Tag Archives: United States
We Are Asking the Wrong Questions …
This morning, an email landed in my in-box with another unintelligent rant from Michael Moore. During his way-too-long knee jerk reaction to a 90 minute anything-but-a-debate that took place on CNN on June 27, 2024, Moore said, about halfway through, “I’m not a doctor. I could be (and hopefully am) wrong about all this. But I do have eyes. They don’t lie.”
Michael Moore, you were wrong, our eyes are deceived all the time by not showing us accurately what we are seeing. Often there is a disconnect between what we think we see, our brain, and our memories can even revise what we thought we saw. Have you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks? and/or Why eyewitnesses fail.
During Moore’s rant about what he saw, there was one name he never mentioned, Donald Trump (if the traitor’s name was there, I didn’t see it after reading the piece once and scanning it three times), who didn’t answer any of the moderator’s questions and repeated all of his fascist lies that have been repeated so many times in the last few years, I doubt anyone has been able to keep count.
After all, Traitor Trump learned from a master: Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party about repeating big lies. “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels.
I didn’t watch the original live debate, that wasn’t a debate. It takes two or more people to have a debate and the only person on that stage struggling to debate was President Biden. Traitor Trump repeated his campaign slogans that are all lies and have always been lies going back to the day he came down that escalator in Trump Tower on June 16, 2015.
After the debate, I started reading the reactions and summaries about the CNN disaster that didn’t challenge Traitor Trump’s lies.
As for me, it took an effort to set aside all the panic and criticisms I was hearing and reading about President Biden and wait a few days to learn more and come to a conclusion. I’ve learned through the decades, I turn 79 in August, that it helps to wait before reacting to something unless it’s a life and death situation like when I was a US Marine in Vietnam being shot at. We don’t have time to think then.
Moore said more shit like, “He’s 81! What do you expect? You’ll be 81 someday!”
Well, Michael Moore, I’m much closer to 81 than you are and I don’t agree with your mindless knee jerk rant.
Then on June 29, I watched this video. That is the day after the debate that wasn’t a debate, and I didn’t see the same Biden from the day before. By then, I’d seen the worst of Biden’s performance on the 28th
Before writing this post, I also watched an unedited ProPublica interview with Joe Biden from September 2023, nine days before his interview with conservative Republican Special Counsel Robert K. Hur, who had worked in Traitor Trump’s administration before he was appointed to oversee the DOJ’s investigation into classified documents found at Biden’s Delaware home. That was no different than hiring a hungry wolf to guard a flock of sheep.
After watching the June 29th video, I wrote a poem comparing two men, although I have problems thinking one of the two is human. I’ll leave it up to anyone that reads this blog post who I think that one is.
NO NAMES
Two men close in age
One accused of crimes with no evidence
The other
Twice impeached
Guilty of rape
Guilty of fraud
A convicted felon
Two men close in age
One honorably served the people for 54 years
The other
Cheated his workers
Cheated his Secret Service agents
Cheated university students
Cheated his wives
Cheats at golf
Doesn’t always pay his bills
Two men close in age
One never accused of rape
The other
Found guilty of rape once
And 18 women have accused him
Of sexual harassment or sexual assault
One alleged victim was 13
Brags he grabs them by the pussy
Two men close in age
One stands strong with other democracies
The other
Says he fell in love with
North Korea’s Kim Jong Un,
who wants to nuke the United States,
And calls Putin a genius
For starting a brutal war
With a smaller country
Two men close in age
One practices a healthy lifestyle
Also shows off his latest reading
The other
Three years younger, is ten years older
Eating McDonald’s and meatloaf
Drinking 12 brain damaging Diet Cokes daily
Thinking exercise is bad
Has a lethal aversion to reading
Two men close in age
One sometimes gets his facts wrong
And broke 3 of his campaign promises
The other
Does not care about facts
Lying more than 30,000 times in four years
Breaking 55 of his campaign promises
Ranked the worst president ever
*****
Here are America’s Worst Presidents. Traitor Trump was ranked the #3 worst president by the 2022, Siena College’s Presidential Expert Poll, #4 by the 2021 C-Span Presidential Historians survey, and #1 by the 2024, Presidential Greatness Survey.
I also suspect Traitor Trump is allegedly responsible for Biden’s performance on June 28, 2024. It’s not impossible.
