Last week, 250 miles of the Rio Grande River shoreline in Cameron and Hidalgo counties were designated a National Defense Area (NDA). The international Boundary and Water Commission land fronting the river has been transferred to the General Services Administration and is now considered part of Joint Base San Antonio.
U.S. Northern Command will exercise command and control. They have been tasked with installing signage and fencing in the NDA according to Air Force standards, and then to immediately source follow-on security operations. The security force’s mission is to provide enhanced detection and monitoring through stationary positions and mobile patrols, detain and transfer trespassers, and support the installation of temporary barriers and signage.
This map obtained by MyRGV.com illustrates the Rio Grande Valley’s designated National Defense Area, or NDA, which was established by the U.S. Department of Defense last week. Highlighted in red, the area will snake along the curves of the Rio Grande from the mouth of the river in Cameron County to the western edge of Hidalgo County. (Courtesy: U.S. Air Force)
What are the ramifications of the border land being under the jurisdiction of Joint Base San Antonio? The NDA land includes local and State Parks, agricultural fields, and privately owned land, which is accessed daily by local workers and tourists. Trespassing on military property is a federal offense; being caught on an Air Force base with a privately owned firearm is a serious federal offense. The risk-averse military prohibits carrying privately owned firearms onto its bases. They claim their policy is for the safety of people visiting or stationed on them. History proves that claim to be ridiculous, but facts are irrelevant to the discussion.
Demonstrating their uncannily poor timing that has become a feature of the Democrats, the South Texas Alliance of Citizen Coalition of Mayors issued a joint proclamación decrying federal illegal immigrant enforcement operations. They claim enforcement of federal immigration laws is bad for business. I didn’t realize that South Texas construction companies, restaurants, car washes, fast food franchises, and nursing homes depend on illegal migrants’ labor to function.
There are unintended consequences when riverfront land is designated as part of a military base.
The mayors claim they are motivated by the “well-being, safety, and economic stability of our communities.” If that were true, the mayors wouldn’t ignore the sky-high automobile insurance premiums we pay in the Valley to cover illegals who drive without a license or insurance and are prone to hitting other people’s cars, especially when it rains.
There is also the increased tax burden to cover the costs of court hearings, police calls, identity theft investigations, and car accidents involving illegals. And health insurance premiums must consider Emergency Room visits by uninsured illegals, of which thousands are (apparently) loitering here in the RGV.
Relying on undocumented workers for labor has several benefits besides paying low wages. Payroll taxes are eliminated, and OSHA regulations and fines are no longer a threat. Illegals cannot file a civil suit for compensation if injured on the job. The only downside to employing illegal labor would be federal prosecution, which can be ruinously expensive and unpleasant.
The Mayors don’t care about any of that. They’re from the rent-seeking class who view government office as a purely extractive enterprise. Every year, they raise our property tax rates to increase the number of their subordinates in the city government, yet public services never improve.
Economic growth in the RGV is characterized by an unending proliferation of payday loans, pawn shops, fast food franchises, and cheaply constructed apartment complexes. The vibrant service economy offers numerous opportunities for young couples to work two jobs each, enabling them to afford to live here.
Boston Jerry aptly sums up the situation faced by many today.
The South Texas Alliance of Citizen Coalition of Mayors represents a new South Texas archetype; men (and women) who are rotund of body, soft of hand, and thick of skull. They operate devoid of facts; they pronounce things to be so, and that’s the end of it.
There is little chance that large numbers of impoverished Hispanics will smoothly integrate into the local Tex-Mex society. They litter HEB parking lots with abandoned shopping carts, they don’t restack their weights in the gym, and they listen to hideous Spanish accordion music at deafening volumes. On the plus side, they seem to despise Rap music.
The city fathers want to meet and coordinate with the military now that our riverfront is part of a National Defense Area. Given their public denunciation of and refusal to support federal law enforcement efforts, why would federal officials bother talking to them?
Not that the residents of the RGV can pick and choose which local law or ordinance they want to ignore. Local politicians can virtue signal with no cost or repercussions to them, but local citizens who do the same to them will be arrested, fined, and jailed by them.
Disposing of 400 decomposing bodies is a routine task in Mexico.
A glance at the morning news from our southern neighbors reveals more reasons to avoid traveling to or living in Mexico: 400 decomposing corpses stacked inside a nondescript building in Juarez. This is one of the benefits of a closed border. Keeping the desperate poor of the world away from the homicidal psychopath rapists venerated in popular Mexican corridors. Every politician in the nation should support that.
Yesterday, I took a tour of the NDA inside Hidalgo County. I found what I expected, nothing. In the many places that were full of Border Patrol and State Police trucks during the President Auto Pen administration, there were no law enforcement vehicles, no stationary police camera units, and no military personnel.
The portable camera systems that dotted the border are now gone.
It is hard to believe that the Air Force will send security units into the RGV to conduct mounted patrols. How many units like that do they have? What kind of vehicles will they use? I don’t see the utility of additional fencing in the parts of the NDA with which I’m familiar.
There is no reason to patrol or fence in the popular birder’s paradise of Bensten — Rio Grande Valley State Park, or the Anzalduas County Park. Texas law enforcement has been using the Anzalduas Park boat ramp to launch their watercraft, and I’m sure NORTHCOM will use it if they bring watercraft. The military has numerous small boats, but for a security mission, the smallest they will use are Riverine boats, which are usually armed with multiple automatic weapons.
