Category: Afghanistan

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The Skipper Moves the Boom

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 The UN had withdrawn a year earlier, so the Taj became home to the Synergy Strike Force, an MIT FabLab, and the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club.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.

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The Foot Sergeant

*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.

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Fitness Standards for the Combat Arms

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.

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Suddenly the CIA is Competent?

This morning America awoke to the news that the CIA had run down and arrested the man responsible for the Abbey Gate bombing. The new CIA director said he called Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and told them a man named Mohammad Sharifullah (aka Jabar) was inside the Northwest Frontier or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or hanging out near Chitral – somewhere on the border that Pakistan barely controls. He claimed Jabar was the man behind the Abbey Gate bombing, so the ISI and CIA launched a raid, captured him and brought him back to the USA to face justice.

ISIS terrorist Mohammad Sharifullah arriving in the USA last night. ISISK is turning into a problem for both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and it is a safe bet that this dude deserves everything he has coming. But it is hard to believe he set up the Abbey Gate attack having just been released from the Bagram jail

The chances that this story is true are not high for the following reasons:

  1. The last time the CIA went after the “man responsible for Abbey Gate” they killed a Kabul-based NGO worker along with a carload of women and children. At the time the morbidly obese Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said it was a “righteous strike” before being forced to admit they killed ten innocent civilians.
  2. The ability of the CIA to gather accurate intelligence inside of Pakistan or Afghanistan was compromised by the ISI, who took our money, gave it to the Taliban, and forced-fed target lists to the CIA, which benefited Pakistan – not America
  3. The ISI is and always has been an enemy and they proved that with 20 years of interference and lying.
  4. The CIA was so incompetent that the military started their own private spy network, which identified dozens of lucrative targets in Pakistan that the military serviced with their drones. That enraged the Pakistan ISI who threatened to throw the CIA out of the country if we didn’t stop hitting targets they had not been nominated or approved.
  5. The military private spy ring identified OBL’s Abbottabad compound in 2008 and even sent the architectural drawings to their boss, retired CIA legend Dewey Clarridge. I know that’s a fact because I sent the drawings through our secure DARPA funded internet connection from the Taj in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
  6. One of the most proficient CIA analysts with a proven regional counter terrorism track record, Sarah Adams, said the Abbey Gate attack had two organizers, Sirajuddin Haqqani and Sanaullah Ghafari: two men who had the means, intelligence, motivation, and a long history of attacking Americans. Sarah was on the Shawn Ryan Show and some other podcasts I listen to and she’s impressive.
  7. It is impossible to believe that some low-level jail bird had the ability to organize, arm and execute a suicide bombing mission so quickly, having been locked up in Bagram until mid-August. The bombers needed the assistance of a senior terrorist experienced in launching suicide attacks in Kabul. The Taliban leadership had one man who fit that bill, Sirajuddin Haqqani, now the Interior Minister of Afghanistan.
The first attempt to exact retribution for the Abbey Gate bombing killed an innocent family.

Like most Americans, I have been thrilled to see President Trump dominate the deep state. If it is humanly possible to turn the CIA from a renegade political opposition operation into a functional organization that subordinates itself to the Executive Branch and is actually capable of doing spy work, I believe President Trump will do it. However, Trump is not a superhuman, and it is going to take a Herculean effort to clean out the Augean Stables of the CIA. It would be easier, safer, cheaper, and more efficient to dismantle the CIA and let Eric Prince of General Michael Flynn build a new organization using the Office of Strategic Services model.

The idea that the CIA suddenly became a functional, nonpartisan intelligence agency during the FJB era is hard to believe. As is the claim, that “Jafar” has confessed to his crimes. Confessions by Hill Pashtuns under the tender ministrations of the ISI are meaningless. American jails are full of men who have “confessed” after very little pressure to crimes that DNA proved they never committed.

Confessions, absent hard, solid, SIGINT complimented by human intelligence are meaningless. The CIA has a 20-plus-year record of failure generating accurate human intelligence in Afghanistan or Pakistan. There is a show on Netflix that proves the point. They think they are depicting a competent human intelligence operation. What they show is two old Warlords taking the agency to the cleaners over fabricated bullshit. My assessment of that amusing spectacle is here.

CENTCOM Commander Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr., USMC is responsible for the disaster in Kabul and should have been held accountable.

Accountability for the disastrous Kabul NEO mission should start at the top because it was preordained the day we abandoned the Bagram Airfield. On this episode of All Marine Radio, I predicted exactly what would happen the month before Abbey Gate, making me one of maybe 10,000 people who recognized that fact at the time. The CENTCOM commander, Marine General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr. should have never allowed Biden to give up Bagram. The Pentagon had already perfected thwarting presidential directives under Trump, so why, suddenly, did their attitudes change with Biden? I suspect they thought the 2020 election marked the ascendancy of the deep state apparatus. So McKenzie played ball knowing he would be handsomely compensated upon retirement while never held accountable for the fiasco he created.

My generation’s senior Marine Corps general officers are not proficient in reading historical trends. I know most of them and once respected and admired them more than any other group of men on the face of the planet. With age comes wisdom as well as the disappointment of seeing your heroes exposed by fate and circumstance as being petty, vindictive shits because all the cool kids in DC thought that the Bad Orange Man was a kook. They thought wrong, but it’s going to take more than six short weeks to repair the damage done by their long march through our institutions.

