Nothing Spooky

(General Carter Ham, USA. Photo US Army).

There is nothing particularly spooky about this Halloween, though it was painfully close when I rolled home from Uncle Julio’s last night. Willow had given up and was closed, so the Mexican place was jumping with deferred energy. It was strange watching the bartender mixing chocolate milks for the hoard of little kids who had been driving their Yuppie parents crazy in the storm.

When I got home the power was still out at the building, with the laboring emergency generator in the basement only providing enough energy for one of the elevators, subdued hallway lighting and the bare essentials for lighting the foyer.

The lobby looked like the Cantina scene in Star Wars. Big Pink’s residents were huddled there, talking to one another about the storm and clearly starting to go a little stir crazy after 27 hours inside. The unit was still cold iron, and with some ice I got from the restaurant, I made a drink in the dark and retired to my bed early. It was cool and the eiderdown welcoming, and I was startled to waken with the light on beside the bed just after midnight. The clock radio was illuminated as well, and I sat bolt upright.

I could open the refrigerator door again, and maybe put those eggs away that had been sitting there accusing me from the counter since breakfast on Tuesday.

That led to a variety of other things, now that I could see them, and I was wired when I was done cleaning up, and celebrated with a toddy at around 0200. I dozed for a while after that, right until the alarm began to squawk.
The internet was still out, but what the hell. Like everyone else here, I am just relieved that the crisis passed without a disaster like the people of New Jersey and the Big Apple experienced. There but for fortune and all that.

We are off on a new tangent for the campaign, with the President looking Presidential, vowing to cut all the red tape and nonsense to get aid to the people who need it. The campaign is carefully pointing out that Mr. Romney has previously called for the elimination of FEMA, or at least the re-subordination of it to the States, so there is nothing that goes to waste in the endless campaign.

That has to be a relief for Mr. Obama, and put the whole Benghazi mess on the back burner. With the election so near, I doubt that it will blip the mainstream narrative. Still, there are some curious things about the whole story.

I am in no position to know, but I do know the process of how these things happen. There was a lot of discussion (prior to the storm) about who knew what and when. It now appears that the people at the consulate had asked for help a couple times, and it had been denied.

The Secretary of Defense helpfully pointed out that things were sort of confused, and therefore, forces should not have been committed prematurely. It was all just unfortunate, nothing to be done.

Sounds reasonable enough, but SECDEF Panetta ignores the process. When something happens that requires the immediate attention of the President, a message called a “CRITIC” is generated within the US SIGINT SYSTEM and sent to the National Security Operations Center at Fort Meade, with information copies to all echelons of command.

There is a reason for that. The CRITIC system was put in place by the intelligence community in mid-1958, responding to a Cold War requirement that critical intelligence be communicated from the field to the “highest authorities” in “speeds approaching ten minutes.” The information copies are spread broadly throughout the system for situational awareness by any command that might have a role to play in response.

That is not to say that ten minutes is all that it takes to get word to the President. But certainly, the information that the Consulate in Benghazi was under attack got at least as far as the White House Situation Room as soon as things started to go south at the compound, and was followed by additional requests for assistance.

That is where things get lost in the fog of war, which is not so much about war, but rather about a smokescreen. The problem with these things is that unless an event like Hurricane Sandy shows up to distract attention, the word begins to leak out. Shoot, we knew with the first chaotic press reports that there was something funny about the story. Demonstrators normally do not show up with crew-served weapons and RPGs at the ready.

Certainly a public affairs hack like Thomas Donolin, the National Security Advisor, would have had the facts quickly. He fell all over himself putting out the details of the bin Laden raid, barely waiting for the helicopter to land, and heavens, I would hate to think that politics would intrude in a matter of national security.

There is more confusing information, including some muttering that the Admiral commanding the Stennis Strike Group was relieved for cause. The Navy is not saying why, and usually it is about some inappropriate personal conduct with subordinates, or alcohol or both. The Russian military intelligence service- the GRU- was circulating a story that General Carter Ham and Rear Admiral Charlie Gaouette were in cahoots to commit mutiny. I never would have considered the GRU a source of anything but maskirovka- deception- but I follow their stuff with interest as a fellow professional.

(RADM Charlie Gaouette. Photo USN.)

Whew. But the problem with the current smokescreen is that other versions of what may or may not be the truth are out there. The most incendiary is that General Carter Ham, the bulldog-jawed Commander of AFRICOM was directed to stand down from a Quick Reaction Force mission he ordered to intervene to save the US Ambassador, who apparently was in Benghazi to meet a Turkish diplomat about the transfer of weapons from the massive caches accumulated by that madcap dictator Muammar Qaddafy.

Sort of elegant, like Iran-Contra, in that it provides plausible deniability while providing weapons to the rebels in Syria. Which I am not opposed to, in principle, but of course that sort of thing  would have wound up with the impeachment of Ronald Reagan, if his National Security Advisor John Poindexter had not taken a bullet and claimed he never mentioned it to Ronnie.

The conspiracy nuts are all over it. Get out your tinfoil, but this one has some interesting aspects and I am sure the investigation will be complete before the inauguration.

Me? I am glad we dodged this bullet, and I suspect that this story will be spiked until after the election is over. It would be too complicated to explain why we had Americans are risk and did absolutely nothing about it, even though we knew.

Within ten minutes. Nothing spooky about it.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Sandy In the House

(The view from the balcony at Big Pink. The wind is starting to rise this morning as the capital braces for shock. Photo Socotra).

Alrighty, then. Yesterday was the day to get organized and maybe feel a grim, tingling sense of predestination. I have eggs, batteries, alcohol and a bad attitude all in place, ready to go.