I would love to see NORTHCOM deploy a Riverrine squadron to patrol the Rio Grande River. They look cool and would be fun to watch in the narrow waters. However, there is no reason for them to be here, just as there is little reason for numerous security forces to be working the former IBWC land. There isn’t much for them to do now; the border is closed.
I was a member of two renowned infantry battalions while serving as a company-grade officer in the Marine Corps. The first was the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines (1/9), and the second was the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines (1/8). 1/9 was known as the Walking Dead, a moniker they picked up after losing a rifle company (Bravo) to a North Vietnamese Army ambush in the Leatherneck Square area of Northern I Corps in 1967. 1/8 was the battalion targeted by Iran in the 1983 Beirut bombing.
Former 1/9 Marines are constantly creating new and improved 1/9 logos
The term “The Walking Dead” originated as a pejorative label for the battalion, referring to it as a hard-luck outfit that suffered excessive casualties. Vietnam-era Marine infantry battalions averaged 800 men. During the four years 1/9 fought in Vietnam, they sustained 747 men killed in action.
Despite the casualties that earned 1/9 the “Walking Dead” nickname, Marines assigned to 1/9 embraced the Walking Dead handle. It was on our PT shirts in the 1980s when infantry battalions were allowed to have distinctive physical training uniforms. It was on our unit plaques; every Marine assigned to 1/9 was proud of being in the famous Walking Dead battalion.
The 1st Battalion, 8th Marines was the exact opposite. There was no institutional memory of the Beirut disaster. When I served in 1/8, I knew the battalion had been decimated in Beirut because my surgical support team was deployed there following the bombing. While I was with the battalion in the mid 90s nobody ever talked about or acknowledged the Beirut disaster.
Former 1/8 Marines do not seem that attached to the battalion despite its long history of combat excellence.
The difference in how Marines viewed the disasters in Vietnam and Beirut proves an old saying, frequently forgotten by officers, that you can’t fool the troops. Vietnam-era Marines knew the media were lying about Vietnam. They knew, after Walter Cronkite said that the War was lost, that it was, in reality, won. The Marines knew that they had beaten the NVA to a pulp, destroying entire divisions with their aggressive deployment of raggedy ass infantry battalions into the Demilitarized Zone.
Despite media skepticism, regardless of the popular histories written by unpopular journalists like Stanley Karnow, Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, and Michael Herr, the troops knew who won the fighting portion of the war. Not until legitimate historians like Mark Moyar, who can read Vietnamese and spent time in Hanoi’s archives researching the war from the North Vietnamese perspective, did the truth known to troops on the ground reach a wider audience.
After the Marine barracks bombing in 1983, the troops knew they would never get payback. They intuitively understood our feckless national leadership would not punish Iran but would, as hard as it was to believe, reward them in the ensuing years. Our national leadership was incapable of understanding or operating from first principles; they refused to understand the Koran, the purpose of Islam, or believe that Islamic clerics and militants meant what they said about the infidel West.
While the “best and the brightest” flailed about in the Middle East, the troops seethed. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the troops got a little payback. Still, they were halted long before the job finished because our leaders were squeamish about the disproportionate casualties they were inflicting on the Iraqis. Then 9/11 happened, and instead of going into Afghanistan and destroying the Taliban and killing Osama bin Laden in a massive punitive raid, we destroyed the Taliban, then let Osama get away because our leaders are risk-averse careerists. The idea of “mission first” or winning a war is an alien concept to careerists.
Then, inexplicably, we decided to stay in Afghanistan because of the “you break it, you buy it” rule at Pottery Barn. That Pottery Barn has no rule like that was irrelevant; our best and brightest do not concern themselves with trivialities like the truth, the narratives they create are more important.
After allowing OBL to slip away, we then invaded Iraq for unexplained reasons, placing our troops in mortal danger while spouting nonsense like Islam is the religion of peace. Islam has never been a “religion of peace” and never will be. Early during the Iraq debacle, the CIA was warned about Iranian military officers infiltrating Shia areas to introduce explosive formed penetrating IEDs designed to destroy American armor and automatic weapons to cleanse Iraq of its Sunni Muslim minority.
The CIA came up with a plan to kill the Iranian agents using contractors, and Eric Prince got busy putting together a force to do it, but, at the last minute, Susan Rice canceled the plan. Every American killed by an explosive-formed penetrator died because Susan Rice found the idea of killing Iranian agents distasteful. The troops who served in Beirut, the ones deployed by dumbasses who had no idea what they were doing, were denied payback by a new generation of feckless idiots.
Public service announcement: I don’t speak for every Marine, sailor or soldier who deployed to Beirut; just the ones who are worth a damn.
Now, finally, we have our payback in the form of a punitive raid launched by a President who understands how to wield the power granted him by our constitution. The hammering of three Iranian nuclear sites by giant GBU 57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators was gratifying. Watching the press, the military YouTubers, and the know-it-all podcasters prove wrong in real time was even more gratifying. I know some of the guys who have taken to the airways, trying to cover their flawed analysis by doubling down with opinions that are half-baked and dead wrong. They’re still my friends, but they’re wrong, and I have never been shy about pointing out the obvious to my friends.
