabiq, let it rot there unfulfilled.’ From Stern, Jessica; Berger, J. M., 2015-03-17, ISIS: The State of Terror (pp. 251-252). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.” On reading the entire book, and which I recommend because it represents the antithesis of SHOM, the operative policy word in the noted paragraph should be “victorious.” it is again.), you might ought to before proceeding.

Because I’m a private program, plus given the personal slowdowns referenced above in “Disclaimer,” it will be a while before SHOM’s apparatus can be constructed in order that it will intercede combat trauma’s etiological impact on the whole decision making continuum, thereafter bringing congruency of purpose and meaning to all, and particularly immutable support to and of the implementation component. So to interimly confront and then begin to rid itself of the encumbering psychological aspects of the bait defense used by psycho-terrorism-experts in the northeast region of the United States⁵⁸And probably somebody in California, too., and in time to do us some good — help to keep us alive — during this war, Americans should do what they are most afraid of, and have been since the ending of the Vietnam War.

First, defend the country outright. Call upon the most committed, rigorously brave,  and completely dedicated to doing that. From that constituency, C130 a company of Marine infantry — when needed, they are true experts in the ethical application of pointedly educated visceralness — who know the mission and risks, into the Dabiq countryside. Order them to take the town, then surround it for the ever-generationally presenting end-of-times-apocalypse to come and now sensationally retained in the memories of Western academically minded advisors to the federal Executive. Don’t worry about what’s in ISIS’s minds. Dig in pretty deep to fend off a nuke that somebody may have stolen or bought cheap from North Korea. Carry chem suits for the likely gas applications. Then kill every single masked thing black flagged and riding in a desert camouflaged pickup truck on its way to their trap, which has now been sprung by the United States Marine Corps. Globally outlaw ISIS and its affiliates, and declaim ISIS members ineligible for any social, government, or particularly university law/poli-science academically-based, and to emphasize leadership position worldwide. Get on the hunt. Simultaneous with the end of days bait taken and extinguished in northern Syria, and while blocking the border with Iraq, then reinforcing the Dabiq-conquering-liberating rifle company survivors with an equally rigorously employed Marine division, deploy the 101st Airborne to take Damascus and everything on either side through Hezbollah to the Mediterranean and the other way to Iran. Arrest that Mengele-styled malpracticing doctor running Syria for using unfair mass murder tactics. Send the Russians and Iranians back to their countries in air conditioned ground transports. Ship Nasrallah home in a box. Then close the lines and destroy the opposition. We’ll get Iraq, North Africa, Nigeria and maybe even Yemen, if still need be, later.

Second, when done with Syria for this time, just bring everybody home till we get a counter-insurgency military training program reinstituted back in America. With those fine and already experienced Afghanistan and Iraq veterans who’ve stayed in, it shouldn’t take long. Historically, large components of the Marines at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in Korea were said to be reserves who’d yet even attended boot camp. It’s also said that when they — bait-takers in mass — got surrounded by unexpected horn blowing and tambourine shaking Chinese hoardes coming south, the untrained recruits learned REALLY fast. And I and a few others made the transition from truck driver to expert jungle warfare fighter, a lot of which though just involved protecting innocent villagers living on the edge of the South China Sea and its waterways, in just two days. In terms of the availability of ongoing new tactical education, to mean the Marine Corps Guidebook which I borrowed from someone back at the base, Chu Lai, — the green cover-bound work didn’t address counter-guerrilla warfare; only Korean and WWII’s more linear methods — we also didn’t have the Internet for looking it up as we went along. Moreover, I’ll bet our guys today can make the transition even faster, and probably do a better job. Or wouldn’t you think?

Third, call the operation, “Crusades II⁵⁹History enthusiasts usually referring to the era beginning in the period 1096 AD recognize the “Crusades” (albeit a different name was used) as separated into three events, each bearing the “Crusades” identifier with a 1, 2 or even 3 appended to it. Non enthusiasts just call the whole thing the “Crusades.”: The secular version.” 

And fourth, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER again send a Harvard, or for that matter great-State-of-Massachusettes-anything-poli-clinical to advise the United States Armed Forces on how to fight. Prepare to continue SHOM Phase Two. We’ll go back in as soon as they’ve had a chance to regroup with more and better social media both razzling and dazzling apocalyptic ideas involving bait, which presentations of enemy vulnerability we Old Corps, now knocked down (or up) to Grassrootists, are always looking for.

Bait. It’s where they’re at.

Postscript

During the beginning active duty years referenced in this article, plus the follow up period, 1967 to 1968, Marine Air Group 36 was presented with two Presidential Unit Citations. They are the combat unit representative recognition equivalent to the individual’s highest achievable acknowledgment: the Congressional Medal of Honor.

In either late November, or early December, 1965, my extra strengthened⁶⁰They each packed two cans of belt ammunition to support the M60 that I carried. rapid response squad of fourteen men at Quang Ngai’s airstrip were boarding UH34Ds to head back into a zone established by a downed helicopter. At the last minute, we were ordered out of the planes by our Group CO, William G. Johnson. A six man squad from an undermanned grunt company replaced us. We were sent back to Chu Lai, and they went in our stead. That night, and when depleted of ammunition, their location was overrun. All six were killed. Those deaths remained in memory with me for life. On this fiftieth year since, I do profoundly apologize to those men and their families for not going with them. I am so sorry. The Marines, as I recall coming from the 7th, 4th and other Marine Regiments I no longer remember, and as well every other Marine infantryman in Vietnam I saw fight, were magnificent; and they performed in keeping with the extraordinary heritage handed down to them. Semper Fi.  

©2015
Jesse W. Collins II