Yesterday marked 26 years since I raised my right hand and swore an oath to the Constitution. It marks the last pay raise I will receive from the Department of the Navy I have served this quarter-century, and it is appropriate that my request for transfer to the retired list is at the Bureau for […]

I slept better last night, maybe just weary and maybe just happy it is all happening at last. I woke up a little early, battered but sound. It is Friday, and with luck I can relax around the edges of the weekend if I do the scheduling for the senior staff to cover the weekend […]

After I heard the news shortly before ten o’clock local last night I called my sons and told them it had begun. I told them to be alert, and I asked my younger boy to pass that along to his Mom. The other shoe dropped. There is word this morning that three SCUDs flew into […]

I slept badly last night, and I awoke heated and sweaty under the covers. I threw the covers off and embraced the coolness of the darkness, realizing it is 18 hours to the end of a deadline. I turned on the radio and heard that taxi fare from Baghdad to the Jordanian border is now […]

It was a restless night here, waking at four, then settling in again just in time for the alarm to pierce the dark with sharp dissonance. I drifted through some Icelandic symphony music before the time-hack that said it was ten hours in London. It is a morning of thrown gauntlets on the BBC, the […]

It is the coffee that is getting me up this morning, the electrons are firing, all right, but not hitting on all the cylinders yet. The week beckons, ready or not, eager to run down to the riverbank of crisis and plunge right in. The North Koreans fired a missile this morning to greet the […]

It is Sunday. I slept late and turned on the coffee when the solar disc rose above the trees to the East. I checked the Blackberry Personal Data Assistant this morning and there was nothing new in the e-mail queue. Maybe the office takes Sundays off. My Boss said this would be a good weekend […]

I was the first one in the office yesterday. I waved my pass at the keypad next to the door and it popped open. I walked in precisely at seven, late by Pentagon standards, and walked back and opened my office and fired up the computer. There is no burn bag under my desk, since […]

I am up this morning early and at the keyboard just after 0530. I will not have the time to do a Socotra piece, but I can write a little as I listen to the cascade of the world’s events. Saddam is at his consumate best today, destroying a few missiles and digging up some […]

The North Koreans have started up their bomb factory, says Bob Edwards on the radio, and the number of US troops in the Gulf topped 200,000 yesterday, and Saddam’s folks have sent a letter to the UN saying they might consider destroying the Al Samoud rockets. The Security Council is agog. Here in Washington we […]