(R.J. Gators is a marvelous place to while away the afternoon). Now, if you think I am going to go all hipster authentic on you and start bashing The Villages, you would be wrong. Of course it is all fake. The artistically cool shipwreck in back of B.J. Gator’s bar? Sunk there on purpose, naturally. […]

The kid at the Hertz Gold checkout booth at the jetport in Orlando checked my driver’s license and nodded that I was ‘good to go’ yesterday afternoon. He asked if there were any questions I had for him, and I thought for a moment. “Is it true that The Villages has the highest rate of […]

Editor’s Note: As you know, I have been rambling on about a Med Cruise in 1990. I am going to do something completely different this morning and take you back a decade, to a troubled time on the Korean Peninsula. There may be more to this saga- I recently came across another manuscript of incoherent […]

31 January 1990 (French aircraft carrier Foch (R99)). Started out wild and wooly today. I actually got outside for a while…but I’m getting ahead of my story. The pandemonium level was extraordinary right through the early hours this morning. Finally had wrestled the genie back into the bottle; we had the DCAG’s graphics built, ready […]

27 January 1990. We were up at 0800 to arrive at the Elephant Cage- the circular AN/FLR-9 Wullenweber antenna array that helped track high value targets in the European Theater. The are nine of them scattered around the world, providing HF/DF direction-finding on high-value targets to the Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility (FOSIF Rota). We […]

VALENCIA, SPAIN 25 January, 1990. (Aerial view of the port complex at Valencia, Spain. It is nice to be at the pier, instead of anchored out). It was a very nice day to pull into Spain. I was stuck on the ship all day and it must have been important to keep me there, but […]

(A formation of all the A-7 airplanes assigned to VA-37- The Bulls- during the 1989-90 Med Cruise). It strikes me that doling this saga out in the jumbled fashion that I have, can either imply that Your Action Navy is populated by sybarites and Lushes. Let me assure you, nothing could be further from the […]

Well, the usual happened. I got distracted this morning for a variety of perfectly god reasons, and plowing through the Great Events of the Day: What is happening to Hillary, who is going to be left standing after the Nevada and South Carolina primaries, why it is that NSA can’t seem to crack into an […]

Long-Suffering Readers, I have subjected you to a short series of tales from a book I wrote long ago, during the last Cold War cruise of a Carrier Strike Force in the Mediterranean Sea. I recently discovered the missing last third of the daily account, which has an eerie similarity to the Daily Socotra that […]

01 April 1990 ROTA: APRIL FOOLS We slid out of the wine-dark Mediterranean Sea via the Straits of Gibraltar during the night, and there were no glimpses of the Pillars of Hercules. By morning we had arrived off the Atlantic coast of Spain, near the bustling little town of Puerto Real and the naval base […]