Rain is Falling Rain is falling, a constant tapping, A flash of lightning splits the dark, Thunder rumbles, shakes our house, The dogs uneasy, answer with a single bark. Holy Thursday in the Dismal Swamp, A good friend and true under the knife, Bypass surgery never routine, A prayer – Dear God, safeguard his life. […]

We See Money for your missiles, A billion for another floating beauty, Billions for bombers and AI, But none for corporals on duty. Politicians take their pictures With some PFC who lost an arm, Spread that picture around, The voters for to charm. But the PFC still has no arm, And his buddies are still […]

The story really begins yesterday, on June 17th, 1775. But my real grasp of it began nearly 200 years later, on an early March day, while I was in high school. My mom was having a big party as a fund raiser for the hospital where my dad worked. We had a large, mostly unused […]

My Muse poked me again this morning, but light-hearted… Archimedes wasn’t the very first, But he did get pretty near, And Ptolemy was very handy In addressing a sphere. The Chinese also chipped in, And Liu Hui shaved it even closer, Though to the average schoolboy It is still a poser. Aryabhata of Pataliputra, A […]

On January 25th, 1942, USS Sargo (SS-186 (under the command of LtCmdr Tyrell Jacobs)) pulled into Surabaya, Indonesia after finishing a short war patrol, offloaded her remaining torpedoes, loaded 1 million rounds of small-arms ammunition, and headed to Mindanao, the Philippines to provide some ammunition to the US and the Philippine Armies. She then picked […]

Once upon a time there was a truly great nation, a nation that tried to bring peace around the world, that tried to improve everyone’s life, that worked very hard as a nation, and the people become fabulously rich. But there were those inside the country who didn’t like things this way, they wanted more […]

In the news this week, Alexei Navalny, the dissident Russian politician who was serving 30 years in an Arctic Gulag, died. Navalny was a longtime rival of Tsar Vlad, had campaigned against corruption – Putin’s corruption – and after returning to Russia in 2021, had been found guilty of “extremism” and “fraud” – what were […]

As I’m sure you know, two years into the war President Zelenskyy just dismissed his senior general and is calling for a new strategy. What might that mean? Begin at the beginning: Russia invaded on as poor a net assessment of the enemy as can be imagined. It was as far off as Hannibal’s assessment […]

There has been some interesting talk in the past week about deterrence and escalation and proportionality and I’m beginning to wonder if those words still mean what I thought they mean, like the word “secret” on the front page of a newspaper. But it’s important to review what they really mean because getting this wrong […]

Author’s Note: And the Muse appeared in my morning in Tidewater- it would make a good start for a Neil Simon play… – Arrias Wide Awake It all started with a very strange dream, But no beautiful maiden and a dragon, Just me and an old Navy buddy, Cans of caviar and a station wagon. […]