(MacArthur with ribbons, Dwight without)   It is winter in Washington, and the first flurries blew through town yesterday, more than a week before Thanksgiving. The Folks back home in Michigan said they got socked with a real snowfall, nearly six weeks earlier than they did last year.   If this is global warming, it […]

(View of the Capital from Camp Marks)   When Douglas MacArthur became the army’s youngest Chief of Staff in 1930, the most highly regarded staff officer in the War Department was a young Major named Dwight Eisenhower. Even before his assignment to the Army’s general staff at the Munitions Building on the Mall in late […]

I got a text last night that Uncle Harold was in Hospice, and that the end was near.   His family was with him, and they watched NASCAR on the tube. Harold put on his USMC hat, and was lucid and in good spirits.   He left us in the early hours this morning, at […]

(MacArthur mops as Dwight enjoys a smoke, 1932)  My Grandfather was a professional railroad man, and a citizen soldier for a brief time in the Great War. He was a working man, and the ranks of the Bonus Army were filled with those just like him. Working stiffs, common men who were badly hurt by […]

Bonus Expeditionary Force at the Capitol, 1932   Ah, what a year it had been! The economy was in the crapper, and the world was shambling into a place that no one wanted to go. Everything seemed to be interconnected in a way that it never had been before the steamship and the locomotive and […]

I got off on a tangent the other day about the establishment of the Veteran’s Day holiday, and then I took an emotional hit that still has me reeling a bit. A bittersweet week, all in all, and not done yet.   I was going to write a tale about the Bonus Army, a bunch […]

It was hard; more so than the usual Veteran’s Day, when we think of the few who did so much for so many. It was chill but the sky was blue and clear as crystal. The Ex called early and announced that it was The Day for the The Dog, and my older boy called […]

  The Ex called a few times, starting last night, and continuing through this morning. The former marital dog is failing, and something is going to have to be done, likely today. She thought I might have the day off, since a lot of people do here, though I regretted to say that I did […]

It was On November 10, 1775 that the Continental Congress authorized “two battalions of Marines” to be raised   for service as landing forces for the new Navy. This established the Continental Marines and marked the birth of the United States Marine Corps. The first amphibious raid on foreign soil was conducted in the Bahamas early the […]

There is a lot to talk about this morning, burning Russian subs and the new Administration’s priorities. But we will have years to talk about both. Something happened this week that was remarkable for our little band of spooks.   The Center for Cryptologic History is located in a former motel very close to the […]