Author: Vic Socotra

Life & Island Times: One Last Item

Editor’s Note: This just in from Marlow. – Vic One Last Item One last item before this Memorial Day week passes . . . All of us Vietnam era vets could do our children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, godchildren, their friends, and class members a great service if we’d talk to them about our service with […]

Buck and The View

This is a short outing this morning due to routine medical appointments in a town thirty miles away from Refuge Farm. Nothing alarming, just assessment interventions based on age. But time consuming and an extravagant allocation of energy resources in an increasingly austere environment that Washington told us they could do little about. Splash snickered […]

Battle of Midway

The 80th Anniversary of one of the historic battles in Naval annals is almost on us. For those in the National Capital region with an interest, a ceremony will be held at the World War Two Memorial on Friday, 03 June: Our intelligence community mentor RADM Mac Showers was an Ensign in The Dungeon at […]

Weather Report: Sultry Day With Storm Clouds

Our usual “All this stuff is going on” holds for this week, avoiding the tiresome responsibility to actually have to talk about it. Of course, some of the issues that will affect our society are clearly already in progress and worth a medium effort. Things that are developing: Ukraine is a still a big one […]

Life & Island Times: Chicken Fried

Author’s Note: On this past Memorial Day, W and I were headed south down on US-17 to Jekyll Island while listening to some peckerwood small town FM station railing on about proposed gun control legislation and the last week’s school shooting particulars, while a song was played as an intermission before the next speaker wanted […]

The Unofficial Start

So here we are in Summer. Not official, of course. Management did their usual short note to the various Socotra Sections advising the color “white,” much maligned of late, is now socially permissible. In certain contexts, anyway. Notably, that includes the Chairman’s option to transition to seersucker for those events in which slightly upscale attire […]

Arrias: DoD’s Augean Stables

Editor’s Note: Arrias steps away from Ukraine today…a brilliant sunny one tinged with memory for those who gave their all… – Vic DoD’s Augean Stables If you have been keeping up with current events you will know that there is a war going on in Europe, a big, ugly, high-end war with one of America’s […]

A Place of Rest

(Culpeper National Cemetery, Memorial Day, 2022) It was a brilliant clear morning, cool at dawn but likely to soar to ninety on this Memorial Day under bright blue sky. There is a National Cemetery right here in town. It is not far off the main drag, and well posted. I had never stopped despite it’s […]

Arrias and His Muse: Remembered Faces

We sat and joked about the day, And then out the door we went, We all addressed our own missions, But he was part of that two percent. Another time, another friend, Off target, headed back to the ship, In the dark he flew into the sea, Into death’s cold, cold grip. Some good friends, […]