I don't know what is going on. I try to post an article here and it shows up about three pages wide! I don't see how to adjust the margins. Any help?

Tonight I was in the kitchen putting together the chicken enchiladas for dinner and listening to "The Essential Charley Pride" on CD.  I have been a fan of his for a long time.  I even saw him in person once, a long time ago, before he became a superstar...he was just a rising star at the time.  Here's how that came about. It was the summer of 1968 in Mannheim, West Germany and we were deep into preparing our unit to return to the States.  Stan, one of my friends at wo...

  Yesterday I wrote about the 14th of July 1967 and why it is a special anniversary for me.  Three years earlier, 14 July 1964, I had climbed on a Greyhound in El Cajon, rode that dog to LA, found the designated hotel, ate dinner and crashed.  The next morning I got up, and had breakfast, then walked the six or so blocks to the AFES building (called "MEPPS" now), spent the day in my underwear walking from station to station getting tested, evaluated, poked, prodded, inoculated,...

MamaCharlie reminded me that the fourteenth is an anniversary of sorts for me.  Aside from Bastille Day, it was my first ETS...the day that I got out of the Army...the first time. I have written about that day before:  the final paper-shuffle, the packing, the last trip through the gate at Fort Huachuca, the afternoon in Tucson, and the night in Phoenix.  It was a day that I had counted down to practically since I first joined the Army.  Their ETS was the date all first-te...

  I had stayed 'way too long at Tiger Switch, the main board at MACV HQ, because a couple of my buddies worked there and I knew when I left that I had to go across town to Cholon and then to the Rice Mill. I hated the Rice Mill more than any other of my many stops. In the summer of '66, anything south of the Saigon Zoo and west of Cholon was definitely "Injun" country...so guess where the Rice Mill was. My route included several irregular customers so I didn't usually get to ...

  When I was a senior NCO in the 1980s, one of the most common headaches/complaints I had to deal with in the barracks was noise control. For some reason, young GIs living in a room about fifteen by twenty feet with three other guys felt they needed to buy a stereo system that cost a thousand dollars with speakers that were five feet tall. These systems could blast out "tunes" at an unbelievable volume. On more than one occasion I had to walk in and touch some young'un because he cou...

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As I mentioned in the story, this is how Maddie spent the rest of the day at Rushmore...the guy in the green hat became the prime mover...

This is one tough little lady!

The position of Chief of Protocol at US EUCOM (United States European Command) is an Air Force full colonel billet. It is common for senior Lieutenant Colonels to be assigned there if they are on the promotion list. Jon Boursaw came to Patch Barracks (the home of EUCOM) in that very position. He was a good boss; I enjoyed working for him, for the most part, and the office had a pretty light-hearted air under his leadership. When his promotion was finally announced, he went out and bought a new c...

  MamaCharlie has Parkinson's. It causes her problems with balance, movement, and pain and makes it difficult for her to walk at all sometimes...long walks are out of the question. So when we took off with HBW and LH for a mini-vacation to Mount Rushmore, we thought taking a wheelchair along would be a good idea, enabling MC to go where everyone else went. We arrived at the monument, got MC in the chair and started into the park when Maddie, our little grandaughter, wanted to push th...

Happy Birthday, U S Army...and Happy Flag Day to you all...hope you're flying 'em high.

  I scrolled through the recent posts on both the blogsites I inhabit just to make sure I didn't miss something, but no...it just wasn't there. Not one mention...not an article or just a random comment. How come? As a community, have we just forgotten? Or maybe we don't feel it is worth the effort to mention. Every year since I started blogging, I have posted some sort of article honoring the men and women who participated in the invasion of France on June 6th, 1944. I though...

  Between the Swirl and South Dakota is Wyoming...or part of it anyway. It is grassy, green, empty, and almost flat...like the scene in "Dances with Wolves" when the camera pans away from the Muleskinner's wagon to show the audience an ocean of prairie. It takes the majority of the trip to get across it. There was a rest stop where they warned us about water being just for washing and drinking. What that meant was that there was no water for flushing. You enter a very clean, modern r...

  I am extremely proud of my grandaughter, Emily. A little while back she heard about an organization that provides buglers to play taps at military funerals. If you watched Fox News Sunday this week you saw the founder of Bugles Across America explain his organization and why he started it. There was a shortage of buglers to play at military funerals and sometimes Taps was played on a boom box or worse, a device that fits into the bell of the bugle and fakes it. So he recruited buglers ...