What a morning! Up just past 0600 as the ambivalence of the pre-dawn Piedmont faded into a warm and golden dawn. A massive high pressure airmass embraces the land below, the greenery is nearly full and the fresh-cut pastures are welcoming in their lighter green abundance. It promises to be an excellent country day. I […]

We could have used a Letter of Marque to deal with the Colonial pipeline hack attack. Of course, I am not a nation state, though I do have a certain undocumented leaning in that direction. What is such a letter? Essentially, it is authorization to hire a pirate to punish people who screw with you. […]

So, all that stuff above is going on. It has the potential to trickle down to all of us, but keeping it all straight is a challenge. Not a crisis. We know how sensitive words are these days, and the entire Socotra Staff is resolute in our support for whatever the Government seems to be […]

(This image is from the Paper of Record, The NY Times. It is of the al Aqsa Mosque atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem yesterday. I saw this vista under gray skies without overt violence). OK. This was going to be an “Editor’s Note” to kick off the piece by Arrias on where we have […]

I don’t know how you got up this morning. None of my business. I turned against the rising light, and with the end of dreams began humming something from long ago. It was from Marvin Gaye’s now-ancient album, “What’s Going On.” It stays with me, released almost on this day in 1971. I was living […]

Editor’s Note: As long-suffering readers are aware, Socotra House has a mission of disseminating the experiences of a generation of old Spooks in the series of conflicts that spanned the globe on which we live. The Editorial Board is always torn between the recollections of what was and the observations of what is. There is […]

I was a good citizen these last twelve or thirteen months. I forget. Life on Refuge Farm has a certain timeless quality. I was compliant when necessary, of course. I wore a mask when interacting with others, made a point of standing a polite social distance from them. I have lived in Japan, so the […]

It was a big week, filled with the new and the old all mixed together. A quick trip to Northern Virginia was the big deal, riding up as a passenger and driving back, in command of my own machine, rolling through what was familiar and is now changing to accommodate new needs. Then the vaccination […]