This morning MamaCharlie was telling me about a story she heard on TV about a kid who had chicken-pox on Halloween and wasn't able to go out trick-or-treating, a heart-breaking reality for a fifth-grader.  But that evening his classmates showed up in their costumes with a banner that said "Happy Halloween!" to try and cheer him up.  A sweet gesture for a friend?  Or just rubbing it in?  Sorry, that's just me twisted perspective kicking in.  A sweet stor...

  I was at an intersection of two major roads right on the edge of Saigon when I saw the Air Force truck's predicament.  The Saigon traffic was unrelenting, and obedience to traffic law was non-existent...obedience to good driving sense was non-existent.  At intersections,  cross traffic would creep out into the lanes, blocking one after another until they got across.  On big roads with multiple lanes, it got really messy.  This Air Force tractor-trailer wa...

  Not a Springsteen fan, but a guy can't cut 200 records, or however many he has made, without hitting a note with you at least once or twice.  "Glory Days" is one I do like, but not because I used to have such glory in the day...in fact, it is just the opposite.  I had no glory to speak of in high school.  I was fair at basketball, a little better than fair at baseball, too skinny for football, and because of heavy smoking by age fourteen, track was a no-go.  Not...

  FOG   Carl Sandberg wrote:   "THE fog comes   on little cat feet.       It sits looking   over harbor and city   on silent haunches            and then moves on."   London is famous for its foggy nights..."Pea Soup", they call it.  The fact is that a lot of Europe has some very thick fog.  In Germany, especially where rivers come togeth...

  I had the opportunity to work with a lot of lieutenants during my military career.  Some of them were good, some not so good.  Most of them were trained in college ROTC programs, a lesser number were West Point grads, and the lowest number of them were enlisted to begin with and then went to OCS to get their commissions.   I won't go into how they earned their reputation for doing dumb stuff, I will say briefly that, in many cases,  it is earned.  ...

  Hunter-Liggett is a military reservation about 60-70 miles south of Fort Ord, CA.  Anyone who spent any time in the 7th Infantry Division in the seventies, eighties, or nineties is very familiar with the place;  it is the primary training area for the division and its support units.  I have spent a lot of time there over the years;  I was very familiar with the terrain and foliage, the ranges and impact areas, and the routes in and out of it.   It was com...

Three, One, Two                                  Two, Three, One I got up yesterday and when I chopped an onion for my omelet, the onion cried.  I left the house and encountered a huge black cat that crossed the street and ran the other way to keep me from crossing his path.  While I  patiently endured the s...

  The late Kate Wolfe, a traditional folk voice of the seventies, had a song that I dearly love about Pacheco, a pass I have been up and down a hundred or more times.  On the same album she sang a song about a Red-Tailed Hawk where she mentions the "Golden, rolling hills of California".  When I think about California nowdays, I don't see beaches or palm trees...I see those rolling hills of central California in the morning sun;  they are covered with wheat- colored gra...

Several years ago I had a discussion with the City Traffic Engineer about certain intersections and why the traffic at those intersectios was so screwed up, especially at rush hour.  In a nutshell, the intersections had dedicated right turn lanes next to a left turn/straight ahead lane.  Think about it;  that is bass ackwards.  I tried a dozen different ways to explain to him that if he switched to dedicated left turn and straight ahead/right turn lanes the traffic would...

  Sour moods have dominated the last month or so.  People I care about in our cyber-world are dropping off the grid for one reason or another.  I know that some have had really painful experiences on the net;  some have caused pain, others have received it.  I feel like the little kid hiding in the closet listening to the adults screaming at each other...or more like one of the most famous receivers of real world pain said, "Can't we all just get along?"  ...

  Fort Hood, Texas in 1971 was a dump...literally.  Soldiers returning from Vietnam who had more than six months left on their enlistment were sent somewhere to finish their time.  If they had less than six months left they were just given a "drop" (early discharge) and sent home.  Many posts in the States were full of soldiers who fit into the first category.  And many of them were bitter because sometimes it was only a matter of a few days that decided if they went ...

    When we came back from Germany in 1983, we were fortunate to move into the newest housing area on Fort Ord, Abrams Park.   The houses were still duplexes and the yards were still small and all the other things about living in government housing were still true, but for the first time in our family's history, we had a house big enough for our whole family to fit in it comfortably.  In fact, it was a pretty nice, two level, house.  Never mind the strange...

  Moving a family from Germany back to the States is no simple task, and the Army does very little to make the move any easier.  There are so many details that have to be taken care of:  arranging the "pack-out"...when they pack up all your household goods into boxes and then the boxes into shipping crates...is traumatic enough.  Then you have to clean up all the equipment you have been using for life in the woods, your rifle, and any other items you have had issued to you...

  It seems that nostalgia is the assignment this week for the Chico crowd...it is usually my topic every week and this week is no exception.  On the way home from Church today I was listening to the Sixties on Six on my "rock and roll from outerspace" and the Stones came on with that distinctive opening riff from "Satisfaction".  For just a quick moment I had a glimpse of where I was living when I first heard the song.  And it dredged up a Sunday morning scene from who kno...

  There have always been homosexuals in the military.    It seems that Alexander the Great was actually Alexander the Fabulous.  So the current hoopla over whether or not there should be gays in the military is not really an issue of "readiness" or "a reflection of societal evolution" so much as it is a political football that crops up every ten years or so.  "Don't ask, don't tell" was one of the most ridiculous policies the military ever adopted...or mo...