I recently wrote about Heather and Mark’s Excellent Adventure. Daughter Courtney also faces a big change in her life, one I – and her husband, Dave – can relate to; a combat assignment. Here’s a little about a hero of mine, Major Courtney Short.
Courtney was born in a little town on the prairie. the model for Carol Bly’s Rachel River, a place our story will wind its way through later. She was in the stroller at her sister’s public dance debut. (See Daughter, Actor, Scholar, Advocate)
She followed her sister to All State Choir, and onto Twin City professional stages, including Children’s Theater, the Guthrie, and Actor’s Theater. At nine, she played Annie Graving (with Craig T. Nelson and Pamela Reed) in Rachel River, a film based on the Carol Bly short stories inspired by the small town of Courtney’s birth. That’s two daughters in the Screen Actor’s Guild. Courtney played volleyball, but injury cut short that endeavor. There was student body office, music, drama, and swing dancing, that last not a school activity.
Courtney developed a love of history and writing early, announcing that she planned to go to Columbia University to pursue journalism. Doing exactly that, she enrolled in Columbia’s Barnard College, pledged Delta Gamma, played intercollegiate rugby, and earned a Bachelor in history from Columbia University, while also earning a commission in the United States Army through Reserve Officer Training Corp across town at Fordham University.
After graduation it was Ft. Bliss for training in Patriot missiles, and on to Korea to run a Patriot platoon and battery fire control. Korea was where her future appeared not to be Army at all, but rather that of an Air Force wife of a fighter pilot, before the tragic death of Lieutenant Randy Murff, whose story was told by Courtney in Determined Dreamer, Passionate Flyer.
Upon returning to the United States, Courtney commanded a Patriot battery, served on battalion staff, earned a Master’s in Management, taught at the Air Defense School at Ft. Bliss, Texas and married fellow Captain (now Major) David Short. Soon after, she accepted an appointment to the faculty at West Point contingent on completing her Master’s in history, which she did at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, completing her PhD., ABD.
She began her West Point assignment in 2008 as an instructor, and later as Assistant Professor (not everyone makes that step), in the Department of History. Promoted to Major in January 2009, her assignment to the United States Military Academy ended this past May.
In August 2009, she became a mother (and I a grandfather) to Olivia. This summer, she’s been preparing to deploy at the end of this month to Afghanistan as a staff officer of the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Armored Division. Meanwhile, husband Dave has charge of Olivia (or is it the other way ‘round?) at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.
Courtney, you’ll be in our thoughts every day until you are safely home.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Daughter, Actor, Scholar, Advocate
Heather married Mark Fields on August 13. In introducing my toast I said we were “Celebrating a bon voyage to Heather and Mark’s Excellent Adventure.” This blog reprises my remarks.
The bride and groom have each lived their own adventures before today, but now, before they embark on their next – shared – adventure, I want to tell you about some of Heather’s.
From the youngest age she was a dancer, a singer, an actor…and a bookworm.
For me, her father, two images of this little girl are etched in my mind; dancing in the aisle of a department store at about 4 years old, a photo of which landed on the front page of a small-town Minnesota newspaper, an indelible image of her creative, performing side. Second, of a little girl with big round glasses, on a small chair in a corner, with a large book, reading, her intent, intelligent, learning side.
Through her early years she seemed mostly focused on her performing side…
She was selected twice to the Minnesota All-State Choir, trod the boards in musicals – South Pacific, Annie, and plays, including Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, a State Championship One-Act. Flutist, middle school cheerleader, and still a top academic performer. Friends remember she talked about law school as early as the 8th grade.
It was theater she pursued between Delta Gamma sorority parties at the University of Minnesota. I see those DG’s are here. Still friends, and that certainly means a lot.
Heather didn’t hesitate, Gopher theater – and history – degree in hand, to head for Hollywood…Malibu, and The OC, to film, stage, child care, and waiting on tables.
There was some film including the lead in “The Layover,” (“A coming of middle-age film,” wrapped in 2001, unreleased) but it was on stage she left her mark, even in that entertainment megalopolis.
On stage she originated principal roles in three world premier plays, one the lead.
Of "A Summer with Hemingway’s Twin" (World Premier at Alternative Repertory Theater, Santa Ana) L.A. Times theater critic T.H. McCulloh wrote, Heather Kjos is marvelously restrained and real as Lila, the college student who spends her whole summer hoping to meet her literary idol. Kjos’ buoyant, wide-eyed wonder at being with the actual Hemingway family is refreshing and believable.
Of Heather’s role in "Six Random Women," Joel Beers wrote in the Orange County Weekly:
There's Miss District of Columbia (a perfectly cast, deer-in-the-headlights Heather Kjos), who sees in the Miss US of A pageant everything bright and shiny about the most wonderful, blessed-by-God nation on Earth.
That tug of the law was still there, and it finally pulled her back to Minnesota, where she took the LSAT and caught on with a Minneapolis law firm as a docketing clerk. She was good at that, good enough to garner a Chicago job for more money, then become a paralegal in intellectual property law, completing her coursework at Loyola University.
It all just whetted that appetite for law school, which sent her to St. Paul, to the William Mitchell College of Law. While there, she was runner-up in the Intellectual Property National Moot Court competition, on the IP Law Review, clerked for a professor, was published in journals, and has been listed in Westlaw. At that table are law school classmates.
She’s employed as an attorney, no small thing in this market.
Now with Mark the next, the start of many more adventures
The toast is coming in a moment, but first, this piece of doggerel:
To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
I propose a toast to Mark and Heather:
Here’s to the past, for all that you have learned
Here’s to the present, for all that you share
Here’s to the future, for all that you look forward to together.
The bride and groom have each lived their own adventures before today, but now, before they embark on their next – shared – adventure, I want to tell you about some of Heather’s.
From the youngest age she was a dancer, a singer, an actor…and a bookworm.
For me, her father, two images of this little girl are etched in my mind; dancing in the aisle of a department store at about 4 years old, a photo of which landed on the front page of a small-town Minnesota newspaper, an indelible image of her creative, performing side. Second, of a little girl with big round glasses, on a small chair in a corner, with a large book, reading, her intent, intelligent, learning side.
Through her early years she seemed mostly focused on her performing side…
She was selected twice to the Minnesota All-State Choir, trod the boards in musicals – South Pacific, Annie, and plays, including Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, a State Championship One-Act. Flutist, middle school cheerleader, and still a top academic performer. Friends remember she talked about law school as early as the 8th grade.
It was theater she pursued between Delta Gamma sorority parties at the University of Minnesota. I see those DG’s are here. Still friends, and that certainly means a lot.
Heather didn’t hesitate, Gopher theater – and history – degree in hand, to head for Hollywood…Malibu, and The OC, to film, stage, child care, and waiting on tables.
There was some film including the lead in “The Layover,” (“A coming of middle-age film,” wrapped in 2001, unreleased) but it was on stage she left her mark, even in that entertainment megalopolis.
On stage she originated principal roles in three world premier plays, one the lead.
Of "A Summer with Hemingway’s Twin" (World Premier at Alternative Repertory Theater, Santa Ana) L.A. Times theater critic T.H. McCulloh wrote, Heather Kjos is marvelously restrained and real as Lila, the college student who spends her whole summer hoping to meet her literary idol. Kjos’ buoyant, wide-eyed wonder at being with the actual Hemingway family is refreshing and believable.
Of Heather’s role in "Six Random Women," Joel Beers wrote in the Orange County Weekly:
There's Miss District of Columbia (a perfectly cast, deer-in-the-headlights Heather Kjos), who sees in the Miss US of A pageant everything bright and shiny about the most wonderful, blessed-by-God nation on Earth.
That tug of the law was still there, and it finally pulled her back to Minnesota, where she took the LSAT and caught on with a Minneapolis law firm as a docketing clerk. She was good at that, good enough to garner a Chicago job for more money, then become a paralegal in intellectual property law, completing her coursework at Loyola University.
It all just whetted that appetite for law school, which sent her to St. Paul, to the William Mitchell College of Law. While there, she was runner-up in the Intellectual Property National Moot Court competition, on the IP Law Review, clerked for a professor, was published in journals, and has been listed in Westlaw. At that table are law school classmates.
She’s employed as an attorney, no small thing in this market.
Now with Mark the next, the start of many more adventures
The toast is coming in a moment, but first, this piece of doggerel:
To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
I propose a toast to Mark and Heather:
Here’s to the past, for all that you have learned
Here’s to the present, for all that you share
Here’s to the future, for all that you look forward to together.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Pettifoggery, Demagoguery, Yachts and Jets
I don't often write political commentary; this, however, is exactly that.
The President launched an all-out war on “…tax loopholes for corporate jets…” yesterday.
In a speech disguised as a policy discussion of serious issues of deficits, debts, and taxes, Obama once again obfuscated the real problems of our economy by raising the imagined bogeymen of our terminally uneducated and willfully uninformed fellow citizens. He seems to think he can be reelected solely by the lowest common denominator amongst the electorate.
Loophole? That’s a disingenuous description of a part of the Federal tax depreciation table. (If you don’t know what depreciation is, you’re pretty much a lost cause – one of those uneducated and uninformed – you really should stop reading now. And please…don’t vote.)
Here’s the fact. The tax code says a business (not necessarily a corporation, but hey, “corporation” makes for a more frightening bogeyman, doesn’t it?) can write off a jet placed in service for the use of the business (original cost written off as a expense) over a term of five years – 20% per year. Jets purchased by commercial carriers for the purpose of carrying passengers for fares, on the other hand, must be written off over a seven year period – 14% per year. That has the effect of lowering the taxable income of the former as compared to the latter.
How much is that? Business jets produced by companies like Cessna and Piper – US manufacturers, by the way – cost from $5 million to about $20 million new, depending on capacity, range, and appointments. Under current law (Obama’s “loophole”) a typical purchase of $10 million would be shown as a deductable cost of doing business in the amount of $2 million in each of 5 years. The demagogue-in-chief demands – as a condition of agreeing to any cuts to Federal expenditures – that the seven-year rate of depreciation used for commercial aircraft be applied to the purchase of these small business aircraft. The result of that will be a deduction from taxable income of about $1.428 million in each of seven years.
In each of the first five years after the purchase, then, our company has to report (if it is that profitable) additional net income of $572,000. If half of that net is taken in taxes (the US corporate tax rate is as much as 35% of net income) the additional tax in each of those five years is $200,000, a total additional tax of $1 million. In years six and seven, our company gets to recoup some of that disadvantage, since it continues to have some write off – a total of $2.86 million – reducing its taxes in those years by $1 million. The advantage to the government? It collects the same amount of tax in five years that it would collect in seven under the current rule.
How does this make a difference? The amount of tax appears to be the same. There are, of course, business advantages to faster write-offs. Those beyond five years are often “over the horizon of planning,” meaning not considered in the purchase decision. Private jets are also more likely be “turned over,” (traded in) sooner than commercial jets, so a shorter depreciation period is a real financial advantage. Remember, too, that if that “trade-in” has value – and it always does – that amount is “recaptured” by the IRS as income.
The real cost of Obama’s demagoguery, however, is borne not by the rich (who will simply decide in some instances not replace that aging business aircraft) but by the poor saps who wire and rivet together those aircraft in Wichita, Kansas (Cessna), and Vero Beach, Florida (Piper).
If all this seems familiar, consider the real world experience of the “luxury taxes” slapped on yachts, and “expensive automobiles” (laughably, those over $30,000) in 1991. After it’s repeal in 1993, here from the Washington Times is the description of that experiment in “fairness.”
"Starting in 1991, Washington levied a 10 percent tax on cars valued above $30,000, boats above $100,000, jewelry and furs above $10,000, and private planes above $250,000. Democrats crowed publicly about how the rich would finally be paying their fair share and privately about convincing President George H.W. Bush to renounce his 'no new taxes' pledge.
"But it wasn't long before even those die-hard "class warriors" noticed they'd badly missed their mark. The taxes took in $97 million less in their first year than had been projected — for the simple reason that people were buying a lot fewer of these goods. Boat building, a key industry in Maine and Massachusetts, (home of some of the more prominent "class warriors") was particularly hard hit. Yacht retailers reported a 77 percent drop in sales that year, while boat builders estimated layoffs at 25,000. With bipartisan support, all but the car tax was repealed in 1993, and in 1996 Congress voted to phase that out too."
There’s your “loophole,” and there is your result. Hope and change.
The President launched an all-out war on “…tax loopholes for corporate jets…” yesterday.
In a speech disguised as a policy discussion of serious issues of deficits, debts, and taxes, Obama once again obfuscated the real problems of our economy by raising the imagined bogeymen of our terminally uneducated and willfully uninformed fellow citizens. He seems to think he can be reelected solely by the lowest common denominator amongst the electorate.
Loophole? That’s a disingenuous description of a part of the Federal tax depreciation table. (If you don’t know what depreciation is, you’re pretty much a lost cause – one of those uneducated and uninformed – you really should stop reading now. And please…don’t vote.)
Here’s the fact. The tax code says a business (not necessarily a corporation, but hey, “corporation” makes for a more frightening bogeyman, doesn’t it?) can write off a jet placed in service for the use of the business (original cost written off as a expense) over a term of five years – 20% per year. Jets purchased by commercial carriers for the purpose of carrying passengers for fares, on the other hand, must be written off over a seven year period – 14% per year. That has the effect of lowering the taxable income of the former as compared to the latter.
