Late Night Laugh: Foreplay For Real Men
June 26, 2008
China’s Testosterone Problem
June 26, 2008
From The New Republic: No Country for Young Men
Over the last decade, they cropped up in cities throughout China, tucked into raucous markets or along forgotten side streets, their interiors smelling of musty canvas and crammed with bounty for aspiring young soldiers: illicit weapons shops with names like ARMY GOODS STORE and GUNCOOL. For a few thousand yuan–a few hundred dollars–assault rifle-like air guns await in dirty back rooms, along with fatigues, bulletproof vests, kneepads, long underwear, camouflage t-shirts, rucksacks, bandoliers, helmets, helmet sleeves, walkie-talkies, and two-liter CamelBaks. Once outfitted, China’s militiamen organize into clubs–Guangzhou Fight Men, Shanghai Band of Brothers, Tianjin Seals–and storm remote lots or abandoned warehouses, shooting at each other with pellets, to stage what they call “war games.” The term belies the seriousness participants assign the activity: The more established clubs have dedicated battlegrounds whose surrounding trees are nailed with DANGER signs.
In gun-happy America, this hobby might not rise above the level of eccentricity; but, in China, where most weapons are illegal, it requires a special degree of passion. Beijing periodically cracks down, and clubs sometimes disappear overnight. In a round-up last year, Beijing cops seized 3,400 guns and knives used in war games. Still, the government can’t seem to quash the urge among Chinese twentysomethings to unleash a few rounds. The headline on a recent Shanghai Weekly article explains the games’ appeal in unusually apt Chinglish: URBAN BATTLE: A VERY MAN ACTIVITY.
The macho violence spurting forth through outlets like war games is a growing trend in Chinese society–and China’s one-child policy, in effect since 1979, is partly responsible. The country’s three decades of iron-fisted population planning coincided with a binge in sex-selective abortions (Chinese traditionally favor sons, who carry on the family line) and a rise, even as the country developed, in female infant mortality. After almost 30 years of the policy, China now has the largest gender imbalance in the world, with 37 million more men than women and almost 20 percent more newborn boys than girls nationwide.
By the time these newborns reach puberty, war games may seem like a quaint relic. In the 2020s, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Zheng Zhenzhen, estimates in a People’s Daily interview that 10 percent of Chinese men will be unable to find wives, which could have a huge impact on Chinese society. Historian David Courtwright suggests in Violent Land that sexually segregated societies in the United States–frontier towns flush with unmarried men, immigrant ghettos in early twentieth-century cities, mining camps–are behind our propensity toward violence. The immigrants and westward migrants who shaped early America, Courtwright says, were largely young single men, who are– today as well as then–disproportionately responsible for drug abuse, looting, vandalism, and violent crime. A long-term study of Vietnam veterans in 1998 may explain exactly why: The subjects’ testosterone levels, which are linked to aggression and violence, dropped when they married and increased when they divorced. Eternally single men, by extension, maintain high levels of testosterone–a recipe for violent civil unrest.
The one-child policy was instituted in an attempt to hamper the wild growth of the Chinese population. But, in the process of plugging one hole, the government may have left another open. The coming boom in restless young men promises to overhaul Chinese society in some potentially scary ways.
Lianyungang, a booming port city in a Jiangsu province economic belt, is ground zero for some of these changes. According to the China Family Planning Association, it’s the city in China with the most extreme gender ratio for children under four–163 boys for every 100 girls. One sunny Saturday morning at verdant Cangwu Park, I count six boys and three girls bouncing on the inflatable castle. Near the ice-cream stand are a dozen sticky-faced kids, seven boys and five girls, feeding pigeons. The children running after kites adorned with Olympics mascots and China’s Shenzhou VII spaceship: three and two. The drivers of the cheerful little tanks circling an electric track: three and one.
These numbers work fine on the playground, but, for China’s many match- making services, they may prove troublesome. At the Good Luck Marriage Introduction Agency, in a town a few hours’ drive west from Liangyungang, two whiteboards mounted on the wall advertise the age, height, and income of available singles. On the day I visit, founder Tao Hui, a fortysomething woman with a bouffant, is watching soap operas in her sweatpants. She hasn’t felt the shortage yet, she says. On the whiteboards, a few dozen nameless men line up nicely to a few dozen nameless women. For now, many in the early wave of surplus men are marrying younger women.
