commentary

the cradle of uncivil-ization

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Opening this week’s edition of TIME magazine (June 26, 2017), my eye caught a pictorial article on the environmental battle that was waged last year in Iraq when ISIS set fire to oil fields to hinder the advance of the Iraqi and coalition force pushing them out from the territory they terrorized for years.

Joint Forces Battle To Retake Iraqi City Of Mosul From ISISIt is quite instructive that the world has become well-versed in the environmental  and human toll of oil spills and fires.  In that region, decades of poisoned water, poisoned wildlife,  and landscapes as a result of months of exposure to deliberate acts of evil men,   toxic fumes, oil -laden smoke and chemicals have been largely overlooked by the European and American “globalists”.   Twenty-five years ago,  while one American political party blamed another party,  the apolitical Government bureaucracy was ignoring the toll on forces of the first Gulf War;  I remember the “Gulf War Syndrome”  where U.S. veterans had to fight through the courts to obtain needed care and Government acknowledgement of responsibility for their ailments.

qayarrah_iraq_joey_l_photographer_11_resizingThe TIME article and other sources make the point that the Iraqi firefighting forces – petroleum engineers specialized in fighting these – have been doing so for years.   With ongoing battles against terrorists’  IEDs, bullets at the same time as fires hot enough to incinerate men and equipment,  Iraqi forces extinguished the fires the terrorists set along their retreat.   The Iraqi people who lived through a “scorched -earth” mandate from Saddam Hussein to his forces in 1991, are the same people who suffered again from an extremist army who once again set fires, IEDs, and booby-traps;  from the oil fires damage caused in the aftermath of the Gulf War,  those exposed suffer from cancer, skin diseases, birth defects,  mental issues and myriad other life-shortening illness.  And that terrorists set their world ablaze again, the effects will continue to plague people.   It is no wonder that the poor have risked dying in the attempt to flee to other countries.

While we wonder whether carbon dioxide in the air over the U.S. is a harmful pollutant,  perhaps the same “climate change” advocates can travel to Iraq to advise them that ending America’s reliance on hydrocarbons will end their suffering.

Further reading:

Tools and their uses

Eric Saretsky1 Comment

5 For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6 and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7 and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. 8 For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. -2 Peter 1: 5 -8 (NIV)

 

Academy to so educate train and develop midshipmen 1 That they may have a fine sense of honor,  a wholehearted love for the best traditions of the service,  an enduring love for country,  subordination based on proper initiative of the subordinate,  an appreciation of the humanities,  and a keen sense of responsibility in assuming authority over others

– Report of the Board of Visitors to the United States Naval Academy, p 10, 1910

“What tools are in your toolbox?”. the speaker asked last night at our men’s church devotional service.   tools_and_their_uses_tm_9-243-10He went on to offer several additional scriptures on faith and perseverance, as tools.   As a former Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer,  I understood that  any young Sailor – or young (spiritually) disciple of Jesus,  life is embracing that you do not know what you do not know but then learning the doctrine, spending time with a mentor and persevering through conflicting desires and priorities.  Perhaps it is safe to say that “duty” is the first concept I embraced.   As a Sailor matures,  the life that each voluntarily accepted  on the NAVY’s terms has certain obligations and responsibilities.  So to as a student of Jesus,  voluntarily but without a ‘contract.   Some skills are beneficial as they will potentially save you or a shipmate in times of peril.  Mastering your calling and seeking to help others grow stronger – for a greater good – will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your naval career.

So too, with a spiritual compass.  The Master Mariner, Jesus, sets my course though I voluntarily follow.   But a path voluntarily chosen can build character, endurance, positive outlook and joy that the world desperately needs. (Happiness is a shallow, easily damaged emotion where joy is not.)   Where the military prepares a service member to prepare for war,  it is no less true with even a glimpse of a spiritual life,  war continally rages around us.  For us to rise and help others to rise out of violence,  hatred,  greed, fear, selfishness, loneliness, and misery,  requires faith in a gracious God and the proper tools – faith, perseverance, knowledge, self-discipline, good character, and whole-hearted love.    God’s Word  and the Navy I served for a quarter-century are tools for life.   FB_IMG_1491759647178

Courage at sea

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“Until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore, you will not know the terror of being forever lost at sea.”  -Ovid

As most of the world knows by now,  a horrible collision at sea occurred between a merchant freighter and a U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS FITZGERALD (DDG-62),  a couple days ago off the coast of Japan.  Three Sailors, the Commanding Officer and two others were injured and are in the Naval hospital in Yokosuka.  The ship was obviously extensively damaged above and below the waterline.

