Guest Editorial: "Dànjìn-liángjué"

By Mike Vanderboegh

"A man can never have too many books, too much red wine or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

They Died Gallantly

"With daylight fading, the relief effort was broken off and the men of the 8th Cavalry were ordered to get out of the trap any way they could. Breaking into small elements, the soldiers moved out overland under cover of darkness. Most did not make it. The bitter fighting which . . . raged over five days saw many heroes and many memorable sacrifices, but it . . . stands (as) the most painful chapter in the proud history of the 1st Cavalry Division. On November 6 (1950), the 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment ceased to exist as a unit, but died gallantly. In all, over (600) men of the 8th Cavalry were lost—almost one-third of the regiment’s strength—in the initial attacks by massive Chinese forces, forces that only recently had been considered as existing only in rumor." -- "8th Cavalry Regiment," Wikipedia

If I believed in reincarnation, which I don't, I might wonder if in a previous life I was an S-4, a supply officer. If so, it wasn't for a well-provisioned army, but for one with a frayed shoestring of a supply line. You know, maybe Washington's ragged Continentals at Valley Forge, or "Skinny" Wainwright's on Bataan. I think this because I am always mindful of the old army motto that lieutenants worry about tactics and generals worry about logistics. I'm not a general, but I worry about supply and how that applies to the armed citizenry of today, and tomorrow. I worry because there's always some idiot like Alabama State Senator Rodger Smitherman who reminds me of it. But more about him in a minute.

It was Smitherman who got me thinking once again about Valley Forge and Bataan and Korea -- especially Korea. I grew up listening to the stories of Korea vets, ex-GIs and ex-Marines, who would gather for the ritual Saturday night beer parties my father would throw for the hops-imbibing menfolk of our small-town neighborhood in Marion Ohio. I would make myself scarce when the order to go to bed came, hiding in a little storage alcove, sort of a closet without a door, where Dad kept the motor oil and such. The stories that got to me the most (and these only came out as the night turned into early morning) were the reminiscences of the desperate days of the early fighting, especially of the Chinese intervention -- stories like the agony of the 8th Cavalry Regiment described above.

The thing to remember when you read stuff like the 8th Cavalry's "Little Big Horn" at the hands of the Chinese at Unsan is that these stories represent the lives and violent deaths of real men, such as you or me. Men who were sons, fathers, husbands and lovers. Men who because somebody screwed up, through no fault of their own, died in a lonely place far away, cut off, out of ammunition. Because I heard these stories from other men who, by luck, hard fighting or great courage (and often all three) survived to tell the tales, I learned early and never forgot that those who died were real men, boys mostly, but real. And what I couldn't understand then, but later came to understand too well, was how somebody could allow them to run out of ammunition.

You know, the Chinese have a symbol in their pictographic language for exhausting one's supplies of food and ammunition. It is this:


It is pronounced, "Dànjìn-liángjué." Each element has its own meaning. The first,


means bullet or a bullet-shaped thing. The second,


means to the greatest extent or always. The third,


means provisions or grain. And the last,


means break off, sever,cut off, die, discontinue, cross, fall, exhaust, stop, surpass, completely eradicate or wipe out. It is, obviously, an all purpose symbol. But let me show you one of the human faces of "Dànjìn-liángjué." A year ago today, the Department of Defense announced the conclusion of some unfinished business from the Korean War.

(Source: http://www.thechinesesymbol.com/Chinese-symbols/for-exhaust%20one)

"We never gave up hope.''

United States Department of Defense
No. 510-07 IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 30, 2007
Soldier Missing in Action from the Korean War is Identified . The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of a U.S. serviceman, missing in action from the Korean War, have been identified and will be returned to his family for burial with full military honors. He is Corporal Pastor Balanon Jr., U.S. Army, of San Francisco, California. He will be buried May 3, 2007, in Arlington National Cemetery . . . In late October 1950, Balanon was assigned to L Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Calvary Regiment, then engaging enemy forces south of Unsan, North Korea, near a bend in the Kuryong River known as the Camel's Head. Chinese communist forces attacked the 8th Regiment's positions on November 1, 1950, forcing a withdrawal to the south where they were surrounded by the enemy.The remaining survivors in the 3rd Battalion attempted to escape a few days later, but Balanon was declared missing in action on November 2, 1950, in the vicinity of Unsan County. In 2001, a joint U.S.-North Korean team, led by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), excavated a burial site in Kujang County, south of Unsan County. A North Korean citizen living near the site told the team that the remains were relocated to Kujang after they were discovered elsewhere during a construction project.The battle area was about one kilometer north of the secondary burial site. Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from the JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory also used mitochondrial DNA and dental comparisons in Balanon's identification.