Here’s a link to the post I wrote about that. Did Donald Trump Sabotage the Atlanta Debate?
How to tell the real heroes from the hero-wannabes.
Like Frankie McGrath, I wasn’t a baby killer
My review of this realistic, historical action suspense thriller will join hundreds of thousands already on Amazon and Goodreads. Still, how many of those ratings and reviews were written by Vietnam combat vets who were there?
Soon after this novel was released, The Women was mentioned in my VA PTSD support group that meets every Wednesday morning. This support group may differ from many since half are women that served in the Air Force, the Navy, with one a Marine, who served in the Middle East. In combat!
Later that day, I saw The Women at Costco and bought a hardcover.
The main character in this novel is a young Army nurse, and the first half of this brutal combat story mostly takes place in Vietnam. Although Frankie McGrath was an Army nurse saving lives in a field medical unit beyond the front lines, and not behind them, she didn’t fight in combat. Yet she was in combat, every moment, awake or asleep. I’m going to explain what I mean soon.
For me, reading this historical fiction became a triggered journey back in time. And I started losing sleep, waking at the slightest sound. Alert, ready to fight.
Remembering!
And by the time I finished reading, I was angry.
My DD214, a form we get when we leave the military and return to civilian life, had one entry that said I’d gone on one major military operation for a few days during 1966. Yet I was in combat almost daily after climbing down that net (like the kind used on D-Day during World War II) on the side of a Navy transport ship, jumping the last few feet into a landing craft that took us Marines ashore. As we landed, fighting was taking place not that far from our location on the beach. And a few hours later, the first night we were there, my company was hit before we’d finished setting up our base camp. We had no wire surrounding us yet, and none of the bunkers had been completed.
All of Southern Vietnam was a war zone. It didn’t matter if you were inside the wire, in a bunker, we were always in the war. No place was safe. We didn’t have to go out on a major field operation to find the war. It found us almost nightly and sometimes in daylight.
Frankie McGraths’ medical unit was inside the wire, protected by bunkers, almost all the time, yet her unit was also under attack, as VC or North Vietnamese mortar rounds dropped in without warning, looking for random kills.
Like me, McGrath has some close calls inside the bunkers and wire. Like me, she lost friends. Like me, she came home to protestors calling her a baby killer. And she shot no one. Instead, she saved lives, even Vietnamese citizens, including children. She was a nurse. Not a US Marine rifleman. Not a grunt like me.
Some protestor in the story spit on her once she returned to the States. I’d heard about that when I came home in December 1966, but being spit on didn’t happen to me.
McGrath suffered from PTSD as I did, and we still do. Yet when she went to the VA for help, she was told no women served in Vietnam and she couldn’t have PTSD. They sent her back home. When she returned to the VA later, after a traumatic episode of PTSD, and tried to join a group of combat vets to share her trauma with, the men told her she couldn’t stay because she couldn’t be a combat vet. No women served in Vietnam. She left again, with no support.
And yet thousands of military women served in Vietnam.
Maybe what happened to McGrath is like what happened to me.
Her being told women didn’t serve in Vietnam reminded me of something someone working in VA-mental health care said to me after 2005. I don’t remember the exact wording but it was something like, Your PTSD can’t be that bad, since you only went on one military operation.
WTF!
Like McGrath, VC mortar shells dropped into my base camp without warning to kill at random. One time, in daylight, a sniper almost took me out. The round grazing my left ear. An inch further to the right, my body might have been shipped home with a Purple Heart my parents could hang on a wall in the same case the folded US flag arrived in.
Then, unlike McGrath, there were the night patrols and ambushes outside the wire that were not part of a major military operation, that were not mentioned on my DD214.
Or that mad dash with sniper rounds snapping past us while we drove at top speed through the jungle, me in an unarmored jeep with no doors on a one lane dirt road to reach a forward artillery base outside the division perimeter that had been hit hard and needed to be resupplied before they got hit again. While I was there, they got hit again, a rain of mortar shells and rockets, when one Marine lost his life, decapitated by a rocket.
I recommend reading The Women for the reality it paints and when you finish the story, read the author’s notes, to learn that about 10,000 women served in Vietnam, many just like McGrath.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of military action suspense thrillers: The Patriot Oath, Never for Glory, and Running with the Enemy, a novel placed in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.
