Written by Stan Goff
Thursday, 09 August 2007
Neither the universe nor life is linear. Things weave through one another. The past and future are more than discrete units of time apart from the shifting instant of now. The ripples on a pond crash into and through one another. The political realities of our time are likewise over-determined, complex, irreducible, a splashing, surging, whirling current of evolutions – personal, geographical, institutional, cognitive-and-affective, inter-subjective, and cultural – so we have to circle these phenomena – like a recon team circling an objective – to get the fuller picture of what we observe and try to understand. The patterns that emerge from the totality of these observations we might begin to call a system. And if that system is a horror; then we cannot escape the responsibility for confronting that system and simultaneously escape the consequences of our inaction.
In 1979, after a break in my Army service and having recouped my sergeant’s stripes as a mechanized cavalry scout in Fort Carson, I volunteered for the Rangers. Off to Ranger School I went, and upon completion I was assigned to 3rd Platoon, Company A (Alpha Company), 2nd Ranger Battalion, 75th Infantry Regiment in Fort Lewis, Washington. Each of the three rifle platoons (organizations of around 40 light infantrymen) had nicknames, in this case, First to Fight, the Blacksheep, and Third Herd. A Company, known for its iron discipline, was called the Alpha-bots. When I left there in 1981 to become a tactics instructor at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama, I never had a notion that I might somehow be entangled with Alpha Company again… two-and-a-half decades later.
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