Of the 914 bird species listed by the American Birding Association, over 500 of them can be found in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV). Eighteen bird species reach the northern limits of their ranges in the Rio Grande Valley and cannot be found elsewhere in the United States. I’ve listed those birds here, not to brag on them, but because my wife has accused me of never writing posts that are happy and positive. What could be more uplifting than seeing a Plain Chachalaca, White-tipped Dove, Groove-billed Ani, Common Pauraque, Buff-bellied Hummingbird, Harris’s Hawk, Gray Hawk, Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl, Ringed Kingfisher, Green Kingfisher, Northern Beardless Tyrannulet, Great Kiskadee, Green Jay, Long-billed Thrasher, Clay-colored Thrush, Botteri’s Sparrow, Olive Sparrow, or the ever colorful Altamira Oriole?
Green Jays are beautiful birds, but they hit bird feeders like Navy jets hit carrier decks: fast, loud, and flashy.
The most common bird in my backyard is the large black great-tailed grackle. I spend a lot of time watching the males fluff their feathers and dance around trying to impress female grackles, who ignore them as they eat bugs from my lawn. Male grackles can be annoying; they are loud and urbanized, so they mostly ignore humans while they pester females with their crazy dancing and fights with other males. They must annoy other bird species, as I often see little two-ounce mockingbirds relentlessly attacking the much larger male grackle. I’ve seen mockingbirds wear out feral cats who come too close to their nest, too. There’s a reason why they are the Texas State Bird.
The Great Kiskadee is just as colorful as a Green Jay, but more mellow and musical. It makes you feel calm and peaceful just looking at it, right?
The Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival will be in Harlingen this year from the 5th through the 9th of November, and you can’t find a more positive, happy, wholesome family event. Events like this make me proud to be a Valley resident, so never let it be said I don’t write in favorable terms about my home because I just did.
Birding is no longer of interest to me after I discovered the Hawk kettles I mentioned often on the All Marine Radio podcast were turkey vultures who congregate here in the winter—fake hawks who fly around defecating on their legs to cool off. Real Hawks move down the Mississippi Flyway to winter in the tropics, returning up the flyway in the spring. They often form large kettles flying in a circular pattern on warm thermals that lift them several thousand feet so they can glide towards their destination without expending energy. I kept seeing these kettles long after the migratory birds had passed, and often reported to the All Marine Radio fanbase that I was seeing hawk kettles after they should have moved through the area.
My wife heard me talking about hawk kettles on the podcast one evening and told me they were turkey vultures that winter in the RGV and spend the evenings surfing the thermals, much like a bunch of stoners on skateboards. Those nasty fake hawks played me like a rube, fooling me into thinking they were massive real Hawks, so I’m done with the birding. But I’m not done heaping praise on my valley home.
Just last week, ICE and Border Patrol agents spent a few days visiting construction sites on Padre Island and Brownsville to round up illegal migrants. As you can see in the photo below, these are well-paid heavy equipment operators working those sites. The response from the local majority Hispanic population has been muted. Residents of the Valley of the Birds understand why so many illegals are given such high-paying jobs. It’s not about reducing project payrolls but the employer’s exposure to OSHA fines and lawsuits from injured workers.
Illegal labor reduces employer exposure to OSHA violation fines and injured worker lawsuits.
Suppose an American worker loses some fingers or has a foot shredded on the job site. That accident and the injuries must be reported to OSHA, and you can bet that soon after, one of the ambulance-chasing lawyers with the same digit phone numbers will be suing. If an illegal is badly injured he is shit out of luck, no OSHA protection, no lawyers suing on his behalf, he might get some extra cash to limp back across the border to heal up if he’s lucky.
As is often the case in our current media environment, memes reveal a truth that is evident to everyone not employed in the media.
Mexico has a long history of blaming its problems that it doesn’t export to the United States on the United States. This deeply rooted victim mentality has served the Mexican state well when dealing with fickle American officials from past administrations. Now they have to deal with President Trump and a cabinet full of uber competent Americans who are uninterested in fleecing American taxpayers. President Trump is revoking visas of high-ranking, obviously corrupt Mexican officials; he has closed the border, and he is going to start taxing remittances.
The ever-prescient Joshua Treviño of the Texas Public Policy Foundation diagnoses the dilemma facing the Mexican government when dealing with President Trump succinctly:
Though the Mexican regime does not particularly care about the welfare of its people – having presided over an internal war that has seen the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Mexicans by its own cartel allies and sometimes its own armed forces – it does care for its own position and privileges, and so an economic collapse alarms it in ways that death and cruelty among its own people does not.
When a country develops a permanent victim mentality, it becomes incapable of understanding the history behind its current state of malaise and incompetence. People with no understanding of their past will have no control over their future. That is why Mexico attempted to combat the endemic violence plaguing the country by suing American gun makers. The Supreme Court dismissed this frivolous lawsuit with a rare unanimous decision last week.
Another meme, nobody in the No Kings organization or the American media understands
Rio Grande Valley history supports the thesis of the recently published The Culture Transplant. The introduction of a handful of Scots-Irish entrepreneurs who accumulated their wealth in the traditional way of my people transformed the valley into an economic powerhouse. They gained power and land by marrying into wealthy Hispanic land grant families. I admit to being the descendant of those handsome rouges with technical educations and good dental hygiene. A few hundred years ago, dental hygiene was of critical importance when romancing comely daughters of the land-owning Hispanic aristocracy.
A book written by an academic that reflects reality, not a progressive narrative? Will wonders ever cease? If you want to live in the thrid world shit hole vote democrat.
Then the newly minted landowners spurred economic growth, transforming the once-tragic soil of the Rio Grande Valley into magic soil. They started with the Steamboat landings in Brownsville and Rio Grande City to stimulate commerce. They established safe, secure, honest banks where their Mexican relatives could stash money, accumulating compound interest rates without fearing periodic Peso devaluations or confiscation by the corrupt Mexican federal government. Anglo engineers figured out how to build a gravity-fed irrigation system, turning the RGV into a farming paradise.
The visuals of the LA riots perfectly represent the magic versus tragic soil theory first propagated by Steve Sailer when addressing the topic of white flight:
So that explains white flight: whites who lived in Compton in 1950, like those white families that included two future Presidents, depleted the Magic Soil, leaving only Tragic Soil for all the blacks who moved in, causing them to shoot each other and make rap songs about it.
I’m not sure how to explain why Compton got less shooty after the Latinos pushed most of the blacks out, but no doubt future advances in Soil Theory will answer that question too.
This is not how to win friends or influence people, unless you’re a democrat, in which case this is just a peaceful protest by hard-working people who deserve never to be held accountable for anything they do
Today’s LA riots don’t look anything like the 1992 LA riots due to the conspicuous absence of black rioters. There are some to be sure, and they seem to have cornered the high-end store looting market, but their numbers are a fraction of what they once were in LA. That has nothing to do with white people, so it is ignored by the legacy media, who despise facts that run counter to their preferred narrative about the evils of Caucasians.
The Mexican Americans in LA are rioting to protest the enforcement of our immigration laws. They are looting, burning cars, assaulting cops, and destroying property while waving the Mexican flag as if there is a reason to be proud of the history of Mexico. Mexican history is a nightmare of callous incompetence, unwarranted arrogance, and total disregard for the people of Mexico. The sole exception to this rule is Mexicans living in the United States; for them, the Mexican government will advocate, insisting that they be able to send remittances untaxed.
There are moments of greatness, compassion, and kindness in Mexico’s history. One of them was the treatment of the five boys captured after the defeat of the 1842 Meir expedition. That expedition was little more than a filibuster operation, and if you don’t know what those were, read The Blood Meridian. The five boys captured by the Mexican army were treated with kindness and affection by Santa Anta and his generals. And not the kind of affection lavished on boys in Afghanistan, I’m talking old-fashioned, appropriate Christian European affection traditionally afforded to children. But I’m saving it for the next time my lovely wife accuses me of not writing positive, uplifting blog posts.
The progressive gringos funding this protest do not understand how hot it is in McAllen in mid-June.
This Saturday, McAllen, along with hundreds of other cities, will experience the joy of No Kings protests. The social media announcements for this protest stress that they are “volunteer organized” which is absolute bullshit. No Kings receives millions of dollars in grant monies from all the usual suspects, meaning you, the taxpayer, are funding the riots and destruction of your cities. They are receiving additional funding from Christy Walton, the heir to the Walmart fortune. Like all the Walmart Waltons, she is an imperious psychopath who gleefully destroyed the independent hardware, clothes stores, sporting goods dealers, pharmacies (the list is endless) across the United States. Mexico, too, for that matter, where their supercenters are called Wally Martinez
Your tax money is hard at work thanks to democratic criminality. This Screenshot is from the Data Republican X account.
The McAllen protest is scheduled from 10:00 am to noon, and the weather forecast is for bright sunshine and 99-degree temperatures, which far exceeds the tolerances of most local citizens. The closest businesses to the planned protest site are rooftop nightclubs, but there are no Roof Koreans around here, so they are, in theory, vulnerable.
There are several rooftop bars and nightclubs with names like Santa Diabla tucked behind the Federal Courthouse. They open after 9:00 pm and often featured Mexican bands singing narco corridos, before Mexico made corridos ballads illegal. Then the narcos started killing the bands off for refusing to sing them. Now we’re stuck with the Mexican folk bands who still have visas, and they always have accordion players. If there is a musical instrument more obnoxious than an accordion, I have thankfully never heard it.
I expect American flag-waving counter protesters will outnumber the No Kings crowd just like they did when President Trump visited McAllen during his first term. But it’s going to be a scorcher this Saturday, so there may not be many people braving the heat, leaving only the paid agitators to stir up a riot. LA has Roof Koreans, Mexico has Roof Dogs*, if Saturday’s protesters try to riot, they will be introduced to a new phenomenon: Roof Mexicans. We’ll have to wait to see how this plays out.
*Do not look at the roof dogs link if you love dogs – it will upset and red pill you into supporting mass deportations.
Last week, in an act that combined desperation and stupidity with ingenuity and hard work, a Narco group built a raft to float a pickup truck across the Rio Grande River near Brownsville. The raft was constructed of blue 55-gallon drums and plywood, and it got the truck safely across. Upon reaching our side of the river, the pickup sped off through an open gate in the border wall. The driver then noticed Border Patrol and State Police trucks waiting for him on the levee once he cleared the wall, so he turned around and drove right back into the river.
You have to give these dope smugglers an A for effort, but an F for planning
Several Mexican nationals then swam to the truck to recover some of the bundles of drugs; the rest floated downstream and were retrieved by the Border Patrol. The large bundles contained marijuana, which raises questions. Thanks to American ingenuity, weed in the form of delta eight and delta 10 THC is (for the time being) legal in Texas. Delta 9 is the high-inducing tetrahydrocannabinol found in legalized weed, but Deltas 8 and 10 will get the job done, especially in smokable concentrates, vapes, or ingested via gummies, drinks, or brownies.
Potent THC hemp derivatives blindsided Texas lawmakers, who claim they legalized hemp for industrial purposes, not psychoactive gummies, so this September, the multimillion-dollar industry built on hemp buds is scheduled for eradication. I’ve gone from supporting THC products as a safe alternative to alcohol to acknowledging that THC is an addictive drug that robs one’s vitality and drive while being difficult to quit. The only safe alternative to alcohol is not drinking alcohol. Still, I’m not sure closing the hemp weed loophole is the best idea because it will encourage Mexicans to build flimsy rafts and float pick-up trucks across the Rio Grande River. The Rio Grande is polluted enough, so adding trucks and whatever was in the blue plastic drums to the water is Eso no es bueno. For readers who do not live in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), I’m obliged to inform you that it is never correct to say “no bueno.”
Why did the weed smugglers go to all that trouble when the market for shitty Mexican weed is so depressed? Granted, the border appears unguarded because illegal crossings are now rare, but the Border Patrol isn’t stupid. They watch the open gates in the wall and have a Tethered Aerostat Radar Systems (TARS) and Ground-Based Operational Surveillance Systems (GBOSS), both of which can see a long way. The federales claim the TARS is used for detecting aircraft, but I watched a contractor using one at Combat Outpost Lonestar in the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan to smoke check a few miscreants. He had observed three dudes planning an IED on the road leading to Tora Bora and summoned a soldier from the fire direction center, who dropped some 155mm artillery on them. The TARS system can see plenty on the ground, just like the smaller GBOSS.
