Last weekend The Lad called with the shocking news that there was going to be something about World War II on the History Channel. He came over to Mullings World HQ to watch what turned out to be an excellent program on the activities of the 10th Mountain Division during World War II.
The 10th Mountain Division was specifically trained in the mountains of Colorado to fight in the mountains of Italy. It's most famous member was Lt. Bob Dole.
After WWII, the unit was deactivated. It was reconstituted in 1985 at Fort Drum, New York (where the Mullmeister spent several very excellent summer camps with the 50th Armored Division during his National Guard days) and is now deployed to Uzbekistan.
The most famous assault was up a mountain slope code named "Riva Ridge." No one thought the Germans could be knocked from their high-ground positions, except for the soldiers involved. They took the Ridge and fought their way up the Po Valley.
As they fought their way north, pushing against German troops, the 10th Mountain Division was ordered to hold in place. They were to wait for other units to catch up with them, then allow them to lead the advance; the 10th providing, in essence, mop-up support.
The Commanding General, George Hays used the Italian equivalent of "Nuts" and kept his three infantry regiments moving toward the Po River.
When they got there, the men of the 10th Mountain found that so many bridges had been destroyed by allied bombing - perhaps by a B-24 commanded by Lt. George McGovern - that they were stuck. General Hays sent his combat engineers out on a recon mission.
Hays' Engineers intercepted a convoy of trucks carrying assault boats headed for one of those other units. They convinced the drivers that they had been sent out to guide the trucks to the correct location.
The 10th Mountain crossed the Po River first.
The point of all this was, the request of President Bush and Secretary of State Powell to the Northern Alliance that they stop short of taking Kabul, which is the capital of Afghanistan, while waiting to form a wider political coalition to govern from there.
However you say "Nuts" in Persian or Pashtu (the two most prevalent languages), the Northern Alliance commanders said it, and kept moving. By yesterday Kabul was largely under Northern Alliance control.
Now the question is: Will the Northern Alliance stop before it gets to the Pakistani border? Or India? A quickly advancing army is no easier to stop than a quickly advancing aircraft carrier.
Naturally the American press corps began to wring its collective hands over the possibility of human rights abuses - the press corps' noun of choice is "atrocities" - by the Northern Alliance soldiers toward Taliban soldiers and sympathizers.
I have not seen any reporting on this, but I am willing to bet that there are not that many people in the Northern Alliance Army with advanced degrees in "Situational Ethics and the Rise of Multiculturalism in Middle Eastern Tribal Societies" from Harvard. Or, from the University of Kabul. So, in spite of our strongest possible wishes to the contrary, some of them may well do bad things.
It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the Taliban might have left a few of its more psychopathic members behind to indulge in exactly the kind of atrocities for which the Taliban itself was infamous when they were in power.
I understand that is a challengeable position. How would anyone be able to differentiate psychopathic Taliban from regular Taliban?
There was a bitter-sweet party Monday night celebrating the posthumous publication of Barbara Olson's book, "The Final Days" (#2 on the NY Times bestseller list; #13 on Amazon).
Standing in a small group including PR guru Ed Gillespie, Washington super lawyer Joe DiGenova, told the following joke: A Western reporter watched Afghanistani women removing their head coverings and watched men shaving their beards. The reporter caught up with a Northern Alliance soldier and asked him what he thought. Said the soldier: "I'm going to party like it's 1399!"
Travelogue Alert: Mullings is going to Paris the week after Thanksgiving. Stay tuned for the travelogue which (a) should be plenty amusing and, (b) may end up with an inside look at the Bastille.
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