The Colonel's Corner

Elvis is Dead, and Memphis Ain't Far Behind

2012-02-07T06:30:00.006-06:00

Two hundred years ago today, the last in a two-month series of four major earthquakes struck along what is now called the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ). Each of the four quakes is estimated by seismologists to have been between 7.0 and 8.0 in intensity. The first two struck on the 16th of December in 1811; the third on the 23rd of January in 1812.

They were accompanied by hundreds of aftershocks, dozens of which would have in their own rights been considered major.

The NMSZ lies along a mid-continent rift that geologists theorize was the result of a failed attempt by plate tectonics to pull the continent apart in pre-history. Sediments of the Mississippi River alluvial plain cover a series of interlocking faults throughout a region of underlying bedrock and mantle weakened as a result of the failed rift.

Unlike the obvious and much more active faults on the left coast, the New Madrid Seismic Zone (named for the only white settlement of any size in the region 200 years ago) is curiously inactive and obscure. It rarely makes itself known beyond a scattered slight tremble.

Unfortunately, when it does announce its true capabilities, the NMSZ does so with unimaginable force and consequence. And, the effects are felt over an unbelievably large area. A quirk of geologic difference between the Western and Eastern sides of the North American Continent causes a great disparity in the "felt effects" of earthquakes as shown in the diagram below.

The 1811/1812 New Madrid earthquakes were felt as far away as present-day Toronto, Canada and caused damage to buildings and streets in cities along the Eastern Seaboard from Columbia, South Carolina to Washington, D.C.

The shaking from one of the earthquakes is reported to have been strong enough to ring church bells in Boston.

From geologic evidence of past earthquakes in the NMSZ, seismologists place the odds of a recurrence of an earthquake of the same magnitude as the 1811/1812 quakes at 10% within the next 50 years. As it is with all of Creation's natural disasters (whether terrestrial or extra-terrestrial in origin), the occurrence of a major quake in the Mid-South is not a matter of if, but when.

When the next major quake (or series of quakes) strikes the NMSZ, it will cause damage and loss of life unparalleled in the history of our nation, or any nation for that matter.

The city of Memphis did not exist when the earthquakes struck 200 years ago.

It will not exist after the next one.

The extent to which critical infrastructure elements will be effected is far greater than the patience of the thousands of you who liberally partake of the barely literate literary libations ladled out hereon can stand the telling. Here's just one example:

Every rail and road bridge across the Mississippi River from St. Louis to Greenville, Mississippi will be, if not outright destroyed, rendered unusable. Memphis is a critical node in the distribution systems for many major corporations.  Disruptions in interstate trade will visit material hardship on the entire continent and could easily plunge the nation into economic depression.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that, instead of focusing the Department of Homeland Security on measures to mitigate this real threat (and others like it) to the well-being of the American people, our federal government is more concerned with punishing the American people for the actions of 19 jihadists on 9/11.

Training is Everything

2012-01-30T11:35:00.001-06:00

First Lieutenant Gregory, at the head of HQ Platoon, 31st MAU, ashore in Australia, 1982

Thirty years a go this week, the Colonel, then a salty first lieutenant with three years in an infantry battalion under his belt, executed a set of PCS orders that reassigned him from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina to Okinawa, Japan.

For the 'Bama and LSU fans who may have erroneously stumbled upon this post in a frantic search for pachyderm print toilet tissue or the fifty-yard line, respectively, PCS is neither a herbicide nor an ingredient in corndogs.

PCS stands for Permanent Change of Station.

"Permanent," in the Marine Corps, ain't really all that permanent.   Most of the time, a set of PCS orders meant you were going somewhere new and wouldn't stay there much longer than it took for the "newness" of the new assignment to wear off.

This particular set of orders was going to be the toughest test the Colonel and his young family had yet to face. He would be separated from them, literally by the bulk of the entire planet, for an whole year.

As he bade farewell to his bride of only five years, and their two toddler sons, the Colonel had occasion to dwell heavily on the decision made mere months previous, at the end of his four-year active duty commitment, to make the Corps his career. As he watched his family wave to his plane, had it been possible, the Colonel would surely have changed his mind.

But, he was committed. Duty called.

It would not be the last time such a call came.

When the Colonel landed in Okinawa, he did just as his orders required and reported to the Commanding General, III MAF (Third Marine Amphibious Force) headquartered at Camp Courtney (one of nearly a dozen Marine camps and bases on the island wrested from the Emperor of Japan's finest in 1945).

Actually, the Colonel, then just a first lieutenant, remember, never got a chance to report to the Commanding General in person. A major in the Personnel Section intercepted the Colonel and welcomed him warmly.

"Hey, newby, c'mere. Let me see your orders."

The Colonel surrendered same, and the major caught the name at the top, "Gregory. Good. Been expecting you. You're going to 31st MAU. Training Officer."

The Colonel volunteered that he was hoping for an assignment as a platoon commander with 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion (the job for which any infantry first lieutenant worth his salt yearned).

The major waved his hand dismissively, "They're full up. You're going to 31st MAU. Training Officer."

The Colonel knew what a MAU was.

Marine Amphibious Unit -- containing a reinforced infantry battalion, a composite (task-organized mixture of aircraft types) helicopter squadron, and a logistics support unit. The Corps calls it a MEU (E for Expeditionary) now, but the organization remains generally the same. Embarked on several amphibious ships, this organization's sea-based flexibility and over-the-horizon loiter capability still makes it the National Command Authority's force of choice for a wide range of pop-up missions such as evacuation of an embassy, support of a hostage rescue, or humanitarian relief.

The Colonel apologizes for the commercial.

The Colonel also knew what a "training officer" was. Also known as SLJO (LJ stands for "little jobs" -- the Colonel will allow you free reign to figure out the S and the O on your own), "training officer" was usually the euphemism for the junior officer in the Operations Section of any headquarters staff. Responsible neither for much training nor for much that would remind him that he was indeed an officer, the Colonel had the sinking feeling that the coming year was going to be painful penance for the pure joy that had been his experience leading Marines in an infantry outfit for the previous three years.

The Colonel could tell that the major with his orders in hand was very unlikely to entertain any assignment appeals.  "Very well, sir. If the Major would kindly endorse his orders, the Lieutenant will be on his way."

The major was obviously impressed with the Colonel's formality. "Cut the 'old corps' crap, Lieutenant." The major cocked his head and squinted at the Colonel in a manner meant to remind this whelp that if either of them had rights to any saltiness it was he, "You even know where 31st MAU is?"

"Aye, aye, sir!" The Colonel responded in answer to the crap-cutting command. To the major's question, the Colonel gave what he knew was the only answer that satisfied the definition of one of the most important of the Corps' cherished leadership traits -- initiative. "No, sir, but the Lieutenant will not trouble the Major any more. The Lieutenant will find 31st MAU."

What the Colonel wanted to, but didn't, say was something along the lines of "I mean, really, Major, I know I'm new on the island and all, and there are a lot of different bases and camps, but it is just a small island, and, while I am hamstrung by a lack of education, having gone to Ole Miss instead of college, I can read well enough to find the sign that says Headquarters, 31st MAU on it."

The Colonel may not have said the foregoing, but evidently the look on his face gave away at least the gist of what was rattling around in his brain-housing group. The major suddenly softened a bit ("softened" being a term subject to the term, "relative"), and placed a hand on the Colonel's shoulder. "Lieutenant, I'll save you the effort of spending the next several days reading the signs in front of every building on the island. There's a plane leaving from Kadena headed for Clark tomorrow morning at 1000. Be on it. When you get to Clark, catch a bus to Subic. 31st MAU will pull in to port there in a few days."

While the major busied himself putting the endorsement stamp on the Colonel's orders, the Colonel digested and tried to make sense of the latest bits of data making slow headway through the tangled maze of synaptic connections in the mass of gelatinous goo encased in the bone between his ears.

'Hmmm... Kadena... that's the Air Force base on the southern end of the island. Put the rising sun on your left when you leave here in the morning. Right. Got it.'

'Let's see, Clark, Clark,... CLARK! That's in the Philippines! And, Subic is the Navy base there!'

From previous posts, the thousands of you who regularly imbibe in the literary libations ladled out hereon may remember that the Colonel is afflicted with the serious mallard-happy malady, duck hunting, which manifests itself in frequent forays afield to stand in freezing thigh-deep water and blow mallard-melodies on a kazoo.

Well, not a kazoo, actually. A duck call. To the uninitiated, however, a duck hunter blowing on a duck call looks, and sounds, for all the world like an asylum escapee playing a kazoo.

A very loud kazoo.

As a going-away present, the Marines of the 2d Battalion, 2d Marines at Camp Lejeune had given the Colonel a very nice pair of calls -- one duck, one goose. The Colonel had them in his ditty bag and intended to stay in practice while overseas.

The enlisted man acting as customs agent at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, opened the Colonel's bag and immediately jumped to the giddy conclusion that he had just scored the Air Force Security Police trifecta -- 1) catching someone red-handed with drug paraphernalia, 2) catching a Marine with contraband, and 3) catching a Marine officer breaking the rules.

"What have we here, Lieutenant?" The airman lifted the lanyard with the calls -- one duck, one goose -- and presented them to the Colonel in his best (but certainly unintentional) Barney Fife impression.

The Colonel snatched the calls from the airman's hand and, before Airman Fife could get the bullet out of his pocket, broke into a serenade of mallard songs that would have brought a tear to the glass eye of any duck hunter in the terminal.

Unfortunately, there were no duck hunters (with or without tearful glass eyes) within earshot. Just a whole squad of Barney Fife's reaching for their left breast pockets and converging on the Colonel's position with intent to nip it in the bud.

Undeterred, the Colonel deftly shifted calls and produced a series of happy honks and gronks that would have, in happier times, steered flapping flocks of Canada geese straight down the Colonel's gun barrel.

In deep appreciation for his talented rendition of the love songs of North American waterfowl, the Colonel was thereupon provided a security police escort straight through customs and right up to the door of the bus to Subic Bay.

A few months later, the Colonel was sent ahead of the sea-borne 31st MAU, on a SLJO errand that turned out to be his first trip to Oz. The MAU was headed for Australia, would arrive in two weeks, and the Colonel was detailed to coordinate several training and social events for the week-long port visit to Perth.

Two weeks to accomplish about two hours worth of errands.

In Australia.

On per diem.

Prodigious per diem.

Best hotel in Perth per diem.

The Colonel could hardly contain his glee upon his arrival in the Land Down Under. He was wiggling like a puppy at the back door. The customs agent must have detected what he considered nervousness as he dug through the Colonel's bag.

Triumphantly, he hoisted the lanyard holding the calls -- one duck, one goose. "What 'ave we 'ear, Mate?"

The Colonel rests quite comfortably in the certain belief that he is the first and last Marine lieutenant to have received police escort from Perth International Airport to the Parmelia Hilton.

Fear Factor

2012-01-28T09:52:00.000-06:00

The Colonel ain't smart and you can't make him.

That, and three other notions, have been the operative phrases with which the Colonel has charted the majority of his adult life.

The other three?

The Colonel don't dance.

The Colonel don't paint.

The Colonel ain't afraid of nothin' or nobody (the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda excepted) .

The Colonel used to have a fifth -- the Colonel don't cry -- but, several years ago he found out that his mother was a civilian and went on a three-day boo-hoo bender.

Now, the Colonel has a confession to make.  Operative rule number 4 wasn't really completely true either.

There was something that so scared the Colonel as a tot that for nearly three decades -- well into his career as a roguishly handsome soldier of the sea -- it held a fright-filled grip on a corner of his subconscious. Mentions of the thing, associations and references, while evoking gales of laughter from his comrades, would trigger a Pavlovian response filling the Colonel with an unaccountable feeling of terror and dread.

What, you ask, could possibly have made such a debilitating impression? The Colonel wondered the same.

Did the Colonel witness a torture/homicide/dismemberment as a child?

No, that wasn't it.

Turns out, as his civilian progenitor [see crying-jag reference above] finally explained to her, then, 35 year-old child, the Colonel had experienced a traumatic experience while watching...

Wait for it...

The Wizard of Oz

Yep, the Wicked Witch of the West and her flyin' monkeys had scared the pea jabbers out of the Colonel.

And, because he had experienced such trauma with the movie so early in his childhood, and could never watch the movie again, the Colonel completely missed out on any understanding of the myriad references to it that so pervaded our culture.

On a hike, a fellow Marine would suddenly break into a skip and sing out, "follow the yellow brick road," to the snickers and snorts of his comrades.  The Colonel was clueless.

What yaller bricks?

"There's no place like home. There's no place like home," a jarhead, soaked and miserable in a swamp somewhere at the far end of the earth, would suddenly exclaim, tapping the heels of his muddy boots together.

Well, duh! Why is everybody laughin' at that?

And then, another leatherneck would shuck his poncho, and while the rain poured down on him, screech,...

Yeah, you know what he screeched, ...and why.

The Colonel? Not a clue.

What? Did the Marine think he was made of sugar? What is so stinkin' funny 'bout that?

Some nonsensical, arbitrary edict would come down from higher headquarters and a devildog would sneer, "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

What man? What curtain?

And then, the Colonel's children began to develop senses of humor, manifested most often immediately upon arrival at the Colonel's newest duty station, "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

Kansas? The Colonel had dragged his kit and kin across the globe, but there was never a stop anywhere near Kansas.  And, who are you calling, Toto, there knucklehead child!?!

Finally, at the age of 40 or so, the Colonel watched the movie.

"Oh! Ruby slippers! So that's where that comes from!"

"Oh! Auntie Em! Didn't think everybody had an Auntie Em!"

Days later, the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda approached the Colonel and lightly touched his lips with the tip of her dainty finger. The Colonel smiled at his Lady. She smiled back.

And then, in her loving way, she gripped both of the Colonel's lips between a thumb and finger suddenly transformed into a set of vice-grips.

"Whistle the tune to 'If I only had a brain' one more time and I'm gonna rip these off."

January Jaunts

2012-01-25T09:39:00.003-06:00

The thousands of the Colonel's loyal legions who imbibe liberally of the literary libations ladled out in posts hereon must, in light of his lengthy cyberspace leave-taking, manifested in a three-week lapse of posts, be worrying that some significant circumstance or serious malady may have befallen him.

For the 'Bama and LSU grads (no explanation needed nor effective for the largely illiterate 'Bama and LSU fans) who may have stumbled upon this site in the frantic search for cut-rate chewin' tobacco and frozen corndogs: the Colonel ain't wrote nuthin' in three weeks and all y'all must be worried that he got sick or sumthin'.

Actually, January happened.

The first month of the calendar year has nearly always been a time of concentrated activity for the Colonel. This January, in particular, has witnessed an amplified confluence of conditions and requirements conspiring to consume the Colonel's every waking moment (and a significant portion of his dreams).

As his readers will remember, the Colonel is a member of an elite, yet egalitarian, band of brothers stricken by an incurable obsession with the idiocy known as duck hunting.  January, here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere, is coincident with the migratory crescendo of that most magnificent of waterfowl -- Anas platyrhynchos. Aka: mallard, greenhead, big duck, [insert deleted expletive exclaimed by duck hunters upon the hunted's failure to decoy and present itself for marksmanship display] duck.

Duck hunting necessitates rising to the alarm hours before dawn; dressing in more layers than worn by the men of Byrd's expedition; enduring a boat ride in the dark that exposes one's self to face-frosting wind-chill and the ever-present danger of drowning; donning chest waders and hauling decoy bags, guns, and enough ammunition to wage a counter-insurgency campaign a quarter of a mile into the "secret spot;" breaking the ice in the "secret spot" in order to place several dozen decoys in open water; and standing motionless in thigh-deep, freezing water for hours, while blowing on a kazoo.

It is a sickness bordering on depravity.

The Colonel loves it.

January is not just about duck hunting, however. There is also the tail-end of the deer season to be celebrated with frequent frosty forays afield.

This January (a moment of thanks for Global Warming -- the advent of which the Colonel welcomes with wide open frost-bitten hands) has been one of the most mild on record.  Therefore, the Colonel has not had bad weather as an excuse to keep him from felling tall timbers and sawing lumber.

The Colonel's infantry-ravaged back is not such a big fan of Global Warming.

Then there is football.

Specifically, the most important football game of the season: The First Baptist Church of Abbeville Adult Versus Youth Flag Football Game.

As the Colonel is now into the latter half of his fifth air-breathing decade of riding the big blue marble 'round Ol' Sol, he has had to begin his preparation for participation in the game with much more seriousness than in previous years.

The Colonel has marked off forty yards on the front lawn of the Big House here aboard Eegeebeegee and has been conducting conditioning drills. The Colonel's favorite is wind sprints.

The other day, the Colonel's Lady -- the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda -- stepped out on the front porch to give the Colonel some encouragement, "Hey, knucklehead, what in the world are you doing?"

"Gettin' in shape for the big game."

"Big game? Thought I expressly forbade you from exposing yourself to ridicule and the threat of serious injury. You are not allowed to play football, anymore."

"Thanks for your kind words of encouragement, dear. Gives me motivation for these wind sprints."

"Wind sprints?"

"Yep," the Colonel explained between ragged breaths, "they're," huff, "my," puff, "favorite."

The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda blinked and her face assumed the visage of stark amazement with which she beholds the exploits of her man.

"I thought you were supposed to run wind-sprints."

Short and Sweet

2012-01-06T09:59:00.000-06:00

The Colonel's family doctor ruined the Holidays and probably saved the Colonel's life.

Nine years ago, during his last annual physical just prior to leaving active duty, the Colonel was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes.

Could have been due to the fact that the Colonel's drug of choice for dealing with stress, since he was old enough to feel stress, has been sugar. The Colonel's sweet tooth is legendary among his family and long-time friends. If all there was to eat in this world was vanilla ice cream and chocolate chip cookies, the Colonel would be just fine with that.

Shortly after his diagnosis as a diabetic, the Colonel had an appointment with a dietitian who proceeded to tell him that, as far as the Colonel was concerned, sugar might as well be rat poison and that the Colonel was going to have to dramatically change his diet and eating habits.

For most of his adult life, the Colonel had lived by one of the more perverse Marine adages that eating during hours of daylight was a sign of weakness. The Colonel's breakfast was a steaming cup of joe, or three. Lunch was a long run, a gallon of Gatorade, and a candy bar.

Dinner, consumed over a two hour period beginning shortly after the Colonel arrived at the front hatch of his quarters and announced in his most effective parade ground command voice, "Lower the drawbridge; the King is home!" (shortened over the years to a terse, but nonetheless commanding, "Drawbridge!") consisted of enough red meat and starch to feed a family of four for a week.

After dinner, dessert was a large mixing bowl of vanilla ice cream and three dozen chocolate cookies.

That was then. Now, the Colonel had to eat three small meals a day; morning, noon, and night.  Carbohydrate intake was restricted to fifty grams per meal. The Colonel was also required to take a pill big enough to choke a hippo with dinner to boost his slovenly sugar-solvent system's ability to process.

Fifty grams sounds like a lot...

                 ...until you see the minuscule plated-portions of real food that provide that restricted intake.

Actually, fifty grams of real food in carbohydrates covers a plate about as effectively as Bo Derek 's bikini covered her...

                          ...you get the picture.

But, the Colonel endeavored to persevere, and within a few short months was back at his service-entrance weight, with blood sugar under control.

For the next several years, the Colonel's semi-annual long-term sugar blood test regularly confirmed his maintenance of appropriate carbohydrate discipline.

Until the first of last month.

Seems the Colonel had fallen off the wagon.

Falling off the diet wagon when one is as active in a Southern Baptist church as is the Colonel, requires slightly less effort than blinking.

For the heathens among the thousands of you who regularly imbibe in the barely-literate libations ladled out in posts hereon, and who may have never attended a Southern Baptist church, Southern Baptists EAT.

The Southern Baptist Convention is seriously considering a name change to broaden its appeal and more accurately portray beliefs and character.

The Colonel recently sent a formal letter to the President of the Southern Baptist Convention recommending the name be changed to The Church of Chow.

Ushers at a country Southern Baptist Church hand out snacks along with the bulletins.

Many Southern Baptist Churches have changed to a earlier start and end time for Sunday morning service, so that their membership can beat the Methodists to the buffet line at Golden Corral.

Yep, it's the Colonel's church's fault that he has lately been tempted to strap on the feed bucket and once again find solace in sugared treats and high carb main courses.

The Colonel's doctor wasn't buying that load, however.

"Well, Colonel, how are you feeling?," the Colonel's doctor scanned the results of the latest blood test.

"Gettin' old, Doc. Not feeling my old self so much lately."

"That's no big surprise. Your weight's up significantly since your last visit and your long-term blood sugar is way too high," the Colonel's doctor didn't waste a whole lot of bedside manner coming to the point.

The worst part was the guilt trip he laid on the Colonel.

"Weren't you in the Marine Corps? How about applying a little Marine Corps discipline to your diet and exercise routine?"

There went the Colonel's plan to celebrate the birth of the Baby Jesus by eating his weight in iced sugar cookies and high-octane fudge.

One month into Operation: Return to Fighting Weight and the Colonel is down four pounds.

Well, three pounds. He's added a pound of hair in the meantime.

iPad Ingrate

2012-01-03T12:03:00.000-06:00

The Colonel is, among his manifold challenges, technologically so.

He is particularly challenged with regard to understanding the how to, not to mention the need for, anything preceded by the lower case letter i.

About three years ago, the Colonel shook off the shackles of time and constant connectivity and has since refused to wear a watch or carry a cell phone.

He hasn't missed either for a slow country second.

Of course, closely surrounded by friends and family so shackled, the Colonel has ample access to the current time and rarely remains truly unreachable. Still, there is a palpable feeling of freedom gained by marking time by the sun and the grumble of one's stomach.

The Colonel has almost reached the point at which someone constantly pulling out a cell phone no longer annoys him...

               ...the emotion is much closer to disgust.

So, it was with no small measure of mixed surprise and chagrin that the Colonel opened a present Christmas morn, marked from his family, to find, of all things...

               ...an iPad.

Yeah, it's cool, and the Colonel is very touched -- perhaps most touched by the loving sentiments engraved on the back -- but, now he's one of those people.

Just how is the Colonel supposed to maintain his curmudgeon cred once the word gets out that he is a closet technophile?

And, now he has to constantly wash his hands else the grimy good earth of the Colonel's vast holdings here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere transfer to the touch screen.

Oh, the shame!

No self-respecting farmer/sawyer/chicken-herdsman is ever seen in public with clean hands.

Did find a good board-foot calculator app, though. And, the local weather app is useful. Oh, and there's an app that tells the Colonel the best planting times for the crops he intends to grow later this year.

Still looking for the app that will harvest, clean, and can the prodigious produce the Colonel expects from his burgeoning garden plots.

The Colonel hasn't disposed of his PC and 3D keyboard just yet. He'll probably maintain at least that curmudgeonly customary link with his past.

Old habits do die hard.

It took the Colonel a long time, during his transition from typewriter to word processor, to learn not to use white-out on his computer screen.

Is there an app for removing axle grease from the touch screen?

Year In, Year Out

2012-01-01T13:35:00.000-06:00

The Colonel can tell that he's gettin' old.

There are the obvious clues of course; constant pain, loss of memory, expanding waistline, and the overwhelming desire to choke the ever-livin' you-know-what out of those who flaunt the fact that they are not yet suffering from the former three.

Then, there is the fact that time is passing at a seeming exponentially-increasing rate...

              ...with the exception of the interludes wherein the Colonel experiences the space-time phenomenon known here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere as Specious Irrelativity -- manifested as a shimmering bubble of curmudgeonly couldn't-care-less-ness encompassing the Colonel's immediate surroundings when involved in an endeavor for which no passion whatsoever is shared by any other person or animate object.

Specious Irrelativity is transferable. The Colonel has observed the shimmering bubble of space-time irrelevance encompassing others in his area -- around the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda, for example, on rare occasions that the Colonel has accompanied his Lady on a "shopping trip."

A "shopping trip," in the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda's case, is defined (by the Colonel) as an extended foray through a retail or grocery store's territory for what seems (to the Colonel) to rival the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. It takes forever, there are no discernible objectives, and the cost is prohibitive.

The Colonel digresses.

Frequent digression is one of many "frequents" attendant with the Colonel's advancing age.

