On todays issue of Fox News’ The Big Story with John Gibson, just hours after Kerry’s handlers threatened to rip out the lectern timing lights for tonight’s debate, I heard DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe claim Kerry actually likes the lights. )

Here I am working late. I say “working” when I am in fact just waiting until after duty hours to do system maintenance that will require about 5 minutes of downtime. I’m doing a little reading while checking my emails every few minutes for signs of locked accounts and/or forgotten passwords, and checking the audit logs every few minutes for signs of inactivity. I’m listening to the free Classic Rock station on Launch, and coming close to breaking out those 3 bucks a month to get my personalized station back. Now, my idea of “Classic Rock” is the Beatles, the Doors, the Stones, Hendrix, Zeppelin, Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and various other late 60’s and 70’s artists. I’m even willing to concede to including late 70’s Van Halen and Heart. Suddenly I realize “Hey, that’s the Police.” Then I hear some Poison, Ratt, Bon Jovi, Loverboy, Foreigner, and (gasp) U2. What the? When did the stuff I listened to in high school and college become “classic” rock??? How can Van Hagar be classic rock??? It hasn’t been that long…has it?

Update: The maintenace took 30 minutes. I walked out of the building, and noticed the “Dilbert cloud of doom” overhead. Got out of the car at home and thought “What is that spraying noise?” The antifreeze shooting out of my radiator all over the garage. What a day. Then I go through the mail and find a card from a friend, who is a former JACster as well. I open up the card to the photos placed inside and almost busted a gut over these. Heh heh. And I will never accept Van Hagar as “classic rock.”

Echoing all the Democratic talking points that I’ve read about in blogs, the Lone Star Iconoclast is endorsing John Kerry for President. The Iconoclast is the newspaper in Crawford, TX, where President Bush has his ranch.

Excerpt:

Four items trouble us the most about the Bush administration: his initiatives to disable the Social Security system, the deteriorating state of the American economy, a dangerous shift away from the basic freedoms established by our founding fathers, and his continuous mistakes regarding terrorism and Iraq.

I’m hoping that one (or more) of my fellow bloggers can address that editorial point by point, and show where the fallacies are. I know they’re in there, but I don’t have the rebuttal information at my fingertips. If a rebuttal is already out there, could someone please provide the link? Thanks.

UPDATE: Reader Bill Powell (USN, Ret) sent me an email sharing some information he had dug up.

I did a little investigation into this outfit. Not living in the Waco area, I don’t know what kind of storefront this paper has, but I checked out their website. The site’s domain name was registered on Nov 28, 2000 (the day after Al Gore sued.) The registrant is Smith Media, Inc. in Clifton, TX. Smith Media owns the Clifton Courier weekly newspaper in that town. The owners of this paper are James W. Smith and W. Leon Smith. According to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article, W Leon Smith is the publisher of the Lone Star Iconoclast. Well a little Google search turned up that W. Leon Smith (as of Oct 2003) is the Mayor or Clifton, TX. Now Clifton is located south-west of Dallas. This is a long way from Crawford, which is near Waco. It would seem to be a large coincidence that a publisher in Clifton would want to expand into the Crawford market at exactly the same time as Bush won the election unless the guy wanted to have a base for making political statements - dontcha think?

Personally, I think it’s interesting that in the endorsement commentary, they state that they endorsed Bush in 2000 — how could they do that if the paper didn’t exist until well after Election Day?????? Hmmmm……..

Update, Part Deux:

Over at The Captain’s Quarters, Ed blogged about this as well, but he also shared the follow-up reactions.

Seems that the folks of Crawford did not appreciate the editorial nor the endorsement, and already six advertisers have pulled their ads from the small weekly paper (circulation 425).

Madison, WI talkradio host Vicki McKenna posts on her website this recorded telephone campaign message from John Kerry, which came out of Ontario Canada.