Few institutions in America are as worthless as the media, but idiot congressmen and the Council on Foreign Relations run a close second.
The thought that President Trump would put boots on the ground in Iran, of all places, is ludicrous. Iran is a natural fortress protected by massive mountain ranges and deep, hot deserts. The fear that Iran is capable of hurting the United States financially by closing the Strait of Hormuz or by activating “sleeper cells” of battle-hardened jihadists is a pipe dream. Closing the Hormuz hurts Iran (and China), not the United States. How long would “sleeper cells” last in a country that has more firearms in the hands of its civilian population than people?
I admit that using firearms to kill Americans would work in the blue cities that prohibit or restrict their citizens from owning or carrying firearms. It would be most effective in Washington, D.C., where the law-abiding are unarmed and law enforcement DEI-centric. Still, Iran isn’t stupid enough to do us the favor of shooting federal officeholders.
Punitive raids do not start wars; they avoid them by punishing the targeted country so severely that they are incapable of meaningful retaliation. And we just saw one pulled off by true professionals. The plans were kept secret, and the operation was flawless, indicating that we now have a Secretary of Defense who knows how to operate effectively. President Trump did a masterful job of obfuscation, which enabled both strategic and tactical surprise.
This proves that being a wounded combat vet doesn’t prevent one from becoming a political hack who places her dysfunctional political party and personal interests above a competent military.
I don’t care how much of Iran’s nuclear program was destroyed, and I know that nobody currently commenting in the old and new media about it has any idea about the extent of battle damage from our GBU 57s. Not that it stops people from claiming it had a limited effect or that it destroyed the targeted facilities. Nobody will know that for a long time, and the only source that has proven it has the human intelligence networks to find out is Israel.
I hereby retract every snarky thing I have ever said about the Air Force. They did us old Marines a solid by putting the big boom on target in Iran.
We now have a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, which is impressive, and it might even hold. I don’t care about that either, although it is certainly an impressive accomplishment by President Trump. All I care about is that we finally got our payback on a bill that has been long overdue. Iran delenda est, let’s hope they do something stupid so we can destroy more of their military infrastructure.
Dar al-Harb is still out there, and there will come a day of reckoning with them. Let’s hope President Trump or someone like him is at the helm when that happens.
I have a friend named Beverly “Bev” Cook whom I have never met in person. We became friends after she contacted Michael “Mac” McNamara, the host of the excellent All Marine Radio (AMR) podcast. Bev had recently lost a friend she corresponded with daily, and was looking for something to fill her time. She had been amusing herself stringing along a Nigerian scam artist who, in his social media profile, was using a picture of Marine Corps General John Allen while begging for money because his “was all tied up”. Beverly tired of the scammer, but one day she discovered a long-form interview Mac had done with General Allen on All Marine Radio, and she found it fascinating.
Bev started listening to All Marine Radio daily in 2017, and for good reason. Mac is an excellent interviewer who has put in his 10,000 hours of practice, as Gladwell would say, honing his skills on an AM talk radio station in North Dakota. She listened to the AMR live broadcast daily but became annoyed when Mac failed to post one of his episodes to his podcast page. Bev sent Mac an email alerting him to this lapse, and he promptly wrote back, inviting her to assume the position of the All Marine Radio quality control officer.
Beverly Cook during her teaching career.
In the Marine Corps when we like each other we constantly give each other shit. We expect the same in return, and Bev, a retired schoolteacher from the plains of Canada, seemed to understand this immediately. However, she was incapable of responding appropriately, as she does not habitually use gross profanity. She came on the podcast, endured Mac’s relentless (good-natured) teasing with grace. I have it on good authority that her favorite segment was the Mensa Brothers demonstrating excellent taste and an appreciation of ironic humor.
It wasn’t until Mac developed and deployed his remarkable Post Traumatic Winning (PTW) seminars that I learned Bev had been handicapped from birth by congenital lymphedema. Lymphedema is the accumulation of fluid that’s usually drained through the body’s lymphatic system. Undrained lymphatic fluids constantly swelled her legs and arms, which made her the target of bullies when young and social ostracism as an adult. She was a schoolteacher who maintained contact with many of her former students, but she lived alone, her social circle limited to family. When Mac started offering his Post-Traumatic Winning classes in an online seminar format, she was the first person to sign up.
Before that seminar, she had never talked about herself or the problems she endured growing up with such a debilitating, disfiguring disability. All her life, she had held the pain in; during the PTW seminar, she let it all out. I saw it as it happened and have loved her ever since because she gave me, and the others in that class, strength.
Bev became a student of the Stoics, who figure prominently in Mac’s work, and she became a regular at the twice-monthly PTW graduate seminars. She had built the best life she could before meeting Mac. Still, like any person cursed with a congenital, disfiguring condition, she was lonely, searching for a community that would accept her without question. She found one headed by a retired Marine Corps infantry officer who practiced truth-based tough love. I’ve always enjoyed her wry sense of humor when participating in the PTW seminar with her. She is generous with her time, voluntarily reviewing and editing the manuscript of my memoir about Afghanistan. She is a genuinely good-hearted, loyal friend.