“We’ll see real problems in eight or ten years,” Tao predicts. Her 17-year- old son, she assures me, has good prospects. But she already turns away a lot of single males from outlying villages with no money or education. “If they’re ugly and can’t find work, there’s nothing I can do. No one wants them.”
Preliminary returns from the first generation of population-controlled kids suggest how all those unwanted men might fill up their time. Over the past decade, as the boys hit adolescence, the country’s youth crime rate more than doubled. In December, Chinese Society of Juvenile Delinquency Research Deputy Secretary General Liu Guiming told a Beijing seminar that today’s teens were committing crimes “without specific motives, often without forethought.”
The Chinese government–which, policy-making blunders aside, hardly wants a population of hopeless, volatile men under its rule–has been vainly trying to undo the damage. At a symposium on the policy last August, family-planning commission head Zhang Weiqing said the gender ratio harbors a “hidden threat to social stability.” In February, officials publicly debated the timeline for phasing out stringent population planning targets, citing the gender ratio along with a rapidly aging population. “In the past, everyone thought we didn’t have a problem,” says Gu Baochang, a demographer at Renmin University in Beijing. “Now they’re starting to pay attention.”
In the meantime, the government is adopting a softer tone in its propaganda. The red characters painted on village walls throughout the countryside have evolved from the 1980s slogan YOU BEAT IT OUT! YOU CAN MAKE IT FALL OUT! YOU CAN ABORT IT! BUT YOU CANNOT GIVE BIRTH TO IT! Now they read: IMPLEMENT FAMILY PLANNING FOR THE GOOD OF ALL CITIZENS. And, recently, the government added BOYS AND GIRLS ARE BOTH TREASURES. In 2003, it unveiled the Care For Girls program, which gives stipends to parents of girls in some provinces.
But, as Chinese couples make more money, fertility is naturally declining– meaning that today’s bachelors will form an even larger proportion of China’s future population than officials expect. Wang Feng, a sociologist at the University of California-Irvine who’s part of a group of scholars advocating phasing out the one-child policy, says the outlook is grim: “Each successive birth cohort is going to be smaller. When younger cohorts get smaller, you have fewer females. It’s a double whammy.”
Online, many Chinese are worried–about the safety of their daughters, the marriage prospects of their sons. Others–presumably the boys themselves–meet the problem with ominous boasts. As one predicted last year on the portal Tianya: “Our national ability to pick up chicks will reach heights unparalleled in human history.”
And still others are coming up with more practical outlets to exploit China’s new cadre of unstable young bachelors. Two years ago in Nanjing, Jiangsu’s capital, businessman Wu Gang opened the Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in a cheap hotel near the bank of the Yangtze River. The bar featured staples of Chinese entertainment like big-screen karaoke and plates of sunflower seeds but also a central catwalk where, for 100 yuan ($15) per minute, customers paid to assault the waiters, single young migrants from poorer cities to the north. If a customer preferred, his victim would dress in drag. Men “are under too much pressure,” Wu explained to me one day, as the waiters high-kicked Pepsi bottles in the storeroom. “They need a way to release it.”
We’ve got good news and we’ve got bad news…:
Upbeat news would have to make up half of all newscasts on all of Romania’s radio and television stations, under legislation adopted unanimously Wednesday in the senate.
“News programmes on TV and radio shall contain, in the same proportion, news with positive and negative themes,” states the legislation, which is going to President Traian Basescu for adoption.
The measure is the idea of two senators — one from the governing National Liberal Party, the other from the far-right Great Romania party — who bemoan the “irreversible effect” of negative news “on the health and life of people”.
Following a Tuesday trial when he called for DNA evidence from a urine puddle, a Rochester man was found not guilty of a violation-level charge of urinating in public.
Michael Huppe, 56, of 44 Forest Park Drive, was found not guilty by Judge Sawako Gardner, who offered no explanation for the verdict beyond “not guilty.” Her decision was released Wednesday…
Representing himself at trial, Huppe fired a colorful line of questions at the officer including, “Did you see me take my thing out and urinate?” and “Did you test DNA to see if it was my urine?”
The officer testified he did not test DNA from the urine puddle.
“Swear on a Bible and say it was Mr. Huppe’s urine,” Huppe shouted at the officer during the June 24 trial, when the judge ordered him to “take a deep breath” and promised the verdict would be forthcoming.