How much is that? Business jets produced by companies like Cessna and Piper – US manufacturers, by the way – cost from $5 million to about $20 million new, depending on capacity, range, and appointments. Under current law (Obama’s “loophole”) a typical purchase of $10 million would be shown as a deductable cost of doing business in the amount of $2 million in each of 5 years. The demagogue-in-chief demands – as a condition of agreeing to any cuts to Federal expenditures – that the seven-year rate of depreciation used for commercial aircraft be applied to the purchase of these small business aircraft. The result of that will be a deduction from taxable income of about $1.428 million in each of seven years.
In each of the first five years after the purchase, then, our company has to report (if it is that profitable) additional net income of $572,000. If half of that net is taken in taxes (the US corporate tax rate is as much as 35% of net income) the additional tax in each of those five years is $200,000, a total additional tax of $1 million. In years six and seven, our company gets to recoup some of that disadvantage, since it continues to have some write off – a total of $2.86 million – reducing its taxes in those years by $1 million. The advantage to the government? It collects the same amount of tax in five years that it would collect in seven under the current rule.
How does this make a difference? The amount of tax appears to be the same. There are, of course, business advantages to faster write-offs. Those beyond five years are often “over the horizon of planning,” meaning not considered in the purchase decision. Private jets are also more likely be “turned over,” (traded in) sooner than commercial jets, so a shorter depreciation period is a real financial advantage. Remember, too, that if that “trade-in” has value – and it always does – that amount is “recaptured” by the IRS as income.
The real cost of Obama’s demagoguery, however, is borne not by the rich (who will simply decide in some instances not replace that aging business aircraft) but by the poor saps who wire and rivet together those aircraft in Wichita, Kansas (Cessna), and Vero Beach, Florida (Piper).
If all this seems familiar, consider the real world experience of the “luxury taxes” slapped on yachts, and “expensive automobiles” (laughably, those over $30,000) in 1991. After it’s repeal in 1993, here from the Washington Times is the description of that experiment in “fairness.”
"Starting in 1991, Washington levied a 10 percent tax on cars valued above $30,000, boats above $100,000, jewelry and furs above $10,000, and private planes above $250,000. Democrats crowed publicly about how the rich would finally be paying their fair share and privately about convincing President George H.W. Bush to renounce his 'no new taxes' pledge.
"But it wasn't long before even those die-hard "class warriors" noticed they'd badly missed their mark. The taxes took in $97 million less in their first year than had been projected — for the simple reason that people were buying a lot fewer of these goods. Boat building, a key industry in Maine and Massachusetts, (home of some of the more prominent "class warriors") was particularly hard hit. Yacht retailers reported a 77 percent drop in sales that year, while boat builders estimated layoffs at 25,000. With bipartisan support, all but the car tax was repealed in 1993, and in 1996 Congress voted to phase that out too."
There’s your “loophole,” and there is your result. Hope and change.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Determined Dreamer, Passionate Flyer
The second of two articles for Memorial Day, 2011. The first, "Appreciation of Gentle Heroes we Left Behind," is here.
By Courtney A. Kjos (Major Courtney A. Short)
When I first met Randy Murff, it was in a bar in Seoul, South Korea. He was sitting in a high-backed chair at a low table and I noticed immediately how broad and muscular his shoulders were. I thought that they would be so nice to curl up in. I was so right.
Randy was stationed at Kunsan Air Base, on the west side of the South Korean peninsula. He was an F-16 fighter pilot with the 35th Fighter Squadron — impressive, but he didn't try to charm me with Top Gun stories. Instead, he let me know where he went to college: Columbia. I was amazed. A First Lieutenant in the United States Army myself, I realized that I had found possibly the only other young military officer in Korea who had gone to school on Morningside Heights. We spent the rest of the evening comparing stories about our college years. We laughed because almost all of our friends were doctors, lawyers, bankers and consultants from Long Island. We mourned the loss of Ferris Booth and wondered about the never-explored Lerner Hall. As the night closed, I took another long stare into his large, round, star-studded blue eyes and fell in love with him. Right there.
On the evening of June 12, at 9:35 p.m., Randy Murff's F-16 crashed into a rice paddy during a routine night training mission, and he was killed instantly. He was 26 years old. Yet in that short time, he accomplished more, dreamed more, and lived more than many people do their entire lives. He followed a simple principle that is oft forgotten in a world that places high value on money and prestige; he simply did what he truly wanted to do.
In his 26 years, Randy Murff had achieved success in almost everything he tried. He was an outstanding student, athlete and pilot.
Randy is still remembered on the fields of Bellaire (Texas) High School. His decision to play football was made his freshman year, a late start for the average American player, who normally begins in elementary school, especially in a football-crazy state like Texas. However, when Randy, weighing over 200 pounds, approached the coach to express his interest in taking up the sport, he was not met with resistance. You can never have too many big linemen, the coach probably thought to himself.
Yet Randy had more than size on his side. He also had athletic talent that quickly became apparent. He was voted first team All-District, and to the Houston Independent School District All-Academic Team as well. By his senior year, he was co-captain of the football team, offensive MVP and Male Athlete of the Year. He also lettered in baseball and track, all while posting grades that earned him a place on the school's honor roll.
Numerous prestigious universities recruited Randy, and he chose Columbia over Princeton and Cornell, among others. At Columbia, he achieved the same success he had enjoyed in high school. Gracing program covers with gritted teeth and menacing, outstretched arms, No. 68 was a huge offensive lineman — literally. He grew to 6-2, 315 pounds, but despite the robust belly, Randy was a strong, fit powerhouse on the field. "Big Randy," as he would later call his football self, lettered all four years at Columbia, twice made the All-Ivy Second Team and was named to Columbia's "Team of the '90s." As co-captain his senior year, he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with such as Marcellus Wiley '97, who now stars for the NFL's San Diego Chargers, and helped the Lions to an 8-2 record, their best mark since 1945.
Randy loved football; he felt a strong loyalty to the team. Yet if he had been offered an NFL contract, he would have turned it down because he wanted to fly. Every night he would force his roommate to watch Wings on the Discovery channel. Although a Dean's List student, he studied flying far more than he read history. He followed his ambition right to the Air Force recruiter's office, where he was shown a fighter plane. But the recruiter was brutally honest with the would-be pilot; he told "Big Randy" that he simply wouldn't fit in the cockpit.
Most people would give up, go home, reopen those history books and change plans. Not Randy. He embarked on a weight-loss program that consisted of running and eating one Mama Joy's deli sandwich a day. He felt so drained from the toll on his body that he slept away every afternoon. But it produced results — in nine months he dropped 100 pounds.
He weighed 210 when he graduated from Officer Training School in June 1998, a year after his college graduation, still in pursuit of his dream. Randy had a true, heartfelt passion for flying F-16 fighter jets, and he was not about to be denied. He displayed the kind of ambition and drive that made even hard-working fellow Columbians take notice. "He loved flying and he went after it hard," said Gary Kahn '97, his roommate and teammate. "I have never seen that type of determination from anyone in my life. He was the 5-year-old who wanted to be an astronaut or a fighter pilot and refused to let his childhood dream die. How many of us get herded into the jobs that we figured we were supposed to take and didn't follow our dreams?"
Not Randy. He was awarded his wings in July 1999 after graduating from Undergraduate Pilots Training at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas. One year later, in July 2000, Lieutenant Murff graduated as a mission-capable fighter pilot from follow-on fighter training at Luke AFB in Arizona. He was then assigned to the 35th Fighter Squadron at Kunsan AB, Republic of Korea.
Randy was an exceptional fighter pilot with a particular skill for air-to-air missions. He was one of his squadron's best, logging over 250 flying hours and being chosen for special schools and missions. He transported jets from Korea to Moody AFB in Georgia. He conducted over 10 sorties within certain strategic areas that resulted in him being awarded the Aerial Achievement Award. He was chosen to attend Fighter Electronic Combat Officer Course (FECOC) at Nellis AFB, Nevada, and was chosen as Electronic Combat Pilot for the 8th Fighter Wing, a position that normally is given to a major. As Wing ECP, he would have been the Wing expert and trainer on radar and radar warning gear.
He loved going to work every day. He would call me every evening between 9:30 and 10:30 p.m., and the wonder and excitement on the other end of the phone was like a child's. "I flew today," he would say. "I felt just like I was in Star Wars!"
No words can recreate Randy Murff. He lived every moment of his life exactly as he wanted. He flew with desire, energy and sheer excitement; he loved with abandon, devotion and pure adoration. He valued his friends and celebrated his friendships with bravado and a wild spirit. He never missed a moment to tell someone close to him what he or she meant to him. It didn't take me long to realize that I hadn't been alone when I fell in love that night in Seoul. He had fallen in love with me as well. Right there. And he never let a breath slip through his lips without telling me.
Randy Murff, Columbia College, Columbia University '97 met and fell in love with Courtney A. Kjos, Barnard College, Columbia University '99, while both were serving in the military in South Korea — halfway around the world from Morningside Heights.
Although Murff never formally proposed to Kjos, an engagement ring was presented to her by one of his closest friends shortly after Murff was killed in a flying accident on June 12, 2001. Murff had purchased the ring three weeks earlier in the United States (on a mission in which he and another pilot transported F16s to Korea from Luke AFB by flying them across the Pacific) and was going to propose to Kjos in Hawaii during a trip the couple had planned to take in October.
1st Lieutenant Courtney A. Kjos, now Major Courtney A. Short, US Army, wrote this memorial of Randy Murff for Columbia College Today in July, 2001.
By Courtney A. Kjos (Major Courtney A. Short)
When I first met Randy Murff, it was in a bar in Seoul, South Korea. He was sitting in a high-backed chair at a low table and I noticed immediately how broad and muscular his shoulders were. I thought that they would be so nice to curl up in. I was so right.
Randy was stationed at Kunsan Air Base, on the west side of the South Korean peninsula. He was an F-16 fighter pilot with the 35th Fighter Squadron — impressive, but he didn't try to charm me with Top Gun stories. Instead, he let me know where he went to college: Columbia. I was amazed. A First Lieutenant in the United States Army myself, I realized that I had found possibly the only other young military officer in Korea who had gone to school on Morningside Heights. We spent the rest of the evening comparing stories about our college years. We laughed because almost all of our friends were doctors, lawyers, bankers and consultants from Long Island. We mourned the loss of Ferris Booth and wondered about the never-explored Lerner Hall. As the night closed, I took another long stare into his large, round, star-studded blue eyes and fell in love with him. Right there.
On the evening of June 12, at 9:35 p.m., Randy Murff's F-16 crashed into a rice paddy during a routine night training mission, and he was killed instantly. He was 26 years old. Yet in that short time, he accomplished more, dreamed more, and lived more than many people do their entire lives. He followed a simple principle that is oft forgotten in a world that places high value on money and prestige; he simply did what he truly wanted to do.
In his 26 years, Randy Murff had achieved success in almost everything he tried. He was an outstanding student, athlete and pilot.
Randy is still remembered on the fields of Bellaire (Texas) High School. His decision to play football was made his freshman year, a late start for the average American player, who normally begins in elementary school, especially in a football-crazy state like Texas. However, when Randy, weighing over 200 pounds, approached the coach to express his interest in taking up the sport, he was not met with resistance. You can never have too many big linemen, the coach probably thought to himself.
Yet Randy had more than size on his side. He also had athletic talent that quickly became apparent. He was voted first team All-District, and to the Houston Independent School District All-Academic Team as well. By his senior year, he was co-captain of the football team, offensive MVP and Male Athlete of the Year. He also lettered in baseball and track, all while posting grades that earned him a place on the school's honor roll.
Numerous prestigious universities recruited Randy, and he chose Columbia over Princeton and Cornell, among others. At Columbia, he achieved the same success he had enjoyed in high school. Gracing program covers with gritted teeth and menacing, outstretched arms, No. 68 was a huge offensive lineman — literally. He grew to 6-2, 315 pounds, but despite the robust belly, Randy was a strong, fit powerhouse on the field. "Big Randy," as he would later call his football self, lettered all four years at Columbia, twice made the All-Ivy Second Team and was named to Columbia's "Team of the '90s." As co-captain his senior year, he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with such as Marcellus Wiley '97, who now stars for the NFL's San Diego Chargers, and helped the Lions to an 8-2 record, their best mark since 1945.
Randy loved football; he felt a strong loyalty to the team. Yet if he had been offered an NFL contract, he would have turned it down because he wanted to fly. Every night he would force his roommate to watch Wings on the Discovery channel. Although a Dean's List student, he studied flying far more than he read history. He followed his ambition right to the Air Force recruiter's office, where he was shown a fighter plane. But the recruiter was brutally honest with the would-be pilot; he told "Big Randy" that he simply wouldn't fit in the cockpit.
Most people would give up, go home, reopen those history books and change plans. Not Randy. He embarked on a weight-loss program that consisted of running and eating one Mama Joy's deli sandwich a day. He felt so drained from the toll on his body that he slept away every afternoon. But it produced results — in nine months he dropped 100 pounds.
He weighed 210 when he graduated from Officer Training School in June 1998, a year after his college graduation, still in pursuit of his dream. Randy had a true, heartfelt passion for flying F-16 fighter jets, and he was not about to be denied. He displayed the kind of ambition and drive that made even hard-working fellow Columbians take notice. "He loved flying and he went after it hard," said Gary Kahn '97, his roommate and teammate. "I have never seen that type of determination from anyone in my life. He was the 5-year-old who wanted to be an astronaut or a fighter pilot and refused to let his childhood dream die. How many of us get herded into the jobs that we figured we were supposed to take and didn't follow our dreams?"