Tethered Aerostat Radar System Site Lajas, Puerto Rico.
Photographer: Donna Burton
Even when the border looks empty, there are plenty of eyes watching it, and they don’t miss much.
Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were a constant menace for me in Afghanistan, and they have now made an appearance in the RGV. Last February, a local rancher, Antonio Céspedes Saldierna, was killed by an IED on the Mexican side of the border near Brownsville. Mr. Saldierna, like many RGV ranchers, has property on both sides of the border and was traveling to his Mexican Hacienda when he hit the IED. His son, Ramiro Céspedes, an army vet who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was injured in the blast. An IED that kills the driver but not his son or wife, who were in the truck with him, isn’t much of an IED. I assume the Gulf Cartel has yet to tap into terrorist expertise from Afghanistan or Iraq. Mexico imports tons of calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which is easily converted into a powerful homemade explosive.
Ammonium nitrate IEDs with simple, easily fabricated pressure plates. These were recovered in Nimroz Province, Afghanistan. It is only a matter of time before these are deployed in Mexico and the United States.
In a recent interview on Chuck Holton’s Hot Zone podcast, Mexican Journalist Oscar Ramirez claimed that the Arellano-Félix Cartel in Tijuana has already imported Taliban from Afghanistan to train them on tunnel digging and IED construction. It’s just a matter of time before we start seeing the boom in Mexico and on this side of the border. It’s more effective than throwing children into the Rio Grande River (a routine occurrence during the FJB administration) to distract American law enforcement so they can complete their nefarious missions.
Our side of the border is like a ghost town, while Mexico is filling with ghosts. Last Tuesday, Ximena Guzmán, the personal secretary to the mayor of Mexico City, Clara Brugada, and José Muñoz, a municipal advisor, were shot and killed in the Moderna neighborhood of Mexico City. It has been five years since there was a high-profile assassination in Mexico City. That shootout was triggered when sicarios from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) ambushed the chief of police.
Murders on busy streets in broad daylight are depressingly common south of the border—photograph by Teun Voeten from his book Drug War in Mexico.
This hit indirectly targeted La Presidencia, Claudia Sheinbaum. It’s a safe bet that one of the Sinaloa cartels carried it out, targeting associates of allies of President Sheinbaum because they are afraid to target her directly. It is an undeniable fact (according to my Blanco Brujos neighbor, who knows things) that she’s a powerful Negros Brujos. I, too, am afraid of her after she flooded out the RGV in a 3-hour supernaturally powerful rainstorm.
The following day, protestors from Reynosa closed the international bridge connecting their city to Pharr, Texas. They were protesting the disappearance of five musicians from the Grupo Fugitivo band, who may or may not have been writing and performing narco corridos. Corridos are ballads that portray powerful Narcos as Robin Hood-like figures. Singing Narco corridos songs in Mexico is now illegal. Not singing Narco corridos in Mexico is deadly. A few days after the protests, the bodies of the five men were found outside Reynosa.
Luis R. Conriquez, a 28-year-old Sonoran singer with hundreds of millions of views on YouTube
I’ve been told the mark of a true gentleman is one who can play the accordion—and doesn’t. I’m not a fan of regional Mexican folk music, but those guys have it hard. President Trump, probably acting under a spell cast by Mexico’s chief Curandero, President Sheinbaum, won’t give corridor bands visas so they can’t rake in the big bucks playing venues in San Antonio, Houston, or Robstown. If they play their original ballads in Mexico, they’ll get arrested. If they don’t play them, they’ll be disappeared. It’s not like they can turn themselves into American law enforcement, confess to playing the accordion, and request asylum.
When Conriquez announced he would no longer sing Narco Corridos or corridos belicos (warlike ballads – a term he invented), his fans in Texcoco rioted, ran him and his band out of town, smashed their drum set and amplifiers, but didn’t trash his accordions. Can you believe that?
There are over 124,000 Mexicans listed as disappeared by Mexican authorities. Seven women go missing every day in Mexico. The usual fate for these poor souls is rape, torture, and a gruesome death. Protests and vigils by the family and friends of the missing are a near-daily occurrence, as is the discovery of mass graves, illegal crematoriums, or acid bath operations. There are thousands of heartbreaking stories about mothers dedicating their lives to organizations like Madres Buscadoras (searching mothers).
Cecilia Flores, a member of the “Searching Mothers of Sonora and Jalisco” group. Photo from Israel Fuguemann of NPR
The earliest known madre buscadora is Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, whose son Jesús Piedra Ibarra was forcibly disappeared in 1974. These women lead teams of volunteers on searches throughout Mexico for mass graves, and they stage protests at government offices or popular border crossings. They garner their share of sympathetic international press, but this has been going on for over 50 years and it is obvious the powerful elites of Mexico don’t give a damn about them or their missing children.
The last known photo of 18-year-old Debanhi Escobar, which went viral and was featured on the front page of many Mexican newspapers after she was kidnapped in April 2022.
The elites might give a damn now because Marco Rubio has quietly put them in a very uncomfortable position that will cost them the one thing they care about: money.
Our Department of State is revoking the US visas of Mexican politicians, police, and military officers linked to the Narco cartels and/or fuel theft rings. I have never seen our State Department working for the interests of the American people, or the Mexican people, for that matter. They have always pursued their own progressive globalist agenda, but now their agenda seems to be President Trump’s agenda, and President Trump is putting the American people first.
The most common drug war trope from Mexico is that America’s thirst for drugs fuels the drug war. That is nonsense. What Americans have is lots of money to pay exorbitant rates for drugs. Countries like Mexico don’t have people with much disposable income but they still have plenty of junkies who pay fire sale prices for the same poison that is smuggled into el norte. photograph by Teun Voeten
He is also lending a hand to La Presidencia, Sheinbaum, by placing pressure on bad actors. Not having an American Visa is, for the wealthy elites of Mexico, a serious problem. Being on an American revoked visa list negatively impacts banking and investment, hurts business relationships, and international credibility. I am not implying that every rich Mexican national has amassed their wealth illegally; that would be rude. There must be a way to accumulate millions of dollars in Mexico legally. . . I guess, but check out the names that have been published in the press:
Marina del Pilar Ávila, Baja California governor
Américo Villarreal, Tamaulipas governor
Rubén Rocha Moya, Sinaloa governor
Alfonso Durazo, Sonora governor
Samuel García, Nuevo León governor
Layda Sansores, Campeche governor
Mario Delgado, federal Education Secretary
Ricardo Monreal and Adán Augusto López, Morena power players
Several mayors from Tamaulipas and Chihuahua
At least four high-ranking generals
According to the Gringo Gazette Alberto Granados, the mayor of Matamoros, had his visa revoked while attempting to cross into Brownsville. He denied it. But the story didn’t go away.
The Mexican elite can find other countries to bank their wealth, educate their children, and purchase vacation properties. But the modern, enjoyable, safe, and investment-friendly places like Dubai or Singapore are off-limits to them. Those countries, mui eso no es bueno, the drug business. If they’re on the State Department shit list I doubt many European tax havens would welcome them either.
Will putting the soft power screws to the monied elites change anything in Mexico? Who knows, but the cartels are losing tons of money and the head Negros Brujos is keeping the pressure on them. Mexican Marines have been raiding “mega drug labs” in Sinaloa for months now, seizing tons of methamphetamine. Fentanyl seizures are plummeting at the border, although it is unclear why. Illegal border crossings are down 94%, and it is very clear why. The big question is how long the cartels will continue to lose money before they start getting dangerously desperate and resort to powerful IEDs for leverage in Mexico and revenge in the USA.
This article first appeared in the November 1998 issue of Proceedings magazine, earning my father, Maj. Gen. J.D. Lynch, USMC (Ret.), author of the year. With his permission, I’m repurposing it for a Memorial Day tribute. It is a story of the price paid by grunts for the incompetence of higher headquarters. It is also an elegant testament to the grit, determination, and resilience of American infantrymen thrust into an impossible situation.
The 2d Battalion, 26th Marines, rarely appears in the Marine Corps’ illustrious combat history. The battalion saw only brief service during World War II—long enough to land in the assault wave at Iwo Jima. Later, during the Vietnam War, it reappeared for a few years before its colors were once again returned to the museum curators.
Major JD Lynch, USMC working the DMZ during the fall of 1968
Its daily Vietnam experience was usually far less stressful than the Iwo Jima operation, but Vietnam had its days – and when it did, the late 1960s Marine of 2/26 experienced the horrors of war at the same level of intensity faced by the generation that fought its way up the black ash terraces beneath Mount Suribachi. This is the story of one of those days: 16 September 1968.
Late 1968 found the 3rd Marine Division serving in the extreme north of I Corps, the northernmost corps in what was then the Republic of Vietnam, controlling ten infantry battalions: those of its organic 3rd, 4th, and 9th Marine Regiments, plus 2/26. The division’s operational concept – an effective one – was as easy to understand as it was difficult to execute. Relying on few fixed defensive positions and even fewer infantry units to defend them, the defense was offense. Battalions stayed in the bush for weeks on end, covering North Vietnamese Army (NVA) infiltration routes and, in general, looking for trouble. They moved constantly on foot or by helicopter, and when they encountered an NVA unit, all hell broke loose until it was destroyed.
MajGen JD Lynch USMC (Ret) speaking at an LZ Margo reunion in May 2019. Today, he is 92 years old and still going strong
Our battalion – I was the operational officer – celebrated the Fourth of July in an area near the coast called Leatherneck Square, where it was responsible for defending the square’s northern and western sides. In late July, the battalion was reinforced to conduct amphibious assault operations and designated Battalion Landing Team (BLT) 2/26.
After training with the reinforcements, BLT 2/26 embarked on the Amphibious Ready Group Alfa ships, including the famous World War II Essex-class carrier Princeton (LDH-5), now an amphibious assault ship. Initially, there was talk of landings just south of the Ben Hai River inside the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), but the pattern of NVA operations had shifted westward, and the amphibious talk died out. An early-September landing well inland marked a temporary end to our amphibious experience and the beginning of service as one of the division’s maneuver battalions. Despite the change in mission, the battalion kept its reinforcements – among them a tank platoon, a 105mm artillery battery, and a 4.2 inch mortar battery.
Operational control shifted to the 3rd Marines, headquartered in Camp Carroll, but several days of aggressive patrolling yielded no enemy contacts. About 7 September, the BLTs’ field elements were trucked to Camp Carroll. They staged for two contingencies: a helicopter assault in Landing Zone (LZ) Margo, a barren hilltop just south of the DMZ, roughly 17 kilometers west-northwest of Camp Carroll – or a shift of operational control to the 4th Marines and return to Khe Sanh, where the battalion had served throughout the early-1968 siege.
To the relief of those who had served at Khe Sanh, the Margo operation prevailed—an assault into the LZ followed by movement north to the high ground on the southern border of the DMZ, where the battalion was to turn east and sweep the high ground. The orders emphasized the need to take prisoners.
A typhoon brushed the coast, and although the tree-covered mountains inland showed no outward signs of rain, movement became impossible—the war ground to a halt. Finally, the weather began to clear, and on 12 September, the commanding officer of the supporting helicopter squadron flew in for the Zippo brief – a planning and coordination meeting attended by the battalion and squadron commanders and their staffs.
Zippos were businesslike affairs. Lives were at stake, and the assaulting battalion and supporting squadron had to reach complete agreement and understanding. On the plus side, Margo was easy to find due to its location on the north side of the Cam Lo River, inside a distinctive, kilometer-wide and more than kilometer-deep U-shaped bend. Unfortunately, this plus was offset by several minuses, most of which stemmed from the tiresome but necessary subject of terrain.
The spring – used for a water resupply point in LZ Margo
Margo, which resembled a broken bowl, was smaller than the maps indicated. Using north as 12 o’clock, the rim from 5 to 10 o’clock was the dominant piece of ground within the LZ. The southern side of the rim dropped sharply to the Cam Lo River, actually more stream than river at this point, while the interior slope provided good observation over the landing zone and north toward the DMZ. A spring near the center of the zone fed a stream that had cut a deep draw, which meandered eastward and exited Margo between 2 and 4 o’clock. From 10 to 2 o’clock, Margo’s northern rim varied in height but was lower than the southern rim. Its exterior sloped sharply downward for a kilometer or so before reaching the steep approaches to the terrain fingers that led to the high ground in the DMZ. At its highest point, Margo was about 150 meters above sea level. The hills to the north were three to four times that height, while the intervening terrain dropped to low points of about 50 meters.
