Subjects
Bias and Accuracy (see also Sources)
CIA Actions
Cold War crossovers
Dates
Fatality and Casualty Counts
Indian Wars
Language Choices (Includes discussion of location names and terminology of ethnicity and race.)
Length of Entries
Mindanao and Related Areas
Occupations
Piracy
Posse Comitatus
Steam Ships and What They Implied
Sources
Which events are in this timeline
Where to find more information

Bias and Accuracy:
We have worked as hard as we can to present an unbiased view of the events listed here. We have also striven to make this list as accurate as we can manage. At one point, when this was still a one person project, I hired a fact checker with decades of experience to double check my conclusions. He both worked from the main New York City reference libraries, his own books, and from the two full milk crates of books that I loaned him. He had suggestions but no major concerns. Those suggestions have long since been incorporated. I also paid him to compile his list of major relevant sources; as best he could determine, I hadn't missed any.
As you can see from our Sources overview as well as the More Information section below it, we have read primary documents, spoken with veterans, and read through a broad range of books, articles, and monographs from sources as diverse as Annapolis, major universities, and various peace groups.

We use strong language throughout this document, as befits the discussion of massive destruction, nations being overthrown, and millions of deaths.
If you feel that you are finding a bias in our documents, then please do email us and we’ll be glad to look into it.

CIA Actions:
As many of you will have noticed, this chronology, with some few exceptions, does not contain the actions of the non-uniformed arms of U.S. policy, most notably the Central Intelligence Agency. Undoubtedly a full understanding of the implications of U.S. policy since World War II requires a knowledge of such actions, as well as those of the D.E.A. and other federal agencies. However, for purposes of brevity and due to the terrible lack of reliable documentation, we have decided that covert actions in general are not within the scope of this document.

Cold War crossovers:
A distinctive characteristic of Cold War actions is the level of overlapping personnel and arms between actions.
The most visible “Where’s Waldo” of the period was the strange and extended saga of the denizens of Camp Trax. Camp Trax was set up to train Cuban refugees for the eventual military overthrow of the Castro government. However, having trained them, and the retaking of Cuba not being imminent, Trax men were used in a number of regional actions, while the aircraft prepared for them made its way as far as the PEMESTA rebellion in Indonesia.
With transportation cheap and reliable soldiers valuable, it frequently made more sense to ship troops in for one engagement and then ship them back out again.
In some cases troops from distant locations were used to muddy the trail of who had been where when. During the Indochina wars, U.S. troops would be picked up at a base in Vietnam, flown into Cambodia for combat, and returned before their next paychecks were due, reducing the paper trail to almost nothing. On a related front, training sometimes took surreal turns, including Tibetan (anti-Chinese) rebels flown to the United States for brief covert training sessions and then flown back to Tibet.

Dates:
Date Formats: We list only starting dates in most cases. Yes, in an ideal world all events would not only be listed with both dates, but even less likely, would even have clean end dates. Also, since World War II, increasingly days or even weeks of lethal covert operations preceed the publicly acknowledged beginning of combat.
Missing Events: The careful observer will note that the chronology above is far from complete, most obviously leaving out several of our most famous “unofficial” cold war postings (who else remembers the CNN footage of troops firing in the jungle while Reagan spoke of “advisors”?), and many of the incidents like Detroit and Kent State where our soldiers went into combat right on our own streets.
The only incidents listed are those that combine four things.
1.) Our uniformed forces must have played a key role, which must include the real risk of those soldiers facing combat.
2.) There must have been a true combat-level involvement overall, with fingers held to triggers and guns loaded. Thus rear-echelon support to an ally like provision of arms or intelligence do not qualify.
3.) There must be reliable sources who can provide at least a basic level of detail about the event.
4.) The troops must have been operating under the orders of the federal government. (This condition rules out many events within the United States, such as Kent State, where National Guard troops were acting on the orders of their governor.)

If you have a particular event you feel we missed, then by all means, let us know. If it pans out we’ll include it as soon as we can and give you credit as the person who brought it to our attention.

Give us time. I, and the other folks on this project are more than eager to fill in the gaps. Personally I'm looking forward to giving our activities in Tibet in the 1950’s their due. Behind the scenes we are hard at work building the combination of database structures and web site capabilites to bring all of our history to this site.

How can you speed this up? Buy stuff from us. Or just tell your friends about our products and our site.

Fatality and Casualty Counts:
In almost all incidents fatality and casualty counts are not given. And where they are given, they are usually only for U.S. forces. This is not our preference, but merely an artifact of limited space and the difficulty of obtaining reliable figures for casualties. Keep in mind that not only did much fighting take place against people not likely to have kept reliable numerical records we can access, but also for every death or significant injury claimed among American forces, a person had to be presented. A lieutenant in Vietnam might get away with claiming thirty utterly falsified enemy dead, but every U.S. casualty claimed, even one so minor as a broken finger, must be documented as to which soldier, where, and how it was treated.
There is no doubt that our figures contain errors somewhere. If you know of any and have solid documentation then please do contact us with that information. For now we will continue to include what generally reliable numbers we can, as they do give a sense of scale, of public reaction, and of the impact an incident will have had on those involved in it.