Not Randy. He was awarded his wings in July 1999 after graduating from Undergraduate Pilots Training at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas. One year later, in July 2000, Lieutenant Murff graduated as a mission-capable fighter pilot from follow-on fighter training at Luke AFB in Arizona. He was then assigned to the 35th Fighter Squadron at Kunsan AB, Republic of Korea.
Randy was an exceptional fighter pilot with a particular skill for air-to-air missions. He was one of his squadron's best, logging over 250 flying hours and being chosen for special schools and missions. He transported jets from Korea to Moody AFB in Georgia. He conducted over 10 sorties within certain strategic areas that resulted in him being awarded the Aerial Achievement Award. He was chosen to attend Fighter Electronic Combat Officer Course (FECOC) at Nellis AFB, Nevada, and was chosen as Electronic Combat Pilot for the 8th Fighter Wing, a position that normally is given to a major. As Wing ECP, he would have been the Wing expert and trainer on radar and radar warning gear.
He loved going to work every day. He would call me every evening between 9:30 and 10:30 p.m., and the wonder and excitement on the other end of the phone was like a child's. "I flew today," he would say. "I felt just like I was in Star Wars!"
No words can recreate Randy Murff. He lived every moment of his life exactly as he wanted. He flew with desire, energy and sheer excitement; he loved with abandon, devotion and pure adoration. He valued his friends and celebrated his friendships with bravado and a wild spirit. He never missed a moment to tell someone close to him what he or she meant to him. It didn't take me long to realize that I hadn't been alone when I fell in love that night in Seoul. He had fallen in love with me as well. Right there. And he never let a breath slip through his lips without telling me.
Randy Murff, Columbia College, Columbia University '97 met and fell in love with Courtney A. Kjos, Barnard College, Columbia University '99, while both were serving in the military in South Korea — halfway around the world from Morningside Heights.
Although Murff never formally proposed to Kjos, an engagement ring was presented to her by one of his closest friends shortly after Murff was killed in a flying accident on June 12, 2001. Murff had purchased the ring three weeks earlier in the United States (on a mission in which he and another pilot transported F16s to Korea from Luke AFB by flying them across the Pacific) and was going to propose to Kjos in Hawaii during a trip the couple had planned to take in October.
1st Lieutenant Courtney A. Kjos, now Major Courtney A. Short, US Army, wrote this memorial of Randy Murff for Columbia College Today in July, 2001.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Reprise: Appreciation of Gentle Heroes We Left Behind
Jeannie and I covered American automobile racing from 2000 until she passed away in 2007, traveling from race to race, writing previews, race reports, and commentary. Automobile
racing, thanks to the iconic Indianapolis 500, has long been associated in a peripheral way with Memorial Day. The sport provided the impetus to write a 2007 Memorial Day article dealing with a bigger question, "How big, really, are the trials of our everyday endeavors, whatever they may be - even if they're ostensibly dangerous and difficult, like driving a race car?" Here is that 2007 Last Turn Clubhouse article:
Appreciation of Gentle Heroes we Left Behind
Some time ago, I wrote something mildly critical of a young driver. “He thinks you don’t appreciate how hard it is to be a sports car driver,” I was told. I assume what was meant was “race car driver.” An old Porsche in the garage makes one a sports car driver.
Mostly, I like race car drivers and appreciate their skills. There are those who have earned that as drivers, and more importantly, as people. Like other athletes, some are very good. Some are not. Sometimes they do badly. Sometimes they rise to excellence. They are not beyond commentary on their worst – or best – days.
I was bothered by that response, though. It seemed somehow…wrong. It became a question: What is hard? What is to be appreciated?
I’ve stood on hallowed ground, at Gettysburg, Shiloh, Chickamauga, Antietam. At the Bloody Lane, on Little Round Top, in the Hornet’s Nest. What boys and young men did there is beyond words. In three days at Gettysburg, the two armies suffered nearly 8,000 killed and over 27,000 wounded. Shiloh, where 3,500 died over two days, was by the end of the war only the ninth most bloody battle. The night of the first day at Shiloh, "You could hear the screams of the injured. They screamed for water, God heard them, for the heavens opened and the rain fell."
From those places and others an unbroken road of gallantry and of tears has run through France (twice), the Pacific and Asia, to Korea (still), Vietnam, Iraq. My time on that road was nearly forty years ago. Some memories are – always will be – vivid.
Brian joined the platoon in December, and later he carried our radio. We shared a hooch of two ponchos, and wrapped up against the chill of the Southeast Asian nights in damp poncho li
ners. We waded through paddies and hacked through jungle. We were in Quang Tri for Tet, then the relief of Khe Sanh and into the A Shau Valley. Brian died in Quang Tri Province in May, thirty-nine years ago (2). He is memorialized on Panel 65E, Line 2, one of 58,256. He never saw his twentieth birthday.
Brian’s mother wrote, “Brian has been buried on a small hill top overlooking a peaceful valley. It is a secluded and restful place, and we are able to go up each evening and pray for his eternal rest.” (1)
Men and women, including some dear to me, continue along that unbroken road, in Korea, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere on land, sea, and in the air around the globe. (3) Unfortunately, gallantry and tears never leave us.
It was right – that thing I was told. I don’t much appreciate how hard it is to be a sports car – race car – driver. Nor any other athelete, football player or snowboarder. Especially on this Memorial Day 2007. Today, I’ll take to heart, for my lost friend Brian and for others, these words penned at Dak To, Republic of Vietnam, January 1, 1970, by a young man soon to become one of “those gentle heroes.”
If you are able, save for them a place inside of you
and save one backward glance when you are leaving
for the places they can no longer go.
Be not ashamed to say you loved them,
though you may or may not have always.
Take what they have taught you with their dying
and keep it with your own.
And in that time when men decide and feel safe
to call the war insane, take one moment
to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind.
Michael Davis O'Donnell
Panel 12W Line 40
KIA March 24, 1970
Notes: Memorial Day 2011
(1) I've since visited that "restful place."
(2) Now forty-three years.
(3) "some dear to me," will apply to Afghanistan later this year when Major Courtney Short begins a tour with the 1st Armored Division.
racing, thanks to the iconic Indianapolis 500, has long been associated in a peripheral way with Memorial Day. The sport provided the impetus to write a 2007 Memorial Day article dealing with a bigger question, "How big, really, are the trials of our everyday endeavors, whatever they may be - even if they're ostensibly dangerous and difficult, like driving a race car?" Here is that 2007 Last Turn Clubhouse article:
Appreciation of Gentle Heroes we Left Behind
Some time ago, I wrote something mildly critical of a young driver. “He thinks you don’t appreciate how hard it is to be a sports car driver,” I was told. I assume what was meant was “race car driver.” An old Porsche in the garage makes one a sports car driver.
Mostly, I like race car drivers and appreciate their skills. There are those who have earned that as drivers, and more importantly, as people. Like other athletes, some are very good. Some are not. Sometimes they do badly. Sometimes they rise to excellence. They are not beyond commentary on their worst – or best – days.
I was bothered by that response, though. It seemed somehow…wrong. It became a question: What is hard? What is to be appreciated?
I’ve stood on hallowed ground, at Gettysburg, Shiloh, Chickamauga, Antietam. At the Bloody Lane, on Little Round Top, in the Hornet’s Nest. What boys and young men did there is beyond words. In three days at Gettysburg, the two armies suffered nearly 8,000 killed and over 27,000 wounded. Shiloh, where 3,500 died over two days, was by the end of the war only the ninth most bloody battle. The night of the first day at Shiloh, "You could hear the screams of the injured. They screamed for water, God heard them, for the heavens opened and the rain fell."
From those places and others an unbroken road of gallantry and of tears has run through France (twice), the Pacific and Asia, to Korea (still), Vietnam, Iraq. My time on that road was nearly forty years ago. Some memories are – always will be – vivid.
Brian joined the platoon in December, and later he carried our radio. We shared a hooch of two ponchos, and wrapped up against the chill of the Southeast Asian nights in damp poncho li
ners. We waded through paddies and hacked through jungle. We were in Quang Tri for Tet, then the relief of Khe Sanh and into the A Shau Valley. Brian died in Quang Tri Province in May, thirty-nine years ago (2). He is memorialized on Panel 65E, Line 2, one of 58,256. He never saw his twentieth birthday.Brian’s mother wrote, “Brian has been buried on a small hill top overlooking a peaceful valley. It is a secluded and restful place, and we are able to go up each evening and pray for his eternal rest.” (1)
Men and women, including some dear to me, continue along that unbroken road, in Korea, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere on land, sea, and in the air around the globe. (3) Unfortunately, gallantry and tears never leave us.
It was right – that thing I was told. I don’t much appreciate how hard it is to be a sports car – race car – driver. Nor any other athelete, football player or snowboarder. Especially on this Memorial Day 2007. Today, I’ll take to heart, for my lost friend Brian and for others, these words penned at Dak To, Republic of Vietnam, January 1, 1970, by a young man soon to become one of “those gentle heroes.”
If you are able, save for them a place inside of you
and save one backward glance when you are leaving
for the places they can no longer go.
Be not ashamed to say you loved them,
though you may or may not have always.
Take what they have taught you with their dying
and keep it with your own.
And in that time when men decide and feel safe
to call the war insane, take one moment
to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind.
Michael Davis O'Donnell
Panel 12W Line 40
KIA March 24, 1970
Notes: Memorial Day 2011
(1) I've since visited that "restful place."
(2) Now forty-three years.
(3) "some dear to me," will apply to Afghanistan later this year when Major Courtney Short begins a tour with the 1st Armored Division.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
This is what Democracy Looks Like?
So reads a sign in the rotunda of the Wisconsin state capital building in Madison. It describes the demonstration by thousands of union members against the attempt of the electorate’s representatives to pass legislation that would strip public employee unions of some of the collective bargaining tools first granted by state law in 1959.
Yes. 1959. Before that, unions of public employees union were generally prohibited from collective bargaining and striking, the widely held belief described by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, certainly a great friend of the union movement,
But it’s not whether you or I are yea or nay on the proposed change, it’s rather whether there are votes cast at all. A teacher at the capital was asked, “shouldn’t you be teaching your students?” She answered, “I’m teaching them about democracy (here).”
According to the Merriam Webster dictionary,
FDR recognized the absurdity of the people’s employees striking against the public, and of unions able to elect those with whom they would then bargain. It should be easier for us to recognize the same now that collectively bargained contracts have brought cities and states to the brink of insolvency.
One might well sympathize with those protesting in Wisconsin, but is that the way we should henceforth contest political decisions – on the street and in hiding rather than on the floor of a legislature?
Whatever it is that's going on in Wisconsin, it’s certainly not democracy.
Yes. 1959. Before that, unions of public employees union were generally prohibited from collective bargaining and striking, the widely held belief described by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, certainly a great friend of the union movement,
All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.The legislation proposed in Wisconsin is a partial roll-back of that 1959 law and a 1967 extension of collective bargaining to state employees (the 1959 law applied to teachers and municipal employees). It’s partial because it preserves collective bargaining for wages. Why is it necessary? According to who supporters, without it, the very budget roll-backs that the unions say they are willing to accept can be blocked across the state town-by-town, school district-by-school district, and contract-by-contract.
But it’s not whether you or I are yea or nay on the proposed change, it’s rather whether there are votes cast at all. A teacher at the capital was asked, “shouldn’t you be teaching your students?” She answered, “I’m teaching them about democracy (here).”
According to the Merriam Webster dictionary,
democracy is a: government by the people; especially the rule of the majority, b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.So, how is democracy defined by a mob intent on blocking a vote of the people’s freely elected representatives? Where is democracy implemented by fleeing across a border to thwart the will of a freely elected majority of the state’s citizens? Should the Republicans in the United States Senate have fled to Canada to block the vote on the president’s health system overhaul? Would that have been defined as democracy? Should our armed forces now be allowed collected bargaining over wages, benefits, and working conditions?
FDR recognized the absurdity of the people’s employees striking against the public, and of unions able to elect those with whom they would then bargain. It should be easier for us to recognize the same now that collectively bargained contracts have brought cities and states to the brink of insolvency.
One might well sympathize with those protesting in Wisconsin, but is that the way we should henceforth contest political decisions – on the street and in hiding rather than on the floor of a legislature?
Whatever it is that's going on in Wisconsin, it’s certainly not democracy.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Valentine's Day 2011
A card for those I love
And have loved.
Some are with us still;
A few are gone.
Some are near
And many are far away.
All are in my heart,
All are in my thoughts
Every day.
For your cards,
For your thoughts,
For being you,
Thank you.
Be successful
By your own measure.
Be good at what is important:
Mother, father, son, daughter, wife, lover, brother, sister, friend.
Be happy
And create happiness around you.
To be loved –
love.
And have loved.
Some are with us still;
A few are gone.
Some are near
And many are far away.
All are in my heart,
All are in my thoughts
Every day.
For your cards,
For your thoughts,
For being you,
Thank you.
Be successful
By your own measure.
Be good at what is important:
Mother, father, son, daughter, wife, lover, brother, sister, friend.
Be happy
And create happiness around you.
To be loved –
love.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Urban (and rural, and suburban) Myths
Here are a few things nearly always stated to be factual - things that "everyone knows." Unfortunately for those who so smugly say them, they are also completely wrong.
