(Group of officers of the 837th Squadron, 487th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force at RAF Lavenham, Sussex, England. Uncle Dick is third from left, back row.)
I would have written about D-Day this morning, 69 years ago. I normally tip my service cap to the memory of Uncle Dick, the bomber pilot, who launched in his B-17 out of RAF Lavenham on that morning to take out a bridge that would enable the German panzers to flow toward the invasion beaches and hurl the Yanks, Brits and Canadians back into the surf.
His B-17 lost an engine on takeoff, and as a matter of crew safety, he should have dumped his bombs in the channel, burned off fuel, and returned to base. Instead, he went on to the target on three engines and bombed the crap out of the bridges.
It was a day of common courage for a hundred thousand young men. Lest we forget.
I am sitting, remembering, in a Staged Unit. The young Realtor and his Stager swept into the place yesterday morning and transformed it into the equivalent of a barracks bay ready for a Room Locker and Personnel inspection. Which is to say, unlivable. Pictures of the former residence, now trapped in amber, are on the Facebook page if you care.
(The dining nook I am instructed not to go in. Photo Socotra).
I wandered around looking at the yellow post-its they left behind, telling me not to touch anything. Fine. I won’t. I may have to go to the office to be compliant.
It has been tough coming out of the gate this morning. All the old Spooks are agog over the disclosure that the National Security Agency has been collecting the metadata on every phone conversation in the United States. It has been for months, and will be for another few weeks.
“Metadata” refers to the envelope information that you can play on your voicemail if you press “4” on the options menu. Some professionals have pointed out that this information doesn’t really require an individual warrant, and they could have been doing it all along (and many suspect they are) but the point of the special secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order to Verizon is that the program was to be held as a secret, so the company could not complain.
There is nothing to worry about. As my pal Pete observed:
“Hey, what’s the problem? It’s not like the government has said they could kill citizens without a trial, or use the tax system to persecute political opponents. I mean, if they started to do that AND they were seizing phone records you might think they were usurping power and wildly exceeding their Constitutional boundaries.
Thank God none of that stuff is happening. I mean, it’s not like we have some huge internal security force that is out there buying up the ammo and surplus armored vehicles, you know?”
I wonder what Uncle Dick, or Raven would have said about it.
I can’t ask either of them now, and we entered into some strange new territory, haven’t we? I need to get out of the staged unit- it is a Potemkin Village now, and you know who lives in those things, right?
(A bogus library in the back bedroom. Photo Socotra).
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com