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A Protest too Pharr

February started with a number of anti-immigration protests breaking out across the country. “People are feeling galvanized,” gushed USA Today as they tried to paint the anti-Trump protests as organic, spontaneous demonstrations of popular outrage. The protests in Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin, and Washington D.C. were supported by open-border NGOs like the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and We Fight Back. They are progressive leftist fringe groups who contend society can only survive by ending capitalism. American billionaires like Neville Roy Singham fund these organizations to protect us from the excesses of other American billionaires like Elon Musk. How this envy of Elon shifted into open border advocacy is hazy. Regardless Roy Singham is pissed off and has paid millions of dollars to various progressive protest organizations to get the rest of us pissed off too.

Law enforcement personnel stage on the 110 freeway during a protest calling for immigration reform Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Eric Thayer)

Even McAllen, Texas, had a Saturday night anti-ICE protest on February 1st that attracted hundreds of mostly young locals. Unlike the protests in big blue cities, the McAllen protestors were peaceful and friendly. Mostly, they drove up and down 10th Street waving Mexican flags and honking their horns, which is what most of them do on a Saturday night anyway (minus the flags). When I was their age, we would have headed over the Anzalduas Bridge into Reynosa to party once we were done cruising 10th Street, but the kids these days . . . not so much. In fact, it’s safe to assume most of them never venture into Mexico because it’s too dangerous.

Local kids express their solidarity with Mexico – a country they love to talk about but never visit. How ironic would it be if Mexico became a safe, sovereign country for these kids to visit during President Trump’s term?

This past Wednesday, RGV Truth live-streamed another spontaneous anti-Ice protest down the road at the Westlico Premium Outlet Mall. Judging from the video, it looked more like a car show with a little swap meet on the side than a protest. But there were plenty of young folks flying Mexican flags from the beds of late-model customized pickup trucks that they would never drive across the Mexican border for obvious reasons. But we don’t talk about that in the RGV because it’s not polite. As we headed into another weekend of action, the mood was tense, with some shadowy miscreants calling for a Saturday night protest next door in the hamlet of Pharr.

This unique call to arms rapidly spread across social media but generated no interest.

Pharr, Texas, was famous for a riot on Cage Street on February 6th, 1971. Back then, the street was lined with bars, cantinas, and barber shops that catered to the local Mexican American population. The police station is also on Cage Street, and on the 6th of February, some local women gathered there to protest the arrest of one of their kids. Back then, the Pharr police and fire departments were staffed with white dudes, and they hosed down the protestors with a firehose, causing the bars and cantinas to empty out. When the local men confronted the cops, they opened fire with live ammunition, killing a local barber.

The Pharr Riots were a big deal in the 1970s; even back then, shooting live ammunition into a crowd of aggravated citizens was considered way out of line. Just a few years earlier, Texas Rangers Alfred Allee and Jacquin Jackson responded to a hostage situation at the Maverick County Courthouse in Eagle Pass by methodically taking the third-floor jail area apart with Browning Automatic Rifles until the hostage takers begged them to stop shooting. That was considered solid police work at the time, but not shooting a barber protesting the use of fire hoses on the local citizens.

Every small town has a unique feature that drives civic pride. For Pharr, Texas, it’s a massive freeway interchange between Highways 83 and 69 that is always expanding to accommodate explosive population growth. I think the Pharr off-ramps are in their third iteration, and they are spectacular, arching so far above the city you look down on Top Golf

With that kind of history, how could the local open-border NGOs go wrong staging the Pharr II Riots? Every Latino Studies graduate in the nation knows that the United States is systemically racist, so the oppression of brown native-born people by The Man in Pharr, Texas, has not changed in 54 years! Only everything in Pharr, Texas, has changed in the past 54 years, starting with trigger-happy white dudes on the police force.

The majority Hispanic population now runs Pharr and every other municipality in the Rio Grande Valley. And these aren’t catty punk-ass Hispanics like the councilwoman from LA caught bad-mouthing the blacks. These are legit civic leaders – the mayor of Pharr is a perfect example. Dr. Ambrosio “Amos” Hernandez is a pediatric surgeon and a principal investor in Doctors Hospital Renaissance (DHR), a massive doctors-owned hospital system with curious funding mechanisms that we don’t talk about in the Valley because that too is considered impolite. Recently, Doctor Hernandez headed the initiative to open a massive branch of the Driscoll Children’s Hospital on the DHR Edinburg campus. DHR is three miles away from the giant South Texas Health Systems Children’s Hospital. You might think that there are a lot of children’s hospitals in a geographically remote border area, but that’s another topic that polite people don’t talk about in the Valley. We have great weather and would rather talk about that.

Top Golf was opened to “drive down diabetes” but hasn’t drawn big crowds yet

Dr. Hernandez is also an accomplished businessman who raised enough investment capital to address the obesity epidemic plaguing the citizens of Phar, with a three-story air-conditioned driving range. The mayor also spearheaded the effort to transform the spot of the 1971 Pharr Riot into a food truck park called The Hub.

The Hub – a food truck park that doesn’t have any food trucks. I’m guessing the close proximity of the police station discourages the taco truck chefs from selling beer on the side. Who wants to eat food truck tacos without beer?

Saturday evening was beautiful in Pharr, with a glorious sunset and perfect weather for a protest centered on The Hub. However, the venue was empty—no protestors, food trucks, or anything. Top Golf probably attracted a bigger crowd, but that isn’t a sure bet, as it never seems busy.

