I wanted to record The EDs (MiLES FRoM CLEVeR’s acoustic duo) so I purchased an Audiobox USB and the Studio Pro software that comes with it. It’s pretty user friendly and has a lot of features, including a bunch I haven’t tapped into yet. Anyway, I woke up one weekend morning during the holidays and had a riff in my head, sort of a “4+20″ kind of thing. It blossomed into a song that I’m calling “Lioness.” I’m not sure exactly what I was going for with the lyrics, although I love the word combinations, maybe something about strong women flourishing in spite of adversities.

The rough demo can be heard here.

And here are the lyrics:

The wind holds all opinions to itself as it rolls through
The shift in the direction is the only thing that’s true
Let go of tomorrow and it might soon fall behind
The thunder in the distance mirrors echoes of the mind

So breathe in; the heartbeat is the cadence of our sins

Head across the mountain through the darkness down below
The path is laid clear by the steps of those who fell before
The sun and moon don’t judge time; they’re above to show the way
Reach to the horizon and you’ll capture it one day
And just shine on . . .

Fiction won’t become real through desire or force of will
Running faster makes the pain of trying greater still
The pride will judge the jury and just revel in the state
Living’s mostly learning tricks around accepting fate

So breathe in; the heartbeat is the cadence of our sins

Head across the mountain through the darkness down below
The path is laid clear by the steps of those who fell before
The sun and moon don’t judge time; they’re above to show the way
Reach to the horizon and you’ll capture it one day
And just shine on . . .

I plan on debuting the song during The EDs performance in Leonardtown as part of “First Friday” on February 3. (No lead break or bongos, though.)

If you missed the C-SPAN Q&A show last Sunday night you can still see it here.

Ward will be on C-SPAN’s “Q&A” program this Sunday (Jan. 8) at 8 and 11 PM talking with host Brian Lamb about the state of today’s military.  See more about the show here.

Obviously I’ve been ignoring this blog for a year and a half . . . ever since I got back from Afghanistan.  I blame the ease and functionality of Facebook for that . . . but that’s a lame excuse.   As a result, this year my resolution is to maintain a more persistent presence here.

2012 should be a year ripe for picking in terms of random thoughts and impressions what with the election, the economy, the shrinking defense budget, and the olympics in the mix.

In the meantime, Happy New Year.

Here’s the DVIDS video from the press conference we attended in Kabul a couple of days back.  I got the second question:

Sunday started with the threat of volcano ash — the scourge of European travel for the last month or so.  And as we launched out of Dulles just after 10 PM eastern time, the pilot announced that we would, in fact, be affected by the cloud.  Instead of flying the normal route to Frankfurt that would have taken us several hundred miles south of Iceland, we flew north of Iceland, which added nearly an hour to the already 7-plus hour flight.  Otherwise the first leg aboard the 777 was uneventful.  A hot meal (pasta), two Ambien, and presto — Frankfurt before I knew it.

The added flight time was no factor as far as making our connection to Kabul was concerned because we had an eight-hour layover.  We killed time eating sausage and kraut (when in Germany) and bumming around the unspectacular terminal.  After a serious pat down by security (I set the alarm off for some reason) we were aboard our Safi Air jet (767) for Kabul.

We had feared the worst with Safi, but all in all it was a nice surprise.  We’d scored an exit row so there was plenty of leg room and the flight attendants were very attentive.  (Plus, we got another hot meal — chicken this time.  Never thought I’d consider an in-flight meal a luxury.)  The in-flight entertainment was beamed against a screen right in front of us.  Most of the time it was the moving map display, which brings out the aviator in me, of course.  I also enjoy the cities that they highlight along the way — places like Lvov and other cities with a bunch of consonants all crammed together.  The moving map was interrupted briefly by some Turkish candid camera-like show that was weird but engaging in its innocence.