With the ship now safely in port, the Navy has announced that the remains of several of the seven men, previously unaccounted for, have been recovered from the flooded compartments.   It is a credit to the training and resolve of the crew that the ship and crew were able to control the flooding and that not more lives were lost.  At sea,  compartments below the waterline are maintained at modified-Zebra, where the hatches are closed between compartments and between decks, with the scuttles opened for crew movement.

In an emergency, announced over the 1MC system, they would announce “General Quarters” with perhaps only seconds to respond in this case.   I remember one emergency response in our berthing compartment when a sensor in Engineering erroneously detected a poisonous gas (freon) leak in the space below ours (the compartment was above the refrigeration system compartment).  From a dead sleep, all my shipmates and I evacuated in less than 2 minutes.  But in a collision and the resultant flooding might allow for less that half of that time to get out and secure that hatch.

Regardless of the questions as to events leading to this catastrophe, the loss or injury of a single Sailor is a blow to the community of Sailors.   I pray God’s comforting embrace for my brothers and sisters who continue to serve every day.   For the lost and injured at sea.  And for the surviving crew and families of the USS FITZGERALD.  Serving with HONOR, COURAGE, and COMMITMENT.

Civilians say the darndest things

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Men do not make conversation of the sort that women tend toward.  Outside of the walls of a Chiefs Mess, or among men in my church small group,  men do not normally express emotion.  And in those settings, it mainly has to do with frustration or some mis-steps in leadership situations that an  older or more experienced Navy leader (or church leader, given the situation) can provide counsel.    But in the normal daily venues that men gather, in a workplace, at a football game, or in a social setting, I have never heard men discuss emotionally about relationships, weight gain or loss, or the onset of  ‘life changes’.     Continue reading →

the Navy remains in good hands

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Commuting home on a Monday, I knew that the traffic on the second leg of my drive would be better if I stopped by the cigar lounge for a little while.  Watching basketball (Golden State won the championship!) this evening at my favorite den of man-dom, it was also a chance meeting for this old Senior Chief to swap sea-stories with a 9th-year Sailor currently on training orders to San Diego.

Though he is an Operations Specialist (OS) on the USS STENNIS now in Washington state, and I was an Cryptologic Technician,  any Sailor I know would relate to the conversation; it was observations, opinions and swagger that a solidly capable, mentoring-focused, take-no-b***t career Sailor and I enjoyed that evening.  Even though I haven’t set foot, in uniform, on a ship or installation in eight years,  the conversation about current events,  deployment, camaraderie, and the social and political changes the Navy has undergone, invigorated me.  There’s something about watching the NBA Finals with a bunch of guys – some veterans, some civilians, and like this fellow, currently serving, that made a Monday great hangout time.  dont-tread-300

heroes aren’t like in the movies, part 2

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File created with CoreGraphicsRest in Peace, Adam West

The heroes of my childhood were black and white.   Well, they were.  We did not get a color TV in my home until I was in 7th or 8th Grade.   As a child of the 1960s, I watched Batman and Robin, with Adam West and Burt Ward.  It was a campy good versus evil, solving the crisis that befell Gotham in thirty minutes or less Continue reading →

heroes aren’t like in the movies

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There are things that we remember from our youth ( or while I was still ‘under 30’) that should be left in those musty corners of our mental garage.  Just like the old cassette tape  I found during one ‘Spring Cleaning’ out there,  hearing the Split Endz again – or 38 Special  just doesn’t make me “feel” the same thirty years later.   Same thing tonight. A little casual dinner on the couch while watching the beginning of “Highlander” – the one with Sean Connery and Christopher Lambert.  (I recognized the villain, but I can’t remember his name.)   The effects are so rudimentary and the dialogue is rather lame – Sean Connery sounds a Scot but is supposed to be Spanish; however, Chris Lambert – he’s got one of those Kevin Costner-like non-accents due apparently to limited ability to speak English.

Even the swordplay and beheadings are cheesy.   I am trying to figure out why that movie spawned sequels and a television series.  Men in kilts?  Swords?  Perhaps it is the decades in the Navy that have colored my judgement.  I often let reality get in the way of plot on a lot of alien, superhero, or alien versus battleship dramas.   I should have read Mental Floss ‘s review here before I realized a few minutes in that watering the plants and picking up the dog poop was a better use of my time.