Pastor Balanon, a Filipino boy who always wanted to be a solider, was born in the Philippines on 4 May 1928. Had he lived -- had he and his comrades had sufficient ammunition -- Balanon would have been 80 years old this week. Balanon was from a military family. His father, Pastor Balanon, Sr., served in the U.S. forces in the Islands before, during and after WWII, and retired in 1954. Two of Pastor's brothers were soldiers. His sister was an Air Force officer. During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, Pastor Sr. was active in the guerrilla movement. Once, both father and son were arrested by the Kempetai, the Japanese police. Pastor Jr. was hung by his hands and his father was buried alive up to his neck. Their only hope was to credibly deny any knowledge of what the Japanese were seeking. Neither father nor son talked, and they were eventually released.

At the time of the identification of Pastor Jr.'s remains, his younger brother Estaban who lives in Belmont, California, said: "We always hoped that he would come back alive. We never gave up hope.'' His sister Estrella Africa, of Santa Clara, CA said "It was very hard, especially for my mother and father. They never knew what happened to their son.''

What happened was this. The Chinese sprung a trap, cutting off the entire 8th Cavalry Regiment. The 2 Chinese divisions that made up the ambush outnumbered the 8th Cav more than 12 to 1. The 1st and 2nd battalions, cut-up badly, managed to break through Chinese lines and escape. The 3rd Battalion was ordered to be their rear guard and shield the withdrawal. They did, but they never made it out. On the night of 2 November, "over a thousand enemy died outside their perimeter. With their own ammunition almost gone, after each enemy attack had been driven back, men would crawl out and retrieve weapons and ammunition from the enemy dead." (http:www.first-team.us/journals/8th_rgmt/3d-unsan.html)

Sometime that night, their rifles empty, young Pastor Balanon's squad was overrun. From available evidence, the bodies were stripped and left where they lay. Eventually his bones were gathered and thrown down a deep well. That is where they were found in 2001. "Dànjìn-liángjué."

Historical Amnesia, African-American Style

"Some very interesting laws are being passed. They don't name me; they don't say, take the guns away from the niggers. They say that people will no longer be allowed to have (guns). They don't pass these rules and these regulations specifically for black people, they have to pass them in a way that will take in everybody." -- Eldridge Cleaver, 1968.

"History does not take place in a vacuum. Historical events, be they great or small, do not exist in isolation, but are a product of the age during which they occurred. Often times, the reasons why a particular historical incident turned out the way it did can be readily located, while for others, the causes may be more difficult to locate. In both cases, one rule still holds true: that the events of the past cannot be separated from the era when they occurred." -- Scott Ellsworth, "The Tulsa Race Riot."

Meet Rodger Smitherman. An Alabama State Senator, Smitherman was born in Montgomery, Alabama on March 2, 1953 and is in his fourth term in the Senate. According to his campaign bio:

"He graduated from the University of Montevallo with a B.B.A. degree and with honors from Miles Law School with a Juris Doctorate Degree. Senator Smitherman and his wife, the former Carole Catlin of Birmingham are the parents of four children: Rodger, II, Tonya Renee, Mary Elaine, and Crystal Nicole. He is a practicing attorney, a member of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, the Alabama Trial Lawyers Association, and the Birmingham Bar Association. He is a Democrat and an Elder in the Presbyterian Church."

Now, by the bills he has introduced in the past and the claims of his campaign web page, Rodger Smitherman would have us believe that he is a champion of civil rights for the little guy. You could certainly make a case that by being born and raised black where and when he was that Smitherman OUGHT TO HAVE a full understanding of his own history -- local, state and national. Ought to have. Well, given the bill he just introduced in the Alabama Senate, I'd say he has a pretty meager sense of that history. In fact, I'd say he has a full-blown case of historical amnesia.

His bill, SB-541, would mandate, as early as 2009, bullet serialization -- the process by which each individual round of ammunition is identified and marked with a laser-engraved serial number. The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association of the firearms and ammunition industry, has made clear that serializing ammunition on a mass production basis is not feasible from a practical standpoint and any legislation mandating such action could rightfully be considered a de facto ban on ammunition. According to the NSSF press release:

"If manufacturers had to comply with bullet serialization, NSSF estimates that it would take almost four weeks to manufacture what is currently produced in a single day," said NSSF Senior Vice President and General Counsel Lawrence G. Keane. "This massive reduction in ammunition would translate into substantially lower sales and profitability, and ultimately force major ammunition manufacturers to abandon the market. In turn, there would be a severe shortage of serialized ammunition and all consumers, including federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, would be faced with substantial price increases. Ammunition will go from costing pennies to several dollars per cartridge." The domestic small arms ammunition industry, utilizing modern manufacturing processes and distribution practices, produces between 10 and 12 billion ammunition cartridges a year at already low-profit margins. The three largest domestic manufacturers (who collectively account for the vast majority of the market) produce an estimated 20 million rounds of ammunition in a single day. Ammunition manufacturers could not serialize their product without hundreds of millions of dollars in capital investment to build the new factories that would be needed in order to meet the requirements of bullet serialization. At the same time, hundreds of millions of dollars of existing plants and equipment, and decades of manufacturing (cost-saving) efficiencies, would be rendered obsolete.

