by Thomas W. Chittum
October 23, 2006

I was born in 1947. During 1965 and 1966, I was a private first class and a grunt in the US Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam, where I participated in many numerous combat operations. (See the 1966 newspaper article titled "Propaganda Found" that describes how I experienced a taste of George Orwell and the New World Order in a Viet Cong camp. Although I was not politically sophisticated enough at the time to understand the full ramifications, I still sensed that something was very wrong and out of place).
I was in so many firefights that I can't remember all of them.  I never won a single medal for valor. I never even got a lousy "Good Conduct" medal - something about being "drunk on duty." In fact, I barely stayed out of the stockade.
For most of my adult life I was a computer programmer.
I was briefly a grunt in the Rhodesian Territorials sometime in the 1970s. That's something like their version of the national guard or army reserve. I spent a couple of months patrolling the bush near the Zambian border. Not much happened, but I got chased by a rhino and drank a lot of beer.
I was also a grunt in the Croatian army in 1991 and 1992 when they were fighting for their independence from the Serbs. First I served in a recon unit composed mostly of Dutch mercenaries. Then I served in a mortar unit made up of a mix of British mercenaries, other European mercenaries, and regular Croatian soldiers. I drank a lot of Rakia, which is a plum brandy and something like their national drink. We got bombarded by just about everything - mortars, artillery, 20 and 40 mm cannon, tanks, heavy machine guns and occasional Serb helicopters and jets would hose us down.  A lot of the time we were forced to live in trenches and bunkers due to all the incoming. It was a lot like World War One, with two opposing trench lines, and a lot of back-and-forth raiding in no-mans land. As one Brit merc observed, "It was a war fought with 1970s technology and 1914 tactics."
I am the author of the book, Civil War Two which predicts a tribal civil war in America if we don't change course.
I am retired and live in Maryland with my wife and step-son.

 

. . ..An independent military analyst and intrepid social critic, Thomas W. Chittum is the author of the enduring right wing classic Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America and the satire on the New World Order and America's misadventures in the Middle East titled Sgt Skull's Field Manual for the Practical Modern Warrior. Both are available as ebooks from America First Books.

 

 

Flag carried by the 3rd Maryland Regiment at the Battle of Cowpens, S. Carolina, 1781

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