We made our way east, along the northern part of Turkey and across the Black Sea.  Then Iraq and Iran and into Afghanistan.  It didn’t seem real.  The sun had come up by the time we made our approach into Kabul, the capital city surrounded by mountains.  As we walked off the plane we were greeted by a beautiful morning, clear and crisp.  It’s a tired analogy, but it did remind me of Fallon, Nevada.

After clearing customs and waiting a long time for our bags (always nerve-wracking) we went looking for a taxi.  There were a lot of locals waiting to “help” — get the taxi, show you the way to the parking lot, help carry your bags — each demanding $20 for the effort (the magic sum, apparently).

So we loaded into the taxi and headed around the perimeter of the airport to the military side.  Along the way we went through a checkpoint, along a roundabout, and passed by a line of shops that were right out of central casting — a bustling shanty town, half enterprising, half squalor.

The cab driver dumped us once we got in sight of the machine gun at the military checkpoint and we cautiously gathered our bags and approached the German soldiers manning the post.  After about 30 minutes our Army contacts showed up and drove us to the terminal where we got our credentials and were informed we were scheduled to fly to Bagram in the afternoon.  We wound up talking to a German PBS crew for awhile; they’re headed up north to embed with their countrymen.  Great conversation — the brotherhood of journalism, I guess.

So now I’m killing time in one of the rec centers surrounded by young soldiers at computer stations updating their Facebook pages, playing pool, or video games.  (Two guys next to me are playing a college football game — ECU vs. West Virginia.)

It’ seems calm and routine here, but, of course, we’re “in the rear with the gear” at this point.

In any case, the trip has gone smoothly so far . . .

Tomorrow I leave for a three-week trip to Afghanistan.  During that time I will embed (along with Military.com’s managing editor Christian Lowe) with U.S. military forces near the border with Pakistan and on the outskirts of the southern city of Kandahar.  We also hope to speak with Gen. McChrystal (the guy running the show) in Kabul just before we return at the end of the month.

This trip has been in work for some time.  Christian — a veteran of several embeds to Iraq and Aghanistan — received an invite from an Army public affairs officer right before his unit deployed a few months ago.  It has been two years since Christian went to Iraq — the first embed for a Military.com writer — and we figured the time is right for us to get a fresh firsthand look at the war effort.  After all, when your URL is “Military.com” you’d better be willing to roll up your sleeves (or maybe roll DOWN your sleeves) and walk a mile (or three) in your core audiences’ boots.  So as the trip was gathering momentum, I thought it would be more productive if Christian and I both went.

For my part, I’m grateful for the opportunity.  My military experience is substantial, I guess, but it also is what it is; I flew over Bosnia in ‘95 during the Serbian seige of Sarajevo.  While the airwing’s Hornets dropped bombs, the Tomcats I was in took pictures with their TARPS pods.  No SAMs were fired at us.  If the bad guys shot their rifles into the air I was ignorant of it.  I patrolled the no-fly zone over southern Iraq for days on end, but without incident.  I’ve spent a lot of time in the Middle East — Israel, UAE, Bahrain — and never weathered so much as a sneer from the locals.

Heck, my third novel — Punk’s Fight — is set mostly on the ground in Afghanistan.  So, while I’m not necessarily an adrenaline junkie a la Travis Pastrana et. al., I’d feel like a poseur of sorts if I didn’t put myself out there.  After all, I often offer my two cents on TV and radio (not to mention the Internet) regarding the war effort and the state of the U.S. military.  And as Caroline the Rockridge Yoga instructor says, “If you haven’t experienced it it’s someone else’s information.”

So my bags are packed — three of them:  A rolling duffel, a backpack, and a “3-day assault pack.”  The duffel has most of the important war gear — body armor, helmet, gloves, kneepads, night vision devices, rain gear, goggles, etc.  The backpack has my sleeping bag and clothes.  And the assault pack has my electronics (laptop, iPod, headphones, camcorder, digital voice recorder) and important papers.  (Thanks to BLACKHAWK! for outfitting us, by the way.  We’re seriously rigged out.)  And that’s it.  Three weeks worth of stuff in three bags.  We have to be agile, ready to go from Humvee to helo, from FOB to outpost and back again at a moment’s notice.