Bev and her Father
Three years ago, Bev lost her freedom and independence to lymphedema. She was admitted to a nursing home, confined to a hospital bed because she could no longer walk. She was forced to sell her house and car, and, because she’s a Canadian, she went on a year-long waiting list for a powered wheelchair so she could get around the facility to socialize with her fellow patients. She bore this life-altering setback with dignity and grace. She isn’t perfect, and several times during the PTW seminars, it was evident that she was distraught, but she received the same tough love that Mac gives to us all. Life is a battlefield, and sympathy is not valuable ammunition in the fight. Watching her handle a fate that to many of us is worse than death was inspiring, not just to me but to everyone who knows her.
We go through life unaware of the impact that our example and encouragement have on others. We can hope that the effect is positive; nobody wants to serve as an example of cowardice, weakness, and selfishness. Bev daily demonstrates the traits of a true warrior: discipline, fortitude, courage, selflessness, and sacrifice. Once the nursing home staff got around to helping her into her wheelchair, she spent the day helping other patients who were less fortunate than her. When confined to her bed, she corresponded with friends and posted frequently on social media about the weather, old classic comics, eagle nest cameras, and fascinating historical tidbits. Every day, she posts meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living from Ryan Holiday’s book The Daily Stoic.
On June 4th, a bed rail that had been identified as deficient and in need of replacement over a year prior suddenly collapsed when she turned on her side. PTW seminar members familiar with hospital beds had told her it was not a model appropriate for somebody who is confined to it for 18 to 22 hours a day. Bev had raised these issues repeatedly in the past, and she was ignored every time. Canadian medicine might be free, but it’s not fair, and like all free healthcare, a nightmare of bureaucratic indifference and incompetence. When the rail gave way, she fell over a meter onto the floor, shattering both of her femurs as well as her right knee.
The Canadian medical system has refused to repair the broken bones, arguing that her lymphedema would prevent the repaired bones from healing correctly. I’d bet a month’s pay that the reason she is not getting her shattered bones repaired had more to do with cost and a faceless bureaucrat’s assessment of what constitutes quality of life years. In Canada, if they won’t fix your broken bones, they will offer you medically assisted suicide. That dark malevolence disguised as compassion fools no one, but it’s to be expected when you replace God with the State.
She has been given tight splints, but any movement of her legs causes excruciating pain. She has no idea when she will leave the hospital, no idea if she will be able to use her wheelchair when she returns to the nursing home, she now faces the very real prospect of being confined to her bed, plagued by unremitting pain from broken bones that will never heal for the rest of her life.
Her comment about this tragedy: “All I can control is my reaction.”
She has continued to post comics, birthday wishes to friends, daily Stoic quotes, and links to Mac’s media interviews about his newly published book, Post Traumatic Winning. There is no trace of bitterness or anger on her Facebook page; she has managed her reaction well. I have not. There is no excuse for allowing a patient to fall out of bed and fracture both femurs. Bev was raised in a high-trust, homogeneous society but is now living in a country rapidly becoming a third world shit hole.
What do you do when every moral authority in your country behaves immorally? When every act of compassion by the political class conceals cowardice. What happens when the political class is stripped of loyalty to their people and turns against them under the guise of virtue? The mechanisms of the budding globalist hegemony are the same throughout the Judeo-Christian West: manufactured guilt, elite betrayal, moral cowardice, and the belief that goodness consists in submission.
The Canadians who built the Great White North are rapidly being encircled, outnumbered, and betrayed from within by those who worship the act of opening the gates. Look at the picture below from a lake in Brampton, Ontario, home to an ever-expanding population from India. This is the future of Canada: public spaces polluted by people from a culture uninterested in assimilation and unconcerned about the environment.
Brampton Lake, Ontario. When you encourage mass immigration from India, your country will soon look like India.
Canadians like Beverly Cook are forced to deal with the consequences of a virtue-signaling political elite that is itself immune to accountability or the results of its failed policies. Like their American liberal counterparts, they are given safe, highly compensated sinecures when they leave office. This is why there is a growing backlash against the globalist agenda. This is why I am furious at what has happened to my friend. And for her, I leave these words of wisdom because the comfort of old Stoics and the friendship of old Marines are the only comfort she can count on as she deals with a crisis that should never have happened.
Don’t you know life is like a military campaign? One must serve on watch, another in reconnaissance, another on the front line. . . So it is for us—each person’s life is a kind of battle, and a long and varied one too. You must keep watch like a soldier and do everything commanded. . . You have been stationed in a key post, not some lowly place, and not for a short time but for life.
Epictetus Discourses, 3.24.31-36
Stay the course, Bev, and stay strong; you are an inspiration to more people than you realize, and we love you for it.
Saturday’s No Kings protest in McAllen was well-organized and peaceful. Hundreds of protestors lined up outside the Federal Courthouse along the Business 83 throughfare, waved a mix of American, Mexican, and Fuck Trump flags. Many homemade signs advocating for keeping federal hands off families made no sense, and the professionally made No Kings Day signs were totally inappropriate, as we Americans celebrate No Kings Day on the 4th of July.
At the height of the protest, there were a few hundred people. I found it boring, and after walking past the assembled protesters on both sides of the street, I headed home. I wasn’t the only one to leave early. It just wasn’t that interesting.
There were shouted obscenities directed at passing traffic about The Bad Orange Man but no cigarette smoking because there were bambinos present, and nobody wanted to set a bad example for them.
