Something is Very Wrong

Last night a pal was relating a story about an American Navy SEAL commando team that had captured an Arab terrorist who had been responsible for murdering American troops and innocent civilians. In the course of his capture the Arab received a swollen lip. He reported to the military superiors of the commando team that while in custody he had been abused. The accusation was one of the commandos had punched him. Three witnesses, who were not members of the team, said his accusations were false. The terrorist had no corroborating witnesses. Based solely upon the word of this self confessed terrorist, the military authorities of the United States decided to court martial the entire Navy SEAL team. I thought my friend had misunderstood the news report. This morning I heard the same story on one of news shows. Incredible, just a jaw dropping, mind boggling lack of judgment by the same American military who ordered them to risk their lives to capture the murderous bastard. Are you kidding me?

How can I put this? The world we live in is insane, completely off its rocker and the inmates have taken over the asylum. What in hell has happened to the military? The word of a mass murderer is given more creditability than that of genuine heroes that have voluntarily placed themselves in harm's way to protect me and my family.
I am astounded at the utter stupidity of all of this.

A few days ago I was watching the news and heard a Marine field grade officer state that his primary mission was to ensure that no civilians are harmed as a result of military action. When did the change happen where non-combatants were more valuable there your own troops? Who decided that even if Americans are under fire and being killed that you cannot return fire unless you are positive that there are no civilians in the area? No one is wearing a damned uniform except for us. They all look like civilians and when you are being shot at it is hard to determine who is a civilian and who is a zealot doing their level best kill you. If you are not ready to do what has to be done to protect our forces, get the hell out.

While I am on a rant, let me add this. If terrorist have my son, or any American soldier captive, and are going to torture and kill him and you have a captive who knows the location where he is being held, do whatever it takes to make him tell all that he knows. And yes, I mean anything. If we lack the will to fight and win the war, then for the sake of our forces, get the hell out.

On Veteran's Day I was watching the news and they did a program commemorating the sacrifice and service of veterans. Guess who they interviewed for their "Profile in Courage?" a North Vietnamese army captain. He told of the awful things he had endured during the American invasion of his country. Maybe he did, I don't care, but couldn't a major American TV network find one American serviceman worthy of mention on, what is after all, an American holiday? So many gave so much and yet an enemy officer is selected for national television as an example of courage and devotion to duty. Keep in mind his duty was to kill American servicemen and women. Something is wrong.

I was born in 1943; the Civil War had ended just seventy eight years before I came into the world. As a boy I heard firsthand from those who had observed a war fought on their soil. Georgia was subjected to tens of thousands of troops being released to burn and kill everything from Atlanta to Savannah a distance of some three hundred miles. Homes were burned, crops destroyed, animals slaughtered and people, soldiers as well as non-combatants, were killed. The great hero of the Union, William T. Sherman said "War is Hell." He proved it to the people of Georgia.

In World War II it was the stated policy of the allies to bring the war to the civilian populations of our enemies. Cities were targeted and carpet bombed. Incendiary bombs were the preferred weapon. Bombing cities was not considered as collateral damage, they were the targets. The war was finally brought to an end by dropping two nuclear bombs on two cities, the citizens of whom were all non-combatants.

Had we applied today's standards to any war we have ever fought, all would have been lost. The South would be an independent country and in all likelihood, both the North and South would be speaking German. Hawaii would be in the Japanese empire and Italy would control Africa. It is hard for a Southerner, especially one born in Georgia to say this, but Sherman had it right. War is hell and those who think other wise are delusional.

Seven hundred thousand Americans dead in the War Between the States, twenty million dead world-wide in World War II and hundreds of thousands more from the other war fought by our country. Worth it? I don't know, but it is fact.

Contrast the mission of bombing the German city of Dresden where forty thousand civilians were killed with a prisoner with a swollen lip. Want a better comparison? During World War II, Germany put five saboteurs ashore to plant bombs in American cities. They were captured, tried and executed in less than two weeks. The revered FDR gave the order and I don't think he asked if they had puffy lips before they were shot. The folks that captured them were given medals, not a Court Martial.

I do not condone anything about war, it is an unspeakable blot on humanity. A testament to the inhumanity and terrible deeds that mankind is capable of inflicting on fellow human beings. However if a government makes a decision to send men and women to fight and die, don't you have to stand behind them? I know that I have to. And when such a gross miscarriage of justice as this trumped up atrocity of a court martial happens, it sickens me and adds to my increasing concern about the direction in which our country is heading. I hope that I am wrong.

As to whether or not the terrorist was punched, I damned sure hope he was.