In Vietnam, a disproportionate number of those who served in country – and thus of those Killed in Action – were black.
A smaller percentage of those who served in Vietnam were black – 10.6 percent – than the percent of black Americans of military age in the general population – 13.5%. Of those killed by hostile action, 12.1% were black. That reflects the fact that blacks were slightly more likely to be in combat military occupational specialties like infantry and artillery, but is still less than their representation in the American population.
Most of the combat troops in Vietnam were drawn from the poor and poorly educated in American society.
Half of those who served in Vietnam were from middle class, 75% from lower middle/working class or higher backgrounds. About one fourth had a parent who was in a professional, managerial, or technical occupation. Nearly 80% of those who served in Vietnam had a high school diploma, compared to only 63% who served in Korea and 45% in WWII.
Vietnam veterans are broadly afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder, and as a result are less successful in life than their non-veteran peers.
Vietnam veterans have a lower unemployment rate than their age group in the rest of the population. Their personal income is 18% higher than that of their non-veteran peers. There is no difference in the rate of drug use by veterans and non-veterans. Vietnam veterans are less likely to be in prison – only one half of one percent have been incarcerated for crimes.
You met a guy at the club or bar yesterday who was a Vietnam vet – who served “in country.” Naturally, you bought him a drink. Was he for real?
The chances are four in five that your new-found friend was lying. According to the Department of Defense, about 2.7 million soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen served in Vietnam. Many have been lost to us in the years since. However, according to answers given on the 2000 census, 13.9 million claim to have served in-country in Vietnam.
In Vietnam, a disproportionate number of those who served in country – and thus of those Killed in Action – were black.
A smaller percentage of those who served in Vietnam were black – 10.6 percent – than the percent of black Americans of military age in the general population – 13.5%. Of those killed by hostile action, 12.1% were black. That reflects the fact that blacks were slightly more likely to be in combat military occupational specialties like infantry and artillery, but is still less than their representation in the American population.
Most of the combat troops in Vietnam were drawn from the poor and poorly educated in American society.
Half of those who served in Vietnam were from middle class, 75% from lower middle/working class or higher backgrounds. About one fourth had a parent who was in a professional, managerial, or technical occupation. Nearly 80% of those who served in Vietnam had a high school diploma, compared to only 63% who served in Korea and 45% in WWII.
Vietnam veterans are broadly afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder, and as a result are less successful in life than their non-veteran peers.
Vietnam veterans have a lower unemployment rate than their age group in the rest of the population. Their personal income is 18% higher than that of their non-veteran peers. There is no difference in the rate of drug use by veterans and non-veterans. Vietnam veterans are less likely to be in prison – only one half of one percent have been incarcerated for crimes.
You met a guy at the club or bar yesterday who was a Vietnam vet – who served “in country.” Naturally, you bought him a drink. Was he for real?
The chances are four in five that your new-found friend was lying. According to the Department of Defense, about 2.7 million soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen served in Vietnam. Many have been lost to us in the years since. However, according to answers given on the 2000 census, 13.9 million claim to have served in-country in Vietnam.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
A Personal History of Computing - Part 6
By January 1985, I was up to my eyeballs in the commercialization of a maintenance management-inventory control-purchasing software product at EMA, Inc., in St, Paul. – Part 5, June 28, 2008.
When I was hired in January 1985, EMA, with corporate offices in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, had two divisions – EMA Technologies, and EMA Services. Most of the company worked for the second of these, an engineering unit that designed control systems for water and waste water facilities. Of course, I worked for the other one.
EMA Technologies grew out of a contract with WLSSD – Western Lake Superior Sanitary District, in Duluth, Minnesota – to design and develop a computer-based equipment and facilities maintenance and inventory management system. This had been completed successfully enough – at least in the view of EMA executives – that it was decided to purchase the rights to the system and market it as a software product. Soon after, the sale of a corporate license to 3M convinced the company that it was on the right track. It wasn’t.
I was hired to be Technologies’ Product Manager for its key – only, actually - product. A multi-user, mini-computer-based, maintenance planning, scheduling, work order, and inventory control system written in COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) and running on Hewlett-Packard’s HP3000 line of mini computers. It seemed a natural fit. My resume included oversight of the development of just such a system at Chevron, and my education was in marketing.
Short of writing a business case study, I’ll just enumerate the problems with EMA Technologies. Most of the company, the engineers who worked for EMA Services, hated the product (actually hated the idea it was a product at all), and hated the computer it ran on (if it wasn’t a DEC VAX, it wasn’t worth spit). They wanted nothing to do with it and prevailed on the company’s CEO to bar any realistic attempt to sell it to the municipal and regional utilities with which the company routinely did business and with whom the company had a positive image. So the only market in which EMA had any contacts or credibility was off limits. The accidental sale to 3M – a scandalously cheap corporate license, little more than a give-away – convinced the geniuses running the company they could succeed in a competitive market after giving away their only substantial competitive advantage. It didn’t take long to figure out this might be pretty difficult, but heck, there were three small children at home in Apple Valley, and I was at the age at which I could do almost anything – or so I thought.
Technologies was headed by a 3M refugee named Doyle – his last name escapes me – and had a salesman named John Stack. Techies included two project managers and three programmers. And me. The Product Manager.
It had been some time since the 3M sale – since any sale – so Doyle was on the hot seat. That summer Stack, an officer in the Naval Reserve, went on temporary active duty in Hawaii (a better deal than mine in the Minnesota National Guard, a couple of weeks at mosquito-infested Camp Ripley). Anyway, Doyle fired John when he returned. I wasn’t there long enough to know whether John was a good salesman or not. Not long after, Doyle called – or was asked to call – a meeting, a strategy session at which a new direction could be found for Maintenance Manager (that was the product name) sales.
That meeting was a disaster – even before it started. Doyle had invited the CEO, Exec. VP., and other senior employees. Doyle was running around the conference room, hanging paper on the walls, paper that represented the discussion of the group. It wasn’t going anywhere, aimless chatter, when what was expected was leadership, from Doyle, who was supposed to know where we should be going. Alan – he was the CEO – finally got tired of it all, ended the meeting and left. Doyle was gone the next day. Randy, the Exec VP and CFO – the guy who had overseen the development of Maintenance Manager and created Technologies – took over. He was a pretty good manager, but this was a product not going anywhere, anyone could see that. Well, not anyone. I couldn’t. Not then, anyway.
You’ll find out why when I get around to Part 7.
When I was hired in January 1985, EMA, with corporate offices in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, had two divisions – EMA Technologies, and EMA Services. Most of the company worked for the second of these, an engineering unit that designed control systems for water and waste water facilities. Of course, I worked for the other one.
EMA Technologies grew out of a contract with WLSSD – Western Lake Superior Sanitary District, in Duluth, Minnesota – to design and develop a computer-based equipment and facilities maintenance and inventory management system. This had been completed successfully enough – at least in the view of EMA executives – that it was decided to purchase the rights to the system and market it as a software product. Soon after, the sale of a corporate license to 3M convinced the company that it was on the right track. It wasn’t.
I was hired to be Technologies’ Product Manager for its key – only, actually - product. A multi-user, mini-computer-based, maintenance planning, scheduling, work order, and inventory control system written in COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) and running on Hewlett-Packard’s HP3000 line of mini computers. It seemed a natural fit. My resume included oversight of the development of just such a system at Chevron, and my education was in marketing.
Short of writing a business case study, I’ll just enumerate the problems with EMA Technologies. Most of the company, the engineers who worked for EMA Services, hated the product (actually hated the idea it was a product at all), and hated the computer it ran on (if it wasn’t a DEC VAX, it wasn’t worth spit). They wanted nothing to do with it and prevailed on the company’s CEO to bar any realistic attempt to sell it to the municipal and regional utilities with which the company routinely did business and with whom the company had a positive image. So the only market in which EMA had any contacts or credibility was off limits. The accidental sale to 3M – a scandalously cheap corporate license, little more than a give-away – convinced the geniuses running the company they could succeed in a competitive market after giving away their only substantial competitive advantage. It didn’t take long to figure out this might be pretty difficult, but heck, there were three small children at home in Apple Valley, and I was at the age at which I could do almost anything – or so I thought.
Technologies was headed by a 3M refugee named Doyle – his last name escapes me – and had a salesman named John Stack. Techies included two project managers and three programmers. And me. The Product Manager.
It had been some time since the 3M sale – since any sale – so Doyle was on the hot seat. That summer Stack, an officer in the Naval Reserve, went on temporary active duty in Hawaii (a better deal than mine in the Minnesota National Guard, a couple of weeks at mosquito-infested Camp Ripley). Anyway, Doyle fired John when he returned. I wasn’t there long enough to know whether John was a good salesman or not. Not long after, Doyle called – or was asked to call – a meeting, a strategy session at which a new direction could be found for Maintenance Manager (that was the product name) sales.
That meeting was a disaster – even before it started. Doyle had invited the CEO, Exec. VP., and other senior employees. Doyle was running around the conference room, hanging paper on the walls, paper that represented the discussion of the group. It wasn’t going anywhere, aimless chatter, when what was expected was leadership, from Doyle, who was supposed to know where we should be going. Alan – he was the CEO – finally got tired of it all, ended the meeting and left. Doyle was gone the next day. Randy, the Exec VP and CFO – the guy who had overseen the development of Maintenance Manager and created Technologies – took over. He was a pretty good manager, but this was a product not going anywhere, anyone could see that. Well, not anyone. I couldn’t. Not then, anyway.
You’ll find out why when I get around to Part 7.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
A Late Holiday Greeting
Thanks to those from whom I got cards. Once again, it’s well past the holiday, and here I am – finally – with a little Christmas missive; even now I’ve not gotten around to mailing it. Still, I hope it finds every one of you in good health and in the successful pursuit of happiness the founders intended.
Christmas Greetings,
It’s been a year of consolidation and completion. I’ve traveled less while continuing to cover North American sports car racing; for the first time since 1997, I wasn’t at Sebring for the 12 Hours. I was in Monterey in May; that race will return to the fall schedule next season. In August I again visited Kelly and Phyllis Wechsler the weekend of a race at Road America; this year we were joined by some of the guys – including son Ashley – who a few times made the annual winter trek to Daytona for the Sunbank – since renamed Rolex - 24.
In June - for the first time - I attended the annual reunion of the 1st Cavalry Division in Bloomington, Minnesota. Nearly forty-two years later I again saw a few I knew then, and many more with shared experiences. It was a treat to have daughter Heather attend the banquet with me. I'll try to get to the 2011 event at Killeen, Texas (Fort Hood).
Instead of the summer race at Lime Rock Park in Connecticut, I spent time with Courtney, Dave and Olivia in New York, where Courtney is Assistant Professor of History at West Point, and Dave recently moved from the Center for Enhanced Performance to the Academy’s Dean’s Office. Both Majors, this the third of a three year assignment. In the new year, Courtney will be deployed – not certain where – while for Dave a military education assignment to the Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas is likely. Olivia – she was one year old in August – will be with her Dad, who will be keeping a student’s schedule.
Ashley, lately managing a downtown Chicago book store, just recently took a new job as a research editor for a magazine publishing company in Chicago. Along with his sisters, he and GF Lindsey spent Thanksgiving with Nancy in Proctor.
Heather completed her coursework at William Mitchell College of Law this December; during her matriculation, she was on Law Review, National Moot Court competition, was research assistant for a Wm. Mitchell professor, worked for a housing advocacy legal organization, and for a federal judge in an “externship.”
Heather receives here Juris Doctor cum laude in January. Then it’s the bar exam, and in April she begins work for law firm Hanft Fride in Duluth, for whom she interned this past summer.
I’ve been kept busy with writing, including two on-going projects that I’m not ready to talk about. Mom is 96; all-in-all doing well.
Christmas Greetings,
It’s been a year of consolidation and completion. I’ve traveled less while continuing to cover North American sports car racing; for the first time since 1997, I wasn’t at Sebring for the 12 Hours. I was in Monterey in May; that race will return to the fall schedule next season. In August I again visited Kelly and Phyllis Wechsler the weekend of a race at Road America; this year we were joined by some of the guys – including son Ashley – who a few times made the annual winter trek to Daytona for the Sunbank – since renamed Rolex - 24.
In June - for the first time - I attended the annual reunion of the 1st Cavalry Division in Bloomington, Minnesota. Nearly forty-two years later I again saw a few I knew then, and many more with shared experiences. It was a treat to have daughter Heather attend the banquet with me. I'll try to get to the 2011 event at Killeen, Texas (Fort Hood).
Instead of the summer race at Lime Rock Park in Connecticut, I spent time with Courtney, Dave and Olivia in New York, where Courtney is Assistant Professor of History at West Point, and Dave recently moved from the Center for Enhanced Performance to the Academy’s Dean’s Office. Both Majors, this the third of a three year assignment. In the new year, Courtney will be deployed – not certain where – while for Dave a military education assignment to the Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas is likely. Olivia – she was one year old in August – will be with her Dad, who will be keeping a student’s schedule.
Ashley, lately managing a downtown Chicago book store, just recently took a new job as a research editor for a magazine publishing company in Chicago. Along with his sisters, he and GF Lindsey spent Thanksgiving with Nancy in Proctor.
Heather completed her coursework at William Mitchell College of Law this December; during her matriculation, she was on Law Review, National Moot Court competition, was research assistant for a Wm. Mitchell professor, worked for a housing advocacy legal organization, and for a federal judge in an “externship.”