Call it morbid, but I stayed up to the bitter end to see the Tigers disintegrate before the inexorable force that was the San Francisco Giants last night. I know Prince Fielder, the enormous Detroit First baseman, was a little short on his $214 million compensation package, since he went exactly one hit in fourteen World Series at-bats.

If he lost fifty or sixty pounds I wonder if he would have been caught at the plate in Game Two? Oh well. It is all history now.

We have been in panic mode here in Blue Arlington since last Friday. Governor MacDonald has declared a “state of emergency,” as have eight other governors. The rain is drumming down, dank and gray and chill. I have the back door to the balcony open to permit the steady pounding to echo through the unit.

The winds have not come up to any degree as yet, and there is plenty of time to put the hasp on the door should the gale threaten to rip the stout wooden structure from the steel jam.

The Federal Government is closed, and I knew that before deciding to stay up and watch the dismal last game of the Sweep in in Detroit.

I normally listen to streaming audio for NPR from places far away from here. I could do the morning commute traffic jams by heart without ever looking at a Highway Camera. It is more soothing to listen to places where the traffic is much lighter, though the hazards of the weather are real enough everywhere.

Depending on who is where in this sprawling nation, I sometimes choose Public Radio from the Square States, like Colorado or Wyoming, or spewing from the campus of Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, reporting the weather the pleasant voices report will impact “the Algoma District of Ontario” and all the way south to Flint.

This morning I just turned on the radio to listen to what is happening here.

I have a certain interest in that. I have thought through many of the bad things that could happen. The Electro Magnetic Pulse event that would fry all out computers is one, along with the crop-dusting airplane spreading nasty germs, or the suitcase nuke that has eluded someone else’s stockpile.

I don’t know what is most likely- but I think it inevitable that something bad will happen to the National Capital Region one of these days, and it might actually be today. When one deals with the man-made contingencies, the massive raw and implacable force of Nature is disconcertingly vast.

The real deal is the vagaries of weather. The Deracho wind took us unaware and un-alerted earlier this year, and wiped out the power for nearly a week. Hurricanes have flooded us out, and the Veteran’s Day snowfall buried us in two feet of heavy ice.

We don’t know quite what to make of it yet as Sandy is nearing. The rain has picked up from a blowing mist last night to something steady this morning, and we are not looking at landfall for the massive messy storm until later today, somewhere around Delaware to the Central New Jersey Coast.

We are only on the edge of things- I am not going to be optimistic just yet, but I am hoping that we will dodge the power outage and leave that to the DelMarVa peninsula.

I think the farm will be OK, if the rain does not weaken the root systems of the pine trees, and there is nothing to crash into the condos up here, so I am keeping my fingers crossed.

The upside to this is that the crisis will cause the campaigns to concentrate on looking supportive and Presidential in the face of disaster. Appearances are being cancelled, and one can only hope that the rhetoric about the storm will be tempered.

Ten inches of rain in the next day? Possible. Could it have an impact on the election? Worse, suppose there is no resolution on November 6th, and this awful process drags on and on?

One thing at a time. Mother Nature first, then the affairs of mankind.

Stupid Tigers. All hail the Giants, those bums.

(Let’s see if the rain can go sideways. More on that as it happens.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Stocking Up

The Russians were over for dinner at the farm last night. It has been two weeks since I was on the property and a lot has changed. The scarlet leaves out the kitchen window have dropped from the branches and their color is a forlorn brown in a heap near the roots.

Fall fell.

So did the stupid Tigers, now down three and on the brink of abrupt elimination by the Giants.

The Dinner was all courtesy of Tatiana and the local farmers. She prepared a slow-cooked celebration of local food. The stew was conjured from a combination of vegetables from the garden they put in- the stuff that survived the deer, anyway- and the Croftburn Market on State Route 3 near Culpeper.

Andrew Campbell, the owner, just expanded into the downtown market, so I am hoping for great things for the Culpeper Cheese Company where he has a counter. I am also hoping for great things from the garden next door in the near term, and helpful tips on growing things myself, maybe next season.

It may be the barometric pressure but I was up early, prowling the deck like the bridge of a ship looking at the outbuildings in the thin gray dawn and wondering what the winds will do to the scraggly pines on the property.

The weather maps can’t help us much, which tells you something about weather and climate, and this is an event that might be starting this afternoon, or maybe tomorrow. What does not seem likely is that we will dodge the bullet, but there is hope where there is life, I suppose.

Don-the-Builder told me that Rappahannock Co-op was pretty good about keeping the branches trimmed against the winds, and in twenty-two years in the County he had only lost power once for a significant period.

That could be useful if we get smacked Up North in Arlington. They say there will be hundreds of miles of steady, strong and damaging winds and rain for the entire Eastern region for several days. That could produce a bigger wallop than last year’s damaging Irene flood-out.

I heard the officials on the radio beginning the State of Emergency. Governor MacDonald wants us to stock up on food, water and batteries. The stores are packed with frantic citizens buying groceries, generators, candles, bread, eggs and other supplies in anticipation of power outages.

Some local governments have already canned the school days for Monday and Tuesday. The farm is battened down as well as I can get it, but just in case I have to flee the capital, I want to ensure the place is ready to go when I get here.

Here is the chart from Adams County, courtesy of alert reader Lisa, with the projected storm impact by region:

I am going to fire up the Syclone pick-up truck and mosey over to the Old House Winery and ensure I am ready for the storm.

My only real issue with the storm is this: are fifteen cases enough?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Old School

(The Piper of the 46th Naval Intelligence Dining In. He’s an acoustic physicist in his day job.)