Three or four years ago while Saddam Hussein still had a death-grip on the Iraqi people and a slightly looser grip on the Western journalists who came to commiserate with them, I listened to an interview on NPR, an interview with an Iraqi gentleman and musician, who was the principle cellist with the symphony orchestra in Baghdad. The orchestra then existed against great odds and every deprivation that the UN sanctioned, and out of which certain western powers were profiting.

It was heartbreaking, listening to the voice of the cellist, and his account of the orchestra, much reduced, and with its surviving coterie of musicians having to work day jobs, and starving not only for materiel sustenance, but for connection with the larger world, with other musicians, to travel, to perform for a world audience. The Iraqi cellist longed for it, longed with the desperation of a man stranded in the desert who craves water, a desire all the more poignant because of dread, dread of what might, would, probably take place in order to make all those longings a reality. And of course, with Saddam’s media minders vetting every word of interview, the cellist could not voice his hopes or fears in any but the most banal and inoffensive phrases and I am sure the interviewer knew this, and so did any sensitive listener.

The interviews were taped during rehearsals for a concert featuring Elgar’s Cello Concerto. I rather like Elgar and composers like Smetana, Dvorak, Neilson, and Delius; the agreeably second-rank, late nineteenth and early 20th century composers of symphonic music, with a mildly nationalist interest in the folklore and musical traditions of their respective countries. It’s accessible in a way that the jangly and self-consciously modern later composers are not. They composed and performed largely in a time and world which was hopeful, where great and wonderful advances in everything—medicine, machinery, political movements, and communications— were making lives better and more rewarding, and most Americans and Europeans were confident that things would get even better. Even the Cello Concerto, completed in 1919 after the wreckage of much of that sunny confidence during the First World War, still offered a bit of hope, and a refuge in music, when everything else is gone.

I don’t know how the concert itself went over, but I wonder now if it wasn’t something like an occasion caught for newsreel cameras sometime during the last months of Hitler’s Germany; one last performance by the Berlin Philharmonic; the faces of the audience somber and exhausted. The vengeful Soviets are advancing from the East, the British and Americans from the West, every night, the nights are hideous with high-explosives as the Allied air forces methodically steam-roller cities into rubble, the thousand-year Reich is imploding, its’ functionaries seeing enemies and saboteurs everywhere, nemesis and blood. There is no refuge for the concertgoers, except for a little while in the music. That little is all they have left, before the ending of their world, and so they are lost in it, grateful for this little respite, the reminder that there is order, and beauty, and hope in the world, and a promise that the present nightmare may pass. And so I think it was for the principal cellist of the Baghdad symphony— a hope and a reminder.

I don’t know about Afghanistan; it seems to be very like what it was in Kipling’s’ day, all swashbuckling and intrigue and tribal feuds. But for a country like Iraq, where there can be a symphony orchestra, and a musician who loves Elgar’s Cello concerto; that is indeed a light and a promise of order, beauty and hope.

I can’t say that I liked additional duties, but they were necessary. One I had at Tinker was PRF (Personnel Readiness Folder) Monitor for the squadron. Each flight had one, too. The way I approached this one was to keep up with any changes in requirements from Group, and pass this info to each flight so that everyone would have everything up-to-date and correct in their individual folders. This was part of readiness to deploy on short notice. Basically, I kept the most current checklist and distributed it to the rest of the squadron. This checklist listed every item you were to keep in your 6 part PRF, and was also one of the required items in the PRF.

About the time I got this dubious honor, we started the buildup to an ORI (Operational Readiness Inspection). ORI’s produced several practice run exercises prior to the actual inspection. During one of the practice Air Mobiles, several squadron personnel were simulated deployed, which included a PRF check. Now, of course the rest of the squadron’s PRF’s needed to be checked too, as you never know when or who might be a replacement. So each flight brought me a boxful of PRF’s to check…by myself. There were probably 50-80 folders to go through. Not hard mind you, but oh so mundane. To this day I have the immunization requirements memorized.