Italian architect Dr. David Fisher announced on Tuesday the launch of a revolutionary skyscraper in Dubai dubbed as the “world’s first building in motion,” an 80-story tower with revolving floors that give it an ever-shifting shape.
The spinning floors, hung like rings around an immobile cement core, would offer residents a constantly changing view of the Persian Gulf and the Dubai’s futuristic skyline…
Fisher acknowledges that he is not well known, has never built a skyscraper before and hasn’t practiced architecture regularly in decades. But he insisted his lack of experience wouldn’t stop him from completing the project, which has attracted top design talent, including Leslie E. Robertson, the structural engineer for the World Trade Center and the Shanghai World Financial Center.
“I did not design skyscrapers, but I feel ready to do so,” Fisher said.
Skeptics might question Fisher’s credentials to pull off the job.
In a biography he had been distributing for months, he said he graduated from the University of Florence in 1976, came to New York in the mid-1980s and later developed hotels and ran a company that specialized in stone and prefabricated construction materials.
The biography also said he received an honorary doctorate from “The Prodeo Institute at Columbia University in New York.” No such institution exists, however, and Columbia said it had never awarded Fisher an honorary degree.
Asked to explain the discrepancy, Fisher said, through his New York publicists, that he had been awarded the degree by the Catholic University of Rome during a ceremony in 1994 held at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, which is near Columbia’s campus.
The bank just called. ‘Build it if you can.’
Sharia Hits The Slopes
June 26, 2008
Apparently being bundled up head to toe in winter gear isn’t enough for some ‘militants.’
June 26: Islamist militants burned down a hotel at Pakistan’s only ski resort on Thursday as security in a northwestern tourist valley deteriorated despite a month-old peace pact, the police said.
The Swat valley, several hours drive on mountain roads from Islamabad, was a prime tourist destination until 2007 with ancient Buddhist ruins, a golf course, trout streams and the ski resort. “Half of the hotel has been burned down,” said Swat’s police chief, Waqif Khan, referring to the only hotel at the Malam Jabba ski resort. The hotel is owned by the state tourism authority.
Mr Khan said authorities had not been able to get to the resort to tackle the blaze or inspect the damage.
“The area is not under our control, it’s under the militants’ control and no one can go there,” he said.
Militants infiltrated the valley from the Afghan border in 2007 to support a radical cleric based there.
Deja Vu: Little Green Psychoanalyst
June 26, 2008
It turns out that Charles Johnson, your host at Little Green Footballs has more than a bit of analytical skill going for him. He can connect the dots, no small feat in a political environment where stupidity, apologetics and denial are found in Niagara Falls proportions.
I realize we shouldn’t expect murderers whose entire lives revolve around genocidal hatred to follow rules of logic. But don’t these cretinous killers in cheap suits feel any cognitive discomfort at all when in one breath, they commit themselves and all future Palestinian generations to eternal war until the Jews are wiped out, and in the next breath say, “The Zionist entity is incapable of making peace?”
“Incapable of making peace” means: won’t just lay down and be slaughtered.
Be sure to see the Memri video embedded in the LGF post.
Recall this, by Youssef Ibrahim (see bio here) and written over a year ago in The New York Sun.
With Terrorists, Let Israel Succeed Where America Has Failed
It may just be that Israel will do what President Bush promised but failed to do: bring about some serious regime changes in the Greater Middle East by overthrowing the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas government and then destabilizing the decrepit Syrian dictatorial regime.
With Israeli troops poised to enter the Gaza Strip, the first goal is within Israel’s grasp.
One can only hope that by buzzing President Assad’s summer palace with fighter planes on Tuesday, Israel also was signaling that the second act will follow.
Muslim fundamentalists and rotting Arab dictators are the gnawing evils of the Middle East. They have a lot in common, most particularly their use of the tired and abused Palestinian Arab cause as the eternal vehicle to their taking and retaining power.
It happened with the dictators first. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser took power in Egypt in 1952 to build a model of subsequent pan-Arab dictatorships premised on vows to unite everyone around the promise of eradicating Israel. He quickly became mired in two wars with Israel, in 1956 and 1967, when he lost the entire Sinai Peninsula.
Similarly, Hafez Al-Assad, the father of the current president of Syria, came to power in the late ’60s on a platform of upholding the Arab dream of unity. And what was it centered around? You guessed it.