It was rugged, forbidding country, made all the more so because, although Margo was clear, the heights and intervening areas were covered with double – or triple-canopy forest.
The terrain inside the LZ made Margo a “one-bird zone” – helicopters had to land and unload one at a time. This was hardly unusual, but it slowed the rate of assault dramatically. Margo was also too small to accommodate the entire BLT. Since the intent was to retain only G company, the BLT command group, along with the 81mm mortar, engineer, and reconnaissance platoons, in the zone for any length of time (a few days), the size of the LZ did not seem to be a major factor. Its rock-hard soil, however, was another problem. Digging in took time.
Finally, there was Margo’s history. For a brief period, some months before, it had been used as an artillery fire support base, and the North Vietnamese were known to keep such positions under observation. The terrain and history summed to the point that BLT 2/26 was landing, one aircraft at a time, into a zone that was:
Too small to hold the entire BLT
Dominated by high ground to the north
Probably the subject of continuing NVA attention, at least to the point of registering mortar fires.
Not good . . . but not unusual.
Friday the 13th of September 1968, a date not lost on many of the Marines, marked the beginning of several days of cloudless skies and comfortable temperatures. By 0700, a thousand or so Marines and corpsmen were waiting quietly in the Camp Carroll pick-up zone, smoking, talking, thinking, and maybe – especially in Golf Company – which was landing first – praying. They were grunts, a term coined during the Vietnam War. While it may have been a derisive term, the sting was long gone. With a certain pride, it is what they called themselves.
Believing that the chances of infection dramatically increased with the amount of clothing worn when wounded, they were deliberately underdressed. Boots, socks, and trousers were the standard: no underwear and often no shirt during the day. Their faded helmet covers sported an elastic band around the outside intended to hold camouflage material when the wearer sought invisibility in the bush. More often, it held either a main battle dressing for use if the wearer’s luck turned bad or, in the case of optimists, a bottle of mosquito repellent. The graffiti on most of the covers addressed a variety of subjects, but many tended toward the religious. David Douglas Duncan’s striking photographs of the 26th Regiment Marines at Khe Sanh captured the phenomenon.
A David Douglas Duncan photograph from Khe Sanh
They all wore flak jackets, never zippered because shell or grenade fragments taken in the wrong place could jam the zipper, making it difficult for the corpsmen to remove the jacket and treat the wounded man in the field.
The flak jackets, if anything, were dirtier than the helmet covers. Sweat-stained from long wear by a series of owners, they had the same faded color as the camouflage covers, but their graffiti, for whatever reason, tended to more basic thoughts than those found on helmets.
They carried a haversack holding a box of venerable C-rations, a poncho, a poncho liner, and, most importantly, an extra two or three pairs of socks. They also carried extra radio batteries, mortar ammunition (although not mortarmen), rocket launchers, grenades, at least four filled canteens, and as much extra rifle and machine gun ammunition as possible.
They were typical grunts and corpsmen, normally unwashed, usually underfed, always overloaded, and, more often than not, tired. The lucky ones, those who avoided disease, wounds, or death, did not enjoy a hot meal or cold shower for weeks.
Shortly before 0800, the CH-46s began landing in the pickup zone with their distinctive whumping blade sound – unforgettable for those who rode them into combat. As the first wave launched, the sound of the artillery preparatory fires in the distance and the roar of the fast movers orbiting overhead helped ease the tension.
The actual landing was anti-climactic. Although there was no opposition, it still took a considerable amount of time. Echo, Fox, and Hotel companies quickly assembled and began moving north. Echo struck out for the finger on the right, which led to the high ground, while Fox and Hotel headed up the other finger on the left. Golf Company, the command post, the 81mm platoon, and others established defensive positions in the LZ and began digging in. Friday the 13th passed quietly.
Inserting BLT 2/26 into LZ Margo
On Saturday, 14 September, the companies continued moving north at first light. While there were well-worn trails in the area and occasional sounds of movement ahead, there were no contacts. Even so, the companies called artillery fire on possible targets to keep the fire-support system active. About midday, Hotel Company’s point, leading movement up the left finger, saw movement ahead and signaled the company to move off the trail and wait. Their patience was rewarded as they watched a North Vietnamese soldier, weapon at sling arms, striding down the trail toward them.
The point team was in an excellent ambush position and easily could have killed him. That they didn’t was a testimony to discipline and the emphasis on taking prisoners. Waiting until the NVA soldier had passed, the point man re-entered the trail and, in Vietnamese, ordered him to halt, which he did promptly. The capture was reported to the company commander, relayed to battalion, and within a matter of minutes, the 3rd Marines had learned of a potential guest speaker. Within the hour, the prisoner had been flown to Camp Carroll for interrogation.
BLT 2/26 command post, the author is the second Marine from the right.
Throughout the war, most higher headquarters consistently failed to pass timely intelligence information down to the battalion level, where it could be acted upon. The 3rd Marines did not make that mistake. Just before sundown, 2/26 learned that the prisoner had intended to surrender because he had been at Khe Sanh when the Marines first arrived. Stating that he “had a love of life,” he added that he wanted no more of anything remotely resembling that battle, a confrontation that had a psychological hold on both sides. Of greater interest was his disclosure that the lead company – Hotel Company – would be attacked at about 2000 that evening. All three companies were alerted.
Echo, Fox, and Hotel halted for the night and began registering artillery defensive fires. Hotel Company’s artillery forward observer (FO), controlling a supporting 155mm howitzer battery, had just started registering fires to cover a listening post located on the western side of the finger when the Marines manning the post reported hearing movement through the draw to their direct front. Since the registration rounds were on the way, they could only wait. Seconds later, as the roar of the explosions died away, the listening post reported screams and other sounds of panic. The FO immediately called “fire for effect” and swept the draw with 155mm rounds. Other than some moans and the sounds of some movement in the draw, the remainder of the night was quiet.
15 September dawned clear and cloudless. Visibility was so good that Marines could watch outgoing 81mm mortar rounds until they reached their apogee. Again, keeping the mortar and artillery fire support systems active, E, F, and H companies resumed their slow climb toward the high ground. Signs of enemy presence were plentiful, but there was no contact.
The 81mm Mortar platoon fire direction center moments before the shit hit the fan
The trouble started at noon, when a radio message from 3rd Marines ordered the BLT to pull its companies back to the LZ and prepare to shift operational control to the 9th Marines. The message was cryptic – it had to be because none of the radio transmissions with any of the battalions in the 3rd Marine Division’s area were secure. The encryption equipment of the day was too heavy to be carried in the field and, in any case, seldom worked in the heat and humidity of the bush. Problems with getting shackle sheets (code) down to the company level precluded using even decades-old encryption. Everyone assumed that the North Vietnamese heard most of the radio traffic.
Communications security problems notwithstanding, the order was received with incredulity. There was little doubt that the NVA would follow the companies back to the landing zone, and less doubt that mortar and perhaps infantry attacks would follow. The three rifle companies were told to halt and then move south to Margo; meanwhile, the order was strenuously argued. The regimental commander made it clear that he agreed with the battalion’s tactical assessment of what lay in store. Obedience would have a price; that much was obvious. What was not obvious was how much.
After a few hours, the three companies were instructed to halt, reorient, and resume their original northwest advance. We had to know if the trailing enemy theory was correct. The order did not specify how long to follow the reverse course, but did tell the company commander something they already knew – to expect contact. It came quickly on both ridges as small NVA units were surprised to find the Marines heading north again. Breaking contact, the companies once more turned south toward Margo. So far as 2/26 was concerned, the point had been proven. We reported this to the 3rd Marines and forcefully recommended cancellation of the withdrawal order.
The reply was more enlightening than helpful. The battalion was told that its arguing and temporary resumption of the offensive had caused some difficulties (it wasn’t phrased quite that way) and that there would be a 24-hour postponement. Furthermore, the entire battalion was to concentrate in LZ Margo, south of the 61 grid line – an east-west map line that split the LZ – by a specified time early the next afternoon, 16 September. In the meantime, the BLT was authorized to take whatever actions it deemed necessary to prepare for the return to the LZ. The maneuver companies were turned north again; within minutes, they bumped into NVA troops following them down the ridgelines.
The enlightening section of the order was the part about moving south of the 61 grid line. It made no sense because the area remaining in the LZ south of the grid line was too small to accommodate the BLT in anything resembling a tactical position. Even worse, it did not permit defense of the LZ, especially against infantry attacks coming from the most logical direction – north. It was apparent that the order had emanated from a headquarters other than regimental or division, neither of which would have displayed that level of tactical ignorance. This, and the urgency associated with the 61 grid-line provision, led to the conclusion that an Arc Light – a high-altitude B-52 area bombing mission – was imminent.
It might seem strange to those steeped in the traditions of obedience to orders, but the BLT now confronted a dilemma. If its tactical assessment were correct, the order returning the maneuver units to the LZ would result in some form of NVA attack: if, on the other hand, the Arc Light guess was right, there were other problems. The timing and target area were unknowns and, for security, would remain unknowns at the battalion level. Further, the tactically inane directive to move south of the 61 grid line indicated that the Arc Light was going in north of Margo – but close.
The dilemma was stark and straightforward: Comply with the order and risk NVA action, or move the companies toward Margo, retaining some semblance of tactical deployment north of the LZ, and risk the Arc Light. To those who have seen a proper Arc Light, the choice was easy. The companies were directed to hold in place and begin moving south to the LZ early the next morning. But as a concession to common sense, that portion of the order regarding the 61 grid line was interpreted rather loosely. We would defend Margo.
The weather on 16 September matched the brilliance of previous days. Today, the Vietnamese Bureau of Tourism would tout the weather; on that day in 1968, however, it turned into a scene from hell.
Occasionally stopping to engage the NVA units following them, the three rifle companies slowly made their way back to Margo. Echo company came in last. Commanded by Captain John Cregan, now a Roman Catholic priest, the company began to climb Margo’s northern slope and, by approximately 1430, was taking up its assigned defensive positions on the northern perimeter. Even after ignoring the order to stay south of the 61 grid line, there were too many troops in too small an area – and they had to contend with Margo’s rock-hard ground. Digging in took more time.
Echo Company Marines moments before the first attack
Early in the afternoon, ominous sightings of North Vietnamese soldiers with mortars fording the Cam Lo River west of Margo were reported. Artillery fire was called, probably without effect. At the same time, there was a minor flurry of activity as the BLT shifted to the operational control of the 9th Marines, and radio frequencies were changed and tested. That done, the chatter of troops and the clanging of their entrenching tools were the only sounds disturbing the quiet.
At 1500, Captain Ken Dewey, an F-4 pilot serving as the battalion’s air liaison officer, was looking north toward the left of the two hills that had been the original objectives when suddenly a mirror started flashing – followed immediately by the soft “thunking” sound of mortars firing in the distance. Within seconds, Margo was blanketed with exploding 82mm rounds from several compass points, especially the northern arc. The battalion began its “time on the cross,” as the French put it earlier in the Indochina War.
The noise was deafening. Each explosion filled the surrounding air with black, stinking, greasy-tasting smoke. The mortarmen poured it on until 200 to 300 rounds had pummeled the Marines and corpsmen, a good percentage of whom had no protection beyond that of shallow fighting holes. As the fire eased, the LZ sprang to life and First Lieutenant Al Green’s 81mm platoon began counterbattery fires, an action that won them concentrated NVA attention.
Battalion machine gunners on Margo’s southern rim saw some enemy mortarmen and began to engage them at long range – attracting in turn, their share of incoming. The exchange continued for a few minutes until a mirror on the high ground flashed again. The incoming barrage slowed, then stopped – but the noise in the LZ grew to deafening proportions as hundreds of rifles went into action. At first, it seemed as if frustrated Marine riflemen were wasting ammunition on out-of-range NVA mortarmen, but a radio query to First Lieutenant Bob Riordan, the Golf Company Commander, revealed that from his position on the southern rim, North Vietnamese soldiers could be seen moving uphill to assault the LZ’s northern side.
