Communication out of Allen Field House is beginning to sound a bit like that coming out of besieged Khe Sanh combat base in the Vietnam War between 21 January and 9 July 1968.
Elements of the Third Marine Division and the First Brigade, Fifth Infantry Division of the US Army were strong enough to resist the siege by 2-3 divisions of NVA regulars, strong enough finally to break it, but not strong enough in new General Creighton Abrams opinion, to prevent another siege.
Allen Field House is being besieged by a season of playing at a height disadvantage inside and the injuries from the siege, especially at point guard, where Mason is playing on a sprained ankle, and Graham is out with turf toe, and Conner Frankamp is out with an acute desire to be a point guard at WSU, leaves the KU perimeter as thin as Khe Sanh eventually became before a combined force of Marines and Army from outside Khe Sanh spearheaded an attack on NVA forces and liberated the combat base just in time for Abrams to "shut her down."
Self seems to be pulling together a force of Wayne Selden, Evan Manning and, yes, Self has repeated that Jamari Traylor is an option, to spearhead an attack to break the siege on the hobbled Mason.
Self's repetition of Traylor as a possibility could well give board rat @HighEliteMajor a pulmonary embolism, for @HighEliteMajor has already posited that serious consideration of such an option might be grounds for Self seeking psychiatric assistance involving therapeutic use of psychotropic drugs, or some similarly playful hyperbole . (Note: which is continuing to make me intermittently split a gut laughing hours after first reading it.)
As yours truly grew up under the leadership and occasionally harsh tutelage of the can-do Marine Corpse spirit, yours truly has been sounding warnings since early on that Self's call in of the Marines to counsel his team before the season started carried within it certain grave implications for the season this one might become.
Few, I think, took me seriously.
With the Marines, like anything else, you have to take the good with the bad. Their greatness is a sword with two edges. They can real estate with the best of them, and they can withstand sieges for sure, but there is something about the leatherneck spirit that can also lead them into sieges and slaughters in the first place. It is not so much that they lead themselves into them, but rather that leadership commits them to them, because the Marines will go.
Khe Sanh was a good example.
Likewise, if Self cannabalizes his bigs and orders Jamari Traylor into service as a point guard Jamari will most assuredly go into harms way as ordered. Its the Marine way. Run at the pill box with the machine gun firing and toss a satchel charge in to save your buddies? OK.
And though @HighEliteMajor may be quite ready to insist that psychotropics are now in order for our beloved coach, I would remind him and others that what we are witnessing really is the Marine Corp way, scary and mad as it may sometimes seem to the Sempre Fi uninitiated.
Recall that I have told folks in the past that in the Marine Corp tactics can suddenly become strategy at a moments notice; that any one, anyone at all, may suddenly be grabbed from the duty they are trained at, and be tasked with the most unlikely duty in the very heat of battle. Training? Instruction? Fuggeddaboutit. Just get her done. And though this sort of thing happens at desperate moments in other branches it is not necessarily a sign of total desperation in the Marine Corp, because...
The Marine Corp trains for desperation. It assumes desperation is SOP. It indoctrinates its men to expect it. Nothing is impossible. Or as they endlessly repeat: the difficult comes easy, the impossible takes a little longer. The reason that is such a big epigram for them is that they are routinely asked to do the impossible. If there is a job no one else in their right minds wants to do, send in the Marines. They take a certain amount of perverse pride in it.
The shock of of the idea of Jamari Traylor redeployed as a ball handling combo guard might be slightly relieved if I relate one old war story from my late father, then green Second Lieutenant of the Third Marine Division, 9th Marine Regiment, Company C, Motor Transport Battalion attachment, in the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, formed at Camp LeJeune, shipped out from San Diego, CA and reformed on Guadalcanal, shortly after Guadalcanal was secured. After some getting familiar, they were transported up The Slot of the Solomon Islands around 1 November 1943, and disembarked at Empress Augusta Bay, landing at Cape Torokina Point, aka Torokina Point, Bougaineville to take a third or so of that large island for an airfield, while leaving the larger Japanese force on the far side of the sizable jungled, swampy, and mountainous island essentially in tact. The airfield was for land based air attacks on Rebaul, the then stronghold of the Japanese Navy in that region. This operation came on the heels of success at Guadalcanal and many subsequent Naval and island actions, mostly small in the Slot thereafter.
Second Lieutenant jaybate beta, father of @jaybate 1.0, was trained to organize trucks, jeeps, and a small number of bull dozers into a unit capable of creating a primitive road from the beach to Marines already a goodly distance into the jungle and engaged in some unexpectedly intense fighting that was depleting their ammunition and other supplies at an alarmingly fast rate. The Second Lieutenant came into his first invasion without combat experience and knowing only that there would be little resistance and a short road was to be graded through a grove of palm trees. The fire fight was well inland and danger would only be present once the trucks and jeeps carrying supplies had driven on the new trail a mile or two inland. The Second Lieutenant served under a green First Lieutenant and an old Captain with brief WWI combat experience and a notorious drinking problem.
