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Willam P. Homans Playing Taps at Quantico by self
Back in 2002, a CD came to my attention by an artist that I thought was long retired. The CD, and you'll want to get it, is Dave Dudley: American Trucker (Music Mill Ltd., 2002).
Dave Dudley's hit song Six Days On the Road, from the 1960s, is perhaps the iconic American truckdriving song. American Trucker was Dave's final recording, and it was recorded partially as a response to 9/11/01.
Dudley's unmistakable bass rumble didn't lose a thing in all those years of recording inactivity. It is one of the finest albums of country music you'll hear.
But the opening cut will put chills down your spine. It is (along with my own song, which I wrote on 9/13/01, The Red White and Blues, from the CD Big Shoes to Fill, by Watermelon Slim, NorthernBlues Music, 2002) the purest expression of outrage at the hit we took that day.
Dudley died in 2002, not too long after this record came out. I wonder what he, a simple country music singer from another era, would think about how Bush/Cheney dropped the ball in Afghanistan by not sending a Rapid Deployment Force of our own crack troops to take out Osama and Omar and all their rats, but rather letting the job be botched by the warlords who were stringing us along for money, and then cynically going into Iraq and STAYING THERE for years after any military reason there might have been for the incursion (and the reason kept changing like shifting desert sand) is gone?
For myself, I never could have written The Red White And Blues a year and a half later. I knew too much. We all did, or had deep suspicions about the dirty pool that we know, after 8 more years, continues to be played no matter which Party is in the White House.
If somebody's got a mad on about America, I say they should bring it on right here, out in the open. I say bring our troops home, station them on the Mexican border, absolutely shut off any possibility of illegal immigration OR continued Mexican drug Mafia wars, and stop spending the billion a day for sheer logistical support of our FUBAR military mission (to say nothing of the lives and the scars and the cases of PTSD, and to say ABSOLUTELY nothing about the foreign casualties).
And then let a president with cojones proclaim, " If you've got a problem with America bad enough to fight her, there's the ocean. Get sailing."
And of course, no one will sail, because the US has air and space supremacy, and we can blow any invasion force out of the water before it ever crosses one of the two oceans any invader must cross.
You see, it's logistically and militarily impossible.
Completely impossible. No nation or consortium of nations can put enough troops on a mission to establish a beachhead on a land mass of 8 million-odd square miles, and have any of them reach here.
We are bankrupting our grandchildren through a combination of corporate greed, and at least as importantly, insecurity about our ability to beat any foe that attacks HERE ON THESE SHORES.
I am an antiwar activist. But I am also an armed American, and I say to any implacable foe of the US, I will pay the cost of one first-class ticket for any fighter who wants to come to America, to a battlefield and at a time of your own choosing, and take your stand, with all of those who agree with you. Bring everyone!
And I will do my best to knock you off that stand. HERE. IN THE USA. MY country.
As one of the lines in Dave Dudley's song "Dont Mess With U.S. Truckers" goes, "it's the last time that you'll see Afghanistan."
Of course, if the US left, such supposed foes couldn't follow.
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