Last year for the fourth of July I sat in the apartment most of the weekend, emerging briefly to see the on-base fireworks display. This year I plan to top that: I’ve got a four-day weekend, an off-base pass, and a well-stocked debit card: I am travelling. Right now I’ll sleep a few hours, then [...]
There’s a small howitzer, almost a mortar, on the helipad at Camp Casey. I’ve seen it a bunch of times, but never at 1700. At 1700, it seems, it gets set off with a blank charge daily. When this happens, there are a few consequences. A 20-foot fireball shoots briefly out the muzzle. A shower [...]
The paradox of excellence is that for doing good work, your reward is more work to do. Actually, it’s not much of a paradox unless you assume that a fundamental goal at work is to earn the most pay for the least amount of trouble, which seems a very reasonable goal. It’s not quite the [...]
Reading Albert Camus’s book. So far, I can’t say I’m impressed. He’s got a big vocabulary. So do I. I’ve experienced often enough the fact that people assume that this implies intelligence far beyond what actually exists. Now I have evidence: this book, which I’m reading because of a recommendation saying it was quite profound, [...]
I’ve been reading books about North Korea since I got here to the South. I think that by this point I’ve got a fair sense of what the nation is, and what it might do. Given that, I think that the US, S. Korea, and as many of the UN as we can convince should [...]
Cyrano de Bergerac was the first rapper. What? Most rap is the singer bragging about their accomplishments. The most frequently bragged about accomplishments: The ability to compose verse on the fly. The ability to seduce women with the aid of said verse Proficiency with a weapon Cyrano was accomplished in all of this, before the [...]
Last Friday I took a tour of the Blue House: Korea’s executive mansion and offices. It was a nice enough tour, though we were only allowed to take pictures from three designated locations. For the most part, the landscapes were beautiful and the architecture stately. There were two exceptions: two carefully manicured lawns which had [...]
At the beginning of this month, I got a task: I was to produce a comedic video short, 10-15 minutes long, celebrating the tenure of the BN Commander, to be shown at his outbound Hail and Farewell dinner. One of my peers would back me up, and I’d have command support for getting the filming [...]
After 863 pages of the man from la Mancha, that book is finally finished. Normally such length wouldn’t be a real obstacle, but this time I found myself reading half a dozen more contemporary novels between the time I started and finished the classic, just to remind myself that I enjoy reading. I come away [...]
(Preface: I am neither an official Pentagon source nor an official spokesman for the Army. I am a US Army UH-60 pilot otherwise entirely dissociated from this event; these are my personal opinions.) A video was posted recently by WikiLeaks. It’s gun camera footage from an Apache engagement on 12 July 2007. The video begins [...]