Vesuvius in Winter The weather was crappy, but the Jugs were determined to get the Admiral and his party back to their ship in order to get the heavy cruiser Des Moines underway on schedule. The port visit was scheduled for four days, and four days only. Leaving on the 23rd gave her plenty of […]

Felix Dzerzhinsky I’ll get to something heartwarming and quirky for the season, I promise. But it is year-end, and time to contemplate some of the things that have happened in this strange and unsettling year. I was watching Michigan State play Texas in college hoops last night with the Boys. They came by Big Pink […]

The White Palace, Belgrade It is December, 1951 in the northern Adriatic Sea. It is approaching Christmas, and the Heavy Cruiser USS Des Moines (CA-138), Flagship of the SIXTH Fleet, is sliding into a berth downtown in the splendid Adriatic port of Rijeka. It is a mountain of gray steel bristling with guns, and it […]

USS Des Moines (CA-134) in the Adriatic, 1951 Did you ever hear of Slivovitz? It is a plum brandy that is made in Eastern Europe, and notably Yugoslavia. Rene LaPlante could have told you about it, since it is one of the tools of the trade. “Plum brandy” sounds like something your great aunt might […]

The LaPlants entertain at home, in Belgrade, 1946 There are those who feel a fondness for the old Bolshies who terrorized and murdered their people. You hear a lot of that from the Osties, the East Germans who yearn for the good old days when the Stasi- the secret police- recruited your husband or your […]

Holiday Party at the LaPlante’s, Belgrade The whirl of parties increased in the Serbian capital as the holidays of 1946 approached. It actually was quite bothersome for Evelyn LaPlante, who was just getting her new house in order. She found the diplomatic community stuffy and boring. Her house was quite grand. It had high ceilings, […]

Josef Broz Tito Oh, Evelyn was a beauty in her day- not that she is not now, I hasten to add. Annie would smack me if I implied otherwise. She is just of a certain age, if you know what I mean. You can see the vivacious young woman she was looking out from the […]

Mohammed Odeh al Rehaief. On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright took the Flyer for a 12-second, sustained flight. Thirty-two years after that, the date was picked for the first official flight of the Douglas DC-3, the most legendary aircraft of the first century of powered flight. It is the first airplane on which I ever […]

The cotton wool hanging from the balcony is not a product of the vestiges of the Big Pink Holiday Party. Those would be purely mental, like what has happened to the interface between my protein-based processing unit and finger. It is a real enough meteorological phenomenon outside, a by-product of the warm moist air coming […]

I stopped to take a snapshot of the destruction at the White House yesterday. No, not that one, appealing as it might be to some folks. I am talking about the one in Buckingham. The minute I write about a building standing in “lonely isolation,” someone appears to take it as a direct challenge. The […]