The storm is coming, so we will drop any pretense at literary devices, cute asides of extended metaphors. This is going to be a wet week, at a minimum, and the maximum…well, it could really suck.

Hurricane Sandy- or Tropical Storm Sandy, or just that vast mass of moist swirling air- is behaving unusually. Normally, hurricanes diminish in intensity as they move north over cooler waters.

The boffins of weather forecasting demure as to the precise point of impact. This one is too tricky: before Sandy comes ashore, somewhere between here and New Jersey, she will encounter cold air bearing down from the northwest. The collision will transform Sandy from a tropical storm to something more like a winter storm. The air mass will then be able to intensify when most weather systems would be diminishing.

The transformation will eliminate the usual characteristics of a hurricane: the eye will disappear, but we will be left with an “enormous swirling mass of wind and rain, and even snow.”

Yike. So, with all this bearing down on us, it was good that we got the smaller social rituals of the Fall out of the way.

The Annual Meeting of the Professionals has been coordinated with the active duty crowd, and retirees and real sailors got together out in Tysons Corner, at the venerable Crowne Plaza Hotel. There was an address from the Intelligence Officer to Navy’s Cyber Command, which was purely non-attribution, so I can’t tell you how scared to be about what is going in back of the screen of the computer on which you read this words.

(The Chairman considers the implications of what Admiral Sam told us to be looking out for.)

Oh hell, be scared. That is another perfect storm coming our way.
The social hour was wonderful, and two glasses of white wine were just right to get to the rubber chicken and the remarks of the Chairman and the keynote address by the Vice Admiral who is now entrusted with herding the kittens of Intelligence, Cryptology, Meteorology and Public Affairs down the pier in something like a rational manner.

Two of our very good pals were honored. The first was Mac, of course, and I had to pinch myself to note that he wasn’t at one of the tables. He was so much a part of this organization that his absence left a hollow spot in the Agenda.

Rex was likewise there, at least in spirit. His son Earl Junior had made a significant contribution to the organization in honor of his Dad, and delivered from the foundation established to honor his Mom.

Arlington Cemetery had scheduled Rex’s interment for the morning of Snowmaggedon, when twenty-odd inches of cement-like white stuff entombed us all. The wet flakes were coming down as we walked downhill from the grave on the hill.

Stormy weather, loss of power and general panic ensued, and that was another weather event for the ages, totally in keeping with the solemnity of the day.

It was a good meeting, and despite the sense of loss, positive and upbeat on the weather front passing through the officer corps as the Navy moves to confront an uncertain future.

We wrapped things up just before two, and I had to get to the office to attempt to salvage the day, since Phase Two was coming at 1800 sharp.
I had the usual problems with the studs on the formal white shirt, though I was relieved to find that the tuxedo still fit. The problem with formal garb, in my experience, is that it has a distressing tendency to shrink while on the hangers in the closet over the winter.

Looking and feeling my best, I drove the Panzer over to Ensign Socotra’s house and was entertained by the chaos of  his shipmates changing out of khakis and into bow-ties and mess dress.

You should see the racks of medals on this generation of officers. It is quite amazing, but reasonable, considering that the nation has been at war since these kids were in junior high school.

It was a short jaunt over to Ft. Myer, where the Dining In has returned to the Officer’s Club on the bluff overlooking the capital and Arlington National. The Chairman of the Joint Staff lives nearby, along with the Chief of Staff of the entire US Army.

It is a return to another era walking into that club. If there are other O Clubs still in existence, this might be the last that continues in the full flower of the Old School tradition.

Drinks were in the Koran Room, an oddly prophetic name for a cocktail lounge, and the new Piper was in the lobby, waiting the moment to pipe the assembled Mess to the big dining room upstairs. We chatted for a while- he is a nuclear physicist, by the way, and we talked about the peril of going down in the Sedan Crater at the Nevada Test Site while I snapped pictures and juggled a glass of Chablis as the officers swirled around us.

The Dining In was a venerable tradition of the Old School of Naval Intelligence. It was placed on hiatus, since the institution viewed as a bastion of possible resistance to the consolidation of the old four Restricted Line communities into the Corps of Information Dominance.

The full effects of the merger have not been internalized, but moral is the essence of vitality in a profession that is laden with tradition, if not monetary remuneration.

(Chief of Chaplains leads Admirals Sam, Kendal and John to their places at the head table to the strains of the pipes.)

Admiral Sam was president of the mess, and he presided on a transformation of the tradition to one much more approachable and fun. The old ones featured rigid adherence to the ancient forms, and a sort of ritual humiliation to ensure compliance.

The traditions were all still there: the Piper gearing up “Scotland the Brave,” and piping the Brass to the head table.

A superb a capella version of the Anthem was sung by a junior officer.

 

The Beef was presented to The President of the Mess, who though a vegetarian, pronounced it fit for consumption for those who indulge in that sort of thing.

There was a remarkable moment in which the Oldest Living Active Sailor called out the distinguished guest, and insisted on moving the Aviator Wings from the top of the rows of medals to the bottom, replacing them with the warfare pin of the Corps of Information Dominance.

Highly symbolic, like the video from Hawaii that pointedly reminded the crowd of the Pivot to the Pacific. The traditional skits were in the manner of Foc’sle Follies, a forum in which the Juniors can say whatever they desire about their Seniors without fear of retribution.

It is a new officer corps, and one that looks like America. I am very proud of them.

Plus, the food wasn’t bad, the remarks were light and upbeat, and there were few of the retirees who used to pack the audience and subdued the natural high spirits of the kids. Now, a trip to the Grog Bowl for minor Mess infractions is just good fun.

