Blithering On

In the history of Tunisia, it's been ruled by all of the major players in the area because of its strategic location in North Africa on the Mediterranean Sea. The Romans, the Carthaginians, the Muslims, and the French all had their turns there. It was a contested area in World War II as well, the site of famous tank battles involving Rommel and Patton. Today, Tunisia is an Arab Islamic nation and an ally of the United States. With that country in the news a lot here lately, I've been thinking back on when I was there in the late 80s. The United States had good relations with the government (and still does now, I believe) so we were able to train there in the Tunisian countryside west of the capital, Tunis. We had completed a week of training there and the U. S. Ambassador to Tunisia was on our ship for a visit. He needed to get back to Tunis so I was assigned to fly him there the night before we pulled up the anchor to move to another part of the Mediterranean to train....

I had never been to combat before I was deployed in support of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in late August of 1990. I had flown quite a lot of rather difficult tactical missions, however, where we needed to be intense and absolutely focused on what we were doing. The missions we flew as we trained to deploy and those we flew while on deployment were especially challenging because of all of the moving parts and because of the complexity we deliberately dialed into our scenarios. Before launching from the ship on those missions, I used to go down to my state room (living quarters) to gather and put on my flight gear and to "get my mind right" for the mission. A lot of pilots listened to a little bit of "mood music" before flying. In my own case, I usually cranked up the volume to U2's "New Years Day" before heading to the flight deck to start the mission. Most of us believed getting zoned in with good mission planning and the right mood was...

When I enlisted in the Marines in early 1975, there were still people on active duty who had fought in World War II—and many more who had fought in Korea. Today, those veterans belong to a dwindling few. The youngest of the World War II generation are now approaching their hundredth year. The Korean War veterans aren’t far behind. Vietnam veterans are now in their 70s. We see them with canes, walkers, and wheelchairs. We see them sitting quietly in the corner, sometimes overwhelmed by the noise and motion around them. We see them needing help with the simplest tasks. We see some confined to beds in the final chapters of their lives. And yet, some remain remarkably strong—sharp, steady, and full of life. It can be hard to imagine them as anything other than what we see today. But we can—if we try. If we look closely, past the years etched into their faces, we can see them as they once were: seventeen… or even sixteen, having lied about their age to serve. We can see the energy, the rest...

Our nation will be fixated for days over this week's loss of three show business icons: Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson. Ed McMahon was Johnny Carson's late night show sidekick for more than 30 years and was known as a man who became famous for helping make Johnny Carson famous. He served as a U. S. Marine during World War II and Korea. McMahon died Tuesday after battling pneumonia and bone cancer. Farrah Fawcett was one of the three "Charlie's Angels" in the 1970s television series and she became a popular pinup poster model with a number of television and movie credits to her name. She bravely battled cancer for three years, seeking out aggressive treatments in her attempt to defeat the disease. She lost her battle today. Michael Jackson has been known as the King of Pop Music. His dancing, music, and showmanship electified audiences throughout the world, but his conduct with and around children taint his image. This conduct will be a minor footn...

Founding Father James Madison is sometimes called the "Father of the Constitution," and rightfully so. He authored 29 of the 85 articles that comprise the Federalist Papers, written to argue the case for a constitutional form of government.  After nearly four months of strenuous debate, deliberation, and compromise, Madison sat down and drafted the U. S. Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation which many considered inadequate and a confederacy to be a weak structure for the newly independent United States. His words live on today as his name was mentioned 17 times during the testimony of three Constitutional experts before the House Judiciary Committee hearing on the impeachment of President Trump on December 4, 2019. One of those experts reminded us of a speech that Madison delivered at the Constitutional Convention on July 20, 1787 when he said that impeachment was "indispensable" “for defending … ag[ain]st the incapacity, negligence, or per...

I was relatively new to offshore flying when I picked up an assignment to spend the day supporting an oil company in a field of oil platforms more than 100 miles off of the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. As I landed on my first platform after that long overwater flight, my passenger said that he would be only a few minutes so I decided to delay a needed refueling until I could take him to his next stop. If I took off to get fuel on another platform right then, I'd need to shut the helicopter down to refuel and wouldn't be able to return for a half hour or more. I didn't want to keep him waiting if it wasn't necessary. It turned out that I waited on the deck at idle for about half an hour for him to return to the aircraft, so I was really needing fuel by the time he was back on board. He boarded the aircraft and I dropped him off at the next stop, and then went looking for a refueling platform. With all of those gas and oil resources out there, you would t...

In early 1996, I was a member of Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 162 (HMM-162), the aviation element of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) on board the USS Guam (LPH-9). We were operating in the Adriatic Sea and ashore in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Albania as part of the peace enforcement force, the "implementation force" (IFOR), during Operation Decisive Endeavor. We were wrapping up our work in the Adriatic in early April, preparing to head to Israel for some exercises, when we received an order to prepare to redeploy to the west coast of Africa for potential operations in embattled Liberia. As we steamed toward the southern end of the Adriatic, we were either going to turn left toward Israel or right toward Liberia. By the time we reached the Mediterranean, it was a right turn. We arrived at "Mamba Station" off the coast of Liberia early in the morning of April 20th. When we arrived, fighting around the U. S. Embassy was pret...

