Precision Engagement

That’s SGT Frank Vukasin of Great Falls, Montana, bundled in his winter coat, while using his frozen fingers to jam another eight-round clip into his M-1 rifle and kneeling for the ages. Next to him lie two dead white-clad German soldiers. In 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge, this was precision engagement. As soon as he reloaded, he’d be back on his feet maneuvering again through the Ardennes Forest on this flat battle-field, rather than remaining stationary as would have been the case in the trench of a WWI battle-line. He could pour out a 30 to 40 rounds-per-minute rate of fire in place of the slower rate WWI infantry rifle, the more accurate M1903 Springfield with its single-shot bolt-action.

A history of Black Eagle, Montana, families says Vukasin had been working in the Anaconda Company Refinery when he got drafted. After surviving the war and returning  home, he and his brother traded up through a couple of Black Eagle saloons. He once got a gig as an actor with Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges in that poolroom scene of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. In the years after his wife passed he made his living as a gambler. He died in January 1995 and is buried in Highland Cemetery among hundreds of fellow veterans, not too far from Charlie Russell.

Since 1996, the word battle-field has been replaced by the word battle-space, a multi-dimension civilian and military sphere ranged by every kind of weapon, including weaponized lying and demeaning of truth-telling. Battle-space can be fully ranged with doctored images, honey trap pornography, destructive and instructive movies, and bad or good art and writing, using targeted new media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and hundreds of variations being sought and linked by like-minded groups.  

The iconic photo of Vukasin in The Bulge serves as an early example of weaponizing images in battle-space. Eight years after Vukasin died, his photograph taken by a U.S. Army Signal Corps cameraman and preserved by our National Archives, was used by the NRA to narrate its firearms oriented point of view. The picture, properly sourced and credited, belongs to all of us, each for our own reasons, as I am using it here to ask a question: “Did anyone care then or now whether SGT Vukasin was a Republican or a Democrat? No! We cared that he was a calm and courageous American soldier who could shoot straight.

That’s because during WWII our leaders did everything possible to bring us together, instead of doing everything possible to aggravate divisions that split us from each other to  disempower us. Fear is being used to harden our hearts. Whether or not we order Pizza with anchovies and who we talk to on FaceBook help to precisely target messages to our minds, which is far better than an enemy’s bullet to our brains. Now we are where we’ve come to be, and only by learning and relearning in our best respective ways will we recover from the November 5, 2024, battle-space defeat of our country.

On the cold winter night we were making inquiries in Black Eagle the waitress in “Borres” told my friend Magoo and I, “The name’s pronounced ‘Vukaaasin.’ When my father was alive, he could tell you everything. He knew all those guys. There were a lot of bars around here. When they came back from the war they all hit the bars. Sorry, I can’t help you more!”