Heather receives here Juris Doctor cum laude in January. Then it’s the bar exam, and in April she begins work for law firm Hanft Fride in Duluth, for whom she interned this past summer.
I’ve been kept busy with writing, including two on-going projects that I’m not ready to talk about. Mom is 96; all-in-all doing well.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
The Inconvenient Truths of History, Part 2
Following Michael Steele’s remarks about Afghanistan, Republicans (and most Democrats) have coalesced to thump anyone questioning the prosecution of this war. Steele may have been artless - and certainly incomplete - in his criticism of our military commitment in Central Asia, but he does seem to assert that the present war is a different war than the one we launched in 2001. It's worth exploring whether that might be the case, and along the way there are other things we need to question that seem lately to have been accepted without challenge.
There seem to be four principal assumptions underlying this broad support for the policy of the United States in regard to Afghanistan.
1. The war is “winnable” if the United States provides adequate support (money, troops, political and moral will).
Here I get to define “winnable.” (No one else has.) I assume we’ve won when (a) the Taliban is permanently banished or housebroken (participates benignly in some future successful central government); and (b) Afghanistan has a central government that has enough control over its own territory to preclude that territory from serving as a base for international terrorism.
Neither of those objectives seems attainable. For the first, an armed insurgency based in part on religious belief has to be completely destroyed or reject its own core beliefs, something I can't remember having been accomplished anywhere, even with overwhelming military force. (The jury is still out on the Tamil Tigers.)
For the second, Afghanistan has to be converted from a loose confederation of tribal areas into a modern state with a strong central government. That’s not a description that has ever applied to Afghanistan, with only the possible short-lived exception of the Marxist government that the Soviet Union tried to rescue in a decade-long war that many believe contributed to the final break-up of the Soviet Empire. To my knowledge, we’ve engaged in no other mission in our history – even Vietnam – as formidable as “winning” the “war in Afghanistan.”
2. “The War in Afghanistan” is one war, continuously fought for a consistent set of objectives.
It simply is not. It’s at least two wars; I can account for four.
The first war commenced in October 2001, and ended some time in 2002. It was fought to disrupt Al-Queda by destroying their training bases and supporting infrastructure, the latter necessarily including the incumbent Taliban government.
That war was a “qualified” success; it denied al-Queda its Afghanistan base, and ended the Taliban’s loose control of Afghanistan in favor of reversion to the country’s traditional and historical loose confederation of tribal areas – “warlords” to some. The “qualifier” on that success? Both the Taliban and al-Queda set up shop in the tribal areas of nearby Pakistan.
The second war commenced immediately on the end of the second. It consisted of a kind of “benign neglect” in which an international force applied just enough force in the region to keep the Karzai government in place and the Taliban at bay (or at least in Pakistan).
The third war (some might call it Obama’s war) began more recently, when Afghanistan was defined as “the right war,” one in which “victory” would depend on “nation building,” an “on-again, off-again” and “in-favor, out-of-favor” “end state” for United States policy toward “failed states” in the twenty-first century. This war began when we stopped “drifting along,” and became committed (after a fashion) to ‘winning.” The question is whether we should have begun this third war, or accepted the ambiguous outcome of the second.
There may be a fourth war, and it may already have begun. This “Fourth War” would be fought in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan with the objective of further pursuing and weakening – if not actually destroying al-Queda and the Taliban leadership. Obama’s increase in missile strikes from remote-piloted aircraft in Pakistan certainly looks like a significant shift of focus to that theater. The pursuit-of-al-Queda rationale that no longer applies to Afghanistan would certainly apply here, with the added advantage that there could be no pretense of “nation-building” in Pakistan. This war would be fought in a lawless frontier, with no objective or pretense to leave it as anything but.
3. Leaving a “failed state” state in Afghanistan will result in a uniquely useful terrorist sanctuary, a “breeding ground” for terror, or somehow erode our ability to protest our interests elsewhere in the world.
The first of those is a “been there, done that,” sort of argument; they’ve been there, and moved on, we’ve been there and if we do the same they won’t then return; so could we, and with advantages – knowledge of the ground, local allies – we have few other places. No, our enemies will stay in the places they have gone – Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Algeria (the hapless AQLIM).
That list of countries strikes directly at the heart of the whole “failed state” theorem – the one that says we can’t “leave one.” Given there are thirty-seven (37) countries that made the Foreign Policy 2010 list of “failed states,” and Afghanistan is one of them, my question is “so what?” There are 36 others that can’t police their territory, that can’t provide security or other basic services for their citizens. Any one of them is a candidate for a sanctuary or a breeding ground. In fact many of them are. What makes Afghanistan unique? Nothing I can see.
Does abandoning Afghanistan compromise our “moral authority,” in foreign and military affairs, the degree to which others see our nation as “reliable?” Any reader able to make sense of any of this will recognize this argument as one of the underpinnings of our engagement in South Vietnam, a bedrock principle of “containment,” supported by the “domino” theory. I won’t take on here whether those assumptions were valid – or whether they were warranted in the circumstances of the day. (That's quite different than an analysis fifty years after the fact.) After the unfortunate boat people and the butchers in Cambodia, no communist horde has swept through South Asia. On the contrary, frozen swai and shirts “Made in Vietnam” are ubiquitous. Ho Chi Minh’s eternal rest must be more than a little uncomfortable; those of us who served in Vietnam could never doubt the population’s entrepreneurial spirit, with ice, (rice) French bread, and Ba Moui Ba (Biere 33) Export on country roadsides and every city street corner.
Afghanistan left to its own devices will, in two or three decades, end up in the same place it would with our “guidance” (to say nothing of our treasure).
4. Afghanistan is a state of strategic importance.
Perhaps if one is intent on holding a South Asia empire. As far as I know we are not, having watched Darius, Alexander, the Mongols, Russia, and Britain acquire – then lose – one, each in turn. (Four of those five were “local powers.” I have no idea what Britain’s excuse was…something about the sun never setting?)
In fact Afghanistan lacks the most rudimentary infrastructure, which, along with a formidable topography, makes it a lousy “base” for anything, excepting perhaps an attack on Iran. Given the difficulty of getting men and material into Afghanistan, getting them out in the direction of Iran is of limited utility. And if that’s our objective, we best get on with it, before a nuclear weapon makes the whole thing moot.
In regard to Iraq, at least George Bush’s strategic vision (practical or not - that's another discussion) of a secular democratic state in the midst of despotic theocracies in the oil-rich (and sea-lane-straddling) Middle East has a potential value that might be worth the expenditure of war. In modern times, no such vision is possible in regard to Afghanistan.
Is there another rationale for pursuing war in Afghanistan? Is there some other support for one of the above principals? I’m willing for a reader to make the case.
There seem to be four principal assumptions underlying this broad support for the policy of the United States in regard to Afghanistan.
1. The war is “winnable” if the United States provides adequate support (money, troops, political and moral will).
Here I get to define “winnable.” (No one else has.) I assume we’ve won when (a) the Taliban is permanently banished or housebroken (participates benignly in some future successful central government); and (b) Afghanistan has a central government that has enough control over its own territory to preclude that territory from serving as a base for international terrorism.
Neither of those objectives seems attainable. For the first, an armed insurgency based in part on religious belief has to be completely destroyed or reject its own core beliefs, something I can't remember having been accomplished anywhere, even with overwhelming military force. (The jury is still out on the Tamil Tigers.)
For the second, Afghanistan has to be converted from a loose confederation of tribal areas into a modern state with a strong central government. That’s not a description that has ever applied to Afghanistan, with only the possible short-lived exception of the Marxist government that the Soviet Union tried to rescue in a decade-long war that many believe contributed to the final break-up of the Soviet Empire. To my knowledge, we’ve engaged in no other mission in our history – even Vietnam – as formidable as “winning” the “war in Afghanistan.”
2. “The War in Afghanistan” is one war, continuously fought for a consistent set of objectives.
It simply is not. It’s at least two wars; I can account for four.
The first war commenced in October 2001, and ended some time in 2002. It was fought to disrupt Al-Queda by destroying their training bases and supporting infrastructure, the latter necessarily including the incumbent Taliban government.
That war was a “qualified” success; it denied al-Queda its Afghanistan base, and ended the Taliban’s loose control of Afghanistan in favor of reversion to the country’s traditional and historical loose confederation of tribal areas – “warlords” to some. The “qualifier” on that success? Both the Taliban and al-Queda set up shop in the tribal areas of nearby Pakistan.
The second war commenced immediately on the end of the second. It consisted of a kind of “benign neglect” in which an international force applied just enough force in the region to keep the Karzai government in place and the Taliban at bay (or at least in Pakistan).
The third war (some might call it Obama’s war) began more recently, when Afghanistan was defined as “the right war,” one in which “victory” would depend on “nation building,” an “on-again, off-again” and “in-favor, out-of-favor” “end state” for United States policy toward “failed states” in the twenty-first century. This war began when we stopped “drifting along,” and became committed (after a fashion) to ‘winning.” The question is whether we should have begun this third war, or accepted the ambiguous outcome of the second.
There may be a fourth war, and it may already have begun. This “Fourth War” would be fought in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan with the objective of further pursuing and weakening – if not actually destroying al-Queda and the Taliban leadership. Obama’s increase in missile strikes from remote-piloted aircraft in Pakistan certainly looks like a significant shift of focus to that theater. The pursuit-of-al-Queda rationale that no longer applies to Afghanistan would certainly apply here, with the added advantage that there could be no pretense of “nation-building” in Pakistan. This war would be fought in a lawless frontier, with no objective or pretense to leave it as anything but.
3. Leaving a “failed state” state in Afghanistan will result in a uniquely useful terrorist sanctuary, a “breeding ground” for terror, or somehow erode our ability to protest our interests elsewhere in the world.
The first of those is a “been there, done that,” sort of argument; they’ve been there, and moved on, we’ve been there and if we do the same they won’t then return; so could we, and with advantages – knowledge of the ground, local allies – we have few other places. No, our enemies will stay in the places they have gone – Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Algeria (the hapless AQLIM).
That list of countries strikes directly at the heart of the whole “failed state” theorem – the one that says we can’t “leave one.” Given there are thirty-seven (37) countries that made the Foreign Policy 2010 list of “failed states,” and Afghanistan is one of them, my question is “so what?” There are 36 others that can’t police their territory, that can’t provide security or other basic services for their citizens. Any one of them is a candidate for a sanctuary or a breeding ground. In fact many of them are. What makes Afghanistan unique? Nothing I can see.
Does abandoning Afghanistan compromise our “moral authority,” in foreign and military affairs, the degree to which others see our nation as “reliable?” Any reader able to make sense of any of this will recognize this argument as one of the underpinnings of our engagement in South Vietnam, a bedrock principle of “containment,” supported by the “domino” theory. I won’t take on here whether those assumptions were valid – or whether they were warranted in the circumstances of the day. (That's quite different than an analysis fifty years after the fact.) After the unfortunate boat people and the butchers in Cambodia, no communist horde has swept through South Asia. On the contrary, frozen swai and shirts “Made in Vietnam” are ubiquitous. Ho Chi Minh’s eternal rest must be more than a little uncomfortable; those of us who served in Vietnam could never doubt the population’s entrepreneurial spirit, with ice, (rice) French bread, and Ba Moui Ba (Biere 33) Export on country roadsides and every city street corner.
Afghanistan left to its own devices will, in two or three decades, end up in the same place it would with our “guidance” (to say nothing of our treasure).
4. Afghanistan is a state of strategic importance.
Perhaps if one is intent on holding a South Asia empire. As far as I know we are not, having watched Darius, Alexander, the Mongols, Russia, and Britain acquire – then lose – one, each in turn. (Four of those five were “local powers.” I have no idea what Britain’s excuse was…something about the sun never setting?)
In fact Afghanistan lacks the most rudimentary infrastructure, which, along with a formidable topography, makes it a lousy “base” for anything, excepting perhaps an attack on Iran. Given the difficulty of getting men and material into Afghanistan, getting them out in the direction of Iran is of limited utility. And if that’s our objective, we best get on with it, before a nuclear weapon makes the whole thing moot.
In regard to Iraq, at least George Bush’s strategic vision (practical or not - that's another discussion) of a secular democratic state in the midst of despotic theocracies in the oil-rich (and sea-lane-straddling) Middle East has a potential value that might be worth the expenditure of war. In modern times, no such vision is possible in regard to Afghanistan.
Is there another rationale for pursuing war in Afghanistan? Is there some other support for one of the above principals? I’m willing for a reader to make the case.
Friday, June 25, 2010
The Inconvenient Truths of History
The other day a television reporter, commenting on the President’s relief of General Stanley McChrystal, said, “Obama’s already done the unprecedented…relieved a commanding general in wartime…” referring to his relief of General David McKiernan a year ago.
Of course that’s stupid. Just off the top of my head, there were McDowell, McClellan, MacArthur, and McKiernan before McChrystal. But so what? Being stupid is routine enough not to require comment.
The real question: “Is such stupidity important?”
In the past two decades, education in the United States has been hell-bent on being “relevant,” as if immediate use is the sole measure of knowledge. Tell Plato. Or Einstein, for that matter. Neither one spent a great deal of time being relevant. As things turned out, what they thought about was important, however.
If you think something is “unprecedented,” you might be easily led to the conclusion it’s wrong. Years ago, in this very blog, I wrote disparagingly about George Bush’s un-nuanced pronouncement that he “trusted the generals.” He couldn’t know whether his general would turn out to be Washington or Burnside.
