Post by Mulligan on Oct 31, 2014 19:45:42 GMT -6
Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
~~~
I have spent some time away attending to everyday affairs and activities, including some golf in Palm Springs, California, studying the Donahue map book and reading up on General Crook, as I mentioned, and feeding what has become my late night online addiction to Napoleon: Total War.
I've discovered in NTW that if one chooses to engage in campaigns against the AI (artificial intelligence) of the computer game -- individuals are advised to play against other humans, such as my grandson -- one will be playing against an immense digital library of Napoleonic strategies and tactics written into the game program by teams of scholars and period battle experts working with the game maker (Creative Assembly) software engineers. From these large files of historical military data the AI chooses its responses to each of an opposing player's moves.
It's like trying to play chess against IBM's Watson. Actually, one is playing against every grandmaster from Seigbert Tarrasch to world number one Magnus Carlsen.
Since the computer cloud facility that supports the NTW game contains such a vast array of possible battlefield-proven stratagems it is virtually impossible to score a victory against the AI. One's slightest false step is instantly recognized, and the AI quickly brings the full weight of its entire arsenal to bear at the point of a mistake. A player's own army is overrun in a matter of minutes, and the battle is lost almost before the player realizes he's made an error.
Does this scenario sound familiar to anyone?
~~~
Having spent a few days or weeks away from the LBHA board, and then returning occasionally as a guest to read everyone's continuing observations, comments, and thoughts, one thing in particular stands out to me now.
I think everybody here is working with too much information.
Welshofficer's recent post (10/14) that considered Putin's options for a nuclear first strike against Europe -- and how the excruciatingly fine details of that imagined pre-emptive war plan supposedly related in some way to LTC Custer's thinking in 1876 -- is an example of my point.
Understandably, military men will always discern the Custer fight in military terms. Historians will view it as an aspect of America's historical imperative. Horologists will time the precise clockwork of events on the battlefield. Ethnologists will regard the conflict as a climactic clash of immiscible cultures. Archaeologists will envision the sweeping movement of participants by reading scratches etched on corroded cartridge cases dug from the ground.
Every blind man among us will touch the elephant, and each will form their own opinion of the beast, and there will never be a resolution.
~~~
In the case of Custer, we may be bereft of satisfactory explanations because battle theorists have been forced to peer back into time through the prism of the modern age -- through a glass, darkly, if you will -- and have thus inadvertently lost sight of the realities of the frontier period, and they have missed their mark.
Think of a fish underwater, as seen from above the surface. Because of the diffraction of light it does not really occupy the position in which it appears to be swimming.
Custer does not exist where we perceive him to be, and therefore any of our suppositions about him and the battle are wrong.
~~~
Complete understanding of LBH will be forever frustrated and elusive because an accurate, era-specific solution to the puzzle cannot be formulated based on the experiences of modern, mechanized army officers or present day Pulitzer Prize-winning authors. We can't go online and have an epiphany about the Plains Indian Wars.
In short, we can't get there from here or we would have arrived by now.
The Custer battle is fixed in the amber of remote space-time. The closer we can get to that moment -- and that space -- perhaps the better vantage we will have from which to draw our final conclusions.
This will be our own inner Weir Point.
In the end, we must rely on the contemporary observations of the experienced cavalry officers who were actually present at LBH, and perhaps a limited number of corroborated NA accounts transcribed in the years shortly afterward. Even then, says Gregory Mincho, we must filter and interpret and be aware of significant amounts of selective omission.
We will be looking into a cloud of dust and gunsmoke so sulfurous it hasn't settled in 140 years, and the devil will be in the details.
While we're at it, I think we should also listen very carefully to two successful agricultural businessmen who lived their entire lives next to the battlefield and worked two lifetimes with the descendants of the Sioux who fought Custer and the Crow warriors who scouted for the Seventh Cavalry.
These two men, father and son commercial ranchers, knew the land and their tribal neighbors intimately. I suspect they were privy to more than a few NA ancestral secrets, as well.
I'm telling all of you, gather around the fire here. I've stumbled upon the real truth of LBH -- a much higher level of truth than has been previously encountered on this subject. It is elegantly hidden (in plain sight) in Henry and Don Weiberts' plain-spoken story/parable/fable.
Of course, any truth will remain invisible to those whose eyes will not see it.
~~~
The classic court-martial exchange between hostile witness Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) and Navy lawyer Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) in A Few Good Men is so embedded in our cultural consciousness I'm not even going to bother quoting it.
But I'm sure you can hear it in your mind.
Mulligan
