Sunday, December 29, 2024

The “Battle” of Wounded Knee

Heather Cox Richardson, December 28, 2024, Letters from an American.

On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated valuable weapons for themselves.

As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.

Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.

As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, and what I learned still keeps me up at night. But it is not December 29 that haunts me.

What haunts me is the night of December 28.

On December 28 there was still time to avert the massacre.

In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Sitanka had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota's Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

There's more at the link.

1 comment:

  1. This scenario invokes The Strategic Corporal... "... three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated valuable weapons for themselves.

    "As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky."
    ###

    Plenty of struggles within the competing generals and corporals, and I wouldn't want to be part of the outgroup when the corporals start...
    HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
    DEC 28, 2024
    "Civil war has broken out within the MAGA Republicans. 
    ...
    "Now, with Trump not even in office yet, the two factions of Trump’s MAGA base—which, indeed, have opposing interests—are at war."
    https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-27-2024

    Mango Mussolini is the Don. I now cannot work out the other two highest positions of the incoming "administration". Plenty of capo's, who are on the ground strategic corporals...
    "The three highest positions make up the administration. Below the administration, there are factions each headed by a caporegime (captain), who leads a crew of soldiers and associates. They report to the administration and can be seen as equivalent to managers in a business. When a boss makes a decision, he rarely issues orders directly to workers who would carry it out but instead passes instructions down through the chain of command. This way, the higher levels of the organization are insulated from law enforcement attention if the lower level members who actually commit the crime should be captured or investigated, providing plausible deniability." ~ Wikipedia

    "The Three Block War ...
    "... The latter condition caused Krulak to invoke what he called "strategic corporals"; low-level unit leaders able to take independent action and make major decisions.
    ...
    "The strategic corporal is the notion that leadership in complex, rapidly evolving mission environments devolves lower and lower down the chain of command to better exploit time-critical information into the decision making process, ultimately landing on the corporal, the lowest ranking non-commissioned officer.... In very rapidly evolving mission situations, obtaining mission instructions from remotely located command may result in mission failure, or in casualties to both force personnel and civilians. Conversely, misusing this kind of responsibility may result in personal liability for the team leader: a decision executed to respond to situational needs may result in later prosecution as the team leader's actions are reviewed by higher authorities."
    ...
    "Example
    "In the Battle of Mogadishu, as detailed in the book and film Black Hawk Down, small-unit leaders on the ground continually had to make crucial decisions which had major impacts on not only the forces initially deployed on the mission, but to follow-on forces as well."
    ...
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Block_War

    I fear the US is going to have lots of minor and major internal "Pine Ridge Reservation" situations brought on by strategic coporals in the next 2-? years. Dipity.

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