It was a great show, and went on well past the assigned time of closing. The Ensign and his pals were off to someplace else to follow, but I am old now and just wanted to get home to Big Pink and get to bed.

It was a big day, and not a drop of rain to spoil it.

Not like what is going to start smacking us late tomorrow.

Bring it on, Sandy. Let’s see what you got. There is plenty in the grog-locker to get us through.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Perfect Storm

I was trained as a worst-case analyst of military capabilities and human nature. Accordingly, I knew things were going to get worse. Sure enough, they have.

I have veered over into denial over the performance of the Tigers. They got body-slammed by the Giants again last night, and are going back to Detroit two games in the hole. To avoid depression, I was actually looking morbidly at the poll numbers this morning and the antics of the candidates on the campaign trail. Sorry, I could not resist. There are some great stories out there as the rhetoric races to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

I won’t dignify any of it by citation. There are less than a dozen days until we will no longer listen to all this- well, let’s call it what one of the candidates does: bullshit. I have noticed one interesting and positive indication:  Michele Obama and her husband and that guy from Michigan or Massachusetts or wherever are no longer peering at me intently from the right-hand ad banner that AOL has inserted into my email.

It is quite liberating. I think that means that the campaigns have already decided the Virginia vote, and we are no longer a “battleground state” and they have decided to leave us alone. That is a curious thing, since there are big things still in play that could impact Election Day and Halloween.

The difference between the two holidays is as razor thin as they are telling us the election will be. In the case of the former holiday, we get to vote between two candidates who are pretending to be something they are not, and in the latter, we all get to pretend we are all someone else and everything is just fine.

It is too late to find anything substantive to argue about, and I won’t attempt to bullshit you on that. I am nervous. I will accept that no one is talking about Sequestration, since that is not a matter over which the President, whoever it might be, has any direct control. The Office of Management and Budget has responsibility for implementing what the Congress has mandated- and apparently they are not talking about what the massive whack to the budget is going to do. No one else is, either, so it could be a perfect storm of activity in the Lame Duck Congress that comes back after the election.

Those would be the same Bozos who legislated the thing to begin with, by the way, so why we would expect them to do anything courageous is quite beyond me.

Neither of the candidates is saying anything about Global Warming or Climate Change or whatever the term of art might be this morning. I have a grim fascination with that, since Hurricane Sandy is headed this way.

Weather is not climate, as we have been told by some, or this is the Crack of Doom according to others. But the issue clearly has not been selling very well to an electorate clearly preoccupied with other matters.

I have decided to buy into the hype about the storm. Weather has become show business these days, and the eponymously-named Channel is filled with news of apprehension and dread. We are still smarting over the savage Deracho wind event that knocked the nation’s capital off the grid for a week this last Spring, and I am prepared to believe that this could be bad.

The matter at hand is Hurricane Sandy, which weakened to a category 1 hurricane last night, after raking itself along the island of Cuba, killing nearly a dozen people on the eastern end of the island, and dumping rain on the detainees in Guantanamo.

Sandy is not the most deadly storm to hit Cuba in recent memory. That renown goes to cat-5 Hurricane Dennis in the summer of 2005. Out problem is the course of the jet stream and an early-winter cold front headed east. That system could slam into the vast moisture-laden corpus of Sandy’s stately progress to the north over the next few days. Some of the storm tracks have the storm cutting to the left right over the Potomac. Others have New York in the cross hairs.

Either one is going to get us wet. The question is whether our roofs will stay on.

Unlike the Deracho event, the power companies have a chance to prepare for this, and crews are being placed on alert as far away as Michigan and Ohio. Preparations are good, and I would hate for the power to be out all across the Northeast on Election Day.

Worse, I would hate to miss Halloween. Tracy O’Grady’s Willow is going to feature fortune-tellers and costume-themed prizes for the evening. I have not figured out the right costume yet, but a fisherman’s oil slicker, hip boots and a Sou’Wester might be just the thing.

I don’t know about perfect storms, like the political ones in 2008 and 2010, but I am prepared to believe that this one could go right beyond weather and straight to metaphor.

And that event, my friends, is why storm preparation is the key. Avoid literary devices. Lay in a stock of TP, eggs and milk just like the people on the Weather Channel recommend. And vote early.

Why wait?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

After Midnight

Our Boss at THIRD Fleet, Vice Admiral herb “The Superb” Browne used to say “nothing good happens after midnight.” He was usually referring to the arrests or incidents in Tijuana at the Monday morning staff recitation of human failure. I would expand it to other events on the Left Coast, last night’s case in point being from San Francisco.

The evening had just about everything. I got a call from Ensign Socotra when I finally wound the Panzer into the space down in the garage and returned to the safety and comfort of my unit high above the green tarpaulin-covered pool at Big Pink. It was from my younger son about his meeting with the dreaded Detailer today. That is the term for the officer who passes out the orders for his next job- the one that should send him to The Fleet in some aspect.

This is one of the more traumatic rituals of military service- the obligatory conversation that will determine where in the wide world an officer will serve, and what they are expected to do when they get there.

The Navy is a complex system with many requirements for intelligence specialists, but mostly it is like everything else: round holes to be filled with square pegs, jamming young officers into aviation squadrons, or ships, or the more unusual and exotic requirements of the Special Warfare crowd- the SEALs.

The Ensign is prepared and has done his homework to prepare.

I know how this works from both sides of the desk, as supplicant and survivor. I was a Detailer in my day, a stressful job if you overthink it, and a challenge in any event, since people seem to be very sensitive about their lives. I recall a trip to Rota, Spain, one time in which I was scheduled to meet with the dozens of junior officers at our intelligence center there, plus the squadron kids onboard Coral Sea, the aircraft carrier in the Med at the time, just completing an extended cruise and six or seven months away from homeport.