One of the main points of this seemingly pointless missive, to which the thousands of you who regularly imbibe in the scarcely-literate literary libations ladled out hereon are exhausting great supplies of patience enduring even greater amounts of drivel in the vain hope of reaching, is that the Colonel is amazed as just how fast the year of our Lord, two thousand and eleven whizzed past.

Would that 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1998 -- years in which all or an extended part of which the Colonel spent separated from the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda while deployed abroad keeping the world safe for democracy as a roguishly handsome, steely-eyed soldier of the sea -- had passed half as rapidly.

At any rate, the Colonel isn't posting to mourn the passing of a year.

For the benefit of Tide and Tiger fans accidentally perusing this post as a result of an internet search for a highly effective herbicide or a killer corndog recipe, the Colonel's use of the phrase at any rate is a clever literary use of a previously addressed concept as a segue.

For the benefit of those suffering from the educational disadvantage of being 'Bama and LSU grads (a much, much smaller subset of Tide and Tiger fans -- most Tide and Tiger fans prominently display framed GED's), a segue is neither a highly effective tree-killer nor a secret herbal ingredient for a killer corndog.

At any rate, (segue phrase repeated for the benefit of you-know-who -- listen carefully for the sound of open palms striking empty heads) the Colonel wishes to take this opportunity to welcome the new year and wish you and yours a blessed and productive 2012.

With the speed at which years are flying by nowadays, the Colonel reckons he better get started on his post for January 1, 2013.

Rebel Clipper

2011-12-26T07:00:00.006-06:00

The Colonel needs a haircut. Badly.

Even a bad haircut would do.

The Colonel's had the same hairdo since he was eighteen. Early on the Colonel paid a weekly visit to his barber for the traditional Marine "high and tight."  Then the Colonel began to notice that there was less and less on top to cut "tight."

The Colonel also broke down and used a little bit of not-so advanced mathematics and discovered that at three or four dollars a weekly barber shop visit, a $20 hair clipper set would quickly pay for itself -- plus give the Colonel some regular practice in case he needed to cut hair to augment his retirement.

For the better part of the last three decades the Colonel has, each Monday morning, set his trusty clippers, Semper Clip, on the lowest setting, and reduced his meager mane to a barely visible stubble.

Sometime back in September (that's as specific as his rapidly diminishing collection of viable brain cells will allow him to remember), the Colonel missed a Monday morning meeting with Semper Clip.  It wasn't necessarily intentional, mind you. He just forgot.

And, it wasn't all that noticeable a week later.

Nor the week after that.

The Colonel, being the creature of habit that he is, missed a whole month of Monday morning meetings with Semper Clip, and just that quickly began a new habit.

After about six weeks, there was enough fur around the Colonel's ears for one of his domino buddies to look up from the table, squint at him like there was a big daub of axle grease smeared across his face, and ask, "Growing your hair out, Colonel?"

"Nope. What makes you think that?"

"I dunno. Just looks like you and your barber had a fallin' out."

"Nope. Just giving my follicle's a rest."

"Looks to me most of your follicles have been resting in peace for quite some time now."

Soon, the hair was as long as it had been since just before the Colonel's dad returned from Vietnam.

The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda held her peace for as long as she could bear it and finally, in her gentle and loving way, told him what she thought of the Colonel's new 'do.

"Hey, knucklehead! You look like a hippie gone to seed! You need to cut that mess off your melon before people start asking you how you came up with E equals MC squared!"

The rest of the Colonel's family displayed even more loving interest in his noggin' wrapping cultivation.

"Daddy, you look terrible!" The Colonel's favorite daughter always knows just what to say to warm his heart, cockles and all. "When are you gonna cut your hair?"

The Colonel flipped his locks and flippantly declared, "When Ole Miss finally wins a football game."

"But, Daddy, this season's over!"

"Yep, looks like I won't get it cut until after the Spring Game."

"But, Daddy, didn't they tie the Spring Game last year?"

Hmmm.  Wonder what the Colonel would look like in dread locks?

Season Reason

2011-12-24T08:00:00.011-06:00

The old man didn't believe in much, and he certainly didn't believe in anything he couldn't prove. He was too intelligent and too learned to indulge himself in beliefs that required faith -- that was just too simple-minded and uneducated for a college professor.

He wasn't completely passionless -- he did love his birds.

As a trained biologist, he knew every detail of the physiology and behavior of animals in general, and, as a ornithological specialist, his knowledge of birds was particularly deep and broad. He was unabashedly vain in the surety that he knew practically everything there was to know about birds -- he was darn near omniscient when it came to feathered fauna. He lived alone and kept several feeders in his backyard to attract the birds he loved so much--they were his company, and he often, embarrassingly, caught himself talking out loud to them.

He stood at the window as the light of the late December afternoon dimmed to early evening twilight. It had snowed most of the day and several inches had accumulated. The temperature was dropping precipitously--it was going to be one of the coldest nights of the year. But, that hadn't deterred his neighbors from their annual ritual of asking him to join them at church for Christmas Eve services. He had politely refused, and even wished them "happy holidays," even though he considered it hypocritical to do so.

His principled disbelief in the basis for the holidays prevented him from even recognizing Christmas in any way. There was no decorated tree in his house, no silly lights outside, and certainly no gift giving. He was no hypocrite.

As darkness fell, he heard the bells ringing from the church down the road, and he marvelled at the waste of time, energy, and resources devoted to Christianity. How could anyone with half a brain buy in to the immaculate conception fairy tale? If there was a God running this universe, and he was fairly certain there wasn't, why would he waste his time on the insignificant life forms on an insignificant rock circling a nondescript star in a galaxy of billions of stars, in a universe of billions of galaxies?
It was snowing again, and he reached over and turned on the outside light so he could watch the flakes fall. His attention was drawn to the ground just at the edge of the circle of light, where a flock of small birds was huddled motionless in the snow. He was immediately concerned. He had seen this kind of behavior before and it normally resulted in the death of all the birds in the flock. Stunned by the sudden onset of bitter cold, they would just sit there and freeze. He hated to see that happen. He loved his birds and it just tore at him any time he found one dead. He had to do something for this flock.

He quickly pulled on his coat and boots and stepped outside in the snow. He thought maybe he could scare them into some life-saving activity. Maybe he could chase them into the air and they would fly somewhere safe. He waved his arms and stomped his feet, but the birds just moved out of his way and continued to huddle in the snow.

He walked across the yard to his workshop at the back of the lot, opened the door, turned on the light, and stooped to turn on the space heater in the corner. He propped open the door and then stepped outside and into the shadows. He hoped that if he remained motionless and hidden the birds would see the light and warmth of the workshop and move inside.

After a few minutes, it was obvious that the birds weren't going to take the initiative to move into the workshop on their own. He would have to try to move them himself. He walked over to the flock and bent to pick up a bird, but it fluttered away and landed on the other side of the flock. He tried several times to catch a bird, but the results were always the same. He tried to herd the birds toward the warmth of the workshop by stooping and waving his arms, but the birds just scattered in front of him and then rejoined to huddle in the snow.

Again and again he tried to shoo the birds toward the lifesaving warmth, and he became increasingly frustrated at his failure to save them.

The temperature was dropping perceptively and he noticed that one of the birds had slumped lifelessly. He redoubled his efforts to herd them to the workshop. Another bird slumped in the snow. He was frantic now, speaking to the birds, trying to reason with them, and then caught himself, embarrassed.

He said to himself aloud, "If I could just become a bird for one minute, I could lead them to the light and warmth of the workshop and save them from dying in the snow."

At that moment, the bells on the church down the road began to ring again.

The old man sank to his knees in the snow and understood.

Tallahatchie Free State 2012 Gift Catalog

2011-12-19T07:00:00.010-06:00

Christmas 2011 will be celebrated here aboard the Colonel's vast holdings at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere with all of the joy and familial...

*** We interrupt the Colonel's latest literary libation to bring you the following crass commercial message.***

Due to overwhelming demand and underwhelming supply, the following Eegeebeegee Christmas Gift and Tallahatchie Free State Souvenir items have been sold out for this season, but will be available for advance ordering beginning in late Spring 2012:

The Comely and Kind-hearted Miss Brenda's Wild Blackberry Jam Sampler.  Spoon a dollop of Miss Brenda's Wild Blackberry Jam on a hot buttered biscuit and take your taste-buds to a whole 'nuther existential plane. Blackberries lovingly hand-harvested by the citizens and legal residents of the Tallahatchie Free State at the height of their finger-staining ripeness. A six ounce jar for only $29.99, plus S & H. A bargain at twice that price!

The Semper Filet Souvenir Sawdust Display Board. Keep your family, friends, and the many guests in your home entertained with the ultimate conversation piece. A half dozen samples of the most prodigious product of the Colonel's sapling to sawdust process mounted on a rustic mill-sawn foot-long 1 x 6 board. All logs converted to lumber and sawdust come from timber harvested by the Colonel on the Colonel's timber plantation at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere. For a limited time only... $299.99 each, plus S & H.  (The Colonel's signature $0.37 extra.)

The Colonel's Carbon Creator Special. For that special person on your gift list who has everything, but needs to leave a lasting legacy for his or her progeny. Prior to harvesting, the Colonel will name a tree in honor of the giftee. The tangible gift (in addition to the intangible personal knowledge of making a tree-hugger cry) is a framed collage of photographs depicting the Colonel's death-defying and maim-missing chain-saw dance 'round the base of the standing tree, the Colonel's death-defying and maim-missing chain-saw dismemberment of the fallen tree, the conversion of the tree's logs into lumber and sawdust, and the bonfire consummation of all tree products not converted to lumber and sawdust. Personalized with placards in each photo on which the giftee's name will be scrawled in a special ink composed of kudzu extract, loblolly pine charcoal, and North Mississippi red clay (aka Confederate Concrete).  $499.99, plus S & H.

The Colonel's Bucket List Headliner. The trip of a lifetime! An all expense-paid working vacation aboard the Colonel's vast holdings at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere. Your stay will include 1/4 star accommodations and a customizable smorgasbord of chores aboard the Eegeebeegee Timber and Wildlife Plantation. Drive the Colonel's muddy red tractor, Semper Field. Operate the Colonel's toothy sawmill, Semper Fillet. Skinny-dip in Lake Brenda. Attend an ad hoc meeting of the Congress of the Tallahatchie Free State.  Pick-up bed tour (in the back of the Colonel's rusty red pick-em truck, Semper Fillit) of Ole Miss and the cultural center of the southern universe -- Oxford, MS; available. $1999.99 per day. Photos with the Colonel at a small extra charge.

*** We now return you to regular programming...***

It Ain't Over

2011-12-15T09:40:00.001-06:00

Despite the erroneous media hyper-ventilation and political victory lap-taking to the contrary, the announced "end" of US combat operations in Iraq (redux of 2003's "Mission Accomplished"), and the projected end of same in Afghanistan, will not mean the "end" of the war with Islamic extremists and their rogue nation supporters. It is far from over, and is indeed on the threshold of a far more dangerous phase. While the people of our nation may believe the war is over, our enemies do not.

If the war was really over, there would no longer be a need for the unconstitutional punishment meted out on the traveling public by the Transportation Safety Administration, in the name of safety and security.

If the war was really over, people throughout the Middle East and Southwest Asia would be governed by, if not a close facsimile of our constitutional representative republic, at least forms of government that respected and protected basic political, economic, and religious freedoms for men and women.

If the war was really over, our nation's hard and soft power-projection capabilities would be focused on the increasing threat from the Peoples' Republic of China (neither of the people, nor a republic -- but, the Colonel digresses).

As any of the thousands of you who regularly imbibe of the literary libations ladled out in posts hereon will no doubt remember from dozens of treatises on the subject, the Colonel believes with every fibre of his being and without a doubt in his military mind that "the war" could have been over at least five years ago.

Let's spend a little time coming to the correct understanding of just what it is that these re-United States have been involved in for the past decade, shall we? The Colonel has wasted a great deal of his few remaining brain cells and your valuable rod and cone time in previous posts hereon, explaining, in exacting detail, the correct nomenclature of the diplomatic, economic, and military operations in which our nation and its allies have participated since 9/11. He won't subject you to a retelling, nor dull the easily-glazed eyes of the Bama and LSU grads who may have accidentally stumbled onto this blog whilst in a frantic search for hound's-tooth hats and Mardi Gras beads.

Suffice it for the Colonel to say, the military operations in Afghanistan since 2001 and Iraq since 2003 are not separate, distinct, and exclusive wars in and of themselves. They are theater campaigns, in a far larger war. And, while the American military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan may be ending, the conflicts there ARE NOT.

Several decades ago, leaders in many countries (primarily in the Islamic world), whose continuance in tyrannical power over their downtrodden and exploited populations was threatened by American-led Western freedom-supporting presence in their region; formed, bank-rolled, and trained irregular para-military formations to carry out asymmetrical attacks against American and Western interests, in order to dissuade those free governments from interfering in their not-so free governance.

For the Bama and LSU grads, the Colonel will spell out the previous point more simply. Bad guys like Gaddafi didn't like the fact that Western (American) values and ideals were giving their people "revolutionary" ideas. Bad guys like Gaddafi paid other bad guys (and gals) to blow up airplanes and nightclubs to send a message to the sponge-spined, weak-willed democrats (little d) to stay out of the bad guy's business. We call the bad guys (and gals) that blow up airplanes, terrorists.

That war, begun long before 9/11, ain't over.

And, so far, we're losing it.

Freeze Warning

2011-12-12T11:32:00.000-06:00

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen"     --Paul's letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11, Verse 1

The Colonel, as his family well knows, and the thousands of you who regularly imbibe in the barely literate literary libations ladled out in posts hereon have surely surmised, enjoys an albeit diminishing reputation for unerring accuracy in his prognostications. There was a time when, before the ravages of age and mental gymnastics endured attempting to make sense of Ron Paul's appeal to more than three dozen survivalists hiding out in a remote canyon in New Mexico reduced the Colonel's mental faculties and powers of observation to the few remaining synaptic connections still firing across the ever-widening gaps between the atrophying cells lying fallow in the grey goo lodged in forgotten recesses of his bony brain-housing group, if the Colonel told someone a chicken could plow they hooked up a rooster.

That was then, this is now:

The Colonel finds himself, more often than not of late, retracting, retracing, regretting, and otherwise admitting his error on previous predictions and proclamations. For example, the Colonel was way wrong when at the beginning of the season he predicted that the Ole Miss Rebel football team would stink up the kudzu-clad hills here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere and win only four or five ballgames.

The Rebels went two and ten. Epic frontal lobe fail on the Colonel's part.

Predictive failure is happening with such increasing frequency lately that the Colonel is starting to succumb to self-doubt and beginning to make apologies for prognostications and proclamations not yet proven false.

So it is with the University of Mississippi's hire of Hugh Freeze to remedy the failure of Huston Nutt (and the failure of Ed Orgeron, David Cutcliffe, the despicable Tommy Tuberville, Billy Brewer, Steve Sloan, Ken Cooper, and Billy Kinard before him) to reincarnate the great Coach Johnny Vaught. A fortnight ago, the Colonel posted the following prediction regarding Archie Manning's mission to find the next Johnny Vaught :

"...So, sometime here in the next couple of weeks, a new head football coach will be announced here in Oxford. He'll be a good guy and all. Young, energetic, positive.

And totally not up to the task of competing in the Southeastern Conference.

Ole Miss football will flounder on, sub-par, for the foreseeable future. That young, energetic, positive coach will last three or four seasons, at most, before giving way to the next young, energetic, positive, and totally not up to the job of competing in the SEC, head coach..." http://thecolonelscorner.blogspot.com/2011/12/life-at-end-of-tunnel.html

Three days later Archie Manning sent the Colonel a personal message announcing the results of his committee's exhaustive head coach search.

Okay, it wasn't exactly intended as a personal message for the Colonel -- there were a few tens of thousands others who got the same message. The Colonel took it personal, though.

Archie told me, us, that a young, energetic, positive man by the name of Hugh Freeze would be the next Head Football Coach at Ole Miss.

A short time later, the Colonel watched as Coach Freeze made his first speech to Rebel Nation. The man's faith and fervor was impressive. The Colonel couldn't help but feel a surge of hope stirring deep within the shriveled cinder that passes for his heart. The first play from scrimmage was yet unseen, but the Colonel felt a rekindling of the fires of faith.

Self-doubt crept from hiding deep in the Colonel's soul and whispered compellingly into his tinnitus-tortured ear, "You could be wrong. Freeze could be Vaught reincarnate. He's so positive; so likable; so convincingly earnest. He's been a winner everywhere he's been in charge."

Oh, how the Colonel wants to be persuaded!

The Colonel may indeed be proven wrong once again, but in the meantime he'll cling bitterly to his guns and maintain his football faith rooted firmly in what he has seen.   And, he'll offer Freeze the following warning:

You have embarked on the single most challenging endeavor of your young career.  Your on-field foes at LSU, Bama, and the School Beneath Us pale in comparison to the off-field foes arrayed against your success and dreams of retirement here in Oxford.   You'll be tempted to take sides for or against the tradition-trashing insanity that dwells in the hallowed halls of the Lyceum.

Don't. (The Colonel will keep up that fight for you.)

Find and bring us players who share your integrity and want to fight for Ole Miss. No matter the outside pressure, stay focused on your team. Love 'em and lead 'em. Like you said in your introduction, it's really all about family.

Oh, and one more thing...

Beat State!

Sawdust Savant

2011-12-08T10:57:00.000-06:00

Warning: Graphic images of a real tree's conversion from log to lumber contained hereon.

As the thousands of you who regularly imbibe in the barely literate literary libations ladled out in posts heron will no doubt recall, one of the critical components of the Colonel's sapling to sawdust production system aboard his vast holdings here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere is his trusty sawmill, Semper Filet (not to be confused with his trusty red tractor, Semper Field; nor his rusty red pick 'em up truck, Semper Fillit; nor even his former boat and Redneck Riviera partner in redfish and speckled trout population control, Semper Fish).

It has slowly dawned in the rapidly dwindling collection of cells lying fallow in a small puddle of grey goo lodged in a cavernous crevice of his bony brain-housing group, that the Colonel should consider posting a video of the intricately choreographed ballet that is his death-defying and maim-missing dance round the periphery of Semper Filet as the machine makes manageable boards from barely manageable logs.

The Colonel is indebted to his lady, the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda, for her assistance as videographer of the clip proudly presented in this post. The Colonel is indebted to the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda for a great deal more than her assistance as videographer...but, there's no room in this tome, nor allowance in your patience, for that recounting.

The first scene in the video clip below portrays the Colonel in the final phase of manhandling a log into the waiting arms of Semper Filet. What is not shown in this clip is the Colonel's death-defying and maim-missing chain-saw-armed dance around the base of the standing tree -- allowing the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda to witness that evolution would result in either her insistence that the Colonel immediately cease all further felling of timber or significantly increase the amount of his life insurance. The clip also does not show the death-defying and maim-missing chain-saw-armed dismembering and conversion of the tree into ten-foot logs, for the same reason.

Succeeding scenes show conversion of the log into a squared cant, from which boards are cut. Still shots at the end of the video show 1) boards stacked for drying in the Colonel's Man Toy Storage and Sawdust Production Facility and 2) the most prodigious product of the process.

Now, if you will excuse the Colonel, he must begin drafting his Academy Award acceptance speech.

Lessons Infamously Ignored

2011-12-07T07:00:00.023-06:00

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941--a date which will live in infamy--the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."

With these words, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the predicate for his request that the Congress of the United States formally declare that a state of war existed between the United States and Japan.

While Japan's attack on the U.S. military bases in the Hawaiian Islands was the proximate casus belli, the seeds of the conflict were planted decades before, in much the same way as those of the coincident conflict in Europe. Nationalism, like a phoenix risen from the bitter ashes of defeat and global disapproval (in the cases of Germany and Japan, respectively) had fostered an appetite for, and an acceptance of, militant dictatorships promising geo-political glory under the banner of imperialist expansionism and clad in garments of overt racism and brutish megalomania.

The British and the Russians had already been long at war with Nazi Germany by the time Japan awakened, in Admiral Yamamoto's words, "... a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve."  It took the United States and Great Britain, in a mutual nose-holding alliance with the Soviet Union, nearly four more years to bring the Second World War to a conclusion satisfactory to the Allies.

The end of that war brought about, for all practical purposes, the end of the British Empire and ushered in the Superpower Age of the competing American and Russian Empires. Ironically, it was the British Empire's sacrifices and stalwart resistance early-on against Hitler at the Channel and against Tojo in South Asia that bought time for the Russians and Americans to get their logistical and operational acts together.

And, contrary to much of the revisionist and shallow progressive pablum that passes for history in American schools at even the highest levels today, it was not so much the military build-up for WWII that pulled America out of the Great Depression, as it was the fact that at the war's conclusion only the United States, and to a lesser degree the Soviet Union, survived without their industrial capacity in ruins. That, and the fact that the United States' economy was not shackled by central planning like the Soviet's command economy are the primary reasons for America's global economic superiority for the predominance of the second half of the 20th Century.

The point of this missive, for which the thousands of you who regularly imbibe liberally of the literary libations ladled out in posts heron have no doubt reached the uppermost limits of your patience in anticipation of the Colonel's arrival thereto, is that there are several lessons to be drawn from the American experience following her rude awakening seventy years ago, today. Unfortunately, many of those valuable lessons have already been ignored, to our Republic's loss and its leaders' discredit. Two of the most important are provided below:

Lesson #1: War is an ugly business, the wining of which requires great sacrifice at home and the visitation of great and widespread destruction on the strategic home of the enemy. Example: There were NO civilian vehicles for private ownership built in the United States in 1943 and 1944. See history of the strategic aerial bombardment of Japan for an example of great and widespread destruction visited on the strategic home of the enemy.

Lesson #2: The illusion of victory achieved by a long, protracted, limited war (see U.S. strategic objectives since September 2001) is just that -- an illusion. A people, any people, grow weary of a war's sacrifice much more quickly than even the most dynamic and persuasive leaders can muster persuasive speeches to prevent; and an enemy, any enemy, can draw increasing strength in the face of timid military strategy.

Combine the foregoing lessons ignored and the result is strategic failure at the cost of an egregious waste of blood and treasure.  Watch carefully the inevitable fall of Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, et. al. into the hands of the very militant Islamists whose ideology drove 19 young men to use American airliners as guided weapons of mass destruction on 9/11.

And that's all the Colonel has to say about that.

Life at the End of the Tunnel

2011-12-02T10:02:00.001-06:00

The Colonel returned last evening to his vast holdings on the placid shores of Lake Brenda, here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere, after a short trip to the future 32nd through 40th states of Mexico (currently the former Republic of Texas) to briefly reunite the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda with her sister and parental units. A good time was had by all -- even by the, for all practical purposes, unentertainable Colonel.

The physical distance from Mississippi, provided by the geographical imposition of the not-so great state of Louisiana, and the cyber-space access suspension, imposed by the Colonel's Lady for the duration of the trip, served to isolate the Colonel from the incessant cowbell ringing and bulldog barking that has permeated the state since the on-field collapse and season finale of the worst football team fielded by the Harvard of the South since the Hoover administration.

Worst than the team fielded in 1974 -- the Colonel's first fall of matriculation at Ole Miss -- that went 3 and 8, losing to then-lowly South Carolina at homecoming.

South Carolina went 1 and 10 that season.

(For the errant Bama and LSU fans who have stumbled upon this post in search of tree poison or a good corn dog recipe, the Colonel feels the need to explain the significance of the last sentence. He'll type slowly. Ole Miss was so bad in 1974, that the South Carolina Gamecocks' only win that season was against the Rebels.)

Worst than the team fielded in 1942, that was the last (and first) team to lose three in a row to in-state rival, the former Mississippi A & M.

Ole Miss didn't field a football team in 1943, ostensibly due to the country's involvement in World War Two. The Colonel rather believes that after suffering the shame of losing three in a row to Mississippi State, Ole Miss needed a year break from the game.

The two schools renewed their rivalry in 1944. Ole Miss won that game, and the next nineteen straight.

Does the Colonel think that history will repeat itself?

Nope.

Ole Miss football great Archie Manning is heading up the search committee tasked with finding a replacement for former Head Coach Huston Nutt and soon to be (thankfully) former Athletic Director Pete Boone. The Colonel thinks the world of Archie, but he ain't got the chance Lee had at Petersburg of finding a really good coach for Ole Miss.