Indian Wars:
Wars between American aborigines (“Indians”) and emigrants and the descendants of emigrants occupy a special sordid place in U.S. military history. Fundamental cultural differences (what is “property”? What is “war”?) guaranteed a dismally misleading start. Genuine belief by many of the settlers that they were chosen by God to get whatever they could take certainly didn’t help.
Indians and settlers both frequently engaged in torture, looting, rape, and desecration of enemy bodies. Indians and settlers both committed surprise attacks against undefended villages, killing women and children. Indians and settlers both spoke of holy justification and a desire to utterly wipe out their opponents. Indians and settlers both kept slaves, stole each others animals, and engaged in endless varieties of behavior we find reprehensible.
But there the seeming equivalency ends. Over and over, representatives of native tribes negotiated in earnest across from white men who, even in the rare cases that they were personally honorable, would still never ever keep the terms of their agreements. For the first three hundred years native tribes simply lived saner lives then whites, a thing so obvious then that for a settler to “go native” and join the local Indian tribe was a serious crime, usually punishable by death. Only by such extreme measures were whites prevented from wholesale desertion of their freezing, stinking, starving settlements.
A solid case can be, and has been, made that many of the famous Indian criminal behaviors were new to them and encouraged by white interlopers. Scalping, for example, was strongly encouraged by British agents who paid a per-scalp bounty, thereby keeping better track of how many enemy deaths they were paying for.
We're not going to go case by case, treaty by treaty in a chronology like this to enumerate all the reasons the Indians had to rise up in arms, sometimes only after generations of attempts at cooperation or simply appeasement. But you, the reader, should always take it as a given that the first time a native took up weapons on the scale to end up in this chronology, there was a long chain of thefts, deceits, and willful impoverishments before white blood was shed.
Further, it is crucial to note that in many cases, natives were on both sides of these conflicts, either as combatants or, more typically, a few tribes in arms with the rest waiting things out. In quite a few cases the “Indian tribe&rdquo that attacked consisted only of dissatisfied young men, angry as young men always are, and without the support of the majority of their own society.
Lastly, keep in mind that the tribes we hear about were rarely more than a few generations old either in composition or location. By the time a group of natives rose up in arms they had typically been decimated by disease, driven off their traditional lands, and forced into alliance with others against stronger enemies.

Language Choices:
Location Names: Modern place names and borders are used where practical to increase comprehension. In a few cases, such as Panama, all of which was formerly part of Colombia, we have generally chosen to use the name of the nation of which it was part when the incident took place.

“Outlaws”: We make frequent use of the term “outlaw”. By that we mean nothing whatsoever more or less than people outside the law. There is no judgement implied as to the validity of their cause or the nature of the ruling government. After all, Thomas Jefferson was an outlaw.

Race: We refer throughout to American aborigines as “Indians”. We also refer to “blacks” rather than African Americans or, for that matter, Blacks with an initial capital. In each case disagreement within the community is considerable, and, in fact, no racial term is ever entirely precise. There was documented intermarriage between “Europeans” and “Native Americans” at least eight hundred years ago and everybody who could reach the Mediterranean, from the Norse to the Ibo, did so by about the same time. Hence, with rare exceptions, for reasons of brevity we use the term in most common usage.
In the case of Native American names the situation is somewhat more troubling as most of the names in common usage (Such as Seminole, Black Feet, Sioux, etc.) are either corruptions of European terms or derogatory terms that have become accepted. For now, again for reasons of brevity and reader comprehension, we have used the names best known. We're not any too thrilled with this and welcome your suggestions.

Length of Entries:
We have attempted to have the comparative length of our entries proportional to both the objectively judgeable scale of the engagement and the admittedly subjective factors of importance and ease of explanation. In some cases we give less attention to a subject already well known and more to a significant event that is more obscure.
If you feel that a given entry is shorter than it should be, then please feel free to provide us with multiple, documented, reliable sources of more detailed information and we will be more than willing to look into providing a longer entry in our next edition.

