ustxtxb_obs_1978_10_06_50_00021-00000_000.pdf

IN DALLAS: 4528 McKINNEY AVE. 209 S. AKARD, downtown RICHARDSON: 508 LOCKWOOD FARMERS BRANCH SHOPPING CTR. SW CORNER, VALLEY VIEW IN WACO: 25TH & COLUMBUS IN AUSTIN: 1514 LAVACA 6103 BURNET RD. IN FORT WORTH: 6301 CAMP BOWIE BLVD. PRIME RIEI STEAK LOBSTER CRAB elican’s hors indifference of the population it had been sent to protect on endless frontiers. “That’s what happened, finally, with the Roman legions in Spain, Gaul, and along the Danube, until their leaders, with legions for muscle, took over the state. It was what happened with Mameluke professionals of the Mesopotamian empire in the Middle Ages whose leaders set goals which the home society did not care enough about themselves to defend and so lost to the mercenaries. And it was what happened in the 1950s to France, which first lost Indochina with an all-professional army and later, in Algeria, would have fallen to a coup by the generals but for the fact that this time the army contained conscripts, and the citizen soldiers would support only that general who was more statesman than soldier, de Gaulle.” Think about the push-button army General Westmoreland envisions as follows: “On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be located, tracked, and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer intelligence evaluation, and automated fire control. With first-round kill probabilities approaching certainty, and with surveillance devices that can continually track the enemy, the need for large forces to fix the opposition physically will be less important.” Indeed, in that kind of military, give me some suspicious soldiers like Ronnie Dugger, Craig Washington, Albert Petia, Jean Lee and Daniel Ellsberg. Thomas Mann or Hitler? On September 1, 1967, the Czech Writers Union issued a manifesto and inquired, “For we ask: who endured, who wonVoltaire or Louis XIV, Emile Zola or the French general staff, Victor Hugo or Napoleon, Thomas Mann or Hitler?” The answer to that question is not so clear, even after the experience of Vietnam, if in the future we rely on an army without a cross-section of citizen soldiers. The recently passed Pentagon budget, cheered on by the chamber of commerce, big business, and big labor, offers no encouragement. “Old violence is not too old to beget new values,” Robinson Jeffers has written. Have we learned anything from the violence of Vietnam? The napalm? The bombs, greater in quantity than the amount dropped on Nazi Germany? The herbicides? The mutilated children? The endless lies out of Washington? Have we acquired new values? It is a blood, bone, and gristle question. The choice is narrow and mean: a mercenary computer army or a citizen army? At stake is life and death, and maybe the fate of the world. ANDMISON & COMPANY COFFEE TEA SPICES TWO JErninuow SQUARE AUSTIN, TEXAS 78731 512 453-1533 Send me your list. Name Street City Zip HALF PRICE RECORDS NkAG AZ IN E$ THORP SPRINGS PRESS is in the forefront of publishing Texas fiction. BOOMER’S GOLD a novel o Borger, Texas, as a boom town by Jack Walker, $10 SUGARLAND a tale of Texas prisons by Paul Foreman, $7.50 forthcoming: THE COLLECTED STORIES OF AMADO MURO Write for catalog: THORP SPRINGS PRESS 3414 Robinson Avenue Austin, Texas 78722 Austin, Corpus Christi, Victoria, Brownsville, Temple, McAllen, Port Aransas, Tucson, [ay DINER S College Station, San Antonio, Harlingen 21 THE TEXAS OBSERVER