Someone managed to snatch my briefcase at some point during an extended stint at the bar at the Rota Officer’s Club, and launched it over the balustrade of the club.

I got the briefcase back since it had only gone a dozen feet down the hill, but the contents were strewn downslope and I could not see them in the darkness. Consequently, I had to rise with the dawn’s early light to track down the scattered “preference sheets’ though which the officers up for orders communicated their desires to the Bureau of Personnel.

I think I found most of them, though it is possible that some individual desires were not accommodated by the system. Go figure.

Anyway, once I made the usual platitudes (though specifically I did not use the “bloom where planted” mantra. Screw that.) I just asked him to keep me posted and turned on the first game of the World Series.

I arrived at Fox Channel 5 just in time to see Giant center fielder “Kung Fu Panda” Pablo Sandoval hit a solo home run in the first inning, on an 0-2 pitch off Justin Verlander. I knew it was going to go south from there, just a feeling, and went to bed. In saw this morning that the Giants went on to knock Justin off the mound in only four innings, after three more runs in the third, and another couple HRs from The Panda, tying a record for Series home runs in a single game. Seeing the whole messy 8-3 Giants victory would not have made me feel any better than I do now.

But early to bed, early to rise is a good thing, I guess.

I am scanning the news for portents of what is to come. If the Series goes on like this, the Giants could put the Tigers away in four. Verlander was supposed to be the ace who would be good for two wins- his failure to win his first start puts the Bengals in the hole, big time, and throws off the scheme for the rest of the pitching rotation against the San Franciscans.

We will see, I guess. But baseball is supposed to be in the afternoon, not at midnight. Herb the Superb was completely correct.

The Series could be over in less than a week. Then there will be nothing to occupy our attention before Thanksgiving.

Or maybe there is something else. The election is going to be tight, they say. I imagine the news won’t be in until after midnight at the earliest. I am betting Herb will be right about that one, too.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The View from Ankara

(The Citadel at Ankara, Turkey.)

This has been a tumultuous week, hasn’t it? I don’t know about you, but between the loss of old friends and the impressive come-back of the San Francisco Giants to meet the Detroit Tigers tonight in Game One of the World Series my emotions have been whip-sawed quite effectively.

I am a little late this morning, and will have to dip a toe in politics, something that I have attempted to keep at arms-length due to its toxic aura. My intent was to write about the three kittens who have appeared on the porch of Willow owner Tracy O’Grady. It is a cute story.

Instead, I was forced to confront the political mess today because a talented Turkish Journalist of my acquaintance is writing a piece on the American election for a paper in Ankara and asked me for my thoughts. I got off on doing that, trying to capture my feelings about the circus and feeling unease about what is happening in our great nation.

What is one to make of a choice of between flavors of economic folly and balanced against an implacable attempt to restrict individual rights? Where is the choice? Here is what I said:

“The campaign leading to what some people are calling the “most significant election in our lifetimes” here has been very strange.

It has been a tumultuous four years for us who live under the Obama Administration. For the first two years, the President had an unassailable majority in the House and Senate. America was in the grip of an economic malaise unprecedented in nearly a century. Wall Street was out of control, and the depths of depravity had yet to be plumbed. The phrase “too big to fail” was applied to the big investment banks. It really should have been applied to the complex system-of-systems that is America itself.

I have the Newsweek cover that symbolized the time pinned up on my office wall: “We are all Socialists now!” are the words below an image of a red hand clasping a blue hand. I think Newsweek just announced they were going to stop publishing the magazine in hard copy, so maybe we are not.

I snorted when I saw it. America is a center-right nation that occasionally veers to the left. This is at variance with an educated class that is overwhelmingly liberal in outlook and Democrat-oriented in politics. The swooning over a President who represents progressive change made- and makes- the traditional media a virtual adjunct to the Democratic National Committee.

With that complete dominance of social discourse, Mr. Obama rushed to the rescue of the global economy by turning over management of the more pressing issues to his financial team and an ambitious plan to nationalize (and rationalize) the health care sector of the economy- a 25% share of the gross domestic product. It really should be known as PelosiCare, but enough. It is what it is.

Between the last-gasp stimulus of the Bush Administration and the first floodgates of Mr. Obama’s, more than a trillion and a half dollars were thrown at supplementing strapped state budgets, at allegedly “shovel ready” public works projects and green energy initiatives.

Had any of this been without controversy and corruption, things might have gone well, but they did not. The public works projects were steered to Obama supporters. The green technology projects were not ready for prime time- and many of the largest and politically connected ones have gone bust, first with solar panel manufacturer Solyndra and most recently A123, a battery producer that failed along with the innovative and problematic Chevy Volt. It was a total loss of taxpayer money, and the manifold failures of the vast give-away program sparked the rise of the Tea Party and the resurgent Republican base in the 2010 elections.

The last two years of the Obama administration has had many good words and little progress. The Republican majority in the House has stymied the President’s initiatives while the Democratic Senate has played political rope-a-dope with the grandstanding of the pugnacious House leadership. Nothing of legislative consequence has been achieved since the 2010 election.

Not having a great deal of experience with anything except campaign politics, Mr. Obama has demonized the opposition, and accomplished nothing. His campaign strategy against Governor Romney has been the same, and the recently concluded series of debates has only demonstrated that Mr. Romney is a pretty good guy, not the monster straw man that Mr. Obama’s campaign has created.