I offer a list of dropped must-have guy movies (or TV collections) of the last 30 years.    Some I don’t get why I liked them in the first place.  I don’t have either on DVD or nor recorded on the DVR:

  1. Top Gun (I still can watch Minority Report – for Max Von Sydow ) Cruise movies annoy me
  2. Die Hard (sequels)  ( the first was a classic, then they just kept coming)
  3. Highlander ( love Connery, but fast-forward 20 years to see how comic book-type movies are made WELL)
  4. Smokey and the Bandit ( Gleason’s last films, but such a dumb plot!)
  5. Battlestar Galactica (1978) (Lorne Greene still Cartwright for me !)
  6. Star Trek (only one of those movies I’ll watch again is Wrath of Khan with Monteban – I saw the original TV episode and loved the movie.)  However, the reboot movies with Chris Pine are great!
  7. Talledega Nights  ( now I wonder why I thought Ferrell was funny)
  8.  X-men after the first one.  I cannot keep up with the comic book plot jumps)
  9. Outlaw Josey Wales ( I prefer the Eastwood movies he’s made since 2000)
  10. Taken.  I liked Liam Neeson’s portrayals in Star Wars, the villain in Batman Begins, and Taken -even Love, Actually.  Then he just annoyed me with his Taken sequels   and his anti-gun off-screen preaching.

I think I need to watch Gladiator,  Lone Survivor,  and any of the movies that Sam Elliott was in. Testosterone, guts, courage and attitude.  What we need now more than ever are heroes: dads who want to raise their children responsibly,  people who recognize the effort and support the work of cops, volunteers to help our senior citizens  and young people who don’t want a hand out, or a “safe space”.

Pardon me while I gasp for air

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“For, with a ship’s gear, as well as a sailor’s wardrobe, fine weather must be improved to get ready for the bad to come.”
― Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor’s Life at Sea

Call me “somewhat concerned” with my deterioration during and after naval service.  Thirty years ago, I was prescribed steroids for some medical issues.  Twenty years ago, my appendix ruptured at the start of the Labor Day weekend holiday.  I was recuperating for a month.  I started to put on weight (happily-married weight) ten years ago.   And three  years ago, after getting too obsessed with cycling exercise, using clipless pedals  I fell and broke my wrist  in three places.  A year ago, I self-diagnosed that an annual or semi-annual trip to the ER  ( for ten years) was due to a food allergy to capsaicin.  Now that I have sworn off the spicy food or food containing bell peppers I ate for more than 30 years I am not poisoning myself.

This year I seem to have been crushed by flu and colds.  First year in three that I didn’t get a flu vaccine.   Congestion and nasal drip that chokes me at night will persist for a month, then off for a month or two and then come back just to be annoying.   With some of the crazy medical issues I’ve encountered over my life,  I don’t understand how I don’t have anemia like my late mother ( and low blood pressure)  Nor do I have high blood pressure or a  brain tumor like my late father (in his twenties).  Instead,  I find myself obsessed with breathing.

I always associated breathing problems with asthma, chain-smokers, or the people who live in horribly polluted environments.   I visited Samsun, Turkey one winter while in the Navy, and the coal smoke was literally down to waist-level height by the port . (And they were chain smokers as well.)    I only in the last couple years started smoking the occasional cigar figuring that after age 50,  would take twenty or thirty years to harm me. I probably now have only smoked a half dozen cigars in six months. In the next six months I will quit entirely.    I am very aware that my more sedentary life outside of the Navy renders me more susceptible to ills.   An article I read online tells me a healthier diet and exercise will counter the phlegm that is making breathing at night a chore.

Of course, I may have to cough up a lung or two exercising in my deteriorated state, to get healthier.

Whatever became of R. Lee Ermey ?

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Since 1987 when R. Lee Ermey portrayed the iconic Marine Corps Drill Instructor in Full Metal Jacket, he has been in numerous film and television roles.  And then Hollywood found itself in a situation that rivals the “non-person” erasure of critics of the Soviet system.  Like Charlton Heston before him, John Wayne and other icons who find themselves on the wrong side of revisionist history,  Ermey has no invitations to appear in anything produced in Hollywood.

