2018 is shaping up to be a much different year for the Colonel.
He knows, there's still a good bit of 2017 to play through, but he's in the red zone with a comfortable lead. Besides, no year has ever beaten him.
One of the reasons that the Colonel is optimistic about a different new year -- different in priorities, if nothing else -- is that he's going to cleanse his soul of an addiction that has ruled him for decades.
The Colonel is going to kick the Ole Miss Rebel Football habit.
Allow him to be crystal clear on this point: the Colonel will always be an Ole Miss Rebel -- proud that when the choosing time was upon him in the halcyon days of his misspent youth, he chose to go to Ole Miss... instead of college.
It was the third best and second worst decision he ever made.
What was the Colonel's first and second best decisions, you ask? Well, for those of you who don't know the Colonel personally and to whom the answer is not obvious by personal observation -- the first and second best decisions he ever made were Jesus and the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda, respectively.
The worst decision the Colonel ever made is, frankly, none of your business.
Ole Miss ranks as one of the Colonel's best decisions because the school began the process that marked him as a little different than everyone else. The Marine Corps completed that process, but this missive isn't about the greatest fighting force mankind has ever seen.
This missive regards an institution whose very soul embodies the best and worst of the people from whose state it takes its name.
And, Ole Miss Rebel Football is the physical manifestation of all that is good (and not so good) about Mississippi.
To be an Ole Miss Rebel Football fan is to turn your back on the rest of the world and hike your kilt.
To be an Ole Miss Rebel Football fan is to pine for regular winning seasons, but take solace in the irregular upset of highly favored rivals.
To be an Ole Miss Rebel Football fan is to, with a straight face, walk proudly under the arch of the "Walk of Champions" even though the last football championships were so long ago that their memory exists only in the hearts of octogenarian Rebels.
To be an Ole Miss Rebel Football fan is to warmly and graciously invite opposing fans into your tailgate tent and then hotly and viciously tell them "we're gonna beat the hell out of you."
For the Colonel, his Ole Miss Rebel Football fandom has been a drug with unpredictable and monstrous effects. The highs are the highest and the lows are the lowest.
When the Colonel matriculated at Ole Miss in the mid-seventies Ole Miss Rebel Football was in a post-Archie Manning (and post- Johnny Vaught) hangover that left Ole Miss Rebel Football fans with so very little to cheer for that the only rallying cry of any consequence were the stirring strains of "Dixie" and the sight of tens of thousands of miniature Beauregard Battle Flags snapping to the beat.
By the time the Colonel retired from the Marine Corps, moved back to the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere, and purchased Ole Miss Rebel Football season tickets, the miniature Beauregard Battle Flags had been banned in a spate of political correctness appeasement.
But, they still played "Dixie."
No matter how horrible Ole Miss Rebel Football got (and it got pretty stinkin' horrible) the Colonel and 50 thousand of his closest friends could (after shelling out way too much hard earned greenbacks for seats, parking, and stale concessions) fill the hallowed confines of Vaught-Hemingway Stadium and do what no other public collection of people in the world could do -- sing "Dixie."
Without malice. "Dixie" was our love song to a region that was way beyond the rest of the nation in racial reconciliation. Scoff if you must at that notion -- but if you weren't there with the Colonel and 50 thousand of his closest friends (black and white), you just don't know the truth.
Then, a paroxysm of political correctness appeasement once again seized the trembling hearts of the temp-help then poorly filling leadership positions in the University of Mississippi's administration.
"Dixie" was banned.
You could feel the spirit lift from the campus and drift away on a north wind of neo-reconstructionism.
Amidst this spirit-killing de-dixiefication of Ole Miss Rebel Football, the long-standing mascot -- Colonel Rebel -- took a politically correct knife to the back. He was replaced by a cartoon bear. The bear has just recently been replaced by a cartoon landshark.
What's next?
If the current trajectory continues, the nicknames "Ole Miss" and "Rebel" will eventually succumb to the fascism of political correctness.
Oh, and did the Colonel mention that the University of Mississippi -- a state-funded, public institution -- no longer flies the flag of the state?
