"Hangin' in a Tree..."

Those words are banging around in my gnarly old noggin like a BB in a boxcar these days.  

Sergeant Bob Rosenau, one of the guys chosen to train a bunch of us enough to keep us from dying in Viet Nam, famously said to us all one bright Fort Leonard Wood day: 

"There's a guy who's strapped himself high up in a tree, just waiting for you to come a' lookin' for him.  And when you do, unless you listen up to me right here and right now, he'll blow your ass off.  'Cause it's HIS country.  And he'll be fighting for it.  And he'll probably win.  So just remember, keep your heads down when you get off that plane, 'cause he'll be hangin' in a tree..."

Rosenau had been among the first 100 "MAG-V (Military Advisory Group - VietNam) trainers who'd been sent there to teach the regular army of VietNam how to fight its own wars.  That was 1963.  He was tough as nails.  I was told he'd crawled up the side of a burning 10 story brick building to save a family one day.  I personally watched him do 1,500 pushups one afternoon.  Yeah, think about that.  

Anyway, by the time he was training me up in the, shall we say, finer aspects of killing people, it was 1966, and we had 500,000 of our best draftees, like me, fighting - and dying - in the jungles of Viet Nam.  You see how a little skirmish can grow into a full-blown war?  Into which professional pool players like me, guys who just wanted to race cars and chase girls could have been drawn?  And he was preparing us for the house-to-house, village-to-village fighting we would surely face.  A fight with the cards stacked against us.  Because it was their country.  Their village.  Their back yard.  And we'd be trying to take it from them...

You see any parallels to the war Russia's waging against Ukraine?  Putin expected, I'm assuming, to waltz right in to Ukraine and be welcomed as a liberator.  I guess that's what his generals have been telling him, because that's what he wanted to hear.  But this has been the single most monumental military miscalculation in the history of the world, I'm guessing.  Any student of the "Art of War" by Sun Tzu would tell you Putin has blundered without equal.  There will be Ukrainians "hangin' in a tree" during what I predict will be the most punishing and costly occupation any country has ever attempted.  He doesn't have the forces.  They don't have the supplies.  

Putin has done the very same thing Hitler did when it attacked Russia during World War II.  It outstretched its supply lines.  Armies run on food, and fuel, and ammunition. 

And I predict it will be out of all three in just about a month.

Oh yeah, and they also run on morale.  Morale is at all all-time high in Ukraine, fueled by its intense hatred of Putin.  And morale among Russia's military, now 95% committed to the fight, will go nowhere but south.

It took us more than two decades to cut our losses and seek an exit from Viet Nam.  It took Russia more than two decades to seek an exit from Afghanistan.  One can only wonder how long it will take Russia to seek an exit from this war-of-it's-choice which has turned it into a pariah, almost completely isolated nation.

The "friends for life" Chinese and Russians have formed the new "Soviet-style" bloc.  The new cold war has begun.  And, perhaps so has World War III.  The battle lines are now drawn.  It's good versus evil.  As Sun Tzu said, "In times of peace, prepare for war."  I'd like to think our Americans would react as have the Ukrainians were the situations reversed. 

I'd like to think that, but I just can't...