Lincoln would have been in a fine kettle of fish if he hadn’t finally decided to stop trusting “Little Mac” and fire him. McClellan was –and remained – very popular, winning the Democratic nomination and running for president against Lincoln in 1864. McClellan was also a very weak battle commander; so much for popular opinion.
Taking our theme further, our current president made “fighting the right war” a centerpiece of his successful election campaign. What made Afghanistan the right war? “Getting Bin Laden? Since when does revenge – ok, law enforcement, then – justify a nation at war? Killing or capturing Bin Laden will not likely materially reduce the potential of radical Islamists around the globe to do us harm. Disruption of Al Kaida's base of operations at the time they planned and launched the 9/11 attacks? We accomplished that in just weeks after our October 7, 2001 attack. The first U.S. soldier killed by hostile fire was on January 4, 2002. Perhaps that would have been a good time to declare victory and leave; Al Kaida had already done so, decamping for Pakistan. Instead, we stayed in Afghanistan to "nation build," incidentally - and inexplicably - giving Al Kaida the same kind of sanctuary we once gave the NVA and Viet Cong.
Alexander the Great, having subdued the Persian Empire, the world’s great power of that day, took his army into Afghanistan in 330 BC. Four years of bitter battles later, he prevailed, but his army was so exhausted and depleted it never really recovered, and Alexander was soon dead. His dream of Empire had truly died in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan.
Britain fought three Afghan Wars, tactical successes, but strategically no benefit to the Raj and the larger Empire. In the last gasp of its own Empire, the Soviet Union lost 15,000 killed and 35,000 wounded in Afghanistan. From the Sistan Basin to the Hindu Kush this has been graveyard of three Empires. This is really the right war?
Fighting irregulars who have some popular support with a regular army while allowing the enemy a geographic sanctuary is folly. That was true in the British colonies in North America at the end of the eighteenth century. In the Peninsular War of 1807-1812. In Vietnam. It’s unlikely to be different in Afghanistan.
Am I a "pacifist," or "anti-war" in this one? Not really. I'd support a large-scale (Colin Powell's dictum on overwhelming force) attack into Pakistan's tribal areas where the threat might still exist, rip those bastards up - and let Afghanistan go back to hearding goats, growing poppies, beating women, whatever else they do.
History: a compendium of truly inconvenient truths.
Note: A few days after I wrote the above, RNC Chairman Michael Steele was excoriated for saying much the same thing. Is he crazy, as they - even Fox - assert? Am I?
Of course that’s stupid. Just off the top of my head, there were McDowell, McClellan, MacArthur, and McKiernan before McChrystal. But so what? Being stupid is routine enough not to require comment.
The real question: “Is such stupidity important?”
In the past two decades, education in the United States has been hell-bent on being “relevant,” as if immediate use is the sole measure of knowledge. Tell Plato. Or Einstein, for that matter. Neither one spent a great deal of time being relevant. As things turned out, what they thought about was important, however.
If you think something is “unprecedented,” you might be easily led to the conclusion it’s wrong. Years ago, in this very blog, I wrote disparagingly about George Bush’s un-nuanced pronouncement that he “trusted the generals.” He couldn’t know whether his general would turn out to be Washington or Burnside.
Lincoln would have been in a fine kettle of fish if he hadn’t finally decided to stop trusting “Little Mac” and fire him. McClellan was –and remained – very popular, winning the Democratic nomination and running for president against Lincoln in 1864. McClellan was also a very weak battle commander; so much for popular opinion.
Taking our theme further, our current president made “fighting the right war” a centerpiece of his successful election campaign. What made Afghanistan the right war? “Getting Bin Laden? Since when does revenge – ok, law enforcement, then – justify a nation at war? Killing or capturing Bin Laden will not likely materially reduce the potential of radical Islamists around the globe to do us harm. Disruption of Al Kaida's base of operations at the time they planned and launched the 9/11 attacks? We accomplished that in just weeks after our October 7, 2001 attack. The first U.S. soldier killed by hostile fire was on January 4, 2002. Perhaps that would have been a good time to declare victory and leave; Al Kaida had already done so, decamping for Pakistan. Instead, we stayed in Afghanistan to "nation build," incidentally - and inexplicably - giving Al Kaida the same kind of sanctuary we once gave the NVA and Viet Cong.
Alexander the Great, having subdued the Persian Empire, the world’s great power of that day, took his army into Afghanistan in 330 BC. Four years of bitter battles later, he prevailed, but his army was so exhausted and depleted it never really recovered, and Alexander was soon dead. His dream of Empire had truly died in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan.
Britain fought three Afghan Wars, tactical successes, but strategically no benefit to the Raj and the larger Empire. In the last gasp of its own Empire, the Soviet Union lost 15,000 killed and 35,000 wounded in Afghanistan. From the Sistan Basin to the Hindu Kush this has been graveyard of three Empires. This is really the right war?
Fighting irregulars who have some popular support with a regular army while allowing the enemy a geographic sanctuary is folly. That was true in the British colonies in North America at the end of the eighteenth century. In the Peninsular War of 1807-1812. In Vietnam. It’s unlikely to be different in Afghanistan.
Am I a "pacifist," or "anti-war" in this one? Not really. I'd support a large-scale (Colin Powell's dictum on overwhelming force) attack into Pakistan's tribal areas where the threat might still exist, rip those bastards up - and let Afghanistan go back to hearding goats, growing poppies, beating women, whatever else they do.
History: a compendium of truly inconvenient truths.
Note: A few days after I wrote the above, RNC Chairman Michael Steele was excoriated for saying much the same thing. Is he crazy, as they - even Fox - assert? Am I?
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Memorial Day Primer
One of the networks had a "Memorial Day Special" today, a remembrance of the victims of 9/11. Though that may be admirable, it has absolutely nothing to do with Memorial Day. So, for CBS, for those grocery stores touting a "10% military discount" (grammar aside), and others who are confused about such things, here's a little primer.
Memorial Day is observed on the last Monday of May to commemorate U.S. men and women who died while in military service, or as a result of injury in battle. Founded as Decoration Day in May 1868 to honor Union soldiers of the American Civil War, after World War I it became a commemoration of all United States war dead.
Veteran’s Day, originally known as Armistice Day, and observed on November 11, commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front, at eleven o'clock on 11 November of 1918. Veterans Day now honors all veterans of the United States who have served honorably in war or peace.
Armed Forces Day, created in 1949 and designated an official holiday by President Kennedy in 1962, honors Americans serving in the five U.S. military branches – the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard, is celebrated on the third Saturday in May.
A hero is one who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, displays courage and the will for self sacrifice – that is, heroism – for some greater good.
Certainly it's right that individuals and families use this day to remember those they've lost of any history or status. Those conducting official events, however, should do so on the day set aside for that remembrance or honor.
I just thought you should know.
Memorial Day is observed on the last Monday of May to commemorate U.S. men and women who died while in military service, or as a result of injury in battle. Founded as Decoration Day in May 1868 to honor Union soldiers of the American Civil War, after World War I it became a commemoration of all United States war dead.
Veteran’s Day, originally known as Armistice Day, and observed on November 11, commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front, at eleven o'clock on 11 November of 1918. Veterans Day now honors all veterans of the United States who have served honorably in war or peace.
Armed Forces Day, created in 1949 and designated an official holiday by President Kennedy in 1962, honors Americans serving in the five U.S. military branches – the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard, is celebrated on the third Saturday in May.
A hero is one who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, displays courage and the will for self sacrifice – that is, heroism – for some greater good.
Certainly it's right that individuals and families use this day to remember those they've lost of any history or status. Those conducting official events, however, should do so on the day set aside for that remembrance or honor.
I just thought you should know.
Monday, May 10, 2010
24 Hours: Tet 1968
Delta, 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry dug in late that afternoon on a bushy hill in the rolling piedmont of Quang Tri province, a few miles south of the DMZ. Khe Sahn – the reason we’d flown north from the Bong Son plain on the central coast earlier in the month – was already enveloped in a tightening ring not far to the west.
Bong Son had fixed itself in our memories as a kind of mythical hell. Our last time there, before sitting out Christmas in an eerily quiet An Lao valley, was Tam Quan, the battle with the North Vietnamese Army’s 22nd Regiment, where we lost Cortes-Rosa, Southerland, Tierno, Flores, O'Neil, Hicks, and Lebron-Domenech. Where Captain Orsini was wounded, won the DSC, was replaced by Richard Kent. Where Allan Lynch won the Medal of Honor. Pending that award, we’d left Allan behind at Camp Radcliff – An Khe. The paperwork wouldn’t actually be filed until the next fall, when witness statements were found in a previously unopened Conex container flown north with us. Not much had happened since the move north. The 1st Brigade secured and built– was still building, actually - LZ Sharon, its base just outside Quang Tri city. We’d patrolled an area of operations but not found much. There was the occasional small sharp contact, quickly broken off, already only hazily recalled.
We laagered in the afternoon (we didn’t use that word – the mech guys and tankers did – we ”resupplied”). Perhaps we got a hot meal in marmite cans, beer and soda iced down in garbage cans, or just the usual cases of charlie rats, ammo, socks, and such.
It started as a quiet night, and Vietnam, when it was quiet, was deathly quiet – a terribly wrong metaphor, since death in Vietnam didn’t come in the quiet at all, but in the staccatos of M-16’s and AK-47’s, each distinctive, in the zzzzip of ball rounds cutting the air; the double detonations of an RPG, the first its launch, the second deadly; the pungent odor of cordite.
I’d gotten the platoon’s sector of the company perimeter, checked the lay-in of the M60’s, coordinated platoon boundaries right and left, suggested targets – defensive and H&I – to the artillery forward observer.
Our platoon sergeant – it might have been Johnson then – attended to resupply and to the platoon CP. Everyone took turns digging – something we did without complaint – and attending to other things like putting up a hooch, two ponchos, though sometimes in the dry season and in the relative open of the piedmont, we’d dispense with such luxury accommodations. Squad leaders would have fields of fire cleared, OP’s assigned, be working on resupply.
Soon after locating and securing that night’s company position, we’d have gotten a single Shithook (CH47 Chinook) or multiple Slicks (UH-1D Iroquois “Huey”) with our night defensive pack – mortars, extra claymores, ammunition, our rucksacks – whenever possible we were light in the field – rifle, ammunition, grenades, radios – the basics, the rest “hooked out.”
Sometimes – after dark, after all work was done and the first watch was set – we’d talk quietly, about “the world,” and the “round-eyed girls” there, carefully cupping our cigarettes.
That eve of the Tet holiday was one of those nights of quiet talk, and at some time, someone had a radio, and AFVN was reporting “the battle for Vietnam.” Tet 1968 was underway. I have no idea why a radio would be on after dark in the bush, but there it was, and we were listening to the battle for Vietnam under a starry sky on that bushy hill in the piedmont.
We stayed up late that night, listening, talking, thinking about it all; a kind of heavily armed slumber party. We’d usually be down with the sunset, with a second, or third, watch – radio, perimeter, OP – coming up. This time we listened and wondered where we’d be going on the next day. Something in each of us wanted to get into it, this battle for Vietnam, and equally, something in each of us didn’t, wanted to just be able to continue our walkabout in the piedmont, no one gets hurt. We knew better, we’d go somewhere into this battle, and no one would ask us what we thought, or what we wanted, we’d just go where the Slicks took us.
Sometime overnight, Captain Kent – a self-effacing West Pointer who’d told us his fame at the academy derived pretty much exclusively from his membership in its Jewish Choir (true, it’s in his yearbook entry) – got our mission, when we’d be picked up, where we were going, some idea of why, that last part only a guess, to patrol for some NVA unit believed to be in the area, going toward, or coming from one of those soon-to-be-famous places like Hue. Not just ‘like’ Hue, but actually Hue, just down Highway 1 from that bushy hill in the piedmont.
Kent called together his platoon leaders, gave us an order of lift for the air assault, our destination landing zone, order of march out of the LZ, and that ‘objective.’ We took it all back to our platoons, setting our own order of lift, squad, platoon CP, squad, etc., sector responsibility on landing – usually first straight ahead from each of our slicks, then if it’s a cold LZ, rallying to a clock direction, probably 6 o’clock that day, since we’d be last in the company’s order of march. Wherever we were going, we weren’t the most important move on that day, for we sat on that hill for most of the morning, then finally it was ‘slicks inbound,’ smoke was out and the first platoon got ready to scramble aboard.
We flew low and fast, east toward the coast, to a dry paddy landing zone south of Quang Tri. Part of the I Corps coastal plain north of the Hai Van pass on Highway 1 this side of Danang, the terrain was flat, divided into then-dry rice paddies, palm-filled villages dotting the landscape, connected by footpaths adjoining sandy ridges, dunes they might be called, but not the loose sand closer the coast. We were third in the order of march; first and second platoon, and the company command party were in the LZ ahead of us, and moved off it in the lead, to the south. We followed.
Whatever the third platoon’s own order of march for its own squads that day, I was in the lead squad. The point team was ahead, the lead squad leader near me, a gun behind. From there – or sometimes from just behind that first squad, I would more likely be able to tell what was happening in contact. That day, because of what followed, I think the lead squad’s M60 was behind me.
We continued south, platoons in column, moving more slowly than usual, starting and stopping. We traveled through hamlets, and past a small well in an open area within one of them. Ahead of us some had quickly stopped for water; I believe some further back in the third platoon also stopped.