I walked through the crowd in my Seatec SPF 50 Patriot hoody, knowing the red, white, and blue motif would identify me as one of the opposition. I encountered the opposite of hostility; everyone was being exceedingly polite to each other. Ever the gentleman, I said excuse me several times as I moved through the crowd, and several women complimented me on the cool hoodie. I don’t think the Patriot shirt does what I thought it does for the IFF (identify friend or foe) equation.
Does this shirt look right-wingish to you?
There were two Antifa Larpers dressed in all black with respirators around their necks, and one deranged-looking old woman wearing a respirator and eye goggles. Nobody else in the crowd was dressed for rioting. The white folks in attendance were mainly sedentary boomers with pot bellies and ponytails. The rest of the crowd was Hispanic, and I’d estimate 70% of them were women.
There were a couple of McAllen police vehicles staged on the periphery, a few uniformed Federal officers staged in the shade behind the courthouse, but no visible police presence in the crowd. As I walked around the corner of Business 83 down Bicentennial Avenue, I ran into a knot of cigarette-smoking men who were furious that the state prosecutes drunk drivers for having a blood alcohol level of .08 when everyone knows you’re not drunk until your BAC is in the .10 to .12 range. They were adamant that the current drunk driving laws are culturally insensitive and not shy about telling anyone in earshot all about it.
This is a look down Bicentennial Ave – the smokers’ corner/DUI protesters were at the end of this line. Note the crazy woman in a respirator and goggles. People dressed like her make me nervous.
As I walked through the crowd, the signs held aloft and coordinated Viva La Raza chants evoked a vibe of Mexican nationalism and reactionary Hispanic cultural revanchism. It is so weird walking through a crowd of young, attractive Hispanic women just 4 miles from the Mexican border that none of them are stupid enough to cross. Femicide is an enduring, intractable problem in Mexico, and young, attractive Mexican American women know it but never talk about it. The younger generation may not know much about current news or history, but they all know about the four Mexican coeds (and five male teens with them) who went missing last spring and were found dismembered in the truck of a car.
Spring Break vacations are dangerous for Mexican coeds who are subject to abductions, multiple rapes, hideous torture and a brutal death. That happens to seven women every day in Mexico. This woman pictured here was one of the coeds who disappeared last March.
I don’t understand how Americans, regardless of ancestral heritage, support millions of undocumented Hispanics demanding access to and benefits from a State they are hostile toward and have no legal right to enter.
Antifa was in attendance – the guy on the right kept his camera like that until I moved on. I guess I made him nervous.
By 1 p.m., the crowd was reduced to a few women huddled under shade trees waving American flags, and a group of Hispanic women with small children across the street, getting blasted by the sun while waving Mexican flags. Even the cattle in South Texas know to get out of direct sunlight and huddle under any available trees, so I have no idea why those women stayed in the sun, but they looked miserable.
The man walking down the street was one of the organizers who politely asked the participants to stay on the sidewalk. There were no attempts to impede traffic, despite the numerous vehicles that passed, with drivers giving the protesters the finger.
I walked around the area in the late afternoon to find the sidewalks completely free of litter and refuse; the organizers had stayed around to clean up after the crowd dispersed. That’s an impressive end to an unimpressive protest. It is safe to assume that most of the 1400 No Kings protests were peaceful affairs where people on both sides of the issue treated each other respectfully.
As I and hundreds of others have pointed out, these protests were financed by NGOs that have received millions of our tax dollars. Why is this still happening? I thought we had shut down USAID, I thought we were clawing back that money, I felt that Congress would take the hint we delivered with the election of President Trump. I expected them to complement DOGE by addressing the fraud, waste, and abuse. Where the hell is the 20 billion dollars that the autopen running Biden’s failed administration dumped into just eight NGOs?
As is often the case these days, AI-generated memes reveal a truth that the media ignores.
During the Biden era, 10, 20, maybe 30 million (we have no idea how many) desperate, unskilled, illiterate line jumping ingrates came into our country expecting a handout. They got it too from democrats at the state and federal level, and the NGOs they lavishly support with our taxes. How do we rectify this situation? Who is going to be held to account for this invasion of malcontents? How do we get our country back?
Congress isn’t up to the job, as they demonstrated with their pork-laden Big Beautiful Bill. The President can’t do it alone and is being hamstrung by the liberal progressive judiciary. The only administration to successfully deport millions of illegals was the Obama administration and we all know why he could do it without the liberal media going bat shit crazy.
Four hours after the protest ended, there was not a scrap of paper on the ground. No Kings McAllen is hereby officially recognized for being great citizens by this mention in dispatches.
When Elizabeth Willing Powel asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” He famously replied, “A republic if you can keep it.” Suppose we allow the 20 to 40 million illegals to stay. In that case, they will be counted by democrats in our 2030 census, allowing the democrats to establish a one-party rule countrywide just like they did in California. We will no longer be a republic but a dysfunctional third world shit hole just like contemporary California. If that happens, the chances of a hot civil war will be nearly 100%.
I cannot imagine living in California today
The Rio Grande Valley remains Trump country. The light turnout at the heavily marketed No Kings protest proved that. The premise behind No Kings, that President Trump is a dictator, was silly, but the people manipulated into protesting by progressive NGOs and Walton family sociopaths were polite, friendly, and picked up after themselves. Let’s hope the spirit of friendliness and tolerance across the political divide holds in our divided nation. I’m sure it will in South Texas because an armed society is a polite society.
