The Swift boat veterans

I heard some of what John Kerry's former commanding officer said, yesterday, and I am not surprised that the mainstream media is ignoring the event. There was a group of about 200 Swift boat veterans who had served in Viet Nam with John Kerry. It had to be galling to Senator Kerry, just to know the event happened, as he has been trumpeting his service in Viet Nam as sign of his superiority over the President.

I now understand why John Kerry doesn't want to release all of his records about his naval service in Viet Nam. There are pieces that are not flattering, or may even be damaging. The story is covered on World Net Daily. I was glad that I was able to hear the actual audio, as I was hearing the actual story from the source.

Qwest's earnings report puts events into perspective

The contrast between Qwest's performance in the first quarter of 2003 and that from 2004 is very stark. They went from a small profit to a substantial loss, in a year's time. I can even understand the push on long distance, as they are desperate to get revenue from any source, even if it is ephemeral. For example, I only use wireless for long distance, so I am not a potential customer. For my local phone service, I use my T-Mobile phone. I have a local line, but it is only so that I can have DSL. I have a phone hooked to it, simply because it is more convenient to dial the toll free number for my credit union and interact with their system by a regulary phone that it is by wireless phone.

Since late last year, the employment situation has steadily deteriorated. They have good people who have been dedeicated employees, but it can only undermine loyalty, when the only talk is of layoffs and outsourcing. We can understand the reason, but it can only undercut the business. You would think that present management will have only a limited time to fix the cashflow mismatch, or they will be gone. The company will not vanish, but they may have only to be acquired or to go through bankruptcy. A year ago, it looked like bankruptcy was averted, but maybe it is still a possibility. They can only hope that they will be acquired (are SBC's tentacles that long?).

An odd feature of this Compaq machine

A feature of this otherwise "hot" Compaq machine is that it will "hang" for some seconds. My theory is that it is doing a big page swap, but that is only a guess. The machine has a 1.8GHz P4 with one GB of RAM. It has a small (for these days) hard drive. It is just 20GB. The OS is Windows XP Professional. This happens to be one of those very small footprint machines, where the "box" is approximately 13in x 15in x 4in.

I suppose that another possibility is that the hard disk is slow, affected swapping. Typically, I have WebLogic 8.1 running, have the Eclipse IDE open, as well as Outlook and Mozilla, and use a lot of resources. However, I experienced the "hang" with only 365MB of memory used. Does anyone have a theory?

Senator Kerry's new ad campaign

Apparently, the goal of Senator Kerry's new ad campaign is to show him as a "Center-Right" candidate who is strong on national defense and pro-business. The campaign apparently assumes that no one knows anything about him, so that I can say whatever he wants, and people will accept that as the truth. The technical term for it is "tacking right". I suppose that he will try to get to the right of President Clinton, in this portrayal.

We didn't do anything to deserve September 11th

I keep coming back to this point. We were attacked on September 11th, not for anything we did, but because of who we are. We are liberal-minded. We educate our women and allow them to work. We don't require them to wear a burka. We allow homosexuals and we protect them through laws. We allow freedom of worship or the freedom to be an atheist. We don't enforce the Sharia law.

Spain didn't do anything, either, to warrant terrorist attack on March 11th. Their main transgression was to drive the Moors out of Spain, finally, in 1492. What can they do to make up for that? The only other thing that they did was to take part, for a short while, in the fight against the Islamists who would destroy us.

There are some topics that are very sensitive

I heard that Senator Kerry spent two tours of duty in Viet Nam. I was mystified that only amounted to four months, in combat. My younger brother, on the other hand, was in the North, within sight of Khe Sanh much of the time. He was a young marine private and then lance corporal. He was there for one 11 month tour, and then came back for another six months.

I have never really heard the details. I cannot do it justice. I just hope that I have come close enough on the big picture. My bother is six foot-six inches tall. His natural weight is about 235. When he came back from Viet Nam, he was about 175 pounds (or about that). They whole time, they were "speeding", as you hardly dared to sleep. One time, their hill was overrun (he was in the artillery), and they were in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. They killed and were killed or wounded. It is not something that you will forget anytime soon.

The war and the battle left many scars. I was in the Navy, at the time when my brother returned from Viet Nam. I admired his courage and fortitude to have returned from a very harrowing time. I spent the remainder of the Viet Nam war in various schools, until I was commissioned as an Ensign in the Navy. My brother was an inspiration to me. I really didn't understand just how traumatic the whole experience had been, but I resented when I saw someone on television talking about how our troops had been commiitting atrocites in Viet Nam. I only recently realized who that person was.

All my active service as a naval officer was in the Cold War. I spent the summer of 1976 involved with working up the crew and air wing, getting ready to deploy to the Mediterranean. After a month in port, we were off. We sailed with our task group, heading for Rota, Spain.