Slow Saturday in Title Town

This is a great Gator tailgating video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCFbx87OAxs

Florida International University is coming to town tomorrow and it is a little hard to get excited. I just do not think the Golden Panthers will be that much of a game. (I wonder if Michigan said the same thing before Appalachian State blew their doors off?) I know, I know, any given team on any Saturday can ruin the season for us. But F.I.U. really? We are four games away from winning it all again and knowing what is to come serves to keep my emotions in check. After this home game we have Florida State and all of the heat that comes with that bitter rival, then Alabama for the Southeastern Conference title. I am confident that the SEC championship game is not only for the conference title, but in reality is the national title game. If Bama can beat us, especially given our terrific defense, then the Crimson Tide will whack the Texas Long Horns. So for me the game in Atlanta is for all the marbles. Yep, you are right, I do have on my Orange and Blue goggles.

The picture at the top is of my nephew and his son. Skip is my brother's son and Jackson is his son and my brother's first grandchild. I first saw Skip when he was just a baby. In April of 1969, my Dad died in Viet Nam. I came home from Alaska and my brother Stan, Skip's mother Robin and Skip came home from California. I had been in Alaska for more than four years and had not been home during that time period. If I remember correctly Stan was in his senior year at Stanford and he and Robin were the proud parents of a new baby boy. It was also the first time my mother had seen Skip and my two year old daughter, Kimberly. Think time does not fly? Kimberly was 42years old this year. Losing our dad was a difficult time for everyone. However, in the midst of our mourning my father's passing, we shared the joy of celebrating his grandchildren joining our family. It was over forty years ago and yet it seems as if it were only yesterday.

So why the picture of Skip and Jackson? I received an e mail from him today and I remembered the first time I saw him. And maybe it is close enough to Veteran's Day that my Dad has been on my mind.

Dreams to Remember

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhpMMIOccSo

This picture was taken when I was fourteen years old; the young man on my left is my oldest and best friend, Earl Vaughn. Earl and I first met in the second grade and have remained fast friends for the rest of our lives. Like most boys our age, our entire beings were consumed with thoughts of teenage girls and how to act around them. This was eons before HBO, R-rated movies, heck even Playboy magazine was still in its infancy. The only sources of information about girls were "older" boys. Years later I realized not one thing they told us was true.

After every football game there was a sock hop at a place called "The Shanty." (For you youngsters a sock hop is so named because people shed their shoes and dance in their socks) The Shanty was a World War II era Quonset hut and as I remember was located on part of the school grounds. Boys lined one side of the building and girls were grouped on the other side of the room. After finally getting your nerve up to ask a girl to dance, the walk across that floor seemed to take forever. But it was nothing compared to the trek back if she turned you down, Ahh, the pain and humiliation. I am sure walking to your execution is tougher but not by much. At least not to a teenager.

If by the grace of our Lord a girl did agree to dance then I prayed for an Otis Redding or Percy Sledge song. I do not think I will ever again know the absolute passion of holding a girl and feeling so absolutely alive with both anticipation and fear. I am not sure what being bi-polar feels like, but I think that experience came damned close. I mean the thoughts racing through your mind and the hormones rushing through young veins are enough to short circuit a nuclear power plant.

A favorite place to take a date was the drive in picture show. Now in the crowd we ran with you were not taking any young lady out without a pre-date interview with her dad. Water boarding? I would take it anytime if it would have avoided southern fathers of teenage girls. The era of the fifties was not just different from today's morals and customs; it was a completely different universe. If you were going to be truthful about going to a drive in movie, it was required that it be a double date. That left us with a problem namely do you double date or do you lie? Keep in mind being caught in a lie by a father of that era did not merely mean the loss of dating his daughter; it may well portend the end of your stay on the planet. Sometimes we double dated and sometime I risked life and limb and misled the parents. Lie is such an ugly word, misled just flows better. Alright, sometimes I lied.

I think the first girl I ever kissed on an actual date was named Shirley. She was a year older and tried to instruct me in the fine art of osculation. She said to pull your lips back over your teeth and press on the girl’s lips as hard as you could. It would be a few months, or maybe years, before I realized she had a convoluted understanding of what was supposed to be a tender act. Not only did you look like someone with no teeth, you were likely to maim your date. Some where along the line some young lady said "Larry, let me show you a different technique." Yes indeed it was way better and my world took a turn for the better.

I am not satisfied that I caught the essence of what I am trying to convey. I wish I could remind everyone of the absolute magic of first starting to interact with the opposite sex. There was the feeling of being totally lost, confused and yet knowing the best was yet to come. It was such a glorious and yet painful time. but were you ever as alive?