Chris W. Cox, the Executive Director of the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action, summed up the effect of bills like SB-541(and there have been many introduced in various states around the country in a coordinated attack on the armed citizenry) by quoting something Ted Kennedy proposed in 1974: "No Bullets . . . NO SHOOTING."

All gun owners are familiar with the 17th century maxim, “Keep your powder dry.” But if we expect to be gun owners in the 21st century, we have to update that to read, “Keep your powder—and all the rest of your ammunition—at all.” That’s because politicians who want to ban guns, but who don’t have the votes in Congress and state legislatures, are trying to achieve the same effect by banning the manufacture, importation, sale and possession of as much ammunition as possible, and severely restricting the rest. . . All of these bills would prohibit the manufacture and sale of ammunition, unless the bullets and cartridge cases are marked with a code and registered to the owners in a computerized database. Most would also require gun owners to forfeit any non-coded ammunition they possess. For example, Arizona's bill says, “Beginning January 1, 2011, a private citizen or a retail vendor shall dispose of all noncoded ammunition that is owned or held by the citizen or vendor.” Tennessee’s says, “All non-coded ammunition . . . shall be disposed.” And in Pennsylvania, “An owner of ammunition . . . not encoded by the manufacturer . . . shall dispose of the ammunition.” These bills include no compensation for the loss of millions of rounds of privately owned ammunition. But that’s not the point. Nor is the fact that ammunition encoding hasn’t been tested, let alone proven. Nor is the fact that criminals would easily figure out the numerous, obvious ways to beat ammunition registration.
(Source: http://www.nrapublications.org/oj/nobullets.html)

Cox concludes, "The point of these bills is to prevent gun owners from having ammunition for defense, practice, sport and hunting. The fact that these bills are not gun bans is a mere technicality because, in practical terms, ammo bans are gun bans." We need not take Cox's word for this conclusion, for he quotes Ted Kennedy, speaking to the Senate in 1974: "If [banning handguns] is not feasible we may be obliged to place strict bans on the production and distribution of ammunition. No bullets, no shooting.”

Now Rodger Smitherman is a bright guy. He's a lawyer, a businessman and an accomplished politician. He's not some touchy-feely schmuck who's been sold a bill of goods by the Brady crowd. Let us give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to intelligence. He knows what this bill means. He has signed onto to the citizen disarmament crowd's agenda. Now, he's either done that because he's a historical amnesiac or because he's a self-aware Judas goat -- for the entire history of black folks in this country is irrefutable proof that gun control has been one of the often-used tools of their own subjugation.

"Prohibiting Negroes, slave and free, from carrying weapons including clubs." Virginia Code, 1640 (Quoted in The Los Angeles Times, "To Fight Crime, Some Blacks Attack Gun Control," January 19, 1992)

Among those who have written convincingly on this subject are Clayton Cramer, "The Racist Roots of Gun Control," which first appeared in the Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy, Winter, 1995 issue, available here (http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/cramer.racism.html) and William R. Tonso, "Gun Control: White Man's Law," also available on the web. I'm not going to waste time and space remaking the case here. My point is rather informed by the practical history of interest to a supply officer of the American armed citizenry. From my recent reading, the LAST person who ought to be advocating restricting the ammunition supply is black man who wishes to maintain his liberty.

Indeed, Smitherman must be woefully ignorant of a whole series of recent works that deal, sometimes tangentially and sometimes directly, with historical incidents involving black Americans where they lost the battles for their own liberty and security because they were poorly armed and worse, lacked the ammunition to carry the fight to a successful conclusion. Let me be so bold as to suggest a reading list for Smitherman, if he is in fact merely uninformed rather than malevolent in his purpose, so that he might remedy his ignorance.

Smitherman ought first to read, "Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War," by Nicholas Lemann (New York, 2006):

"The only way for Republicans to ensure that Negroes would be able to organize to vote in November, and then actually do so, was through the same kind of military force the Democrats were using. . . Any black militia would be outnumbered and out armed by the shadowy white force now in place all over the state. . . The Democrats . . . had a challenge of their own . . .: if they were too brazen in seizing political power at gunpoint, or too open in preventing Negro political activity, it might turn the opinion of the North against them and force President Grant to deploy the Army. They were on safer ground if they made every incident look spontaneous, local and personal, rather than like part of a planned campaign." (Page 120)

Absent black state militias, the freedmen were on their own. Lacking training, military arms and especially, a stock of ammunition, they were outgunned and eventually forced into the Jim Crow system, or killed.

