(Reflections on Black Granite)   Rex retired in 1976, at the rank of Vice Admiral. As you know, there is no permanent grade for officers above that of Rear Admiral; retirement in the grade of Vice Admiral requires concurrence by the Senate. That body remembered his service with satisfaction, and agreed.   It was a […]

  It is one of those mornings, you know the kind.   We had planned an evening-in, talking about the events of 1974 last night, the Doctor and Mac and I, and from that would have come a lucid discussion of the painful transition from the Nixon to Ford Administrations, and how Rex and the […]

Anyway, I walked up to the glass entrance with a white plastic bag and two trickle-chargers I had purchased at the motorcycle show to accommodate the constantly discharged batteries on the classic muscle pick-up truck (six years to antique plates!) and the Harley that sleeps in the garage.   I guess I fit the profile […]

(Left to right, Henry Kissinger, Jerry Ford and James Schlesinger) The rain is gentle this early morning down here in Culpeper County. We are into a January thaw, a break from the shin-licking cold of the last five weeks.   There is some storm damage at the little farm. Bit sheets of snow compacted into […]

  Here is The Wink, in all it’s strange glory. Congressman Thomas is in the bow-tie just over Lady Bird Johnson’s right shoulder).   Shoot, if you go back and look at the 1970s with fresh eyes you see the Season of the Witch. I don’t know what Rex or the other grown-ups at the […]

Gentle Readers, It was an emotional and uplifting afternoon at Arlington. Uplifting because John is done with us now, and his ashes returned to the soil. Uplifting because the shining swords and crisply presented rifles represented the very best of the Few and the Proud. Emotional because we stood on the grounds made sacred by […]

Lieutenant Baldomero Lopez, USMC, scales the seawall at Inchon’s Red Beach. Minutes later, he was killed when smothering a live grenade with his body. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. John Guenther landed with the Division reserve.Seven days before the main attack, a joint Central Intelligence Agency–military intelligence reconnaissance operation, codenamed “Trudy Jackson,” […]

Port au Prince is in ruins this morning, which is a bit of an oxymoron. But the tragedy is real, and the misery is great. Even the Presidential palace crumbled, and that structure had lasted since General Smedley Butler’s Marines had the place built nearly a century ago.   I remember the last time I […]

(Old Navy Library, where OpNav Staff Documents were held)   The bitter cold lingers here in the capital. It has been quite a stretch, commencing with the two-foot dump of snow a week before Christmas and continuing right through this morning.   The normal strategy of the jurisdictions whose domains intersect this corner of the […]

(Navy Officer’s White Shirt)   There are always more questions than one would like, and some answers that one might not expect. All this happened a long time ago, after all, and with the passage of time comes distance. Emotions can fade, after all, though in the case of Rex his passion never flagged.   […]