Mindanao and Related Areas:
When U.S. forces first began military actions in the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War, they were warned about Mindanao. A cluster of islands along one side of the Philippines, Mindanao has never truly acknowledged the rule of any outsider. Amidst areas of dense jungle and with a culture that, still slave-holding as of the mid-twentieth century, and fiercely independent, values resistance over technique and victory over all, Mindanao is, along with the Ghurkas, rural Afghanistan, and the eighteen hundreds Seminoles and Cajuns, a society that is little tempted by “modern” material goods (beyond those they can get on their own). Deeply entrenched in a region that rewards deep local knowledge and can readily kill the unwary and ignorant, they are fully willing and able to resist conventional armed force with a deadliness and toughness that make them an ill-chosen target for tactics of submission.
The reason that Marines are known as Leathernecks is that, in their thirty years of intermittant combat in the Mindanao region, they soon learned that it was worth enduring a heavy, tall, reenforced leather collar while marching in tropical heat so as to be more protected from sudden sword attacks from out of a seemingly empty jungle. Those not so protected were sometimes decapitated in a blow or two before they were even able to draw weapons.
As we again move into a combat posture versus Muslims in the Philippines, we have once again, as of late 2001, found our troops going into Mindanao. Let us hope that they do better this time.

Occupations: Afghanistan, former Confederacy, Cuba, Deseret (Utah territory), Dominican Republic, Germany, Grenada, Haiti, Iraq, Japan, Nicaragua, Panama, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Samoa, Somalia, West Germany
Declaring risks to U.S. citizens and U.S.-owned businesses, as well as ethical concerns, the United States occupied all or part of each of these nations, usually after sustained local unrest. In all cases but the Confederacy, Germany, and Japan, the U.S. swiftly routed the local military. From then on the occupation has always followed the same pattern. U.S. forces create a semi-autonomous occupation authority while announcing a plan to create a new government and constitution based on U.S. defined democratic lines. Military, police, customs, elections, tax laws, industry, and transportation are then restructured to U.S. specifications under close U.S. guidance.
In each case key industries are restructured in ways that greatly ease U.S. access to those industries and to the goods that they produce. When the setup is declared stable and equitable, the U.S. withdraws, leaving coastal and consular garrisons. Rarely has the US seized permanent control, preferring to leave long-term relationships in private, mercantile hands, the exceptions being Puerto Rico and Samoa. The initial seizures of a good deal of U.S. territory, most notably Florida and Hawaii, followed similar patterns.

Local resistance usually starts out sporadic and minor but frequently builds as insurgents gain skill, resources, and more local support. In some cases, most famously Sandino’s forces in Nicaragua, small bands of fighters eventually grow to become the new government.

In the Dominican Republic, Germany, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Panama, these occupations have later been repeated.

Piracy:
From Maine-based whaling to Mississippi river boats, much of the America’s trade has always been water-based. The United States economy from the beginning depended on imported finished goods and revenue from exported crops. That one early symbolic act of the Revolution was the Boston Tea Party, an assault upon trading ships, was no coincidence. This left much of our survival subject to the dangers of the open seas and, after the Revolution, no longer protected by the might of the British Navy, American ships were considered easy targets.
Piracy was deadly, of worldwide scope, and able to reduce the economy of a town to ruins by seizing one ship sailing off a remote Caribbean Island. However, contrary to media images, most pirate ships were not self-contained. They worked together and were closely tied to secret, or not so secret, ports. Those ports were their quartermaster corps, providing food, water, repairs, and as much of a home as could be managed. In some cases, as in the domain of Jean Lafitte, these ports became tiny empires, with rulers, laws, and distinct cultures.
Understanding this explains why U.S. troops were so frequently found in places far from home attacking villages and asserting “respect”. These were almost always attempts to convince a group of people that helping pirates just wasn’t worth the costs. These actions varied from marching in and just looking impressive to reducing villages to smoking ruins, killing anybody who resisted.
The U.S. fought pirate ships and bases from the Florida Keys and West Indies to Turkey and even Sumatra, working at times alongside English, Spanish and other navies. One anti-piracy squad alone, with 28 ships, saw action over 35 times.
In recent decades the threat of piracy has arisen into relevancy again, but now primarily as a threat to our allies and to citizens of more impoverished places. Most recent has been the anti-piracy patrols off the coast of Somalia that started in December of 2005.

Posse Comitatus:
At the end of the Revolutionary War there was some question as to what form the new government would take. Many suggested that George Washington, and perhaps even the other military commanders, be given powers we would now regard as king-like. In a crucial event in United States and, in fact world history, Washington gathered his commanders and required that they form a new brotherhood, the Order of Cincinatus, named after a Roman general who, having saved Rome, refused the crown and returned to his farm.
The commitment of the Order of Cincinatus is enshrined in United States law as the posse comitatus, only passed into law in the 1870’s, which forbids the military to act as a domestic force.
While this doctrine is still officially federal law, the "War on Drugs" and the “War On Terror” have increasingly been used to weaken this principle as a growing range of exceptions bring the domestic use of federal troops ever further into the realm of the acceptable and routine.