Josh Kavanagh Thriller Series launched with Never for Glory
He’d give his life for his country. But this time, it’s personal.
Josh Kavanagh burns for vengeance. Parachuting with no backup into a lawless area of southern Venezuela, the Special Ops legend is intent on hunting down the rogue agent who put his wife in a coma. But as soon as he gets feet on the ground, the loyal protector discovers he’s dropped into a trap… and a sex trafficking operation run by the Russian mob.
Fighting his way out and desperate to rescue the victims with minimal body count, Josh plans a daring raid on a remote ranch. But after learning the identity of the mastermind behind the hit on a former lover, the talented operative takes the law into his own hands on a hell-bent solo mission for revenge…
Will Josh’s single-minded thirst for justice finish on the wrong side of a gun barrel?
Never for Glory is the pulse-pounding second book in the Josh Kavanagh thriller series. If you like determined heroes, tough conflict ripped from the headlines, and page-turning action, then you’ll love Lloyd Lofthouse’s pursuit of payback.
Buy Never for Glory to retaliate with deadly force today!
The first thriller in this series was The Patriot Oath.
“Here’s a pull quote from Chuck Yarling’s 1-star review on Amazon. “Once you started reading it, this was one book that was absolutely hard to put down. It has great characters, action galore, and about a group whose mission is to preserve the American republic. That made it hard not to put it my top ten books I read this year!”
“Yes, it was a gem right up to the near-end …”
He fought for his country. Now he’s home and engaged in the deadliest of battles.
Josh Kavanagh eats and breathes loyalty. Wary of how he’ll fit in after a twenty-four-year absence, the Special Forces legend returns to his family’s Montana ranch on an undercover mission. And though he’s anxious to see the high school sweetheart he abandoned a lifetime ago, the dedicated Marine’s greatest concern is tracking down a dangerous neo-Nazi cell.
Juggling unresolved feelings for the woman he left behind, a sister expecting him to avenge her brutal rape, and keeping his own covert activities secret, Josh discovers the threat to the US is bigger than anyone previously thought. And when a member of his team goes MIA and the danger creeps perilously close to home, the talented military man fears he’ll lose everything he holds dear…
With a tangled web of corruption pulling deadly strings, can he blow a conspiracy apart without paying the ultimate price?
The Patriot Oath is the riveting first book in the Josh Kavanagh thriller series. If you like war-hardened heroes, action-packed fight scenes, and powerful political agendas, then you’ll love Lloyd Lofthouse’s gripping adventure.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed … with the blood of patriots & tyrants.”
The title of this post was taken from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in Paris, on Nov. 13. 1787. He sent that letter to William Smith. Those words do not appear in the Declaration of Independence. Those words do not appear in the U.S. Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson was the principle author of the Declaration of Independence, and had a major influence on the United States Constitution. Jefferson’s quote about refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots & tyrants was an opinion to a friend, not for the public or justification for a revolution or civil war to replace the government.
In fact, Jefferson “wanted the new Constitution to be accompanied by a written ‘bill of rights’ to guarantee personal liberties, such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from standing armies, trial by jury, and habeas corpus.” — THE FIRST AMENDMENT ENCYCLOPEDIA
When Jefferson was sworn in to become the third president of the United States (1801—1809), he took the same oath that is enshrined in the US. Constitution. Every president has taken that oath, an oath that defines what the Founding Fathers thought a patriot should be
There are many in the United States today that think they are patriots, but, because of that Constitutional Oath, some so-called patriots are wrong. They are not patriots. They are anarchists, loyalists (to Trump or another authoritarian), and traitors.
Patriotism is not defined as blind loyalty to an individual, the flag, a religion, or a militia. For instance: The Oath Keepers or The Three Percenters, et al. To these violent militias, nothing matters but defending what they blindly think is their country against anyone they see as a threat, and that means anyone that doesn’t think like them. If we disagree with what they think, they often reply with something like, “Go home. Go back to Russia, or Africa, or China…. Get out of my country.”
