This week Shelley and I departed for the Midwest to visit children and grandchildren and attend an annual reunion with the 1st Infantry Division officers I served with in war and peace. I write about many of them in Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War. I have known many very Read more…
That we have a crisis in fatherhood in American is as plain as the next crime committed by a young male, of any race, in any place, and without regard to the appalling nature of the crime. In almost every case I know of, when a young male subject perpetrates a Read more…
In the fall of 1968, I was considering where to go to college the following September. I was ambivalent and not a strong student. To be sure dyslexia and lousy study habits did nothing to improve my grades. I thought about different colleges. I would pore over the college guides in our school library Read more…
Some years ago, when preparing for battalion command, I joined others attending a pre-command course to brush up on Army operations, planning, training, and personnel matters. There is much on the plate of a battalion commander. For the most part, those selected for command are strong leaders with a solid record of Read more…
In 1992, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) penned an article in The American Spectator titled “Defining Deviancy Down: How We’ve Become Accustomed to Alarming Levels of Crime and Destructive Behavior”. In it, Moynihan addressed the permissive decline of society in the 1990s. If he was alive today, he would wonder if the country had fallen Read more…
It’s so easy to complain about the government these days. Particularly the Federal government that has grown in power and reach for the last 100 years. Our Founding Fathers would be horrified by the aggregation of power from the states to the federal authorities. While they saw a need for a federal system Read more…
It’s easy to grow weary of politics, despite the fact that for 16 years as an elected member of the Virginia General Assembly I was clutched by its talons. It wasn’t as if I was unwilling prey. But it was a tight grip that held me. In 2017, the grasp was loosened, and Read more…
The French revolutionaries of the 18th century were so committed to overthrowing their monarchy that they went so far as to scrub from existence the very calendar of the year. Their goal was quite radical; revising the number and length of weeks in a month and even the number of minutes Read more…
Thirty-two years ago today, the US and its Gulf War coalition were enjoying our first day of ceasefire after vanquishing the Iraqi Army. It was a remarkable accomplishment that was the result of building the most capable military the world had ever seen. Certainly, the building of that coalition by Read more…
On 23 February 1991, we were all very focused and ready to “get on with it.” For the previous 7 days we had conducted destructive artillery raids on the Iraqi 26th Infantry Division that sat in front of us blocking our way into Iraq. They would not obstruct us much longer. That day Read more…