Frankly, there ain't a really good coach in the land, worth his salt and in his right mind, who would subject himself to the tradition-trashing politically correct administration and Grove and Square party-centric fan base extant at the University of Mississippi.

So, sometime here in the next couple of weeks, a new head football coach will be announced here in Oxford. He'll be a good guy and all. Young, energetic, positive.

And totally not up to the task of competing in the Southeastern Conference.

Ole Miss football will flounder on, sub-par, for the foreseeable future. That young, energetic, positive coach will last three or four seasons, at most, before giving way to the next young, energetic, positive, and totally not up to the job of competing in the SEC, head coach.

The University itself will eventually succumb to the inexorable tide of politically correct idiocy. The nicknames Ole Miss and Rebels will be found by the liberal loonies running the asylum to be socially insensitive, and a once-great tradition-soaked school will become just another cookie-cutter public university.

Not such a bad thing, actually.

Maybe without Ole Miss, the Colonel can finally get a life.

Mississippi MASH Hero

2011-11-23T11:07:00.000-06:00

"When the sun goes down, the tide goes out,
The people gather 'round and they all begin to shout,
'Hey! Hey! Uncle Dud,
It's a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi Mud.'"

During his formative years, the Colonel was a fan of the movie M*A*S*H and the television series of the same name. Both were adaptations of a book written by H. Richard Hornberger and published under the nom de plume, Richard Hooker. Hornberger's book was based on his own Korean War experience as a surgeon in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital -- the 8055th.

Ironically, as wildly successful as the movie and television series were, Hornberger profited little from their popularity, having sold the film rights to the story for a pittance. And, as the left-leaning writers of the TV show increasingly used their medium as a thinly-veiled message against the Vietnam War, Hornsberger is reported to have refused to watch the show.

The Colonel takes pride in the fact that there is a strong Mississippi connection to the M*A*S*H story -- beyond the above-quoted lyrics to the song sung by the crazy general in the first episode of Season 3, "The General Flipped at Dawn."

The commanding officer of the real MASH unit that was the inspiration for Hornberger's book, was a Mississippian by the name of Dr. Jeremiah Henry Holleman.

Born in Hattiesburg in 1916, Dr. Holleman recieved his undergraduate degree from Millsaps College in 1939 and his medical degree from the Universities of Mississippi and Tennessee in 1943. After surgical training at Carraway Methodist in Birmingham and The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Dr. Holleman joined the U.S. Army's 89th Infantry Division in time to participate in their assault across the Rhine in the early Spring of 1945 and the first liberation of a concentration camp.

After serving as a battlefield surgeon and witness to the horrors of the Holocaust, Dr. Holleman would have been entirely justified to have decided to sit out the next war in the civilian surgical practice he had opened in Columbus, Mississippi.

Only he didn't.

In 1951, as the war on the Korean peninsula settled into a meat grinding impasse, Dr. Holleman rejoined the U.S. Army and was assigned as the commanding officer of the 8055th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Pioneering the mass casualty concept of triage, and developing new vascular surgery techniques, the 8055th was credited with saving the lives and limbs of over 5000 soldiers, with an amazing 97% survival rate.

With the signing of the Korean Armistice in 1953, Dr. Holleman returned home to his surgical practice in Columbus, Mississippi where he served as a leading citizen and benefactor for the next half century.

Dr. Holleman, a real American Hero, died earlier this month. He was 94. Dr. Holleman was buried on Veterans Day in Columbus' Friendship Cemetery -- the site of the first Decoration Day (later Memorial Day) ceremony.

Entirely fitting.

The "Great Task Remaining"

2011-11-18T10:48:00.002-06:00

Tomorrow marks the 148th anniversary of President Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address." He spoke for only a few minutes. Others preceded him at the podium with loud, lengthy speeches; and, when Lincoln spoke, many in the crowd struggled to make out his words. Not until much later, after they were published in the newspapers, did these words strike a chord that resounds even today:

"...The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

A little over four months had passed since the titanic battle at the quiet pastoral crossroad college town in Pennsylvania. A few men in the final grey-clad assault against the Union Army's defenses actually reached the rock wall behind which their brothers in blue had poured hot lead into, and decimated, their ranks. Historians have since marked that spot as the "High water mark of the Confederacy."

Only it wasn't.

At least it wasn't the northernmost invasion of the North by Southern forces.

That distinction actually belongs to the Battle of Salineville, fought in Northeastern Ohio three weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg. A Confederate cavalry force under Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan struck deep into enemy territory and was eventually cut off and defeated by Union forces under the command of one Brigadier General James M. Shackelford, to whom the Colonel is distantly related on his mother's side.

The Colonel digresses.

The point of this post, for which the thousands of you who regularly display enormous erudition and enhanced cultural consciousness by imbibing liberally of the literary libations poured out hereon have waited patiently for the Colonel to make, is that the "great task remaining before us" to which Lincoln referred in his remarks honoring the sacrifice of those "who gave the last full measure of devotion" was not accomplished with the end of the American Civil War.

Lincoln's "Great Task" remains ever before us. Like God's perfection, it is an unachievable goal toward the achievement of which we must never cease to strive.

"Government of the people, by the people," and, "for the people" is not an easy thing to achieve.

It is, in the history of man, nearly an impossibility.

Therein lies, the Colonel believes, the true measure of the greatness of our republic. The American people are world-renown for achieving the impossible. Need an example? Just look at the impossible leap made, in less than a citizen's lifetime, from the sandy dunes of Kitty Hawk to the dusty plains of the Sea of Tranquility.

The Constitution, with which, and on which, the American Republic was founded, is not so much a blueprint of a form of government as it is an aspirational torch lighting the way for Jefferson's inalienable right to pursue freedom.

It is claimed that the Constitution contains guarantees of our rights and freedoms.

It does no such thing.

In our republic, the people, as Lincoln so clearly understood, guarantee their own rights.

In our republic, the people guarantee their own freedom.

And when a government oversteps the constitutional authority given to it, not by the Constitution, but by the people, the people must guarantee their own rights and freedoms with a box of ballots; and failing that, when due to clearly unconstitutional governmental trampling and usurpation, with a box of bullets.

The Colonel has his hopes on the former and his money in the latter.

Catch #2

2011-11-12T13:53:00.000-06:00

The Colonel made the grave error the other day of asking the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda for her unvarnished critique of the lucidity, efficacy, and interest of his regularly irregular posts hereon.

The Colonel's Lady not only laid off the varnish, but the sandpaper as well.

How rough was it? Well, it was so uncomfortable that the only reason he didn't immediately vacate her immediate presence was because the Colonel was driving.

He briefly considered exiting the vehicle while on the bridge over the Tallahatchie, but that song's already been written.

The criticism from the Colonel's favorite person in all the world wasn't so much like a sharp stick in the eye...; it was more like multiple thrusts of a rapier under his ribs. The Colonel was faced with the choice to either face it like a man, or respond like a little girl.

"...tedious, infantile, sophomoric, redundant," the comely and suddenly, shockingly not-so-kind-hearted Miss Brenda paused twenty minutes into her caustically cruel critique, "Hey, are you crying?!? Oh, for goodness sake; Man-Up!"

"Ye, ye, ye, yes, dear," the Colonel stammered between sobs.

"And, another thing," the Colonel's Lady continued, "this bit about 'the three dozen who waste rod and cone time reading your posts...'"

"You mean," the Colonel sniffed and corrected, "'the three dozen or so of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon...'?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah; whatever. Hate it."

"But that's one of the Colonel's signature catch phrases," the Colonel whined.

"And, quit referring to yourself in the third person around me. Hate that, too!"

The comely and suddenly, shockingly, not-so-kind-hearted Miss Brenda was not only repeatedly ramming her rapier under his ribs, but was violently twisting said repeatedly-rammed-rapier at the hilt-deep conclusion of each thrust.

"But, but, dear," the Colonel defended, "self-deprecation is one of the Colonel's most cherished literary devices."

"Well," the Colonel's Lady retorted, "I don't like anyone deprecating on my hubby; not even my own hubby."

The Colonel thought she might be confusing deprecation with defecation and briefly considered delivering a short lecture regarding the fine art of differentiating the two.

But, then again, she probably already knows the difference -- she's (new Colonel's Lady-approved signature catch phrase to follow) one of the thousands of erudite, discriminating, and culturally conscious readers who closely follow and appreciatively drink up the literary libations provided here at the Colonel's Corner.

Armistice Day Salute

2011-11-11T06:00:00.123-06:00

The Colonel never really knew his maternal grandfather.    Eubanks McCrary was not much more than a name, a few faded photographs, and a handful of anecdotes -- the Colonel was a mere toddler when the man died.

The one thing about the man that had always been intriguing was the fact that he had served in the First World War.  Shame on the Colonel, but only of late has he begun to research the history of his grandfather's service.

The Colonel's mother recently granted him custody of a small clutch of her father's documents. When she handed them to him in a legal envelope, it felt to the Colonel like being entrusted with a most fragile fragment of our family history. Of no inherent value in and of itself, but, to this increasingly sentimental soul, a treasure trove of not-so-trivial trivia about a man with whom the Colonel wishes for all the world to have spent acknowlegeable time.

On the Colonel's desk this morning rests the contents of that envelope: a photograph of Grandmother and Grandfather McCrary taken several years before his death; a copy of their marriage license (married on Christmas Day, 1923); and a non-descript, paper-thin leather envelope with the faint embossing of an eagle and the words "Honorable Discharge from the U.S. Service."

Protected within that folded leather is a two-sided document. On the front above the seal of the United States (appropriate to this day that the eagle's talons grasp both the arrows of war and the olive branch of peace -- our nation's enemies still have a choice) are the words, "Honorable Discharge from the United States Army."   On the reverse, a summary of Private McCrary's service under the words, "Enlistment Record."

There are terse, handwritten blank-fillers to the right of line headings such as Name:..., Grade:...; Date and Place of Enlistment:...; etc..., but from them a quick snapshot of the man can be gleaned.

Eubanks McCrary, from Columbus, Mississippi, was inducted into the United States Army on May the 27th, 1918. He was 22, single, and by vocation, a farmer. Upon his discharge a year later he was described as in "Good" physical condition and of "Excellent" character.

Near the bottom of his Enlistment Record are four tight lines available for "Remarks." Into that small space the practiced hand of a military professional entered a shorthand account of Private McCrary's service to his nation in the Great War:

No A.W.O.L. No absence under G.O. 45 WD 1914
Co. D. 4th Tr. Reg Camp Pike, Ark5/27/18 to 7/10/18. Co L C.P. July ARD 7/10/18 to 9/22/18.
Co. B. 161st Inf. 9/22/18 to 10/7/18. Co. B. 137th INf 10/7/18 to 5/6/19. Cas Det 4th Rc Bn 162nd DB
5/6/19 to date of discharge. Served in France. Sailed for France 7/18/18. Arrived U.S. 4/28/19 Entitled to travel pay to Columbus, Miss.

Immediately following his induction into the Army, Private McCrary reported to Camp Pike, outside of Little Rock, Arkansas and was assigned to Company D, 4th Training Regiment until his completion of basic training on July 10, 1918.  Within the next week he traveled by troop train for the East Coast, from which he sailed aboard a troop ship to France on the 18th of July, 1918.

From what was known about the casualty rates of the horrific meat-grinder that had gone on in France since 1914, he likely never expected to see home again.

Upon arrival in France, Private McCrary was assigned to Company B of the 161st Infantry Regiment. That regiment, in the 81st Infantry Brigade of the 41st Division, had been one of the first units to go to France with the American Expeditionary Force in the fall of 1917. Upon arrival in France, the 41st Division was designated a "Replacement Division" and its men were subsequently distributed as replacements to other divisions when their ranks were depleted during fighting. The 41st Division then assumed the role of training new arrivals to France prior to their assignment to the front.

The Colonel's grandfather arrived in France just as the great Allied Meuse-Argonne Offensive of the war against Germany was kicking off. One of the divisions at the forefront of that offensive -- the 35th Division -- had been in the attack for four days when, short of food and ammunition and its fighting strength sapped by heavy casualties, it was counterattacked by the better part of four of the best-trained divisions in the German army. The 35th Division ceased to exist, for all practical purposes, as a fighting force and its remnants were withdrawn from the line.

Private McCrary was among the soldiers, newly arrived in France, who replenished the ranks of one of the 35th's four infantry regiments, the 137th Infantry. The 35th Division was sent to the relatively quiet Somme Dieu sector on the southeastern end of the Allied front. There, it went into defensive trenchworks and so remained until the Armistice went into effect and the guns fell silent...

... ninety-three years ago, today.

For two decades, Americans celebrated the 11th of November as Armistice Day, in remembrance of the victory over Germany and the American fighting men who helped bring an end to "the war to end all wars."

Only, that war didn't do any such thing.

American men in uniform knew little peace during those next two decades. Combat in defense of American interests in Latin America and even in Russia (grist for a future post) kept a sharp edge on the small cadre of American warriors who would form the backbone and animating spirit of the mighty force called on to defeat the Axis Powers during WWII.

So, after that war, and the one that followed, America began to focus it's remembrances on the 11th of November not so much on the end of what had become known by then as the First World War, but on the living men and women who had honorably served our nation in uniform.

Armistice Day became Veterans Day.

Eubanks McCrary arrived back in the United States on the 23rd of April, 1919, less than eleven months after joining the United States Army and reporting for training at Camp Pike. Less than two weeks later he was honorably discharged and back on the farm.

He is buried in the small cemetery at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church on the eastern outskirts of Columbus, Mississippi. Not far from his farm, now a subdivision.

A simple marker reads:

B. Eubanks McCrary

Mississippi

Pvt Co B 137 Inf

World War I

4 Mar 1896 – 9 Oct 1958

The Colonel knows that the three dozen of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon may indeed be remembering that one of the Colonel's pet peeves is the aggravating and undisciplined habit of a majority of Americans to mix up the meanings and observances of Memorial Day (initially known as Decoration Day, and first celebrated by the fair ladies of Columbus, Mississippi at the conclusion of the War for Southern Independence), Veterans Day, and Armed Forces Day.

For the record: Memorial Day is reserved solely for the solemn remembrance of those who died in battle in our nation's wars, Veterans Day is reserved solely for the recognition of living veterans of the United States military, and Armed Forces Day is reserved solely for the recognition of those currently serving in the armed forces of these re-United States. Period. No room for discussion or latitude for mix-matching.

So, the three dozen of you who regularly waste rod and cone perusing posts hereon may mistakenly believe that you have caught the Colonel in a rare mistake -- recognizing a deceased veteran on Veterans Day.

The operative word in the sentence above is "mistakenly."

The Colonel, sole arbiter of said (and unsaid) matters both in posts hereon and actions hereabout his vast holdings here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere, is exercising the rights vested in him, by him, to declare today Armistice Day, here aboard Eegeebeegee, capital of the Tallahatchie Free State; and, therefore, takes this opportunity to come to the correct position of attention and execute a hand salute to the memory of his grand progenitor.

10 November 1775

2011-11-10T06:00:00.078-06:00

Prominent in the Colonel's pantheon of personal military heroes is Lieutenant General John Archer Lejeune, 13th Commandant of the United States Marine Corps. Ninety years ago, this week, in his capacity as Commandant -- fresh from the fighting in France, during which he served as the Commanding General of the U. S. Army's 2d Infantry Division -- Lejeune ordered that "a reminder of the honorable service of the Corps be published by every command, to all Marines throughout the globe, on the Birthday of the Corps."

On this Birthday of the Corps, therefore, in compliance with the will of the 13th Commandant, Article 38, United States Marine Corps Manual, Edition of 1921, is published as follows:

"(1) On November 10, 1775, a Corps of Marines was created by a resolution of the Continental Congress. Since that date many thousands of men have borne the name 'Marine.' In memory of them it is fitting that we who are Marines should commemorate the Birthday of our Corps by calling to mind the glories of its long and illustrious history.

(2) The record of our Corps is one which bears comparison with that of the most famous military organizations in the world's history. During 90 of the 146 years of its existence the Marine Corps has been in action against the Nation's foes. From the Battle of Trenton to the Argonne, Marines have won foremost honors in war and in the long eras of tranquility at home, generation after generation of Marines have grown gray in war in both hemispheres, and in every corner of the seven seas, so that our country and its citizens might enjoy peace and security.

(3) In every battle and skirmish since the Birth of the Corps, Marines have acquitted themselves with the greatest distinction, winning new honors on each occasion until the term 'Marine' has come to signify all that is highest in military efficiency and soldierly virtue.

(4) This high name of distinction and soldierly repute we who are Marines today have received from those who preceded us in the Corps. With it we also received from them the eternal spirit which has animated our Corps from generation and has long been the distinguishing mark of Marines in every age. So long as that spirit continues to flourish, Marines will be found equal to every emergency in the future as they have been in the past, and the men of our nation will regard us as worthy successors to the long line of illustrious men who have served as 'Soldiers of the Sea' since the founding of the Corps."

To all of his brother and sister Marines, the Colonel hefts this morning his customary mug of joe and wishes each and all "Happy Birthday" on this the 236th anniversary of the founding of our beloved Corps.

Semper Fidelis, Marines!

Yes, for Life

2011-10-31T10:02:00.000-05:00

A week from tomorrow, 8 November 2011, the Colonel and his fellow Mississippians will vote on Initiative 26. The question on the ballot is, "Should the term 'person' be defined to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the equivalent thereof?"

A "yes" vote will amend the Mississippi Constitution to define the word “person” or “persons”, as those terms are used in Article III of the state constitution, to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.

In practice, such a definition of personhood will protect unborn children from infanticide within the territorial confines of the state.

As the two or three dozen of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon can well imagine, Initiative 26 has generated no little controversy and placed the Colonel's state (Sorry, MSU, but it's the Colonel's state, too) squarely in the cross hairs of the sharpshooters on both sides of the abortion argument.

Out-of-state Pro-Choice advocates have flooded the state in numbers not seen since the Freedom Riders of the Sixties, obfuscating the debate with fear-mongering and falsehoods.

And, therein lies the greatest irony of ironies.

One would think that those who consider themselves the heirs of the righteous Civil Rights movement and wave highest the banner of social justice and defense of the defenseless would hear that the drummer leading this parade is beating out a far different march.

Despite the canards and protestations to the contrary, it is clear to those who think for themselves and fall not in line with the current cultural definition of "cool," that the abortion rights movement is about nothing more than convenience.

Based on a "right of privacy" not found in our Republic's Constitution, and cloaked in the supposedly unassailable right of a woman to decide the future of the child she carries, the practice of pre-birth infanticide has destroyed more American lives than all of the wars in which America has participated -- each and every year, since 1973.

The Colonel finds no little irony in the fact that the vast majority of those currently climbing the ramparts of class warfare to protest the ravages of rampant capitalism on the defenseless middle and lower classes, will, in the same frame of feckless mind see no contradiction of conscience in their support of a practice that has decimated two generations.

The Colonel has long-since ceased attempts to debate the issue on its merits with those who oppose his position. It always ends the same way. After the Colonel has simply and completely demonstrated the scientific, legal, and moral bankruptcy of the euphemistically-named "Pro-Choice" position, his opponent has either attempted to obfuscate the issue with off-topic canards or resorted to name-calling. The Colonel, taught by the best, is unbeatable in the latter and has no time for the former.

Many of the Colonel's friends and acquaintances have taken umbrage with his support of the criminalization of abortion. Were every one of the small circle of his acquaintances and even smaller circle of his friends to oppose his position, the Colonel would maintain it still. It is a matter of his most jealously guarded principles of manhood.

Real men -- gentlemen -- know that there are a few very important things worth fighting for, even when others would back off in the ill-conceived notion of "civility" or the inane, suicidal concept of "tolerance." Real men -- gentlemen -- have no higher calling than to fight to protect the most defenseless among us.

The Colonel votes Yes, for Life.

Pigskin Prescience

2011-10-24T14:41:00.001-05:00

The Colonel would once again like to thank the Ole Miss season ticket holders in Section H of the hallowed halls of Vaught-Hemingway stadium for selling their tickets to the opposing team's fans. This week, however, the Arkansas fans were refreshingly different than the Bama Bandwagon Boors who invaded the Colonel's space last week.

Despite witnessing yet another epic gridiron collapse by his Rebels, the Colonel actually thoroughly enjoyed his weekend.

Some of the Colonel's Ole Miss NROTC classmates were in town for our annual reunion to reminesce, catch up, share sea stories, and give stern (and not-so stern) advice to the current middies in matriculation preparing for careers as naval officers. The revelry was interrupted by a football game, to which the Colonel dutifully marched and assumed his appointed place of duty.

The Hog fans sitting in front of him seemed pleasant enough and the Colonel felt comfortable enough, when his Rebels had jumped out to an early 17 to nuthin' lead, to reassure them that they would indeed enjoy the rest of the game just as much as Rebel fans had enjoyed the initial quarter of play.

"Y'all don't worry, now. You're gonna win this football game."

The Arkansas fan squinted out from under his hog hat and gave the Colonel a look the picture of which he is quite sure is in the Diamond State Dictionary alongside the definition of the word "quizzical"

On cue, the Rebels imploded. Arkansas scored 29 straight points and the game ended in their favor, 29 to 24.

As he bade the Hog fans safe travels home, one turned to the Colonel and asked, "Can you really see the future?"

"No," the Colonel responded, "but I got a great view of the past."

Bama Bandwagon Boors

2011-10-19T09:24:00.001-05:00

There is nothing more pathetic to the Colonel, not even fair-weather fans, nor even his own perennial passion for lost causes, than a bandwagon fan.

The Colonel would like to pause at this juncture and thank the many Ole Miss season ticket holders in his section of Vaught-Hemingway Stadium who sold their tickets to Tide fans for last Saturday evening's game. Were it not for that contemptible act of cowardice and capitalism, the Colonel would not have had the pure joy of having every one of his beliefs regarding Alabama fans confirmed.

It should be said that after cheering lustily for his Rebels' early first quarter successes, the Colonel settled resignedly into his seat and actually admired the play of arguably the finest football team in the land.  His Rebels were trounced by a far superior team, as he expected. Alabama is awesome.

Their fans..., not so much.

Call him an old-fashioned sportsman, but on the rare occasions that the Colonel has visited other stadiums to watch his Rebels play, and on the even rarer occasions when his Rebels enjoyed success on foreign turf, the Colonel has never dreamed of mouthing off and acting disrespectful to the home fans. And, anytime the Colonel has witnessed fellow Ole Miss fans crossing that line, he has been quick to provide corrective instruction.

With all that said, the Colonel would like to expose what he believes is the most odious actor in all of sportsfandom. The Colonel calls him the "Bama Bandwagon Boor."

The Bama Bandwagon Boor doesn't just cheer for his team, which is expected. He sits in the middle of the other team's fans and taunts them on every play.

The Bama Bandwagon Boor speaks about Bama's successes in the first person plural, "We're gonna beat y'all lak a drum."

Most egregious of all, the Bama Bandwagon Boor never set foot in a classroom at the University of Alabama.

The Colonel is not referring to the those who for whatever reason did not pursue post-secondary education.

The Colonel refers specifically to the despicably disloyal low-life who went somewhere else for his college education, and cheers instead for Alabama. Nothing else in his life of viewing a plethora of pathetic sights does more to stir the pangs of pity in the Colonel's hardened, shrivelled, walnut-sized heart.

Case in point is the twenty-something preppie punk in Bama colors seated in much too close proximity to the Colonel and his Lady, and their perpetually spring-loaded for a scrap #2 son last Saturday.

Early in the game, obvious pass interference by a Bama defender was ignored by the refs. It wasn't a close judgement call. It was blatant. The Colonel's #2 son loudly complained, "Here we go again."

The punk began mocking loudly, "Conspiracy, conspiracy!"

#2 leaned in and opined that "even a moron could see" that it had been pass interference.

To which the punk responded, "Who you calling a moron? I went to Vanderbilt!"

The Colonel and #2 were stunned speechless at this disloyal punk's brazen admission of his Bama Bandwagon Boor club membership.

#2 might have been speechless, but the Colonel easily detected that he was on the verge of initiating physical hostilities. As much as the Colonel loves a good scrap, the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda was in attendance and as the punk had yet to cross any line disrespectful of her personally the Colonel didn't want to subject his lady to the spectacle of her men bloodying this boor.  So, the Colonel resorted to the tried and true method of dealing with errant children. He cranked his facial features into the scornful scowl mastered by few, but common among Marines, put his vocal chords on the stun setting, pointed his bony finger at the punk and commanded,

"Siddown and SHUT UP!"

