History doesn’t move in a straight line, it just sort of piles up on certain days. Looking at the archives today, April 11 feels especially crowded—full of weird, heavy, and occasionally absurd moments that still echo. I’m sitting here with the office window open and the smell of wet pavement coming in; it’s a quiet day, but the historical record is definitely not.
Take 1951, when President Truman finally decided he’d had enough and fired General MacArthur for insubordination. It was a massive power play. Or look at the 1950 incident where a B-29 crashed near Albuquerque—luckily, no fissile core was installed when the high explosives detonated. It could have been much worse, obviously. Actually, it’s strange how often these near-misses define the timeline.
Then there’s the 1966 ambush at Xa Cam My. Misryoum editorial desk noted that Charlie Company, 134 strong, was basically used as bait by the CO of the Big Red One. Things went sideways fast—friendly fire, chaos, 36 KIA, 71 WIA. It’s one of those parts of history that feels like a jagged edge you shouldn’t touch, but you have to. And just a few years later in 1968, LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Progress is never clean.
Wait, let me backtrack to 1985. There was that whole ordeal about Reagan visiting a cemetery in Bitburg. The initial word was that he’d be honoring both American and German soldiers, but—well, it turned out to be Waffen SS only. A total PR disaster, or maybe just a fundamental failure of the people managing the schedule. It feels like these mistakes just keep repeating themselves in different outfits.
Some events are just smaller, like Richard Whitney of the New York Stock Exchange getting five to ten for larceny back in 1938, or the weird visual of an errant balloon drifting Gen. Fitz John Porter over Confederate lines in 1862. It’s hard to imagine the look on his face. History is full of these—the ridiculous, the tragic, and the moments that just leave you wondering what everyone was thinking. I mean, even the 1955 attempt by Chiang Kai-shek to bomb an airliner to hit Zhou Enlai, who wasn’t even on the plane. It’s all just…