Blithering On

A few years ago, I was doing some genealogy research and came across an interesting photograph from the November 25, 1965 Wise County (Texas) Messenger that showed my great-great grandfather's headstone. The photo got me interested in trying to find his and my great-great grandmother's gravesites and maybe do a little maintenance on them while I was there. But first, I'd have to find the Oak Grove Cemetery just north of Decatur, Texas, where they were buried. They had originally settled in Collin County, Texas in the mid-1800s after they left Kentucky as part of the migration of Midwesterners to Texas. But within a couple of years of settling in as tenant farmers there, the Civil War started, and my great-great grandfather ended up in the Confederate army as a private in a cavalry unit. He returned home destitute at the end of the war and moved his family to a farm near Dallas, looking for a better future, still farming someone else's land. Finally, he ended up in the ...

The Gaza Strip was once a prominent trading center, historically advantageous for its location along the coast of the Mediterranean. We know from the Bible, Judges chapter 16, that Israelite warrior and judge Samson died in Gaza “with the Philistines” to get revenge on them. From Jeremiah chapter 47, we also know that Pharoah attacked the Philistines in Gaza. In fact, the Bible has more than a dozen references to Gaza, beginning with Genesis in which the borders of Canaan are identified. Then, in Judges 2:3 we read that God punished Israel for not driving the Canaanites from the Promised Land after He delivered the Israelites out of Egypt. In response, the Bible says God told the Israelites, “they will become traps for you, and their gods will become snares for you.” Some might say they're still paying on that penalty. But setting that aside, history informs us that in addition to the Philistines and the Egyptians, Gaza has also been occupied by the Babylonians and even Alexander t...

Marine Corps aviators in fleet squadrons have two “jobs.” The obvious one is their flying job. In my day, the other was simply what we referred to as our “ground” job, an assignment that contributed to the running of the squadron. When I checked in to HMM-365 in the Fall of 1985, my CO asked me what ground job I wanted, probably just to see where my head was. He was going to put me where he wanted to either way. "I don't care" wouldn't have been a good answer. With my experience as an enlisted infantryman, I wanted to be in a position where I could lead Marines. The place to do that in a squadron is in the aircraft maintenance department, so that’s where I told him I wanted to work. He said that he didn’t put new guys in the maintenance department right away, but he’d see how things worked out.  H e put me in an office pushing paper instead, but when someone told me that the best way to earn my way into the maintenance department was to jump on every post-maintenance ...