25 June 02 Comment on OC from a friend and student:

"During recent Simmunitions exercises, we were required to carry (simulated) OC. As we worked our way through escalation scenarios, most of us found ourselves with flashlights in our support hand and simultaneously OC in our strong hand. When the heretofore non-lethal antagonist suddenly produced a gun, we were hosed while trying to pocket the OC bottles.

I know we should have just jettisoned the OC bottles as we moved and drew our own guns, but the bottom line is we obviously hadn't developed either a methodology nor the muscle memory required for successful OC use under all foreseeable circumstances.

If one routinely carries OC, he needs to work its deployment into his regular training regimen."

Indeed!

/John

25 June 02

I just received this from a friend and student in Zimbabwe. For all those naive liberals who think that Communism is "just another form of government."

"It is with despondency that I write you today. On Monday morning, under the ‘Compulsory Acquisition Act,' Zimbabwe's commercial farmers have been confined to their homesteads and forbidden to continue operating. Anyone who attempts to produce food, in any quantity, will be arrested and imprisoned (a death sentence, as few here survive imprisonment). I am required to abandon, among other things, hundreds of tons of tomatoes. They will rot in the field. It is an obscene and sickening irony that, in a country that has the most fertile and productive farm land in the world, seven million people are now facing starvation and are appealing to American tax payers for food aid.

By the end of the year, two million (otherwise productive) people here will be homeless and jobless. Even those farmers who have attempted to cooperate with the new ‘law' have been beaten and murdered and have seen their homes and crops burned, their wells poisoned, and their livestock shot and left to rot. From the director of the Farmers' Union, there is silence. Ditto from the South African Government, and indeed, the rest of the World.

Last week I visited our (former) farm in Marondera. Five hundred people have been transported there by the government and discarded. Our beautiful farm is now being used as a dumping ground for jobless who have been evicted from other farms or rounded up in the cities. They are all camped out in a tiny area that is knee high in trash and human excrement. The smell is overwhelming. A cholera epidemic is sure to follow.

The above scenario has been duplicated a thousand times. We have a humanitarian disaster unfolding here and no one to turn to for help.

Until next week, pray for us my friend."

/John