The punk Bama Bandwagon Boor blanched and obeyed.

Which leads us to the Colonel's final observation regarding Bama Bandwagon Boors.

They are cowards.

Booing the Bear

2011-10-14T11:53:00.001-05:00

Alabama is in town tomorrow and the Colonel is praying for a mercifully quick and huge blowout.   The Tide are four touchdown favorites over his Rebels, but the Colonel believes that is giving the Ole Miss squad far too much credit. Bama's lead will likely be four touchdowns by the end of the first quarter of play.

There are a few perennially positive proponents among the Colonel's friends who view this particular David and Goliath tilt in the same light as others in relatively recent gridiron history wherein the heavily under-dogged Rebels rode a wave of mediocre play less significant that a ripple on one of the Colonel's farm ponds into a contest with a highly ranked team and emerged a miraculous victor.

Making Tim Tebow cry in the Swamp three years ago, comes to mind. Florida, the two dozen or so of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon will remember, went on to win the national championship that year.

But, not even in the Colonel's kindest comparisons can he place the current Rebel football team in league with the '08 nine and four, Cotton Bowl Champions squad.

The Colonel fondly remembers an Ole Miss - Alabama game from the increasingly far distant past that were the halcyon days of his matriculation at the cultural center of the southern universe. Bear Bryant had achieved great fame (infamy in some quarters) as Bama's coach and he and his team were roundly booed as they took the field at Memorial Stadium in Jackson. Ole Miss pulled off a 10 - 7 upset and, as it was the Bear's anniversary of the beginning of his air-breathing ride round Ol' Sol, the Ole Miss fans ceased booing the Bear long enough to sing "Happy Birthday" to him.

The Colonel harbors not even the slightest expectation of a similar outcome this year.

Oh, and did the Colonel mention that our star running back and half of the starting offensive line have been suspended for the game? Not that it would have made any appreciable difference against a Bama defensive unit that many pro scouts believe could start in the NFL -- right now.

The good news for 'Bama is they will be able to save a few bucks this year. There won't be a need to pay off the refs to steal a close game.

The equally good news for Ole Miss fans is that the game won't be close enough to have it given to the Tide by the refs. That has happened far too many times and the Rebel fan base's hearts, already stressed by fried chicken clogged arteries and the loss of every beloved tradition that made trudging into the stadium to watch the inevitable second half collapse at least spiritually worth the effort, can't stand many more shocks to the system without suffering complete calamitous collapse.

However, the Colonel is nothing if not fiercely loyal to his alma mater and its football team; and so, he will trudge into Vaught-Hemingway Stadium tomorrow afternoon, cheer lustily as his Rebels take the field, and remain rooted in his assigned place of duty until the bitter end.

Oh well, at least the Colonel can look forward to booing the bear.

Microcosm

2011-10-03T09:48:00.000-05:00

This past weekend, the Colonel's adopted hometown, the not-so thriving community of Abbeville, Mississippi (Population: 419), held its annual Autumnfest. The weather obliged with blessedly cooler temperatures worth festing and a good time was had by all.

Abbeville's Autumnfest has something for everyone. Arts and crafts vendors, food booths selling southern staples from homemade peach ice cream to funnel cakes, bouncy houses for the kiddies, and an after-dark street dance to live music--all packed into space at town center so compact that one can stand anywhere and watch all of the action everywhere.

Yet, after witnessing a handful of Abbeville Autumnfests firsthand, the Colonel has begun to detect the unmistakable texture and taste of a stale cracker. There is no identity beyond the name of the town, and a palpable sense of going through the motions.

Abbeville is no Mayberry. It once was. But "progress" by-passed the town thirty years ago and although residents remain in mostly well-maintained homes, town center is now a hollow shell.

The Colonel knows full well that the town's leadership will take great umbrage at his descriptions. They have worked hard to revive Abbeville. It has thus far failed to respond to resuscitation, despite efforts to refurbish the few remaining buildings that formerly housed businesses.

One could easily say that the poor economy is mostly to blame for Abbeville's plight. But the truth is Oxford (cultural center of the southern universe and home of Ole Miss), with a plethora of businesses easily serving a relatively prosperous population of permanent residents and university students, is only a fifteen-minute drive down the road which, straightened three decades ago, bypassed Abbeville and left her to dry up like a shallow oxbow cut off from a river's course.  Progress is an unsympathetic beast.

There are some, the Colonel among them, who believe that Abbeville's fires of relevance can be rekindled. The trick will be to use just enough of the town's history as tinder without burning down all of the traditions and sense of community upon which the present citizens (many of whom have lived in Abbeville their entire, long and short, lives) rest their senses of self.

The problem is that, as with any town, large or small, politics of the personal-power-preservation persuasion all too often displace positive leadership.

The Colonel doesn't pretend to know the weave of even the first thread of the political tapestry here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere. There is way too much history, even for this history buff, to understand. But, he is enough a student of leadership to recognize a people in political paralysis.

No personal indictments intended by the Colonel. He knows, loves, and respects many of the actors in the play. They are good people.

But the play has no script, no discernible plan for subsequent acts.

In this, the Colonel's beloved town is no different than most, he guesses.

And certainly no different than his beloved Republic.

If Abbeville wants to survive it must have a plan to expand.

So must our Republic.

National Coffee Day

2011-09-29T07:00:00.003-05:00

By whose proclamation the Colonel knows, nor, frankly, cares not, but today in the good ole U.S. of A. is National Coffee Day.

The Colonel can't speak for the rest of the nation, but here, on the grounds of Eegeebeegee, capital of the increasingly less whimsical and increasingly more plausible Tallahatchie Free State, every day is Coffee Day. Each and every day, seven days a week, thirty (give or take one or two) days a month, twelve months a year. No day is gainfully begun until the contents of a steaming cup of joe are coursing through the Colonel's bloodstream.

And, here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere the coffee is consumed without pollutants. No sissified sippers here. Straight and strong, thank you very much.

The Colonel's preferred mug? Of the scores in his collection, he's a mite partial to the red one with the gold eagle, globe, and anchor emblazoned on its side.

National Coffee Day, huh?

That ain't near good enough.

By the power invested in him, by him, the Colonel declares that henceforth here in the Tallahatchie Free State every day from daybreak til noon is National Coffee Morning.

Beary Bad Ball

2011-09-26T10:40:00.001-05:00

Writing about the plight of one's college football team is a lot like complaining about a persistent rash. Friends tend to distance themselves and enemies exult.

So, the Colonel apologizes in advance to the dozen or so of you who persist in wasting valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon for subjecting you to the following.

Yesterday at church, the Colonel sat with his pre-service coffee klatch and opined that he was actually heartened that after having been away from the cultural center of the universe here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere for 30 years, he had returned to find Ole Miss football right where he left it upon his graduation -- mired in mediocrity.

Actually, referring to the current state of Rebel football as mediocrity is an insult to mediocre programs everywhere.

Ole Miss football is, well, just awful.

At times like these, and there are times like these all too often in the life of an Ole Miss football fan, the Colonel is reminded of something credited to Robert E. Lee and paraphrases it here: "It is good that Ole Miss football is so terrible, or else I would grow too fond of it."

The Colonel could be boorishly snide at this juncture and point out that the gridiron slump coincides with the administration's evisceration of every tradition at the University of Mississippi in the name of political correctness.  But, he won't go there.

Okay, maybe just a short side trip over there.

Long-time Ole Miss mascot Colonel Reb has been banished and replaced by a bear. Supposedly, finding the bear was the culmination of a free and open mascot search. However, if one peeks out from under his tin-foil hat for a moment he'll have no problem recognizing the signs of a massive conspiracy that perpetrated this fuzzy fraud on Rebel Nation. One needs look no further than the rallying cry that began to appear in print coincident with the disrespectful disappearance of Colonel Reb: "Be A Rebel!"

The Colonel will pause briefly to help the Alabama and LSU grads among the few of you upon whose screens this missive has materialized to catch up. Look at the first four letters of "Be A Rebel."

Keep looking.

Sound the letters out.

Okay, while the tide and tiger alums work on figuring it out, the Colonel will continue.

Back to the sorry state of Ole Miss football. With a 1 and 3 start to the season (the one win being an anemic effort against an FCS opponent), even the most fervently faithful and perpetually positive fans are having a hard time calculating how the total in the win column will even match last year's. (For those of you who mercifully don't closely follow the merciless misery that is Ole Miss football, the win total last year was 4 -- the same as five of the last ten years' result.)

As a result, Rebel Nation is on the cusp of yet another winter of discontent wherein the following questions will be asked ad nauseum:

1. How much longer will the Harvard of the South (by reciprocal agreement, Harvard is allowed to call itself the Ole Miss of the North) be allowed by the Stalinist purveyors of political correctness to use the appellation: Ole Miss Rebels?

2. How much longer will incompetence and ineptitude continue to be the two critical criteria by which athletic directors and coaches are hired at the University of [name of school and state found to be offensive and hereby redacted pending politically correct replacement]?

3. How much longer will the [offensive title of the author redacted] continue to expend his meager treasure on season tickets?

The [offensive title of the author redacted] loves [offensive name of the state redacted], and can think of nowhere else on [offensive reference to a possessive Deity redacted] Green Earth he would rather live. It's just a good thing the [offensive reference to a militaristic organization redacted] provided him with lots of training at being miserable.

Suit Up or Stay on the Porch

2011-09-15T11:08:00.002-05:00

During a recent weekend of watching far too much football on TV, the Colonel and # 2 son saw a Marine recruiting commercial, a frame of which featured a recruit exiting a hut in which he and 50 of his closest friends had been exposed to a heavy concentration of tear gas. The Marine Corps bills this as "an exercise to boost confidence in the standard issue field protective mask."

Okay.  If you say so.

The recruit in question is in a condition two short steps from agony. The tear gas is assaulting every orifice, the eyes being but two of many. Every pore stings. Every drop of formerly viscous fluid recently resident in the sinus cavities has achieved a state approximating the flow rate and volume of the Niagara river over American Falls. With sinus cavity and tear duct evacuation at levels unprecedented in the recruit's young life, the close up picture captures him at one of the least flattering of a whole catalog of unflattering moments in his three months at boot camp.

Demonstrating the arrogance only ignorance can summon, #2 son turned to the Colonel and snidely suggested, "He needs to man up."

For the next twenty-seven and one-half minutes, #2 was on the receiving end of one the Colonel's patented and practiced personal one-on-one "teaching moments." Said teaching moment reminded #2 that he had little germane experience from which to draw such conclusions and included a play-by-play recreation of the annual gas chamber training required of all Marines.

At the conclusion of the teaching moment -- "Arethereanyquestions?Ididn'tthinksokeepyourstupidopinionstoyourself!" -- #2 sat in the stunned silence that he and his siblings had practiced and patented as response to many, many of the Colonel's teaching moments over their lives blessed with the presence of the man curmudgeoned before his time.

Then, a stray synapse fired across the wide gap separating two of the Colonel's few remaining cognitive cells lying fallow in the amorphous goo puddled in a recess of his combination brain-housing-group and cap rack, and the Colonel was reminded of an incident early in his training as a steely-eyed defender of freedom and the American Way.

Too many years ago for him to count -- even removal of footwear will not provide sufficient appendages for enumeration -- the Colonel was assigned collateral duty as the Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Officer (NBCDO) for the 2d Battalion, 2d Marines.  In order that the Colonel might best perform his duties as NBCDO, he was detailed to a four week course of study at the prestigious institute of higher learning known as the Fleet Marine Force, Atlantic, Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (FMFLANTNBC) Defense School. At this school (and the Colonel uses the term "school" in a manner so loose that a newborn's diaper deposit looks like a granite composition by comparison), the Colonel and forty other Marines were educated in the fine arts of chemical agent detection and decontamination, downwind nuclear fallout hazard plotting, and the appropriate wear and care of the (then) state of the art butyl rubber suit.

The butyl rubber suit was the early forerunner of the relatively lightweight HAZMAT suits now in vogue in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic movies.

The butyl rubber suit weighed more than the Colonel.

The entire annual production of two large rubber plantations in IndoChina went into the construction of one butyl rubber suit.

When conditions called for the wearing of the butyl rubber suit, conditions were bad. Very bad.

Early in our first week of training, the old salt instructors at the ivy-covered halls of the FMFLANTNBC Defense School regaled the students with tales of how tough and realistic training had been in the "Old Corps" and that one of the most realistic portions of training in the old days was to expose NBC Defense trainees to a live blister agent similar to the mustard agent used in World War I.  As they told us, the blister agent was so caustic in concentration that even the tiniest droplet on the skin would cause a huge blister that in some cases would reoccur on the site for the remainder of the life of the one exposed. Sure enough, a grizzled old NCO rolled up his sleeve and showed the class a nasty scar on the back of his hand, "It hasn't blistered up in two or three months..."

At the beginning of week two, the instructors informed the class that permission had been granted by Headquarters to resume student exposure to live agents. Several members of the class actually "ooorahed!" The Colonel was not among those so easily motivated by the prospect of pain and permanent scarring.

At the beginning of week three, the instructors told the class that a sufficient quantity of live agent had been requisitioned from an Army chemical agent repository and that it should arrive in time for the class to be individually exposed on Friday afternoon.

At the appointed hour that Friday, the students returned to the classroom following lunch break to find a squad of hospital corpsmen (that's pronounced "core men," Mr. President) lined up in the back, each carrying their large battlefield medical pack. The head instructor reminded the class of the extreme toxicity of the chemical agent and gave some instructions about remaining motionless when the instructor administered a tiny amount to the back of each student's hand. He then waved to the back of the room.

Every student turned to look.

A Marine entered through the double doors at the back of the classroom carrying a large jar of liquid.

He was wearing a butyl rubber suit.

The butyl rubber suited-Marine carefully carried the large liquid-filled jar to the front of the class, placed it gingerly on a table, and slowly unscrewed the top. He then dipped a wand into the liquid, dabbed the tiniest of drops onto a large square of cardboard. and then carefully replaced the jar's lid. The cardboard square was passed around the room for all to examine.

"Marines," intoned the head instructor solemnly, "this tiny amount will cause a severe blister on your skin."

To emphasize a point that frankly needed little emphasis at this point, a slide projection of a horribly blistered hand flashed on the screen at the front of the classroom.

A Marine muttered "[expletive deleted] this," and stood as if to leave.

"Siddown, Marine!," bellowed the head instructor. "This is not a voluntary exercise!"

The butyl rubber suited Marine returned to the large jar on the table at the front of the classroom and slowly and carefully removed the lid. He then tucked the slender wand under one arm and picked up the jar in two heavily-gloved hands. Turning slowly around to face the class, he stepped toward the first row of desks.

The slender wand slipped out from under his arm.

In one quick motion, the butyl rubber suited Marine attempted to cradle the jar in one arm and attempted to grab the falling slender wand with a free hand.

Both attempts failed.

The jar's liquid contents sloshed heavily across the front row of students in a scene reminiscent of the splash zone in front of Shamu's tank at Sea World.

Pandemonium.

Unmanly screams.

Loud wailing combining fervent prayer and frequent use of the words [expletive deleted] and [expletive deleted].

At the back of the classroom, a tight knot of ten or twelve Marines attempting to escape the horrors at the front of the classroom, were attempting, at the exact same moment, to exit the four-man wide double doors.

Both attempts failed.

Deep sobbing and other-worldly moans of anguish and despair became suddenly and incongruously mixed with gales of hilarious laughter.

The Colonel, attempting to extricate himself from the tangle of Marines clogged at the rear exit, and attempting to demonstrate appropriate officer conduct by leading the chemically contaminated classroom exodus from the front (both attempts failing), heard the laughter and deduced that the experience of dying a horrible and excruciating death, in addition to eliciting prayer mixed with the words [expletive deleted] and [expletive deleted], must also cause one to laugh uncontrollably.

The next ten and one-half minutes can only be described as a free-fire zone of expletive-filled indignation, the most frequent refrain being repeated use of the phrase, "That [expletive deleted] ain't right!"

The Colonel learned an immensely valuable set of lessons that day.

1. Fear ain't funny, unless you are the one doin' the scarin'.

2. Marines are heartless fatherless creatures who'll do anything for a laugh.

3. Never trust a man in a butyl rubber suit.

The Lost Decade

2011-09-12T09:12:00.002-05:00

Ten years ago, this morning, the Colonel put on his uniform and eased bedside to kiss the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda goodbye, before heading to the office.  He hadn't slept.

How could he?

How could anyone?

The last twenty hours had seemed to last weeks.

A young Marine had tapped on his office door frame the morning before and said simply, "Colonel, you need to turn on your TV."

The set was across the office and rarely on. Not a good example for the boss to have the boob tube on during working hours, even if it had become a military tradition to keep CNN on to find out where the next hot spot was -- CNN's field reporters had become our best strategic scouts. He could tell by the look on the Marine's face that there was something big happening and the Colonel waved his permission.

The picture that filled the screen was instantly recognizable, if incongruous. One of the towers of the World Trade Center was afire at the top, black smoke billowing downwind against a vividly clear sky. The news anchor was breathlessly and a bit incredulously repeating the first reports that a small plane had accidentally crashed into the tower. Clear blue skies and huge gash in the building belied that. The Colonel's worst fears were confirmed only a minute later when the next hijacked airliner bored in on, and exploded into, the South Tower.

Our Nation was under attack.

For the previous two decades the Colonel had been privy in varying degrees to the shadowy, half-hearted battle these re-United States had been fighting against terrorism -- enough to come to the conclusion, shared by many of his fellow military professionals, that our small scale retaliatory actions were doing nothing more than demonstrating a lack of resolve, emboldening the enemy, and feeding a cycle of violence.

That morning, as he sat on the bed beside his Lady, the Colonel was convinced that the nation was about to go to war. The Colonel quietly told the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda that she needed to be prepared to see her man and their two sons (not then in uniform) go off to fight in what he was sure would be a war rivaling the major wars of the previous century and eclipsing totally the "drive by" that had been the quick campaign to free Kuwait.

"Are you sure?", Miss Brenda asked.

"No doubt in my military mind." The Colonel answered confidently.

The Colonel seriously over-estimated the wisdom and fortitude of our nation's political leadership.

Instead of DECLARING and waging WAR on the states fomenting and funding terrorism, our political leaders waged war on their own people, and their rights and freedoms.

Oh, they talked big: "You are either with us or against us!" But, our actions were small and shadowy and ineffective; and we left many, many terrible regimes in place who were solidly "against us."

It has been the Colonel's contention for the better part of the last ten years that the United States was frittering away time, opportunity, blood, and treasure in what has become "The Lost Decade."

A real war, ruthlessly prosecuted against the states backing militant fascism and using its tactic of terrorism, might just have had the same result as our real war, ruthlessly prosecuted against the militant fascist states that had threatened freedom in the first half of the last century -- relative peace and unprecedented prosperity for the American people in the second half of the century.

Oh, and a real war to end the threat of terrorism from militant fascist states would have been OVER six or seven years ago, and would have cost the same if not less than the phony war in which we are currently in the tenth year.

Despite the pandering politicians' pronouncements to the contrary, the Colonel must have you know that we are no more safe from the threats against our liberties and way of life than were we ten years ago. If anything, we are more at risk than ever. And, the American people are paying the price for our leaders' (the Colonel uses that word in this context as loose as a newborn's diaper deposit) lack of exceptional American statesmanship.

But, what does the Colonel know? He's just a graying centurion who reads history books.

Happy Birthday, Miss Brenda!

2011-09-09T09:38:00.000-05:00

The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda begins her [number censored]th air-breathing trip 'round ol' Sol today. Born in the year [number censored], the Colonel's Lady has been witness to momentous marvels and marvelous moments in the history of man on this big blue marble.

During her time on the planet:

Two territorial possessions of the Republic were granted Statehood.

Men walked on the moon.

Al Gore invented the Internet and founded a false religion.

The Cold War ended.

The Culture War began.

Elvis died. Or did he?

Saddam did the stupid. Three times.

Walter Mondale lost 49 states. Ronald Reagan found them.

Ole Miss won a National Championship in football. Really.

The United States gave away a canal it built on the isthmus of Panama to a country it created on territory taken from Colombia.

The United States invaded Cuba, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan to depose/arrest their leaders. Four out of five ain't bad.

More than just a passive witness, the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda has been a trend-setter and over-achiever from the moment she and her twin sister disembarked from my favorite mother-in-law.

She is a world traveler.

She graced the new state of Hawaii with her pre-school presence; lived in Washington, California, New York, New Jersey, and Tennessee as a kid; and then, as a teen, landed in the Panama Canal Zone happily coincident (dare we call it serendipity?) with the arrival of the Colonel to that tropic.

As spousal support unit to her Marine, the Colonel's Lady has made spartan dwellings happy homes in Virginia (twice), North Carolina (twice), Mississippi (twice), Georgia, Alabama, Hawaii, Rhode Island, South Korea, South Carolina, and Florida -- in all, EIGHTEEN different abodes adopted and adapted to serve as wonderful, welcoming homes for the Colonel and kids.

She is an organizer par-excellence.

No church, community, club, school, nor business has experienced her membership without fundamental transformation -- for the good.  Even the Colonel's hen herd has been subject to her organizational will -- eggs are laid with precision placement and perfunctory punctuality.

She is a consummate care-giver.

The Colonel's Lady is so constantly concerned with the comfort and confidence of others, that the Colonel's numerical call-sign for the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda is "Twelve" -- she always feels the need to "tend to" others.

The Colonel feels the need to pause as this juncture for the benefit of the 'Bama and LSU grads among the two dozen of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon, and explain the punchline in the preceding paragraph. The Colonel will attempt to use the smallest words he can.

Her nickname is "Twelve" because she thinks she must tend to (ten two) others.

The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda is a talented musician.

She plays the piano and plucks the Colonel's heartstrings. She is the Colonel's angel -- often up in the air harping about something or another the Colonel has done, or hasn't.

The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda loves the Colonel. The Colonel reminds her of this often...

...often coincident with the purchase of a new gun or power tool.

He could go on and on, but suffice it to say the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda is the Colonel's favorite person in the whole wide world.

Happy Birthday, Miss Brenda!

Willis A. "Buddy" Hinson, Marine

2011-09-01T17:23:00.000-05:00

One of the last of a rapidly diminishing group of living American heroes was laid to rest today. He was a charter member of the Greatest Generation; more than fulfilling his duty to his nation in his youth and yet active until his death as a champion of causes great and small. He was eulogized by his pastor as a man who always "took care of things;" at the age of 89 he remained on the go and always in service.

Willis A. Hinson (Buddy to his friends and Great Uncle Buddy to the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda) was one of that rare breed of men who early in their adult lives recognize that there are indeed things worth fighting for and that a small minority of hard men are needed to fight for the rest. At the age of eighteen, more than a year before Pearl Harbor, Buddy Hinson enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. For his twentieth birthday Uncle Sam gave Buddy an all-expense-paid trip to the South Pacific.

By the summer of 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army had earned an aura of invincibility--they had virtually steamrolled every Allied force in their way from China to the Philippines to Singapore.  The inexorable Japanese march south had reached the last rim of islands to the north of Australia -- the Solomons -- and there seemed nothing to prevent invasion.  There were scant Australian forces available to defend against the impending attack -- most of Australia's military manpower was fighting Rommel's Afrika Corps in the deserts of North Africa.

Enter Buddy Hinson and several thousand of his closest friends.

In August of 1942, the woefully understrength and ill-equipped 1st Marine Division was thrown ashore on the key island in the Solomons -- Guadalcanal.  The Japanese had been constructing a large forward airbase on Guadalcanal from which to support future operations against Australia. Buddy Hinson was a machinegunner with the 2d Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment (2/7)of the 1st Marine Division. The U.S. Navy landed the 1st Marine Division with the mission to seize and hold the airfield, and steamed away.

The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy had a problem with that.

For the next three months, the American Marines, soldiers, and airmen holding tenuously to the former Japanese airfield endured unimaginable horrors as the Japanese threw everything at the mud-mired men but the kitchen sink.  Ferocious Japanese naval bombardment preceded determined land assaults by increasingly larger and larger Japanese army forces against the American perimeter.