We’d just passed that well, and not yet cleared the built-up area of the hamlet when “all hell broke loose,” down the path. This was an explosion of sound, a huge crashing clash of scores of weapons all together that drowns any of those distinctive sounds in other, more sporadic, engagements.
Two platoons were pinned down by fire in an ambush ahead of us, where the path passed a low rise on the left of the direction of march. I may have decided to move the platoon to the left on my own, or it may have come as an order; there was no way to go ahead, that would just run into the next platoon, and from the sound, into a kill zone. Follow me. As we started go left and ahead, keeping the firing to our right, I had the handset in my grip, tugging the platoon radio – and Brian, to whose back it was attached – along. Follow me. I’d said it, and how trite was that, the Infantry School motto? But what else is there to say? It’s too damn noisy to say anything else, and there’s no time to discuss anything. You don’t get to call a time out.
We moved a hundred yards, maybe a bit further, on an angle to the left, until we encountered a ditch across our front. The firing was to our right, and some of it was coming up that ditch. But across, that was the way we had to go, I knew it, that there we’d be behind that ambushing enemy. I crossed. I thought for a moment I was alone that no one had followed. I was wrong, one soldier, a SP4 separated from the rest of his platoon, the second, I think, just ahead of us when the firing broke out. He’d followed me, looked at me, asked, “Where are we going?” “There,” I said, “along that ridge.” We were now behind it, and clearly there was the sound of AK’s firing, most away from us, some not. No conscious thought of that, though. After a few ineffective rifle rounds into the dirt of that rise, a muttered, “let’s go,” and we rushed forward, now with grenades – I usually carried four – preparing one on the run. Reaching the nearest spider hole, I pushed a grenade into it, rolled away, and without waiting for its detonation, went for the next, then continued down the line to my left. My companion had caught up, and worked in the other direction, doing the same.
Finally, as firing went quiet – not just where we were, but elsewhere on the field, those weren’t the only positions of the NVA enemy – we exhausted our grenades, and almost immediately, the rest of the third platoon, they had followed, came up to where we were, and secured the ridge. The sound of firing was now replaced by the thump-thump-thump of the dust off (medivac) slick. Captain Kent had been wounded early in the contact, and PFC Billy Lee Wright, a medic, was killed in action.
Our old friend, Captain Donald Orsini, returned to Delta that night to replace Kent, who had first joined us when Orsini was wounded at Tam Quan.
That was our Tet, what I remember of it, anyway. Other units of the 1st Cavalry Division were in the battle at Hue. We returned to a combination of a lot of search and not much destroy, along with some firebase security though February and March. Then in April, the routine would change once again with Operation Pegasus – the relief of Khe Sanh.
Bong Son had fixed itself in our memories as a kind of mythical hell. Our last time there, before sitting out Christmas in an eerily quiet An Lao valley, was Tam Quan, the battle with the North Vietnamese Army’s 22nd Regiment, where we lost Cortes-Rosa, Southerland, Tierno, Flores, O'Neil, Hicks, and Lebron-Domenech. Where Captain Orsini was wounded, won the DSC, was replaced by Richard Kent. Where Allan Lynch won the Medal of Honor. Pending that award, we’d left Allan behind at Camp Radcliff – An Khe. The paperwork wouldn’t actually be filed until the next fall, when witness statements were found in a previously unopened Conex container flown north with us. Not much had happened since the move north. The 1st Brigade secured and built– was still building, actually - LZ Sharon, its base just outside Quang Tri city. We’d patrolled an area of operations but not found much. There was the occasional small sharp contact, quickly broken off, already only hazily recalled.
We laagered in the afternoon (we didn’t use that word – the mech guys and tankers did – we ”resupplied”). Perhaps we got a hot meal in marmite cans, beer and soda iced down in garbage cans, or just the usual cases of charlie rats, ammo, socks, and such.
It started as a quiet night, and Vietnam, when it was quiet, was deathly quiet – a terribly wrong metaphor, since death in Vietnam didn’t come in the quiet at all, but in the staccatos of M-16’s and AK-47’s, each distinctive, in the zzzzip of ball rounds cutting the air; the double detonations of an RPG, the first its launch, the second deadly; the pungent odor of cordite.
I’d gotten the platoon’s sector of the company perimeter, checked the lay-in of the M60’s, coordinated platoon boundaries right and left, suggested targets – defensive and H&I – to the artillery forward observer.
Our platoon sergeant – it might have been Johnson then – attended to resupply and to the platoon CP. Everyone took turns digging – something we did without complaint – and attending to other things like putting up a hooch, two ponchos, though sometimes in the dry season and in the relative open of the piedmont, we’d dispense with such luxury accommodations. Squad leaders would have fields of fire cleared, OP’s assigned, be working on resupply.
Soon after locating and securing that night’s company position, we’d have gotten a single Shithook (CH47 Chinook) or multiple Slicks (UH-1D Iroquois “Huey”) with our night defensive pack – mortars, extra claymores, ammunition, our rucksacks – whenever possible we were light in the field – rifle, ammunition, grenades, radios – the basics, the rest “hooked out.”
Sometimes – after dark, after all work was done and the first watch was set – we’d talk quietly, about “the world,” and the “round-eyed girls” there, carefully cupping our cigarettes.
That eve of the Tet holiday was one of those nights of quiet talk, and at some time, someone had a radio, and AFVN was reporting “the battle for Vietnam.” Tet 1968 was underway. I have no idea why a radio would be on after dark in the bush, but there it was, and we were listening to the battle for Vietnam under a starry sky on that bushy hill in the piedmont.
We stayed up late that night, listening, talking, thinking about it all; a kind of heavily armed slumber party. We’d usually be down with the sunset, with a second, or third, watch – radio, perimeter, OP – coming up. This time we listened and wondered where we’d be going on the next day. Something in each of us wanted to get into it, this battle for Vietnam, and equally, something in each of us didn’t, wanted to just be able to continue our walkabout in the piedmont, no one gets hurt. We knew better, we’d go somewhere into this battle, and no one would ask us what we thought, or what we wanted, we’d just go where the Slicks took us.
Sometime overnight, Captain Kent – a self-effacing West Pointer who’d told us his fame at the academy derived pretty much exclusively from his membership in its Jewish Choir (true, it’s in his yearbook entry) – got our mission, when we’d be picked up, where we were going, some idea of why, that last part only a guess, to patrol for some NVA unit believed to be in the area, going toward, or coming from one of those soon-to-be-famous places like Hue. Not just ‘like’ Hue, but actually Hue, just down Highway 1 from that bushy hill in the piedmont.
Kent called together his platoon leaders, gave us an order of lift for the air assault, our destination landing zone, order of march out of the LZ, and that ‘objective.’ We took it all back to our platoons, setting our own order of lift, squad, platoon CP, squad, etc., sector responsibility on landing – usually first straight ahead from each of our slicks, then if it’s a cold LZ, rallying to a clock direction, probably 6 o’clock that day, since we’d be last in the company’s order of march. Wherever we were going, we weren’t the most important move on that day, for we sat on that hill for most of the morning, then finally it was ‘slicks inbound,’ smoke was out and the first platoon got ready to scramble aboard.
We flew low and fast, east toward the coast, to a dry paddy landing zone south of Quang Tri. Part of the I Corps coastal plain north of the Hai Van pass on Highway 1 this side of Danang, the terrain was flat, divided into then-dry rice paddies, palm-filled villages dotting the landscape, connected by footpaths adjoining sandy ridges, dunes they might be called, but not the loose sand closer the coast. We were third in the order of march; first and second platoon, and the company command party were in the LZ ahead of us, and moved off it in the lead, to the south. We followed.
Whatever the third platoon’s own order of march for its own squads that day, I was in the lead squad. The point team was ahead, the lead squad leader near me, a gun behind. From there – or sometimes from just behind that first squad, I would more likely be able to tell what was happening in contact. That day, because of what followed, I think the lead squad’s M60 was behind me.
We continued south, platoons in column, moving more slowly than usual, starting and stopping. We traveled through hamlets, and past a small well in an open area within one of them. Ahead of us some had quickly stopped for water; I believe some further back in the third platoon also stopped.
We’d just passed that well, and not yet cleared the built-up area of the hamlet when “all hell broke loose,” down the path. This was an explosion of sound, a huge crashing clash of scores of weapons all together that drowns any of those distinctive sounds in other, more sporadic, engagements.
Two platoons were pinned down by fire in an ambush ahead of us, where the path passed a low rise on the left of the direction of march. I may have decided to move the platoon to the left on my own, or it may have come as an order; there was no way to go ahead, that would just run into the next platoon, and from the sound, into a kill zone. Follow me. As we started go left and ahead, keeping the firing to our right, I had the handset in my grip, tugging the platoon radio – and Brian, to whose back it was attached – along. Follow me. I’d said it, and how trite was that, the Infantry School motto? But what else is there to say? It’s too damn noisy to say anything else, and there’s no time to discuss anything. You don’t get to call a time out.
We moved a hundred yards, maybe a bit further, on an angle to the left, until we encountered a ditch across our front. The firing was to our right, and some of it was coming up that ditch. But across, that was the way we had to go, I knew it, that there we’d be behind that ambushing enemy. I crossed. I thought for a moment I was alone that no one had followed. I was wrong, one soldier, a SP4 separated from the rest of his platoon, the second, I think, just ahead of us when the firing broke out. He’d followed me, looked at me, asked, “Where are we going?” “There,” I said, “along that ridge.” We were now behind it, and clearly there was the sound of AK’s firing, most away from us, some not. No conscious thought of that, though. After a few ineffective rifle rounds into the dirt of that rise, a muttered, “let’s go,” and we rushed forward, now with grenades – I usually carried four – preparing one on the run. Reaching the nearest spider hole, I pushed a grenade into it, rolled away, and without waiting for its detonation, went for the next, then continued down the line to my left. My companion had caught up, and worked in the other direction, doing the same.
Finally, as firing went quiet – not just where we were, but elsewhere on the field, those weren’t the only positions of the NVA enemy – we exhausted our grenades, and almost immediately, the rest of the third platoon, they had followed, came up to where we were, and secured the ridge. The sound of firing was now replaced by the thump-thump-thump of the dust off (medivac) slick. Captain Kent had been wounded early in the contact, and PFC Billy Lee Wright, a medic, was killed in action.
Our old friend, Captain Donald Orsini, returned to Delta that night to replace Kent, who had first joined us when Orsini was wounded at Tam Quan.
That was our Tet, what I remember of it, anyway. Other units of the 1st Cavalry Division were in the battle at Hue. We returned to a combination of a lot of search and not much destroy, along with some firebase security though February and March. Then in April, the routine would change once again with Operation Pegasus – the relief of Khe Sanh.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Ambiguity is the Soul of Deterence
In today's news:
Fine. But why in hell would you announce it? An effective deterent policy is intentionally ambiguous.
The Obama administration is adopting a new policy limiting the circumstances under which the U.S. would use nuclear weapons, keeping with the president's pledge to give the nuclear arsenal a less prominent role in U.S. defense strategy.
The document is expected to say the U.S. is moving toward a policy in which the "sole purpose" of nuclear weapons is to deter or respond to nuclear attack, according to the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the policy review has not been released.
That wording would rule out the use of such weapons to respond to an attack by conventional, biological or chemical weapons. Previous U.S. policy was more ambiguous.
In an interview with the New York Times on Monday, Obama said his administration was explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons.
Fine. But why in hell would you announce it? An effective deterent policy is intentionally ambiguous.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Football's Part of the Glue
I remember the last two Vikings NFC Championship games, both losses. Regardless, they’re good memories. The first of them, my son Ashley and I were at the All American Sports Bar at the Mall of America – gone now.
That was January 17, 1999, at the end of that amazing 1998 season – an end that came too soon. Denny Green had Randall Cunningham take a knee. Gary Anderson missed the winning field goal from 38 yards – a foot wide left – with 2:07 to play, his first miss of the season, after a perfect 44 straight. At the end it was a 30-27 loss in overtime.
It was a great time, few hours in which sports, entertainment, friends, and family, all come together, sharing the ecstasy of winning and the agony of defeat one play at a time, suspending time and thoughts of everything outside of the game before your eyes.
Two years later, January 14, 2001, Kelly Wechsler, Jim Schwartz and I were at the latter’s for another NFC Championship game, the Vikings at the Giants. Ashley was away at Drake University.
This one was over early, and the sports only lasted for a while before we turned to other topics, taking refuge in friendship – including our Packer-fan host – in the early absence of entertainment that could hold our attention.
Giants 41, Vikings 0, launching a dark era in Vikings history that’s only recently ended – ironically with the arrival of the old man from Kiln, Mississippi – the Packers quarterback we loved to hate – but recognized for his skills – all those years.
Jeannie and I watched the Vikings and her Broncos; we were at the Metrodome for a Broncos' win. She laughed that I pouted for hours after. We enjoyed the Rodents for two seasons in the dome and traveled to Nashville to watch them beat Alabama in a bowl game. Shared experiences.
We’re scattered now; Jeannie is gone. Ashley and I talked last night, and I talked to Kelly. We’ll likely text during today’s game. Hopefully, the messages will be ones of satisfaction rather than of frustration.
Yes, I remember the “Hail Mary” of 1975, and the Superbowls lost before that. But those spirits are long since exorcized. It’s those two recently past NFC Championship game that are the emotional background for this game. It will either be 1 for 3 or 0 for 3 at the end of the day.
