According to a June 10 letter by Defense Secretary Mark Esper and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley in advance of Trumps planned walk to his Biblical photo-opportunity that required the teargassing of his own cavalry, the 3rd United States Infantry Regiment Commander issued bayonets and live ammunition to some 800 infantry soldiers.

As many as 800 members of the The 3rd United States Infantry Regiment, assigned to Presidential protection, known as “The Old Guard” were on alert as Trump planned to walk to a church and hold up a Bible, to reassure the Clan than he was safe in his Bunker. The ‘Old Guard’ may be misleading for an Infantry regiments in respect of the age of the troops expected to use the bayonets. Typically front line infantry deployed into hostile bayonet type situations would be the same age as the average Vietnam soldier. 19. But in the age of deception and deceit in the White House the ‘Old Guard’ sounds older than ‘The 3rd Infantry Regiment.” Jared and the team know when it comes to gooder smart words.

By their own admission Defense Secretary, Mark Esper and General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued as many as 800 bayonets to soldiers knowing their most likely purpose would be disemboweling young girls who might impede the CIC’s path to the Bible?

What else do soldiers use bayonets for?

The 3rd United States Infantry Regiment is Army. Not Marine Corp. What if its true that US bayonet training is limited only to Marines.

So lets talk bayonets.

I know we all have an equal right opine on bayonets, right?
Free speech is a wonderful opportunity to present the opinion of the speculative idiot as the equal to the expert with facts. On this basis, I doubt many of my readers have the first clue about bayonets.
Or Geneva convention law on bayonets. Their design. Their use.

Everyone has an opinion. But not everyone has been issued a bayonet and been trained in the use of the bayonet. So I guess its fair to claim my opinion is different to someone who has not a clue about bayonets or bayoneting. Like, for example, The CIC of the US Military.

What do I know about bayonets?

Not that much. More than Trump certainly, but that’s no grand claim. I do know though why the SADF stopped issuing bayonets as standard to new intakes. And I have taken part in a bayonet training drill as a RFN in the SADF Infantry. So you could say I am a veteran with bayonet skills on my CV.

And there’s more.

During my two year army service, in 1979 I found myself at a tribunal hearing at 3 Mil hospital in Bloemfontein. A Medical Tribunal for reclassification. This was an enormously grand affair involving generals and colonels and officers with purple insignia. Looking down from on high to assess a list of carefully screened candidates who had met the legal requirements to be considered for medical reclassification, or released from military service.

Mostly I was in a group of 18 year old white boys displaying crippling disabling PTSD symptoms arising from being forced to kill young Black boys on the Border. Most attendees at that Military Tribunal I attended had spent the preceding week, seven days, in Ward 5, the Psychiatric ward, being evaluated.

Ward 5 was a fantastic resource for me as an author. A bona fide military Psychiatric ward housing those most affected by the Border war conflict. The ward where I met a good few ‘bosbefok’ 18 year olds who I knew would never see normality in their future. I too was 18 at the time. And I listened and learned with great interest, aware of my enormous good fortune in having this front row seat at a rare moment in the History of right-wing-religious racist behaviors.

After the 7 day evaluation, those who were to be considered by the board at the Tribunal were assembled in a room adjacent to the Hall filled with the ‘Board’ comprising some seven uniformed officers including Psychiatrists and Generals. One of my fellow attendees in the waiting room waiting to be summonsed before the tribunal became my conversational friend for around three hours. While we waited to be called before the Medical Board.
Grant was also from Bryanston and 18.
“Grant.”
“Andrew.”
We shook hands knowing we were the only two people in that room not clearly troubled by severe mental disorder so it made obvious sense we would seize this unexpected opportunity to chat with each other while our nerves tingled in anticipation of going before the ‘Board’. Grant was seated to my left side while on the other an 18 year old I recognized from Diskobolos was concentrating on tearing a page at a time out of a magazine on the waiting room table.