In 1967, Assad went to war against Israel and lost the Golan Heights, which the Assads have yet to recover, even as they continue to urge the masses to liberate Palestine. It is not for nothing that Palestinian Arabs will tell you that Bashar Al-Assad will fight to the last Palestinian Arab.
Jordan’s King Hussein, another Arab potentate, followed Nasser and Hafez Al-Assad into the 1967 war and lost all of the West Bank of the Jordan River.
In Act II, Islamic fundamentalists with their many names – Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Islamic Republic of Iran – are again all focused on uniting the ummah of Islam around the liberation of Palestine.
Potentates or fundamentalists, the dynamics of their tactics always lead in one direction: another attack on Israel. Hamas was bound to get there sooner or later. It starts with renouncing all peace treaties signed by previously chastened Arab potentates – in this case, the unlamented Yasser Arafat. Then they promise a dash of military struggle, but the results are inevitably the same: suicide bombers, lame tunnels to Israel from Gaza, killing soldiers, and kidnapping Corporal Gilad Shalit, the Israeli army recruit.
Islamist fundamentalists and Arab potentates, in principle so very different, end up acting alike.
It is no coincidence that the commander of Hamas’s military wing, Khaled Meshaal, lives under the protection and sponsorship of the Assad regime in Damascus. Nor is it a coincidence that Hamas was born, established, and intellectually weaponized by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement. The cycles are connecting.
Indeed, while Israel points a menacing finger at the Damascus-based Hamas leader, it also points at his benefactors – the Assads and Syria.
Is it time for America, Israel’s strategic partner in the Middle East, to get some help from its friends? I think so.
America has never failed to support Israel politically and militarily. Now we need the Israelis to lead, since we have so plainly failed to deliver the regime changes we promised.
The first order of business is for Israel to widen and deepen the military operation in Gaza, until it results in the arrest and jailing of all Hamas representatives starting with the prime minister and the foreign minister, who happen to be Hamas’s top leaders in Gaza. This time, Israel should not leave Gaza until every Palestinian Arab clearly understands that the clocks will never be turned back.
Then Israel should demand that Syria hands over the Hamas military leader – with the full knowledge it will not happen, but with the clear intention of attacking Syria when it does not.
The timing and circumstances are perfect. Not one Arab country would entertain the notion of helping Syria. Indeed, many would wish to see Mr. Assad dispatched.
Iran can yell a lot, but it will do little. Hezbollah in Lebanon, which may be tempted to jump into the fray, this time must suffer the relentless bombing of all the Shiite villages in south Lebanon, its power base.
Finally, it matters little whether the Israelis kill Mr. Assad, so long as they clearly humiliate him from the air and with special operations on the ground. Mr. Assad humiliated is Mr. Assad finished.
We have rarely asked our Israeli friends to do us a favor. Right now, we need them
America, and for that matter, the civilized world, has no business being ‘even handed’ with any bigoted, intolerant and racist regime. What is our business is to do everything we can to eradicate the evil and dysfunctional bigots in power.
Portions of this post have been previously published.
Offensive Peace?
June 26, 2008
Matin Peretz in The New Republic:
In Middle Eastern wars, the United Nations is almost always hectoring Israel for being reluctant to seek peace. So it was a stunner when Terje Rød-Larsen–U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s “special coordinator” in the occupied territories, Kofi Annan’s “personal representative” to Yasir Arafat, Ban Ki-moon’s “special representative” for overseeing the cease-fire agreement ending the second Lebanon war, and in his next posting “envoy to the personal representative of the special coordinator for planetary salvation”–lambasted Israel for its recent negotiations with Syria: “Israel has given Syria a huge gift, without thus far receiving anything in return.”
Israel, it seems, is in a chatty mood these days. It is cutting deals with Hamas and prepared to talk with Lebanon (an imaginary country, really) over the fate of Shebaa Farms–a worthless tract the size of a table cloth. Wiseacres say that Israel’s foray into parleying with its enemies is to save Ehud Olmert’s prime ministerial hide, sandblasted for the umpteenth time by accusations of unethical personal conduct with other folks’ cash. This may or may not be a plausible explanation. But the Israeli public would by far rather forfeit (Arab) parts of Jerusalem than give up the Golan Heights, from which for two decades Syrian artillery fire had targeted the kibbutzim and moshavim of the Galilee. And killed not insignificant numbers of Israelis.