What's next? Change the name of the institution, because the very name "Mississippi" offends the sensibilities of a very vocal and very small minority?
Will the flag of the United States of America slide down the pole in front of the Lyceum one evening, never to fly again, because it also offends the sensibilities of that very vocal and very small minority?
Here's a fact you can take to the bank. The Colonel, and his money, will no longer be a party to fascism. He'll no longer shell out way too much of his hard earned cash for seats, parking, and stale concessions, to sit in a half-empty stadium and have his tinnitus-ravaged hearing assaulted by bigoted and rapine rap.
The Colonel is kicking the habit. He will, however, forever loudly and proudly be an Ole Miss Rebel.
Even when the political correctness fascists get around to outlawing that self-identification.
Martha Cannon used to say, speaking of her son-in-law, "When I couldn't run him off, I adopted him."
The Colonel didn't need adopting -- he had very special parents doing a great job of raising him already -- but, Miss Martha saw the connection between her daughter and the Colonel and decided she would also lend a hand in shaping the young man who would probably end up becoming her son-in-law.
Martha lost the love of her life a year ago and came to live with the Colonel and the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda. She passed peacefully in her sleep early this morning and awoke in the arms of her Savior and looking into the eyes of her husband of 61 years.
Four decades ago, when the Colonel took off with Miss Brenda, Miss Martha held his face in her strong hands and simply said, "You love my daughter."
It wasn't a question. It wasn't a request.
It was a sweet command.
Miss Martha was never demanding, but she was the master of the sweet command. And, nobody dared disobey -- not out of fear, but out of tremendous love for a lady who never gave anyone a reason not to love her.
The Colonel first became aware of an irresistibly cute and shy Brenda Cannon when they were barely 15. It may not have been "love at first sight" but it was definitely not long after first sight that the Colonel, young as he was, decided that the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda was someone to lay claim to for a lifetime.
When the Colonel met the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda's beautiful mother, the deal was sealed.
The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda's parents were not so sure. In fact, they strongly counseled her to keep the Colonel at arms' length. It was wise counsel. But, to the Colonel's good fortune, Miss Brenda picked him to be one of the very few things on which she ever disagreed with her parents.
Jack and Martha Cannon were the Colonel's in-laws from the 31st of July in 1976. But, they were more than just "in-laws." Because Miss Brenda loved him with all her heart, they did too.
Miss Martha was a small-town girl from rural West Tennessee. She went to work at Sears in Memphis right out of high school and there caught the eye of a stock-boy working his way through school at Memphis State. Jack Cannon set his heart and mind on meeting (and marrying) the dark-haired beauty and finally finagled a date by inviting her to church. They were married not many months later and parents of twin daughters within a year. The next two decades took Martha far from Tennessee, following Jack's career as an Air Force pilot -- Texas, Florida, Washington, Hawaii, New York, California, New Jersey, Tennessee, Panama...
Martha moved and set up household for her family more times than most folks take a trip out of state. She kept her daughters safe and secure while Jack flew around the world representing the United States and helping keep the world safe for democracy. She supported her husband's demanding career without question and with evident pride.
When Linda and Brenda left home for college, Martha immediately opened her home to more children -- serving as a foster mom for dozens of children. At her church in Panama City, Florida, Martha served as a pre-school Sunday School teacher for two generations of children, one of whom later became the Colonel's daughter-in-law.
To her grandchildren and great-grandchildren she was known as "Memaw," a name that everyone in the family, young and old, used with great affection.
When Mr. Jack passed last year, the wise and courageous Miss Martha came to live with the Colonel and his bride. What a blessing that year has been! Caring for Miss Martha consumed each day, and enriched each one as well.
Compassionate, humble, positive, wise, devoted... there's a whole dictionary of noble descriptions for this wonderful woman, and all the words in the world won't fill the hole in the Colonel's heart this morning.
Love you Memaw!
Ninety-nine years ago, the guns fell silent.
