20 DEC, 1989: There was a great Foc’sle Follies the last night at sea before pulling in to Marseilles on the mighty USS Forrestal, (CV-59). The Follies are the satiric variety review the Air Wing puts on for itself to poke fun at the complexities of life on the Bounding Main with 4,000 of your […]

(The Iron Duke- Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, KG, GCB, GCH, PC, FRS gives us an imperious look. I have to tell you, I have enjoyed taking a trip back in time to visit some of the great cities of Asia from a long time ago. Since I threw in a trip […]

I am late on the story this morning, but I have a decent reason. I attended a small but very moving memorial at the cemetery for those veterans who gave the last full measure of devotion to their nation. Considering how almost universally dismal the recent events overseas have turned out, this ceremony with active […]

Here at Refuge Farm, I got some things done that didn’t really need doing, and and started others that are going to be left unfinished by the time we get to beyond this chilly morning. The dawn was bright and the skies Virginia Blue as I swept up pine needles and surveyed the Fall debris […]

I talked to the LTJG via the miracle of Google Chat the other morning, and we discussed a couple clear differences between my Navy and his. It is a lot more correct these days, and not nearly as hung over as my class of hard-partying liberty hounds. Of course, I was a couple years older […]

Vic, the stories about Sydney were Interesting, though the waters I cruised in my career were a little closer to home. You wrote about sea-stories yesterday. I have a few of those, too on the way to a career that culminated as a Master Chief Boatswain’s Mate, United States Coast Guard. I don’t mind your […]

My pal Marc had to chime in about Sydney- a town several colleagues waxed enthusiastic about. There is a reason for that, just as there is a reason the story today is late. This will address this. Marc recalls: (USS Independence underway out of Japan, 1992). “We took Indy-maru (CV-62) down to Sydney in 1992 […]

25 April 2005 There are some other things I could talk about this morning, but I am going to let the smart people read the tea-leaves, as someone said yesterday. This remarkable situation will either sort itself out or it won’t. I prefer to contemplate times when things made sense in the great cities on […]

It was Tokyo, 1980. I was taking a break from the military coup in Korea about halfway through my 14 month one-year-tour on the Peninsula, not that I was counting. The Generals had killed President Park the year before and Major General Chon Tu Hwan, pride of the Korean Military Academy’s Class 11, had taken […]

THE SNAKE RANCH YONGSAN SOUTH POST 11 May 1980 It appears that the bad Koreans are all out planting mines (a good sign, from what they tell me) or transplanting rice. They couldn’t fly their MiGs due to inclement weather. The telephone circuits were down because the lines that run on the poles outside the […]