Readings in American History

Today's tidbit comes from the War-on-Drugs era, more specifically from Mark Bowden's Killing Pablo (which is about the manhunt for Pablo Escobar).

The Americans were used to working with Colombian officers who would joke about failed missions, who took them no more seriously than getting the wrong order at a restaurant.
There were plenty of reasons why they repeatedly failed. On one occasion, approaching a suspect finca on a morning raid, the assault force lined up along a ridge and then simply walked toward the structure. A Centra Spike soldier accompanying them suggested that the force drop down on the ground and crawl.
"In the dirt?" asked a Colombian officer, insulted by the suggestion. "My guys don't crawl in the dirt and the mud."
The occupants of the target house fled well before the raiding party arrived. The finca had all the hallmarks of an Escobar hideout [...] The occupants had fled in such haste that they hadn't had time to completely burn documents, so they had urinated and defecated on them. This was enough to dissuade the national police from taking a look. When the Centra Spike man began to fish the papers out of the mess, the colonel himself objected.
"I can't believe you'd do that," he said. "That's human waste!"
"Where I come from we also low-crawl and get our uniforms dirty," the American said. (88)

Readings in American History

Russell often reads me tidbits from the books he's reading. I've posted them occasionally in the past (the first that comes to mind ended up in my blogger profile), but today¹ it occurred to me that maybe I should make these a more formal (if sporadic) feature. For now they'll be called "Readings in American History" (following my first-year humanities course at Chicago, Readings in World Literature). The title may change, but he's on an American (or at least North American) history² reading kick right now so it should suffice for now.

A bit of Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 by Fred Anderson:

Of more immediate consequence for the governments of Pennsylvania and Virginia was an event that occurred not long not long after the [treaty] conference [at Logstown, PA in the spring of 1752] ended, two hundred miles farther west, at Pickawillany--the Miami town where George Croghan and his associates maintained their trading post. At about nine o'clock on the morning of June 21, 1752, a party of about 180 Chippewa and 30 Ottawa warriors, accompanied by 30 French soldiers from Detroit under the command of a French-Ottawa office named Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade, attacked the settlement. Most of Pickawillany's men were away hunting; most of its women, who had been working in the cornfields, were made captive. After a six-hour attack, Langlade called a cease-fire. He would, he said, return the women and spare the defenders (who numbered only about twenty) if they agreed to surrender to the traders. Lacking any alternative, the defenders agreed, then looked on while the raiders demonstrated what the consequences of trading with the English could be. First they dispatched a wounded trader "and took out his heart and eat it"; then they turned their attention to the settlement's headman, Memeskia. This chief, known to the French as La Demoiselle, had lately acquired a new sobriquet, Old Briton, from Croghan and his colleagues. Now, to repay "his attachment to the English" and to acquire his powers for themselves, the raiders "boiled [him] and eat him all up." Then, with five profoundly apprehensive traders and a vast amount of booty in hand, they returned to Detroit. Behind them lay the smoking ruin that, twenty-four house earlier, had been one of the largest settlements and the richest trading point went of the Appalachians. (28-29)

This falls into the "weren't things great back then?" category.

1. Incidentally, today's our anniversary.
2. A Seven Years War / War of 1812 kick to be more precise.