Columns

Summer, early 1950s. Three companies of bootcamp draftees are on a firing range to live-fire for the first time an Army Colt .45 caliber pistol. Instructors patrol their charges, giving instructions as a bullhorn in a tower snaps commands. Everything is done “by the numbers”: each step clearly defined to be exactly performed. After hours of sighting, aiming and dry-firing, young men aim their weapons at targets that seem far away. As the noncoms repeat the tower’s commands, they aim the heavy pistols. Precisely on command, they fire their first .45 round down range. All except one who, also precisely on command, shoots himself in the temple, spattering two recruits on his left with blood, barely missing them with the bullet. The Korean War is raging. Some of the training cadre are back from seeing hastily called-up reservists get slaughtered because they’re out of shape, poorly trained. New draftees find hard Korea-era basic training dismaying.

“Even now, the easiest way to get into an argument at a VFW (or an American Legion) bar is to mention Vietnam. Seared into all who fought it – and many who merely lived through it – that conflict remains a bitter stew of second-guessing and recriminations”

– Time magazine’s Mark Thompson talking with author Lewis Sorley

Mexico never had a chance to recover from the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, writes a Houston historian. That war ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. For 15 million dollars, Mexico ceded some 55 percent of its prewar territory to the United States. A tight-fisted U.S. Congress said it was too much. The Treaty gave the U.S. what became all or part of the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, the entire State of Texas that then included part of Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and New Mexico. The remaining southern part of Arizona, and part of southern New Mexico were purchased by the June 8, 1854, Gadsen Purchase for ten million. Near-endless negotiations were the job of Nicholas Trist, chief clerk of the U.S. State Department. Trist persisted even after he was fired by the impatient President James K. Polk. The Treaty was signed by Trist, a civilian without official authority, and a Mexican federal representative. Congress whined about “formality.” But the deal was too good: Trist’s treaty was ratified.

Early last Saturday a sombreroed older man bought three cigarettes at Nacho Gutierez’s ample Aborrotes El Oso across from the Jocotepec municipal market. In line at the cash register a woman asked for two aspirina. Just down the street a bit later a child peeked over the splintered counter of a tiny store to ask for seven pesos of manteca (lard).

Paco Estrada Ruiz stood in a light rain Monday morning, swearing quietly. He is part of a family clan of campesinos whose ample, but modest ranch sets mostly on a steep twist of Jalisco highlands southeast of Guadalajara. It was a region treated unkindly by weather this growing season. Paco spat into the drizzle. Sunday had smiled with a convincingly lying sunny sky. Today’s rain was swearworthy, but not totally unexpected this loco year.

Ken Burns, whose 1990 television series on the U.S. Civil War changed the way documentaries were perceived, presented a five-and-a-half-hour production, “Prohibition,” on the PBS network last week.  Many readers may have heard vivid tales of that 1919-1933 period. Older relatives have told children and grandchildren those stories for decades, a history that has been passed down. It was called a “disastrous experiment,” one that numerous cultural analysts and journalists are noting is clearly pertinent today. Many refer to philosopher George Santayana’s admonition about “learning from past or being condemned to repeat it.”