Whatever happens, few things in my life have felt as important as this trip.  Again, I’m lucky to have the opportunity.

Stay tuned for the rest . . .

 Here’s the manifesto by the pilot who plowed into the IRS building in Austin, Texas today:

If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?”  The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time.  The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken.  Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it.  I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head.  Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy.  Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all.  We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers.  Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”.  I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood.  These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.

While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind.  Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours?  Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies.  Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”.  It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!

Read the rest of this entry »

I spoke with WTOP’s Nathan Hagar yesterday about the near-term future of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Is it as easy as a stroke of the pens from the likes of Pelosi and Reid? Is this simply lip service from the Obama administration to the progressive wing of the Democratic party going into the midterm elections? And will repealing affect military readiness and the warfighting effort?

Listen now . . .

Download

 Dark, etherial, and soaring.  A visual and sonic masterpiece that signaled that prog rock was back in 2009.

As the band prepares to come off a year-and-a-half hiatus, we have dusted off the official site and given it some new features. Check it out here.  (Be sure to put on the good headphones.)  And while you’re there, please fill out the contact form and we’ll get you on our email list.  Don’t be the person who says, “Man, I wish I’d known about that night that is now a moment in rock n’ roll history.”

It all started with a “save the date” email from the White House press office a few weeks ago — sort of cryptic . . . no real specifics other than the fact that the White House press party was happening on Dec. 14 and they wanted to know where to snail mail the actual invite. That email was followed by weeks of silence . . . so much silence I wondered if the list had been re-scrubbed and someone had realized there was a gross mistake and I shouldn’t have been invited in the first place. I emailed a member of the White House press office staff — the guy Military.com usually deals with — and asked if I had missed something or what, (mail has been known to get misplaced around our place) and he replied that the invites still hadn’t been mailed, which turns out to have been slightly inaccurate because it showed up the next day. 

 In any case, here’s what it looks like:

Read the rest of this entry »

If Fred Tripp had known he was going to die that day he would have said more.  He would have done more, whatever the time and space would have allowed, perhaps joining his wife of a quarter century in the shower one last time before dressing and heading downstairs to hug his teenaged son and daughter and offer them a final bit of advice that might carry them into adulthood.

     But he hadn’t known.  And minutes before his head struck a fatal blow against the glare shield above the instrument panel, he went through the same steps he had thousands of times in the nearly thirteen years that he’d been an airline pilot.  As his copilot acknowledged the tower controller’s “position and hold” command over the radio, he keyed the cabin intercom and told the flight attendants to prepare for takeoff.  He pushed the throttles slightly forward and taxied the Trans Coast 757 onto San Francisco International’s runway zero-one left and awaited further instructions.

     “Damn, where’d this fog come from?” the copilot muttered, squinting as he leaned into the front windscreen.  “Wasn’t it just sunny?”

     “You’ve flown out of SFO before, right?” Fred asked.

     “Yeah,” the copilot replied.  “It’s been a while, though.”

     “Marine layer – San Francisco goes from severe clear to zero-zero in minutes when the conditions are right.”

     The tower controller’s resonant voice again came over the radio:  “CalSky three-four, winds two-nine-zero at ten knots, cleared to land runway two-eight right.”

     “CalSky three-four, copies cleared to land runway two-eight right,” the other pilot replied.

     “Trans Coast two-five, cleared for takeoff on runway zero-one.”

     Fred shot his co-pilot a confused expression as he keyed the radio:  “Tower, understand you just cleared another airplane to land on the crossing runway?”

     The dead air over the frequency spoke volumes.  A second later the controller said, “Trans Coast two-five, continue to position and hold.”

