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Vic Socotra

Author: Vic Socotra

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August 15, 2020 Vic Socotra

Life & Island Times: Destiny

Editor’s Note: All the people I knew who were confronted by the prospect of being ground up in the invasion of Japan’s home islands are gone. Dad’s class at Pensacola were weeks away from having the Wings of Gold pinned on their Aviation Green uniforms and line up for transportation to the Far East. Our […]

August 14, 2020 Vic Socotra

Swamp Postcard: The Show Goes On!

The circus continues with wild abandon just up the road from Refuge Farm. Peace may be breaking out in the Middle East as the UAE makes nice with Israel. The echoes of all of the global events bounce off the unremitting and insistent downpour of rain. It is pretty neat. Earlier in the week, former […]

August 13, 2020 Vic Socotra

Point Loma: Death of the Ready Room

Editor’s Note: Point Loma has some thoughts on identity in the institution we served. There is nothing more personal than your name, right? One of the most important characteristics in the culture of Naval Aviation was the re-naming that new arrivals in operational squadrons received. In no small part it was the establishment of an […]

August 13, 2020 Vic Socotra

Life & Island Times: Ready Room Response

Point Loma’s ruminations on a changing culture brought a marked response from a crowd of those who grew up in the old culture. Marlow was inspired to characterize the perspective of age on us all. First, some of the pithier ones: Joemaz: After reading the call sign adventures of how a lost Naval Aviator had […]

August 12, 2020 Vic Socotra

Life & Island Times: America’s War Department

Editor’s Note: Gentle readers, we are blessed to have some great submissions from Arrias, Marlow and Point Loma this week. In hierarchy Arrias dealt with a national numbers crisis. Marlow today explores out institutions and the nature of their generational change. Tomorrow Point Loma will take us to the tactical level of organizations, and the […]

August 11, 2020 Vic Socotra

Arrias: Robert Strange McNamara and the Wuhan Virus

Editor’s Note: This is the best National Emergency since I have been sequestered at Refuge Farm. I am following common sense plague avoidance, avoiding crowds and masking in situations that would discomfit my fellow citizens. There was something else I was doing, but have forgotten what it is. This has been a bountiful week. Below […]

August 10, 2020 Vic Socotra

Arch Cunningham’s Lost Cause

OK- I found the concluding line to the couplet that ends Uncle Pat’s obituary. I mentioned that it was more work than usual, but after some false starts, I was eventually able to find the publication in which it originally appeared. It was a curious thing, one I should have focused on at the front […]

August 10, 2020 Vic Socotra

Not Lost, Not Gone

(Artist Jerry McWilliams painted the scene above from the battle of Raymond, MS, in 1863. The figure on horseback is Colonel Randall McGavock, who was mortally wounded by Union fire and fell into Pat’s arms. He is depicted at the lower left. The great Rebecca Blackwell Drake, a former State Department player was instrumental in […]

August 8, 2020 Vic Socotra

Trust- In the Country

The storms seem to have passed, and there are spurts of sunshine on a pleasant Virginia day. It would have been Dad’s 97th birthday today. Maybe better phrased, it is still his birthday, and I remember it that way. I had some plan to continue the story of Great Great Uncle Pat’s wild ride through […]

August 7, 2020 Vic Socotra

Great Great Uncle Patrick Speaks

This has been a cyclone of a year, and one in which taking stock has been a key activity amid the mass confusion. I am trying to order my affairs, sell my hot rod truck, and lessen the impact on the kids when they hav to deal with the mounds of paper and old wood. […]