We had a quick evening ashore, and we were off, again, heading East. I was on the bridge at dawn, as we sailed past Gibraltar. I can't say that I even remember what it looked like. But I was on the bridge, quite busy, as Junior Officer of the Watch. I'm not even sure why I was there, as later, I spent all "Special Sea and Anchor" details in CIC.

I didn't explicity say this, but I was on an aircraft carrier. My ship was so old, they we did everything manually. No NTDS for us. I tracked ship with grease pencil on the scope face and drew in pencil on maneuvering board paper.

Being on a warship is not safe. We lost five men on the cruise. The most traumatic was when I was on the bridge in early evening (as I recall) and we heard that a plane was down. The airgroup commander had seen the A7 go into a flat spin, and then vanish. As soon as we got the word, we headed for the site at high speed. We spent the night looking for wreckage with search lights. All they ever found was a battered helmet.

Probably the next significant even, for me, was the "Iran Hostage Rescue Attempt" on April 24-25, 1980. I had to look up the dates, as I did not remember when it was. The main thing I remember is being dressed in my winter uniform with black shirt and trousers, with a tie. I had my Lieutenant bars on my collar and my Surface Warfare Officer pin and ribbons on my shirt. I had taken my son to the "Rec Center" for swimming practice. A retired Navy Captain cleaned the pool for the team. This was in Virginia Beach. The Captain broke the news to me that we had sent men into the desert in Iran, to try and rescue the hostages, and it had gone terribly wrong. I must admit that I went home and wept.

Much later, I met a black, former serviceman, selling Kirby Vacuum Cleaners in 1988, who had been in that desert. He was in Marine Recon, and he said that it was terribly disorganized, as the different branches of service had radios that wouldn't intercommunicate, and the whole operation was a terrible disaster.

This ex-Marine had also been in Lebanon, in 1982, before anyone knew they were there. To my mind, he was typical of the bravery and dedication that I had seen in others who I had seen, and some with whom I had the privilege of serving.

For myself, I was just there, even though it was in the Cold War. We weren't fighting anyone. I heard about other's fighting, and was certainly in some danger, as anyone on board ship lead a dangerous life. When I was first Electrical Officer and then A-Division Officer on the USS Nashville, we heard about the young Engineering officer who was scalded to death by steam. He double knit uniform melted on him.

Many of those I served with on the Nashville in 1977-1979 were off Lebanon in the early 1980's (apparently, 1983). I later ran into a Second Class Machinists Mate who worked for me in A-Division, and he told me the story of when ran the landing craft back and forth from land performing an evacuation.

I get very angry when I see the so-called anti-war crowd protesting. Are they against freeing the people of Afghanistan and Iraq from terrible governements? Are they in favor of regimes that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people and dumped them in mass graves? All I can say is "give me a break".

What is actually happening in Fallujah is strange but interesting

Despite what you might have read or heard in the mainstream media, there is something odd happening in Fallujah. One thing that has not happened is that the Marines have given up and left, although you might think so, from what we are being told in many places. Instead, the Marines are still around, but they are giving the former Saddam general and his battalion a little bit of responsibility to see how they do. If it works out, they will get more, and more of these units will be formed.

This is more of a political move than a military one. It is part of a move to give the governance and maintenance of security an Iraqi face. Presumably, they have vetted these guys (the Iraqis) and they passed.

I hope we have a Retief working behind the scenes in Iraq

All too often, the U.S. State Department comes across like they are all like Ambassadors GrossBlunder, Longspoon, Straphanger, Colonel Underknuckle, and others. Even someone like Mr. Magnan would be an improvement. It is really great that our State Department is staffed by the Corps Diplomatique Terresteriene (search for it in Google, if you are not familiar with them).

John Kerry and the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War

John Kerry's involvement with the November 1971 meeting of the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War, that took place in Kansas City, surfaced again, in conversation. What I came away with is that not very many people know about this incident. It is mostly floating around the Blogosphere. All you have to do to get up to speed, however, is to give this search string to Google: "John Kerry November 1971" and click "Search".

The curious thing is that John Kerry had denied being at this meeting, at first. Reportedly, he had quit, when they talked about assassinating pro-war senators. Why didn't he just say that? It was a reasonable thing to say, and reflects pretty well upon him.

I hope what is happening at Fallujah turns out to be a great idea

Most amateur conservative military strategists would say that the Marines should have gone into Fallujah, as they were only facing about 1500 Saddam loyalist troops. There would have been a good bit of destruction, as we use the same tactics as the Israelis. We don't go in doors, we bust through one wall into another. We are probably also using "sensors" that allow us to view through the wall (I have finally seen, in the open press, that we are using such things).

It is hard to imagine that sending in one of Saddam's generals, with a 1000 troops, will root out the enemy, but I am willing to see this through (as if we have any choice). We can only hope that the people there, on the ground, and our "elite team of diplomats" (members of the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne?), know the situation better than we do.