At the end of October, 1942, a final do or die assault was mounted by the Japanese. On the afternoon of the 23rd of October, Marine commanders detected a Japanese force massing on a hitherto unassailed flank and hurriedly repositioned 2/7 on a low ridge of hills astride the expected Japanese avenue of approach. The battalion commander placed his 33-man machingun section on a spur that extended off the ridge and had a field of fire covering the expected Japanese line of attack.  The Marines got into position as darkness fell and had very little time to dig in and prepare defensive positions.

Fast forward to the first, and last, sadly, time the Colonel got to spend any time talking with Buddy Hinson -- about six years ago. The Colonel knew Buddy had been a World War Two-era Marine, but not much else about his service.  Buddy and the Colonel participated in a quick round of chest-thumping traditional among Marines and then Buddy sharpened his eyes and leaned in,

"You ever heard of Mitchell Paige?"

Ever heard of him!?! Mitchell Paige was among the pantheon of legendary figures the exploits of whom young Marines memorized like favorite bedtime stories. The Colonel knew that Platoon Sergeant Paige had received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valor during a particularly brutal fight on Guadalcanal and had gone on to serve a distinguished career; retiring as a Colonel.

"Yessir!" The Colonel answered Uncle Buddy.

"Well, I served with Mitchell Paige on Guadalcanal."

The Colonel pressed him for more, but true to the character of his generation, Uncle Buddy gave little other information about the most significant event in his life. But, the Colonel could tell there was a great story behind those sharp eyes.

To his discredit, the Colonel quickly forgot about the incident, until the other day when he heard that Uncle Buddy had passed away.

The Colonel began a crash course on the Guadalcanal exploits of Willis A. Hinson. The Colonel was amazed at what he found.

Platoon Sergeant Mitchell Paige's 33-man machinegun section was positioned at the very point at which the Japanese commander had marked for his forces to assault and penetrate the Marine lines. When the assault came at 0200 on the morning of 24 October 1942, Paige was on the right flank by the #1 machinegun and Buddy Hinson was on the left flank, manning the #2 machinegun.

Within minutes nearly every Marine in Paige's outfit were dead or severely wounded. Early in the fight Paige looked over to see Hinson fall from a head wound, and then moments later looked back to see Buddy back on his gun, operating a 3-man weapon singlehandedly.

Suffering from his severe head wound, short of ammo, and now the lone Marine alive on his end of the line, Hinson followed his last order from Paige and put his gun out of action before crawling back to the rear.

The Japanese pouring through the gap in the lines beat Buddy back to the rear and were advancing on the Battalion command post. Paige was still on his ridge, now behind the advancing Japanese. He picked up a weapon and took the Japanese under fire, blunting the attack enough to allow an adhoc Marine counterattack force to form and begin to push the Japanese back.  Paige picked up an eighty-pound, 3-man, water-cooled machinegun, cradled it in his arms and joined in the counterattack which re-established the Marine defensive line. THE STUFF OF LEGEND.

At the ceremony at which Paige was presented with the Medal of Honor, he deflected credit from himself and heaped praise on the men, Buddy Hinson among them, who fought and fell in that climactic battle.

Others have told the Colonel that Buddy used to joke that, "Paige got a parade; I got a pat on the back." Still, Hinson was devoted to his wartime leader until Paige's death in 2003; and to Paige's memory until his own death this week.

Until Guadalcanal, the Imperial Japanese Army had never been beaten. On Guadalcanal, a few great Americans stood toe to toe with the cream of the Japanese military...and won. After Guadalcanal, eventual American victory over the Empire of Japan was never in doubt.

The Colonel had the honor of telling Mitchell Paige's and Buddy Hinson's battle story this morning at Uncle Buddy's funeral service. The Colonel is quite certain that Uncle Buddy is now guarding heaven's gates and that the Colonel will have to answer someday to Uncle Buddy for telling a story Hinson would rather not have been told.

The Colonel is looking forward to the butt-chewin'.

Public Enemy

2011-08-24T15:43:00.000-05:00

The Colonel has found out a great deal about himself recently and would like to thank the kind folks who so civilly and courteously enlightened him.

1. The Colonel is a terrorist.

Of all the "ists" he has been called, this one comes as quite a surprise. Still the Colonel would like to extend his thanks to an unnamed member of the Democratic Caucus of the House of Representatives for making him aware of this fact. It must be a fact, because the Vice President of the United States was the person to whom the comment was directed and he not only did not chide the congressman (as he surely would have done, were the Colonel not a terrorist) but he is reported (by another Democrat congressman in the room) to have agreed with the assessment. The Colonel is a terrorist.

2. The Colonel has Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters' permission to take a noncircuitous trip to Hell.

The Colonel was heretofore not aware that Congressional permission was required for such a trip, and thanks the gentlelady's gracious grant of such. Heck, Hell can't be much worse than Mississippi in August..., or California anytime, for that matter.

3. The Colonel is a hostage-taker.

There was a time when he was part of an elite organization whose missions included in-extremis hostage rescue, and the Colonel is chagrined to learn that he must now retrain.

4. Jesse Jackson says the Colonel is actually a neo-klansman.

This, too is quite disconcerting. Heretofore in posts hereon, the Colonel has vociferously denounced the Ku Klux Klan and it's mouthbreathing, sister-chasin' members.

(Good thing the Colonel doesn't have a sister.)

5. The Colonel is really an enemy of the state.

Democratic Representative Frederica Wilson, she of snappy red cowboy hat wearin' fame, says that the real enemy is the Colonel. The Colonel assumes she means that he is no longer bound by the oath he took nearly four decades ago to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic." If this is true, it actually comes as quite a relief -- there are so many churlish characters currently undermining our Constitution that the Colonel has been in quite a quandary over where to start to "defend the Constitution against all enemies" and was beginning to feel a bit guilty about his inability to prosecute an adequate defense.

There has been one recent description of the Colonel that he already knew about himself. President Obama described the Colonel a while back as clinging to his faith and his guns.

He got that right.

Storm Warning

2011-08-23T16:36:00.001-05:00

The novel the Colonel has been working on supposes a Category III hurricane hitting the Northeast megalopolis -- overwhelming the Feds -- followed in a couple of weeks by a 7.8 temblor on the New Madrid fault.

So much for originality...

News of the 5.8 earthquake that rattled the East Coast today is taking up all of the oxygen in the room, but the Colonel's eyes have been glued to a hurricane gathering steam south of the Bahamas. Hurricane predicted paths five days out are notoriously inaccurate.

But, this much is clear:

If a Category IV hurricane races up the Eastern Seaboard this week, or any week, there is great potential for a disaster that will make Katrina pale white in comparison.

The following Forward extract from the Colonel's book in progress (working title: "Tallahatchie") provides a concise 200 year history of hurricanes hitting the vicinity of New York City.

"Three years after the earthquake series [New Madrid, 1811/12] that struck the middle Mississippi Valley, a Saffir-Simpson Scale Category 3 hurricane struck New York City, washing over Long Island and dramatically rearranging the barrier island features. Another even stronger Category 4 storm, the so-called Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane struck the city in 1821, swamping Manhattan under a 13 foot tidal surge. Seventy-two years later a mere Category 2 hurricane made landfall on Long Island and completely washed away a mile long barrier island and brought waste deep water to the streets of Brooklyn. One and a half million inhabitants were eyewitnesses.

In September of that year a hurricane formed off the west coast of Africa and rapidly grew to Category 5 strength. The monster storm roared straight west across the Atlantic until it was north of the Bahamas and then turned north. On the afternoon of September the 21^st, only a couple of hours short of astronomical high tide, the storm sliced across the middle of Long Island, having weakened to a strong Category 3. Still, the hurricane carried with it a storm surge in excess of fourteen feet. Making landfall as it did to the east of Manhattan, the city only experienced 75 mile per hour winds and minor flooding as winds backed up the East River. The Eastern end of Long Island, on the storm’s stronger right side, took the brunt of the storm. Barrier islands and inlets were rearranged; roads and structures washed away, and 100 people lost their lives. The storm barreled north across Long Island Sound and bulls-eyed the city of Westerly, Rhode Island. The eastern quadrant of the storm pushed full moon and Autumnal Equinox tides straight up Narragansett Bay and poured thirteen feet of water into downtown Providence. Although on the weaker western side of the hurricane, water piling up in Long Island Sound inundated Connecticut’s coastal cities and caused the most damage from a natural disaster in that entity’s 350 year history. By the time the storm tracked over Massachusetts and New Hampshire and then dissipated over Ontario, Canada, nearly 800 people were dead. The storm destroyed or severely damaged 30,000 dwellings, destroyed 25,000 automobiles, and severely disrupted rail and road transportation for weeks.

Today, the behemoth megalopolis that is New York and the major cities to its north and south, and whose built-up areas merge and extend nearly without interruption from Washington, DC to Boston, is home to three times the population that existed in 1938. The building boom that ensued after the Second World War has increased the density and subsequent vulnerability of the infrastructure in the region by a factor of 10... "

Finding Miss Brenda

2011-08-21T14:24:00.000-05:00

As the two dozen or so of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon will recall, the Colonel's vast holdings are situated just north of the cultural center of the universe and home of the Harvard of the South (by reciprocal agreement, Harvard is allowed to call itself the Ole Miss of the North): Oxford, Mississippi.

Oxford is a wonderful place; a delightfully traditional, yet understatedly progressive (in the best, not political, sense of that word) town whose resident population doubles and halves with the convening and adjourning of classes at the school for which the town's founders named itself to attract the state's grant of it's flagship university one and two-thirds centuries ago. There are times in the year when it is a pure joy to amble through town, cruise it's byways, and frequent its stores and shops. But, anyone who has lived in this area for more than a year knows that there are times when it is just plain prudent not to get on the road and go to town if you can avoid it.

Last Friday -- Move-In Day for the population-doubling attendees of Ole Miss' Fall Semester -- was one of those days.

The Colonel's consort, the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda, evidently didn't get the memo. And the Colonel, willfully oblivious to specific times and dates -- with the exception of the time for sunrise and sunset and the opening dates of the college football and hunting seasons -- agreed, in his calendar ignorance and preference not to do chores outside in the sauna of August in Mississippi, to accompany his Lady on her bi-weekly shopping foray.

Traffic was gridlocked on every major artery into and out of Oxford.

Actually, "gridlocked" is an understatement that does not account for the antics of hundreds of coeds in SUVs attempting to rewrite the laws of physics. Where only a week before, the Colonel had cruised contentedly and with so little competition for lane space that he could dawdle and gawk at the beauty of a southern town in quiet, unhurried serenity, there now existed a clogged river of revving engines and unblinking brake lights.

The Colonel sat patiently at a traffic light through a half dozen cycles, and then turned to his bride, "Do you trust me, Honey?"

"Of course not! What are going to do with my car? Don't do something stupid!"

With that ringing endorsement bolstering his confidence, the Colonel gunned the engine, leaned on the horn, and executed a series of tire-squealing turns that so startled two dozen motorists in close proximity that two dozen other drivers not in close proximity heard through their cell phones loud gasps followed by the unmistakable sound of a cell phone hitting the floorboard.

Notwithstanding the distracting harmonic blend of high-pitched tire squeal and high-pitched female screech resonating in his ear drums, the Colonel managed to reorient 90 degrees, dart down a little known sidestreet (little known because it isn't exactly a street), squeeze through an alley, and zig-zag across a parking lot to reach their intended destination.

"You're going to get a ticket!"

"Not likely; ain't no cop gonna try that move!"

The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda was still complimenting her man's driving skill as they walked into Kroger, "I can't believe you did that! You never cease to amaze me!"

The Colonel reached for his lady's hand to thank her for her compliment but she brushed his hand away. Obviously, she didn't feel worthy to even hold his hand.

Inside the store, 27.3% of the female student population of the state's flagship university were cramming the aisles making a run on Lean Cuisine and Diet Mountain Dew. Miss Brenda sent the Colonel to grab a bunch of bananas while she navigated down the bread aisle. Upon completion of his mission, the Colonel turned to reacquire target lock on Miss Brenda and was dismayed to discover that she wasn't anywhere in sight.

The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda has long since mastered the art of instantaneous in-store disappearance. The Colonel can turn his head for just the most minute of moments and Miss Brenda will vanish into thin air in a move not even David Copperfield could replicate. When that happens, the Colonel has learned that the smartest thing to do is to go hang out in the sporting goods department and let Miss Brenda find him.

Kroger doesn't have a sporting goods department.

They got everything else. Tools.  School supplies. Flowers. Light bulbs. Kitty litter.

But, they ain't got a gun, fishin' pole, nor carton of stink bait in the whole place.

"Don't panic," the Colonel told himself, surveying the sea of petite young ladies into which his bride had disappeared. "Just look for the prettiest lady in the store."

When the Colonel got tired of that, he decided it was time to go find Miss Brenda.

Borrowing is for the Birds

2011-08-20T15:31:00.001-05:00

The Colonel's ornithological passion and enlightened desire to provide help for the least among the residents of his rump republic is beginning to reveal unintended consequences. There is palpable fear here aboard the Colonel's vast holdings at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere that currying favor with the feathered fauna on the grounds of Eegeebeegee is creating a dependency class for whose provision the resources of the Tallahatchie Free State are increasingly stressed to sustain.

Take, for example, the state bird of the Colonel's virtuous and less and less virtual republic, founded as much hand-on-wallet as tongue-in-cheek: the ruby-throated hummingbird.

From the first of April through the end of October each year, the grand gardens adjacent to the Big House play host to a hummer host whose natural numbers have swollen to unnatural levels due to several large sugar-water feeders that attract veritable buzzing clouds of the diminutive hovering jewels. So many hummingbirds have habituated to the handout that the Colonel's grocery bill swells seasonally with the addition of several tons [literary license warning light blinking] of sugar with which he daily replenishes the dole.

With so many handout-habituated hummingbirds hovering hungrily [abnormal alliteration alarm sounding] above the grounds of the capital of the Tallahatchie Free State, their notorious territorially anti-social behavior is manifested exponentially. Above the ever-present hum of scores of pairs of wings, a shrill chatter of complaint about disrespect rises and falls as the tiny birds crowd in constant contention at the limited leads to the Colonel's largess. It is a good thing that hummingbirds are of such limited mass and without the means to ignite flames or carry markers, else the Colonel would fear for a feathered flash mob of arson, looting, and vandalism.

"Cut 'em off!," the callously conservative, yet otherwise kind-hearted Miss Brenda cries. "They can fend for themselves quite well!"

"Too cruel!," the Colonel counters. "Besides, they love me. See how they flock around me when I refill the feeders?"

"They're eating us out of house and home!," the Colonel's consort complains.

"Don't worry," the Colonel mollifies his mate, "I'll go borrow some sugar from the neighbors."

"They'll eventually stop loaning you sugar," the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda warns.

"Have no fear, my dear, I'll plant some sugar cane."

"Where?"

"Why, in the fenced-in garden, of course. Can't have the critters eatin' all the cane."

"Where are we going to grow our vegetables then? We have a lot of mouths to feed, right now."

"C'mon, Miss Brenda, we'll worry about that next year..."

Dakota Meyer, Marine

2011-08-16T15:02:00.000-05:00

"The President of the United States in the name of the Congress takes pleasure in presenting the

MEDAL OF HONOR

CORPORAL DAKOTA L. MEYER
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS

For service as set forth in the following

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the repeated risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as a member of Marine Embedded Training Team 2-8, Regional Corps Advisory Command 3-7, in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, on 8 September 2009. When the forward element of his combat team began to be hit by intense fire from roughly 50 Taliban insurgents dug-in and concealed on the slopes above Ganjgal village, Corporal Meyer mounted a gun-truck, enlisted a fellow Marine to drive, and raced to attack the ambushers and aid the trapped Marines and Afghan soldiers. During a six hour fire fight, Corporal Meyer single-handedly turned the tide of the battle, saved 36 Marines and soldiers and recovered the bodies of his fallen brothers. Four separate times he fought the kilometer up into the heart of a deadly U-shaped ambush. During the fight he killed at least eight Taliban, personally evacuated 12 friendly wounded, and provided cover for another 24 Marines and soldiers to escape likely death at the hands of a numerically superior and determined foe. On his first foray his lone vehicle drew machine gun, mortar, rocket grenade and small arms fire while he rescued five wounded soldiers. His second attack disrupted the enemy’s ambush and he evacuated four more wounded Marines. Switching to another gun-truck because his was too damaged they again sped in for a third time, and, as turret gunner, killed several Taliban attackers at point blank range and suppressed enemy fire so 24 Marines and soldiers could break-out. Despite being wounded, he made a fourth attack with three others to search for missing team members. Nearly surrounded and under heavy fire he dismounted the vehicle and searched house to house to recover the bodies of his fallen team members. By his extraordinary heroism, presence of mind amidst chaos and death, and unselfish devotion to his comrades in the face of great danger, Corporal Meyer reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service."

Affection Reflection

2011-08-04T09:00:00.007-05:00

Thirty-five years ago this past weekend, the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda made the biggest mistake of her life and the result was the best thing that could have ever happened to the Colonel.

On Sunday, the 31st of July, the Colonel and his lady celebrated the 35th anniversary of their wedding.

For about twenty years now, the Colonel and Miss Brenda have brought the house down with the following routine:

Innocent Questioner: "So, how long have you two been married?"

The Colonel: "Thirty-five years...[2-beat pause for maximum comedic effect]; three of the best years of our lives."

[4-beat pause while IQ and any interested by-standers trade puzzled looks]

The Comely and Kind-hearted Miss Brenda: "Those were the years he was deployed."

Gets 'em every time.

In what is sure to become a highly anticipated annual ritual, the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda sat with the Colonel for a rare quiet and reflective interlude Sunday afternoon.

With five adults and two pre-schoolers under the roof,  the two dozen of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon have no idea how rare quiet and reflective interludes are here at the Big House aboard the Colonel's vast and well-defended holdings at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere.

The Colonel and his Lady sat for nearly an hour recalling, recounting, and remembering where they were on each of their wedding anniversaries; beginning with the first (and certainly not the last) spent separated--he at Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia and she ensconced in a tiny efficiency apartment on campus at Ole Miss. Many anniversaries were coincident with duty station moves. Many others were remembered for being the first with a particular child, or without that child as he or she left the nest.

The Colonel and Miss Brenda chuckled at the memory of the tenth anniversary trip to the Bahamas. While checking through customs, the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda clung tightly to the Colonel's arm and gushed to the customs agent, "It's our tenth anniversary!"

The agent looked up from the paperwork and dead-panned, "I...don't...care."

There must be a government gulag somewhere in North Dakota, to which all prospective Customs and TSA agents are sent to strip them of all humanity, feeling, and common sense.

The Colonel made a point of reminding the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda that for their 20th, he took her to Hawaii...and they got to stay for three years. She made an even sharper point of reminding the Colonel that she was not a beach person and that Hawaii is a great place to visit, but an even greater place from which to return. The Colonel thereafter refrained from attempting to convince his Lady that she had been fortunate to have been married to a roguishly handsome soldier of the sea whose postings took her to far-flung exotic locales about which most others only read.

Truth is, the Colonel has been the fortunate one.

The Colonel's Kernels

2011-07-25T14:26:00.000-05:00

It was corn harvesting time here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere last week, and the Colonel beat the critters to the kernels.

Back during June, the temperature climbed into the middle miseries, the clouds departed hereover, and nary a drop of rain fell for four weeks. An acre of corn, beans, and cantaloupes planted by hand the middle of May began to wither in the wicked hot weather. The Colonel carried buckets of water every evening down to the garden plot in the back forty, and lovingly ladled liquid on each and every stalk and vine.

The corn survived.

The cantaloupes thrived.

The Colonel began to worry about four-legged veggie vandals and fruit thieves.

A scare-crow and a two-wire electric fence around the garden served to ease the Colonel's worries a bit. Several fruitful late afternoon anti-critter patrols served to reduce the critter population substantially and put the remaining bandits on notice.  The best defense, after all, is a strong offense.

Last week, the Colonel checked on the progress of his corn and decided it was time to harvest. He pulled ears for a couple of hours and filled up the bed of his rusty red pick-up, Semper Fillit, with, well, shucks, a whole load of corn.

More corn than he'd ever grown.

More corn than he'd ever shucked.

More corn than he knew what to do with.

The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda took one look at the Colonel sitting on the tailgate backed by a mountain of corn, and remarked with obvious pride at her man's produce prowess, "What in the world are you gonna do with all that corn?"

The Colonel grinned like a mule eatin' briars and replied, "Not my problem. I grow it. You process it."

The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda thereby clouded up and commenced to rain all over the Colonel's harvest victory parade.  The Colonel hates it when that happens.

After the corn had been shucked and cleaned, it became obvious that the mountains of corn on the cob and buckets of corn off the cob far exceeded the storage capacity extant in the one freezer in the Big House. There are now two freezers in the Big House, and the economy has been sufficiently stimulated.

All told, the Colonel figures he brought in a corn crop valued at approximately $3.75 a cob, given the Colonel's valuable time and effort expended and the economic stimulus applied toward appliances.

Berry Nice

2011-07-11T10:10:00.001-05:00

One of the most abundant and valuable natural resources aboard Eegeebeegee--the Colonel's vast holdings here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere; and capital of the Tallahatchie Free State--is a berry. Blackberries. Rubus fruticosus. The soil here in this forgotten corner of Dixie--viscous, boot-sucking mud when wet, and shovel-dulling Confederate Concrete when dry--grows little well but loblolly pine trees and blackberries.

Due to the Colonel's careful cultivation, blackberry brambles thrive throughout his heavily guarded territory and dominate the edges of most of the fields. To the untrained eye of the casual observer, the Colonel's careful cultivation might seem more like benign neglect. Some brambles might even seem to encroach willy-nilly upon the otherwise clear fields and glades of the Colonel's campus. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There is sheer brilliance in the apparent madness of neglect.

"Brilliance" hard to accept on the part of the Colonel?

Those among the two dozen of you regular post-perusing wasters of valuable rod and cone time who are displaying disdain at the thought of the Colonel demonstrating brilliance in any endeavor have obviously never tasted a hot, buttered biscuit, slavered with a generous helping of the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda's homemade blackberry jam. The Colonel has tasted upwards of two million hot, buttered biscuits, slavered with a generous helping of the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda's homemade blackberry jam, and is, therefore, the self-proclaimed, world-class expert on the topic of the most delicious food on the planet.

The Colonel sticks to his self-assessment of brilliance.

Want further proof of the Colonel's brilliance?

While he is inside in the air-conditioned cool on this sweltering summer day, the Colonel's fair lady is out in the heat picking blackberries.

Better go turn the A/C up a notch--it's gonna get hot in the kitchen when Miss Brenda comes in and starts cookin' jam...

China Doll

2011-07-05T11:22:00.001-05:00

The Colonel's baby girl began her 30th air-breathing lap 'round ol' Sol yesterday, even though her birth certificate says her 29th birthday is today--the 5th of July.

Sugar Bear, as she is known to none but the Colonel, joined the Gregory Clan in November of 1986.  Born in Hong Kong, she lived in an orphanage there until she was nearly four and one-half years old. At her birth, none but God knew that she would be the capstone to the family created by the Colonel and the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda 35 years ago this month.

When the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda began giving birth to the Colonel's children, two robust man-children -- call signs: Hero and Juice (grist for another post) -- appeared on the scene in such rapid succession (less than sixteen months separation) that the Colonel and his Lady suspected that further procreation would lead inevitably to a house full of boys.

The Colonel was okay with that. Miss Brenda? Not so much.

Snip. Snip.

The Colonel realizes that the Mississippi State and LSU grads among the two dozen of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon are scratching hat racks and doing the hound-dog head-tilt at his point. The Colonel could have used the medical term for the procedure but the State and LSU grads would end up making futile trips to their respective schools' libraries to look up the word (it is the Colonel's understanding that all of the books held therein have already been colored in).

The Colonel shoots blanks.

The Colonel and his Lady still wanted a baby girl.

"No problem," the Colonel and the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda thought. "We'll adopt."

Problem. Counter-intuitive, incomprehensible problem.

Finding an American-born baby eligible for adoption is so much more difficult than one would think. And, if a couple already has children, that couple goes to the back of the line.

