by Fred Reed
As this illustrious columncharges resolutely into the future, a few thoughts on geopolitical doings may, or for that matter may not, be of interest. I’ll try. Regarding the war in Ukraine, massively different understandings exist. In America and countries controlled by it, it is believed that Russia invaded without provocation to begin reconstituting the Soviet …
LVT P5 AMTRAC. What we drove in my AMTRAC Battalion in Danang. Designed as a Landing vehicle, it had the gasoline tank in the bottoms so that, when the Marines decided to used them on land around mine fields, they were death traps. We were rushed into the war half-trained. Happy Memorial Day This might …
In Washington some damned fool Republican, actually Lindsey Graham, R-SC, suggests sending the US Army to Mexico, “to fight the drug trade,” this to be done “with Mexico’s permission,” which is Washington talk for “after buying Mexico’s President.”Whether this is luminous stupidity or malign intent isn’t clear. It is militarily absurd. Why? First, the population …
The Atlantic waters off Snead’s Ferry in North Carolina are shallow, maybe 125 feet to the continental shelf. Several wrecks lie on the bottom, mostly in advanced stages of disintegration, sunk by U-boats in the early years of the war. I know them well as for years I was a member of Capital Divers, out …
-T{he current state of the American Army. Troops learn the hardships of pregnancy. The United States seems to be contemplating war with Russia, Iran, China, or all three. Washington pushes NATO ever closer to Russia, leaves the nuclear-missile treaty and tries to destroy both countries and China economically. Why the push for war? Simple. Asia …
He grew up in the woods and rivers of the county, fishing and swimming and hunting under sprawling blue skies and driving his rattletrap car insanely and lying on the moss with his girl and watching the branches above groping the sky and marveling as the young do at the strangeness of life, and the …
Dawn comes to the alleys around Tan Son Nhut Field with a faint grey light seeping past the graveyard and up the dusty road toward the banana market. Pots begin to clatter and red charcoal dims in brightening court-yards. A hungry dog sniffs in the ditch. A cyclo, a motor-driven coal scuttle equally useful as …
The firing range lay in spectacular desert hills rising to a huge sky over Las Vegas, a blue immensity bounded by worn red stumps of rock like shattered molars. Startling pink strata cut through darker layers the color of clotted blood. Scrub vegetation struggled on the dry earth, forming such a wasteland that it was …
We stood, the captain and I, high in the sail, the rounded steel dorsal fin that used to be called the conning tower, as the sun rose red over the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest. A bitter cold wind raced over the Hood Canal, leading to the open Pacific; the water was black and …
To an observer on one of Fort Hood’s flattened prominences, the Abrams M1 tank would seem a dark mote below a high plume of dust, a glint of periscopes, a small furor lost in the vastness and pastels of central Texas. Not even the grandest of tanks can intimidate a landscape. By day and night …