On the 17th of February, 2007, I posted an article about my dad, the Chief. It was a story called, "It Rained Beans". One of the comments was from Dynamaso asking if I knew where the Chief had been in Antarctica. I couldn't find the citation for his "Wintering Over" medal so I never answered. Well...this last week we have been going through some old boxes and I found a few photos that included a group shot of the whole detachment as they prepared to go to Antarctica. The photo was labeled "Tas...

Whenever I hear the title of the movie "The Year of Living Dangerously", I think of 1971. But not Southeast Asia. I think of Texas. I remember what it was like go to bed on a mattress flat on the floor listening to KRLD until Garner Ted Armstrong came on. We lived in Lampasas in a shack for part of the year, amidst some pretty interesting people. Eventually we moved to Copperas Cove, to a better house but not necessarily a better neighborhood; but mostly I remember what it was like to be at Fo...

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi has requested that the Scottish courts drop the appeal of his conviction in order to clear the way for a potential release from prison in order for him to return to Libya to die. He has prostate cancer and it has spread and he hasn't long to live. The Libyan government and his wife and several others have requested his release, based on compassionate reasons. Name not familiar to you? Megrahi was a former Libyan intelligence operative who was serving as the hea...

After he retired from the Navy, the Chief became an expert gardener. His lawn always looked manicured and just right. In the backyard he had several types of fruit trees and the grandkids were allowed, at certain seasons, to pick, wash and eat fresh apricots, plums, or citrus fruits right off the tree. Southern California is great for those kinds of things. The only challenge was to get to the fruit ahead of the birds. He read somewhere that birds were inherently afraid of snak...

In an effort to make some sense out of the bottom half of our house, we have been going through some old boxes and other items. One of the boxes that has been neglected for several years, twelve, in fact, was a box of mementos from my dad, the Chief. When the box came to me a few weeks after the Chief died, I wasn't ready to deal with it so I stuck it in a corner and left it be. Yesterday I thought I was ready. Wrong. One of the items I pulled out of the box was an old beat-up Cribbage board. ...

If you've ever seen films of deep-sea divers under water, you might think they look a lot like astronauts: bouncing along semi-weightless, big helmet and heavy shoes, big equipment belts and all. But when they are "topside", just before they go into the water, they sit on a stool and two or three other divers help put on all that equipment on them. Then, with the help of all those assistants, they stand and walk to the side of the ship or dock or whatever they are diving from, weighted down to...

Just a few weeks after completing the OSI's counter-terrorist driving course, the gunslingers that protected the 4-star wrangled a dozen slots in the German Polizei's driving course for security personnel. The MPs wanted all the slots for themselves but the Chief of Staff insisted that the senior VIP drivers needed to go, too. So three of us went along. The MP company commander was a cool fellow named Lon Walker. He later came back to Stuttgart as the Provost Marshall, and retired to become th...

I've always been interested in cars. My Dad, the Chief, was a Chevy guy so I was a Chevy guy, too. Until I got back from Vietnam and started shopping around for a Butt-kicking Chevy and wound up buying a Butt-kicking GTO. From that pointg on I have been primarily a Poncho guy. I had to put it on a shelf during the years of kids and dogs and such, but have returned to tooling around in my pretty blue Goat. My boys all seem to have the bug, too, to varying degrees. Over the years I have had a ...

I talked about some of this in an early article so I won't go over old ground. But some other things happened that morning and one of them has stuck with me ever since. The blast came at about 0400. After counting noses upstairs and finding the dead guy downstairs, the next thing that popped into our minds was getting armed. We had a new Arms Room (the place they keep the guns). It had only been completed a couple of weeks before this. Before we had an arms room, we kept our weapons in rack...

Rita was a Chihuahua. She was a beautiful specimen of the breed, what they called a "toy" with an "apple-head" and almost perfect comformation. She had delivered many litters of near-perfect puppies that fetched a pretty penny in the 1950s dollars. She belonged to my Aunt Essie who, along with Uncle Jimmy, was "Elliot's Chihuahuas"; a name that had some note to it in the Chihuahua world. (One of her more famous dogs, rat-sized at full growth, was named Ollie and was featured in a nationally syn...

During the almost six years I spent at EUCOM HQ in Stuttgart I was assigned to the Protocol Office. Officially, I was the "Protocol Driver". The motor pool had a VIP section of about 8 sedans designated for use of the 13 or so general officer and civilian equivalents at Patch Barracks as well as the twenty some full colonels. One sedan was dedicated to the Protocol Office and was primarily for use of any visitors to the command of four-star rank (or equivalent civilian rank) or higher; that was...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, USA !!! Sharing with you a thought (paraphrased) from Erma Bombeck: You have to love a country that celebrates its birthday not with parades and shows of might in front of the White House but with family picnics and barbeques.  Have a good one, all.  

I was remembering some things about perfume. I guess the scientists would explain something complex about how different ingredients are designed to bring out different reactions and how the chemicals work on our receptors blah blah blah. I just know what I like. I like good smells. Over the years we (MamaCharlie and I) have tested many different scents; she seems to have settled on one called "Dune". We both like it and it has stuck around for a long time now. I don't tire of it. I am not s...

In October 1981, while reviewing a parade with many dignitaries from several nations, Anwar Sadat was assassinated. One of the trucks in the parade stopped in front of the reviewing stand. Men dressed as Egyptian soldiers threw flash-bangs into the reviewing party then opened fire with AK-47s. One of the shooters jumped from the truck, ran up to the reviewing stand, and fired point blank into the reviewing party. Some on the stand threw folding chairs over Sadat and his party to try to protect...

The Chief and Betty Lou were passionate people. Their passion for each other was matched by an equally fierce passion against each other. But I knew that no matter how vicious a fight sounded, no matter how nasty the threats, no matter how many things got thrown or broken, they would not really physically hurt each other. Often when the storms raged I would hold my terrified little sister and assure her that they were not killing each other, just ironing out a few differences of opinion. And a...