Coming ashore, the Second Lieutenant suddenly was confronted with news that maps did not indicate a quarter mile wide ribbon of swamp starting about an eighth of a mile into the jungle and stretching the entire length of the beach. He was also notified that the First Lieutenant had been injured in an accident descending the cargo nets and that the Captain, who had come ashore somewhere down the beach was suffering from the DTs.and from a flare up of malaria contracted during formation and training on Guadalcanal. This the Second Lieutenant,who was barely shaving at the time, and barely filling out his combat fatigues after having contracted and battled some dyssentary on Guadalcanal, was now in command of an element of a motor transport battalion attached to support a Marine Rifle company engaged in a fierce battle a couple miles inland across a swamp that in the prior 24 hours not one single vehicle of any kind, either tank, bull dozer, jeep, truck or otherwise had done anything but sink in. As the Second Lieutenant reconnoitered with his Chief Warrant Officer, and a Sergeant, the Second Lieutenant was informed by a runner and subsequently by radio, that at that moment it was imperative that the Second Lieutenant's brand new trucks deliver ammunition and medical supplies to the front line of attack one way or another "immediately if not sooner." When the Second Lieutenant informed his superior officers both on the beach and inland that an impassable swamp not on the map made such an order impossible to carry out, the Second Lieutenant was told in some of the most colorful and certain language he had ever heard that he would either find a way across the swamp, or be escorted to the Brig, and some mention of Portsmouth Naval Prison was also invoked. After conferring with his Chief Warrant Officer, who actually knew what he was doing, the Second Lieutenant concluded that threats were real and that the mission at hand had to be undertaken regardless of its seeming futility. In turn, the Second Lieutenant ordered jeeps and teams up and down the beach to look for the narrowest width of swamp. Shortly, this location was identified and the convoy, such as it was was assembled in a single file line without separation and in full view of any enemy aircraft, all in contravention of all prior training, and the Second Lieutenant ordered the jeeps to commence gunning their engines and driving one at a time head first into the swamp, then for the driver to get out of the jeep and stand aside while the next jeep was driven from a long running start into the half submerged jeep already mired in the swamp. Many privates, corporals, lance corporals, and a sergeant or two remarked that the Second Lieutenant seemed to be even dumber than they had believed him to be, and they had believed him to be barely above functional moron, as Marine noncoms and grunts are want to think about young, untested 2 Louies. Over the next few hours the battering ram process proceeded without interruption moving only progressing from jeeps to ten wheeler trucks. As the lead jeep was slowly rammed a few feet farther out by each impact, by the time it reached near the mid point of the swamp, the Second Lieutenant order the scavenging of steel cables from as many disabled, or abled but unattended vehicles with wynches on the beach not belonging to the Second Lieutenant's outfit. Shortly, a rather long chain link of winch cables was strung from the lead jeep's winch to the nearest palm tree cluster on dry land across the remaining swamp and the winch on the battered jeep was used to draw the pitifully beaten and swamped vehicle to dry land. The process was repeated agains and again until it was time for the trucks. Half a dozen jeep cables were attached to the long steel cable reaching from the truck to dry land and six jeep winches were used to drag the 10 wheeler across the swamp. With a ten wheeler across fast work was made pulling the rest of the trucks to dry land. And then a several trucks were used to help draw the bulldozers across whenever they bogged down. And then all the vehicles followed the bulldozers plowing through jungle the rest of the way to the front, where ammunition was dispensed amidst all hell breaking loose, after which angry Marines killed many Japanese and took no prisoners that my father recalled.
To put the Marine Corp in perspective, there were no medals for this little act of get her done. No citations. My father actually said he did not even get a pat on the back or a job well done. It was just next.
Why did he do it that way? I asked. Had one of the old Sergeants seen it done it that way before? No. It just occurred to he and his Warrant Officer to do it that way. It was the only thing they could think of at that moment. So they did it. And it worked. And that was what Marines were expected to do. One Major did say to him, "Well, you really fucked those trucks up, Lieutenant." But other than that they just got on with it.
My point here is that Self is trying to hold this thing together with whatever he can think of right now, and his guys know it, and his coaches know it, and what keeps them going is that that is what he is expected to do, and what they are expected to do, and so they just get on with it. This is the Marine Corp way.
How do you get it done?
Any way you can.
Lance Corporal Traylor?
Yes, Lieutenant.
Yesterday, you were a 5.
Yes, Lieutenant.
Today, you are a 1.
Yes, Lieutenant, what does a 1 do, Lieutenant?
Hell if I know, Lieutenant, Chief Warrant Officer Dooley, who used to know once said, "You drive at the rim and if you can score you score and if you can't you pass it to someone who can.
But, Lieutenant, I only know how to dribble with one hand.
As of now, Lance Corporal, you now know how to dribble with both hands. Now go get me some W's Lance Corporal, and be quick about it. I am depending on you and know you will not let me down.