It took me about 3-4 days to finish as I still had to do my primary job. I would just go through the checklist. For each requirement on the list, you either had it or you didn’t. I think out of all four flights, there were maybe 5 folders that passed. All the others had at least one thing wrong. A MSgt from one of the flights looked at the results for his flight, and then looked at me. “You are the PRF Dragon Lady.” As far as the actual ORI, our squadron received a 100% passing score on PRF’s.

So I’m discussing Bush, Kerry, and Iraq on some inconsequential BBS. And I’m subjected to the typical liberal idiotarian arguments about no WMD, yadda-yadda, Chalabi. yadda-yadda, Haliburton, yadda-yadda, ad nauseam. So, after discrediting about the 50th cited article from the likes of Al Jazeera, and the World Socialist Website, I respond with the following:

Basically, what you guys are saying is that, because there is some evidence that your preferred conclusion is true, than it is true without question. That is a logical fallacy.

Yes, there have been substantial miscalculations in the past, and there will be more in the future. But, as Sun Tzu teaches us, “no plan, no matter how cleverly conceived, survives its first contact with reality.” When John Kerry says he has a “Four Year Plan” to get us out of Iraq, the wisdom of the ages tells us he’s trying to sell us a bill of goods. Any actions we take will be contingent upon the actions of the Iraqi civil authorities, which aren’t even in place yet. So any talk of grand “plans” is utter nonsense.

Yes, there are negative trends in some metrics. The most notable would be the increase in terrorist aggression, and the resultant losses. And I do not argue that is an entirely unsatisfactory situation. However, from the standpoint of the objective military strategist: The situation is likely to be beyond our currently achievable level of control. But the rate of loss, and its projected increase, is well within a sustainable range. At least on a near to mid-term basis.

Longer term, there are Iraqi security forces coming online – not nearly as quickly as Messrs. Bush and Allawi would have us believe, but far more rapidly than Mr. Kerry is claiming. All indications are that the training situation is getting the bugs ironed out, and moving forward smartly. AND, in this matter, we are getting significant international support (ref. The new NATO sponsored training academy). However, it will take time to build the Iraqi security force level up to one which has the upper hand on the situation. Keep in mind though, there is substantial weight to the argument that, with properly directed control measures by existing coalition forces on the guerillas, the rate of increase in guerilla offensive capability will be far outstripped by that of the Iraqi security forces.

In short, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

And it is common for those in the Kerry camp to liken the Iraq campaign to the Vietnam War. There are far too few parallels here to make any plausible claim of equivalence. Most notable among these differences are that, while the NVA/Vietcong axis had a personnel pool of millions to draw upon, without a massive influx of foreign forces, the Iraqi guerillas can draw upon a pool no likely larger than 250,000. And, while Ho Chi Minh strategized upon an acceptable loss ratio of 10 Vietnamese to 1 imperialist fighter, the loss ratio for the Iraqi Saddamist army/guerillas is far worse. Further, while the NVA/Vietcong axis could call upon the virtually unlimited materiel support of their superpower sponsor, the Iraqi guerillas are far more limited in what support they can expect from their foreign sponsors, as this must be transferred quite clandestinely.

But there is one important parallel we must be wary of: the politization of the war. In Vietnam, when we conducted serious, militarily planned operations, most notably Linebacker II, the results were swift and devastating for the North Vietnamese. But then, on the threshold of victory, the politicians stepped in and pulled back on the reins. The enemy regrouped the war continued, and more people died. And so it has been in Fallujah, Najaf, and Sadr City. Our forces have been on the verge of pacifying, and then sanitizing these major terrorist enclaves, only to be withdrawn for misguided political considerations. Such missteps cannot be repeated.

Now, My personal experience and philosophy tells me that, as with the general war on terror, our Iraqi campaign must be conducted far more aggressively than that of the current administration. Were I CIC, I would be instituting far more dramatic redeployment – making more troops available for actual combat theaters, conducting far more vigorous enlistment campaigns, vastly increasing pay and benefits – for not just active duty, but R/NG, and vets as well - and deploying far more troops to Iraq. This would be not simply for force protection and security, but as a buildup for potential invasion of Syria and/or Iran.

