A couple of things to blog about with this chapter. First off, a couple of readers have complained I have had Carl do the impossible. No officer would have ever have jumped his paratroopers from airplanes they had never trained on; Wilcox, Donovan, & Buckman would have all stood their ground and refused; Hawkins would have been court-martialed on the spot, etc. I have pushed the story too far.
Well, maybe yes, maybe no. It was curious that when I was having some military people review this portion of the story this really didn’t come up too much. Pretty much everybody agreed that there were plenty of idiot generals who would think nothing of ordering a drop like this, as well as the upcoming events. More than a few military people wrote about when they were in the military, and they remembered some REMF (Rear Echelon Mother Fucker) screwing things up royally and then trying to cover it all up. Quite a few said they remembered dangerous and impossible orders they got where they just had to suck it up and do it anyway. They all agreed that I was pushing the envelope, and that a good hanging party should be in the future for all involved.
Curiously, only two readers commented that Carl has now committed murder, and one reader hopes he goes to jail. (Boy, talk about a party-pooper!) We’ll have to see about that. Chapters 58 and 59 are all about the cover-up.
A second item to discuss is the title of the chapter - The Anabasis of Xenophon. For the readers who don’t know military history, let me give a quick rundown. Following the Peloponnesian War there were large numbers of unemployed Greek mercenaries on the Mediterranean arms market, highly employable heavy infantry. Approximately 10,000 Greek soldiers were hired in 401 BC by Cyrus the Younger of Persia, a rival to his brother Artaxerxes II for the Persian throne. After marching 1,000+ miles into what is now Iraq, Cyrus managed to get killed in battle, leaving his mercenaries trapped in the middle of Persia. The Persians, no fans of the Greeks following their losses in the Greco-Persian Wars years before, managed to kill off most of the Greek officer corps. The Greeks, now led by Xenophon, marched 400 miles to Trebizond on the Black Sea, pretty much fighting all the way and living off the land. From there they sailed home.
Back home, Xenophon wrote a book, the Anabasis, about the entire trip. Technically, in Greek, anabasis means ‘march from the sea’ and would only cover the first half of the trip. The katabasis or ‘march to the sea’ is the return trip. The book earned Xenophon fame through the ages and ranks with Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War among ancient histories. Ultimately it showed the hollowness of the Persian Empire and was one of the reasons that Alexander the Great figured he could conquer Persia.