This brings up another topic we don’t talk about much down here: federal HSI designation. Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) were eligible (during previous administrations) for multiple streams of federal grant monies. Every school district, hospital system, and municipality in the RGV anticipated unimpeded access to federal HSI grants in perpetuity, but that now appears to be in doubt. The loss of federal grant monies combined with increased scrutiny into the origins of Mexican investment capital would have a catastrophic impact on the current economic development.

We Fight Back had big plans for the weekend but lacked enough cash to pay for an outrage mob. Could this be a second-order effect from turning off the USAID money spigot?

Pharr wasn’t the only scheduled protest with no protestors – of the 40 cities targeted by the Weekend of Action, only a handful had actual protests. The crowd in Austin was sparse, as was the crowd in Colorado Springs, and those were the only protests I could find in the news. I suspect it takes a lot of walking around money to generate a proper outrage mob, and apparently, that money has disappeared from the open-border NGOs. There is no organic support for a wide-open southern border, nor do rational people consider the abuse inflicted on illegal immigrants by human traffickers acceptable.

I’ve seen French street mimes draw bigger crowds than this in Austin. Protesters against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations gathered at the Texas Capitol on February 8, 2025. (KXAN News/Aidan Boyd)

The United States is poised for significant change in how the federal government interacts with its citizens and state governments. In places that have benefited from the transfer of American jobs to the third world (like the Rio Grande Valley), change means the end of easy federal dollars subsidizing wealthy real estate speculators. The reaction of local power brokers to the new administration was summed up by this statement from McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodriguez.

“The McAllen Police Department has in the past and does so today deem immigration matters to be a federal jurisdictional responsibility, and as such, we do not engage in immigration enforcement activities.”

That is total bullshit. The McAllen police deemed immigration a problem when the FJB administration started releasing thousands of illegal migrants into the city back in 2021. President Trump easily won the popular vote in the Rio Grande Valley but not the votes of the entrenched Hispanic elites who run this valley. Now they are lying low, waiting to see how badly designating Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations hurts the flow of investment capital and bribe money flooding the border area from the narco-terrorist state next door. In that respect, the RGV is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to taking control of our Southern Border away from the cartels. If the Trump Administration is serious about stopping both cartel trafficking and fraudulent government disbursements, there are a bunch of powerful people in this valley who are about to face the grim prospect of federal prosecution for fraud and/or aiding and abetting terrorism.

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USAID Was a Racket: It Deserves to DEI

The United States spent 54 Billion dollars on economic development and reconstruction in Afghanistan. The reconstruction effort was a comprehensive, across-the-board failure characterized by shoddy workmanship from shady contractors invariably connected to powerful national or provincial government leaders. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was the lead agency in these efforts, and they are responsible for the failure of the reconstruction battle. You will be shocked, shocked, I tell you, to learn that nobody at USAID was ever held accountable. In fact, the concept of accountability is foreign to USAID. Accountability is organic to organizations with meritocratic competence hierarchies. But meritocratic advancements, like trigonometry, two-parent households, and high standardized test scores (according to the FJB era zeitgeist), were all signs of white racism and, therefore, never considered relevant at USAID.

I was the project manager for the first US Embassy Kabul security guard contract in 2005, which included the USAID compound across the street from the Embassy. The USAID staff lived and worked in a small, tightly packed compound that was connected to the embassy by a tunnel under Masood Road. They worked long hours in tight quarters, and they had unlimited access to inexpensive, top-shelf booze. Thursday evening is the start of the weekend in Islamic lands, and Kabul provided a heady brew of wartime danger in an exotic land far from home. I got an unusually intimate look at USAID officers operating in the wild. and was not impressed. They drank too much, which is saying something coming from a retired infantry Marine.

Wheat for sale in the Qala-e-Naw Bazaar in December 2006. I was inventorying wheat stocks for USAID, and every one of those 50lb bags said, “Gift from the People of Canada to the People of Iran.” No idea what USAID thought about that, as my report was received without comment. Qala-e-Maw is the Capital of Badghis Province.

I should be grateful to USAID for funding some of the greatest adventures of my life. The 2006 Winter Emergency Food Assessment of Western Afghanistan jumps immediately to mind, as does the refurbishment of the Nimroz Province irrigation systems from 2010 – 2012. But the truth is I was working with such nominal sums (5 – 15 million annually) that our USAID supervisor was an Afghan employee. He was a good man, high in trait conscientiousness and impeccable honesty, but he refused to leave Kabul to inspect our operations. He gave us everything we asked for (in additional funding) because we finished every project on time and on budget.

Critics of international aid observe that it takes money from the poor residents of rich countries and gives it to the wealthy residents of poor countries. That certainly happened in Afghanistan, but internal corruption doesn’t explain why the billions of aid dollars spent to build infrastructure and governmental capacity produced such limited results. The failure of aid programs in Afghanistan started with money flooding into the country faster than it could be absorbed and ended with the lack of oversight in project implementation.

Every large USAID implementation partner working in Afghanistan’s countryside followed the UN Minimum Occupational Safety Standards (UN MOSS). These mandated enhanced security measures included hardened compounds with RPG screens on top of massive exterior compound walls, a hardened safe room with radio communications to regional UN security offices, armored SUVs, and personal security details provided by approved international professional military companies PMCs.