But George Bush has taken a markedly less dynamic and cautious course.

But what of John Kerry? Well, it’s harder to pin down his position on this war than that of a Florida hurricane on a weather map. But there is little doubt that, in one regard, he will increase political control over the Iraq campaign. This goes inescapably had-in-had with his professed desire to increase international participation. Does he fantasize that he could even get France to deploy even a single company, without giving up some major amount of control over conduct of the campaign?

Maybe someone else with more knowledge can fill in the details on this man. I learned about him in this week’s issue of “This is True” - he was the “honorary unsubscribe.”

Gene Hambleton, perhaps better known by the call sign “Bat 21″ died earlier this week at age 85. From his “honorary unsubscribe,” I learned that this Air Force navigator was shot down in 1972, while on a mission, jamming enemy radio signals. He parachuted from his plane, and landed in the middle of 30,000 NVA troops. While avoiding capture, he used his survival radio to call in airstrikes on the invading soldiers. He was eventually rescued, but not until one helicopter lost its entire crew trying to get him out.

I don’t know how I ever missed this story, among all the Project Warrior readings I did as a young airman. A book was written about his experience in 1980 (Bat 21), and another in 1998 (Rescue of Bat 21). Looks like I’ll be adding another couple books to my “must read someday” stack.

Randy’s “unsubscribe” does a better job of giving a picture of who the man was than the Legacy.com obit did. And a little more Googling turned up this article in Golf Digest. Seems the LTC was an avid golfer, with a fantastic memory for courses he’d played. They used that knowledge to tell him which way to go to avoid enemy villages and get to the river.

Update: His name was Iceal “Gene” Hambleton.

In a conversation I am having with some individuals on another website, who don’t understand the military mindset, or the concept of duty and honor; they guffawed when I claimed that I did not know of a single American service member in Iraq that claimed they weren’t doing their duty willingly and proudly. One cited the infamous “One weekend a month my ass” sign(s) (I’ve only seen one myself.). He obviously also doesn’t understand the difference between a political statement, and a critique about one’s individual situation.

So, if there are any disgruntled service members out there, and they care to step to the fore, I urge them to write me, and I will post their letter(s) here.

Here are the rules:
Anyone that writes must include their name, rank, and unit. No anonymous BS. I also don’t care about subjective judgements about command decisions. What I want to read is some American service member deployed to Iraq that feels they were duped when they enlisted, and led to believe they wouldn’t be subject to the possibility of extended overseas deployments or combat. I will also post any letters from American service members who believe they are being compelled to participate in an internationally illegal war, or any other illegal military action.

When I was in high school, I remember reading a letter to the editor in my hometown paper written by a woman whose brother had just died from cancer. He had fought in Vietnam and was exposed to Agent Orange. Around the same time, John Ritter starred in a movie about a Vietnam Vet/teacher who had been exposed to Agent Orange and later died from cancer. I was 16 or 17, and full of idealism, although I thought Ronald Reagan was the man. During my junior and senior years I did a couple of reports on the Vietnam that were very critical of the government’s involvement in Vietnam. I became quite anti-Vietnam.

So here I am now, double the age I was then, a veteran, and keeping up with current events which I didn’t bother with as a teenager. Just in the past 5 years or so I learned that we never lost a major military battle against the North Vietnamese. I hear John Kerry boast about his 4 months in Vietnam. Then I hear about his post-war testimony and anti-war activities. Then the Swift Boat Vets come out against him. I am starting to look at Vietnam again in a different light.

When I went through ALS, they gave us General Robbie Risner’s book, The Passing of the Night. It was encouraged reading, but not required. A few of my classmates read it during those weeks, and said it was great, so I resolved to read it someday. I finally read it over this past weekend. I’m not so anti-Vietnam anymore. Abu Gharib was a pajama party compared to the Hanoi Hilton. I think again about John Kerry’s 1971 claims of war crimes being committed by US soldiers. It sounded just like what the North Vietnamese were torturing the US POW’s into “confessing.”