The Colonel will refrain from leaping into his Pro-Life sermon at this point, but will leave you with this firmly held belief: The vast majority of babies killed by abortionists would easily find love-filled adoptive homes.  Don't believe the Colonel? Try to find an orphanage with babies in these re-United States. The Colonel will wait while you search...

Since the Colonel has long since surpassed his own attention span on the topic, he will allow you to continue that futile search on your own and get back to him.

But, back to the Colonel's baby girl.

When the Colonel and his Lady shared with friends their frustrations regarding adoption, those friends recommended foreign adoption. Long story, short; the little girl God wanted to be a Gregory was found in an orphanage in Hong Kong waiting patiently for the Colonel and the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda to get their act together.

In November of 1986, the extent of Sugar Bear's grasp of the English language was counting to ten and a rapid-fire recitation of the alphabet, which far outstripped the extent of the Colonel's grasp on Mandarin.

A Mandarin/English phrase book facilitated a smattering of communication for the first couple of months. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, Sugar Bear no longer understood her native tongue.

Well, she no longer understood the Colonel's pronunciation of her native tongue.

At any rate, January of 1987 was a very frustrating month on the communication front. Stalemate. Battle lines drawn.  Tons of tears.

Then, as if another switch had flipped, Sugar Bear began speaking English, daily gaining vocabulary and sentence structure at an exponential rate.  By the time she started kindergarten, her vocabulary far exceeded that of the average Mississippi State or LSU grad. When she learned to read, she read everything. Twice.

The Colonel's baby girl is a month away from earning certification as a surgical technician, and has a job at the local hospital waiting. The Colonel has taken to memorizing medical dictionaries to maintain his tenuous position atop the family vocabulary pole. He is also not just a little proud of his Sugar Bear.

The birthday thing?

Well, Sugar Bear once remarked that she wished she had been born on the birth date of her adoptive country--the Fourth of July. The Colonel told her she had been.

"No, Daddio Pistachio," she responded, rolling eyes and sighing heavily in weariness at her Daddy's lack of calendar acuity. "I was born on July 5th."

To which the Colonel launched into a two-hour lecture on planetary physics, geography, and international customary agreements, culminating in a description of the International Dateline and man's attempt to bring order to the longitudinal chaos of solar time-keeping on a rotating planet.

"...and, so, Sugar Bear, when it's the 5th of July in Hong Kong, it is the 4th of July here in the Western Hemisphere."

The conclusion of the Colonel's lecture, delivered two and one-half decibels higher than a parade ground command of execution, had the desired effect of waking the Colonel's favorite daughter from her sermon-survival slumber, and she blinked in comprehension.

"Cool!"

Sugar Bear celebrates her birthday on the fifth of July every year, but the Colonel doesn't let her forget that she was really born on Independence Day.

Critters of the Corn

2011-06-29T08:52:00.000-05:00

The Colonel begs the forgiveness of the dozen or so of you who have absolutely nothing better to do than to regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon for the lack of postage hereon of late. Forgive him, dear reader, for the transgression; it has been two weeks since the Colonel's last mind-mangling missive.

Frankly, the Colonel's been a little busy.

It is the time of year here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere in which everyone with a patch of dirt has a garden planted on it. The Colonel has two.

One garden up near the Big House, nicknamed "Li'l Gitmo" for the massive amounts of anti-critter fencing and barbed wire ringing it, has begun to produce a bumper crop of squash, 'maters, peppers, okra, and cukes. The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda, whose job it is to process the produce, has begun to give the Colonel the stink eye every morning as she navigates the limited floor space of the kitchen -- now further limited by buckets of fresh veggies.

She'll get over it. She has to -- the other, bigger, garden down in the bottom behind the Big House is beginning to make bountious amounts of corn, beans and melons.

The Colonel has been advised by his domino-playin' buddies that the local coon cartel, a particularly violent and rapacious masked gang, will make short work of his corn if he doesn't take some rather drastic actions to prevent their depredations.

"Colonel, dem coons'll wait right 'til you decide to pick yore corn the next day an' they'll get into yore patch that same night, pull down every stalk and take a bite outa every ear."

"Really?"

"Yep, if'n you 'spect to get some corn from yore patch, you gotta pick it a day before you decide to."

Given that the Colonel has notoriously bad timing, and would probably end up trying to pick his corn the day after he decided to, he's thinking a multiple-strand high-voltage electric fence is a better option.

That, and a surge of counter-critter clear and hold operations aimed at eradicating the threat.

Setting Sun; Rising Dragon

2011-06-13T13:26:00.000-05:00

The Colonel has, in several posts hereon and on many other occasions in many other fora over the last two decades, posited his strongly held belief that a major war between these re-United States and the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) is a foregone conclusion. Nothing in the last few years has swayed that belief. In fact, recent events and increasing tensions in the Western Pacific region have only served to concrete the Colonel's contentions.

The Colonel maintains that the United States and its regional allies will go to war with China for much the same reasons that resulted in the War with Japan in the early 1940's.

Rising Sun

A wave-top summary of Japan's rise in the region, beginning in the last years of the 19th Century, and culminating in the Japanese military offensives begun in December of 1941 is instructive and necessary to understanding the current threat posed to the region by the PRC.

The seeds for the fruit of Japanese imperialism were actually planted by the United States in the middle of the 19th Century, when the U.S. and other Western European powers forced Japan to emerge from nearly three centuries of self-imposed isolationism. The U.S. and Western Europe viewed Japan as fertile ground for new markets and possible colonial expansion. Open contact with the West over the next few decades taught two important lessons to the Japanese--the potential gain from imperialism and colonialism; and the military modernization required to be a player in the region and on the world scene.

Many theories exist to explain the rise of imperialism/colonialism and expansionism in a nation.

Hobson's "Excess Capital" theory can be dismissed as the reason for Japan's expansionism. The was no excess capital available in Japan's largely agrarian economy at the turn of the 19th to 20th Century. In fact, Japan incurred great debt borrowing to finance its military modernization.

Likewise, Lenin's Marxist view of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism prior to proletarian revolt can be dismissed in Japan's case.

Probably the most apt explanation for Japan's expansionism is a rapidly developing nationalism, a national social dynamic manifesting itself in the desire to increase standing (politically and materially) and security relative to other nations. Japan saw the rapacity of Western imperialism and colonialism and adopted similar postures to both increase its standing and to ensure its national survival vis-a-vis the West. The result was expansionist war with Russia culminating in the annexation of Korea and the occupation/colonization of significant portions of the Asian mainland. Western resistance to Japanese expansionism in Asia gave rise to Western efforts to sanction and dissuade Japan's imperialism. Japan responded with pre-emptive war against the U.S. and Britain.

Rising Dragon

With the counterproductive era of intentional Maoist social upheaval far behind her, China is today rapidly modernizing and expanding its regionally hegemonistic and internationally relative standing in consonance with a national pride completely understandable in a people who comprise nearly a third of the planet's population. The PRC's economy is growing at one of the fastest clips of any in the world and will, if maintained and supplied with resources, become the world's largest within a generation.

Couple modern Chinese nationalism (on the rapid rise since WWII) with a Hobsonian-satisfying excess of capital (thanks to abundant cheap labor and Western markets hungry for inexpensive goods) and you have all the makings of a rising dragon in the East whose size and reach will easily over-shadow the rising sun of a century ago.

The relatively minor military campaigns we've been involved in since 9/11 can't rightly be called wars. Going toe to toe with China--now that will be a WAR. The war with China will rival, if not greatly eclipse, last century's war with Japan in scope and will be fought for much the same reasons.

In the Colonel's not-so-humble opinion, the flash point for the next War in the Pacific is the region of the South China Sea and further south toward Australia.

In the geopolitical category of "Who'd a thunk it?" the headlines from that region this week are about Vietnam's leaders (with whose predecessors the United States fought a debilitating decade-long limited war) asking for U.S. help against what they view as aggressively expansionist behavior by the PRC. Besides Vietnam, we actually have treaty allies in the region with territorial claims and vital commercial interests (SLOCs, Spratly Islands' oil and fisheries, etc...) in the South China Sea area--Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, et.al. The PRC is increasingly viewed in the region as expansionist, in much the same way and for much the same reasons as Japan in the inter-war years.

While consuming all of the political, social, and media oxygen in the room at present, our current limited military actions in the misguided, mismanaged, and misnamed "War on Terrorism" (wars are conducted against nations, not against tactics), is but a sideshow interlude before the main attraction; in much the same way as U.S. military adventurism and interventionism in the inter-war years (1919--1940) was for the main attraction of 1941 to 1945.

Hot Water

2011-06-06T06:00:00.078-05:00

The Summer Solstice may still be a couple of weeks away, but here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere, the heat is officially on.

It is hot. How hot?

Approaching triple digits hot.

So hot the Colonel puts on his Kevlar overalls before going outside-- to protect against shrapnel from the gravel popping on his driveway.

So hot the shoreline of Lake Brenda is receding faster than the Colonel's hairline.

So hot the crows are carrying canteens.

So hot spittle sizzles before it hits the pavement.

The heat is quite an inconvenience. The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda was working out in the garden the other day while the Colonel was supervising from the air conditioned interior of the Big House. She was perspiring heavily enough to give the folks over in the Delta fresh worry about high water.  The Colonel felt bad about it, and stepped outside to check on her.

"Hey, Sweetie, I really hate to see you workin' out in the heat. Could you please work in the flower bed on the other side of the house?"

The Colonel's Lady looked up from her work, mopped her brow, and asked, "Why, is it any cooler over there?"

"Nope. But, I won't be able to see you 'round there."

The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda shot the Colonel a not-so comely and slightly less than kind-hearted look, and returned to her work.

Yep, the heat is on...and the water is hot.

Freedom Flier

2011-06-01T08:56:00.000-05:00

On the fourteenth of June of each year, the people of the United States, whether they realize it or not, celebrate Flag Day. The day commemorates the anniversary of the 1777 resolution of the rebel Continental Congress declaring that "the flag of the United States be thirteen alternate stripes red and white" with a union of "thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation."

The resolution made official a battle flag that had already led troops of the rebel Continental Army in combat against the British Army, loyal American formations, and mercenaries hired by the Crown. By the time the Continental Congress got around to recognizing it, the blood of patriots had already christened what Francis Scott Key would, nearly two generations later, immortalize as the "star spangled banner."

Over the next century, disparate organizations and communities across America conducted their own unique patriotic celebrations honoring the flag. On the one hundredth anniversary of the resolution of the Continental Congress, the United States Congress recognized the occasion, but it wasn't until 1949 that the Congress passed an act declaring June 14th as Flag Day.

Twenty-six years earlier (1923), the National Flag Conference, attended by representatives of the U.S. military and 66 other interested national groups, adopted the first "National Flag Code" providing guidance for the display and care of the National Flag of the United States. In 1942, the 77th Congress of the United States ,using the National Flag Conference's "Code" as a guide, passed Public Law 829, which included rules for use and display of the flag, as well as rules for conduct during playing of the National Anthem and recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.

The United States Code (the official compilation of Federal Law) Title 36, Chapter 10 contains what is known as the Flag Code--the clear, unambiguous rules for properly and respectfully displaying and caring for the flag. As you read the following excerpts (particularly §176) from that law, the Colonel asks that you recognize wherein you have been guilty of disrespect for the flag under which millions of Americans have fought for our freedom.

§170. National anthem; Star-Spangled Banner

The composition consisting of the words and music known as The Star-Spangled Banner is designated the national anthem of the United States of America.

§171. Conduct during playing

During rendition of the national anthem when the flag is displayed, all present except those in uniform should stand at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart. Men not in uniform should remove their headdress with their right hand and hold it at the left shoulder, the hand being over the heart. Persons in uniform should render the military salute at the first note of the anthem and retain this position until the last note. When the flag is not displayed, those present should face toward the music and act in the same manner they would if the flag were displayed there.

§172. Pledge of allegiance to the flag; manner of delivery

The Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, 'I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.', should be rendered by standing at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart. When not in uniform men should remove their headdress with their right hand and hold it at the left shoulder, the hand being over the heart. Persons in uniform should remain silent, face the flag, and render the military salute.

§174. Time and occasions for display

(a) Display on buildings and stationary flagstaffs in open; night display It is the universal custom to display the flag only from sunrise to sunset on buildings and on stationary flagstaffs in the open. However, when a patriotic effect is desired, the flag may be displayed twenty-four hours a day if properly illuminated during the hours of darkness.
(b) Manner of hoisting The flag should be hoisted briskly and lowered ceremoniously.
(c) Inclement weather The flag should not be displayed on days when the weather is inclement, except when an all weather flag is displayed.
(d) Particular days of display The flag should be displayed on all days, especially on New Year's Day, January 1; Inauguration Day, January 20; Lincoln's Birthday, February 12; Washington's Birthday, third Monday in February; Easter Sunday (variable); Mother's Day, second Sunday in May; Armed Forces Day, third Saturday in May; Memorial Day (half-staff until noon), the last Monday in May; Flag Day, June 14; Independence Day, July 4; Labor Day, first Monday in September; Constitution Day, September 17; Columbus Day, second Monday in October; Navy Day, October 27; Veterans Day, November 11; Thanksgiving Day, fourth Thursday in November; Christmas Day, December 25; and such other days as may be proclaimed by the President of the United States; the birthdays of States (date of admission); and on State holidays...

§175. Position and manner of display

The flag, when carried in a procession with another flag or flags, should be either on the marching right; that is, the flag's own right, or, if there is a line of other flags, in front of the center of that line.

(a) The flag should not be displayed on a float in a parade except from a staff, or as provided in subsection (i) of this section.
(b) The flag should not be draped over the hood, top, sides, or back of a vehicle or of a railroad train or a boat. When the flag is displayed on a motorcar, the staff shall be fixed firmly to the chassis or clamped to the right fender.
(d) The flag of the United States of America, when it is displayed with another flag against a wall from crossed staffs, should be on the right, the flag's own right, and its staff should be in front of the staff of the other flag.
(e) The flag of the United States of America should be at the center and at the highest point of the group when a number of flags of States or localities or pennants of societies are grouped and displayed from staffs.
(f) When flags of States, cities, or localities, or pennants of societies are flown on the same halyard with the flag of the United States, the latter should always be at the peak. When the flags are flown from adjacent staffs, the flag of the United States should be hoisted first and lowered last. No such flag or pennant may be placed above the flag of the United States or to the United States flag's right.
(g) When flags of two or more nations are displayed, they are to be flown from separate staffs of the same height. The flags should be of approximately equal size. International usage forbids the display of the flag of one nation above that of another nation in time of peace.
(h) When the flag of the United States is displayed from a staff projecting horizontally or at an angle from the window sill, balcony, or front of a building, the union of the flag should be placed at the peak of the staff unless the flag is at half staff. When the flag is suspended over a sidewalk from a rope extending from a house to a pole at the edge of the sidewalk, the flag should be hoisted out, union first, from the building.
(i) When displayed either horizontally or vertically against a wall, the union should be uppermost and to the flag's own right, that is, to the observer's left. When displayed in a window, the flag should be displayed in the same way, with the union or blue field to the left of the observer in the street.
(j) When the flag is displayed over the middle of the street, it should be suspended vertically with the union to the north in an east and west street or to the east in a north and south street.
(k) When used on a speaker's platform, the flag, if displayed flat, should be displayed above and behind the speaker. When displayed from a staff in a church or public auditorium, the flag of the United States of America should hold the position of superior prominence, in advance of the audience, and in the position of honor at the clergyman's or speaker's right as he faces the audience. Any other flag so displayed should be placed on the left of the clergyman or speaker or to the right of the audience.
(l) The flag should form a distinctive feature of the ceremony of unveiling a statue or monument, but it should never be used as the covering for the statue or monument.
(m) The flag, when flown at half-staff, should be first hoisted to the peak for an instant and then lowered to the half-staff position. The flag should be again raised to the peak before it is lowered for the day. On Memorial Day the flag should be displayed at half-staff until noon only, then raised to the top of the staff...
(n) When the flag is used to cover a casket, it should be so placed that the union is at the head and over the left shoulder. The flag should not be lowered into the grave or allowed to touch the ground.
(o) When the flag is suspended across a corridor or lobby in a building with only one main entrance, it should be suspended vertically with the union of the flag to the observer's left upon entering...

§176. Respect for flag

No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America; the flag should not be dipped to any person or thing. Regimental colors, State flags, and organization or institutional flags are to be dipped as a mark of honor.

(a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.
(b) The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise.
(c) The flag should never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free.
(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free. Bunting of blue, white, and red, always arranged with the blue above, the white in the middle, and the red below, should be used for covering a speaker's desk, draping the front of the platform, and for decoration in general.
(e) The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in any way.
(f) The flag should never be used as a covering for a ceiling.
(g) The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature.
(h) The flag should never be used as a receptacle for receiving, holding, carrying, or delivering anything.
(i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown.
(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations. The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin being a replica, should be worn on the left lapel near the heart.
(k) The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.

§177. Conduct during hoisting, lowering or passing of flag

During the ceremony of hoisting or lowering the flag or when the flag is passing in a parade or in review, all persons present except those in uniform should face the flag and stand at attention with the right hand over the heart. Those present in uniform should render the military salute. When not in uniform, men should remove their headdress with their right hand and hold it at the left shoulder, the hand being over the heart. Aliens should stand at attention. The salute to the flag in a moving column should be rendered at the moment the flag passes.

Daniels Down

2011-05-27T08:30:00.000-05:00

The Colonel has allowed the balance of a standard calendar week to pass before proffering his assessment on the decision by Mitch Daniels not to seek the Republican Party nomination for the Presidency of these re-United States.

As the dozen or so of you who regularly participate in egregious wastes of valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon will remember (and recoil in regret at the remembrance), the Colonel has, for the balance of a standard calendar year, vociferously promoted the candidacy (if undeclared) of the current Governor of Indiana.  One or more of the dozen of you would be quite correct in asking why the Colonel has not addressed Governor Daniels decision not to embark on the national rescue mission, the leadership for which the Colonel felt the Governor had the foremost qualifications.

Frankly, the Colonel has yet to work his way tortuously through the lengthy and laborious grieving process.

The Colonel just can't believe that Daniels has really decided not to run. Maybe he'll change his mind.

How dare the Governor make such a decision! The Colonel has invested the last remaining shreds of his public and private credibility in promotion of Mitch Daniel's candidacy. The Colonel wants to grab the man by the scruff of the neck and shake him like a rag doll!

C'mon, Mitch. Please.  The Colonel will spend every waking moment from here on extolling your virtues, if you'll just get in the race. The Colonel promises he'll deliver the Tallahatchie Free State.

This is so hard. The Colonel just feels numb. There's no reason to even care about the political process anymore. The Colonel will just lose himself in his sawdust production chores. Even that seems pointless.

Well, the Colonel guesses the Governor has his own good reasons. Running for the Presidency of these re-United States takes an incredible toll on a candidate and a candidate's family.  Being President sounds cool and all; but the job is relentless and thankless, perks notwithstanding. Probably best for him and his family that he not run. He'd probably win, and then he would really be in trouble.

Okay, the Colonel will review the field of Republican candidates for a few days and let the dozen or so of you who regularly waste rod and cone time perusing posts hereon know, in short order, just who you should next support for the nomination.

Apologies for getting you all excited about Mitch Daniels, but you are not alone in your pain.

He broke the Colonel's heart, too.

Honoring the Fallen

2011-05-24T17:15:00.000-05:00

This coming weekend America observes Memorial Day. We shouldn't celebrate the day. It is too solemn an occasion for that.

The Colonel begs the patience of the dozen or so of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon while he pontificates on his pet peeve. The Colonel has few causes and crusades to which he devotes his energies that are more dear to him than the effort to educate those within reach of his voice and pen regarding the sacredness of Memorial Day, and the distinct difference between Memorial Day and Veteran's Day.

While he always appreciates the sincerity of the sentiment, it has always frustrated the Colonel to be thanked for his military service on Memorial Day. The Colonel did not die (at least he doesn't think he's in Heaven, presently--although his vast holdings here at shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere are close, and the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda is an angel) on a battlefield in service to his nation.

Memorial Day was formerly known as Decoration Day--a day on which flowers were placed on the graves of war dead. While many communities claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day, it is widely accepted that Columbus, Mississippi holds as strong a claim as any on that distinction. Cemeteries across the south were filled with both Union and Confederate dead, but it was at the 1866 Decoration Day service in Friendship Cemetery (hallowed ground in which many of the Colonel's kin are buried) in Columbus that flowers were first placed on both Confederate and Union graves.

Memorial Day is reserved solely for remembering those who gave the ultimate sacrifice of their lives in the wars to which our nation sent them. Memorial Day should not be a celebratory holiday. It should be a day of solemnity and thankful remembrance of our honored war dead. The trivialization of Memorial Day as a beach holiday and a shopping summons denigrates the memory of the fallen.

On the other hand, Veterans' Day, as the day formerly known as Armistice Day (in recognition of the date on which hostilities in the First World War ceased) is now called, is the appropriate day for recognizing all who served (past tense) in the uniform of the United States.

If one wishes to use a specific day to recognize the service of men and women still in uniform, Armed Forces Day is the appropriate occasion for that. And...you'll have to wait a whole 'nuther year for that--Armed Forces Day was last Saturday.

If you wish to properly observe Memorial Day, the Colonel respectfully refers you to:

http://thecolonelscorner.blogspot.com/2010/05/decorating-day-decorum.html

Polk's Precedent

2011-05-13T15:53:00.001-05:00

One hundred and sixty-four years ago today, at the behest of the greatest and least heralded U.S. President of the Nineteenth Century--James Knox Polk--the Congress of the United States declared war on Mexico.

The proximate casus belli was tension over the admission into the union of the Republic of Texas, including territory still claimed by Mexico. In truth, the conflict was a war of conquest in fulfillment of the American foreign policy concept of Manifest Destiny. At war's end, Mexico ceded, according to the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, all of the territory which was later to become the States of California, Utah, Arizona and Nevada (as well as territory that would become portions of Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming).

Frankly, as much as the Colonel is a huge fan of Polk, he is disappointed with the 11th President for not annexing all of Mexico (as many in his party--Democrats--were rightfully demanding). The Colonel can only imagine the economic, resource, and social advantages that would have accrued to our nation had the United States added a dozen or more States stretching from California to well south of the Yucatan. Our present issue with illegal immigration and the violent Mexican narco free-fall toward failed state status would in all likelihood be...,well, non-issues.

The Colonel has little doubt in his military mind that, at this point in this egregious waste of rod and cone time, there are many readers with hands reflexively to mouths in horror (or a liberal facsimile thereof) at the thought of our nation making such a nakedly imperialistic land grab. The Colonel would point out to those of you hyperventilating from behind your cupped phalanges, that the history of man is the history of men taking territory from those who took it from someone else, and that if our American ancestors had not taken land from others we Americans would probably not exist as such nor enjoy the highest standard of living and wealth of social accomplishments ever seen in the solar system.

But the Colonel digresses.

Just prior to initiating hostilities against Mexico, President Polk's administration negotiated (some today call his negotiating style "brinkmanship" due to its bellicosity) the terms of the Oregon Treaty by which the United States gained exclusive possession of the territory that would later become the States of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho (as well as portions of Montana and Wyoming).

Thus, President Polk's muscular foreign policy resulted in the extension of the boundaries of the United States all the way to the Pacific Ocean and increased the territory of the United States by a third. In fact, Polk increased the territory of the United States by significantly more contiguous land area than did President Jefferson's much more highly lauded Louisiana Purchase.

Polk was not only a foreign policy visionary with significant achievements attendant to his vision, but was a domestic policy champion as well. He created the Department of the Interior, oversaw the establishment of the United States Naval Academy and the Smithsonian Institute, re-established an independent Treasury, and reduced trade-strangling tariffs. Were he alive today, he would undoubtedly be a darling of the Tea Party for his veto of federal funding for state and local projects that forestalled, albeit briefly, the scourge of political pork rampant in our republic.

Slight of stature and temperate in nature, Polk was nonetheless renowned for his oratory (often without notes and always without a teleprompter) which earned him the sobriquet "Napoleon of the Stump." In office, he was referred to as "Young Hickory" after his mentor and fellow Tennessean Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson. The youngest man (49) to assume the Presidency to that time, Polk was not without qualification, having served as Chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Governor of the State of Tennessee.

Polk is still the only Speaker of the House to serve as President.