     “Trans Coast two-five, continuing position and hold,” Fred intoned, at once impassive while still allowing his voice to carry his displeasure with the controller’s error.

     “CalSky three-four, report when passed the crossing runway,” the controller said.

     “CalSky three-four, roger.”

     “Good catch,” the co-pilot said, eyebrows arched high.  “That could’ve been ugly.”

     “Yep,” Fred replied.  “Make a note.  And let’s pay attention here.”

  Read the rest of this entry »

Here I am talking to KGO’s Rosie and Brett about the leaked McChrystal report and what President Obama might want to do about it.

Although being born in 1959 technically makes me a boomer, I’m not a real one.  For me Woodstock was a movie I saw a handful of times in a theater in downtown Den Haag and a triple album that expanded my musical influences well beyond the Beatles.  The Vietnam War was something that had taken my dad away from the family for 13 months, a topic of the nightly news, articles in Life magazine (a staple in our household), and a coffee table book called War Without Heroes.

By the time I got to the Naval Academy the baggage of the late ’60s/early ’70s had all but disappeared.  No war protesters were waiting for us outside the gates; we never felt the impulse to stage any sit-ins on the lawn of the Supe’s house; and we didn’t purchase long-haired wigs as a liberty accessory.  I never felt any tension from my civilian couterparts during my college life . . . or my Navy career, for that matter.

So when I read “While Woodstock Rocked, GIs Died” from the latest edition of the VFW magazine, my first thought was that the writer was taking a cheap shot.  Wasn’t it a cliche for Vietnam vets to whine about their homecomings and complain that the hippies and the elites enjoyed a life of sex and drugs while they bled and died in the jungles half a world away?  Wasn’t the nation over it by now?

I asked as much of a military veterans email group I’m part of, and the Vietnam vets among them all came back with the same sentiment:  The societal schism was real and the scars of it remained in each of them.  Several of them pointed out what they considered to be the definitive piece on the matter, James Fallow’s “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?”  Here’s an excerpt:

The children of bright, good parents were spared the immediate sort of suffering that our inferiors were undergoing.  And because of that, when our parents were opposed to the war, they were opposed in a bloodless, theoretical fashion, as they might be opposed to political corruption or racism in South Africa.  As long as the little gold stars kept going to homes in Chelsea and the backwoods of West Virginia, the mothers of Beverly Hills and Chevy Chase and Great Neck and Belmont were not on the telephones to their congressmen screaming you killed my boy, they were not writing to the President that this crazy, evil war had put their boys in prison and ruined their careers.  It is clear by now that if the men of Harvard had wanted to do the very most they could to help shorten the war they should have been drafted or imprisoned en masse.

But they weren’t drafted en masse.  Some got deferments (hello, Citizen Cheney) and some did insane or rude things like throwing urine samples on medics or shitting their pants (hello, Ted Nugent) during the screening process to ensure they wouldn’t have to serve.  And who got drafted and who didn’t remains the fundamental matrix of that era — one that those who have fought or are fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for all of their service and sacrifice, don’t get because it’s impossible to get unless you lived through it.  But America’s current generation of vets should appreciate it.  In many ways, it’s a the stuff that fuels ongoing public support for the troops in spite of an increasingly unpopular war.

There are many legacies of the Vietnam War.  One of them is that a nation that dishonors those who step up when called has lost its way.  In time that nation will crumble and fall.

Since the three days of peace, love, and music first happened during the summer of ‘69 Woodstock has been a symbol.  It’s at once a metaphor and an overly romaticized fiction.  It’s a cool notion, whatever the truth is.  And the music holds up forty years on.

I still enjoy watching the Woodstock movie.  (I own the director’s cut DVD and the 30th Anniversary edition CD package that includes lots of stuff that wasn’t included on the original albums.)  But while Alvin Lee’s performance of “I’m Going Home” might water my eyes and make me want to saw my hands off as I consider my inability to play the guitar with similar speed and articulation, I’m not going to demand that Vietnam-era veterans watch it without some sense of resentment.