Typical CADG cash for work project targeting the central canal in Kandahar City – not the most pleasant work, but it paid well

Brand new armored SUVs drew unwanted attention and were bullet magnets in most of the country. The PMCs providing protection details knew this and limited trips outside the compound walls accordingly. Nobody expected international project managers working in places like Kandahar, Lashkar Gah, or Jalalalabad to inspect any of their multiple projects. I was working for Central Asia Development Group (CADG), a Singapore-based company owned by an American couple. They had direct implementation contracts that allowed us the freedom to ignore UNMOSS rules and travel into any area we felt had adequate security.

We found that wearing a local dress driving beat-up Toyotas, living in nondescript local compounds, and minimizing the use of English when out and about gave us the ability to safely move around contested districts. CADG Provincial managers closely supervised all projects, most of which were simple cash-for-work public works projects. We were working in highly kinetic districts in Kandahar, Helmand, Paktia, Khost, Nimroz, and Uzgon Provinces, so we traveled armed.

Panjwayi Tim (on the left and cropped out on his request) rapping some of our Gaardez workers in Pashto. Notice how the Afghan men in this completely Taliban-dominated town reacted to us when we showed up to inspect projects or pay our workers. Panjwayi Tim was out of Kandahar, and also my boss in 2009 and always happy to help out on paydays (which were dangerous).

Our projects were manpower intensive, so paydays involved Retrieving between $70,000 to $100,000 in American dollars from a local bank, driving it to a company compound, and converting it into low-denomination Afghani. Transporting suitcases full of Afghani to the payday site, which was normally the city mayor’s compound. Then, holding a pay call for 5,000 Afghan laborers. Moving large sums of money around Jalalabad, Lashka Ghar, or Kandahar was inherently dangerous. Moving large amounts out into rural projects or deep into the Dasht-e Margo (Desert of Death, which was an intensely cool place to visit) was even more dangerous.

Our USAID manager in Kabul steadily increased our annual budgets and approved every project we submitted. I was moved down to Lashkar Gah in 2010 to be the Southwest Regional Manager for the USAID-funded Community Development Program. There was a USAID officer stationed with the British PRT there who immediately reprimanded me for carrying a pistol. He then explained to me how project approvals were now going to work because the British Aid Agency was in charge, and they had different protocols for project approval. The next day, I flew out to Camp Leatherneck to talk to the Marines. I was sent to the G9 and told him I had 20 million in USAID Community Development funds and planned to spend all of it in Nimroz Province, where the Brits and USAID had no say in what I did.

The only way to earn a seat at this table is consistent, competent performance over a span of years, not months. The idea of leaving a protected firm base to participate in culturally enriching events like the gladiator fights that dedicated this fine stadium my team and I built was inconceivable to USAID managers.
We didn’t really see gladiator fights but impressive Taekwondo demonstrations from the local youth clubs.

I was a big fan of the governor of Nimroz, Abdul Karim Brahui. Governor Brahui was a graduate of the Kabul military academy who founded and commanded the Jabha-e Nimruz (Nimroz Front) as part of the Mujahedeen Southern Alliance against both the Soviet army and the Taliban. He was a lead-from-the-front commander and the rare Afghan politician who concerned himself more with the people’s problems than accumulating additional power and wealth.

Explaining my understanding of how USAID works to the Governor of Nimroz Province

Governor Brahui was as close to an honest politician as one could be in Zaranj, given that the local economy revolved around plastic jerry cans. They were used to smuggle petrol or heroin across the border or to haul water from various sources for sale to one of the two municipal water treatment plants. Teenage boys selling petrol or diesel out of 5-gallon jerry cans dotted every major road in the city. The only way to generate income in Nimroz was to fix their massive, district-level irrigation systems.

We built a large main irrigation canal in Charborjak district that extended 56 kilometers and services every farming hamlet in the district. We were going to do 60 kilometers but ran into a minefield at the tail end of the canal and could not find a way around it.

The easiest and fastest project was the Chakhansor district because the Khashrod River, which fed the irrigation system, was dry for most of the year. Using 1,500 local laborers, we rehabilitated 300 kilometers of canals and rebuilt a 170-meter reinforced concrete check dam to capture the spring run-off. The Chakhansor irrigation system served 7,200 farms, and the first post-project wheat and melon harvests yielded outputs three times greater than pre-project averages. The Baloch of Nimroz no longer had to import melons from Kandahar, and if you knew how much Afghans love melons (which are excellent), you would understand the significance of that accomplishment, and we weren’t even getting started.

Opening ceremonies for the Charborjak irrigation system.

The Chakhansor district project was completed by Mullah John while I was still in Jalalabad. With the large fiscal year 2010 budget, we could do both Charborjak and Kang districts simultaneously, which would mitigate some of the heavy equipment costs. That year, we built 400 miles of irrigation canals, turning 25,000 acres of the Dasht-e Margo into highly productive farmland, allowing the Baloch to get in on the poppy boom. We hired over 18,000 workers to dig these canals in the middle of the desert where the temperature could hit 120° daily.

Opening the Kang district irrigation system.

The key to completing these so quickly was we were replacing systems, not building new ones, and we hired as many of the engineers who had built the original weirs and dams as we could find. The only problem with this massive project was the USAID stipulation that no material originating from Iran could be used in the construction. Instead of using high-quality Iranian concrete at $5.00 per 50lb bag, we were supposed to import low-quality concrete from Pakistan, which the State Department insisted was our ally. We worked around that somehow, I don’t remember the details, and finished on time and on budget. But we had a problem: the Helmand River was low due to maintenance at the Kajaki Dam, so our new intake check dam dammed the damn river.

