One Hell of a Hunch
Where Fools Rush In…
The Hunch: On or about the 1st of February 2022, the Russian Military will march, roll and sail into and around Kiev, the capitol of Ukraine.
Please bear in mind that this hunch comes from an individual, me, that failed History — a subject that made no sense to me the way it was taught — in the first year of high school and, in order to enter Sophomore year, go to summer school while working a summer job.
When a substitute teacher’s position opened up many years later I would apologize to the History class about the way History was taught — in a linear fashion — like a train that traveled from one year to another, on a track that stopped at various stations then moved on to the next. To the class I proposed this; go beyond the view of a frog in a well and see all of human events as a pond and when an event drops into the pond, like a rock, it causes ripples. Some events create powerful ripples, more like boulders; assassinations, slavery and monstrous boulders we call War.
On 20–21 August 1968 a group of countries, known as the Warsaw Pact, invaded then Czechoslovakia with upwards to an estimated 500,000 participants.
Imagine what it takes to move, some 500 miles, all those people with their vehicles, petrol to supply those vehicles, food, medical care, waste stations and so on; entire cities like Boston, Cleveland, Seattle, gathering and moving, en masse, some four or five states away…one fifth the distance of the USA from one coast to another.
Now imagine the planning of that move…the logistics of the planning itself. That idea travels on much slower train of thought and stops at many stations and is touched by many station handlers…until the boulder is unloaded.
How does a guy who failed History know so much about that day in August 1968?
Because he was there…flying a few thousand feet above the western border of Czechoslovakia with 1,300 other NATO paratroopers in combat gear and parachutes on their backs.
What might surprise the reader here is that the soldiers, in thirty or more planes, had no advanced knowledge of what was unfolding on the ground below them at that very moment…until a commanding officer announced the invasion and informed us that we may be jumping into a border dispute with a real adversary; Russia.
It was a surprise to me. We had planned this maneuver about a month earlier to meet up with other NATO allies and the Air Force, the Navy and the Sixth Fleet coming up the Mediterranean Sea for a joint military combat exercise; designation Operation Deep Furrow — euphemistically referred to as a War Game.
My very first thought when I heard the commanding officer’s announcement of the invasion was; what a coincidence. Such a naïve thought. That thought quickly burst and I woke up to the Game of War. This tactic, our presence in the air, had specific intentions; display of military capability and might, saber rattling, military brinkmanship to name a few. At that moment I imagined the Russian forces gazing toward the sky and saying to each other that the Americans were right on schedule and that they knew that we knew…yet I didn’t know.
That thought gnawed at me. My father, uncles and neighbors came back from World War Two with the clear knowledge of who and what they were risking and losing their lives for. Who now was I in this political chess game; a pawn, not a knight, not a warrior? Was I about to be thrown out of the plane like a bone to the dogs of war?
We eventually dropped into Drama, Greece in the northern part of the country. My mission was with an elite platoon of thirty-six police paratroopers, with myself being specially trained in Military Police Intelligence. One of my assignments was to guard the Generals in the field by standing watch outside the Command Tent. Tents have very thin walls and I was privileged to all conversations.
What I heard was a disregard to a stern warning from a statesman and former five star general, Dwight D Eisenhower, delivered during his farewell address upon leaving the Office of President of the United States. Misplaced power was on the rise and the military-industrial complex was thriving and seeping into our national policies.
Today, the machines of war include more sophisticated computers that will play a major role in any campaign. We can imagine a supercomputer that is fed geopolitical data, weather predictions, locations of all and any military hardware, intelligence gathered from well-placed sources, phases of the moon, and much more. I will call that an incessant military strategy optimizer. I am not privileged to such an instrument.
However, around midnight 31 January 2022, the moon will be entering the New Moon phase in Ukraine, offering a dark cover, similar to the 1968 Russian incursion of Czechoslovakia that began at 11p.m. The ground will be frozen, an advantage to moving heavy equipment over almost any flat terrain, even lakes. And with the relatively small (106,000) buildup of Russian troops at the border of Ukraine, Kiev could be encircled, and the current government displaced.
How does this kind of unwise human folly still occur today. My hunch is; fear, multi-cultural incompetency (ignorance about the Other), and the sheer momentum of; misguided policies, personal political ambitions, and misplaced power. In a word — ripples.
