It is my contention that part of the attraction of Hong Kong is that the city so many of us love and remember fondly is actually another place- a city named Shanghai. The Fall of the Kuomintang to the Reds caused enormous dislocation in the most western and amazing city in all the Far East- […]

That had to be the nicest weekend of the Fall. I stopped by the Belmont Distillery to pick up a couple bottles of their Copper Kettle Vodka to enjoy after the chores, and marveled at the quality of the rich blue cloudless skies. I puttered on the bushes and did some trimming around the farmhouse, […]

I have a festival of Blue Jays on the lawn- I don’t know what they are after, but the gone-to-seed garden plot seems to be of particular attraction for the members of the species Cyanocitta Cristata. They are big fellows, a kind we do not see up in Arlington. There is a forecast for temperatures […]

Gentle readers, there were a lot of comments about a retrospective trip to the pearl of the East, the lovely city of Hong Kong. Some are too good not to compile, so here goes. It beats talking about crazed Islamists and Ebola and politics, wouldn’t you agree? A lovely lady in Rancho Santa Fe wrote: […]

January, 1979 There is plenty that no one is talking about these days- the madness in Ottowa yesterday, four more cases of possible Ebola infection identified at Dulles, the drumbeat of negative advertising for the impending elections. It makes me feel a little sullied, just listening to the blather of absurdities we are supposed to […]

(Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini He was a strange Dude.) On the 18th of October, 1979, I noted the situation seemed bleak because the Bazargan Government in Iran had packed cheeks and gone away. This left Khomeini and the Revolutionary Council as the only decision-making unit in the country, even they did not seem to be […]

Unvarnished and un-retouched. We were young, once, and out in a wild world. Vic 03 February 1979 YOU COULD SMELL THE LAND THIRTY OR FORTY MILES OUT, if you had gotten up early enough for it. I couldn’t have; stupefied still from over-liberty in HONG KONG, I suppose, but here is how it would have […]

It isn’t all just knuckles and know-how out there in the Fleet. “Other duties, as assigned,” was part of it, and as the coffee mess officer for World Famous Medium Pursuit Squadron 151 sometimes writing detective stories and designing new unofficial squadron patches was part of it. Considering the other stuff I could have been […]

THE next morning the word was out. The port visit to Australia was cancelled. Some damned fool in the National Command Authority took it in his head that the deteriorating situation in the Gulf of Aden required our presence more than the fair ladies of Perth. It was an obvious case of misplaced international priorities. […]

A shipmate wrote to me about the Mombasa tale. He had joined the Foreign Legion after our last outing to the Indian Ocean, and the grand adventure of liberty in Africa with no immediate crisis in progress. He had not visited Kenya before, and he was determined to enjoy it, Hostage Crisis or not. He […]