In his book Basic Economics , economist Thomas Sowell observes that despite their “economic woes and worries,” middle-class Americans are “one of the most affluent groups of human beings ever to inhabit this planet.” He underscores the point with a August 1, 1999 New York Times column featuring a middle-class American family photographed in their own swimming pool under the headline: “The American Middle, Just Getting By.” That image and its caption mirror the ongoing narrative about a middle-class in crisis, but certainly not reality. The problem isn’t that middle-class families face tough financial decisions. The problem is the assumption that a middle-class family’s need to make those decisions itself is evidence of a crisis. It isn’t. It’s economics. At its core, economics is the study of how people use scarce resources which have competing uses. That definition from economist Lionel Robbins is a description of everyday life, not some abstract theory. It applies to all economies la...

When I was flying in the Marine Corps, we talked a lot about compartmentalization . For a pilot, that meant recognizing the stressors in your life—family, finances, relationships—and understanding what it takes to cope with them without carrying them with you into the cockpit. You didn’t ignore those pressures. You dealt with them. But when it came time to brief, pre-flight, and fly, you left them where they belonged—outside the aircraft. If you didn’t, you risked being distracted. You could be dangerous. At an aviation safety event, a psychologist gave a presentation titled “The Failing Aviator.” In it, he focused on compartmentalization and how poorly managed stress—especially from strained relationships—can erode judgment, focus, and ultimately safety. He told a story about a Marine Corps F/A-18 pilot. His wife struggled with the realities of his job—the late nights, the deployments, the uncertainty and danger of his job. Over time, the strain wore on both of them. She pressed him ...

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle introduced the idea of potentiality and actuality—the notion that everything exists somewhere between what it is and what it could become. Fifteen centuries later, Thomas Aquinas carried that idea into a theological context. In his Summa Theologica , he argued that we aren’t static, but that we’re in motion, always moving from our potential toward our fulfillment. And ultimately, he said, that fulfillment isn’t found in comfort or achievement alone, but in coming to know God more perfectly, having been created in His image. The idea was that because he is a potentiality, he wouldn’t achieve true happiness any way other than in coming to know God more perfectly. But strip away the philosophy and the theology, and what remains is something we recognize in our own lives: We aren’t finished products. We’re works in progress—living somewhere between what we are and what we could be. The problem isn’t that we fall short. The problem is when we stop...

I think we all have had times when we did something, or thought about doing something, that didn’t seem like much of a big deal at the time, but then later its importance grew over time, and the decision you made to either do that thing or not turned out to be more meaningful than we had imagined at the time we made the choice. One such time for me was the time some friends and I climbed Mount Fuji in Japan. We were deployed to a camp at the base of the mountain from Okinawa. It was July 4, 1976 and we had a military parade in honor of the 200th birthday of our Nation and about a dozen of us thought it would be cool to climb it to celebrate the day after the parade. Mount Fuji isn’t a difficult mountain to climb, there’s just a lot of it: a little more than 12,000 feet of it. A lot of Japanese successfully make a pilgrimage of the climb every year. You can climb it in about eight hours if you follow a trail. It’s certainly no Denali. We wanted the climb to be special though, so we ...

At the height of recent immigration enforcement efforts in Minnesota, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis compared sanctuary policies and the refusal of some state and local officials to cooperate with federal authorities—actions he characterized as obstructing federal law—to the way some Northern states resisted enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Acts from the late 18th through the mid-19th century. He didn't draw a moral equivalence between slavery and illegal immigration; he framed the issue as one of the rule of law and federal supremacy under Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution. Interestingly, similar historical references have surfaced on the other side of the debate—but with a very different emphasis. U.S. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley have suggested that there are moments in history when laws become so unjust that defiance is warranted, applying that logic to current immigration enforcement debates. Gavin Newsom has been more explicit, ...

We know from experience that it's difficult to distill an event to a sentence or even to a paragraph and accurately capture its fullness or its context and implications. Leaving important voids in the storytelling leaves it to others to tell it their own way to the point that they might distort the facts and the story. But the retelling of history is full of examples where that very thing happens, where the story is told and retold inaccurately. Sometimes it's done to illustrate a broader point. Sometimes it happens to make the history easier to follow and more relatable to students. Sometimes it arises out of mythmaking where over time, the myth takes on the appearance of truth. Take Mason Locke Weems for example. In his "The Life of Washington," Parson Weems wrote that young Washington damaged his father's cherry tree and confessed as much to him: "I cannot tell a lie...I did cut it with my hatchet." Some retelling has it that he didn't just cut th...