We arrive at the ceremony site – you can see dust trails from the escorts who have been working the flanks and are just now crossing the Helmand. Which is dry downstream. Because we built a check dam that is apparently checking the entire river at the moment.

Only after I inadvertently dammed the Helmand River did USAID and the Brits in Lashkar Gah find out I had built two regional irrigation systems, and they were furious. But I had been working for the Marines, and the Colonel running the G9 shop ran cover for me because that’s what Marines do. He also attacked USAID for not doing anything in Nimroz Province except cancel the one Women Empowerment Program that actually worked. The Baloch people dominated Nimroz Province, and they had different cultural expectations for their women who wore the Iranian Chador, not the Afghan Burqa

One of our Zaranj students in our USAID-sponsored rug weaving class. We ran several training programs for women that were ended by USAID, who wanted us to stop training women in order to “build capacity,” whatever that meant.
This takes arrogance and hubris to new levels, revealing exactly how reckless USAID officials were in producing propaganda that enraged local Afghans. Rather than spend a few thousand dollars setting up Afghan women to run their own beauty shops or rug-weaving companies, we spent millions on a handful of elite young women to participate in a meaningless feel-good competition that placed their families and everyone associated with the effort in mortal danger when we cut and ran.
I’m all about providing technical training to Afghan kids of both genders, but you have to do this from the ground up, not the top down. Jalalabad kids in the MIT-sponsored FabLab. August 2008
This little girl would have never received a minute of academic instruction if it were not for the MIT grad students who ran the FabLab. She damn sure would have never received the opportunity to be on a USAID-sponsored computer team, although she developed skills that could have got her a spot; her parents were dirt poor farmers, not connected Kabul elites.

USAID did a great job taking money from the poor residents of America and giving it to the wealthy residents of Afghanistan. They spent 20 years inside a little Kabul compound from which they never ventured and created an alternative reality for themselves where workshops on women’s rights and protections for the LGBTQ community made perfect sense. They endangered the lives of the elite children they showcased in international events like the robotic competitions while ignoring the needs of the rest of the children in Afghanistan. USAID will disappear from the international stage without a whimper; they will not be missed, and hopefully, most of them will find their way into 12-step programs. Fat, drunk, and stupid is not a recipe for the good life, and there are thousands of swamp creatures about to find that out.

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Charity is a Racket

The Catholic Relief Charities scam has finally gained the attention of the legacy media. Not for the billions of federal tax dollars they have been given but a video from Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee on how to avoid ICE detention.  Lawyer Barb Graham made the video, and she opens with the following:  

“All people living in the United States, including people who are undocumented, have certain rights under the United States Constitution,” 

That is total bull-Schiff. Illegal aliens have no constitutional rights because they are not citizens of the United States. But that’s not the issue that the public has focused on; it’s the 2.9 Billion taxpayer dollars that FJB gave the charities sex-traffic women and children on behalf of Mexican drug cartels. But this tawdry situation was remedied this morning by the Secretary of Homeland Security, who cut all government funding to NGOs and religious charities that have been making bank on trafficking illegal migrants. The government is not known for the timely payment of invoices, and I doubt those currently being processed will be paid.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is heading out into the wilds of New York City, leading ICE raids. After this demonstration of competent leadership, she returned to DC and cut all the funding to the NGOs who have facilitated four years of open border madness. Photo from Reuters January 28, 2025

Catholic Charities is a tax-exempt charity, which means we can see its financials on Charity Navigator. Charity Navigator loves Catholic Charities, designating them a 100% four-star charity. But there is an obvious discrepancy in the financials. A 2021 ProPublica audit of Catholic Charities USA concluded:

The group’s local affiliates were taking in a total of nearly $2.9 billion annually from the government — representing about 62% of its $4.67 billion annual revenue.

Charity Navigator lists Catholic Charities USA’s 2021 revenue as 50 million. ProPublica contends it was 4.67 Billion. Clearly, shenanigans are happening at Charity Navigator, which is a shame; I once trusted that site. But who cares about Charity Navigator? I’d like to know how Catholic Charities accounts for the disbursement of 4.67 billion dollars. That is a mountain of money; there is a slim chance that Catholic Charities can account for it.

These are Catholic Charities financials on the Charity Navigator website.
These are the federal tax dollars given to Catholic Charities according to the website usaspending.gov

Catholic Charities USA President Kerry Robinson issued a statement yesterday saying:

“The millions of Americans who rely on this life-giving support will suffer due to the unprecedented effort to freeze federal aid supporting these programs,”

Even more bull-Schiff that reveals the profound disconnect between words and action in the “humanitarian” space. It is clear from the actions of Catholic Charities that they are not concerned with the plight of poor Americans. If they were, they would not be facilitating the influx of tens of millions of dirt-poor, unskilled migrants who are controlled, exploited and abused by the drug cartels who trafficked them across the border. These migrants will drive down wages, drive up crime and housing while straining public schools and other municipal resources. All of these follow on effects impact working class Americans, not the elites who head tax exempt charities or billion dollar NGO’s.

Catholic Charities RGV is closed in McAllen, and now that Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act has been invoked, every illegal the Border Patrol catches is bounced back across the border the same day.

So what motivates the “humanitarians” of Catholic Charities USA? It’s not caring for the poor . . . obviously. They may have a few under-resourced programs for the poverty-stricken in the Rio Grande Valley, but the FJB administration wasn’t paying them billions to spend on poor American citizens. That money was to facilitate a massive flow of unvetted aliens from 130 different countries who will draw massive resources away from the American citizens who needed it the most. Using dirt-poor migrants to enrich well-heeled, connected democrat cronies is not something the American taxpayer should tolerate, let alone fund.

