Author: Vic Socotra

Visits to Hanoi

(For reasons best known to AOL we can’t just drop the carefully assembeled picture in this place. Instead, we must attach it with digits from someplace else). Big morning here in DC! Which we are not in, or at least not exactly, the Patio being on the Western side of the Potomac. We are still […]

Arrias on the World: What Happens Next?

There’s a minor cottage industry that has sprung up in the last 12 months in which various foreign policy mavens play Nostradamus and forecast “How the War in Ukraine will end,” some with a good deal of detail, some with a very broad hand waving at a map of the world. Of course, using the […]

Quo Vadis

It did not take long, did it? The packaging was prepared during what used to be the Regular Order period in budget formation for the vast, sprawling, incoherent budget of the United States of America. Who benefits from all this madness? Without the Budget, or at least “a budget,” a lot of stuff has to […]

Legal Legerdemain

We have some strange stuff going on in the current Legal Circus. It is an entertaining show, since the performers are engaged directly in the struggle for the Oval Office. That will drag on through next November. Not the month around the corner, mind you. The one after that (by year). Part of the excitement […]

RUE DE L A CHON

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I was writing to a squadron buddy 43 years ago. I was stuck in a Snake Ranch, the term used for officer housing at the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, Korea. It is an odd letter, transferred in some ancient Word format via Government Xerox machines a couple times and then tucked away someplace […]

Arrias and His Muse: Fall Is Come

A distant moan, a growl, the treetops shake, A rafter of turkeys wander out of the trees, Pecking through the grass, feathers ruffled in the breeze, Dawn approaches, the Dismal Swamp awakes. The deer disappear, under the still-green leaf, Fat they’ve all grown through summer’s dog days, Soon trees’ will be dressed in a multi-hued […]

Seasonal Transition

So, here we are in the season of transition. It is still hotter than hell in afternoon when the sun cuts the arc over the parking lot at Big Pink. It bathes the western-facing units on the north-south wings by the Big Road with warmth and light. It also brings up the prognosis for what […]

H-Day

We both got it right this morning! We guessed and got lucky after the confusion of the recent Short Week caused by Labor Day in which we didn’t. Labor, that is. This morning we are awake at the same time and relatively certain as to what day it is! That is a challenge sometimes, since […]

The Gee Twenty

We could feel the heat rising in the eternal campaign this morning. There was the fall-out from one of the efforts to secure the most powerful office in the land. There is talk of impeachment abroad and ashore and more entertaining antics as our current President spent some time at the G20 conference. There is […]

Arrias:  Indiana Jones, ATACMS, and the National Debt

There is a great scene in “the Raiders of the Lost Ark” in which Indiana Jones jumps on a horse to chase the Nazis in their big Mercedes Benz touring car, and he is asked: “What are you going to do?” Jones answers, in his insouciant, devil-may-care style: “I don’t know, I’m making this up […]