Next, Smitherman needs to peruse books such as "Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America," by Elliot Jaspin (Basic Books, 2007); "Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood," by Michael D'Orso (Putnam, 1996) and especially "The Burning: Massacre, Destruction and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921," by Tim Madigan (St. Martin's, 2001). From the latter work:

For a few minutes in early morning, Mann also enjoyed the illusion that he and John Williams and the other blacks fighting from the buildings along Greenwood Avenue would actually defeat the (invading) whites, or at least turn them back across the tracks. The whites took heavy casualties on their first push before sunrise, when a cloud of Negro bullets greeted them and sent them scurrying in retreat. But Mann's hopeful illusions burned off with the morning sun when he could see that there was no end to the enemy. Kill one white and ten more sprang up in his place. The Negroes also didn't have the luxury of looting a dozen pawnshops and hardware stores (like the whites). Their bullets had been purchased for hunting and ammunition soon ran low. (p. 159)

Deacons

Most importantly, Smitherman should acquaint himself with "The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement," by Lance Hill (UNC Press, 2004).

In 1964, a clandestine armed self-defense organization formed in the black community in Jonesboro, Louisiana, with the goal of protecting civil rights activists from the Ku Klux Klan and other racist vigilantes. After several months of relatively secret operations, the group publicly surfaced in February 1965 under the name "Deacons for Defense and Justice." By the end of 1966, the Deacons had grown to twenty-one chapters with several hundred members concentrated in Louisiana and Mississippi. The Deacons guarded marches, patrolled the black community to ward off night riders, engaged in shootouts with Klansmen, and even defied local police in armed confrontations. When the U.S. Justice Department faltered in enforcing the Civil Rights Act, the Deacons' militant politics and armed actions forced a pivotal showdown in Bogalusa between the government and southern segregationists. Although the Deacons began as a simple self-defense guard to compensate for the lack of police protection, they soon developed into a highly visible political organization with a clear and compelling alternative to the pacifist strategies promoted by national civil rights organizations. They were not the first blacks to practice or advocate armed self-defense. Throughout the civil rights movement, African Americans frequently guarded themselves and their communities against vigilante assaults. But until the Deacons emerged, these armed self-defense efforts were almost always conducted by informal and disconnected covert groups that avoided open confrontations with authority and purposefully eschewed publicity -- in part because they feared retaliation and in part because they wanted to maintain the illusion of nonviolence in the movement. It was this public image of a nonviolent movement that ensured white liberal support in the North. . . Invisible to the broader public, clandestine self-defense groups had little effect on the Ku Klux Klan or federal policy in the South. The Deacons, in contrast, consciously built a highly public, regional organization that openly defied local authorities and challenged the Klan -- something that neither the Klan nor Washington could ignore." (pp. 2-3)

The Deacons were careful, not only to arm themselves, but to amass credible stocks of small arms ammunition so that the right to keep and bear arms was not canceled after the first skirmish. Indeed, it was their ammunition purchases which convinced the FBI that they were serious. The thing is, by virtue of who he is and where he was raised, Smitherman must surely have heard about the Deacons. There was a chapter in Birmingham, and another in Montgomery. Is he really that ignorant of his own history?

Rodger must be either be perfectly clairvoyant or smoking something (I rather think the latter) if he proposes laws such as SB-541 as if the bad old days cannot ever come again. Anyone who thinks that tyranny cannot come to America is whistling past the graveyard of history. And if the "sheetheads" of the Klan once again grow and take over local and state governments and the police agencies they control (which, by the way, they have done three times in less than a century), or even, God forbid, acquire the power of the federal government -- what then will prevent Smitherman from being chased out of his political office, put out of business, arrested, beaten or even killed by thugs acting under color of law merely because they don't like the color of his skin? He might resort to arms, if he had the ammunition. He might, if he isn't, as a result of his own bill, "Dànjìn-liángjué."

If he was standing here in front of me I would tell him this:"Be careful what you wish for, Rodger, you may get it. 'History does not take place in a vacuum,' and there are always unintended consequences. If you don't withdraw this bill and rethink your participation in the citizen disarmament movement, at the very least the ghosts of the Deacons will haunt you past the grave for spitting on their memory. As Pastor Balanon could tell you, the wages of 'Dànjìn-liángjué' will get your life cut short and your bones tossed down a deep well. And as Santayana observed, it is best to remember history lest you repeat it."

Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com