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Catholic Church and NFWA Hit Hard by Closed Border

The flow of illegal migrants using the CBP One app to claim asylum has ended in the Rio Grande Valley sector. There are still people crossing who want to avoid detection, like the Russian mercenary with $4,000 and a drone in his backpack who was caught in Roma two weeks ago. But the constant flow of illegals from around the world who used the CBP One app to claim asylum after jumping the border has ceased.

The day President Trump declared the border a national emergency, I took a tour of the usual Border Patrol collection points along the McAllen/Mission area of the Rio Grande River. No buses were picking up recently arrived illegals, the Border Patrol presence was light, and the border was quiet. Anzalduas Park, which is on the River, has closed again and is now being used to launch and recover the law enforcement boats supporting Operation Lone Star.

Anzalduas Park is closed again

Anzalduas Park was closed before when the Catholic Charities RGV ran out of hotel rooms to rent for COVID-19-positive illegals. to “quarantine themselves before being flown or bussed into the country under the FJB catch and release policy. The thousands of illegals pouring across the border who were not positive were stashed under the Anzalduas Bridge, which connects McAllen to Reynosa, Mexico.

These are new, and I saw a few more stationed at crossroads near the border fence. This is at the junction of FM 494 and the dirt road leading to La Lomita Chapel
La Lomita Chapel is on the other side of the levee. The Border Patrol

The restored Capilla De La Lomita is a few hundred meters inland from Anzalduas Park and once served as an important way station on the old Brownsville to Roma trail. The La Lomita (little hill) chapel was built in 1865 by The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (Oblates) from the new Archdiocese in Galveston. The pioneer priests of the Oblates were Belgian missionaries who learned Spanish and used Capilla De La Lomita as a headquarters to service four other chapels and seventy-five ranches from Brownsville to Roma. The Oblates were a fixture in the Rio Grande Valley for over a century, but they are long gone, replaced by Catholic Charities RGV, which the Brownsville Archdiocese sponsors.

Capilla De La Lomita

The Oblates were poor missionaries who dedicated their lives to serving the people of the Rio Grande Valley. Catholic Charities RGV may provide services to the poor in the Rio Grande Valley, but their focus is servicing the tens of thousands of illegals who have poured over the border during the last four years. Catholic Charities RGV is essentially a government contractor that has spent millions of taxpayer dollars on hotel rooms, bus and airplane tickets, meals, and clothing. The Catholic church has gone from sending missionaries to care for the poor to aiding and abetting the exploitation of the poor by supporting the human and sex trafficking of Mexican Narcos.

Manual Molina talking with Father Hendrik Laenen, a Belgian Oblate priest, outside Our Lady of Refuge in Roma, Texas, between 1956 and 1960. Photo from R.J. Molina

One of the reasons President Trump won every border county in Texas was his promise to lock down the border. Allowing millions of unvetted migrants into the country hurts the working class, and most of the Hispanic residents of the border are working class. Why the Catholic Church has prioritized big fat government contracts to house and transport illegal immigrants who will drive down wages and drive up crime among the people they are supposed to be serving is a mystery. However, my experience with government contracts is that the people who win and manage them in the NGO world are handsomely compensated.

In the early 1960s, a poorly compensated  Mexican American civil rights activist, Cesario Estrada Chávez, started the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Chavez used the NFWA to raise wages and improve working conditions for farm workers. Once Chávez successfully unionized farm workers who became an implacable foe of illegal immigration. In 1989, César Chávez & Dolores Huerta founded La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) to lobby for farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley. Farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley have always included Mexican-based harvesting crews, so I assume his view on wetbacks had moderated when he arrived in the RGV.

This is not a popular cause in the RGV. Inflicting drag queens on local children without their parent’s expressed consent would be suicidal. The number of parents who would support this is ridiculously low.

The second of Robert Conquest’s three laws of politics states: “Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing. ‘ That law has always proved true in my experience, which explains why LUPE is now focused on open borders, all-ages drag shows, PRIDE celebrations, and anti-Trump protests.

In the RGV, when a girl turns 15, we put her in a ball gown and spend thousands of dollars on a Quinceanera for her. Who needs drag queens when your 15-year-old girls dress like this?

While I was driving around the border, Taylor Cramer from RGV Truth was covering a LUPE inauguration day protest in McAllen’s Archer Park. His pictures capture exactly why this group is so marginalized. They are clearly unable to understand why Donald Trump won every county on the Texas border. They, like the democratic senators trying to derail Trump’s cabinet picks, cannot read the room. They do not understand why their divisive rhetoric and anti-American propaganda do not resonate with normal Americans. To prove that point, LUPE is the first RGV-based organization I have heard of using “Latinx” in their advertising.

Not a large turnout in a town that President Trump carried in a landslide. These people are no longer relevant in Rio Grande Valley, which is exploding with jobs, young families, and the opportunity provided by solid jobs for the middle class.

Latinx is not a popular neologism with my Hispanic neighbors, who use proficiency with the Spanish language as a more reliable gauge of who is and is not “Hispanic.” If you have blond hair and blue eyes and speak perfect Castillian Spanish, you’re not just Hispanic but upper-caste Hispanic. If you are a third-generation Hispanic kid who doesn’t speak Spanish, you’re essentially a white dude. This is a drawn-out way of demonstrating that looks don’t matter in the Rio Grande Valley, and nobody here appreciates divisive terms like “Latinx.”