For four years, mostly along a line that ran across Belgium, Luxemburg, and France from the Channel to the Swiss border, an incessant roar of artillery and staccato chatter of machine guns had filled the air. From any listening point along that line the din of war was rarely ever squelched.
Now, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month -- 11 A.M. on the 11th of November, 1918 -- the only sound along the front was a ragged cheer from men long at war finally at peace.
The Great War was over -- the fighting ceased by an armistice later codified by a treaty of peace. However, the pain and suffering, political disorder, and technological change wrought by the conflict would endure for, and impact, generations.
The war had literally bled white an entire generation of European men. Apocryphal, yet telling, is the belief that of the plaques honoring the war dead of each graduating class at the French military academy Saint Cyr, there is one that simply says "The Class of 1914." (In reality, only three quarters of the class died in the WWI; but, that is, in itself, emblematic.)
The horrors of this first "modern" war defy comprehension. The slaughter wrought by the mismatch of ploddingly antiquated battlefield doctrine and galloping technological advances boggles the mind. Nearly 11 million soldiers (and half that number of civilians) died. Life in the trenchworks was a horrid existence -- vermin and disease sat to a soldier's left, death by shrapnel or gas to his right. To leave the trenches and assault forward meant crossing ground churned by shell and swept by machine gun fire. Advances were often measured in mere yards. Casualties dwarfed any previous war's toll.
The killing fields of France, scarred still by the detritus and designs of war, were sown with seeds of monstrous destruction from which sprouted literal death and maiming for years to come. Mines, unexploded shells (many filled with poisonous gas), and barbed wire entanglements continued to claim victims for decades after the fighting ceased.
Even the 1919 Treaty of Versailles -- the treaty of peace forced on a politically, if not militarily, shattered Germany by the victorious Allies -- contained its own clutch of eggs in which poisonous offspring incubated in the heat of national humiliation, and from which slithered serpents of deception and destruction to wreak even greater pain and suffering on future generations.
The world of 1919 was a place much different than it had been in 1914. Empires, whose hereditary monarchs once ruled far-flung colonial possessions and commanded respect and admiration on the world stage, now lay headless and shrunken corpses in the back-alleys of history. In their place, upstart empires led by commoners stoking the flames of ideology (democracy, socialism, nationalist socialism, and militant religious nationalism) flexed their newly fledged wings and flew about picking over the abandoned territories like so many buzzards over carrion. From this witches' brew of humiliation and populism, new, more deadly, conflicts arose.
Many of the military strategists who fought in the Great War (Pershing and his Operations Chief -- Fox Conner; one of the Colonel's military heroes -- prominent among them) saw clearly the certain future world war. Pershing and Conner had argued in late 1918, as the German army retreated from the Allied offensive made possible by American reinforcements, and the German people recoiled in revolution at the great slaughter, that the "unconditional surrender" of the German army should be demanded; but, the Allied supreme command (French) considered unconditional surrender by the Germans unrealistic. The Allied offensive was reclaiming ground held by the German army since the beginning of the war, but the German army was still very much an effective fighting force. As the toll of the war mounted on the German people, revolution brewed. Kaiser Wilhem, support lost among both his people and the army, finally abdicated on 9 November. The new German regime immediately sued the Allies for an armistice. Half a year later, the civilian leaders of the victorious powers -- France, Great Britain, the United States, and Italy -- wrought (and forced on Germany) not just a treaty of peace, but a severe punishment that included devastating reparations, humiliating territorial concessions (Japan got Germany's colonies in China and the Pacific -- setting the stage for a future war in the Pacific), and unrealistic military limitations.
Pershing and Conner opposed the harsh punishments imposed on Germany by the Allies in the Treaty of Versaille. Conner saw clearly that the humiliation of who he considered "the strongest people" in Europe would blowback with another even larger war as a result. Over the next two decades, Conner made it a point to prepare his proteges (Marshall, Eisenhower, and Patton, among many others) for the coming second world war he was certain would spring from the stipulations of the treaty.
