Mission Creep
Ever since human beings have gathered together with enough organization to marshal an army, they have succumbed to the temptation of allowing their military objectives to gradually shift and circumstantially over-commit to any manner of unanticipated objectives. But it wasn’t until the 1990’s in Somalia and the Blackhawk Down problems in Mogadishu that some NYT or WAPO journalist came up with a catchy term to explain what was turning into U.S. State Department policy mush. That feel-bad drift towards more troops and less success on the ground became known as “mission creep”.
I’ve always liked the expression and find myself repeating it in my head the way someone can get stuck in a repetition of words like “pumpkin” over and over again until it looses all meaning and just becomes a funny sounding word. Mission sounds important and creep sounds nasty sneaky. A mission creep could be a noun and could be a person who stands in your way, but most often it is a noun that describes a state of being that implies that things are fluid and perhaps unfavorably so.
The first of the California Missions was built 254 years ago here in San Diego. Under the leadership of Father Junipero Serra, an original Franciscan priest (who paled around with St. Francis of Assisi himself) from Majorca, Spain who had found some success as the founder of missions in mainland Mexico and Baja California that followed the Archdiocese of Mexico history of one hundred years of mission expansion into the Texas territories. This was in the days that the Spanish Crown seemed way ahead of the game of conquest in the new land of the Western Hemisphere. The goal Father Serra envisioned was to put a few missions along the coast of the land north of the Baja in what was being called Alta California. The weather seemed nice, the landscape was pretty and covered with succulent flowers of extreme brilliance, which came to be known as ice plants and are still popular around here, and the local Native American people were more friendly than not compared to others that the Spaniards and Mexicans had encountered. The assumption was that life was good and the living was easy in this paradise, so the indigenous people had no need to be bloodthirsty the way they were in Central Mexico and in other parts of the North American continent. The first mission was set at the mouth of the San Diego River, near what we now appropriately call Old Town (note that the Alcala Mission has since been moved inland by six miles to give the Franciscans more arable land to exploit to make the mission more revenue-rich for the mission of converting the locals to Christianity).
Father Serra spent the next thirteen years founding a total of nine of the 21 existing missions in the string of pearls that dot the California coast. His nine took him as far north at Carmel on the Monterey Peninsula. Most people assume that since there is about thirty miles in between each of the twenty one of the missions, that they were built as a progression to create the equivalent of the Caravanserai of the Silk Road with the separation representing one day’s ride in between each. That may be how it ended up and perhaps how they were eventually connected, but the pattern of establishment was far more random and the sixth mission founded by Father Serra was one only sixty or so miles north of the original Alcala Mission in San Juan Capistrano, just north of what is now San Clemente and Dana Point. It took over twenty years for some erstwhile priest to decided that it was too far from Alcala to San Juan Capistrano, so they put another Mission San Luis Rey in the middle between them in what is now Oceanside. Since we are quite close to Mission San Luis Rey, that means we are equidistant between Alcala and San Juan Capistrano.
The Mission in San Juan Capistrano is, in Kim and my opinion, the prettiest of the twenty one missions, so we joined as members of the mission three years ago and probably go there a few times every year to take visitors to the best of the missions that is still relatively nearby. What we like about the Mission is that it is partially in ruin and partially intact and their gardening volunteers plant the courtyards magnificently with a full array of indigenous California plants, trees and flowers that look and feel like they may have to Father Serra all those years ago when he first came to the spot to found the mission.
The Mission is also special to me because my half-sister Diane was married to Doug Avery, scion of the six-generation California family that owned the 230,000-acre ranch, known as Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores in Orange County that encompassed the original Mission San Juan Capistrano. While Abraham Lincoln returned the Mission to the Roman Catholic Church, who had been forced to secularize it thirty years earlier by the Mexican Government, it was a mess and the family made a significant donation to help restore parts of it and in return were granted a special chapel that to this day is where all children born into that family get baptized in a private ceremony with an antique baptismal gown embroidered over the years with all of their names. That strikes me as an impressive family connection to the history of California and I get vicarious pleasure out of thinking about it when I visit.
Today Kim, Mike, Melisa and I took a roadtrip to Mission San Juan Capistrano…just for fun. We walked the courtyards, bought a few trinkets, had lunch at a favorite nearby bistro that we like, and then drove to CostCo San Clemente to keep Mike happy (Mike likes to visit every CostCo in the world as often as he can). We then drove back home down the 5 along the coast through Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps’ major West Coast staging platform that comprises 122,798 acres of the camp. The land was gifted by Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores to the government in 1942 as the nation mobilized against the Japanese threat in the Pacific. In exchange, the Camp Pendleton logo incorporates the Ranch’s cattle brand in honor of the donation by the family that my half-sister married into. I think of that as I drive the many miles of wide open camp property along the Pacific. I also think about my friend Jay Paxton who is the highest ranking military officer ever to graduate from Cornell University. He is a retired 4-star Marine Corps General who ended his career a few years ago as Deputy Commandant of the Corps. One of his jobs along the way was to be Commandant of Camp Pendleton.
Jay once told me that when he was the Chief of Staff for General Schwarzkopf when he headed the Central Command for Desert Storm, he kept a spreadsheet of all the activities involved in the war and he watched it grow to an enormous 47 sub-spreadsheet model that lumbered the military through the pains of mission creep until we left Iraq….momentarily. None of that matters in the grand scheme of things any more, but its what comes to mind when I do my version of mission creep up to San Juan Capistrano as we did today.