It’s not only Rød-Larsen who’s unhappy that Jerusalem is negotiating with Damascus; Condoleezza Rice is plenty upset, too. And, of course, anyone with a brain grasps that there are only two concessions worth getting from Bashar Assad, and these are: a) detaching Syria from Iran and b) lifting Syria’s hold over Beirut, which, alas, was just solidified by Hezbollah’s quickie civil war in the capital and in the Shouf mountains and then ratified without real alternative by a summit of factional leaders convening in Qatar.
Proposition A is tied to Proposition B in that Hezbollah is an instrument of Iran and its Revolutionary Guards. Tehran’s road to Beirut is through Damascus. And the co-dependence of these two propositions also highlights the fantastical nature of all this peace talk: Iran must respect Syria’s historic ambitions for direct political dominion over Lebanon, and Syria must allow the Shia of Iran the religious sweep of their doctrine across the region. Oh, yes, I mustn’t forget: Since 2006, Iran has been on both of Israel’s northern frontiers and, in a meaningful sense, in Gaza, too. This is not a happy circumstance. If there is any development that will deflect the powers from squeezing the ayatollahs into giving up their nuclear aspirations it is the prospect of Israel living quietly with borders on which Iran sits.
Maybe the Israelis think they will disentangle Syria from Iran. They cannot. The alliance fulfills Assad’s Lebanese dreams, and the Golan Heights means almost nothing to the tyrant. Not since the Yom Kippur War has Syria made a move against the Golan. All its bloody mischief was funneled through Lebanon, and Lebanon was the name of his and his father’s desire. Of course, Assad would take the Heights if Israel were silly enough to give it. But it would get nothing in return.
I am afraid that the false peace initiatives have already registered a “success” in Gaza. Hamas has announced and Israel has acquiesced to a cease-fire. I oppose this cease-fire for the same reason I opposed the wildly heralded one in Lebanon two summers ago. Then, of course, it was Rice who drove the international stampede that the IDF leave the country and that the ensuing disarmament and pacification of Hezbollah be assigned to unifil, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, which has been both interim and a flop since 1978. The dreary results of that assignment can be judged by indisputable facts.
Under the terms of the new truce in the south, Israel will reopen the supply lines to and from Gaza: fuel, food, trade. (Medicines had always been getting through.) Hamas promises not to hurl rocketry and missiles into Israel and, of course, Israel will not retaliate if there is nothing to provoke retaliation. But an armistice lasts only until it is broken. Just wait. In the meantime, Egypt and Hamas have committed themselves to prevent and interdict smuggling of weapons and weapons-grade materiel from the Sinai to Gaza. This is a vocation that Cairo has never truly taken to, and the terrorist militias have always found ways to run contraband arms through tunnels in the sand. They are not likely to stop. Anybody want to bet?
As you already know, I’m no fan of Mohammed Abbas or his Fatah henchmen. But they have been designated as the Palestinian moderates. So, like Secretary Rice and in the awful circumstances that obtain, I suppose these are my favored Palestinians. They were also supposed to be Olmert’s and Ehud Barak’s. Therefore, it is often said that this new deal with Hamas cuts the legs from right under Abbas and chaverim. Well, I’m sorry, those legs were not at all sturdy. And, in the end, with American prodding, Abbas will negotiate the state that Hamas will inherit. That’s the grim conclusion I have reached.
It used to be that Israel would move the heavens to rescue its kidnapped soldiers. This is one reason for the daring of so many of its fighting men. In recent years there has been an increase in kidnapping as a battle tactic by both the Palestinians and Hezbollah. Frankly, the Arabs play cruel games with these people (and their relatives), not saying whether they are dead or alive, even those who were captured decades ago. Are Eldad Regev and Udi Goldwasser still in this world? Nasrallah will not say. Gilad Shalit, it is believed, is still alive. Why was he not released in exchange for the last return of Palestinian prisoners? Liat Collins had a story, “Between life and the dead,” in the Jerusalem Post some weeks ago detailing this manipulation of sorrow and fear. Dog tags and body parts are transmitted but not accurate information or men who are still breathing. Make peace with these people? This might be the only instance you hear me utter this: I wholeheartedly agree with the U.N. hack.
*UPDATED* If Berlin Were In Sudan
June 26, 2008
If the citizens of Berlin were blockaded today, there would be no airlift and hundreds of thousands would be left to die or be murdered.
Think Darfur and the kind of regimes worshiped by the left.
Sixty years ago today, 32 planes took off for Berlin with a cargo of milk, flour and medicine. The Berlin airlift, one of the first big battles of will at the start of the Cold War, had begun.