Imagine what it must be like to be blindly loyal to someone like Donald Trump and/or the U.S. flag with little or no knowledge of the U.S. Constitution. For those ignorant, misguided Americans, the concept of patriotism tied to the U.S. Constitution would seem alien because not every American takes the Constitutional Oath of Office, and many Americans don’t know what the U.S. Constitution says beyond the 1st and 2nd Amendments, and many also get the meaning of those two amendments wrong.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you’re free to say whatever you want. For some liars, we have libel and slander laws. And writing for the Supreme Court in the 1919 case of Schenck v. United States, Justice Holmes argued, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
Just one year after Schenck, United States Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, in congressional testimony, claimed, “A man may say what he will, as has often been said; but if he cries ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, with the intent to injure the people there assembled, certainly his right of free speech does not protect him against the punishment that is his just desert [sic].”
So, deliberately making a false statement that might harm someone, may not fall under the protections offered by the 1st Amendment. Still, the individual making such a false statement is innocent until proven guilty.
“The founders (including Jefferson) required an oath for federal and state officials—absent a religious test—in the Constitution, but the specifics—such as the wording of the oath—were left to the First Congress (1789–1791). In its first act, Congress specified the wording: “I, ______, do solemnly swear or affirm (as the case may be) that I will support the Constitution of the United States.” This oath was used for all federal officials except the President, whose oath was prescribed specifically in the Constitution (Article II, section 1, clause 8).”
Today, who is required to take the oath to defend the U.S. Constitution against both foreign and domestic enemies?
1. Every President of the United States
2. Every member of Congress
3. Every member of the state legislatures and all executive and judicial officers, the United States and the states. (Again, think of all the Republicans in charge of state elections that defied President Donald Trump’s attempts to find votes that would make him the winner.)
4. Every judge (Think of the dozens of judges that ruled against Donald Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election, even judges appointed by Trump.)
5. FBI agents and other federal law enforcement officers
6. Federal employees, including postal workers
7. Both officers and enlisted servicemembers swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but in the Oath of Enlistment, service members swear they will “obey the orders of the president of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over [them], according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” However, officers do not include the president in their Oath of Office.
That may not be the complete list.
Most Americans who take that oath also live by that oath, and it doesn’t matter if they are Democrats, Republicans, or independent voters. To millions of Americans, regardless of their political and religious beliefs, their loyalty is to the U.S. Constitution, not to an individual, religion, or private militia. Still, some that have taken the oath never intended to defend the U.S. Constitution. Case in point: On January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump told his supporters at a rally near the capital to “fight like hell.” He also told them to march on the capital, and they did. Then they attempted to pull off a violent coup and install Trump as president for life.
I have no doubts that most if not all of that violent mob that attacked the US capital on January 6, 2021, thanks to Donald Trump urging them to “fight like hell” saw themselves as patriots following the flags they carried. But which flag: that mob carried US flags, Confederate flags, and flags with only TRUMP’s name on them?
The real patriots on January 6, were the capital police, risking their lives to save and preserve the U.S. Constitution they took an oath to defend, not Trump’s mob of loyalists, anarchists, and alleged fascists.
Amazon Kindle Countdown Deal
June 1 to 7, 2022
“Never for Glory,” a work in progress, the sequel to “The Patriot Oath”
Never for Glory is the unfinished sequel of The Patriot Oath. With 25 completed chapters, there are about 10 to 15 left to finish the first draft. The first five chapters have already been presented to two of the four critique groups I belong to. One of the two groups has heard all of The Patriot Oath. The second group hasn’t, and I am getting conflicting constructive criticism from the two groups. One group is suggesting a lot of changes, and the other group familiar with the first novel in the series likes what they’re hearing with little need for massive revisions.
With this post, I’m inviting readers that have read The Patriot Oath to have a look at Never for Glory’s first chapter and, if wiling, to leave comments letting me know what works, what doesn’t. Thank you. If this early preview works, I have another four chapters I’m willing to add to this post later.
Chapter One
After their first HALO jump together in 2002, Josh and Cheéte vanished into the Hindu Kush Mountains, a rugged area covering 160,000 square miles. Their orders had been to search for targets of opportunity, and for weeks they worked alone with little or no support.
Now, in 2019, seventeen years later, they were doing it again. Still, this time their C-130 belonged to The Oath Group, and it was 30,000 feet over Venezuela.
Getting ready for the repeat was like déjà vu all over again. Back then, they were Marine Corps scout snipers serving in Operation Anaconda against al-Qaeda, Taliban insurgents, and members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. That had been their last mission together. Cheéte retired a few months later in 2003.