We were not the bad guys in Vietnam. We’re not the bad guys now either.

Source: Nastech Pharmaceutical Company, Inc:

Nastech Pharmaceutical Company Inc. and Merck & Co., Inc. Announce Co-Development and Co-Promotion Alliance for Investigational PYY3-36 Nasal Spray for Treatment of Obesity

As you might guess, Nastech stock has skyrocketed.

In a very interesting interview on C-Span’s Washington Journal today, I caught an interesting fact concerning the action at ground zero on 9/11. Peter Lance was hawking his new book Cover-Up, Saying that it was the first time he brought it up, he mentioned a man arrested while coming out of the basement of Tower 7, wearing a fireman’s coat stolen from Engine Co. #10, and speaking Arabic on a cell phone. The NYPD notified the FBI, and were told they weren’t interested in him. He was given time served and released.

So, standing in the supermarket checkout line this evening, I notice a minor tabloid on the rack called the Weekly World News. And their lead story is headlined: Real Life Catwoman Found In Ozarks. In checking out the picture, I see she looks just like … Jeff Foxworthy

So, I can hear it in my mind: You Just Might Be A Redneck Catwoman If…

Your Litter Box Is At The Edge Of The Woods…

When You Go To Scratch Up The Furniture, You Keep Poking Yourself On The Springs…

You And Batman Are Actually Cousins…

The Hound-dog Only Chases You When You Try To Raid His Still…

Something has been bugging me all weekend. The kids and hubby are irritating me to no end, but I know it’s not them. I think I know now what my problem is. A couple of weeks ago, I read a post on Blackfive written by a Navy doctor leaving Iraq describing what was good and what was bad. Of course I broke down, and sent the link to all my friends and family. Naturally a few replied and bitched at me for making them cry, but one of my cousins replied and told me how she thought so many take the sacrifices military members make for granted. Then she thanked me for serving and told me how proud she was of me. Well, there I went bawling again. See, I don’t feel that I ever really made that much of a sacrifice. Sure I missed my daughter’s first Christmas when I was in Kuwait, but thousands of men and women miss a lot of their kid’s Christmas’s, and birthdays, and anniversaries than I ever did. But that’s not what’s bugging me either.

I have another cousin who joined the Army National Guard about 14 years ago. His unit deployed to Iraq a few months ago. I know he is no more or less important than any other soldier over there, but he is the only one that I have known my whole life. He is the only one over there that I used to sneak off with to smoke cigarettes when we were teenagers. He’s the only one over there I cruised around town with listening to AC/DC’s Who Made Who tape. He’s the only one who was standing next to me in front of our Granny’s casket and saw her eyelid flutter. (I would have thought it was my imagination, but he saw it too.) I think that’s my problem. It’s hitting close to home. There hasn’t been a war or conflict before this one, in my lifetime, that someone that close to me has been involved in, because I was too little to remember Vietnam.

Godspeed Gary, and be safe. I am proud of you.

So, I am putting it out to the many fans I know I have who also have blogs of their own: send me half a dozen questions that you absolutely, positively want to know the answer to, direct from me— and I will answer them, honestly and amusingly. You can post the interview on your site, with a link to my eccentric and charming memoir, and I will post a link to your penetrating and insightful interview on TDB.
No, it is not link-whoring, just exploring the so-far-unlimited limits of the blogosphere. And it’s not like I’ve been booked on “The Today Show” or “Fresh Air” or anything… but I have four hungry cats to support, and a daughter to put through veterinary school, even though the GI bill will do a lot of the heavy lifting as far as Cpl. Blondie’s continuing education is concerned. (She already knows how to hotwire a Humvee, and siphon gas with a length of garden hose, but veterinary school requires many, many other skills.) And why do I have to travel, when I can be there, with the click of a mouse?
Let me know, via comments, or e-mail.

I had planned a much longer, more thoughtful, more cogent, more eloquent essay about some other subject this weekend, but time has (yet again) gotten away from me. I am behind in all three of my classes (students are waiting patiently on returned papers AND I have a test to finish preparing) and I’m supervising Sageling on my own this weeken while the General is on a retreat.