America -- never keen to enter the war in Europe -- quickly settled back into isolationism; and worse, unpreparedness. In Fox Conner's mid 1920's assignment in charge of the U.S. Army's logistics, he was appalled to find that the Army's entire budget for one year was less than what was spent to keep the AEF in the field for one week. Ammunition stocks were aging and dwindling at an alarming rate. The Army's manning dropped precipitously in the twenties and thirties -- to less than a third the number that Pershing and Conner considered the minimum to keep a nucleus of prepared forces to meet the next threat and train a rapidly swelling wartime force.
(Such unpreparedness was, unfortunately, an American habit. When the United States declared war on Spain in 1898, it had a relatively modern and effective navy; but the American army was miniscule. The Spanish army in Cuba dwarfed the standing American army -- Spain had nearly 200,000 men in Cuba, armed with modern weapons. In order to invade and "liberate" Cuba, a volunteer army was quickly raised. Fortunately, Spain quickly grew tired of the fight and sued for an armistice -- although its main force in Cuba was still effective. The Colonel believes that had Spain really wanted to hold on to Cuba, and its other Caribbean territory, Puerto Rico, it could have easily done so -- within a half dozen weeks of landing on Cuba, tropical diseases had swept the American invasion force and reduced its fighting efficiency by 75%.)
Clauswitz, one of history's most profound students of the nature of war, maintained that war was not a failure of politics and diplomacy, but was itself an extreme extension of those interstate activities. By logical extension, preparedness for war strengthens a nation's diplomatic hand. America's ability to exercise the influence in world affairs won by great sacrifice in 1918 was squandered by myopic populist politicians and nearly nonexistent a decade later.
Of the lessons of war Conner's mentorship imparted on the generation of military leaders that saw America and her allies through to victory in the next great war, the maxim that while weapons, doctrine, terrain, and weather change -- human nature does not, is perhaps the most salient. Conner taught this maxim to prepare Marshall and Eisenhower to expertly conduct the coalition-building required to make many allied nations fight as one. While that was indeed the competency that Marshall and Eisenhower needed most, there is a greater, big picture lesson for our Republic.
War is the one certain constant in the nature of man. Denial of this fact places a nation at existential risk. Peace is ephemeral -- out of humanity's grasp by God's design. But, freedom and relative security is attainable -- at cost.
Ninety-nine years ago the guns fell silent. The Colonel's maternal grandfather was one of a million American fighting men whose voices joined the chorus of cheers that swept the lines at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. The sacrifice those men -- and those like them in generations before and after -- laid on the altar of freedom must be remembered. It also must animate us to internalize and apply the lessons of war.
There is no more fitting tribute to an American veteran than to earn, through respect and preparedness, the freedom and security for which they fought.
One hundred years ago -- November 5th, 1917, to be exact -- one of the most influential, and practically unknown, Mississippians of the 20th Century was named acting Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations (G-3) for the fledgling American Expeditionary Force (AEF) forming in France for participation in the war against Germany. The eyes of the world were on the AEF and it's dashing commanding general, John J. "Blackjack" Pershing. The hopes of the bled-white French and British allies were on the infusion of manpower that promised to come with the entry of the United States into the Great War. The man upon whose shoulders Pershing placed the burden of planning the largest foreign expedition of American forces in the nation's 140 year history, was Fox Conner of Slate Springs, Mississippi.
Pershing's AEF would be formed from a literal standing start. The plan to field 100 divisions to help the Allies drive the Germans out of France was particularly daunting given the fact that the United States Army in 1917 had no divisions. The largest standing maneuver organizations the Army had were a handful of infantry regiments of a few thousand men each. The plan that Conner and his fellow planners had developed in the few short months since the United States had declared war on Germany in April of 1917 called for very large (28,000 men) divisions organized in two brigades of two regiments each.
Organizing and training this behemoth force was one thing. Getting a million men and their equipment to France in a matter of months was quite another. Shipping was at a premium and German submarines were sinking allied shipping at an alarming rate.