Then the rifle fire stopped abruptly, and, within seconds, the southern rim and center of the LZ was alive with Marines running to the northern side. Their fires had been masked by those manning the northern slope defenses, and they were leaving their own positions to get into the fight. The enemy never has a chance. The NVA commander who ordered the assault likely had fewer troops than he thought, due to previous contacts. In any case, the reactions of the defenders were too violent. No more than 20 minutes had elapsed. The cost to BLT 2/26 was more than 150 dead and wounded. The cost to the enemy was unknown.
Marines filtering back to their positions after repulsing the NVA ground assault
At 1700, the mirror flashed again, and the mortars went to work. Once more, rounds rained down on Margo – fewer this time and without an infantry attack – but the BLT’s casualty list grew longer. For the first time since the attacks began, medical evacuation of the wounded now seemed possible. It was likely that the NVA had expended most of their mortar ammunition and would not interfere with the helicopter evacuation.
The casualties had been separated by category . . . emergency, priority, and routine . . . and the “permanent routine,” a euphemism for the dead that had crept into the radio operator’s lexicon. We hoped to medevac at least the emergency and priority wounded before nightfall. Several CH-46As and gunships arrived about 1830, and the laborious process of loading the casualties, one at a time, began as soon as the lead bird touched down.
As usual, the strength and example can be found in the casualties. I saw Staff Sergeant Donner from the reconnaissance platoon, covered in blood, as he was being escorted to the medevac staging area. He was refusing to leave, insisting that he was okay. I told him that he would leave.
Late in the afternoon of 16 September, I watched as an unwounded Marine rapidly searched the rows of wounded looking for a friend. Suddenly, a large arm reached out and waved. “There you are” said the first as he took the wounded man’s hand and squatted down to talk. They held hands quietly until the medevac helicopters arrived. The wounded Marine had been hit badly. I do not know if he survived. Nor do I know if his friend survived our subsequent encounters with the NVA. What I do know is that the wounded Marine was black and his buddy white. I remembered thinking at the time how much better people would be if we were all like those two.
Recently, we have been told that the best and the brightest did not go to Vietnam. When I heard that, I thought of those two Marines so long ago, the hardships they endured, and their obvious respect for each other. Maybe they weren’t the brightest, but they were the best.
Realizing that there would be no other medevacs from Margo that night, the last pilot insisted on overloading his aircraft with wounded. Over his objections, the loading stopped, and the pilot was told to launch. He must have been good. If not good, he was very lucky. The overloaded 46 resembled a giant praying mantis as it struggled into the air, tail down, nose swinging back and forth in a wide arc, as though searching for escape from a trap. Finally, he nursed it a few feet higher, leveled, and began slipping sideways, just above the trees, down the slope that formed Margo’s northern rim. Again, the LZ filled with Marines running north; convinced that the 46 was about to crash, they were moving to assist the survivors.
One of the Medevac helicopters waits patiently for the casualties to be loaded.
The helicopter disappeared from view behind the trees and, an eternity later, came back into view, this time in full flight, nose-high on a southernly course, jettisoning fuel to lighten the load and clear the ridge to Margo’s east. All movement stopped as everyone in the LZ watched the miracle claw its way over the ridge line, taking the wounded to safety.
Quiet settled over Margo. As the troops returned to their positions, the silence was broken by a single “thunk” off to the north. This time, it was only one round, but it landed precisely where the medevac birds had loaded. It was Charlie saying he knew what had been done and could have stopped it at any time. He was also saying he was a pro. We knew that already.
The XXIV Corps Commanding General visited Margo the following morning. His worries about morale evaporated as he watched the Marines improving their defensive positions. He then looked toward a large group of wounded waiting to be evacuated. In response to a question, he was told they were the routine medevacs. Behind them were rows of poncho-covered objects. He looked at them, saying nothing, knowing what they were. Finally, a Marine broke the spell. “The dead go last, sir.”
Epilogue
The Arc Light went in five or six kilometers north of Margo on the afternoon of 16 September. Maybe too much had happened, or maybe there was an unusually high number of duds. Regardless, it was unimpressive. Paradoxically, it hurt 2/26 more than it hurt the enemy.
Early on 17 September, Golf, Fox, and Hotel Companies returned to the familiar trails, attacking north. Echo Company, having lost nearly 70 Marines in the mortar and infantry attacks, remained behind. The LZ was mortared twice that day, but there were few casualties. Margo’s final toll will probably never be known precisely. We evacuated more than 200 dead and wounded, some of whom doubtlessly died later. Before we left, we filled 18 external helicopter nets with packs, weapons, and other equipment that was no longer needed.
Weapons and gear collected from the casualties
Eventually, after another long period of torrential rains, the attacking companies reached the high ground, where Golf found a graveyard – 18 graves with markers aligned in rows near where the mirror had flashed before the mortar attack. They evacuated a few to confirm that it was a graveyard. They also traced the extensive writing on the markers and sent them to the rear for translation. The writings turned out to be a history of each of the casualties. We learned we had gotten the NVA battalion commanding officer and much of his staff. The CO had been a soldier since joining the Viet Minh in the late 1940s: he was a professional. I think whoever ordered all the writing put on the markers did so, at least in part, so that we would not dig up their dead.
One of the 18 external loads of weapons and gear evacuated from LZ Margo
We stood by to attack to the west. It never happened. Near the end of September, the BLT moved by helicopter into another one-bird zone in the DMZ just south of the Ben Hai River, nearly 15 kilometers north and east of Margo. In a series of assaults, BLT 2/26 routed an enemy force defending a headquarters complex and artillery positions. During the last assault, Marines of Echo and Hotel Companies were treated to the rare sight of North Vietnamese troops fleeing in panic.
The Marines and corpsmen of 2/26 formed a typical grunt battalion. They fought a dirty, unpopular war, and they did it well. They never claimed to be the best. All they said was that, if they met somebody better, they hoped he was on their side.
Famous son of the Rio Grande Valley, Joshua Trevino, the Chief Transformation Officer at the Texas Public Policy Institute, made a startling admission on the Hard Country podcast about Mexican Presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum. Joshua admitted he was wrong about the la presidenta, who is not a placeholder for the Morena party but a talented executive. She has better managed Mexico’s relationship with the United States than any Mexican president. Joshua observed that the Mexican government cannot guarantee public safety or clean water, but it is an expert at dealing with the United States Government.
My non-expert opinion is that Claudia Sheinbaum is a Brujas Negras (Black Witch) Curandera. Sheinbaum is a non-religious Jew and a lifelong leftist who reads every policy paper she is handed and is preternaturally alert for every second of hours-long policy meetings. She’s a disciplined, sober female version of Bill Clinton without the sex addiction or lazy disinterest in detail. The true face of evil can be found in any human who enjoys multiple, hours-long, policy meetings. It’s not natural.
Last week, I thought the Brujas Negras had struck again when I saw Grubhub had declared McAllen the most overweight and obese city in America. How had the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) suddenly become populated by food blisters? I detected the hand of bad voodoo, only to remember that polite people here never mention obesity or its downstream effects. We’ve been the fattest city in America for years, but nothing is done about it, and nobody talks about it, so it’s easy to forget.
The RGV has been shrouded in a miasma of black magic fog, the fog of woe, that allows people to ignore the obvious. The average resident should stay the hell out of Starbucks, donut shops, and double-fried taco stands. But every day, a new Starbucks, donut shop, or taco stand opens to serve people a few years away from needing daily dialysis. The Catholic Church should be battling this obvious demonic assault on the faithful. But they’re focused on illegal migrant rights because that’s where the money is. . . Or was it before DOGE uncovered the billions of dollars flowing to the dioceses from USAID to facilitate human trafficking via dozens of ‘NGOs’.
Sister Norma Pimentel, Executive Director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, greets a group of some 25 asylum seekers at a bus station in Brownsville, Texas. No mention is ever made about the millions of dollars USAID has given her. That fact is lost in the RGV fog of woe (photo: John Moore / Getty )
This obesity epidemic in the Rio Grande Valley has disrupted the retirement plan I established in 1985, following my first reading of Lonesome Dove. After retiring, I wanted to be an old, tricky, tough bastard living on the Rio Grande River. But there are no cattle rustlers to fight, and I wasn’t sure my plan made sense until the Narco wars started and President Trump declared them terrorists. There was no doubt that all sorts of miscreants had invaded us. I saw it with my own lying eyes for four years running. Suddenly, my dream of replicating Gus and Captain Call seemed to be answered until I researched Narco sicarios.
What happened to the tough, self-reliant Mexican peasant? Where is the self-sacrificing ethos of the Mexican soldiers who overthrew the Spanish, defeated the French, and fought with courage against the Americans?
See what I mean? These two fat bastards couldn’t run 100 yards but still think they’re bad asses. Plus they have man boobs – a clear indicator of low testosterone.
I live close enough to the Rio Grande River to see the border wall lights at night. During the evening, I sit on my back porch, scanning the river bottoms, just like Augustus McCrae or Captain Call, but without a rifle or jug of whiskey, because I don’t want my neighbors to think I’m antisocial. This is Texas, where many people still carry a pistol, but who needs a gun to deal with pudgy nitwits? Having a charged AED at the ready, along with IV fluids, is more practical given the lack of desperados swimming the Rio Grande and the physical condition of the local population.
Who carries around an automated external defibrillator and IV kits? Sheepdogs – I know quite a few of them and we are all much happier to bring a cardiac arrest victim back to life than shooting a scumbag trying to take a life. The savings in legal fees alone make that a winning proposition. I still carry a concealed pistol in honor of Gus and Captain Call. Reality may have crushed my retirement plan, but a man can still dream.
Narcos are not a problem for the law-abiding citizens of the RGV. Many have vacation properties in the Valley and send their children to school here. Lots of Mexicans send their kids to school here, a constant source of aggravation for property tax-paying Winter Texans. This is another topic rarely discussed in polite company because it raises the ugly specter of racism, even though skin color has nothing to do with being Hispanic. Fluency in the Spanish language determines who is and is not Hispanic in the RGV.
The Narcos are a problem for local politicians, lawyers, and law enforcement. They have too much money, and finding a lawyer, politician, or police chief who would not sell their soul to the devil (or a Bruja Negra) for a few million dollars is as rare. The only defense against multi-million-dollar bribes is strong religious faith. A man alone cannot reject that level of illicit wealth; he needs a strong angel riding shotgun. I have St Michael, who I found guarding my six in Afghanistan. Hopefully vulnerable RGV titans have a similar guardian to with which to battle Santa Muerte.
The appearance of tranquil, law-abiding prosperity is another consequence of the invisible black magic fog that infects the RGV. Everything appears normal, which is abnormal given the corrosive effects of abundant Narco money. Lifting that fog falls in the realm of spiritual warfare, the province of curanderas, now that the Catholic Church has abandoned normal Americans.
Aztecs are all the rage in Mexico, given the popularity of Santa Muerte, a cross between the Grim Reaper and the Virgin of Guadeloupe, Mexico’s patron saint. But the Aztecs weren’t Mexican Amerindians; they were colonizers from the North. Their Náhuatl language is unrelated to Central Mexican Mesoamerican native languages but closely related to the Ute and Comanche languages. History has become a profound, dark mystery because it is actively subverted in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Understanding legitimate, verifiable history is a superpower that allows you to instantly cut through the bullshit inflicted on us by the elite managerial class.
Santa Muerte swag in Mexico City
If a culture that mocks tradition and devalues sacrifice fails to renew itself, what happens to a culture that calls for holy war against the catholic church while conducting human sacrifice? Mexican Narcos can’t grasp the concept of aspirational sacrifice because they are low-testosterone and low-IQ psychopaths. The Stoics tell us that rudeness, meanness, and cruelty are a mask for deep-seated weakness. You can add man boobs, the physical manifestation of low T, to that list.
Which brings up another crushing disappointment. Old retired guys can’t hang out in smoky bars dispensing the distilled wisdom of an aged International Man of Action. If they do, they risk looking like everyone else around here. Who wants to see another old fool with a beer gut thinking he’s a badass? Not looking like a dangerous man is no way to honor the memory of the best two fictional Texas Rangers in the Western canon, or the canon of Westerns. I’m not sure how to make that point. It is a vivid reminder not to base your aspirations on fictional characters created by the same author who wrote Brokeback Mountain.
