"He's Got No Damn Common Sense" said Sergeants of Soldiers, But It's True of All of Us

By the time Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense in 1775, 

the idea of common sense was already disappearing. 

"He's got no damn common sense," is a lament I heard all through my Cold War military career in the 1970s and 80s.  Frustrated sergeants, including me, lamented dealing with soldiers who knew nothing about wrenches or lieutenants who got lost on every field exercise.  

In Germany in 1977, I got a new replacement crewman named Brian. Every new tank crewman starts as a driver, which presumes some mechanical ability.  Brian had never owned a car and never used wrenches before joining my crew.  He became a legend (in the worst way) when I had to show him how to use an open-end wrench in a tight space.  

The head of an open-end wrench is slightly offset. You turn turn a bolt a few degrees, turn the wrench over and turn a few more.  It's slow, but you can remove or tighten a bolt in a tight or covered space by flipping the wrench.  This process mystified Brian.  He got it eventually, but his fellow crew members made merciless fun of him for not knowing how an open-end wrench worked.  

Knowing or catching on quickly to this kind of process is referred to as having common sense.  At the time, I was sure Brian lacked common sense.  

But in her most important philosophical book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt says that by the time Brian was accused of lacking common sense, the whole culture had lost what was common sense across the world.  

Arendt says that the rise of modern science, beginning with Galileo's invention of the telescope, showed we could no longer trust our senses.  

Common Sense took the experience of our five senses and gave them a unified frame of interpretation.  But Galileo showed us that what our senses can be completely wrong even when we simply look at the night sky.  In her book Being Wrong Kathryn Schulz explains how thoroughly wrong we can be when all of our senses tell us we are right. 

"Step outside...in someplace truly dark: the Himalayas, say, or Patagonia, or the north rim of the Grand Canyon. If you look up in such a place, you will observe the sky above you is vast and vaulted, its darkness pulled taut from horizon to horizon and perforated by innumerable stars.  Stand there long enough and you'll see this whole vault turning overhead, like the slowest of the tumblers in the most mysterious of locks. Stand there even longer and it will dawn on you that your own position in the spectacle is curiously central. The apex of the heavens is directly above you. And the land you are standing on--land that unlike the firmament is quite flat, and unlike the stars is quite stationary--stretches out in all directions from a midpoint that is you. 

"It is, of course, an illusion: almost everything we see and feel out there on our imaginary Patagonia porch is misleading.  The sky is neither vaulted nor revolving around us, the land is neither flat nor stationary, and, sad to say, we ourselves are not the center of the cosmos. Not only are these things wrong, they are canonically wrong. They are to the intellect what the Titanic is to the ego: a permanent puncture wound, a reminder of the sheer scope at which we can err. What is strange, and not a little disconcerting, is that we can commit such fundamental mistakes by simply stepping outside and looking up."

Arendt says that when we cannot trust the most obvious perception of our sense, we eventually lose the common sense that still is valued in its absence a half millennia later. If physics on a cosmic scale says we are wrong when we perceive the sun circling east to west every day, it's worse at the atomic level.  Who can really believe an oak table is as much empty space as the night sky.  The solid hardwood of every oak plank at the atomic level protons, neutrons and electrons and a whole bunch of nothing. And those atoms are strung together held by charge with mostly empty space in every direction.  

Poor Brian could blame every physicist from Galileo Gallilei to Albert Einstein to Richard Feynman to Roger Penrose for proving that nothing that his senses experience is as it appears. 

The Cold War sergeants' lament that "none of my soldiers has a lick of common sense" was more true than he knew.  The sad thing is, that old sergeant did not have much common sense in the traditional sense either. 

In Our Army, The Generals are Fat, The Sergeants are Thin

In the Spring of 1977, a group of Soviet General officers made an inspection tour of our base in Wiesbaden, West Germany.  In October 1976, the 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division relocated from Fort Carson, Colorado, to what was formerly an air base in Wiesbaden.

Our 4,000 mechanized troops were meant to be a show of force to the Soviet Union by America.  We were reinforcing NATO.  Within 48 hours after we landed, we were on the border in our fully loaded tanks at Fulda, where World War Three was supposed to begin.

The following spring, a group of Soviet Generals toured our base.  My unit, 1st Battalion, 70th Armor, stood in formation in front of our tanks for the inspection.  One Soviet General spoke to us after the inspection.  He said, in English, that "In our Army, the generals are fat and the sergeants are thin.  In your Army, the generals are thin and the sergeants are fat.  I wonder why that is?"

I don't remember much else about that day, except that the sun was out--not the norm in Wiesbaden.  But that one line said so much about our respective armies.

The Soviet General command draftees from his own country and other Warsaw Pact countries.  They were underpaid, badly treated, hungry and hoping just to survive their enlistment.  The American Army was in the fourth year of being a Volunteer Army, which means professional army.  The men who made a career of the Army were divided between those who loved the military and those who just wanted the early retirement--LIFERS, we used to call them.

Even in the 70s, that General saw enough overweight soldiers to make his comment.  I was reminded of this because I have seen several of the Generals in the Pennsylvania National Guard at events recently and they are thin, tough and walk fast.  I also saw a Master Sergeant who hasn't passed a physical fitness test in this century.  He looks like the General in command of the New Jersey National Guard.

Another reason I thought of that Soviet General was a news report on Sputnik (Russian State News) announcing that the 1st Guards Tank Army has been reformed to defend Mother Russia.

We still have thin generals and too many fat sergeants.  And the Russian Army is recruiting more of those skinny draftees for a huge new Mechanized Army.

Our Former Allies: Training Iranian MIssile Technicians at Lowry AFB

Until the Ayatollahs took over in 1979, Iran was an ally of the United States.  They were a very close Cold War ally, bordering the Soviet Union.  Until the Shah's government fell, tens of thousands of Iranian soldiers and airmen trained in the United States.

For eight weeks in 1972, I was part of the training.

After Basic Training in April 1972, I went to Lowry Air Force Base near Denver, Colorado, for an 8-month missile electronics school.  The first eight weeks was basic electronics.  I learned basic electronics from a Ham Radio operator in the town where I grew up, so I tested out of the course, but had eight weeks to wait.

During that eight weeks, I was a tutor for lagging students and foreign students.  During the Spring of 1972, many of those students were Iranian sergeants.  They needed help with vocabulary in addition to the electronics themselves.  It was fun to be able to teach these older guys how a capacitor worked or how to calculate resistance and power in a circuit.

The Iranians really wanted to learn.  The chance to go to school in America was a big privilege, so these guys worked hard.  It was weird to have these mid-20s and older sergeants addressing me formally:  "Airman Gussman, may I ask. . . ".

Iran has always been and still is the most sophisticated and civilized of all the Middle Eastern countries.

The guys I trained would be in their 70s now, if they survived The Revolution.

Right now, Iran is the enemy and no one wants a nuclear Iran.  But Iran was our ally until their particular group of Fundamentalists took over.  They could return to sanity.  Some day.