A Trip to the Midwest
Well, next week we’re off to the Midwest plains of America. I love them. My very first trip to the land of the “big sky”—to Fort Sill, Oklahoma—was in the summer of 1973. I had just finished airborne school and was off to the Officers’ Basic Course (OBC) where I would learn tactical and technical artillery gunnery, how to be a forward observer, and other fundamentals required of a competent Redleg, the nickname of artillerymen.
Shelley and I have made other trips there. I returned to Fort Sill in 1978 for the Officers Advanced Course (AOC). And in 1988, we and our three children ventured west to Fort Riley, Kansas, where I would be assigned to the storied 1st Infantry Division, the “Big Red One.” I recall to this day—and did so in my book Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War—my initial impressions rolling west on I-70 as we approached the Flint Hills of Kansas.
“For a Virginian, the panorama of the resplendent Blue Ridge Mountains or the vast and placid waters of a calm day on the Chesapeake Bay count as two of the most beautiful sights God created. But on a sunny winter day in January 1989, this US Army major first beheld the endless plains of Kansas, another masterpiece of His hands. Their expanse seemed to go on forever, inviting my eye to survey the enormous blue sky above and ahead. Even when the horizon was broken by the Flint Hills east of Fort Riley, home of the 1st Infantry Division (1ID) situated between the towns of Manhattan and Junction City, you could not avoid marveling at the vastness of “The Sunflower State.” It was simply big. I suppose it was fitting that the division I was joining as a field artillery (FA) officer was known as “The Big Red One” (BRO).”
That description has stood the test of time during the several trips west for reunions with my fellow BRO combat colleagues and to visit our daughter’s family in Kansas City for the last several years. When the “Big Sky” rises up before you as you roll westward, it simply embraces you, as if it knows you are part of it, one of its own, a lover of freedom, and absorbed in the vastness of what it is to be an American.
We will head there again next week. My heart longs for the “Big Sky,” to say nothing of seeing my grandchildren.
So why this trip? I will be inducted into the Field Artillery Hall of Fame on 4 November. Never mind 10,000 other Redlegs who deserve the honor more than I, but I’m grateful for the recognition. The honor aside, the trip allows me to engage in research for another book I have in mind. But my love of the “Big Sky” alone justifies the trip.
Things I’m Thinking About
I suspect like you—at least I hope so—I’ve been repulsed by the campus bigots who are protesting across the nation in favor of Hamas. You know, the terror savages who on 7 October murdered Israeli men, women, and children, burning babies, slitting throats, beheading victims of all ages, cutting off breasts, gouging out eyes, and desecrating their victims beyond anything conceivable. What should be our response to campus idiots? They should be required to tour the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC and, if they don’t, be disenrolled from college. They are a dangerous kind of stupid.
And now we have a new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (R-LA). He seems like a very good man. Of note, when the man who led the former Speaker’s ousting, Matt Gaetz, voted for Johnson, no one reacted. When the former Speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), voted for Johnson, he received a standing ovation. Tells you all you need to know about how Gaetz is perceived by his colleagues.
Beyond the political war in Washington, there’s a regional one brewing in the Middle East. It will be much different from the ones between Israel and its neighbors in 1948, 1967, 1973, 1978, 1982, and 2006. It has every potential to involve the US. I think about that a lot.
Get Yanks and Understand
Considering a new war in the Middle East, there’s no better time to read my newest book Yanks in Blue Berets, American UN Peacekeeper in the Middle East where, among many things and stories, I discuss the “intolerance of ambiguity” when people try to understand the Middle East in very simple terms. Nothing is simple. The conflict there is like a highly dysfunctional family profoundly filled with generational and multilayered disagreement that defies resolution.
Take a read. I’ll take some books with me to autograph and send one to you.
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