Category: The Grab Bag

This post originally appeared in The Nugget News, December 27, 2016 If you are a parent – particularly a father – and you have a daughter, or if you like great movie scenery, or even if you are merely a curmudgeon with gender axes to grind, here’s a fun holiday season idea: Go see “The ...

This piece originally appeared in the Nugget News, November 8, 2016 I have a photograph somewhere, taken from the rear seat of a British Norman Islander, of my father and uncle. My uncle, the captain on this flight between Pago Pago and the Samoan island of Ofu, is hoisting a beer and flashing a decidedly ...

This piece originally appeared in The Nugget News, August 30, 2016. Hohenfels, Germany:  One of my companions for the evening was U.S. Marine Gunnery Sergeant Robert Gallup. Gallup, 32, was wounded in the second battle of Fallujah in 2004, scene of the bloodiest fighting in the Iraq War, where 82 Americans were killed, and some ...

This article originally appeared in The Nugget Newspaper, August 23, 2016. Joint Multinational Readiness Center, Hohenfels, Germany: On the outskirts of this training village, known to the real world as Raversdorf but today serving as the notional Afghan village of Spinchai, someone has propped a large stuffed panda on a fence. The panda stares out over ...

This article originally appeared as one in a three part series in the Nugget Newspaper, August 16, 2016 Hohenfels, Germany.  There is a grim certainty of purpose among the 30-odd professional military officers gathered in the room. We are at the orders briefing, in a non-descript hut among a village of huts, berms and concrete ...

If I have any readers left, I would like to assure you that I will soon be returning to this page in force.  Although I am, in theory, retired from gainful employment, my life seems to have become busier than I would have expected.  Here on the Figure 8 we have many, many, irons in ...

In my last post, I promised that Jim Cornelius and I were up to something.  Here’s a sample.  It’s a mindset, it’s a way of life, it’s a business card.  This is just a teaser of what is to come.  More important things on the general theme will follow soon…just you wait.

This one comes by request from a very good friend, but it will stand some explanation. Recently, I wrote a column piece for the paper discussing our garden. The point, more or less, was that we aren’t raising a garden for amusement. We are trying to raise food, and a lot of it, as much ...

Been a few days, friends, but I could explain if I felt compelled too.  I don’t, but will anyway, because if you are here, we are probably to some degree simpatico.  You already understand.  Life, in the modern world, is busy, and we have things to do and people to meet and deadlines to appease. ...

“The Road March is the crucible in which the soul is refined. Pulling a trigger is easy. Humping the load over the distance is where you find out who will be on the ambush site to pull the trigger with you.  The Road March defines you.  Never quit.  Come in ugly if you have to, ...