Not that Romney is a really good guy- he is a compromise candidate who had to “run right” in the primaries and “run to the middle” for the general election.

I am far too libertarian in outlook to be comfortable with either of the Big Government parties, and the Taliban wing of the Republican Party is far too willing to insert government into my life for me to be very happy with them. The issues there are things that I find offensive: Women should have control of their own reproductive lives, people should be able to marry whoever they wish (and suffer the consequences), smoke what they want (or not), insure their health (or not) and generally live lives without the intrusive assistance of the Federal Government.

To say that the government is dysfunctional is to be charitable. Mr. Obama’s record is abysmal and the recent news of improving unemployment numbers is widely viewed as suspicious in the extreme. Since the record is not defensible in any rational manner, the drumbeat of Romneysia-style insults has had to stand as an outline for a second Obama administration.

Which is to say, there is no agenda.

People have watched the debates and seen that Governor Romney seems much more likable than the caricature the President has been running against. The polls reflect that trend, depending on which ones you believe. It may not suffice to provide a victory for Mr. Romney, and in one of the more likely scenarios, Mr. Obama will return while the Republicans will hold the House and gain in Senate, though the Democrats will retain a slim majority.

That is a recipe for more gridlock in a second Obama administration, problems for an initial Romney administration, and uncertainty for the Middle East as the dust settles.

Mr. Romney’s relationship with Mr. Netanyahu suggests greater solidarity with the Jewish State, if he is elected. Will he countenance a war with Iran, when there is so much war fatigue here? If Mr. Obama is returned, it will probably mean “doubling down” on the muddled American response to the Arab Spring, and no one quite knows what that means.

Whatever happens, the US government is still borrowing nearly half the money it spends. That can mean no long-term good for the looming debt and entitlement picture, though austerity imposed to solve that problem will cause massive dissatisfaction, if not outright violence.

It is going to be interesting, if not ominous, regardless of what happens. I am eager (and resigned) to discover what will come of things after the sixth of November.

Could it be a Republican Congress and President? Or will it be a mix-and-match return of a rudderless administration accompanied by more gridlock and governance by decree?

Talk to me in 13 days.”

I will be interested to see what my pal makes of that, if anything, and the general perspective from Ankara, which is tempered by the impact of mortar rounds fired from disintegrating Syria next door, a ruling Islamist party democratically elected to head a secular state, the looming Iran Problem and the chaotic consequences of the incomplete Arab Spring across the region.

The weekend seems a long way away. I am looking forward to getting down to the farm where nothing at all is changing except the color of the leaves on the trees.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

It’s Debatable

Thank God. The Debates are over. Four of them, if you count the AAA-ball version of the Battle of the Veeps, Smokin’ Joe versus Paul Ryan.

I made the mistake of clicking over from the ballgame to the debate last night once I got back from Willow. I was watching the St. Louis Cardinals unravel in Game Seven, replete with errors, and it looked like the Giants from Baghdad-By-the-Bay were going to advance to meet my Tigers of the Motor City.

I was encouraged that it would not be St. Louis to play in the World Series. We did that in 1968, when the world was new. So fifteen minutes ago. Flipping over to the all-politics, all-the-time channel to see what the candidates were up to, I did not know quite what to think, even when the yammering was done. The Governor seemed to acquit himself pretty well. I mean, who knows how to pronounce the name of that idiot President of Iran, anyway?

The President was much closer to being on his game than he has been, though he was clearly irritated at some of his challenger’s assertions about the remarkable last four years. It is a little disconcerting. I certainly don’t blame the candidates for being a little shell-shocked. This last two weeks is going to be a blur for them out there on the road. The President is going to be using Air Force One as a camper, blistering his way across the battleground states. The talking heads are saying that the sprint to the final is just beginning; it makes me tired just watching the frenetic effort.

It is debatable as to whether this means anything in particular. The polls are either razor thin, or breaking away, or settling, depending on which one you examine. There is only one that matters, and that will be in exactly two weeks.

The best line of the evening was the President’s, and since the topic was my beloved and slightly bedraggled Navy, my ears pricked up. The Governor suggested that the Fleet that has declined to a level not seen since the pre-World War One naval building program.

“Well, Governor,” responded the President, voice dripping contempt, “we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.” Mr. Obama then proceeded to give a tutorial on some of the amazing capabilities in the current force. Apparently there are ships on which airplanes can land, and an astonishing capability for some ships to go all the way underwater, powered on nuclear energy or something.

It occurred to me that a cavalry charge with fixed bayonets still has an imperative all its own, and the folks who were besieged in Benghazi for seven long hours would have welcomed one with open arms. Airplanes could have flown there in less than an hour from ships at sea, or land based from bases in Italy, but of course they did not.

I thought it was interesting that the political football de jour centered on a year just two before our pal Mac was born in Iowa, which shows you how things go around in the course of a century. Three hundred, four hundred ships. I don’t know what the correct number might be. I know how the Navy counts it, though, and that is how long you have to stay out there until the mission is complete. The fewer the number of ships, the longer the kids have to steam out of sight of the shore.

Something has got to give. There is not enough money in the world to pay for everything, and despite all the arguing, no one is talking about how to adjust expectations to reality.

We were talking about it at the Willow Bar last night. It felt a little like old times: The Ensign was there, looking crisp in his khakis. Elisabeth-with-an-S was on the civilian side of the bar, looking sleek and relaxed; The Master Chief elbowed his way into the Amen Corner for refreshment, the Johns, both with and without H’s were there, in between Clean Coal receptions up the street, Senior Executive Jeff popped up, and some business got done between Jake, Melissa and a couple company guys who were new in the rotation in between tall glasses of Mac’s favorite brew, Bell’s Two Hearted Ale, and the famous Willow Happy Hour White wine.