Giving away free condoms and lube is not how you win friends or influence people in the Rio Grande Valley. LUPE should have followed the example set by our Jewish neighbors and set up free food, a petting zoo, and kiddie rides in the park.

Our national nightmare has ended with the nationwide repudiation of the progressive woke agenda. Yet the progressive left is still aligned with the thoroughly discredited global elite who continue to loot the peace while increasing income inequality. LUPE receives funding from the Soros Open Society Foundation, which claims to promote democratic practices as well as equity and justice. But not justice for the farmers, ranchers, and families of the Rio Grande Valley. The Open Society wants justice for the illegals who trespass on our property, trash our fields, cut our fences, steal our pets, and threaten our children.

Operation Lonestar is popular in the RGV but not with George Soros’s Open Societies Institute, which now funds LUPE. The thought that people should “migrate freely” is insane and not supported by normie Americans. Photograph courtesy of RGV Truth

LUPE and Catholic Charities RGV have no problem aiding and abetting the sex trafficking of women and children. They know that nobody comes across the Rio Grande River without paying the cartels, and they know how the cartels collect from women and children. Donations from the local church congregations do not fund LUPE or Catholic Charities RGV; our tax dollars fund them, as do international open-border organizations. These malignant RGV-based organizations will contract and shift focus after President Trump locks down the border. Maybe they’ll start serving the residents of the RGV instead of the illegals, who have been their sole focus for the past four years.

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A Bittersweet Veterans Day

Election Day was long and busy as I was the judge for the Cayetano Cavazos Elementary School polling station. This is a blue county, and I was appointed an election judge because I was one of the few Republicans who volunteered to work the polls. Shout out to the Vet the Vote organization, which is where I got the idea to volunteer. Regardless of political affiliation, the people working this election were professional, conscientious, and pleasant to be around. It was a fantastic experience.

Throughout election day, I was asked if I was a veteran, and when I confirmed I was a retired Marine, I was thanked for my service. That made me uncomfortable because our failure to win the Global War on Terrorism has left this country in much greater peril than it was in 2001. Not only did we do exactly what Osama bin Ladin predicted, which was to fight a long war we could never win, only to withdraw in humiliating disgrace. But we degraded our military capabilities and are now ruining the fighting spirit of the fighting men at the pointed end of the spear.

Our military is a broken, demoralized joke that cannot meet its recruiting or retention goals. When I enlisted in the Navy in 1978, the military was considered a hollow force, but that force was full of mean bastards who could fight. And we had the ships, combat aircraft, and officer corps required to take those rowdy misfits into a fight and crush any other adversary in the world. Now, we have a diverse force with women in the infantry and trans moralism making a mockery of the profession of arms. We no longer have the sea lift or aircraft to meet our peacetime obligations, let alone fight a peer-level war.

Battalion Landing Team 1/9 exercising in Australia during the summer of 1987. The Marine Corps can no longer insert and sustain a battalion in the field from Amphibious shipping. A task that was routine when I was on active duty. Photograph of 2ndLt Lynch and my radioman LCpl Kline courtesy of Marines magazine.

Our Navy has shrunk to the point it can no longer control the busiest shipping lane in the world. Instead of using the Red Sea, commercial ships are now re-routed around the horn of Africa, adding 3500 nautical miles to their transit, which takes 12 extra days and a million extra fuel dollars per trip. The Navy can only field 12 Amphibious ships worldwide because a former Marine Corps Commandant reduced the number of amphibious ships the Navy was required to maintain from 38 to 31. He did this to free up money for the Navy to build a new class of ships called Landing Ship Medium, which would support his Force Design 2030 plan. Those ships have not been designed, funded, or built and will never be because of this harsh rebuke from the Congressional Research Service over the ludicrous FD 2030 concept.

The Navy/Marine Corps team can no longer perform the missions they have been assigned for the past 85 years. Now that President Trump is returning, Congress suddenly has buyer’s remorse for agreeing to the radical reorganization it allowed under the commandants Berger and Smith. This article by a former mentor to officers of my generation, Colonel Gary Anderson, USMC (Ret), sums up the state of play well. I’m pasting his last two paragraphs below because they describe exactly how we ended up with a broken Marine Corps.

There are two types of incompetents, active and passive. Active incompetents don’t know they are incompetent. They are dangerous because they don’t know they are incompetent. They are dangerous because they act on the zany ideas. Passive incompetents know that they don’t know what they are doing. They are dangerous because they tend to defer to the active incompetents.

Berger and Smith are active incompetents. Biden and Congress have been passive incompetents. Shame on them. If Congress acted today to repair the Navy and Marine Corps and return it back to 2018 capabilities, it would take at least a decade to recover. Our civilian leaders were sold snake oil, and the rubes bought it.

Those same rubes are now plotting to undermine President-elect Trump. These are the same people who had no problem abandoning Bagram airbase when FJB arbitrarily and recklessly cut the troop numbers in Afghanistan. Without Bagram, there was no way to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan in an orderly manner. Everyone (not inside the Pentagon) who knew anything about Afghanistan recognized that total abdication of service stewardship. The resulting fiasco in Kabul was as easy to predict as it was uncomfortable to watch.