Last Monday, Mexico acquiesced to President Trump over the South Texas Water War. President Sheinbaum promised to deliver between 324,000 and 420,000 acre-feet of water to the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) by October. The current Mexican drought, caused by Climate Change™ (unlike the hundreds of previous periods of drought), has been miraculously reversed by La Presidenta. Now there is plenty of water to go around. The RGV’s democrats freaked out because they know the capabilities of Brujas Negras and assumed she would send another Training Thunderstorm. Instantly, the forecast for scattered weekend thunderstorms suddenly morphed into a weekend of torrential rain.
I’ll decipher that RGV coded message for you: “The Bad Orange Man has pissed of La Presidenta Shiebaum and she’s going to conjure up another training thunderstorm flood to punish us.
Five weeks ago, the Rio Grande Valley was suddenly inundated with several feet of rain in three hours. The rain appeared out of nowhere; the sky was clear, and the forecast matched the sky. Suddenly, thunderstorms started forming and stacking themselves so quickly on radar that they looked like the smokestack of a moving train. I explained the supernatural component of this incident in this post. Brujas Negras (black witches) are taken seriously in Mexico and the RGV, lending credence to my theorizing about spiritual warfare.
When rounds one and two produced no rain, the gaslighting continued for the rest of the weekend.
You will be shocked when I tell you it did not rain in the RGV all weekend—not a drop. Don’t shut the stable door after the horse has bolted (one of the oldest recorded English proverbs) warns not to take precautions when the damage is already done. The flood damage was done five weeks ago. The president won the water war, and there is no reason to expect treachery from Mexico, but nobody fears treachery like treacherous.
The nanny state tricks citizens into believing it cares about them using performative gestures that accomplish nothing. Giving away three sandbags per family (six to local businesses) accomplishes what? Three sandbags won’t help when flood water crests three feet above your front door. If the floods are the work of Curanderas, why not paint your front door frame with lamb’s blood? There are many tools in the Valley of Miracles to use in a spiritual battle. We have the Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle, where you can get holy water by the gallon 24/7. Fill a humidifier with it and create an invisible fog that will repel demons, vampires, and (theoretically) flood waters sent by Brujas Negras.
There was no panic among the faithful. We took President Shienbaum at her word and were proved right. The massive amounts of rain that were supposed to hit us were pushed south at the last minute by the freak formation of a cold front to our north. The water was dumped where needed, in Mexico, where it will be collected and used to meet Mexico’s 1944 water treaty obligation.
Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez held a press conference to issue a proclamación that the treaty water will bring only “short-term stability” to the community. Why would a county judge hold a press conference to minimize an accomplishment no American president has accomplished since 1944? It is not like the citizens of South Texas, who voted overwhelmingly for President Trump, are interested in commentary from elected democrats. I’d like to hear his honor explain the constitutional basis for his draconian COVID mandates. But that won’t happen because he doesn’t answer to the public, and the constitution has no provisions for stripping personal liberties in response to a virus that 99.9% of the population survives. During a real pandemic with a high infection fatality rate, the public health apparatus will be focused on the disposal of bodies. The public won’t need to be forced into doing a damn thing because the evidence of a real pandemic doesn’t require gaslighting to digest. The public health response will take organization, cooperation, and leadership to motivate citizens to form teams for unpleasant tasks like dealing with thousands of human remains.
We are not experiencing that kind of leadership from the democratically dominated judiciary. The video pasted below explains why:
District court judges keep releasing accused murderers back onto the streets of Texas, with 900 released so far.
Judge Hilary Unger of Harris County is one of these judges.
She released 8 criminals, via bond, who then went on to murder innocent Texans:pic.twitter.com/1jHQzROJ3N
Spiritual Warfare is a topic that is gaining traction in normie podcasting and social media. The Shawn Ryan Show has recently featured a series of guests from the Special Forces community, porn industry, and (the most unpopular segment of society) journalists who have been called to Christ in a variety of ways. These men have remarkable back stories; only one, former SEAL,Jared Hudson, is a lifelong practicing Christian, the rest were sinners just like you and me. Jared Hudson is an impressive man who founded The Shooting Institute (TSI), providing tactical training to law enforcement, military, and civilians, and Covenant Rescue Group (CRG), a nonprofit combating human trafficking and child exploitation. He offers free tactical training to police departments. In return, they use his CRG model to run a child exploitation sting targeting human traffickers. Their methodology has a 100% success rate, and you would think it was being used across the fruited plains, but you would be wrong. The sexual exploitation of children is not something police agencies prioritize.
Recognizing the face of good is essential to easily seeing the face of evil.
The CRG website correctly points out that Human Trafficking and child exploitation are among the darkest evils our world has ever known. Over 350,000 unescorted children crossed our border during the Biden administration and were handed over to “charities” like Catholic Charities or Southwest Key Programs and then disappeared. Nobody knows where they are or what happened to them except for men like Jared Hudson, who rescues those children with his police training program. The border remains closed, but evil never takes a holiday; below is the face of evil.
The face of evil. Gloria Lopez-Corona was arrested for attempting to smuggle a druged 5-year-old boy she did not know across the border.
Gloria Lopez-Corona, a Mexican national, had a child hidden under blankets in the back of her car when she attempted to cross the San Luis port of entry. ICE officers were unable to wake the child and noted the boy was years older than the birth certificate, which Corona produced when questioned. It did not take long for her story to crumble, and she admitted she had no idea who the boy was or where he was heading. She also had no problem drugging the kid or turning him over to pedophiles.
What kind of woman smuggles a drugged child across an international border? If she is not, by definition, a demon of the worst sort, then what is she? Why are the democrats and liberal judiciary encouraging this type of gross criminality? Here is another face of evil:
More evil – Patrick Scruggs, a former January 6th federal prosecutor, stabbed a man after a vehicle accident in Florida.
Watching the video of former J6 federal prosecutor Patrick Scruggs viciously assaulting a man after a car accident is heartbreaking for me. It shows a man demon possessed, which isn’t surprising given his former job. It is disheartening that nobody shot him about 15 times, which he richly deserved. He’s been arrested, but the chances of him being prosecuted with the level of severity he showed the people he prosecuted are not high. Nobody trusts judges in America to apply the rule of law to progressive members of the legal system. Maybe we will be surprised, but I doubt it.
The Dread Coward Roberts‘ Supreme Court could end democratic judicial madness this Wednesday. The Democratic Party’s District Court judges have been issuing sweeping orders enjoining the government’s attempts to deport illegal criminal immigrants before even hearing the administration’s side of the case. We have never seen anything like this in our history. What are the chances the dread coward will re-establish the rule of law by smacking down district judge overreach? Not high, but there is always a chance that good will trump evil; it’s time to pray that The Dread Cowards Roberts finds the courage to support the American people, not wealthy oligarchs running the Democratic party.
This fictional short story first appeared in the Wrath Burning Tree in 2023
It was a typical Thursday night at the Taj Tiki Bar, tucked away off the Jalalabad–Kabul road in the Bagrami hamlet just outside the Jalalabad city limits. The Taj Guesthouse Tiki Bar was established by a UN road-building crew from Australia in 2003 and was the only bar in Eastern Afghanistan. The Taj was a three-building world-class guesthouse featuring a custom swimming pool that the Aussies built, which we filled with sand-filtered, freezing-cold well water. This being Afghanistan, Afghans were not allowed in the Tiki bar, and because Western NGO women frequented the pool, it was surrounded by a 40-foot bamboo screen. Bikini-wearing women cavorting in a pool with men is haram in Afghanistan and best kept out of public view.
During the summer of 2008, the Tiki Bar was busier than ever on Thursday nights during happy hour. The UN had withdrawn a year earlier, so the Taj became home to the Synergy Strike Force, an MIT FabLab, and the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club. My USAID-funded Community Development Program (CDP) was also located there. Since Jalalabad and San Diego are sister cities, the Rotarians actively funded projects to refurbish schools, build dormitories at Nangarhar University, and purchase modern equipment for the Nangarhar University Teaching Hospital.
The Synergy Strike Force was a San Diego-based group of high-end tech experts who aimed to “save the willing” by accessing unlimited funding from DARPA to refine their crowd-sourcing software. To bring the internet to the people, the founder of the Synergy Strike Force, a dual MD/PhD named Bob, convinced the National Science Foundation to fund the deployment of an MIT Fabrication Laboratory to the Taj Guesthouse, which came with two Graduate students to set it up.
The Tiki Bar had become so busy that I brought my son Logan, who had just graduated from High School, over to run the bar, allowing me to focus on supply. Buying beer was no problem, but getting it past the National Directorate of Security (NDS) checkpoint in the Kabul Gorge could be a real problem. I had already lost two sets of body armor and five bottles of booze to them, but they headed home early every Thursday, clearing the run back from Camp Warehouse long before the sun set.
There was a giant clay fireplace across from the bar for cold-weather operations, and the patio area between the main house, bar, and pool deck was filled with the usual suspects. NGO workers from the American aid giants DAI and Chemonics, two women from Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale, the attaché from the Pakistan consulate who had the hots for one of the German ladies, four agriculture specialists from the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the ever lovely and vivacious Ms. Mimi from Agence Française de Développement. Mimi had a male colleague who insisted on wearing a Speedo bathing suit in the pool area, but we let it slide because Mimi was a most attractive and agreeable guest who often stayed the night and spent Friday poolside.
A Blackwater crew from the Border Police training academy was there as usual, as was the brigade Human Terrain Team from FOB Fenty. There were two Air Force officers from the Nangarhar Provincial Reconstruction Team, technically in a UA status. One of them, an intelligence officer, was dating my Aussie running mate, Rory, which, in my opinion, was a lot of risk for marginal gain. As a retired Marine Corps grunt on the other side of 50 I might have been jealous; I was never sure.
The SSF crew was spending their last night in the country before heading back to the USA for the annual Burning Man festival. They were in rare form, as were the Rotarians from the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club, who were joined by Rotarians from Perth, Australia. Perth is a sister city to both San Diego and Jalalabad, who knew? The MIT grad students sent to start up the FabLab were immediately nicknamed the twins. They were TS (SCI) cleared rocket engineers from the Center for Bits and Atoms. Both were from New Jersey, both had long, jet-black hair, and smiled so much it made me uncomfortable; one was Chinese American, and the other was Indian American. They were seated at the bar with The Skipper – an EOD trainer who remained outside the wire, living with his Afghan trainees in a compound near the Jalalabad Teaching Hospital. The Skipper was a retired Navy Senior Chief EOD specialist who bore a striking resemblance to Alan Hale from the 1960s-era TV Show Gilligan’s Island. He had laid out a bunch of triggering switches he had collected from disabled IEDs and was taking notes as the Twins examined each with magnifying glasses. The Twins had the uncanny ability to recognize countries of origin and fabrication anomalies in the circuit work.
One of the Twins test-firing an old Soviet PPsH submachinegun she built from a bunch of junked weapons
The Twins were trouble from the start because they proved indispensable. We expected computer geeks from MIT, not engineers who could fix or build anything without apparent effort. They rebuilt the Tiki Bar because they found the original construction to be faulty; they built shelving from wood scraps that were so impressive, they looked like museum pieces. They got bored one day and started working on the War Pig, our up armored Toyota Hi Lux, fabricating a turbo charger and, with the help of our house manager Mehrab and a local diesel mechanic, super charged the engine and lifted the suspension 3 inches so the new tires they “found” would fit the truck. Once done, they surmised the War Pig would run hot and fast on the hairpin mountain turns, which were a feature of the Kabul – Jalalabad highway, and they frequently jetted out of the front gate to drive like maniacs on the mountain roads when unsupervised.
The Skipper was a regular at the Tiki Bar every Thursday evening, drinking exactly two beers regardless of how long he stayed. The Skipper was superstitious; he insisted on driving himself, just as I did, but he was the slowest and most cautious driver I had ever seen in Afghanistan. He also never missed church on Sundays. After documenting the Twins’ comments on trigger switch construction and anomalies, he told the Twins he was heading into Khogyani district in the morning to blow some dud ordnance at the Border Police Training Academy. Friday, a weekend day in Islamic lands, should be quiet enough for them to tag along.