Of the 914 bird species listed by the American Birding Association, over 500 of them can be found in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV). Eighteen bird species reach the northern limits of their ranges in the Rio Grande Valley and cannot be found elsewhere in the United States. I’ve listed those birds here, not to brag on them, but because my wife has accused me of never writing posts that are happy and positive. What could be more uplifting than seeing a Plain Chachalaca, White-tipped Dove, Groove-billed Ani, Common Pauraque, Buff-bellied Hummingbird, Harris’s Hawk, Gray Hawk, Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl, Ringed Kingfisher, Green Kingfisher, Northern Beardless Tyrannulet, Great Kiskadee, Green Jay, Long-billed Thrasher, Clay-colored Thrush, Botteri’s Sparrow, Olive Sparrow, or the ever colorful Altamira Oriole?
Green Jays are beautiful birds, but they hit bird feeders like Navy jets hit carrier decks: fast, loud, and flashy.
The most common bird in my backyard is the large black great-tailed grackle. I spend a lot of time watching the males fluff their feathers and dance around trying to impress female grackles, who ignore them as they eat bugs from my lawn. Male grackles can be annoying; they are loud and urbanized, so they mostly ignore humans while they pester females with their crazy dancing and fights with other males. They must annoy other bird species, as I often see little two-ounce mockingbirds relentlessly attacking the much larger male grackle. I’ve seen mockingbirds wear out feral cats who come too close to their nest, too. There’s a reason why they are the Texas State Bird.
The Great Kiskadee is just as colorful as a Green Jay, but more mellow and musical. It makes you feel calm and peaceful just looking at it, right?
The Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival will be in Harlingen this year from the 5th through the 9th of November, and you can’t find a more positive, happy, wholesome family event. Events like this make me proud to be a Valley resident, so never let it be said I don’t write in favorable terms about my home because I just did.
Birding is no longer of interest to me after I discovered the Hawk kettles I mentioned often on the All Marine Radio podcast were turkey vultures who congregate here in the winter—fake hawks who fly around defecating on their legs to cool off. Real Hawks move down the Mississippi Flyway to winter in the tropics, returning up the flyway in the spring. They often form large kettles flying in a circular pattern on warm thermals that lift them several thousand feet so they can glide towards their destination without expending energy. I kept seeing these kettles long after the migratory birds had passed, and often reported to the All Marine Radio fanbase that I was seeing hawk kettles after they should have moved through the area.
My wife heard me talking about hawk kettles on the podcast one evening and told me they were turkey vultures that winter in the RGV and spend the evenings surfing the thermals, much like a bunch of stoners on skateboards. Those nasty fake hawks played me like a rube, fooling me into thinking they were massive real Hawks, so I’m done with the birding. But I’m not done heaping praise on my valley home.
Just last week, ICE and Border Patrol agents spent a few days visiting construction sites on Padre Island and Brownsville to round up illegal migrants. As you can see in the photo below, these are well-paid heavy equipment operators working those sites. The response from the local majority Hispanic population has been muted. Residents of the Valley of the Birds understand why so many illegals are given such high-paying jobs. It’s not about reducing project payrolls but the employer’s exposure to OSHA fines and lawsuits from injured workers.
Illegal labor reduces employer exposure to OSHA violation fines and injured worker lawsuits.
Suppose an American worker loses some fingers or has a foot shredded on the job site. That accident and the injuries must be reported to OSHA, and you can bet that soon after, one of the ambulance-chasing lawyers with the same digit phone numbers will be suing. If an illegal is badly injured he is shit out of luck, no OSHA protection, no lawyers suing on his behalf, he might get some extra cash to limp back across the border to heal up if he’s lucky.
As is often the case in our current media environment, memes reveal a truth that is evident to everyone not employed in the media.
Mexico has a long history of blaming its problems that it doesn’t export to the United States on the United States. This deeply rooted victim mentality has served the Mexican state well when dealing with fickle American officials from past administrations. Now they have to deal with President Trump and a cabinet full of uber competent Americans who are uninterested in fleecing American taxpayers. President Trump is revoking visas of high-ranking, obviously corrupt Mexican officials; he has closed the border, and he is going to start taxing remittances.
The ever-prescient Joshua Treviño of the Texas Public Policy Foundation diagnoses the dilemma facing the Mexican government when dealing with President Trump succinctly:
Though the Mexican regime does not particularly care about the welfare of its people – having presided over an internal war that has seen the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Mexicans by its own cartel allies and sometimes its own armed forces – it does care for its own position and privileges, and so an economic collapse alarms it in ways that death and cruelty among its own people does not.
When a country develops a permanent victim mentality, it becomes incapable of understanding the history behind its current state of malaise and incompetence. People with no understanding of their past will have no control over their future. That is why Mexico attempted to combat the endemic violence plaguing the country by suing American gun makers. The Supreme Court dismissed this frivolous lawsuit with a rare unanimous decision last week.