General Furness and Mac hosting me for the 2011 Marine Corps Birthday at Camp Dwyer in the southern Helmand province

However, all is not lost because these two fighting generals, LtGen Dave Furness, USMC (Ret) and MajGen Dale Alford, USMC (Ret), who know how to train and lead Marines, may have been sidelined, but they are not forgotten. They are featured in this All Marine Radio podcast that dropped yesterday, and listening to them is a tonic for the souls of concerned military professionals. It is worth listening to if you (like me) are alarmed by the current state of our military and think the current crop of general officers are a collection of sycophantic yes-men. LtGen Furness tells me the other services still have talent hidden in their flag officer ranks, too, which is remarkable given the ongoing war on competence being waged by DoD diversity/equity mandarins.

I made the mistake of listening to this while lifting weights and damn near broke my back when LTGen Furness popped off with, “I’m just happy somebody gives a shit about what I have to say.” Listening to two of the best generals of my generation will instill some much-needed confidence in today’s broke-ass military.

Have a Happy Veterans Day, and let us hope the incoming Trump administration taps these two retired generals or others just like them to resuscitate our broken, demoralized military.

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Here Comes the Judge

As I’ve grown older and wiser, I still haven’t wised up about joking with dated material. Last year, when physical therapists were torturing me after shoulder surgery, I would start to sing Roxanne, hoping they would stop the torture for some red light therapy. The PT techs had no idea what I was talking about. They had never heard of The Police or their hit song, Roxanne. They ignored my suggestions about using Red Light Therapy, preferring a more active, painful physical approach. For that, I’m grateful. My shoulder has healed nicely, and I’m back in the gym almost daily because I don’t have anything better to do.

Except during the election season because I volunteered to be an Election Judge. Here Comes the Judge is America’s first Meme and was a staple of the old Rowman and Martins Laugh-In show, which was popular in the late 60’s. It’s the first thing I thought of when a Hidalgo County Election Supervisor I call Neo, called me to ask if I’d like to be a judge instead of a poll worker. Neo isn’t the supervisor’s real name, but he only communicates to me through texts, which for some reason seem Matrix-like.

Democrats have the media, academia, the billionaires, the Yellow Generals, and the Deep State. We have the memes

I volunteered for election duty, hoping it would instill some long-lost confidence in our civic governance. I am terrified that the Democrats will steal this election, which, given the disaster of the Biden-Harris years, seems impossible. I live in the Rio Grande Valley, which has long been a Democratic stronghold but is now firmly Trump territory, given his massive appeal to working and middle-class Hispanic men. So, I was interested in seeing how the votes would be tabulated and if there was a chance for voter fraud or other shenanigans.

One of the many things to be thankful for is not seeing this kind of BS ever again. Propaganda is designed to demoralize, and nothing demoralizes me more than seeing a nitwit LARPing on the taxpayer’s dime.

We don’t have dominion voting machines in the valley; we use Verity Duo voting machines with touchscreen voting that produce paper ballots. Those ballots are then scanned into a separate Duo machine that is not connected to the internet or the voting machines and then end up in a locked ballot box that can only be opened at the county election office. The system seems as fraud-proof as one could make it because the paper ballots are the only thing that counts, and if the hand count varies from the scanner count, then all hell breaks loose at the county election headquarters.

The Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley overwhelmingly support the Catholic Church and are not amused by Dem anti-catholic propaganda. This idiot woman cost Harris votes.

The only organized election fraud in the Rio Grande Valley comes from Politiqueras. These are teams of vote harvesters funded by Democrats that prey on the older Hispanic population in regional colonias, nursing homes, or adult daycare centers. This year, the Texas Office of the Attorney General’s Election Integrity Division is actively hunting these ballot harvesters, so I do not believe they can inject enough bogus ballots into the system to make any difference.

The Hunter Biden laptop disinformation campaign by our so-called intelligence agencies was clearly election interference, and those responsible should be held to account. But they won’t because you know why.

In Texas, there is no electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place, including clothing supporting a specific candidate or political party. I have yet to see a voter show up with a MAGA hat, and I doubt that it will be a problem if one does. Nobody mistakes me for a Harris supporter, and I’m so damn cheerful I doubt anyone will argue with me when I ask that the hat be removed while they vote. The only issue I have had is with college-aged women who want to document everything they do with their cell phones. The dad in me wants to plead with them to wear more clothes because they tend to be grossly overweight. But I simply ask they refrain from taking photographs in the voting area and they pout but put the phones away. There are no policemen assigned to our polling location, and there is no need for them. The voting public in the RGV is friendly, happy, and content with the integrity of the county voting system.

In order to be a serious country with a functioning military and state department, this kind of bullshit has to stop.

I’ve been checking in voters, and it has been a delightful experience. Voters step up to my table and present their driver’s license. I enter the first four letters of the last name, the first three of their first name, and their date of birth. Their name and address appear 98% of the time, indicating they are registered to vote. A label printer attached to my laptop prints off their name and address, and I paste that into my voters’ log, ask them to verify everything is correct, and sign. A second label contains a bar code that the Verity Duo scan machine reads, which then spits out a six-digit code for use at the ballot machines. The voter enters that code and votes, and when finished, the machine spits out a printed ballot with the voter’s name and information and the votes they have cast.

I remain concerned about voter irregularities throwing the election to the worst Presidential candidate I have ever seen. I am also worried that the deep state will not step aside and accept the will of the American people when they vote President Trump back into office. But I am glad I volunteered to work this election because it restored my faith in my fellow citizens and local government. I doubt I’ll ever have the same degree of confidence in the federal government, but four years of Trump and JD Vance would be a good start.

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