I agreed to join them to provide an extra hand if things went pear shaped so as dawn broke across the Nangarhar Valley on a scorching hot Friday I was poking along in The Skippers armored SUV with the twins. I was wearing body armor, with my 1911 pistol mounted in a chest holster, and I had my Bushmaster rifle with its 10.5-inch barrel and Noveske Vortex pig snout flash suppressor. We had discovered regular bird cage flash suppressors kicked too much gas and noise back into a vehicle, but the pig snout kicked it all out the end of the barrel, which resulted in a little additional muzzle flip but no gas blowing back in your eyes.
The Twins carried Glock 19s with two extra magazines in Kydex holsters, and they both sported WWII-era M3 .45-caliber Grease Guns. There were hundreds of old M3 submachine guns and 1911 pistols circulating in Afghanistan at the beginning of the War, and we had obtained more than our fair share somehow. The M3 was the only weapon that could be fired out of the muzzle port in the windshield of the War Pig. The poorly designed add-on armor from South Africa featured a V-shaped windshield with a firing port on the passenger’s side. But the angle of the bulletproof windscreen was so steep that the only weapon we could fire out of it was an M3 subgun held upside down with the bottom of the magazine facing the roof. The Twins liked them because it was easy to modulate the trigger and control them when firing on full auto.
We were poking along the hardball road leading into the foothills near Tora Bora when The Skipper stopped dead in his tracks. His Afghan EOD team driving behind him must have anticipated this because they stopped on a dime, too. “You smell that?” he asked as he opened his door, letting in an overpowering smell of cut hay and shredded leaves. His Afghans were out of their truck, looking up and down the road. The Skipper looked over at me and said, “IED”. That perked the Twins up as the Skipper explained that we should see a carpet of leaves covering the road ahead.
The road doglegged to the right, crossing a large culvert that channeled a fair-sized stream under the asphalt-paved road. The road was covered in a several-inch carpet of leaves, but I could detect no blast signature. We got out of the trucks and started looking around, trying to figure out what had happened, when an Afghan National Army (ANA) patrol pulled up with many villagers in the back of their pickups. The villagers told us there is a bomb in the culvert we’re standing on. The Afghan team leader asks what had just blown up, and an elder pointed downstream and said, ‘The man who put the bomb in the culvert.”
The Skipper was called out to arm caches like this often by locals who didn’t want their children handling old corroded Russian ordinance.
The Skipper retrieved one of those fisheye mirrors used for vehicle searches from the back of his truck, along with a powerful Surefire flashlight, and gave them to his EOD techs. One of the EOD techs lay on his belly and held the mirror in front of the drainage pipe while one of the other EOD men shined the flashlight into the culvert pipe. They spot the IED immediately – The Skipper and the Twins look and see it too; a pressure cooker on a vehicle jack stand jammed up against the top of the culvert pipe with a blasting cap inserted into a hole in the lid and wire running out of the drainage pipe heading downstream.
The Skipper called the IED into the American Army brigade headquarters at Forward Operating Base Fenty, and they instructed us to stay on scene and wait for the route clearance package to lead the EOD team out to recover the IED. The Skipper acknowledged them, but we knew waiting for the army was a non-starter. They would take at least 8 hours to roll out of the gate and another two to get to us; there was no way the ANA would keep a road closed that long. He looked at the Twins and said, “let’s blow this bitch up”. They broke into radiant smiles and immediately started organizing a work area on the tailgate of our truck.
The Skipper retrieved four bricks of C4 and handed them to the Twins, who taped them tightly while he unspooled some detonation cord. The Twins then wrapped the bricks tightly with the det cord and gave them to the Afghan EOD techs. Along with the ANA troops, they glued the charge to a piece of cardboard and then taped it to a five-gallon water jug some local kids had taken down the creek to top off.
The Twins conned The Skipper into giving up his blasting caps so they could prime the charge. The Afghan EOD men attached about 10 feet of shock tube to the charge and, using 550 cord, lowered the water jug over the mouth of the culvert. A few of the ANA troops and some local teenagers had stopped up the downstream end of the pipe that was now filling with water. The other ANA troops were with the EOD techs in the stream bed, making a big show of lining up the shot correctly. Once the shot was perfectly lined up, they threw a yellow smoke grenade into the pipe and scrambled up the stream bank.
When the smoke flowed out of the pipe, the senior Afghan EOD tech looked at the Skipper, who nodded his head while putting on a set of high-end hearing protectors. The Twins and I had foam earplugs, which we fished out of our pockets before sitting on the folding beach chairs the Skipper carries around for such occasions. With the smoke billowing out, the techs and ANA soldiers yelled ‘fire in the hole’ three times (in English) and the senior EOD man shot the charge.
The C4 went off with a giant WHOOMP; it’s a slow-burning explosive, so it doesn’t evaporate the water, but instead pushes it down the pipe at around 26,000 feet per second. The kinetic energy neutralizes the IED, and the water renders the explosive components inert. A giant gush of yellow-tinted water erupted out of the downstream end of the culvert pipe, arcing over the creek bed for about 100 feet before slamming into the trees like a wave. The water then exploded into the sky, slowly dissipating in a rainbow of colors suspended in the air for 45 seconds.
There were dozens of local people from nearby villages, and the stalled traffic, watching us, erupted in cheers, laughter, and shouts. Their kids were excitedly dancing, laughing, and clapping; local men came up to take pictures with the ANA troops and the EOD team. The Skipper looked over with a big broad smile and said to me “can you believe we get paid to do this shit”? I could not, nor could the Twins who were self-funded volunteers and not making a dime during their time in the Stan but still happy to be here with us.
The Skipper lost his dream gig in 2011 when the position was eliminated, and he moved onto the big box FOB on Bagram. His company felt it was no longer safe for him to free range outside the wire, and they were probably right. Someone in Nuristan had taken a shot at the Skipper that missed due to a low-order detonation caused by incompetent and poor waterproofing. So, despite his willingness to stay, it was time for him to go. For the three years he roamed around Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, and Laghman provinces, removing the boom from local towns and villages while making a lasting impression on the Afghans. They loved him and he, in return, posed for hundreds of pictures, while patiently fielding complaints about ISAF, the Afghan government, and various American administrations from local elders. The Skipper had balls the size of grapefruit, and he never hesitated to go into Indian Country with just his Afghan EOD crew when called.
The Skipper, like every heavily armed humanitarian I knew, made it home safe and sound after staying in Afghanistan (on FOBs) until 2015. He never talked about his free-range past because none of the people he worked with believed his stories. That was a common occurrence among us, outside-the-wire contractors in Afghanistan. Only a few of us invested the time it took to learn the language and put our skin in the game. Like the Skipper, those who did were rewarded with a veil of protection by the local people. That may have been a minor accomplishment in the big scheme of things, but it was a worthy one that came with no small amount of pride. We were able to go places and do things that would have gotten us killed ten times over had we still been in uniform. And that little bit of special pride is borne in silence by us these days because nobody believes that we lived outside the wire with the Afghans, for years, and enjoyed every minute of it.
*Although based on actual events, this is a fictional story of love and forgiveness that seems timely on Easter Sunday. But this is a man’s story, so there is no actual love or formal forgiveness, because that is not how men love each other.
When the 1MC (ship loudspeakers) erupted with “Mass Casualties Inbound,” I hustled down to the hangar bay and started to set up stretcher stands. Ship-to-shore communications were not robust in 1983, so we had no idea how many wounded we would see when the elevator came down from the flight deck. It was just one Marine on a stretcher; the red shirts from the flight deck deposited him in front of us; one of the squadron corpsmen was with him, and as he talked with the surgeon, the other corpsmen and I started prepping him for the Operating Room.
The Marine was a sergeant, but he didn’t look like any of the Marines from Beirut International Airport that we had previously treated. His camouflage utilities were clean and starched, and the boot he still wore was shined. He didn’t smell from weeks without showering, yet he was lying before us, missing a good bit of his right hand and left foot. The battalion aid station had administered morphine before he flew out to us, so although alert, he wasn’t feeling any pain. When I removed his boot, I gasped in amazement. The surgeon and Marine looked at me, so I pointed to the intact foot, saying: “Holy shit, his feet are clean, and toenails trimmed; he doesn’t even smell bad. I’ve never seen a wounded Marine who wasn’t filthy; I think he might be a homosexual.”
I made the joke because the sergeant was starting to freak over the severity of his injuries; getting him focused on something else was a professional move. Back then, you could joke about the gays without fear because the military was male-dominated. Men don’t coddle other men – they teased them, often unmercifully, even if they were friends. The Foot Sergeant was a public affairs Marine assigned to the USS New Jersey and had been riding a CH-53 ashore to do man-on-the-street interviews of the grunts for his ship’s newspaper. The pilot thought he saw an RPG grenade launched at his aircraft as he was landing and dumped the collective, skipping his tail rotor off the deck. The rotor shattered on impact, and pieces flew into the big airframe, hitting the Sergeant, the only passenger. When the sergeant heard my allegation, he protested his innocence as expected, starting a heated back and forth with me until the Anesthesiologist put him under. We were professionals, after all, and knew how to handle injured Marines, even clean ones.
The surgeons trimmed up his lower leg stump and right hand, and both were elevated with Penrose drains inserted in the wound tracts to facilitate proper healing. The sergeant joined another recently wounded Marine in the USS Guam’s seven-bed sick bay. The other Marine was a machine gunner from New York City nicknamed Second Best. He had been wounded in the right leg by First Best, a Syrian machine gunner. They had been dueling for fifteen minutes before Second-Best, who was lying prone behind his gun, was hit by a round that traveled the length of his leg. Although the wound track was long, the injury was minor, allowing Second Best to return to duty in a few weeks for another attempt at his Syrian nemesis.
The Foot Sergeant would be sent back to Bethesda Naval Hospital at some future date. For now, he was stuck on the USS Guam because all our helicopters were ferrying the equipment and entertainers for a Bob Hope Christmas Special to the ship. The lineup included TV stars Brooke Shields, Cathy Lee Crosby, Ann Jillian, and Miss USA Julie Hayek. This would be the last Bob Hope Christmas Show for service members deployed in a war zone, making it a big deal. Not that the Pentagon was admitting Beirut was a war zone, but the loss of over 250 Marines, sailors, and soldiers over the months made it seem damn close to one.
The big show was on Friday, the 23rd of December, and was impressive. The Marines had flown a few hundred of the grunts in from the beach, and they were given the front-row seats. I had a dirty pair of Marine Corps cammies stashed in my locker for just such an occasion and was hanging out close enough to the stage to be selected to go up and get a Christmas present from Brooke Shields, who kissed me on the cheek on national television. I couldn’t have had a better day before Christmas Eve.
On Christmas Eve, I strolled into the ward to check on the Foot Sergeant and Second Best, who were restricted to their racks while their wounds drained. The Foot Sergeant asked if one of the Hollywood stars or Miss USA would be dropping by, and I said they would, but added, “Not to see you; they want to see wounded Marines, not a closet homo injured by a shitty pilot.” My joke was not well received; instead of calling me foul and filthy names, the Foot Sergeant started to cry. I didn’t know what to do and looked to Second Best for some guidance, but he called me a motherfucker for teasing the Foot Sergeant until he cried. I felt like shit and apologized profusely, but the Foot Sergeant was inconsolable.
I had to make things right; it was Christmas Eve, a time to share joy and love with your fellow man, even those with clean feet and trimmed toenails. I glanced into our two-room ICU and was suddenly inspired. I told the Foot Sergeant to calm down as I was moving him into the ICU, where we could cover him with bloody bandages, hook him up to the EKG, and lure a Hollywood starlet in to spend some time comforting him. The sergeant thought about it for a minute and decided he liked the idea, so I got a wheelchair and moved him over to the ICU.
Pulling Liberty in Haifa, Israel, with one of the Foot Sergeants’ Marine buddies
In 1983, the ICU aboard the USS Guam had an illegal washer and dryer set up in its bathroom. The washer and dryer ran 24/7, except when patients were in the ICU, so the room was hot, and the floor was covered in dust bunnies from the dryer vent. The ICU beds were bigger and taller than the medical ward racks, so the foot sergeant fit comfortably in one, wearing just his pajama bottoms. I covered up his chest and head with gauze, poured a little blood on him, hooked up the EKG monitor, and put an oxygen mask on him without connecting the hose to oxygen (that required doctor orders), so it hung down on the deck.