The Colonel would be remiss to not mention the one blight on Polk's memory--he was a slave-owner. He was in "good" company as such, however--nine of his predecessors and four of his successors, were, or had been, slave-owners at one time. Polk's will stipulated that his slaves were to be freed upon his wife's death.

Polk's accomplishments as President are all the more impressive given that he did not overtly seek the office, and, once nominated by his party as a compromise candidate, pledged to serve only one term. A pledge he honored without prevarication.

Who is the man with Polk's temperament, moral and physical stature, foreign and domestic policy principles, and breadth of leadership experience in American politics today?

Mitch Daniels.

No Cause for Celebration

2011-05-09T06:00:00.004-05:00

As he told a friend earlier this past week, the Colonel wishes with every fibre of his being that he had been the last person to see the light of life in Osama bin Laden's eyes. Yet, the celebration surrounding the death of the evil man who visited terror on our nation has seemed to the Colonel to be...well, unseemly.

The Colonel couldn't quite put his finger on the reason for the unease he felt at the gloating and exuberance displayed by Americans at the death of the terror chief.

Don't mistake the Colonel's feelings for any sort of remorse--bin Laden needed to be dead, and by our hands.

The Colonel is not the least bit sorry that an enemy of the United States has assumed room temperature.  However, the excessive verbal victory dancing at his demise just seems tawdry and, dare the Colonel say it, un-American.  Part of what makes us so special as Americans is our quickness to celebrate positive achievement. We revel in feel-good stories wherein good things happen to good people. If every American wore a medal on his or her lapel denoting citizenship, the obverse would have the likeness of one American applauding another.

On the reverse of that medal would be the likeness of someone displaying what used to be the common trait of uncommon humility among we who proudly call ourselves Americans.

Midst all of the pumping and bumping of fists last week, the Colonel was reminded of the admonition credited to Coach Vince Lombardi. One of his running backs had celebrated a bit too excessively, in Lombardi's estimation (probably far less celebration than is common in sport today). The legendary coach caught the player by the arm as he returned to the sideline and said to him, "The next time you score a touchdown, act like you have been there before."

In his Bible study this week, the Colonel read the following passage in God's word and was struck by its timeliness:

"Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when he stumbles, do not let your heart rejoice, or the Lord will see and disapprove and turn his wrath away from him." Proverbs 24: 17-18

Seems to the Colonel that we have gloated and celebrated a tad too much at bin Laden's death--even if he was evil incarnate and harbinger of unprecedented havoc in our once-safe harbor.

The Colonel smiled a bit (no overt celebration, mind you) at the irony of bin Laden's burial at sea. Such an action is truly only an honor to anyone whose life is connected with the sea--commercially, militarily, or even recreationally. To anyone or anything not connected in some way to the sea, burial at sea is just disposal.

We swept up some trash last week, and dumped it overboard. No cause for celebration.

Hoosier Daddy

2011-05-02T07:00:00.025-05:00

The man behind whose as-yet-unannounced candidacy for President the Colonel has thrown his admittedly inconsequential support--Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels--took a manly step toward the Republican nomination late last week.

The governor signed into law a bill passed by the Indiana legislature that, among other things, prohibits state taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood of Indiana; presumably to prevent public funds from paying for abortions.   In so doing, Daniels has left himself open to attack from the left, not only for signing a Pro-Life bill, but also for seemingly backtracking on his call for a national "truce on social issues" in order to get the nation's financial house in order. Mitch is seen by the left as pandering to the social conservatives whose votes will make or break his quest for the Republican nomination.

Were the Colonel advising Governor Daniels, he would have him point out that he proposes a NATIONAL social issue truce. Indiana's financial house is already in order--the state's budget is in the black.

The Colonel will subject the dozen or so of you who regularly waste rod and cone time perusing posts hereon to a lengthy treatise on all of the reasons why he strongly supports Governor Mitch Daniels' candidacy for the Republican nomination for President in another post. In the meantime, the Colonel will sum up his support for Mitch in one short sentence:

Mitch Daniels is the anti-Obama -- not cool; not a Marxist

As the dozen or so of you who frequently waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon know, the Colonel is a vociferous opponent of the practice of infanticide. Cloaked in the euphemistic mantle of a woman's right to choose whether to carry a (and the Colonel quotes from the "Pro-Choice" movement's own words) "non-sentient mass of cells and tissue" to full term as a human child, convenience abortion is the most heinous of crimes against humanity.

But, the issue is much larger than the public funding of abortion. The real issue is whether any non-governmental agency or organization--no matter how well-meaning--should receive taxpayer funding.

The Colonel argues, particularly given our nation's current debt crisis, that NO non-governmental organization should receive federal funding, in whole or in part.

Not NPR. Not Planned Parenthood. Not Utah's Cowboy Poetry Festival. Not the NRA. Not the NAACP.   Not for any of their projects, no matter how well-meaning.

Not the Boy Scouts. Not because the Colonel doesn't like the Boy Scouts of America--he earned Eagle rank in 1972--but, because the nation can't afford the luxury.

No federal taxpayer-provided funds should pay for anything not directly related to the aims put forth in the preamble to the constitution under which our republic was established:

"...in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution..."

Granted, everyone who has a favorite non-governmental organization or project can probably make the case that his or her organization or project does one or more of the things above. The Colonel can make a fairly convincing argument that federal funding of some of the projects on the Honey-do list posted by the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda conspicuously on the fridge would go a long way toward insuring some "domestic tranquility" here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere.

However, the question we citizens of these re-United States must ask ourselves at this particular juncture is whether our nation can afford to fund (even partially) our favorite non-governmental organization or project, given the fact that our national debt is rising at several million dollars a minute.

The Colonel makes no judgement here on the efficacy or worthiness of any non-governmental organization or project. What he does judge is the wisdom of continuing to spend money we don't have on luxuries we don't need for national survival right now. It is purely a matter of priority. Some might even call it triage.

The Colonel has lots of projects aboard his vast holdings that he would like to fund now. There's just this little issue of the availability of funds. He's not going to borrow money to fund non-essential projects. Were he to do so, he would fast reach the point where required payments on debt would swamp his ability to pay for essential survival items.

The Colonel isn't borrowing beyond his means to easily pay back.   Nor should our government, until our budget is balanced and our debt is paid off.

Governor Daniels rightly calls our massive debt, recalling early Cold War rhetoric, "The New Red Menace," and correctly identifies it as the greatest threat to our continued existence as a free republic.

The Colonel concurs.

"Pond would be good for you"

2011-05-01T12:26:00.001-05:00

One of the favorite pastimes this Spring for the Hope of 21st Century Civilization--dashes 1 and 2 (H21CC-1 & 2) is slipping off down the hill from the Big House here at Eegeebeegee to the shores of Lake Brenda for a fishing trip with the Colonel.

The Colonel fishes. The grandsons..., not so much.

Not unless you define "fishing" as peeling off every stitch of clothing and participating in a full, frontal frolic in the shallows.

This afternoon the Colonel sat watching the two splash in a muddy froth at water's edge and was reminded of the scene in that cinematic classic, Caddyshack, when Bill Murray's character asks Chevy Chase's character if he had a pool at his place.

Chevy's character answers, "We've got a pool. And a pond. Pond would be good for you."

That reminder sent the few remaining cells lying fallow in the amorphous goo settled in a cranny in the Colonel's brain-housing group into a dizzying dance down memory lane. One particular memory parked in long-term parking at the synaptic terminal leapt to the fore and the Colonel remembered the first and next thirty times he watched Caddyshack.

Nearly three decades ago, the Colonel, then a brash young lieutenant, was assigned as the Training Officer for the HQ of the 31st Marine Amphibious Unit, forward deployed in the Western Pacific.  On amphibious shipping in those days movies were shown each night on the mess decks and in the officers' wardroom. The movies were played on 16mm reel-to-reel projectors and flashed onto large screens. Ships left port for several weeks at sea with a few dozen movies and would trade movies with the sister ships in their squadrons at sea.

Most of the movies were horrible. Often, only one of a dozen would be worth watching at all, and when that one was determined, it was watched repeatedly.

Caddyshack was the best of the bunch on one stint at sea, and that tells you exactly how bad the movies were that were given to ships at sea in those days. On the night of its first showing in the wardroom, it was immediately re-wound and shown again.

Bill Murray blew up the gopher tunnels three times the next evening.

By day three, many sailors and Marines on board the USS Tripoli had huge chunks of the movie's dialog memorized. By the end of the first week, the sound was turned off while the movie played and members of the audience spoke the lines.

In the wardroom one evening, instigated by a group of young officers, with whom the Colonel can neither confirm nor deny conspiracy, a majority of those who showed up to watch the twenty-something screening of Caddyshack were not in the required uniform of the day, but rather wore golf attire or a reasonable facsimile thereof. The officers sat waiting on the ship's executive officer (aka: XO; second-in-command) to arrive so that the screening could begin (the Commanding Officer had his own mess and the XO, therefore, was the senior man in the wardroom).

Every time the door to the wardroom would open, all eyes would turn expectantly to see the XO's reaction. The XO was running a bit late this particular evening, attending to some important matter relative to keeping the water on the outside and late-comers were streaming into the wardroom, delayed by their own duties relative to keeping the water on the outside.  Each time, an officer would either enter in golf garb or quickly run back to his stateroom to change when he noticed the situation.

The XO was a man not particularly known for his sense of humor. The atmosphere in the wardroom full of officers in unauthorized attire was a mixture of nervous giggling and tense anticipation. More than a few officers thought better of the whole deal and slipped out of the wardroom to change back into the uniform of the day--only to be met by a chorus of cat-calls when they returned.

At last, the door to the wardroom opened and the XO strode into the room. Before he could launch into his customary "Lights, camera, action!," he was stopped short by the undisciplined sea of non-uniformed officers flooding his normally highly disciplined and formal wardroom.

The XO's head swung back and forth, and a deep frown slowly took control of his facial features. He spun on his heel and left the wardroom, slamming the door behind him.

Several other timid souls bolted out behind him. The rest sat in stunned silence. One of the ship's department heads finally stood and addressed his fellow department heads.

"We probably shouldn't wait for the XO to summon us. Let's go to his office."

They left, and the rest became..., well, restless. Several more timid souls bolted to change back to the uniform of the day.

Suddenly, the wardroom door slammed open and a voice boomed, "Attention on deck!"

The XO strode in wearing a brightly colored shirt and the loudest pair of plaid trousers this side of Baton Rouge. "Gentlemen," he declared in a serious tone, "I apologize for my earlier appearance in an improper uniform. As for those of you not in the proper uniform,"  he motioned to his own attire, "for this evening, and this evening alone, you are excused and may return when properly attired."

The Colonel is thankful that the dwindling collection of cognitive cells in his grey matter can still cobble together that particular memory. It's a good one. Still displaces his perpetual frown with a smile to this day.

First Natural-born Citizen of the Tallahatchie Free State

2011-04-26T21:00:00.000-05:00

The Colonel now has first hand knowledge of the veracity of the saying, "One should not count their chickens before they hatch."

One of the Colonel's hens went, as they say, "broody" nearly four weeks ago. With a little help from her sisters, Silvia, so named for a speckling of silver in her speculum feathers, quickly amassed a mound of eggs and assumed the setting position.

Once a hen assumes the position, she is pretty much there for the duration. And, supposedly, the duration of incubation for a Rhode Island Red egg is 21 days.

So, Silvia set. Not sat. Set.

The Colonel feels positively farmerish usin' the farm lingo.

"Yup," he tells his friends and neighbors, "Ah gotta hen settin' on a whole mound'a aigs. Gonna have me a huge hen herd, now."

And, Silvia set.

And, she set some more.

That hen set right there on that mound of eggs, unmovable, day and night, rain and shine.

Pine stump unmovable.

War protester unmovable.

Twenty-one days passed. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four.

The Colonel checked and re-checked the calendar.

Twenty-five days passed.

Just about the time the Colonel had decided to take ol' Smedley the rooster in to the vet for a fertility check, one egg hatched.

You have got to be kiddin' the Colonel! Silvia is setting on a mound of eggs the height of which rivals that of an early Egyptian step pyramid and only one egg hatches?

Luckily, the Colonel's hen herd egg production costs have decreased steadily over the past several months and the cost per egg is now down to just shy of their weight in silver, so the investment only rivals the GDP of, say, Luxembourg.

Everything here on the farm (and the Colonel uses that term more loosely than a newborn's diaper deposit) gets a name. Every piece of machinery, every bend in the creek, every hen in the herd has a proper name. The new chick was hatched on Good Friday.

It's name is Friday.

This morning another egg hatched. The Hope of 21st Century Civilization, dashes 1 and 2 (H21CC, -1 & -2) were in attendance, peering impatiently over the rim of the brooder box, as the newest member of the Eegeebeegee Egg Production Platoon struggled to free itself from its shell.  The Colonel turned to H21CC-1 and asked him, "What should we name this one."

"I dunno, Pop," he answered. "What day is it?"

Children of the Wheat

2011-04-20T09:48:00.000-05:00

In the northernmost field (designated North Field in a fevered fit of originality) of his vast holdings here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere, the Colonel has a quite unintentional, yet satisfying nonetheless, stand of wheat. The Colonel can neither confirm nor deny that the wheat growing in the North Field is as a result of the field's use for several dove shoots last Fall.

Small heaps of shotgun shell hulls spaced regularly around the field tend to lend credence to confirmation.

The lack of substantial amounts of meat in the freezer tend to lend credence to denial.

While the neither confirmed nor denied dove shoots may or may not have been impressive, the stand of wheat now extant in the North Field is, the Colonel can proudly attest, very impressive.

The Colonel's grandsons, the Hope of 21st Century Civilization dashes One and Two (H21CC-1 & 2), are even more impressed with the impressiveness of the unintentional wheat field than is the Colonel. They especially like the fact that the Colonel allows them to romp in one small corner of said impressive unintentional stand of wheat that may or may not be the result of copious amounts of wheat spread on the North Field in what may or may not have been a bonafide agricultural practice.

Children are one of only two species on this big blue marble that romp. (The act of romping is impossible for anyone over the age of twelve, of which the Colonel can attest with certainty born of a very recent attempt.) The only other species capable of romping is the adolescent phase of the domestic canine.

That's puppy dog for the LSU and Alabama grads among the few of you struggling to maintain your sanity perusing the drivel in this post.

Puppy dawg for the Mississippi State grads.

A full-fledged romp worthy of the appelation is no ordinary scurrying about by feet of kids clad in Keds. A romp is accomplished with wild abandon. A romp combines tumbles, leaps, screeches, giggles, and, if an appropriate nearby shallow semi-liquid-filled depression is available, full frontal splashes.

That's puddle for the Georgia grads struggling to keep up.

When H21CC-1 & 2 told their Nana, the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda, that the Colonel let 'em romp in the wheat field (the little snitches), the Colonel's lady fixed the Colonel with her patented and lovingly oft-used "You idiot!" look and asked with great concern,

"What about snakes?!?"

The Colonel assured her that no snakes were harmed in the accomplishment of the impressive wheat stand romp.

The Colonel is not a complete idiot.

Rebel Run-a-thon

2011-04-18T10:15:00.003-05:00

Rhett Anthony, the Colonel, Jim "Psycho" Ward,
and Dan "Danno" Carpenter loop The Grove
in the inaugural Run-a-thon.

Google the term "run-a-thon" and the dozen or so of you who regularly waste rod and cone time perusing posts hereon will find several references to running events held to raise funds for charity. The Colonel has no doubt in his military mind that he and his classmates in the Semper Fidelis Society at Ole Miss coined the term and hosted the first "Run-a-thon" thirty-five years ago this spring.

The Colonel wishes he had trade-marked the term.

Besieged by scores of sorority sisters batting lashes and begging pledges of dollars for March of Dimes for each mile walked in the annual Walk-a-thon, the Colonel (then a lowly NROTC Midshipman) had a rare moment of mental clarity (it is unbelievably difficult to think when besieged by a lash-batting, sugar-mouthed Ole Miss coed) and empathy (the Colonel is an INTJ -- Google that and understand his difficulty feeling for others' misfortune).   In that fleeting moment of rare mental clarity and empathy, the thought occurred to the Colonel that he and his brother (and sister) Middies could do the whole walk-a-few-miles-for-charity thing in a much more manly (and womanly) manner.

We NROTC midshipman (the Marine officer aspirants, in particular) weren't walkers. We were runners.

Not joggers. Runners.

We future Marine leaders had stellar Marine leaders teaching us and they stressed leadership from the front. Our Marines would be running, not jogging, and a Marine officer needed to be running out front.  We future Marine leaders also had a rite of passage to complete near the end of our college matriculation--Officer Candidate School--and said rite of passage was not passed walking, nor even jogging.

So, we ran. Three, four, five miles a day. Every day. The goal was to run sub-six minute miles. That was a high and rarely attained goal. So we ran hard, pushing ourselves. We ran laps around the joggers on campus. The only ones running faster were the athletes on scholarship.

But, we ran farther. Much farther. Forrest Gump farther.

Our leaders challenged us to do something for charity every year. In years past the NROTC Battalion of Midshipmen had played marathon softball games for charity and pummeled fat frat rats in charity boxing smokers. But this year we would do something that would capture the imagination, and capitalize on our strength.

We would run as far as we could run in 24 hours and collect pledges for each mile run. We would concentrate our pledge efforts on the monied Sorority and Fraternity Rows. We would take their daddies' money in huge wads--we were known for running long distances, but no one could fathom the distance we could run in 24 hours. Most pledgers thought, at best, we would log ten miles each.

We planned, secretly, to double that, at least.

At the center of the Ole Miss campus sits a wooded patch of hallowed ground known as The Grove, the home of the most famous and most genteel college game-day "tailgate" assemblance in all the land. The irregular circumference of The Grove is exactly one half of one mile.  In those days, the Naval ROTC unit was headquartered in McCain Hall (named in honor of the Senator's grandfather) across Grove Loop from The Grove. We set up bivouac, and runner check-in, out front of McCain Hall.

The rules for that first Run-a-thon, and every one thereafter, were simple. A baton would be kept moving around The Grove in the hands of a dedicated runner for 24 hours, in 30 minute shifts.  All other runners could run at their own pace and at their own desired time of day or night, but were encouraged to run at least one of their laps around The Grove with the designated baton carrier.

At the start of that first Run-a-thon, more than a score of runners escorted the baton around The Grove for several laps. Late into the night the baton kept circling The Grove; sometimes the runner carrying it in lonely pavement-pounding vigil.

At the end of that first Run-a-thon many of the runners had covered more than twenty miles.  Jim "Psycho" Ward (later to command a Navy F/A-18 squadron and currently commanding airliners) logged thirty miles and set a bar over which future Run-a-thon runners would be challenged to take a running jump.   As memory serves, and it serves rather slovenly these days, the Colonel believes that Jim also set the record for the longest seated shower immediately following the inaugural Run-a-thon--and proved that one could actually consume meals under running water.

That first Run-a-thon netted over a thousand dollars (a tidy sum of lots of sorority girls' daddies' money in 1976) for the March of Dimes.

The Colonel's #1 son, then himself a midshipman in the Ole Miss NROTC program, ran for over 30 miles in the 25th Annual Run-a-thon. The Colonel doesn't know if the tradition continues, but he will be a presenter at the Ole Miss NROTC Awards Day next week and intends to find out. If the tradition has lapsed, the Colonel will attempt to challenge its re-institution.

Just hope they don't challenge the Colonel to run with 'em.

Spring Planting Planning

2011-04-05T09:57:00.000-05:00

Spring has sprung, maybe, here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere. The signs are everywhere, to include the roller-coaster ride of temperature changes.   The Colonel hasn't put away his jacket just yet, even though most days he finds himself working in short sleeves by mid-day.

And, there is plenty to keep the Colonel busy this time of year. The next five months are critical to the well-being of all--flora, fauna, and folks alike--here aboard Eegeebeegee. There are trees to plant; fields to mow, spray, and disc; and the garden plot to prepare for 'maters, 'taters, squash, peppers, peas, and okra.

A quarter acre plot back in the bottom below the Big House has been limed and disced and will be planted in sweet corn and pole beans in another week or so. The Colonel is going to try to go a bit native this year and plant non-hybrid sweet corn. He's ordered Golden Bantam corn seed and hopes to save enough seed to remain self-sufficient in future years. When the corn is up half a foot or so, the Colonel plans to plant Kentucky Blue pole beans next to each stalk. The theory is that the corn and beans will enjoy a symbiotic relationship. The corn will give the pole beans support and the beans will fix nitrogen for the corn.

The Colonel realizes that the Mississippi State and LSU products among the dozen (readership is increasing near-exponentially) of you who regularly waste rod and cone time perusing posts hereon may have difficulty understanding some of the words in the last two sentences of the preceding paragraph. The Colonel will break it down Barney-style for you:

Symbiotic: supporting and being supported by (Example: The University of Alabama football team and the SEC officials at every Ole Miss--Alabama football game.)

Nitrogen:  chemical element common on the planet essential for growth (LSU grads should not confuse with the term "not your gin").

Pole: stick

Perhaps the greatest excitement here at the capital of the Tallahatchee Free State this spring is the potential for the significant increase in the size of the Colonel's Hen Herd. One of the hens has gone broody. She's been setting on a clutch of a dozen eggs for over a week. Despite the fact that at the ROI cost of $5 per egg leaving a dozen uncollected is a great sacrifice; and without counting the Colonel's hens' chicks before they hatch (Hey, that would make for a sage saying, wouldn't it?), the sacrifice might actually be worth it--if it means growing the herd.

With the Colonel's luck, the hatch will be all roosters.

Hat in the Ring

2011-04-01T09:46:00.001-05:00

Noting a glaring lack of principled commitment and fiscal common sense required to lead this nation back to greatness, the Colonel is hereby announcing the establishment of an exploratory committee to determine the feasibility of a run for the Presidency of the United States.

Should be a rather short process.

In the meantime, the Colonel's platform is provided below:

1. American Exceptionalism will be the overarching principle of our administration. Every decision, every program, every expenditure of blood and treasure will be evaluated in the light of whether it will make our nation, not a political party, stronger. Programs found to be dilatory to that end, from the individual citizen up, will be eliminated.

2. A balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, requiring that, except in the case of an official declaration of a state of war by the Congress, the Federal government's budget not exceed 18% of GDP, will be our administration's foremost legislative priority. No other programs or expenditures will be proposed by our administration until a balanced budget amendment is ratified.  All acts of congress passed prior to passage of a balanced budget amendment act will be vetoed.

3. All departments of the Federal government will be operated as "profit centers." Any department found not to have a positive return on investment of the taxpayers' treasure, as determined by an independent accounting firm, at the end of 18 months from our administration's inauguration, will be eliminated.

4. In order for the Department of Defense (name to be restored to the original "War Department") to accomplish the foregoing requirement, and to eliminate the issue of illegal immigration from within the hemisphere, the reinstatement of Manifest Destiny and the forceful annexation of the remainder of the Western Hemisphere will be pursued as the foremost foreign policy initiative of our administration.  Voluntary entrants into the union, prior to the initiation of hostilities, will not be required to pay tribute.

5. All moratoriums on drilling for petroleum and natural gas will be lifted immediately.

6. All military forces permanently stationed outside of the Western Hemisphere will be returned to the territory of the United States within 36 months of the inauguration of our administration.   Our strategic nuclear forces will suffice for deterrence of enemies outside of the Western Hemisphere. Countries desiring protection by the United States will pay tribute.

7. Upon ratification of a balanced budget amendment, our administration will propose, and support passage and ratification of a Federal office-holder term limits and equitable compensation/benefits amendment to the Constitution. Until ratification of said amendment, all acts of Congress regarding congressional compensation will be vetoed.

8. In order to spur competition for greatness among the States, the Federal Social Security Administration will be phased out over the four years of our administration and the requirement for retirement savings and relief returned to the American citizens and the states to which they belong.

9.  In order to spur competition for greatness among the States, our administration will, upon congressional passage of a balanced budget amendment, propose an amendment to repeal the 16th Amendment. Pending such action, the Internal Revenue Service will be eliminated. The States will assume responsibility for tax collection. As price of continued membership in our great union, the States will remit to the Federal government funds equal to ten percent of the tax revenues raised by each State.

10. In order to spur competition for greatness among the states, the Medicare and Medicaid programs will be phased out over the four years of our administration and the responsibility for such services returned to the States.

