Author: Vic Socotra

Weather Report: Fire in the Whole

Exciting week, right? You should see the pile of digits reflecting the thoughts and raw emotions of people who have dealt with the litany of memorable actions with which America has played a major role down through the years. Some of the Writers Section participated in the evacuation of Saigon, now 46 years in the […]

Coastal Empire: Over, Under, Sideways Down

Coastal Empire: Rants 1 & 2 Editor’s Note: Marlow sums up a general consensus for those who remember some of America’s moments in misguided policy. The long string of notes on “Afghanistan” is one for the books, from people who helped the Saigon evacuation in 1975, those who responded to the Tehran Hostage Crisis and […]

Coastal Empire: And Now for Something Completely Different

18 August 2021 Editor’s Note: The Editorial Staff was wrestling with the Afghan situation and the aftermath of a horrific humanitarian collapse. The topic caused the two Interns to look on with amazement, and another member of the senior circuit to announce “their” displeasure on a topic settled by law 56 years ago and depart […]

Life & Island Times: Time Has Come Today

Editor’s Note: A lot of the Old Timers are captured in memory today. I am one of them. So is Marlow. – Vic Author’s Note: The below images and video reminded me of the Chambers Brothers 1966 song Time Has Come Today and provoked these thought shards to surface from the sedimentary levels of the […]

Field to Flask

There was quite a flurry of anguish in the stack of electronic mail yesterday. Last week everybody seemed to be on vacation, and the summer breeze was laden with moisture and seasonably warm. The crop of corn and barley are coming up in the fields, a joyful linkage between natural bounty and human engineering to […]

The 42-Year War

(Alexander of Macedon visited Afghanistan, 300 years Before the Current Era). There is some talk this morning about the end of the twenty-year American experience in Afghanistan. For some of us it goes back a little further. For others, a lot further. Some of the Writers Section participated in one. I got to watch two, […]

Arrias: Afghanistan, A Failure of Expertise

You can already hear the first faint echoes of the experts running through the halls of power in Washington, screaming, Cassandra like: “I told them! I told them!” Hmmm… Years ago, Michael Handel, a professor at the Naval War College, made the point that an intelligence officer’s duty was not simply to gather the facts […]