What started me down this thought process was a song I heard this morning. I am putting a link to it at the end of this posting. I am still in awe of how a song can immediately transfer me back in time and bring back long lost memories and emotions. Music has always done that for me. I hope it always does. Dreams to remember, I have them

Note: If you want to get a feel for what it was all about, copy the link below and go to the site, turn up the sound and just listen and remember.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhpMMIOccSo

Gators and Gamecocks

Menacing looking Gator huh? Think he is menacing? Wait until Saturday night and the Gamecocks see Brandon Spikes with his Edward Scissor Hands gloves on. Oh yeah, there are going to be be some chicken remnants spread across the grass in South Carolina this Saturday afternoon. The Old Ball Coach will wish he had stayed in retirement. Hell is surely coming and it is wearing Orange and Blue!

(I am going to keep this post short just in case I have to eat these words.) There is only one more SEC game left. Tomorrow afternoon we beat the Gamecocks and we will have completed an undefeated run through the toughest conference in college football. Of course there is the small matter of the Alabama Crimson Tide, but we will cross that bridge when we get to it. Football season, undefeated, ranked number one, defending National Champions...you just gotta love it.

I forgot to remember to forget

"The day she went away I made myself a promise, that I would soon forget what now I know. But something sure is wrong, for I'm so blue and lonely. I forgot to remember to forget." Apologies to Elvis Presley for paraphrasing a song he did back in the mid fifties. Just knowing a song from that era tells you how old I am. This Saturday I will be sixty six years old and thankfully I do not forget to remember to forget. These days it seems forgetting is what I do best.

True story; (as if everything else is not) A few months ago I became so concerned about my increasingly frequent memory lapses that I made an appointment with a neurologist at the University of Florida's clinic specializing in Alzheimer's and other brain impairments.

I spent the day being tested, prodded and having my brain scanned. It was an interesting, enlightening and somewhat disheartening experience. After all of the testing and a three hour chat with the head of the Neurology Department he finally asked why I thought I might have a problem. I told him that, for more than twenty five years, I had been an air traffic controller. I had been capable of working more than twenty aircraft climbing, descending and turning and remember each of them. Throughout my life I could hear a set of numbers one time and add them in my head as quickly as I heard them. I always finished first on any exam and could remember phone numbers after only hearing them once. Lately I have trouble remembering my own phone number. I frequently forget why I am looking in a cabinet and/or what I am looking for. People describe events that I attended and I have almost no memory of what occurred and sometime have difficulty in remembering that I was even there. I told him that it didn't happen every day but often enough that I was concerned.

He smiled and said I have some bad news and some good news. I thought why in hell is this man smiling while telling me he has bad news. (Keep in mind his comments about good news went right over my head.) He said, "Larry, can you run as fast as you could when you were twenty years of age?" I said, "of course not." He responded, "Do you have the same color of hair, let alone as much hair?" Again I replied negatively. He said "The bad news is you are aging and your mind like your body is not what it once was." He continued, "The good news is your brain function is average for a man your age, no disease, no abnormality, you are in every mental aspect...average." To make matters worse, he later sent me a three page document attesting to the fact that I am of average intelligence and average mental capabilities. I guess he didn't want me to forget.

Knowing Everything is for the Young

When I was young I had the certainty that only comes from illusion. Now I am old and I have the certainty that almost all knowledge is merely an illusion. Someone much smarter than I coined the above two sentences. Anyone with a modicum of self- awareness knows the truth of the statements. This morning I was reading a three column article written by a college student. This particular youngster had recently spent five hours in a city in Europe and was writing that the city did not meet her expectations. The city has a history of more than a thousand years and it is amusing that someone with less than twenty years on the planet, nevertheless felt qualified to author such a lengthy piece. Equally amusing is whom the local paper selects to publish. The same paper that supports a bicycle path from downtown to the airport so that commuters can pedal to their flights. Global warming could be slowed if only I would load my luggage on a ten speed? However, it does make as much sense as most of their editorials.

I lived in Alaska for a number of years. I spent several years in Anchorage and later lived out on the Aleutian Chain. I fished commercially for salmon and flew extensively throughout the state. Given all of that, I still cannot speak definitively about our "Last Frontier." It has been years since I have been there and while there I only saw a tiny portion of our largest state. While I was in the "Land of the Midnight Sun," many folks from the rest of America and the world would come up for a week's visit and then go home and write a book about Alaska and what was best for the state. It was infuriating to the local folks to be lectured to by people who had zero knowledge of their home.

