The Korean War Week 012 - Green Light for Incheon - September 10, 1950

My main source on what was going on at the strategic level here is the book by Matthew B. Chad Ridgway. You can trust him because he basically invented the entire concept of what it is to be airborne, which should be the first step in any man's life. This guy developed the entire American paratrooper program and personally jumped into Normandy on D-Day. We'll get many chances to talk about him later, but I'll say for the for purposes of this, he was a really nice guy who could understand that a person can have good and bad qualities at the same time.

I don't have my library with me right now, but I read it a few times and I think I can paraphrase:

Nobody on the fricking Earth would have been able to think up this plan except MacArthur. He had the genius, the experience, and the guts to think of doing something this audacious. That's the first step. Only MacArthur had the charisma and the... what do you call it where people know what words to use... to then take this seemingly insane plan to all these guys who know a lot about war and stuff, and they all hate you because you're a massive butthole, and convince them to roll the dice on this. Only MacArthur could have done that.

I'm no MacArthur apologist. I mean heck, there's one guy who's a second cousin or something and all I know is that he was a colonel in the Army, served in the Philippines, and he really fricking hated MacArthur. That's what he passed down to us through the years. But we need to be really careful about millennials trying to fit his war plans into whether Kamala has vibes or Trump is MAGAing or whatever. This was a completely different world and I caught the very end of it and I can tell you, any ideas you have about political parties or races or whatever, this is happening before all that.