In 1948, when Stalin’s Soviet Union blockaded Berlin, they cut the city off from the parts of Germany controlled by the Americans, British and French. The purpose of this siege was to wrest control of the entire city. West Berlin was left with little more than one month’s supply of food and fuel. General Lucius Clay, military governor of US-controlled Germany, warned: “People are going to be cold and people are going to be hungry.”
With all land routes blocked off, warming and feeding the two million Berliners became a gargantuan task that could only be accomplished by flying cargo into Tempelhof and Gatow airports. Every day, British and American planes needed to provide 1,534 tons of food and 3,475 tons of coal and gasoline. In winter even more was needed. Military commanders had initially planned for a three-week mission, but they would ultimately need 278,228 flights over more than a year. At one stage, planes were taking off every three minutes, all day long.
Air controllers had to position planes 500ft away from each other in a crowded sky. Pilots had no time to spare between landing and take off; a crew of 12 set a record when they unloaded ten tons of coal in under six minutes. The prettiest girls in Berlin were sent to boost pilots’ morale and hand them drinks through their cockpit windows. Soon after their countries had been at war with each other, French engineers and local German women worked together to construct a new airport on the shores of Lake Tegel in less than three months.
Adding to the hazards of the operation, fog and rain made for treacherous landing conditions. On July 30 1948, ‘Black Friday’, one plane crashed, another burst its tyres trying to avoid it, and a third span onto the auxiliary runway. The incident caused pandemonium for those in the air above. The Soviets, initially scornful of the Allied effort, were determined to ensure its failure. They launched balloons into the flight paths, set up a radio signal at the same frequency as Tempelhof and ordered their pilots to fly intimidatingly close to the cargo planes, firing into the air around them. Once, a Soviet fighter collided with a British plane, killing 35. In total, there were 101 fatalities over the course of the Berlin airlift, including 39 Britons.
Despite the setbacks, enough
supplies got through, and resilient West Berliners were convinced they were better off without Soviet rule. American pilots dropped chewing gum, chocolate and candy from planes christened ‘raisin bombers’ by grateful German children. An illustrated propaganda poster from the time shows a fleet of planes dropping glasses of milk into the hands of a cute pigtailed girl. Its slogan: ‘milk… new weapon of Democracy!’
By May 12 1949, the Soviets had realised the futility of their efforts and gave up on the blockade, though air cargo deliveries continued until late September to create a stockpile for any future emergency. The airlift ranks as one of the great logistical achievements alongside the evacuation of Dunkirk and the D-Day invasion.
*UPDATED* Reader Vickie K sends this CNN link about a real American hero of the Berlin Airlift, Ret Colonel Gail Halverson.
The best load we ever had was a load of bottled milk: fresh whole milk for the kids in Berlin, and that was great. They’d rattle back there when you made a bad landing,
My feelings weren’t too good toward the Germans from day one. With all the problems that we’d had with the war and so forth. …
[But after] the first landing at Tempelhof with a load of flour … we came out the cockpit and watched them unload. And before they unloaded they came up to us, almost [with] tears in their eyes, and looked at us like we’re angels from heaven. [They] put out their hands, and we didn’t understand a word of the language but we understood the feeling. And it was a most unusual feeling, one that turned [my thinking] around completely after just about two trips into Berlin. [It became clear] that we were working for a common cause, that we’re [all] people, that human beings, no matter what side of the border you live on, the spirit’s there. That people are people; it’s the system that gets us fouled up.
It was a [feeling] that I guess it’s hard to explain. It’s one that you don’t often receive: feeling good about a really rough situation. … Working for a common goal, day and night, through thunderstorms and bad weather, whatever. … Doing something for somebody that not only appreciates [it], they’re just loving what you’re doing and you for doing [it]. So it was a great feeling. It was a tough time, but that kind of feeling kept the people dedicated day and night to what they were doing. Without complaint. I didn’t hear any pilot complain about flying all night or the storms. …
I just firmly believe that the Berliners were the heroes. They slept in bombed-out buildings, they slept without heat and with lights only for an hour or two … not enough to eat — but not one would complain. The Soviets offered them food rations: “Hey, we’ll give you all you want. Just sign up with us.” And only 4 percent of the total population of Berlin capitulated and asked for help from the Soviets. They were determined, they said, “It’s freedom or else.”