It's not so much football or the Vikings, or any other team. It's the shared experience, win or lose. A bit of the glue in the friendships and relationships in our lives.
That was January 17, 1999, at the end of that amazing 1998 season – an end that came too soon. Denny Green had Randall Cunningham take a knee. Gary Anderson missed the winning field goal from 38 yards – a foot wide left – with 2:07 to play, his first miss of the season, after a perfect 44 straight. At the end it was a 30-27 loss in overtime.
It was a great time, few hours in which sports, entertainment, friends, and family, all come together, sharing the ecstasy of winning and the agony of defeat one play at a time, suspending time and thoughts of everything outside of the game before your eyes.
Two years later, January 14, 2001, Kelly Wechsler, Jim Schwartz and I were at the latter’s for another NFC Championship game, the Vikings at the Giants. Ashley was away at Drake University.
This one was over early, and the sports only lasted for a while before we turned to other topics, taking refuge in friendship – including our Packer-fan host – in the early absence of entertainment that could hold our attention.
Giants 41, Vikings 0, launching a dark era in Vikings history that’s only recently ended – ironically with the arrival of the old man from Kiln, Mississippi – the Packers quarterback we loved to hate – but recognized for his skills – all those years.
Jeannie and I watched the Vikings and her Broncos; we were at the Metrodome for a Broncos' win. She laughed that I pouted for hours after. We enjoyed the Rodents for two seasons in the dome and traveled to Nashville to watch them beat Alabama in a bowl game. Shared experiences.
We’re scattered now; Jeannie is gone. Ashley and I talked last night, and I talked to Kelly. We’ll likely text during today’s game. Hopefully, the messages will be ones of satisfaction rather than of frustration.
Yes, I remember the “Hail Mary” of 1975, and the Superbowls lost before that. But those spirits are long since exorcized. It’s those two recently past NFC Championship game that are the emotional background for this game. It will either be 1 for 3 or 0 for 3 at the end of the day.
It's not so much football or the Vikings, or any other team. It's the shared experience, win or lose. A bit of the glue in the friendships and relationships in our lives.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Tyrants
Tyrants usually come to power in times of great stress in society, usually economic. Tyrants usually are democratically (or constitutionally) empowered. In classical Greece, in Rome, in Germany in the middle of the last century, in Haiti and Cuba in the Caribbean, and more recently in Venezuela, that has been their pattern.
Once in power they are not necessarily socialists, or fascists, or communists, or royalists - they could be and have been any of those - but they are nearly always populists, seizing on the fears of the masses.
What is universal to tyrants, however, is the message: (1) always attack the predicessor government as the reason for inherited problems, (2) find a "bogey man," real or imagined, some evil that against which the population can be rallyed - bankers will do, all the better if they're Jews; in more recent times, insurance companies, and (3) establish yourself as the good knight fighting that evil.
Elsewhere the United States itself is the bogey man. In Iran, the "great satan," in Venezuela (as in Cuba), the oppressor, readying an invasion that might come at any moment. They should not be our greatest concern, however.
The United States is not immune from tyrants.
Once in power they are not necessarily socialists, or fascists, or communists, or royalists - they could be and have been any of those - but they are nearly always populists, seizing on the fears of the masses.
What is universal to tyrants, however, is the message: (1) always attack the predicessor government as the reason for inherited problems, (2) find a "bogey man," real or imagined, some evil that against which the population can be rallyed - bankers will do, all the better if they're Jews; in more recent times, insurance companies, and (3) establish yourself as the good knight fighting that evil.
Elsewhere the United States itself is the bogey man. In Iran, the "great satan," in Venezuela (as in Cuba), the oppressor, readying an invasion that might come at any moment. They should not be our greatest concern, however.
The United States is not immune from tyrants.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Momentum
So much for being hot. Momentum (an invention, near as I can tell, of Don Meredith, who would be better known for his rendition of Willie Nelson’s Turn out the Lights, the Party’s Over) took it in the boxer shorts in the Divisional round of the NFL playoffs.
The Saints were suspect, having lost their last three in a row, and having been challenged even before that. The Arizona Cardinals, who had the momentum, having beaten Green Bay (which had the momentum, going 7-1 over the second half) the week before. Saints 45, Cardinals 14. Rest 1, Momentum 0.
Dallas was the self (and sports pundit) proclaimed hottest team, some said “the best” entering the playoffs. They’d won their last four, including one over the undefeated (at the time) Saints. The Vikings had no chance it seemed. They were as “cold,” having dropped three of their last four, as the Cowboys were hot. All that was nonsense, of course. Vikings 34, Cowboys 3. Rest 2, Momentum 0.
Indianapolis pulled starters – including the only one that counts, quarterback Payton Manning – giving up its shot at a perfect season, then went on to lose to the hapless Bills. Baltimore was another hot team, having won five of its last six games. That was before visiting the Colts, of course. Colts 20, Ravens 3. Rest 3, Momentum 0.
Some might say that Ol’ Mo finally got a win when the upstart Jets, riding a three-game winning streak and six of their last seven, slipped by the Chargers. But San Diego was anointed the “hottest of the hot” for its eleven game win streak. The Jets didn’t rest, of course, playing through the wild card round. We’ll have to call this a tie. Momentum won for the Jets and lost for the Chargers. Offsetting; no play.
What I take from this is that sports talk hosts and columnists take refuge in “momentum” when they have no idea what else they might talk or write about. Hopefully, going into the two Conference Championship games that’s one discussion we can leave behind.
That might require some thoughtful analysis, though.
The Saints were suspect, having lost their last three in a row, and having been challenged even before that. The Arizona Cardinals, who had the momentum, having beaten Green Bay (which had the momentum, going 7-1 over the second half) the week before. Saints 45, Cardinals 14. Rest 1, Momentum 0.
Dallas was the self (and sports pundit) proclaimed hottest team, some said “the best” entering the playoffs. They’d won their last four, including one over the undefeated (at the time) Saints. The Vikings had no chance it seemed. They were as “cold,” having dropped three of their last four, as the Cowboys were hot. All that was nonsense, of course. Vikings 34, Cowboys 3. Rest 2, Momentum 0.
Indianapolis pulled starters – including the only one that counts, quarterback Payton Manning – giving up its shot at a perfect season, then went on to lose to the hapless Bills. Baltimore was another hot team, having won five of its last six games. That was before visiting the Colts, of course. Colts 20, Ravens 3. Rest 3, Momentum 0.
Some might say that Ol’ Mo finally got a win when the upstart Jets, riding a three-game winning streak and six of their last seven, slipped by the Chargers. But San Diego was anointed the “hottest of the hot” for its eleven game win streak. The Jets didn’t rest, of course, playing through the wild card round. We’ll have to call this a tie. Momentum won for the Jets and lost for the Chargers. Offsetting; no play.
What I take from this is that sports talk hosts and columnists take refuge in “momentum” when they have no idea what else they might talk or write about. Hopefully, going into the two Conference Championship games that’s one discussion we can leave behind.
That might require some thoughtful analysis, though.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Language that makes me just a little crazy.
I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I decided to write a blog entry. Seriously – catharsis – that’s the purpose of this blogosphere, isn’t it? And, no the blogosphere is not the world around a former Illinois governor.
This is going to be about words. Dumb words. I-wasn’t-paying-attention-in-the-fifth-grade words.What is so infuriating is not the language itself. I also make some of these mistakes (ok, one of them). It’s who makes them. Not Norwegians on the North Dakota prairie. Not Cajuns in Louisiana. No, pros – professional “talkers” like sports announcers, news anchors, and…well, you’ll see what I mean.
Mr. “what.” Joe Buck puts “what” in every sentence. “He’s better than what he’s showing.” The Vikings defensive line is bigger than what the Cowboy’s line is.” I don’t have to explain that, do I? He gets paid millions to butcher the language. Great work if you can get it, isn’t it?
Sometimes dumb words are institutionalized. That is, by repetition made more or less the official language of an organization or an entire industry. When you next fly, pay attention to departure and arrival information given by your flight attendant. “We will be departing out of…” and “We will be arriving into…” Into. A preposition indicating that somebody or something moves inside something, either physically or figuratively. No definition even remotely means 'arriving.' The right word in this case is either ‘at,’ as in 'arriving at the gate,' or ‘in,’ as in 'arriving in St. Louis.' Arriving into the gate brings to mind the scene in the movie Airport in which the plane crashes into the gate, through the glass wall of the terminal.
Since we’re on ‘at,’ it is one of the most used and abused prepositions, or I should say overused. It is simply unnecessary in many of its uses. Consider this sentence, often heard: “I wondered where he was at.” Sound familiar? Of course it is. But it’s wrong. The ‘at’ is of no use, no more that other ‘space fillers’ like ‘ah,’ and ‘you know.’ “I wondered were he was.” Period.
The phrase, in a comment on a Wall Street Journal story was this: “What is any of this based off of?” Good grief. Saying that is bad enough; what kind of a dolt do you have to be to type it. Similar (but more egregious) than the ungrammatical “out of,” the departure companion to "arrivals into."
Here’s a sports version of one I hear routinely: “He was waiting on his receivers to get open.” On? You know where you ‘wait on?’ In a restaurant, and then only if you’re an employee. Otherwise, one waits for.Well, I think that’s out of my system – for tonight, anyway. In our next installment, we’ll look at grammatical redundancies. I know you’re looking forward to that.
This is going to be about words. Dumb words. I-wasn’t-paying-attention-in-the-fifth-grade words.What is so infuriating is not the language itself. I also make some of these mistakes (ok, one of them). It’s who makes them. Not Norwegians on the North Dakota prairie. Not Cajuns in Louisiana. No, pros – professional “talkers” like sports announcers, news anchors, and…well, you’ll see what I mean.
Mr. “what.” Joe Buck puts “what” in every sentence. “He’s better than what he’s showing.” The Vikings defensive line is bigger than what the Cowboy’s line is.” I don’t have to explain that, do I? He gets paid millions to butcher the language. Great work if you can get it, isn’t it?
Sometimes dumb words are institutionalized. That is, by repetition made more or less the official language of an organization or an entire industry. When you next fly, pay attention to departure and arrival information given by your flight attendant. “We will be departing out of…” and “We will be arriving into…” Into. A preposition indicating that somebody or something moves inside something, either physically or figuratively. No definition even remotely means 'arriving.' The right word in this case is either ‘at,’ as in 'arriving at the gate,' or ‘in,’ as in 'arriving in St. Louis.' Arriving into the gate brings to mind the scene in the movie Airport in which the plane crashes into the gate, through the glass wall of the terminal.
Since we’re on ‘at,’ it is one of the most used and abused prepositions, or I should say overused. It is simply unnecessary in many of its uses. Consider this sentence, often heard: “I wondered where he was at.” Sound familiar? Of course it is. But it’s wrong. The ‘at’ is of no use, no more that other ‘space fillers’ like ‘ah,’ and ‘you know.’ “I wondered were he was.” Period.
The phrase, in a comment on a Wall Street Journal story was this: “What is any of this based off of?” Good grief. Saying that is bad enough; what kind of a dolt do you have to be to type it. Similar (but more egregious) than the ungrammatical “out of,” the departure companion to "arrivals into."
Here’s a sports version of one I hear routinely: “He was waiting on his receivers to get open.” On? You know where you ‘wait on?’ In a restaurant, and then only if you’re an employee. Otherwise, one waits for.Well, I think that’s out of my system – for tonight, anyway. In our next installment, we’ll look at grammatical redundancies. I know you’re looking forward to that.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Awful Game on Wild Card Weekend
Unfortunately the principal features of this weekend were three really bad, blowout NFL wild card games. The losers – Philadelphia, Cincinnati, New England – can’t claim to have “gone down valiantly.” They played sloppy, disinterested games, looking like they didn’t belong in the playoffs, and knew it. In a word, they sucked.
The only entertaining game (I didn’t say “good,” did I?) was Arizona and the Cheesers – oh, sorry, - Packers. Kurt Warner had more touchdown passes (5) than incompletions (4). Chris (Beanie) Wells rushed for 91 yards on 14 carries, 6 and a half a pop. Neither team played any defense worthy of the name, but the Cheesers were truly gawd-awful.
In a game record setting for the futility of its defenses, the Cardinals sent the Pack Packing. That ended my hopes the Vikings would get that privilege, but this will have to do. As for the Cards, I can well imagine how many points that defense might give up on the road to New Orleans, having surrendered 45 to the visiting Pack – a team without anything near the Saints’ firepower.
I’ll be cheering on the Cards next week against the Saints. Cardinals at Vikings seems infinitely better than Vikings at Saints. First, there are those ‘Boys, though…
The only entertaining game (I didn’t say “good,” did I?) was Arizona and the Cheesers – oh, sorry, - Packers. Kurt Warner had more touchdown passes (5) than incompletions (4). Chris (Beanie) Wells rushed for 91 yards on 14 carries, 6 and a half a pop. Neither team played any defense worthy of the name, but the Cheesers were truly gawd-awful.
In a game record setting for the futility of its defenses, the Cardinals sent the Pack Packing. That ended my hopes the Vikings would get that privilege, but this will have to do. As for the Cards, I can well imagine how many points that defense might give up on the road to New Orleans, having surrendered 45 to the visiting Pack – a team without anything near the Saints’ firepower.
I’ll be cheering on the Cards next week against the Saints. Cardinals at Vikings seems infinitely better than Vikings at Saints. First, there are those ‘Boys, though…
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