I realized the shock of Mac’s departure is beginning to transition into a sort of grudging acceptance. Earlier, Mac’s family was working the details to mark his passing- Mary Pat at Murphy’s Funeral Home was at her efficient best, working contacts with churches and Arlington National Cemetery on the speaker phone as the Family worked through the long list of official documents, notifications and logistical details, I was impressed with the number of things that Mac had pre-arranged.

There was absolutely no debate about the fact that his preparation was thorough, and I resolved for the twentieth time or so to “get my shit together” about the paperwork required to exit this life with as much grace and efficiency as he did. Murphy’s is going to do me, too, whenever that happens, and I made a little checklist to get started.

I looked at it blankly when I got back to the office. It is debatable if I will get much done in the near term, and will probably defer things until it is too late. Good luck, kids.

It will be a busy week, culminating in the Annual Meeting of our little professional association and the Intelligence Dining In formal dinner this Friday.

Once we get beyond all that, the memorial service has been set for a week from Thursday, two in the afternoon at Faith Lutheran Church just up the road from Big Pink.

After I made a note to look up the characteristics of the astonishing warships the candidates talked about. Airplanes actually landing on ships. Who would have thunk it?

For God’s sake, let’s get this thing over with. There is life to be celebrated, life to be lived. Let’s get on with actually doing something about it, shall we?

(One of those amazing ships that can carry airplanes. Photo USN via Battlefleet.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

A Fine and Private Place

(Poet Andrew Marvell).

“The Grave’s a fine
And private place.
But none, I think,
Do there embrace.”

-Andrew Marvell, 1650

I fell asleep watching the Giants-Cards game last night. The brown chair seemed to reach around me and carry me to a private place of contemplation on the inside of my eyelids. It was a valiant try to stay awake after the tumult of the weekend. I don’t care that much about the National League Championship, but it is time to do my homework and see who the likely heroes are going to be when the matter is resolved after Game Seven, and the just who the opponents to the American League Detroit Tigers is going to be.

I know, I know. Why worry about fluff and nonsense when the reality of our short lives on this planet is so stark? Because we can’t take it in, not all at once. It will take a while for the world to stop wobbling. Mine has wobbled quite enough for one season, I think, so deferring rational thought to observation of men playing a boy’s game seems completely reasonable.

These trips to the Fall Classic of baseball, the World Series, are periodic for my home town heroes. The Tigers have won the Series four times, so there is no albatross on their white home uniforms like there was for the Red Sox and the Curse of the Bambino, or worse, for the loveable-loser Cubbies of Chicago. Forgive me a little emotion, since this has been an emotional few days. Detroit has always been a blue-collar team representing what used to be a blue-collar city. They are the oldest continuous one-name, one-city franchise in the American League, and have been playing inside the city limits for well over a hundred years- since 1894.

The Motor City is sinking into a small market team. Wayne County has declined from the fourth largest in America to the second-largest in the state of Michigan.

The Tigers are a legit hood-ornament for the bedraggled city. They were one of the original eight American League franchises, and periodically they inspire and compel.

Like 1968. I remember it as if it were yesterday: Coach “Mugsy” McGinnis calling us in from our positions on the practice field to listen to innings with particular significance on a little transistor radio. That was a victory for the ages, we thought at the time. It was a good run for the latter days of the American Century, and the Bengals came back in 1984, when we lived in Hawaii and were transitioning from working at Pacific Fleet headquarters to the staff of Bull Halsey’s old command, THIRD Fleet, then home-ported on Ford Island.

That is just one of the crossroads in which I could see my pal Mac, and the impact of his astonishing life. He had been at FIRST Fleet in San Diego, of course, in the mid-1950s, doing much the same mission as we did later, and he was the Assistant Intelligence Officer for the Pacific Fleet after the war concluded, and then again as the N2 in the sprawling Vietnam conflict.

For the 1984 Series, the Ex was pregnant with our younger son. The life transition of the time was pretty amazing. Marriage and two kids in Paradise changed life in every respect. Having one little kid was one thing, and it did not account for the remarkable familial dynamics where the opposing forces in high chairs and strollers almost outnumber you.

My wife was back in the Motor City to visit family when the riotous celebration that followed the victory over the San Diego Padres overtook the sedan in which she was riding. She said it was terrifying.

I do not recall 1968 being frightening, not that way. Maybe the behavioral conduct of society had changed by that time. I will have to think about that in more detail. Maybe the ‘60s were a watershed in more ways than just the rending of the social fabric to make celebration almost identical to riot.

I am sort of at a loss about what to scribble about this morning. I don’t want to dwell on Mac’s death, but I have not sorted out my sense of loss and disappointment at his abrupt departure.

What a freaking year; 2012 will go down in my personal annals as the most momentous of my life. Of course, there is plenty of this year to go, and the results of the debate, then the election, and then sorting out what Congress is going to look like and what it will do about the looming tax-and-Sequestration hoo-hoo that kick in even before whoever will get inaugurated at the end of January.

Crap.

But, I was thinking about taking a step back and looking at Mac’s astonishing life: long, honorable and filled with sacrifice and laughter.

I am glad I was able to escort him out to the Nimitz Day ceremony at the Office of Naval Intelligence, his last official trip. I was thinking about calling today’s story “A Man in Full,” borrowing the title of Tom Wolfe’s thick novel, and then I realized there is much more to it than that.