But enough whining.

In place of that, a quick thought on the draft.

Senator Kerry’s rumor-mongering on the draft was covered on this site (and many others — see here for example) earlier this week. Late in the week, on one of the Fox shows, I heard Pat Caddell (whom I’ve grown to like in spite of the fact that we’re on opposite sides of the political spectrum) mention that the draft is a subject that may yet need to be addressed by the candidates. His reason? We will need more troops in Iraq or elsewhere.

Mind you, I don’t think Caddell is engaging in rumor-mongering like Sen. Kerry was, but why does everyone think that a draft is the only solution to our manpower problem? What about just increasing our recruiting efforts and perhaps “sweetening the pot?”

Furthermore, I’ll bet that there are many of us who have retired or separated who would be willing to sign up for another hitch in while we’re engaged in the war on terror. I’d be honored to be recalled to AD (the General might not be so thrilled, but she’s a patriot, and she’d salute and follow right along with me). Warning to the Air Force — the longer I hang out with these academics, the quicker I lose my edge. Hurry!

So, let’s not hear any more about the draft. OK? Except maybe from Charlie Rangel, just for entertainment value.

Just when you thought the service record issue was dead…

Josh Micah Marshall claims that Marc Racicot lied when he said George Bush volunteered to go to Vietnam, Josh is relying upon Bush’s 1968 enlistment forms, and the fact that the Palace Alert program ended shortly after Bush graduated flight training in 1970. However, we now find, according to retired ANG Colonel Ed Morrisey, Bush volunteered again:

“The Air Force, in their ultimate wisdom, assembled a group of 102’s and took them to Southeast Asia. Bush volunteered to go. But he needed to have 500 [flight] hours, but he only had just over 300 hours so he wasn’t eligible to go,” Morrisey recalls.

I’ve got an email into Byron York, perhaps the journalist most familiar with Bush’s service record, hoping to find out when Bush had accumulated 300 hours of flight time. Or perhaps one of our own astute readers or contributors can help me out?

Let me preface this by stating that I have not smoked any marijuana tonight, nor have I in recent memory.

I just put some cooked spinach on a Philly cheesesteak sandwich - YUM-YUM!

Oh, and please don’t tell my doctor I’m eating cheesesteaks at midnight. >:)

This is really amazing:

Sept. 24, 2004 — For years, dog owners have been informing their doctors about the apparent disease-detecting ability of their pets, and today those claims gain some credibility with the release of the first ever peer-reviewed scientific study showing that dogs can smell cancer.

The paper, published in the British Medical Journal, tested whether canines could sniff out bladder cancer within urine samples. The researchers believe dogs probably can smell other cancers and diseases, such as tuberculosis.

But I ask, with all these wonderous things we can train dogs to do, why do we need $50,000 dynamometers to do smog checks?

For just about every busload of kids, a visit to the Mather AFB Museum and Planetarium (and whatever else) was the first ever time they had ever been to a military base. The grade school kids were demented with excitement from the sheer adventure of being sprung from a boring classroom for a day, and although the more worldly middle and high school students managed a show of insouciance, they were usually impressed and fascinated, also. Mather’s neat, tree-lined grid of streets and ranges of World War II era temporary buildings certainly looked like a movie set of a military base. (Temporary in this case means that the military gets at least half a century of hard use out of it; permanent has to last a couple of centuries. Really and truly temporary is canvas with a wooden floor.)

I turned the commute between the gate and the flight line into part of the tour, with a monologue about how the base was really a town, just like where they lived: we had a city hall (the wing HQ), and a grocery store (waving a hand towards the road where the commissary was), a department store (we’d be passing the BX complex at this point), and apartment buildings (which would be the student navigator barrack blocks). Our suburb was the housing area, away around the end of the runway, where there was a church and a grade school. To the kids, this was familiar, but the uniforms…. And the airplanes…. And the helicopters!