He would very precisely, slowly and with considerable forethought, roll it into a ball and place it into his mouth. Where he would chew it thoroughly, continuously with apparent relish before making a satisfied lip-smacking acknowledgment that he had swallowed his mouthful before returning to the identical process with a new page. It seemed obvious to me that he was headed for DB. (Detention Barracks.) Not all applicants for Medical reclassification had equally convincing arguments. I remember thinking of Gregg Allman’s story – how he dodged the draft by shooting a bullet into his foot.

Grant and myself had several commonalities the quickly became apparent. Age and Geography obviously, and especially, intellect, manifest in the ability to speak clearly and with consideration, observing the statistical improbability that would find us two Bryanston teenagers cast by this accident of timing into this pinnacle of possible change. Being micro analyzed by the best minds the Military had to offer.

We were both there because of our intention to get out of forced conscription into an institution established for the defense of right wing religious racist ideology requiring the killing of young black men of our own age in Gods own name. We had both already discovered conscientious objection meant serving 6 years in DB and that AWOL was effectively a death sentence. Circumstance had chosen for us equally to find our exit strategy legally, using our own capacity for critical thought to contrive a legal way to register our objection to this right wing religious racist republican army knowing in that moment that one tiny mistake from either of us at that moment in time leading to being outed by the ‘Board’ could as readily have led to a 6 year sentence in DB as to the hope we had for the pending judgment. Appearing before a medical board experienced at grilling ‘our type’ meant being at the very top of ones games in performance art.

In that room, on that day, we became instant, firm friends. (What are smart guys like us doing in a place like this.) We chatted away. The guy next to us ate his way through an entire magazine, interrupted every forty minutes or so by an orderly opening the door to summons the next troop. One of those before me had wet himself as he walked tearfully to face the Board in his open back hospital dress. This was a scary time and place.

The hearings ran all day, as they worked their way through the 12 or so troops waiting nervously, some shaking and tearful. In the circumstances, having a smart like-minded confidante to talk to was tremendously fortuitous as a preparation for what was about to happen.

In the three hours we chatted before my name was called, I learned Grant was was there for his actions during bayonet training. Two weeks previously, he had stabbed his Instructor lieutenant in the shoulder. His plan was brutally simple.
Far superior to mine.

I was summonsed first and before I left we agreed to find a way to contact each other to learn each others judgment. Two weeks later he managed to reach me by phone in Diskobolos (11 Kommando, infantry camp in Kimberly) as we had agreed, with the news.
“Dishonorable discharge. No camps.”

He was discharged from service. But not jailed. Go figure. Army law.
He was calling from his parents home in Johannesburg, a free man. No longer in the Army; all thanks to the bayonet. And the law.

The offense occurred within .4 of a second and was deemed an intuitive reflex. In military law there is a brief period of time in which you are deemed not culpable. Because there is not enough time for pre-meditation. You have reacted by intuition. Not conscious deliberation.

That was the first part of his plan. Awareness that in law there is a brief period in time when you are not liable for your actions. The second was the law prohibiting an officer (or instructor) from striking a troop.

He disclosed to me that he had planned this event weeks before and had carefully and responsibly bided his time until the opportunity arose during bayonet training.

“I baited him until he slapped me. In that exact moment I bayoneted him in shoulder. Exactly how he taught me to, but I didn’t do the twist and pull. I felt sorry for him. I made sure it was not a serious wound. It was that easy. I had witnesses that saw him hit me. The inquiry showed I was inside that legal time limit.”

Grant walked free from that tribunal with the best possible outcome. Dishonourable discharge meant no more Army, but it also meant he was disqualified from the annual Camp system. (All SADF Troops had to return annually for Border camps. Average two months a year for 7 years.) Double win for Grant.

For me, a great story that appears in my book of that time, “The Emergency Bouzouki Player” illustrating how a little knowledge of the law can be used to great effect by a determined 18 year old. I remember him as one of the most articulate people I have ever met since our three hours together in Bloemfontein in 1979.

He, like me, did not want to do national service in a right-wing-religious racist army. And against considerable odds, because the Army knew that there were ‘Kaffirboeties ‘ like us who wanted to ‘Gyppo’ the system, we both found a legal way out despite their most vigilant efforts to include us in the legal 4% they could kill off in training .