Another meme, nobody in the No Kings organization or the American media understands
Rio Grande Valley history supports the thesis of the recently published The Culture Transplant. The introduction of a handful of Scots-Irish entrepreneurs who accumulated their wealth in the traditional way of my people transformed the valley into an economic powerhouse. They gained power and land by marrying into wealthy Hispanic land grant families. I admit to being the descendant of those handsome rouges with technical educations and good dental hygiene. A few hundred years ago, dental hygiene was of critical importance when romancing comely daughters of the land-owning Hispanic aristocracy.
A book written by an academic that reflects reality, not a progressive narrative? Will wonders ever cease? If you want to live in the thrid world shit hole vote democrat.
Then the newly minted landowners spurred economic growth, transforming the once-tragic soil of the Rio Grande Valley into magic soil. They started with the Steamboat landings in Brownsville and Rio Grande City to stimulate commerce. They established safe, secure, honest banks where their Mexican relatives could stash money, accumulating compound interest rates without fearing periodic Peso devaluations or confiscation by the corrupt Mexican federal government. Anglo engineers figured out how to build a gravity-fed irrigation system, turning the RGV into a farming paradise.
The visuals of the LA riots perfectly represent the magic versus tragic soil theory first propagated by Steve Sailer when addressing the topic of white flight:
So that explains white flight: whites who lived in Compton in 1950, like those white families that included two future Presidents, depleted the Magic Soil, leaving only Tragic Soil for all the blacks who moved in, causing them to shoot each other and make rap songs about it.
I’m not sure how to explain why Compton got less shooty after the Latinos pushed most of the blacks out, but no doubt future advances in Soil Theory will answer that question too.
This is not how to win friends or influence people, unless you’re a democrat, in which case this is just a peaceful protest by hard-working people who deserve never to be held accountable for anything they do
Today’s LA riots don’t look anything like the 1992 LA riots due to the conspicuous absence of black rioters. There are some to be sure, and they seem to have cornered the high-end store looting market, but their numbers are a fraction of what they once were in LA. That has nothing to do with white people, so it is ignored by the legacy media, who despise facts that run counter to their preferred narrative about the evils of Caucasians.
The Mexican Americans in LA are rioting to protest the enforcement of our immigration laws. They are looting, burning cars, assaulting cops, and destroying property while waving the Mexican flag as if there is a reason to be proud of the history of Mexico. Mexican history is a nightmare of callous incompetence, unwarranted arrogance, and total disregard for the people of Mexico. The sole exception to this rule is Mexicans living in the United States; for them, the Mexican government will advocate, insisting that they be able to send remittances untaxed.
There are moments of greatness, compassion, and kindness in Mexico’s history. One of them was the treatment of the five boys captured after the defeat of the 1842 Meir expedition. That expedition was little more than a filibuster operation, and if you don’t know what those were, read The Blood Meridian. The five boys captured by the Mexican army were treated with kindness and affection by Santa Anta and his generals. And not the kind of affection lavished on boys in Afghanistan, I’m talking old-fashioned, appropriate Christian European affection traditionally afforded to children. But I’m saving it for the next time my lovely wife accuses me of not writing positive, uplifting blog posts.
The progressive gringos funding this protest do not understand how hot it is in McAllen in mid-June.
This Saturday, McAllen, along with hundreds of other cities, will experience the joy of No Kings protests. The social media announcements for this protest stress that they are “volunteer organized” which is absolute bullshit. No Kings receives millions of dollars in grant monies from all the usual suspects, meaning you, the taxpayer, are funding the riots and destruction of your cities. They are receiving additional funding from Christy Walton, the heir to the Walmart fortune. Like all the Walmart Waltons, she is an imperious psychopath who gleefully destroyed the independent hardware, clothes stores, sporting goods dealers, pharmacies (the list is endless) across the United States. Mexico, too, for that matter, where their supercenters are called Wally Martinez
Your tax money is hard at work thanks to democratic criminality. This Screenshot is from the Data Republican X account.
The McAllen protest is scheduled from 10:00 am to noon, and the weather forecast is for bright sunshine and 99-degree temperatures, which far exceeds the tolerances of most local citizens. The closest businesses to the planned protest site are rooftop nightclubs, but there are no Roof Koreans around here, so they are, in theory, vulnerable.
There are several rooftop bars and nightclubs with names like Santa Diabla tucked behind the Federal Courthouse. They open after 9:00 pm and often featured Mexican bands singing narco corridos, before Mexico made corridos ballads illegal. Then the narcos started killing the bands off for refusing to sing them. Now we’re stuck with the Mexican folk bands who still have visas, and they always have accordion players. If there is a musical instrument more obnoxious than an accordion, I have thankfully never heard it.
I expect American flag-waving counter protesters will outnumber the No Kings crowd just like they did when President Trump visited McAllen during his first term. But it’s going to be a scorcher this Saturday, so there may not be many people braving the heat, leaving only the paid agitators to stir up a riot. LA has Roof Koreans, Mexico has Roof Dogs*, if Saturday’s protesters try to riot, they will be introduced to a new phenomenon: Roof Mexicans. We’ll have to wait to see how this plays out.
*Do not look at the roof dogs link if you love dogs – it will upset and red pill you into supporting mass deportations.
Last week, in an act that combined desperation and stupidity with ingenuity and hard work, a Narco group built a raft to float a pickup truck across the Rio Grande River near Brownsville. The raft was constructed of blue 55-gallon drums and plywood, and it got the truck safely across. Upon reaching our side of the river, the pickup sped off through an open gate in the border wall. The driver then noticed Border Patrol and State Police trucks waiting for him on the levee once he cleared the wall, so he turned around and drove right back into the river.