Everyday I run into people just out of their teens who are absolutely certain that have all the answers. Recently I said to one of them, "You do realize that by the time your are sixty, almost every thing you know will be proven to be untrue?" I always get the same response, it is the same response I had to doddering old folks, they look at me with a mixed feeling of pity and incredulity. I mean, hey, if in the year 2070, Florida is under water from Orlando southwards and if Palatka is on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, then they will be proven right. However, I am fairly confident that this too shall pass, the world will not be consumed by carbon gases and there will always be another catastrophe just over the horizon.

Does anyone remember the book, "The Late Great Planet Earth?" The author, Hal Lindsey, predicted the world would end during the 1980's. His premise was based on his interpretation of the Bible. He believed the scriptures to say that one generation after the establishment of the state of Israel, (1948) the world would end in fire. (A generation in the Bible is forty years) Note to Mr. Lindsey, it is now late in the year 2009.

Another prophet of doom was the distinguished scientist Paul Erlich. In his best seller of impending doom, "The population Bomb" published in 1968 he boldly predicted world wide starvation and also said all petroleum stocks would be exhausted by the mid 1990's. All creditable geologists now acknowledge there is more oil still beneath the surface than has been found in the past one hundred years. Oh, do you know what Professor Erlich speciality was? Lepidoptera, that's right, butterfly's. Scared the hell out of everyone, lectured at colleges, went on talk shows. He was years ahead of Al Gore, no less well informed, but years ahead.

Don't misunderstand, I know there are going to be upheavals, maybe even on a planet- wide scale. The ice age was a reality but it happened without any of us humans. The dust bowl of the 1930's was absolutely reality but there were not enough vehicles to have been the cause. I have seen the Grand Canyon and heard the park ranger's lecture on what happens when water meets rock for a mere three hundred million years. I do not think even Methuselah lived quiet that long so humans were not culpable for that either. The dinosaurs came and went without human intervention. Yet still, our mother planet endures.

So what is my point? As usual there is not one. I am only smiling at what I perceive as our human arrogance and need for self importance. In the long run I think I haven't learned much as I have gotten older. Mostly I have unlearned a great deal of nonsense, most of it centering around how much I know. I think it is important to unlearn things and from time to time say "I don't have a clue." Maybe the title of this posting should have been "I don't have a clue." because you know what? I don't.

Tentative Thoughts as Told by a Traveling Troll

The picture here is of my oldest son, Don. His mother is the former Sharron Ann Martin. Some of you know our story and some don't, I think I will leave it at that. The only reason for his picture is that I am so proud of him. He has been a paratrooper, a college wide receiver, (fast for a white boy is how he was once described) an officer in a bank and now a Youth Pastor. Don, and all my children, are so much better people than their dad. I have told them how much I love and respect them, but I haven't told them often enough. Don is now a grandfather, earlier I posted a picture of the new baby. Let's see, if my son is a grandfather, that makes me a...great-grandfather. Time marches on...hopefully.

Man doesn't everybody wish that had been a Miami Hurricane, or better yet, a Florida State Seminole, football player with his hands inside of the others player's helmet trying to poke him in the eye? Can you imagine how righteously indignant Gator Nation would have been? At the very least we would have been calling for a public flogging. Unfortunately, this time it was it was our guy.

In the history of the University of Florida, Brandon Spikes has done more for our football program than all but a handful of players. In this incident, he was wrong and there is just no way to justify what he did. However, I am not naive enough to believe that this type of behavior is unusual in football, clearly it is not. Number 51, Spikes, is the middle linebacker and the team enforcer. The play before this happened, the same Georgia back had punched Joe Haden (number 5) in the face. Also earlier in the game a player put his hands under Brandon's helmet, poked him in his eyes and then ripped his helmet off. While his helmet was off, another Bulldog player butted him in the face with his helmet. I was at the game and there was a lot of trash talk and shoving. Both sides were ready to fight and several times it could have exploded into a bench clearing brawl.

Football is an emotional game played by strong, fast, aggressive young men. Some times tempers get out of hand, this time it was one of us. You know what, as far as I am concerned, Brandon Spikes is still a great Gator. He made a mistake but it does not overshadow his tremendous career and contributions. How does the song go? "We are the boys from old Florida, in all kinds of weather, we all stick together....for F-L-O-R-I-D-A."

As far as our opponent from Athens goes, it is no longer a traditional rivalry. We have won seventeen games out of the past twenty contests. That, my friends, is the definition of domination. So the question for the Dawgs is this; Who is your Daddy?