I sat at a portable stand with a logbook open, mimicking the ICU critical patient watch because the Foot Sergeant looked like a goner. A chair was between the two ICU racks for the Hollywood stars to use if they felt compelled to comfort the fallen warrior. The Foot Sergeant was happy; Second Best was delighted too but bitching about not being in the ICU with us, and I felt like I had made up for teasing the Foot Sergeant until he cried (which was gay, as I pointed out to him later). The stage was set, and we didn’t have long to wait.
The first VIP to wander down the passageway was Bob Hope, who appeared to have had too many celebratory drinks. He was escorted by the Surgeons from Mobile Medical Team 11 and my boss, Dr. Derbert. Fortunately, they, too, had been drinking because they overlooked the missing Foot Sergeant when they escorted Bob Hope to meet with Second Best. I had closed the door to the ICU when I saw them coming, saving the Foot Sergeant for one of the starlets. When I saw a gaggle of news photographers in the passageway, I opened the ICU door and told the Fort Sergeant to stand by. Brooke Shields was the first celebrity to poke her head in, but she immediately decided against entering. Miss USA did the same; looking at the bloody, bandaged spectacle of the Foot Sergeant, she took a pass. But not Ann Jillian. She and her husband immediately entered the ICU, asking how badly the Foot Sergeant was injured. I made up some bullshit about him being shot multiple times when he ran into the no man’s land to rescue a small child in the middle of a firefight. I finished my report, telling the couple we did not expect the Marine to survive the night.
The story moved Ms. Jillian; she had wedged herself into the chair between the ICU beds and was stroking the Foot Sergeant’s blood-matted hair while whispering in his left ear. As I watched, I realized that the Foot Sergeant may not handle this attention well. The room was hot, so he just had a thin sheet covering him; his pulse was starting to skyrocket, which we could hear on the monitor, and suddenly his breathing became labored. That was most likely due to dryer lint clogging the open end of the O2 mask tubing. Then nature stepped in to refute my claims about his sexual orientation. Suddenly, the Foot Sergeant had a massive, rock-hard erection that lifted the sheet covering him like a tent pole.
When that happened, the poor guy turned bright red and began making strange noises as he struggled to breathe. Being a sharp lad, I shouted, “Oh my God, he has a priapism. I’m afraid you must leave now.” I thought I was home free as I escorted the pair to the passageway. But when they left the ICU, they ran into the ship’s doctor, who looked in to see what was happening. “What the fuck is going on in here?” He shouted, probably because he, too, had been drinking.
As the other physicians crowded into the ICU, I explained that some of the corpsmen had been teasing the Foot Sergeant about maybe being gay for some reason. I wanted to make amends for their despicable behavior by getting him some one-on-one attention from a Hollywood starlet. My boss, Dr. Derbert, wasn’t having it; “Bullshit, Lynch, you’re the one who started that rumor when he arrived in the hangar bay, and you’re the only corpsman to tease him about it ever since.” That wasn’t true; one of the other corpsmen occasionally teased the Foot Sergeant, but I was still screwed. The only thing that saved me was the propensity of the American military to cover up embarrassing incidents.
When the officers piled into the ICU, one of the nurses escorted Ann and her husband from the room. He confirmed to them that the badly wounded Marine would probably not survive, while Dr. Derbert read me the riot act. The medical men then gathered in a scrum to get their story straight before heading to the bridge to report to the Captain what had happened. When everyone cleared out of the ICU, our charge nurse, Frank, stood there looking at me with a wry smile. He was a good man, and we got along well, but I was still surprised by his following comment.
“Look at the bright side, Lynch; you got the physicians so pissed off they didn’t notice the washer and dryer. Your illegal laundry is safe for the time being.”
That was a big deal; clothes washed in the ship’s laundry returned damp, smelly, and wrinkled. If I had been responsible for losing our machines, I might have been even less popular with the crew. My new reputation for being the guy who took advantage of Ann Jillian’s kindness and sympathy was bad enough.
At Captain’s Mast, the skipper fined me three hundred bucks for being a dumb ass but suspended half of it after Nurse Frank read a statement from the Foot Sergeant about the impact Ann Jillian had on his flagging morale. The Foot Sergeant was a stand-up guy, and we stayed in touch. He married and left the Marine Corps for the big leagues in 1990. In 1992, he won a Pulitzer while writing for the New York Times. Then the son of a bitch got leukemia and died in 1995. I don’t think I ever cried as hard as I did the night his wife called to tell me. The fucking Foot Sergeant was a good man, and It’s been lonely growing old without him.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made headlines last week for ordering the military services to review their fitness standards for troops assigned to combat arms units. His goal is to create uniform standards to replace gender-based fitness tests. Although Hegseth is on record as being against women in combat, this (in theory) wasn’t about that. Hegseth reinforced his order with a video on X where he stated:
“We need to have the same standard, male or female, in our combat roles; soon, we’ll have nothing but the highest and equal standards for men and women in combat.”
That is great news, except it won’t work because standards can be waived, exceptions made, and rigorous standards challenged when senior officers or SNCOs cannot meet them. We didn’t end up with female officers graduating from the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course because IOC lacked standards. General officers of my generation seemed to honestly believe that introducing women into the infantry was a good idea as soon as they were selected to flag rank. But I don’t want to explore flag officer complicity because some of the men involved are friends of mine, and Marines have rules about what one says about one’s friends in blog posts.
Except for Joe Dunford, the best Marine Corps Commandant in my lifetime, who designed and authorized the 2015 Marine Corps Force Integration Plan experiment. That rigorously controlled, detailed experiment showed that forcing females into the combat arms would degrade overall performance and lethality.
Here is a sample of the data collected during the study:
Female Marines averaged 15 percent lower anaerobic power and capacity levels than their male counterparts.
In anaerobic power performance, the top 25 percent of female performers and the bottom 25 percent of male performers overlapped.
Female Marines demonstrated levels 10 percent lower on average in aerobic capacity than male Marines.
Over the course of the assessment, musculoskeletal injury rates totaled 40.5 percent for women, more than double the 18.8 percent rate for men.
In all, female Marines sustained 21 “time-loss” injuries, which took them away from task force duties for a day or more. Nineteen of the women’s injuries were lower extremity injuries, and 16 percent took place during a task that required movement while carrying a load.
Here are some highlights from the nine-month, 36-million-dollar study:
All-male squads in every infantry job were faster than mixed-gender squads in each tactical movement evaluated. The differences between the teams were most pronounced in crew-served weapons teams, which had to carry weapons and ammunition in addition to their individual combat loads.
Male-only rifleman squads were more accurate than their gender-integrated counterparts on each individual weapons system, including the M4 carbine, the M27 infantry automatic rifle, and the M203 grenade launcher.
Male Marines with no formal infantry training outperformed infantry-trained women on each weapons system at levels ranging from 11 to 16 percentage points.
The detrimental effects of forcing women into ground combat units were beyond dispute, and the way forward for then-Secretary of the Navy Ray Maybus was crystal clear. Maybus ignored the study (pilloried in mainstream media), and the standards for IOC were dropped so women could make it through. Putting those standards back will not fix the problem because they never were the problem; women were.
How can the senior flag officers insist it is imperative to put females into every combat formation when they would never force women onto the football teams of West Point or Annapolis? Is winning football games more important than the lives of the men and women they command? Of course not. If you forced a woman into the starting lineup of the Army or Navy, the ensuing disaster would play out on national television, and the ridiculous experiment would be terminated.
The same dynamic will play out if we ever expose our mixed-gender combat units to the sustained ground combat we experienced in Vietnam, Korea, or World War II. During the twenty years we spent fighting the Global War on Terror, the military fought a few battles, lots of firefights, and hundreds of ambushes, but it did not engage in sustained ground combat. When faced with the tactical problem of improvised explosive devices or separating insurgents from the local population instead of tactical solutions, the Pentagon made the money printers go brrr. They purchased thousands of gigantic Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles to protect every fireteam leaving the wire. When we abandoned Afghanistan, we also abandoned the MRAPs. They were no longer needed, and there was no budget or manpower to maintain them.
The Pentagon has lost the ability to make the money printers go brrr. In the future, tactical problems will need tactical solutions, which will be easier to find without the self-inflicted wound of women on the front lines.
I was watching one of the more popular Special Forces influencers, Nate Cornacchia, at the Valhalla VFT channel explain that the Special Forces Q course and Ranger School have already returned to the original, rigorous standards, effectively eliminating women from those courses. Nate explained in great detail why he believes in returning to the former standards. I think I agreed with everything he said, but he took so long to explain things that I skipped through the video. Too much computer screen time has reduced my attention span so much that my wife calls me Desi. My 2 ½ -year-old grandson Desi is not known for sitting still in quiet contemplation for longer than 5 seconds. But he’s cute as shit and can climb like a monkey because he’s fit, just like his granddad.
So I’m watching Nate, who looks like your typical former Special Forces operator. He’s wearing a tank top, has the tats, is jacked, and has the obligatory beard and ball cap. I was wearing a tank top, too, and I have a couple of tattoos but no beard, and I don’t habitually wear ball caps. I take a screenshot of myself watching Nate to compare, thinking I might be able to duplicate his SF mojo and become a corporate-sponsored military influencer. I might have a shot if all it takes is being fit enough to wear a tank top and some military tattoos.
Retired Special Forces operator Nate Cornacchia
Retired Marine infantry officer Tim Lynch watching Nate and realizing he was in grade school when Lynch retired from the Marine Corps
So, with a little more color in the background, I’m one expensive microphone away from the influencer lifestyle. Then, I remembered that America already has a retired Marine Corps infantry officer influencer, my friend Asad Khan. I then went over to his Sentinel 360 YouTube page to grab a picture of Asad in mid-rant.
No ball cap, wife beater, or Tats for Asad, who, like me, is just a regular infantry officer. If you can’t tell, he is a no-nonsense, very bright guy who can be a scary dude when aggravated. He took his battalion into Afghanistan back in 2004 and battled the Taliban to a standstill in Uruzgan Province.
When I went to fetch a shot of Asad, I noticed that Nate Cornacchia had another video up about the same topic. This time, he has another former Green Beret dude on, and they spent almost two hours going over the same territory. Once again, I agree with everything they said in principle because I skimmed through the video. Those guys sure can talk a lot, and I wonder if it’s the ADHD meds that seem prevalent in Gen Z, not that there is anything wrong with getting treatment for ADHD. It would explain why they are both wearing their ball caps backward while getting pedantic over what women can and can’t do in the SF community.
Then it dawned on me why I find the generational differences perplexing.
Chivalry.
Chivalry was taught to boomers at a young age as the masculine way of maintaining social decorum. Men were expected to protect women, children, and the elderly. Before you can protect your community, you must be able to protect yourself, so fistfights were expected as part of coming of age in the 60s and 70s. Our teachers taught us that violence never solves anything but our archaic masculine culture taught us it is really the gold standard.
An armed society is a polite society
Generation Z was taught that chivalry was an archaic, misogynistic artifact of Western European colonizers. They were taught manners instead of chivalry, with schools instituting zero-tolerance physical altercation policies. Chivalry is concerned with the right behavior; manners are concerned with the right appearance. One is the product of a masculine society, the other of a feminized culture. This might explain why testosterone levels are plummeting in younger Americans.
What happens to a military that denounces masculinity as toxic? Mannerism as disconnected from reality today as it was during the Italian High Renaissance. Colonel Susan Myers, commander of the 821st Space Base Group in Greenland, recently displayed classic girl boss mannerism. Col. Myers wrote this in an email to her command last week after hosting the Vice President and his lovely wife.
“I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the U.S. administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base. I commit that, for as long as I am lucky enough to lead this base, all of our flags will fly proudly — together.”
No adult who has taken a hard, straight right to the face would ever talk like that. As the ancient stoic Mike Tyson observed, “Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth.” So what was Col. Myers’s plan with her girl boss email? She had no plan. I’m uncomfortable with military commanders who continue to use passive-aggressive, malicious compliance to ‘flex’ against the bad orange man.
It is not only cowardly but also ungentlemanly to voice your personal “concerns” about the Vice President of the United States when you are in command of a military establishment. Military officers are taught from a young age that with politicians, they are to respect the office, not the man, which was a useful heuristic when serving under Clinton or Obama. As I sat here ruminating about loquacious Green Berets and shit-bird Space Force Colonels, a notification popped up that Sentinal 360 had posted another video. I checked it out, confident it wasn’t another 2 hours about women in combat.