Colonel Fox Conner's office in Chaumont, France, near the border with Switzerland, was a world away from the cotton fields of his youth in Calhoun County, Mississippi. He could not have arrived at this opportunity for professional stardom on the world stage from a more unlikely beginning. This son of a Confederate soldier blinded at Shiloh is perhaps the epitome of the uniquely American ideal that one's starting point has no bearing (except that which one allows) on one's life accomplishments.
Fox Conner's path from Mississippi cotton fields to prominence in the United States Army was kick-started by his thirst for reading, which in turn was nurtured by his educator parents. Accepted into the Class of 1898 at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Conner persevered through persecution for his humble southern beginnings and graduated near the top of his class. The prevalent attitude amongst American military professionals at the end of the 19th Century was that graduation from West Point was all the professional military education one needed for the duration of a career. Conner didn't buy into this attitude. The first two decades of his career were marked by continual study, particularly in his occupational specialty (artillery), but also in the art and science of high level staff planning and strategy.
Perhaps the seminal assignment of his first two decades of service, was Conner's posting to a French artillery regiment in 1912. At the time, the French Army possessed the world's preeminent artillerists, as well as general staff planners second only to the Germans. Conner returned to the United States in 1914 with three strengths unique in the American Army -- fluency in French, knowledge of world-class artillery, and advanced staff planning expertise. When the first coordination meetings occurred with the French (and British) following US entry into the war, Conner was an obvious choice to participate in a supporting role. His inclusion by Pershing on the AEF staff was largely in recognition of the highly professional way in which Conner had contributed to those early meetings.
As American forces arrived in France throughout the first year of US involvement, Pershing and Conner withstood tremendous pressure from the British and French to piecemeal small American units into British and French formations. The American plan was to assemble a nearly three million-man army in France and then employ that force in a war of maneuver (as opposed to the static trench warfare of the first three years' fighting) to take the war to the heart of Germany. Conner's plan called for this massive force to be available in the Spring of 1919.
One of the cardinal rules of war is that the enemy gets a vote. When Lenin's Revolution took the Russian Army out of the war in the fall of 1917, the German Army was able to shift scores of divisions from the Russian front to face the Allies in France. By the time of the German's 1918 Spring offensive, the AEF had barely established only one of the planned four dozen Corps (each comprising four divisions). With Paris threatened by a rapidly advancing German offensive, Pershing and Conner, despite their desire to hold their forces out of the fighting until 1919, threw their four divisions into the fight.
Long war-story short, the German offensive faltered short of Paris and the ensuing counter-offensive by the Allies ended the war with the Armistice signed into effect on the 11th of November, 1918.
But Fox Conner's story doesn't end there -- not by a long shot. In the run-up to the First World War, Conner befriended and began a mentorship with two young officers you may have heard a little bit about. One was a profane squeaky-voiced tank enthusiast by the name of Patton. The other was a serious and strikingly intelligent young staff officer by the name of Marshall. George C. Patton and George S. Marshall had a little bit to do with the successful execution of a little scrape known as the Second World War.
Patton introduced Fox Conner to a down-on-his-luck friend by the name of Eisenhower. Young Ike's career was going nowhere fast. He had missed out on the fight in France in 1918 -- his tank unit was scheduled to embark on shipping for France in late November 1918. Conner saw potential in Eisenhower, when no one else did. When Conner was given command of the garrison in the Panama Canal Zone, he took Major Eisenhower with him as his second in command. Duty in Panama in the inter-war years was stultifyingly boring, but Conner drilled Eisenhower incessantly in staff planning, strategy, combined operations with multi-national allies, and, perhaps most importantly in the art of recognizing talent. Two years with Conner gave Eisenhower a professional education that twenty years in staff colleges couldn't touch.
Eisenhower later praised Conner as the "outstanding soldier of my time," and credited Conner as the "one more or less invisible figure to whom I owe an incalculable debt."
At the end of his career Fox Conner was one of the leading officers of the United States Army. In retirement, he was a highly respected lecturer at the U.S. military's war colleges.
He wrote no memoir. He ordered his letters and papers destroyed on his death. He survives in memory nearly as invisibly as he served.
It shouldn't be so.