You cannot do it better than Mac did it. I am in awe of that. I have the rough draft of the “rest of the book,” that will cover the rest of his Navy career, and then the one after CIA. He was reluctant to speak of what he did at CIA, and so we will go light on that part. He told me some of that was still sensitive, or at least he considered it so. I asked point blank in one session what it was, and he grunted and told me. I won’t trouble you with it this morning, but there is world enough and time to get to it later.

Mac was heavily involved in the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process by which there was oversight on Intelligence Activities. He worked for a decade at CIA, but was drawn away by the increasing demands of his wife’s decline. He was primary care-giver for a decade, doing the cooking and cleaning, before Billie needed the additional care that only a nursing facility could provide.

Billie had been a nurse herself before embarking on a career in the real estate trade, always a good bet here in Washington.

That was one of the touching tales of his later years. The unique aspect of the real estate trade meant dividing up weekend duty responsibility of the agents. Billie had weekend duty one time just after the company had installed a new PBX phone system. The course of the disease had rendered her unable to manage the new phones, and Mac went in with her to operate it and route the calls.

Finally it was too much. Mac and his son took Billie to the facility, and the nurses there asked Billie to go on rounds with them. The familiar routine seemed to comfort her, and the transition to full-time care caused no complaint from her. It was another decade before she passed, and in the meantime Mac became involved in volunteer efforts to help people understand and cope with the ravages of a terrible, terrible disease.

He certainly helped me in dealing with the slow and painful loss of my Dad Raven. Some of his quotes seared with irony that came from hard experience.

“When you have seen one case of dementia,” he said solemnly at the Willow Bar, “you have seen one case of dementia.”

The corollary to the awful process was his description of Pneumonia as: “the Alzheimer’s patient’s best and last friend.”

(Mac dedicates a portrait of FADM Chester Nimitz at the Office of Naval Intelligence earlier this month. Nimitz OPINTEL Center Skipper Andrea Pollard is to the left, and Chester Nimitz Lay, the admiral’s grandson, is to the right. Photo ONI).

Mac was a man in full. His life was complete, his analytic skills were undimmed, even at the end, his sense of joy was never diminished by the aches and pains of aging. “It is not for sissies,” he said. And he went out on his own, and with his decision-making skills completely intact as he directed the Hospice people to turn up the morphine drip.

Damn, he was a good guy.

I can’t say that English poet Andrew Marvell was a pal- he was in his “fine and private place” centuries before our turn came to pirouette for a moment on the grand stage. Andy left us something good, though. His poem “To His Coy Mistress” has lines that resonate still, reminding us about Time’s Winged Chariot hot on our heels, and that if there was world enough, and time, we could accomplish great things.

I have the rest of that book on our pal Mac that I need to put together, while there is time. I will complete the manuscript, and may inflict some of it on you before we are done here. He was a man in full, to borrow Tom Wolfe’s phrase, and his life is worth celebrating.

I will fill you in on the outline of that book tomorrow. Plus, we will know if it is going to be the Cards or the Giants who face off against Detroit in the morning. It was the Cards the Tigers faced in 1968.

I remember. It was a fine thing.

(Tiger catcher Bill Freehan blocks “Sweet Lou” Brock of the Cardinals at the plate to save the Series. Photo Detroit Free Press.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Traveling

(Mac Showers at the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor this last June on the 70th Anniversary of the Battle of Midway).

I did not know that the Tigers had swept the Yankees, a first for anyone against the titans in Pinstripes in 32 years.

I rose at 0300 on Thursday morning to catch a connecting flight from one place to another, and prepared to drag bags through a couple airports.

The flight from Reagan National was a piece of cake, if one discounts the dull ache from being in a parking structure at 0430. No one else was around and the TSA screeners must change shifts around then to prepare for the rush of early activity when noise abatement rules say the jets can start launching out of Alexandria and into the wide world.

Anyway, no muss and no fuss on the first attempt at air travel since the accident.

The complexities of age occurred to me as I lurched out of my seat from the first leg of the trip at O’Hare in Chicago. There are so many things to think about in the Windy City. I had some great times with my son there, when he was living in Wrigleyville just a couple blocks from the grand old steel-girdered stadium.

I was going to write you a story this morning about Butch O’Hare, the Navy pilot whose heroics inspired a nation in the dark days after Pearl Harbor. An F4F-3 Wildcat pulled from the bottom of Lake Michigan harks back to the days when two converted lake boats served as fresh-water training platforms for Navy pilots far from the prying eyes of enemy U-Boats the lurked under the surface of the big salt water.

The fresh water aircraft carriers were on the lake front when Mac was a Midshipman, and there may be- or have been- a couple hundred Navy fighters on the sandy bottom. A company has entered into a partnership with the Naval Aviation Museum- I could go off on a tanget about the differences between ocean and fresh-water salvage law, but I won’t.

I did take a couple pictures of one of the salvaged Hellcats. It is on the concourse on the long hike between the “B” terminal and the “F” wing where the regional jets fly.

It was interesting- I thought I would send the pictures to Mac and see if they brought back some recollections of the fresh-water aircraft carriers and Butch O’Hare’s heroics in his Pacific.

And I was writing things up that way when Mac’s son called. He took ill on Monday, which is why he did return my email or answer his phone. He was at the Arlington Medical Center ER, and then, according to his son, was transferred to hospice care.

He was having some difficulty breathing, but he was lucid as ever. Naturally, he weighed the options and elected the course that would allow him to sleep.

I asked his son what the doctors were telling him, and wondered for the second time this year, if I could make it across the country in time to beat something final.

His son told me yesterday it was hours or days. Today it appears to be hours. It is Mac’s choice and on Mac’s terms.

Pray for him, won’t you? If this is it, we are all going to be losing a really good pal.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com