“I can’t believe my ghillie suit still fits,” Josh said. “It feels the same, hot and heavy. Too bad DARPA wouldn’t let me use that invisible, bulletproof combat suit for this mission. It was perfect last summer for our sortie in Montana.”
Cheéte grunted as he finished squeezing into his old camouflaged ghillie suit. Once he had it on, he looked like an unkempt yeti that needed to lose some weight. “Well, some of us don’t always get what we want. You’ve been out for less than a year so I’m not surprised your suit fits, but I think mine is going to eat me like it’s a starving anaconda.”
They were talking to each other through their helmet’s military-grade communication units.
Josh grinned as he fastened a g-suit around his abdomen and legs, covering most of the camouflaged outfit he wore underneath. Then he manually inflated the g-suit’s five air bladders. The pressure around the muscles would prevent blood from pooling in the feet and legs and push blood pressure up to the heart and brain. The last thing he did was to attach the oxygen mask and tactical goggles.
With a frustrating sigh, huffing, and puffing, Cheéte managed to do the same thing. Once they were on the ground, they’d ditch the gear required for the HALO jump. Their ghillie suits were designed to conceal them from prying eyes.
Like most Marine Corps snipers, they’d made their own unique disguises by hand and, when not in use, stored them in sealed, plastic boxes lined in cotton and kept dry with silica gel packets.
“I’m worried my Christian Crow wife knows about my two other common law wives,” Cheéte said, interrupting Josh’s thoughts.
Josh did a double-take and stared at his old friend. “Whoa! Where the hell did that come from?”
“Well, in case I don’t make it home, I wanted you to know what’s going on in my life. My Christian wife said the only reason for sex is to create children for God. When I said no more kids, she cut me off. There’s no way I’m going without. I refuse to let my demons have an excuse to mess up my nights. What about you?”
“I have nothing to confess to anyone,” Josh replied.
“Ah, … what about Rachel and Mia?”
A green light came on, signaling that it was time to jump. At the same time, the C-130’s ramp started to yawn open, depressurizing the cabin.
Josh stood, ready to go.
“Well?” Cheéte asked.
“I haven’t had sex with anyone since Rachel was shot in San Francisco and is still in the hospital. So, I’m not that desperate.” Finished, he walked off the aft ramp and dropped from sight, falling 30,000 feet toward the ground.
“Sheesh,” Cheéte hissed. “That’s not what I wanted to hear.” Then he was dropping with his belly pointed toward the ground, his chin lifted up, and his arms and legs spread out for stability.
As Josh fell hard and fast, he thought about Rachel and Mia. He’d lied to Cheéte. He was desperate, explaining why he was losing a lot of sleep. But he disagreed with the crap that sexual frustration was normal. So, shrug and take it in stride.
Bull shit! he thought. He couldn’t remember ever being celibate this long before.
The temptation to keep both of his lovers, as Mia had suggested, was almost overwhelming. But, when he thought about going through with it, he heard Dr. Tate’s voice telling him that would be wrong. Then there was the Christian guilt his mother instilled in him as a child with the Seventh Commandment, “Thou shall not commit adultery.”
He still didn’t understand why his mother started preaching that to him when he was seven. It couldn’t have been because of his crush on Rachel in 2nd grade. He never told anyone about that. There was no way his mother could have known.
To escape the jumble of depressing thoughts stirring up trouble inside his head, he gave himself over to the plunge. Jumping from 30,000 feet felt more like flying than falling. It was windy, loud, and intense. Josh’s senses became wildly alive. That’s why he had an obsession for HALO jumps. The thrill lasted about three times longer than a basic skydiver’s altitude.
With a stable belly-to-earth position, the fastest speed he’d reach was 120 mph. If he wanted to fly faster, he’d shift position so his head was facing the ground and his feet were pointed up. Then he’d drop at 180 mph. Josh had always wondered what it would be like to die like that. Every time he jumped, he’d been tempted to find out.
Checking out of life like that also offered him an easy way to avoid deciding between Rachel and Mia. Because this was a high altitude low open insertion, the main chute was programmed to open automatically at 1,900 feet. If that failed, the reserve chute deployed at 1,000.
The best way to bail out of life would be to use one of his keen-edged combat knives and cut the straps that held the two ‛chutes to his body. He had about a minute left to make that decision.
Was there a better way to die if you were doing something you loved? He started laughing and thought he sounded possessed.
