A Memorial Day tribute in song
I can think of no better song for Memorial Day than Tim McGraw’s “If You’re Reading This“:
Continue reading →Category Archives: Military
Memorial Day: mourning and honoring
Before Memorial Day became a national three-day weekend in 1971 and the official kickoff to summer festivities, it was Decoration Day. I’m not all that ancient, but my earliest recollection of the holiday is of the latter name. It was … Continue reading →
Presidents, that ringing telephone, and military service
By now the consensus is that Hillary’s red phone ad probably helped her comeback on Super Tuesday Two. The ad was controversial but traditional, in the mold of a famous ad Walter Mondale used against Gary Hart in 1984, and … Continue reading →
The army rewrites its operations manual: reinventing the wheel
First we had the new counterinsurgency manual. Now the army has a new operations manual with an emphasis on postwar stabilization. This is referred to as a “newly minted doctrine” and “a major development that draws on the hard-learned lessons … Continue reading →
“Attack of the Killer Journalists”
Well, not really. But Iowahawk’s clever satire about journalists run amok makes a good point about the absurdity of the recent NY Times article on crimes committed by returning vets. That Times piece is an excellent example of failure to … Continue reading →
Who’s an armchair general?
On a recent thread here about General Petraeus there was a discussion in the comments section regarding General Shinseki’s original suggestion that higher troop levels would be needed in Iraq. As part of that back-and-forth, commenter Mitsu wrote: …had we … Continue reading →
Veterans Day, Armistice Day
Yes, indeed, I am that old—old enough to remember when Veterans Day was called Armistice Day. The change in names occurred in 1954, when I was very small, in order to accommodate World War II and its veterans. Since then, … Continue reading →
Why did it take so long to install General Petraeus?
Here’s another article about the success of the the so-called “surge.” In it, Jeff Emanual writes that the results—which so far have exceeded expectations—are attributable not only to the increase in numbers that the word “surge” signifies, but to a … Continue reading →
You heard it here first: Charles Rangel, the draft, and the Hegelian dialectic
It seems to me that Representative Charles Rangel’s suggestion to reintroduce the draft should get some sort of prize for cynical ploys in Congress. Granted, he’s got a lot of competition, but this one is designed to offend almost everyone, … Continue reading →
Hawks, chickenhawks, and other birds of prey
Democratic Representative John Murtha has been in the news lately, most recently in his appearance on “Meet the Press” with Tim Russert. Many have commented on his strangely disjointed and virtually unintelligible utterances during that interview (for example, see this … Continue reading →
Writing about Haditha, thinking about Haditha
I haven’t written about Haditha yet. I know that we don’t yet know what happened there, or why. So all we can do is speculate, and to me the speculation seems rather obvious: if innocent civilians were murdered by the … Continue reading →
Jane Fonda and those “killing machines”
Michelle Malkin has a post entitled, “Baghdad Jane’s Bloviations,” excoriating our old friend Jane Fonda for these remarks (offered here in their entirety): “Hanoi Jane” Fonda is claiming that ever since Vietnam, U.S. troops have been trained to commit atrocities … Continue reading →