Asad is interviewing retired Marine Colonel C.J. Douglas, who went through IOC when I was on the staff. C.J. is a great Marine and funny as hell, but as you can see, Asad is a serious-looking dude.
I was not disappointed because Asad had one of his generation’s best-retired infantry colonels, C.J. Douglas. Colonel Douglas distinguished himself during five combat tours and with his all-source intelligence-gathering capabilities. He consulted Free Range International for Afghanistan updates prior to deploying there, which he revealed by mentioning his old mentor (me) during his first interview with Asad, which automatically put him into the Free Range Hall of Fame.
And I know CJ Douglas can think after taking a punch to the mouth because I put him through the Room of Pain at IOC. The room of pain was designed to exercise decision-making while exhausted and fighting an enlisted close combat instructor, followed by an IOC instructor after being thrashed to the point of exhaustion by calisthenics.
As you look at the picture above, C.J. is smiling and is genuinely happy because he’s talking about killing bad guys. Asad is being Asad – interesting and candid, but not somebody you’d want to provoke because he’s a hard dude. CJ is, too, and if you’re not a personal friend and he’s looking at you with that big happy smile, he’s probably working his day job with the New York State Police, and you’re probably going to jail. Chivalrous men delight in tales about well-laid ambushes or nailing a high-value target and are genuinely happy when incarcerating anti-social drunks or petty criminals.
Then, praise the Lord, I found an article that might wrap this rambling post up nicely. It’s too late for me, Asad, CJ, or the Green Berets to be legitimate influencers because influencers are now considered obnoxious. I had no idea there were male fitness influencers who filmed their 6-hour morning routine. Another fitness guru (Dr Edward Group) drinks his urine every morning, claiming it’s the best source of stem cells. Is it possible that Dr. Group is correct? Of course. Should you drink your own urine every morning? No. Chivalrous men don’t drink their own urine or concern themselves with self-improvement via injections.
The antidote to influencers is authenticity, which is why the podcast market is booming. That’s why I enjoy the Sential 360 channel so much—Asad is fun to listen to because he is authentic, interested in the military, knows his history, and has great sea stories. As you watch him interview CJ Douglas, you can see the mutual respect and genuine love of the country and the Marine Corps in both of them.
Increased fitness standards will not rid the military of females in combat arms occupational specialties because they make meeting arbitrary fitness standards the issue. As Saul Alinsky, the patron saint of DEI, noted, “The issue is never the issue.” The issue of women in combat isn’t about fairness and equity for women; it’s about political power and the maintenance of the progressive elites’ narrative. Secretary Hegseth should announce the removal of women from all combat arms occupational specialties, not because they can’t meet some standard but because they have no business being there in the first place. It is high time to make Army infantry look like the West Point football team, not some utopian vision of a color-stratified America.
As I have covered in my last two posts, Mexico has consistently failed to meet its water treaty obligations since they were established in 1948. Several times a year, every year since 1948, politicians in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) speak out about this injustice to coax more federal relief dollars for our farmers and sugar mill operators. Check that our last sugar mill closed last year, a victim of South Texas drought and Mexican perfidy. This year it was State Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa’s (D-McAllen) turn to bitch about the missing Mexican water, which he did last week. Then, out of the blue, the President of the United States stopped American water shipments to Tijuana, citing Mexican recalcitrance over fulfilling their obligations under the 1944 International Boundary and Water Commission as the reason.
At this point, Valley locals who travel to Mexico often to visit with family and friends began to worry. Mexico had just installed (elected isn’t the proper word) its first female President, Claudia Sheinbaum. In a male-dominated, masculine society like Mexico, when you see a woman ascend to the president’s office, it means the office is ceremonial and disconnected from power, or the woman has serious, powerful, hard-to-explain power behind her. This morning, as curanderas throughout the Rio Grande Valley cleaned up behind receding flood waters, they were all saying the same thing: “I told you this would happen”.
Curanderas are practitioners of herbal medicine, home remedies, and witchcraft. There are two types of Curanderas: Brujas Blancas (white witches) and Brujas Negras (black witches). The difference between white and black brujas is that one removes the spells and the other casts spells, but in practice, good curanderas can do both, causing as much peace or mischief as you can afford to pay for. It is easy to recognize the work of Mexican curanderas by timing and irony. Yesterday, the most powerful curandera in Mexico sent a little black magic to Chuy Hinojosa in the form of a biblical three-hour rainstorm that came out of nowhere to dump over 21 inches of rain on McAllen.
Stranded vehicles left on the frontage road in front of the McAllen Convention Center during a downpour on Thursday, March 26, 2025, in McAllen. (Joel Martinez | jmartinez@themonitor.com)
Chuy Hinojosa bitches to the press about not having enough water in the Valley, and suddenly, a scattered line of thunderstorms forecasted to sporadically drop an inch or two of rain somewhere in the Valley turned into a Training Thunderstorm. Training means that as individual thunderstorm cells form and move downwind, another cell forms upwind and moves directly over the path of the previous cell. These storm cells form so fast that when viewed on radar, the thunderstorm looks stationary or moving backward against the upper-level wind. On the radar, they look like a train; on the ground, it feels like you’re being hit by a train.
At this point, I am sure most of my gringo readers who reside far from the border are skeptical of the supernatural angle to this story. Let me provide more evidence that the train rain was the work of curanderas: Nobody can agree on what happened. According to RGV.com, McAllen received 4.96 inches of rain yesterday. The local Fox News station said McAllen was hit with 8 inches of rain. My SanAntonio.com claimed yesterday’s rain totals for McAllen were between 13-21 inches. Good Morning America claimed we got 14 inches of rain. Do you see the trend here? That’s how you know this wasn’t some innocent weather phenomenon. My neighbor on the corner, after saying, “I told you this would happen,” added that in 48 years, she had never seen this much rain or flooding.
The view from my front porch as the flood waters continued to rise. The rain stopped just before the water reached my top step
As usual, the poorest were hardest hit by this storm of spite, with many spending this morning recovering abandoned vehicles or cleaning out flooded homes. Many more are lined up outside various homes or apartments as the faithful consult their trusted curanderas about what the hell is going on with the weather. But I know what’s going on; I’ve seen this shit before in the Hindu Kush with the Mountain Pashtun and their Jinn. If I were an advisor for Senator Hinojosa, I’d tell him to stop bitching about the 1944 water treaty before we end up with 350 acre-feet of water being dumped on our heads.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but just days after I posted on our current water war with Mexico, President Trump responded decisively by cutting American water to Tijuana. This is a very strange development because the Mexicans have not met their 1948 treaty obligations since 1948. Once a year or so, Texas politicians issue a hysterical la proclamación threatening to withhold building permits until Mexico coughs up some of the water we are owed. In the past, this allowed the captured media to portray the matter in whatever light their democratic overlords told them. These days, it allows sharp bloggers to bring up yet another indecency we decent Americans are facing, thanks to progressive globalists. But that’s where the issue is supposed to end – expecting Washington, DC, to do something about it would be like pulling a diamond out of a goat’s ass.
Yet here it is, as explained in this statement from the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs:
“Mexico’s continued shortfalls in its water deliveries under the 1944 water-sharing treaty are decimating American agriculture — particularly farmers in the Rio Grande valley Valley” the bureau said. “As a result, today, for the first time, the U.S. will deny Mexico’s non-treaty request for a special delivery channel for Colorado River water to be delivered to Tijuana.”
I had never heard of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, but I had to correct their statement. They had the valley in Rio Grande Valley in lowercase and were missing a comma. Not bad for government work, but I’d love to see DOGE go to work on their books for one reason. Whatever the mission of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs was when it was formed, it is not its mission now. Bureaucracies, by their nature, grow and expand, losing focus over time, but they aren’t of nature, so they have no predators to keep their numbers down and personnel in fighting trim. To be healthy, federal bureaucracies should periodically be ruthlessly scoured by DOGE autodidacts who test low for the empathy character trait.
It is also worth noting that the attached story credits Senator Cruz for alerting the President to this sorry situation and not the Free Range International Blog. This is probably true, but the timing is suspect, given my last post. Still, I’m amazed that the President acted on something that the federal government has studiously ignored for 78 years. It’s morning in America again! What could possibly go wrong now that we have an awesome president getting things done? And then I saw this:
The 6th generation F-47 can expect cost overruns, production delays, and fatal performance glitches that will be worked out after it has been fielded—just like every other modern jet fighter we have built in my lifetime.
President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth bragging about the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform, which is designated the F-47. There is no better example of Pentagon gold plating inefficiency than acquiring next-generation military aircraft. I thought President Trump, with the able assistance of Secretary Hegseth, was going to trim down and toughen up our military. Their counterrevolution against the pathology of wokeness and political correctness in the military has been impressive. But another massive investment in a “next-generation” manned fighter is a depressing signal that the status quo with our military-industrial complex will continue unimpeded by logic or fiscal responsibility.
The F-47 is the replacement for the F-22 Raptor, which was supposed to replace the F-15 platform. However, we still have lots of F-15s because the F-22 was a nightmare for the Air Force. Only 186 of the 750 F-22s anticipated by the Air Force were delivered, and only 130 of those aircraft were operational. The number of F-22s in service today is classified but suspected to be in the double digits.
Why are these people being trusted to build a sixth-generation air dominance fighter?
We cannot build F-22s anymore because much of that industry was retooled to produce the F-35, another super high-speed ‘next-generation’ jet plagued by reliability, maintainability, and availability problems. The cost of the F-35 program has soared past 2 Trillion Dollars. It is a flying computer that requires periodic updates and modernization that significantly reduces sortie rates. Additionally, the F-35’s current engine and thermal management systems must be fixed. But the Department of Defense hasn’t figured out how these repairs will be accomplished. So we don’t know how much this will add to the 1.6 trillion dollar projected sustainability costs.
It’s hard to believe that the F-47 program won’t face the same challenges, but for what benefit? To have the best air dominance platform in the world? We already possess that capability with our few dozen remaining F-22 Raptors. No hostile Air Force in the world can”dominate” the F-15EX, which the F-22 was supposed to replace. Israel could give the Air Force fits on its home turf, but they are friends, not foes.
Speaking of Israel, its F-35 fleet performed flawlessly against Iran’s sophisticated air defense systems. And speaking of F-35s, the Marine Corps paired theirs with Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie unmanned drones under the “loyal wingman” concept. We currently have the stealth capability married to drones that can defeat any air defense system in the world. The question isn’t why we need a new-generation jet fighter but why we would invest Trillions in developing a new manned air dominance fighter.
I’m not sure these are the people we want building passenger planes, let alone stealth fighters
There may be a logical explanation for the F-47, but we won’t know what it could be until somebody tells us what it is designed to do. Online speculation about its size, shape, and capabilities is all over the map but can be summed up as more lethality, speed, greater range, and additional (undefined) weapons. Every new “air dominance higher” is supposedly more lethal and faster, with longer legs and increased sortie rates due to decreased maintenance cycles. Yet, the exact opposite always proves to be the case.
And we are now supposed to believe that Boeing will deliver this plane on time, on budget, and without a long list of expensive, nearly insolvable problems? Boeing? Are you joking me? What are the chances this plane will be in production and operational by the end of President Trump’s term as currently planned? I say zero. What are the chances that Boeing will deliver this aircraft on budget? Who knows? The price and capabilities of this plane remain classified; we’ll never know how much the program will cost over budget.
Do you believe Boeing will build the F-47 in under four years?
The plane has been designated the F-47 to honor our 47th President, Donald J. Trump, and that’s the kind of bullshit that should have caused instant program termination. Hegseth and Musk are supposed to protect Trump from swamp creatures adept at appealing to the great man’s vanity. Elon Musk called the F-35 design “shit” and derided the “idiots” making the fifth-generation stealth fighter. He met with SecDef Hegseth just before the F-47 announcement and has remained mum on the topic. The SecDef had the appropriate level of gravitas for the situation, but comfort with this new unfunded liability was hard to read.
Gravitas is a word that became common during Bill Clinton’s administration. The paid corporate media used it to describe Clinton when he got that deer-in-the-headlights look while telling what we now know to be bald-faced lies. It is obvious that Secretary Hegseth and his public relations shop will need some serious gravitas to navigate the disaster they unleashed by greenlighting a program they did not have the time to review or understand. The future suddenly does not look so bright, and getting a few more hundred thousand acre-feet of water from Mexico will not change that.