Still, there was Damian Bran, the man they were hunting. He was the one responsible for Rachel living in a hospital, trapped in a coma. Wasn’t that a good enough reason to hang on?
Bran had been a heartless CIA agent for thirty years who left the agency in 2009. He was also known as the Strawman because of his tall, thin stature. Soon after he retired, he’d joined a white supremacist neo-Nazi militia in Montana and ended up working for a ruthless libertarian billionaire, a match made by Mephistopheles.
Josh had been hunting Bran since Rachel had been shot. His efforts to find the former CIA agent had started by putting the man’s wife under surveillance. There had been no calls or texts in or out. Instead, she hadn’t budged from their home in a remote area of Minnesota and didn’t seem to care if she ever saw her husband again.
After The Oath Group’s successful raid in Northwest Montana on that neo-Nazi training camp, Charles Tweet, the billionaire that financed the militia, revealed it was Bran who introduced him to the profitable sex trade. It turned out that the former field agent had started trafficking children years before he left the agency.
Most of the young sex slaves Bran sold to Tweet had ended up working in massage parlors spread across the United States. But some of the most beautiful had suffered a worse fate. If one of them was unfortunate enough to catch the billionaire’s eye, they were doomed.
His last intended victim had been a seventy-six-pound thirteen-year-old Ukrainian girl. The billionaire had slipped a plastic bag over the child’s head while he was raping her. When Cheéte had burst into the underground room where it was taking place, the girl was being suffocated by Tweet, using a method known as erotic asphyxiation.
Later, during his interrogation, Tweet revealed that Damen Bran had introduced him to that risky erotic method. When the billionaire accidentally murdered his first victim, Bran had shrugged it off and said, “Females were created for two purposes. To give men pleasure, and if they survive, to make babies. Besides, when you’re kidnapping children and selling them for a profit, expect to lose a few. Think of it as collateral damage, a business expense.”
Tweet accepted that justification as gospel and had gone on to murder more than a dozen young girls over the years that followed. Now, the billionaire was in court, fighting to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison. The judge had not approved bail, but his lawyers were claiming the evidence was inadmissible.
The information that pinpointed Bran’s location in Venezuela had come from Mia Belle-Chanson, one of Josh’s best friends and a former lover. To her fans, she was a singer-songwriter and a documentary producer. What her followers didn’t know was what she did away from a studio or stage. Because she’d been kidnapped in Haiti at the age of fourteen to become a sex slave, she now operated a secret network that rescued abducted children all over the world. Josh had met Mia when he and Cheéte had rescued her and several other girls soon after they’d been snatched.
Venezuela was the perfect country for a brute like Bran. After Venezuela’s President, Nicolas Madura’s rise to power in 2013, sex trafficking and child sex tourism had become common, and it was getting worse.
The intel from Mia’s rescue organization reported that Bran was living on an isolated cattle ranch located in Venezuela’s savanna southwest of the Rio Apure River.
Having second thoughts about dying, Josh checked his altimeter to determine how much time he had left to decide one way or the other.
Semper Fi and Popcorn
Semper Fi is Latin for “always faithful” and it is the motto of the United States Marine Corps— faithful to God, Country, Family and the Corps. The Urban Dictionary says it wasn’t always this way. Up until 1871, the motto was “First to fight”—a motto that still applies.
Every U.S. Marine knows that Semper Fi is the universal Marine greeting.
Recently I had a reason to explain this motto to my wife when she asked me if I wanted her to share something from me to General John R. Allen when she attended The Daily Beast’s Hero Summit on October 10—my wife was invited to be on the same panel at the summit with General Allen; David Brooks, the columnist for the New York Times who has written so often about moral standards and imperatives, and Nigerian novelist and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka.
I said to my wife, “Say two words to General Allen, Semper Fi.”
“What does that mean?” she asked. “What if he doesn’t know what it means?”
“It’s Latin for always faithful,” I replied. “And trust me, General Allen will know what those two words means. If you look at the Marine Corps emblem, you will see it on a flag flying above the American Eagle.”
As for popcorn, I couldn’t resist adding popcorn to this post because right before I sat down to write, my wife made some in the microwave and then went to see a movie at the local theater. I stayed to write this post.
