At the AFSOUTH Club, I tried to get on a phone and then, worse, when I did I had to try to figure out how to use it. By the time I cracked the code and get a Transatlantic line there is no one home to speak to. The Italians can’t hold a candle to […]

Editor’s Note: I had a chance to find out the thousand-dollar surprise for April, and didn’t even have to wait until the end of the month. New spectacles are the order of the day, since I dropped the perfectly serviceable ones from the night table and they hit with precisely the perfect impact point to […]

Editor’s note: The speculation about what the Russian aggressiveness toward U.S. Naval ships in the Baltic has had many agog of late. The spike of interest in Russian interest brought memories back to some old Shipmates, including the irrepressible Point Loma. He contributes this account of life on the bounding waves- with Russians- to the […]

(One of the places the Amber Room has rested. This one is what used to be Koenigsburg, in the former East Prussia, now Kaliningrad, the city of Kant now named for a Soviet Apparatchik). They may have found it. Buried treasure worth millions, a traveling moveable feast from the darkest days one can imagine, including […]

May Sot is a sweaty little town halfway up the Thai border with Burma. I was listening to the radio in bed. A Correspondent was up there reporting on the misery of the Karen refugees, persecuted by the thug gerontocracy of the rulers of what they called “Myanmar,” and I heard his words from the […]

I was sitting alone at The Front Page last night, flirting with the lovely Kristina, daughter of a real Frog Man, a term favored by some of the early SEALs, to demonstrate their heritage. I was not flirting that hard- Kristina was born in the early 1990s, so she is in no danger of falling […]

Annie saved my butt today. I was out of airspeed and ideas after completing an impressive list of action items that included nothing either vaguely humorous of slyly ironic, unless you call my surreal interaction with the three major credit reporting bureaus to be such, or the obituary for one of our colleagues who passed […]

OK- I am a bum. I freely admit it. I was still toasted from the road, spent Friday trying to recover from being awake in all the small hours of Friday morning. I took my time getting down to the Farm on Saturday, luxuriating in the magnificence of the sun and final banishment of the […]

(A couple classics at the Kokomo Auto Museum: Joe’s Javelin and Todd’s American rag-top on the road to Kokomo last Friday). If there was ever a demonstration of the simple fact that I am not the man I once was (though still pretty good once, I hasten to add), it was the road trip to […]

When the Office of Naval Intelligence was established in 1882 as America’s first continuously operating intelligence service, it was Lt. Theodorus B. M. Mason’s basic concept that “naval attaches had to be assigned to U.S. embassies and legations in the naval and maritime countries throughout the world, and that ONI would be the office to […]