In publicly disagreeing with then-President Obama in 2010, by expressing the opinion that it was the Administration’s aim and policy to change the United States into a socialist state,  Ermey ran counter to the whole industry.  It was also his association with the NRA, this one-time supposed Liberal ( a Marine Vietnam veteran),  that after a long career, he found himself on Hollywood’s blacklist.   The irony, for those who do not recall it,  in the 1950’s Hollywood actors and producers were being investigated by the House Un-American Activities committee for communist sympathizers within their industry.  The never forgave the Republican party for this. At some point, the campus revolutionaries and anti-war protestors took possession of the cultural institutions, college campuses, bureaucracies and political offices. As both corporate entities and even states have learned during the Obama Presidency,  un-approved views and policies, are subject to commercial asphyxiation and shunning.

From several of the Marines I served with and got to know during my 25 years in the military,  I know that all of them might have different views on politics, leadership and our role in the world,  but have first and foremost been champions of their fellow Marines and the services,    Though I have known and respect certain men and women who pursue a career in Hollywood,  I also know that as a Christian, that environment, so much about image, appearance  and so little based on substance and tolerance -to differing views -would be toxic.

Without the Outlaw, there’s no Gun in Gunsmoke

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Gunslinger politics

According to highly disreputable sources, Vladimir Putin, erstwhile KGB spymaster, first thought about becoming President of Russia when he met Ronald Reagan.   A fan of the Gipper’s Western movie classics, he modeled his rise to power in the same fashion.  RR lead the Screen Actors Guild as President twice;  VP lead the Russian Federation  twice as President – and as Premier, in the intervening years.  President Reagan lead California; VP lead the KGB which employed as many spies and “apparatchiks” as the California bureaucracy.  And in his travels, he was photographed on horseback, gifted with a cowboy hat, and met with influential people.  And met also with politicians in America.  

Vladimir Putin (“fan”). at left (1988)
The drama since the election of 2016  seems to recall the Wild West movies with Gary Cooper, Robert Mitchum, or John Wayne I watched in the 1960s and 70s.   There’s a rough and tumble territory being carved up between the natives, settlers, Good Guys and Bad Guys.   The Russian President, is like the card-playing, six-gun toting, ruffian who reads weaknesses in the go-along-to-get-along townspeople he has exploited before.  In place of Dodge City and and Tombstone, Putin  rode into the Crimea, Ukraine, and Syria, and left his mark. The last Territorial Marshall was a lot of talk but slow on the draw.



  

I hope this Western will play well to audiences.   WIth all the outlaws, cheats and desperados in the world, we need them out of our local, state and Federal Government.  Given the chance, Donald Trump may yet prove to be the Fastest Gun in the West.

AUTHOR’s NOTE:  a good script is revised often before the movie is produced; sometimes the author and sometimes the audience wants to re-do a scene or even the entire film.  I have to admit that this re-release is improved.

only the future holds promise

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The dust of history has settled on the year 2011.  Thank goodness, many will agree.  In the next 362 days, new discoveries in science and medicine, art, literature, and the natural world will mark 2012 as their genesis.  The world will welcome millions of new babies, among them future Einsteins or Yitzak Perlman’s,  as well as good, honest, and hard-working future farmers, miners, fishermen and laborers.  In the next year, we will say farewell to many others.  The next 12 months are a cup half-full of promise.

Over the past year, people who engage in politics, economics, and military -backed diplomacy have proved that there will always be tyrants and incompetents,  powerful and the power-seekers, and dreamers and fools.  Middle-Eastern countries we liberated at terrible cost are returned to despotism and chaos; some empires need to be obliterated and not tolerated by a civil society.  After two centuries of upward mobility and American blood spilled to engender an ideal around the world, the American identity is now a weakened vox populi, a bankrupt economy and a powerful State.  Sovietism in America?

In 2012,  new leaders and new visions need to stand up; overcome the noise of the Occupy rabble, the sycophant news media, and the well-connected, and hold the Government to account.   Or the next 51 weeks  may be a cup half-empty.

Can you appreciate the Irony

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Viet Nam Veteran to Be Sold Out for Environmental Fines  Does everyone believe Big Government is the salvation of the common man?  Here’s a Vietnam veteran living off-the-grid in San Diego County whose property is up for auction to pay fines for not clearing brush (fire hazard).   Seems his property was in the area of the big wildfires of a few years ago, but was not harmed by the flames.  He has been levied, but did not pay  nor remove the offending brush.   Hmm, isn’t this just another case of Government apathy toward veterans –except when Government wants to make a buck?