The smell of fresh-popped corn filled the house and I couldn’t resist filling my own bowl with this American treat. Believe me when I say that popcorn is as American as the flag, mom and apple pie, because the History of Popcorn clearly establishes that it originated in the Americas. And the popularity of popcorn as we eat it today started in Iowa in the 1880s.
I made my bowl with two scoops of Orville Redenbacher’s gourmet popping corn poured in a lunch-sized paper bag; two minutes on high in the microwave; a dash of California Branch Garlic Oil made with Extra Virgin Olive Oil; a second dash of 100% Pure Chosen Foods Avocado Oil, and a third dash of Himalayan Pink Salt, referred to as the purest salt in the world. Then I started eating as I wrote this post about Semper Fi. [Note: all the ingredients for the popcorn came from Costco, an American company.]
The United States Marine Corps celebrates its birthday on November 10 because on that day, a decree of the Second Continental Congress led to the Marine Corps first official recruiting drive in the Tun Tavern in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—some argue that the recruiting may have started unofficially before November 10, 1775.
I wonder what kind of beer the first Marines in 1775 drank at the Tun Tavern.
Did you know there is a Founding Fathers Lager Beer listed along with forty-nine other brands that made the list of The 50 Most Patriotic Beers in America?
Too bad the best beer I have ever sipped, St. Bernardus Abt 12 [a product of Belgium], doesn’t qualify.
I guess I should have called this post, Simper Fi, Popcorn and Beer. After all, a cold beer goes great with salty snacks, and I drank my first beer when I was still on active duty in the U.S. Marines back in the 1960s during a brief stay in Okinawa before shipping out to fight in Vietnam.
Do you think a chilled-bottle of beer and a salty-bowl of popcorn would be a good way to celebrate the Marine Corps birthday?
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.
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Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”: Part 4 of 10
Sun Tzu said, “Keep plans as dark as night.”
The NVA (North Vietnamese Army) and Vietcong did this by moving supplies and troops through miles of tunnels built in the 1950 and 60s.
Deception was also one of Sun Tzu’s rules.
To achieve deception, the NVA and Vietcong announced they would honor a cease-fire on January 31, 1968, the Tet New-Year Holiday.
Sun Tzu said, “In battle use a direct attack to engage and an indirect attack to win,” meaning to deceive your enemy so you can win your real objective.
To achieve this goal, the NVA launched a surprise attack on Khe Sanh, a remote US base, one week before the Tet Offensive.
The South Vietnamese and American military are surprised when the NVA launches the Tet Offensive. At first, it looks like the Vietcong will win, but the NVA ignored one of Sun Tzu’s rules—moral influence.
Moral influence means a leader must have the people behind him to win.
During the early days of the Tet, the Vietcong rounded up and brutally assassinated several-thousand South Vietnamese government workers and killed many Catholic nuns losing the support of the people.
However, in America, watching the violence of the Tet Offensive on TV turned more Americans against the war.
Eight years later, in 1975, Saigon falls to the NVA and America loses the war even though the US had military superiority.
Continued on September 2, 2013 in Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”: Part 5 or return to Part 3
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”: Part 3 of 10
Sun Tzu liked the enemy to maneuver and respond to his moves. This way he was in charge of the battlefield.
A US report after the Vietnam War revealed that 80% of the time, it was the North Vietnamese and Vietcong who decided where and when to fight.
Sun Tzu said, “Once you know the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, you can avoid the strengths and attack the weaknesses.” At the beginning of the war, almost 80% of Americans supported it.
As the Vietnam war continued with mounting US causalities, that support at home shifted against the war, which achieved another of Sun Tzu’s rules, “The skillful leader subdues enemy’s troops without any fighting. One does not win wars by winning battles.”
Although the North Vietnamese and Vietcong did not win battles, they won the war by turning the American people against it. To achieve this goal, the North Vietnamese commander was willing to lose ten men for every American killed.
In the end, the US lost 53 thousand troops and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong more than a million with several million more noncombatants killed as collateral damage to the American bombing.
Sun Tzu felt spies were important, and he devoted one chapter to spies. He said, “Use your spies for every kind of business,” and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong followed that advice.
Sun Tzu said, “An accurate knowledge of the enemy is worth ten divisions.”
He also said, “Let your plans be as dark as night – then strike like a thunderbolt.” The Tet Offensive in January of 1968 was that thunderbolt.
Continued on August 28, 2013 in Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”: Part 4 or return to Part 2
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
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