Author: Vic Socotra

Arrias on Politics: Gas Attacks and Cyber Hacking

Ypres, April 22nd 1915: the Germans launch a gas attack on the Western Front. Germany had twice attempted to use gas (October 1914 and January 1915), but both efforts failed to produce the desired results. At Ypres results were consistent with German hopes; along the 4-mile front where chlorine gas was used effects were so […]

Life & Island Times: The Good Life at “One Flew South”

Editor’s Note: Marlow is a real person. Don’t forget! But man, I love Key West! – Vic Author’s Note: After five brief but fun-filled days seeing old friends who still reside on our former island stomping grounds, we returned back to Savannah on Wednesday. This short piece describes an oasis we found that offered a […]

Life & Island Times: Gong Show

Editor’s Note: This just in. Marlow lives in the city I used yesterday as the poster child for the charm of Washington as we leave it behind to live on New York Time. Oh, important correction to yesterday’s screed.: Bill Clinton was the last President to fire a Director of the FBI. President Clinton fired […]

Living on New York Time

New York Second: The shortest possible measurement of time. Vis: Standardised as the time between the traffic light turning green and the taxi behind you beeping his horn. i.e.: He only lasted a new york second in bed. – Urban Dictionary Relax. I am going to attempt to stumble through this morning without any cheap […]

The Crescent Club

There is a work trip to Industry Day in Tampa for the CENTCOM JIOC Support contract- not the 600 Full-time Equivalent (FTE) job that it was when the command was running two full-up wars, but at 250 is still nothing for the Parkway Patriot crowd to sneeze at. There are partnerships to pursue and options […]

Arrias on Politics: Afghanistan, Libya and the Coral Sea

Editor’s Note: Seventy-five years ago, the analysis of what had happened in the Coral Sea in the first carrier-vs.-carrier encounter of the Pacific War. Nearly half the survivors of the oiler Neosho were still adrift, Lady Lexington was on the bottom and Yorktown was gravely wounded. Against that stark backdrop, Australia had been spared the […]

The Armada and Me

(A photograph, taken in 1901, of Fort Hill Cemetery in County Galway. The cemetery contains Saint Augustin’s Hill and is the resting place of a number of Spanish sailors of the Spanish Armada of 1588. Image courtesy of the Galway Library). “The Spaniards cast ashore at Galway were doomed to perish; and the Augustinian friars, […]

Neosho

(Cimmarron-class fleet oiler Neosho (AO-23) during her fitting out in New Jersey in 1939. Photo USN). Yesterday I celebrated the extraordinary career of ADM Noel Gayler, Naval Aviator extraordinaire and hero of the Battle of the Coral Sea, a tactical draw between the navies that saved Australia from the predations of the Empire of the […]

The Last Hero of the Coral Sea

(ADM Noel Gayler in his office at Camp Smith, HI, 1976. An authentic hero and warrior, he was proud of being the first no-nucs officer to head the Pacific Command. Photo New York Times.) It is appropriate to look back to the battle before the battle that changed everything in the Pacific. I hope you […]