I had a song pop into my head from out of nowhere a few days back.  It was “I am a Camera” by Gentle Giant.  Don’t look for it on YouTube or even iTunes, for that matter.  It’s not there.  I have it on LP. 

That realization got me to thinking about the other songs in my album collection that aren’t available on iTunes.  So I broke out my poor man’s analog-to-digital rig — a line from my receiver’s headphone jack into the two-channel mixer I use for podcasting and then into my laptop.  I use the Audacity software to digitize the analog LP signal and then save the files as MP3s.  At that point I have something that I can burn to a CD-R or upload to iTunes.

The latest spin through my 500-some album collection yielded a couple of long-lost gems that now proudly reside among the 2,500-some songs in my iTunes catalog:  Along with “I am a Camera,” I created MP3s for my faves from the Pousette-Dart Band’s first two albums (highlight “All Your Lonely Hours”), Mi Sex’s debut (”It Only Hurts When I’m Laughing”), and Genesis keyboardist Tony Bank’s first solo album (”Lucky Me”).

Now I hadn’t heard these songs for 15 years or more, but as I listened to them, it was as if no time had passed at all.  Technology has caused me to ignore my albums, but they never held it against me.  They just sat there, crushed against each other in wooden crates I bought at some record store many moons ago.  Their magic was dormant among the grooves, waiting ever-patiently for the turntable’s needle to free it once again.  That magic got me through my youth, college, and the first part of my working life.

I thank my albums for their understanding and infinite patience.  And they never asked for anything in return . . . except maybe to be kept out of direct sunlight.

This is less hokey than the Mancow stunt a few weeks back:

But is waterboarding torture?

I attended SERE in (and well north of) Brunswick, Maine in January 1984. Several of my F-14 RAG (training squadron) classmates had been to the class just before mine and those of us about to go sat them down over beers and had them walk us through the entire week, blow-by-blow. They obliged but qualified their comments with “what I’m telling you won’t help make it easier.”

It didn’t.

Warner Springs (west coast SERE) used waterboarding as the torture simulation. Brunswick used smoke — gooey thick pipe tobacco smoke administered point blank to the nose and mouth via an industrial-width rubber hose. I knew it was coming because of the details my friends had offered. Although I couldn’t see him, I had heard there was a doctor observing the conduct of the interrogation through the full-length one-way mirror in the corner of the cement-walled cell. I was pretty sure all I had to do was show some measure of resistance for a few seconds and my training block would be checked.

A few seconds later — after passing out, coming to, and vomiting (certainly worthy of a “training time out” I thought) my interrogator (a
burly red-head with a full beard — DIA, if I remember my final debrief correctly) hit me with the smoke again. At that point, like the reporter
in the video describes, whatever strength and comfort I was drawing with my knowledge of the antiseptic mechanisms around me vaporized, and I was convinced this guy was willing to kill me. I waited several lifetimes for the doctor to rap on the mirror and chide the red-head with “hey, he’s throwing up already; knock it off,” but that didn’t happen. After coming to a second time, the interrogator decreed I was “insincere” (in his Peoples Republic of North America (PRONA — Cold War scenario) accent and sent me back to my cell to think about what I wanted to tell him a few hours later when the questioning started all over again. The second session was worse than the first.

I don’t know if this constituted torture a la current debate around the topic. I do know I thought I was going to die at the time — I mean really die — even though I knew it was a training environment.

The torturer in the video describes waterboarding as “feeling like you’re drowning.” Have you ever almost drowned? (I did the first time I was made to tread water in full flight gear.) There’s no time for the luxury of rational thought at those moments. Your survival instinct screams - blares! - at your body to do what it takes to live. If you’ve never felt it then it’s impossible to know what it feels like. It’s also impossible to know how you’ll react until you’re there.

SERE was easily the best training I ever got on the Navy’s dime, by the way.