10. Any State which desires to leave the union may do so on its own initiative, but will forfeit any and all protections provided by the union. Readmission to the union will require tribute.

11. Upon passage and accomplishment of all of the above, our administration will, by a final Executive Order, reduce the number of federal holidays to three: Independence Day, Memorial Day, and...

April Fools Day.

Head 'em up, Move 'em out!

2011-03-28T13:56:00.001-05:00

Four years ago this week, the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda and the Colonel engaged in an activity that they had done so often that they could do it in their sleep.

They packed up all of their worldly belongings and moved.
But this time was different. This time was the last time.

For the thirty-one years of wedded bliss that preceded that last move, the Colonel and his bride had packed, moved, and unpacked household goods and family every 1.75 years, on average. There were several duty stations at which they unpacked, packed, and from which they moved, all within less than a year's time.  Such a nomadic lifestyle lends itself to the adoption of, by virtue of sad experience, a set of unwritten (heretofore) rules:

Rule #1: Purchase no furniture that cannot withstand the rigors of at least five cross-country moves in its lifetime.

Rule #2: Take up no hobby the fruits of which are inherently fragile; i.e., model building, figurine collecting, etc...; unless of course you intend to take up a follow-on hobby of fragile model and figurine repair...

Rule #3: Any box unopened after a third move obviously contains unnecessary items and shall be deposited forthwith on the curb.

Rule #4: Make no friends with whom you do not care to continue a long-distance relationship.

Rule #5: Take inventory of all household pets, to include the neighbors', before allowing the movers to close and lock the doors to the moving van.

Rule #6: Take inventory of all children, to include the neighbors', before allowing the movers to close and lock the doors to the moving van.

Rule #7: Carry a hammer, screwdrivers, adjustable wrench, a bottle of industrial strength air freshener, and a week's supply of tissues in your car to the next duty station. The tools will allow for quick complete disassembly of broken and unsalvageable furniture so as to make carriage to the curb less onerous; the industrial strength air freshener will ward off odors generated by off-gassing of long-deceased un-inventoried pets and child-packed half-eaten food items; and the tissues will help dry the eyes of the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda when the Colonel informs her that he is expected to report to duty immediately and may not be home for a week.

There are one hundred and twenty-seven more rules, but the Colonel is detecting a whiff of frantic boredom among the five of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon and have persevered in reading thus far in the vain hope that there might actually eventually appear posted hereon something of interest or current events relevance. And, as always, the Colonel is happy to disappoint.

So, this Friday is the fourth anniversary of the Colonel's and the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda's arrival at their last duty station here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere.   The day shall be marked with fireworks, feasting, and patriotic speech-making.

Well, ...maybe the Colonel will step out on the back porch, discharge his muzzle-loader at nothing in particular, take a bite of a day-old sausage biscuit, and off-gas a bit his own self.

"...to the Shores of Tripoli."

2011-03-24T10:59:00.001-05:00

The current U.S. military action in Libya is but the latest in a long history of American use of force against renegades in that North African region. Any review of that history requires setting the dial on the "Way Back" machine to at least 1778.

By the end of the 18th Century, piracy by autonomous North African city states belonging to the vast and crumbling Ottoman Empire had evolved to such an organized and lucrative commercial enterprise that, by comparison, the current Somali scourge looks like 12 year-old bullies knocking over corner lemonade stands. The bashas of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers commanded vast fleets of fast, lightly armed sailing craft which carried boarding parties composed of men who, in the words of a Tripolitan ambassador in negotiations with U. S. envoy Thomas Jefferson in 1785, believed that,

" ...the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once."

The 1778 Treaty of Alliance between France and the American colonies in rebellion against the British Crown had placed American commercial shipping under the protection of the French Navy and French agreements with what were then known as the Barbary Coast Pirates. The end of the war in 1783 caused this treaty to lapse and American shipping began to fall prey once again to Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean. The cost to America was staggering. In 1795, for example, the United States paid the exorbitant ransom of one million dollars to the king of Algeria for the release of 116 American sailors. To put what seems a paltry amount in perspective, in a day when our national debt increases more than one million dollars a minute, the total U.S. federal budget in 1795 was little more than six million dollars.

With continuing protection payments to the Barbary Coast States approaching 20% of the Federal budget by 1800, it began to dawn on congressional leaders that it would be cheaper to build a navy to defend American shipping. Jefferson had long argued that the United States should refuse to pay the Barbary tribute and by the time he assumed the Presidency in 1801, several fine frigates were available for naval patrol in the Mediterranean. One of Jefferson's first command decisions was to refuse further tribute payments. The king of Tripoli subsequently declared war on the United States and Jefferson dispatched a naval squadron to the Mediterranean, thus beginning a U.S. Naval presence in that strategic sea that continues to this day (and one in which the Colonel participated during his career as a ruggedly handsome soldier of the sea).

Jefferson did not act out of disregard for the limits placed on his use of military force by the U.S. Constitution. In fact, he asked the Congress for, and received specific authorization to conduct naval operations against the Tripoli pirates to protect American commercial shipping. Congress recognized that a state of war existed between the United States and Tripoli and, although never formally declaring war on Tripoli, gave Jefferson express permission to seize and/or destroy Tripolitan shipping.

The resurgent U.S. Navy quickly dominated the Tripolitan pirates at sea, but the king of Tripoli remained defiant. For the LSU, Alabama, and Mississippi State grads among the five of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon and among the half-dozen other net-surfing passers-by to this rant who are having a hard time following due to the lack of pictures, that was the early 19th Century analogy to today's situation with Libya.

Enter political intrigue and a handful of U.S. Marines.

It was decided that regime change in Tripoli was in order. The king of Tripoli's brother volunteered to make Tripoli more friendly to American interests if the United States would just do him the small favor of deposing his brother for him. U.S. Marine First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon and eight enlisted Marines at the head of a 500-man Greek, Berber, and Arab mercenary band marched over-desert from Alexandria, Egypt and captured the Tripolitan city of Derna; raising the flag of the United States in victory for the first time on foreign soil.

The king of Tripoli rather quickly thereafter conceded to U.S. demands to cease piracy of American shipping, and we told his little brother to take a hike. But, in return, America agreed to continue paying a much reduced tribute. Call it, in today's terms, Foreign Aid.

As the five of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon, and are not intellectually hamstrung by mis-education at LSU, Alabama, or Mississippi State, can well imagine, the continued payment of tribute demonstrated weakness and only served to encourage more piracy. The United States, after escaping a near-miss in the rematch with Great Britain, had to go to war again against the Barbary Coast in 1815.

Accommodations with recalcitrant rulers have a way of coming back to bite you.

Domino Dummy

2011-03-16T08:57:00.001-05:00

The old men in his church are teaching the Colonel to play dominoes. As a game, it is deceptive in its simplicity, dominoes. The problem is it causes the Colonel to use mathematics, which is only slightly less traumatic and challenging than telling him he has to speak only in iambic pentameter.

And, no, the Colonel doesn't know what iambic pentameter means. He just likes the way the words sound together.

(And, no, the Colonel has no idea how many layers of meaning are in the last sentence.)

Twenty-eight tiles divided evenly between four players. That would be...let's see...um...okay, carry the two...seven tiles a player.

Two teams, each player laying a tile in turn, tiles laid to match ends, score by multiples of five off the exposed ends.  Keep the other team from making big scores. Help your partner score. How hard can this be?

Pretty stinkin' hard, judging by the harsh language directed the Colonel's way when he plays the wrong tile. The only time the Colonel has heard any of the old men use harsh language has been when he's playing dominoes.   Well, then, and when they are arguing over whose turn it is to be the Colonel's partner.

This might be hard for the Colonel to take, if his ego wasn't already diminished to infinitesimal proportions by nearly thirty-five years of marriage to the wisest woman on the planet.

There is a further complication that exponentially increases the degree of difficulty for the Colonel. He is, as the five of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone perusing posts hereon will readily attest, an insufferable know-it-all and loquacious curmudgeon. Turns out that the combination of pontification and multiplication are a neuron bridge too far for the Colonel.

"Hey, Jarhead, you gonna play or bang your gums? The women's gossip table is over in the other corner."

The respect and acceptance the Colonel enjoys at his new (and last) duty station is truly remarkable.   Were it not for the respect and acceptance constantly displayed by the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda, the Colonel might suffer significant emotional distress.

"Hey, knuckle-head, this is the women's gossip table. The old men are over there in the other corner."

Ornery in the Court

2011-03-08T09:53:00.000-06:00

The Colonel achieved a significant milestone in his life this week. He has finally resided somewhere long enough to be called for civilian jury duty. The Colonel's wandering ways heretofore made bedouins look downright sedentary, and, as a result, his only experience with jury selection and court procedings had been with courts martial.

After his first brush with law as practiced in the local county court, the Colonel has a whole new appreciation for the expediency, thoroughness, and discipline of law and justice according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

But, perhaps the greatest surprise the Colonel experienced during jury selection was the lack of respect which many demonstrate for the Court.

Case in point: The Colonel didn't wear a coat and tie, (and has never been an example of civilian sartorial splendor) but he did wear his best button-down shirt, pressed trousers (men wear trousers, women wear slacks), belt without his name on it, and a pair of shoes not last worn to clean out the chicken herd house.
However, the same care in clothing selection can not be said to have been followed by some who responded to the circuit court jury duty summons.

The Colonel was a bit aggravated in partcular at the one man who he'd seen park his beamer on the square a few spots down from where the Colonel parked his rusty red pick-up, Semper Fillit.  This gentleman (and the Colonel uses that term rather loosely in this case) was obviously a man of means, but was not-so-nattily attired in a grubby pair of jeans and a t-shirt. His boots were not even brushed off, let alone spit-shined.

No big deal, you say. Wait, it gets better.

During jury selection, the counsel for the plaintif asked if any one in the jury pool was a lawyer. Several hands went up. (Turns out this town has a lot of lawyers, the vast majority of whom are doing something other than practicing law). One of the prospective jurors who raised a hand, was the beamer driver with the dirty boots. The man was himself a lawyer, and was in a court of law, dressed like a field hand in town to pick up a load of hog slop.

Still not scandalized? Wait, it gets much better.

The counsels for the defense and plaintif all seemed to recognize the beamer-drivin', hog-sloppin'-dressed lawyer. "Please tell the Court what your law practice is," the scoff-court was asked with a wink and a grin.

"Your honor,..."

Wait for it...

"...I teach criminal law at the Ole Miss Law School."

That's right, sportsfans, the man who demonstrated the least respect for the Court, by his slovenly appearance, of any one else in the jury pool, is a law professor.

It was all the Colonel could do to keep from dragging the professor outside and delivering his own professorial lesson on honor and respect.

Even more disappointing was the fact that the Colonel, he of not-so-keen mind but very keen respect for law and justice, was not selected to sit on the jury. It was almost more than his ego could take.

When he got out to the parking lot, the Colonel fingered a load of Mississippi gravel road greasy, wet grime off of the front fender of Semper Fillit and flicked it over on the beamer's windshield. The world, the Colonel's at least, tilted back onto it's proper axis.

Sheen, Shine, Shinola

2011-03-03T08:59:00.000-06:00

To the great of astonishment of no one more than the Colonel, he finds that he has much in common with Charlie Sheen.

Like Sheen, the Colonel, it may surprise the five of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon to hear, also has wild animal markers in the helixes of his DNA. Well, maybe not a wild animal.

Okay, maybe not an animal.

It is patently obvious to even the most casual observer that the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda believes the Colonel has insect DNA. Nearly every day since the Colonel re-retired and graced his best friend with his constant presence, the comely and kind-heart Miss Brenda throws her hands up and requests that the Colonel "go somewhere and quit bugging me!"

Like Chargin' Charlie, the Colonel has the blood of a mythological god coursing through his only slightly plaque-encrusted arteries. Prepare to have your knowledge of mythology expanded. The five of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon have probably never heard of Snorz, the god of Eyelid Light Leak Checks and Supine Strategic Planning Sessions.

Snorz blood races through the Colonel's veins at the speed of sludge through a San Francisco sewer pipe.

The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda regularly uses a W word closely associated with "winning" to describe the Colonel's situational attitude.

Look for yourself, there's only an extra h and one less n in whining.

American Hero v. African Zero

2011-02-23T09:54:00.000-06:00

More than forty years ago a real American hero faced off against a punk young aspiring dictator at the gates of a United States Air Force base in the North African desert. The punk came very close to dying at the hands of the United States Air Force for the first, but not the last, time in his worthless life.

In August of 1969, then Colonel Daniel "Chappie" James, Jr., USAF; Tuskegee airman and Korean and Vietnam veteran; was assigned as Commander of Wheelus Air Force Base in Libya. Less than a month into James' tenure at Wheelus, a small group of junior military officers led by a 27 year-old army captain named Muammar Gaddafi staged a coup d'état against Libya's King Idris. Gaddafi wasted no time consolidating his power and soon turned his eyes on the American military presence in Libya.

On October 18, 1969, Gaddafi rode with a column of armored vehicles to the main gate of Wheelus Air Force Base and ordered them to drive through the base in a show of force.  Instead of leading the column onto the base, the coward Gaddafi dismounted outside the gate and waited for their return.

Colonel James, alerted to the intrusion, strapped on a sidearm and raced to the gate. In a scene straight out of the western movies of the era, Chappie and Gaddafi faced off in the dusty road. Gaddafi's hand rested on the butt of the pistol at his side. James ordered Gaddafi, "Move your hand away from that gun." The punk blinked and complied.

Colonel James was later quoted as saying that if Gaddafi had tried to pull his gun, "it would never have cleared the holster."

Chappie James' outstanding service to his nation culminated at the rank of General. He died on February 25, 1978, only a month after his retirement from the Air Force.

Noted for his stirring speeches on Americanism and patriotism, there have been few men with as much zeal for this great nation before or since Chappie James.  Excerpts of his speeches have been read into the Congressional Record.  James was awarded the George Washington Freedom Foundation Medal in 1967 and again in 1968. He received the Arnold Air Society Eugene M. Zuckert Award in 1970 for outstanding contributions to Air Force professionalism, citing his service to the nation as a "... fighter pilot with a magnificent record, public speaker, and eloquent spokesman for the American Dream..."

The punk Gaddafi wants to die a martyr. The Colonel rather hopes he lives a long, long life ...rotting away somewhere in exile.

Manure Manipulation

2011-02-22T09:31:00.000-06:00

The Surgeon General of the Tallahatchie Free State has determined that harvesting manure in a high wind is hazardous to one's self esteem.

The Confederate Concrete that passes for soil here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere is conducive only for the growing of loblolly pine trees and kudzu.   The Colonel is convinced that when human-kind gets around to terra-forming Mars, loblolly pines and kudzu will probably be the only thing that will grow there initially. Scrape the scraggly weeds off the ground around here and in the right light you would think you were looking at the red-tinted barren landscape pictures beamed back Earthside from Spirit and Opportunity.

For the LSU grads who might stumble upon this blog while searching for uglier clothing to wear to a football game, allow the Colonel to explain that last sentence with a minimum of polysyllabic words.

We launched a rocket. It had a little rover on it. No, not a dog. A robot. The rover's name was Spirit. It landed on Mars.  It took pictures. It sent those pictures back to Earth. Mars is red, not purple and yellow.

That's right folks, LSU fans are indeed from another planet, but not Mars.

As he was saying, before he digressed and wasted even more of the valuable rod and cone time of the five of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon, the Colonel, if he intends to grow anything other than loblolly pines and kudzu in the Confederate Concrete that passes for soil here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere, must amend the Confederate Concrete that passes for soil with extra organic material.

The Colonel's compost bins serve the soil amendment need, but require amendment themselves. The Colonel thought that table scraps would suffice. He was wrong. Between children and chickens, nary a scrap escapes ingestion.

Fortunately, eggs aren't the only thing that proceedeth from the nether region of a Rock Island Red. Prodigious amounts of fertilizer proceedeth as well. Still, until the Colonel can grow his chicken herd appreciably, the amount of fertilizer that proceedeth, exceedeth not, yea, even approacheth not, the compost pile amendment requirements to turn leafy matter into compost with which to amend the Confederate Concrete that passes for soil here at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere.

A neighbor has a cow flock. One cow will process considerably more fertilizer than a whole herd of chickens. So, with long-handled shovel in hand, and his rusty red pick-up truck--Semper Fillit--strapped to his backside, the Colonel proceeded to pasture yesterday morning, before the rain started.

From previous experience, the Colonel has discovered the indisputable scientific principle that cow manure is infinitely more scoopable before a rain, than after one. Unfortunately, the Colonel's previous manure harvesting experience was limited to the issue of moisture content.  He had no experience with regard to climatic conditions involving high rates of regional atmosphere exchange.

Blissfully happy in the knowledge that he had timed his manure harvest at a time at which cow patty moisture content was low, the Colonel began to rapidly scoop and sling manure into Semper Fillit's beckoning bed.   The term "ignorance is bliss" describes a time-constrained concept. Bliss is not the word with which the Colonel would describe the effects of ignoring wind direction when shoveling and slinging dried cow manure.

Unless bliss means covered in powdered cow manure.

If so, the picture in the margin alongside the dictionary definition of the word bliss is of the Colonel standing with shovel in hand, looking around to see if anyone other than Bessy just saw the you-know-what hit the fan.

Hezekiah's Revival

2011-02-20T21:37:00.000-06:00

The Colonel has been praying, more and more fervently of late, for spiritual revival; in his nation, in his church, and in his own heart.  Bible study in 2nd Kings this Sunday morning was on topic and on target.

In the 18th Chapter of 2nd Kings, the writer introduces us to Hezekiah, king of the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and in verse 3 tells us that "he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as...David had done." Because the vast majority of the Hebrew kings that followed David and preceded Hezekiah turned farther and farther away from God, it seems that Hezekiah must have experienced a personal revival that allowed him to lead a national revival.

We can learn three things about revival from Hezekiah's experience as king.

First, revival requires us to challenge old "religious" practices.  In Verse 4, the writer says simply that in addition to tearing down all of the idols of other religions that had proliferated throughout Judah and pulled the people away from the commandments of God, Hezekiah "broke into pieces the bronze snake that Moses had made."

When the Hebrew people wandering in the wilderness had been beset by deadly poisonous snakes, God had instructed Moses to lift up a bronze snake on a pole so that the people bitten by a snake might look upon it and be saved. The Hebrew people had kept the bronze serpent icon for generations and had begun to incorporate it in religious ceremonies, burning incense to it like any of the other idols representing other gods. They had fallen into the habit of a "religious" practice that incorporated a cherished icon, but in their tradition-following had lost sight of God, faith in Whom was their salvation, not the icon. God had not intended them to worship the bronze serpent. He had intended for them to exercise faith, instead of attempting to remedy the snake bite by their own actions. Hezekiah saw that this traditional religious practice was no longer about faith. We all have traditional religious practices that allow us to put a "check in the box" and which shortstop our worship and communion with God.

Second, revival allows us to conquer old adversaries. Verses 7 and 8 tell us that, "...the Lord was with [Hezekiah]; he was successful in whatever he undertook," and that he "...defeated the Philistines as far as Gaza..."   From the time the Hebrew people entered Canaan, the Philistines, whose territory stretched along the Mediterranean coast, were a mortal enemy. After the passing of Solomon, whose father David had slain the great Philistine warrior, Goliath, the Philistines had begun to retake lost territory and to make bolder and bolder incursions into Israel and Judah. Like sin in our lives, the Philistines crowded in on the Israelites and their oppression grew greater and greater. Hezekiah's Revival turned that tide. Spiritual revival reconnects us with the unconquerable power of God, and His power alone gives victory over the old adversaries--sin--in our lives.

Third, revival awakens Satan; but God is greater.  While Hezekiah was leading Judah in revival, the corrupt and ungodly king of the northern kingdom of Israel continued to lead his people further and further away from God's commandments.  The ascendant Assyrian Empire to the northeast overran Israel and carried away the vast majority of the people to exile in the far eastern territories of Assyria. When the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, advanced on Judah and demanded the surrender of Jerusalem, Hezekiah consulted God's prophet, Isaiah. Through Isaiah, God promised Hezekiah that if he would refuse Sennacherib and lean on God instead, then the Assyrian threat against Judah would evaporate.

Understand Hezekiah's strategic military position: The Assyrian Empire was the dominant military force in the region at the time, employing technologically advanced armament and highly evolved tactics and operational art. Judah was no match for Assyria. Sennacherib held every advantage, but one. Verse 6 tells us that Hezekiah "...held fast to the Lord." The Assyrian threat to Jerusalem ended just as God through Isaiah had foretold--Sennacherib returned to his capitol after a signifcant portion of his army was destroyed by what God's word tells us was "the angel of the Lord" (2 Kings 19:35) and was assassinated by a couple of his subordinates.

When we fix our eyes on God's will in our lives and recommit to His leadership, our faith can be tested by what seems insurmountable odds. When Hezekiah was faced with the, to-this-point undefeated, Assyrian war machine and turned to God for help, Isaiah prophesied that "By your messengers you have heaped insults on the Lord.." (2 Kings 19:23). Sennacherib's messengers had relayed a scornful threat, declaring that Judah's God was no greater than all of the gods of all of the other nations that had fallen quickly to the Assyria sword. God was insulted.

Don't know about you, but when his God is insulted, the Colonel gets well out of the line of fire.

First Battalion, Third Marines -- 14 Feb 1997 to 14 August 1998

2011-02-14T09:14:00.001-06:00

Fourteen years ago today, the United States Marine Corps made yet another in a decades-long continuous string of bad assessments of the Colonel's ability and potential and gave him command of an infantry battalion. In front of a thousand Marines and a somewhat lesser number of family, friends, and dignitaries, the Colonel and his predecessor enacted a time-honored ceremony marking the change of command and speechified regarding the occasion.

The Colonel gave one of the most remarkable speeches of its kind ever heard anywhere on the planet, before or since. With soaring rhetoric, sprinkled with humor and emotion, he touched on timeless themes of thanks and expectations. It was inspiring.

The Marines in the ranks heard: "Blah, bablah, bablah, blah, blah, blah."

The Marines in the ranks were thinking: "Here we go, again."

These Marines had just recently returned from a six-month deployment to Okinawa, Japan. Nearly a quarter of them would be leaving active duty within the next few weeks. They were the lucky ones.

Life in a Marine infantry battalion, even in peace-time, is an incredible grind in which a training schedule chock full of ever-increasing physical and mental challenges prepares the Marines and their leaders for a deployment date that looms on the calendar like the date of execution in a death sentence. Commanders in charge of the training schedule talk in terms of "crawl, walk, run." For the Marines, it's a daily sprint.

Most officers take the task of preparing their Marines for the upcoming deployment and the grim possibility of combat with the utmost seriousness, leading and challenging their subordinates to reach levels of physical and moral courage beyond the imagination of mere mortal citizens.

Some officers view their time in command as a golden opportunity to make a name for themselves and boost the upward trajectory of their careers.   A few of these do a good job of masking their intentions. Many over-play their hands and expose themselves as self-serving.

Then, there are the few who cannot believe their incredible good fortune, given their obvious lack of ability and self-determination that they have achieved their terminal rank. These recognize the enormous reservoir of talent on which they have been placed afloat and realize that any success they achieve in command will only come from below.

The Colonel believes he was one of the latter.

The Colonel's good fortune was to be placed in command of a battalion of officers and men whose professionalism and great ability required that he only recognize the fact and act accordingly. No idea or talent of the Colonel's was greater than the thoughts and abilities of the Marines over whom he had been placed in command.

When one sees magnificence in his organization, he is best served to not to overshadow their brilliance.

Over the years of his career, the Colonel had the good fortune to work for many great commanders who tried to teach him how to seize the reins of an organization and crack the whip. Unfortunately, whip-cracking never was a talent the Colonel mastered.

The Colonel is convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt in his minuscule military mind that the only reason he refers to himself today as the Colonel and not the Lieutenant is due to the fact that there were corporals and sergeants and lieutenants and captains in his various commands who were much better than he.

It's days like today, whose dates have seminal significance in the mushy amalgam of under-used cells lying fallow in the recesses of his brain-housing group, that the Colonel misses his Marines.

Even if they were happy to finally see him go at the change of command ceremony marking the end of the Colonel's tenure.

Semper Fidelis, Marines!