All that made it no end exotic, and extra fascinating, to the point where I couldn’t give up this part of the tour when we had a group that came in a carpool, instead of efficiently all loaded onto a bus. In that case, I’d have prepared by bringing along strips of bright cloth, to be tied to the aerials of all the cars in the tour, with me in the lead car, and my casual officer assistant in the last. At various key points, I’d have the tour convoy pull over and park, and the kids gather around for the commentary. This would eat up precious time, unloading and loading the cars, until I came up with a strategy to move the kids along briskly. I told them the story of England’s Finest Hour, when the RAF fighter pilots had to be ready, standing by their aircraft and ready to take off at a moments’ notice to fly and fight. As soon as they were given the order to “scramble” I would say, they had to run to their planes, jump in, fasten their safety belts, and take off, as swiftly and as efficiently as they could. And this is what I wanted the kids to do— to run to the car they were riding in get in and fasten up, and help their friends— the minute that I yelled “Squadron! Scramble!” Worked like a charm, too, but there must be many thirty and forty-somethings on the Sacramento metro area who now have a decidedly eccentric take on the Battle of Britain.

We usually took them to the planetarium first, a tiny column of a building with a domed roof that always reminded me of Poindexter’s planetary telescope— which could seat an astonishingly large number of people, on the tiered seats inside. I listened to the planetarium presentation so many times, I could have done it myself, if necessary. It was interesting to see how the various school groups responded, and sometimes disheartening; how so very few kids could recognize the planet earth, blue and green and swathed with clouds, in a shot taken from space. It seemed that the sharpest classes were either from parochial and private schools, or from the small rural towns outside the city. The dullest academic knife in the drawer during my time doing tours was a class which contained only two kids— one white, one black— who spoke English. The rest of the class was split between Hispanic and Vietnamese, and although they had a Spanish-fluent and a Vietnamese-fluent teachers’ aide with them, we were left all to wonder if anyone had gotten anything out of the trip at all.

The museum was down the street and around the corner from the planetarium, an easy walk of three blocks or so, and which incorporated a “sight” not actually listed in the teachers’ “handbook of field-trips”. I always stopped the column of children about half a block away, and told them what it was, and what they should look for. This was Mather AFB’s very own unofficial mascot and endangered species, a particular and very rare breed of ground-burrowing owl, peculiar to California and very high up on the endangered species list. So when one of these rare birds deigned to make itself entirely at home in a stretch of field and find a mate and build it’s own-equivalent of the rose-covered cottage adjacent to a well-traveled sidewalk, the powers that be were suitably impressed. So was everyone else. No one on base was permitted to pester, harass, or deliberately frighten it. The owl (or owls) were often seen, perched on top of the rounded cone of dirt from the burrow. A kind, wild-life loving soul in CE even provided a gnome-sized patio table with umbrella to mark the burrow especially. (Little-known fact: military preserves are often very well stocked with endangered species, which often seem remarkably stoic about live ammunition, noisy engines, and frequent explosions. Go figure.) With luck, and if they were quiet and kept their eyes fixed on the little table, and the mound of dirt, at least half the tour group would have a glimpse of the owl— a stubby brown little thing about the size of a fat grackle, before it went to ground.

Around the corner, the Museum was in an old warehouse, quite professionally designed and with a nice collection of aviation relics, an authentic old wire recorder, and a half-sized replica biplane that the kids could actually climb into. The unicycle-riding major provided good amusement value, although his accounts of Pancho Barnes’ place in aviation history had to be considerably toned down for the grade-school set.
And then to the picnic ground across the road from the museum, keeping a watchful eye on the kids, eating bag lunches, chatting to their teachers, and answering questions posed by clearly hero- or heroine-worshipping kids… well, there are worse ways to spend a morning at work. I could hardly believe the Air Force paid me a salary to do something I enjoyed this much,
We used to get packets of thank-you letters and drawings from the kids, afterwards. Their teachers assigned them to do pictures and letters as a class assignment.

It was amazing, how many of them did pictures of the owl!