Gentle Readers,
As you you, this is a rough and tumble game, this blogosphere stuff, and generally speaking I don’t go back and correct minor mistakes in The Daily. You already know that, too, so I don’t need to elaborate though of course I will. Endless revisions of this ephemeral stuff is the digital equivalent of the video tapes of the kids that we took when the video camera was a novelty. That was before we valued the brevity contained in a profound Tweet and we had not figured out that it is difficult enough to live one life in real time, much less spend an equal amount of time.
Anyway, the first thing I want to do is publish the amended slide on the Naval Intelligence Essay contest winners that our team at The Daily churned out yesterday. The representative of the united State Naval Institute was in fact the legendary Editor-in-Chief for Proceedings, Mr. Fred Rainbow. The Daily regrets the error. We have worked with or around Fred for nearly 40 years and have the highest admiration for him.
Whew. So, like with everything else going on- and you know that there is some quite remarkable activity in progress in all sorts areas. The exposure to people who are on the business end of the foreign affairs world also made me think about a couple things- like how we manage to forget important things learned at great cost and sacrifice in each generation. One senior officer who has been deployed to The Show multiple times pointed out that the lessons learned in Saigon were directly applicable to contingency operations in the Middle East. That made me think back to some of the things Mac Showers used to talk about in his experiences in the Pacific War, a region in which we may have some painful new lessons to learn. That also prompted the realization that only a small percentage of the interviews with the Admiral, many containing those lessons others paid so much to learn. They were mostly conducted at The Willow Bar had seen the light of day.
There was a hurry-up job to collect his wartime experiences in time for the NIP 25th Anniversary, and it was good to have published the slim volume while he was still alive and in good health. Anyway, there is more, and it is time to package them for larger distribution. So bear with me for the next few days- we will dust off some of the interviews and get back to doing the book that intends to be a version of Mitch Albom’s “Tuesday’s With Morrrie” meeting Godzilla.
We will see how that works out. It is not like there is anything in current events to talk about, right?
Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com