04 December 2016 Editor’s Note: These things float up out of the hard drive. I wasn’t organized enough to compile them as they happened- too much other moving parts of life interacting- so I am scooping them out of the memory pool and dropping them into the manuscript where they appear to best fit. This […]

Editor’s Note: It being just a whisker away from the day we are supposed to never forget, it seems appropriate to delve into the Wartime interviews with Admiral Mac Showers. Mac had arrived in February of 1942, fresh out of his Counterintelligence and Public Affairs training in the Pacific Northwest. By pure dumb luck he […]

Marlow’s Coastal Empire Near the transit center and just south of the Hostess City’s main park is the Sentient Bean coffee shop. Followers of advanced graphic design trades, doodlers in ink and pencil, addicts of over the counter and under the counter drugs, pushers of various socially advanced causes, grey marketers of cyber-stolen code, sellers […]

They say this is going to be a hell of a cold winter coming at us. It is just brisk oday, but out West it is already in the low teens overnight, and probably single digits shortly. You could say, at no risk of exaggeration, that it is going to be cold enough out there […]

In early October, I wrote you about the desperate situation regarding Douglass Hubbard, former NIS Special Agent- Saigon. Doug had contracted a progressive and likely fatal lung failure due to exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange while in Vietnam. Without a transplant, Doug was certain to die. Compounding the tragedy was that our Special Agents, […]

30 November 2016 Editor’s Note: We are back to Mac today. What strikes me as being amazing about the historic times that Mac talked about- all of them down the decades- is the speed with which things changed in his war. From the devastating attack at Pearl to the “turning point” at the battle of […]

Editor’s Note: We are taking a brief break from putting together the book on the life and times of Admiral Mac Showers. I don’t think he will mind, since another old shipmate from the pacific Ocean Area has arrived at the Big Fleet Landing on his side of the Styx. I got the word last […]

28 November 2016 Editor’s Note: Just when you think you have seen it all and had enough, there is the reminder that times past have been at least as wild and wooly as they are now. I was going through some old notes and newly-declassified cables to give a sense of the late 1970s and […]

Editor’s Note: This piece fits in the back of the book; not the end, though the dinner it describes certainly was a real ending. It is sort of in keeping with my mood this morning. The dinner was an affirmation of a grand life lived in perilous times, and with honor and courage. I have […]

Editor’s Note: I stirred around 0200 and saw an alert on the tablet computer. I fumbled for my glasses and turned on the bedside light. The New York Times informed me that Uncle Fidel was gone at the age of ninety. I read the obit in the NY Times, which was extensive and ad obviously […]