Steam Ships and What They Implied:
Around the middle of the 1800’s we see a new source of friction between Americans and islanders around the world, most notably in the Pacific. With the introduction of steam ships passage becomes safer, faster, and able to choose routes with less attention to season and winds. However, these new wonders consume vast amounts of coal and cannot carry enough along with them for long voyages. They also are far more dependant of access to parts, machine shops, and all the other infrastructure of a mechanized system. This requires the creation of coaling stations, regularly spaced outposts along the sea lanes where coal is stored, along with other supplies for the new, less self-contained ships. The placement and effectiveness of a country’s coaling stations are swiftly recognized as key factors in military and commercial power.
Suddenly the United States, which has long treated the very idea of colonies with dismissive distaste, needs strategically-placed land that they hold, control, and that can support the staff and garrisons to maintain that control. This trend accelerates as many America public officials, most famously Theodore Roosevelt, adopt the aggressive philosophy of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who declares that a nation’s power and prosperity depend on the ability to project naval force. Since politicians and naval officers from England to Japan were also reading Mahan, key locations such as Samoa and the potential trans-isthmus canal sites in Nicaragua and Panama saw ever more face-offs between the assorted imperial and would-be imperial powers, with the locals caught between.
With the concurrent rise in missionary activity and all of its ability to alienate, U.S. clashes around the world rise considerably relative to the number of Americans abroad.

Sources:
Sources include but are not limited to: The Official Marine Corps Chronology, Contested Plains by E. West, Endless Enemies by J. Kwitney, Semper Fidelis by Allan R. Millett, and American Naval History by J. Sweetman.

Original inspiration came from a Doonesbury comic strip by Garry Trudeau.

Our military history source matter page provides more information, including a detailed overview of our sources, both listed by subject and with extended commentary.

United States Sectarian Conflict:
mobs, militias, and military dynamics
In every major conflict beween Americans the violence started and escalated for years, if not decades, before actual battles involving uniformed soldiers took place. This includes the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Utah Occupation, anti-union conflicts, and civil rights movements.
Colonists had raised militias, held off British troops for months at a time, and taken over local government functions, from tax collection to courts. Long before 1776, in what is now called Vermont, the Green Mountain Boys were, in effect, a military of their own, with uniforms, command structure, distinctive weapons and tactics, and, sometimes, pay.
Many of the militias so key in early western battles of the Civil War arrived fully formed from the bloody disputes in Kansas about which areas would be declared slave, and which free.
The Mormons had their own military and those who fought them frequently did so under the banner of a formal command.
The 1892 Johnson County War was, in many ways just a bigger case of a typical progression of a conflict.
Until after World War I, it was all too common for local disputes over land, ideology, race, and class to run through a consistant pattern starting with grumbling and discontent, rising through street brawls and bar fights, to face-offs between rival groups with those groups incrementally organized into militias with a recognized chain of command, a name, musters, and many of the characteristics of a full-fledged military. For every Indian war, range war, or union dispute listed here, there were far more going on which simply never involved official involvement by soldiers under Federal command.
Because of this, the reader is advised to assume that, as noted above about Indian wars and our actions in China, that the first events listed here usually occurred years after the initial expressions of hostility and that by the time Federal troops got involved there was a long history of strike and counterstrike, assaults and paybacks. When our soldiers have found themselves thrust into the role of peacemakers, they have all too frequently found themselves trying to reconcile appallingly simplistic cries of but he hit me first!



Future Directions:
As with so many such projects, the more we look, the more we find we do not yet know.
Future directions for us split into five directions. In all cases our ability to carry these things out is limited by our finances, which have never yet been better than paltry. However, these five directions are:
- Creation of more products for use in schools,
- Creation of more localized versions of our existing products, such as a poster dealing only with one region, such as Latin America or the Pacific, as well as versions in different languages,
- Pursuing research into incidents we have heard of but cannot sufficently document (of which notable examples are various 1970s and 1980s covert actions and alleged widespread Persian Gulf actions in the days before Desert Storm),
- More products such as pocket guides, maps and large-format posters, that help bring this and related subjects into useful focus,
- And returning to our original project of taking this chronology and the mountains of data related to it and building it into a fully relational and interactive database. (Properly tying all incidents to GIS data could itself keep several people busy for a year.)
Of course, should you know of somebody with deep pockets who might want to get involved, we would certainly be glad to hear from you.

Overall, we are well aware that this chronology is far from what it could be and is itself a rather small aspect of a project that, having been ongoing since 1996, may at best reach maturity in thirty or forty more years. We hope that it is both of use in your decision-making and intellectually satisfying.

In the meantime, I wish all of us clear minds, productive days, and serene nights.

Rustin H. Wright, archivist, writer, and official Reed and Wright voice of informed cynicism.


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Reed&Wright web site and publications, both text and graphics, are copyright Rustin H. Wright, 2006