Grants bayonet option proving to be even more successful than my Bouzouki outcome, albeit mine involved no bloody injury, which remains an important aspect of my approach to passive resistance. The following year, 1980, as a result of the Medical Boards review of Grants case, the South African army stopped issuing bayonets as standard to new recruits. That was a positive outcome.

Bayonets are dangerous and essentially useless compared to the object they attach too. In military terms Bayonets are a relic from bygone wars, attachments to single shot rifles that took three minutes to reload. Almost every army in the the world has not issued bayonets for decades. Why would you when you have automatic assault rifles? And compact sidearms that can comfortably accommodate 19 rounds as standard.

Bayonets now serve one single military purpose. To foment fearful terror in your enemy. That is the sole applicable reason you would put a bayonet onto a soldiers automatic assault rifle.

Our bayonets, the one I was issued with as a conscript into a fighting army in 1979, had a convex base and a flat top, with a barb cut in at regular intervals along the base. Bayonet training teaches you to aim at the stomach of your enemy – plunge the bayonet in – turn it some 45 degrees – and rip it out. I recall from that training – which was done with suspended sacks of sand – the instruction includes shouting at the the top of your lungs as you speed towards your target. Its a stab, twist and pull motion. Anchor your feet and pull hard backwards. Your enemy’s entrails (intestines) will be caught – fish hook like on the barbs. Once they are ripped out of the stomach cavity, your enemy will bleed out in a painful death within a minute or two. From the moment I first saw my bayonet I was horrified. Bayonets should be, and in some instances are, banned with penalties for use as illegitimate weapons of terror by Geneva.

Today bayonets are not used commonly in the United States Military. The US Military web sites claims; Marines are the only branch of the US Military who still include bayonet assault training in their basic training course.

I admit I was surprised to see the CIC ordering his Defense Secretary Mark Esper and his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, to issue bayonets to US Military in case any of those young ladies protesting might impede his path to the Bible.

Trump, our CIC must be a determined military historian. Prepared to send young boys, as is most commonly the case with front line troops, to eviscerate young women.
The old jab, twist and pull.
Really?
That’s your president?
Your happy to be a right wing racist Republican for that?

If the inquiry into the bayonet order confirms CIC Trump ordered the use of bayonets against American citizens, then, Trump is a war criminal as well as a clear and present danger to the USA where his malignant narcissism has conspired with the opportunity to responsibly allow the deaths of over 100,000 Americans who would not be dead today but for incompetent governance and catastrophic decisions that have seen Trillions of dollars go from the US Treasury into Trump appointed beneficiaries, instead of benefiting the safety of Americans who would not have died of Covid but for Trumps seemingly deliberate, idiotic ineptitude.

If this Bloomberg article is in fact true and there is any justice remaining in our legal system that Barr cannot emasculate, Trump must be summarily arrested and jailed.

Anyone who is willing and prepared to bayonet his own constituents is insane. Anyone who fails to see that young boys in uniform made to eviscerate young girls with blond hair and pretty blue eyes because his CIC ordered it, would become victims as much as their intended targets, has never been issued a bayonet by a fighting army.

Bayonets and Bibles and tear gassing his own horses as well as gassing a jew, Sarah Grossman, 22, in Columbus, is either Presidential conduct that America wants to see more off.

Or it is not.
If international law, or indeed local law of any just nature, is applicable, Trump belongs in jail. Not in the White House.

Whatever the number of ProFa Trumpeters currently stands at, and it was 33 million at last poll, it is the same number who support and defend a man who would make American boys bayonet American girls. Exactly as I saw in South Africa when my generation were given bayonets (in Sheaths) to go and bayonet Black boys on the border.

I saw, in Ward 5 at 3 Mil Hospital, that there are consequences for boys who follow right wing religious racists orders blindly. I see a similar outcome in consequences for the 33 million who know what is happening here. What it is is exactly clear. Trump is not your President. He is an out of control malignant narcissist with blood on his small hands. Every single one of his complicit enabling accomplices must face their version of Nuremberg. Every single one of his Profa base should sign a disclaimer. “We didn’t know what that smell was coming from the Trump chimneys.“

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