You have to give these dope smugglers an A for effort, but an F for planning
Several Mexican nationals then swam to the truck to recover some of the bundles of drugs; the rest floated downstream and were retrieved by the Border Patrol. The large bundles contained marijuana, which raises questions. Thanks to American ingenuity, weed in the form of delta eight and delta 10 THC is (for the time being) legal in Texas. Delta 9 is the high-inducing tetrahydrocannabinol found in legalized weed, but Deltas 8 and 10 will get the job done, especially in smokable concentrates, vapes, or ingested via gummies, drinks, or brownies.
Potent THC hemp derivatives blindsided Texas lawmakers, who claim they legalized hemp for industrial purposes, not psychoactive gummies, so this September, the multimillion-dollar industry built on hemp buds is scheduled for eradication. I’ve gone from supporting THC products as a safe alternative to alcohol to acknowledging that THC is an addictive drug that robs one’s vitality and drive while being difficult to quit. The only safe alternative to alcohol is not drinking alcohol. Still, I’m not sure closing the hemp weed loophole is the best idea because it will encourage Mexicans to build flimsy rafts and float pick-up trucks across the Rio Grande River. The Rio Grande is polluted enough, so adding trucks and whatever was in the blue plastic drums to the water is Eso no es bueno. For readers who do not live in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), I’m obliged to inform you that it is never correct to say “no bueno.”
Why did the weed smugglers go to all that trouble when the market for shitty Mexican weed is so depressed? Granted, the border appears unguarded because illegal crossings are now rare, but the Border Patrol isn’t stupid. They watch the open gates in the wall and have a Tethered Aerostat Radar Systems (TARS) and Ground-Based Operational Surveillance Systems (GBOSS), both of which can see a long way. The federales claim the TARS is used for detecting aircraft, but I watched a contractor using one at Combat Outpost Lonestar in the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan to smoke check a few miscreants. He had observed three dudes planning an IED on the road leading to Tora Bora and summoned a soldier from the fire direction center, who dropped some 155mm artillery on them. The TARS system can see plenty on the ground, just like the smaller GBOSS.
Tethered Aerostat Radar System Site Lajas, Puerto Rico.
Photographer: Donna Burton
Even when the border looks empty, there are plenty of eyes watching it, and they don’t miss much.
Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were a constant menace for me in Afghanistan, and they have now made an appearance in the RGV. Last February, a local rancher, Antonio Céspedes Saldierna, was killed by an IED on the Mexican side of the border near Brownsville. Mr. Saldierna, like many RGV ranchers, has property on both sides of the border and was traveling to his Mexican Hacienda when he hit the IED. His son, Ramiro Céspedes, an army vet who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was injured in the blast. An IED that kills the driver but not his son or wife, who were in the truck with him, isn’t much of an IED. I assume the Gulf Cartel has yet to tap into terrorist expertise from Afghanistan or Iraq. Mexico imports tons of calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which is easily converted into a powerful homemade explosive.
Ammonium nitrate IEDs with simple, easily fabricated pressure plates. These were recovered in Nimroz Province, Afghanistan. It is only a matter of time before these are deployed in Mexico and the United States.
In a recent interview on Chuck Holton’s Hot Zone podcast, Mexican Journalist Oscar Ramirez claimed that the Arellano-Félix Cartel in Tijuana has already imported Taliban from Afghanistan to train them on tunnel digging and IED construction. It’s just a matter of time before we start seeing the boom in Mexico and on this side of the border. It’s more effective than throwing children into the Rio Grande River (a routine occurrence during the FJB administration) to distract American law enforcement so they can complete their nefarious missions.
Our side of the border is like a ghost town, while Mexico is filling with ghosts. Last Tuesday, Ximena Guzmán, the personal secretary to the mayor of Mexico City, Clara Brugada, and José Muñoz, a municipal advisor, were shot and killed in the Moderna neighborhood of Mexico City. It has been five years since there was a high-profile assassination in Mexico City. That shootout was triggered when sicarios from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) ambushed the chief of police.
Murders on busy streets in broad daylight are depressingly common south of the border—photograph by Teun Voeten from his book Drug War in Mexico.
This hit indirectly targeted La Presidencia, Claudia Sheinbaum. It’s a safe bet that one of the Sinaloa cartels carried it out, targeting associates of allies of President Sheinbaum because they are afraid to target her directly. It is an undeniable fact (according to my Blanco Brujos neighbor, who knows things) that she’s a powerful Negros Brujos. I, too, am afraid of her after she flooded out the RGV in a 3-hour supernaturally powerful rainstorm.
The following day, protestors from Reynosa closed the international bridge connecting their city to Pharr, Texas. They were protesting the disappearance of five musicians from the Grupo Fugitivo band, who may or may not have been writing and performing narco corridos. Corridos are ballads that portray powerful Narcos as Robin Hood-like figures. Singing Narco corridos songs in Mexico is now illegal. Not singing Narco corridos in Mexico is deadly. A few days after the protests, the bodies of the five men were found outside Reynosa.
Luis R. Conriquez, a 28-year-old Sonoran singer with hundreds of millions of views on YouTube
I’ve been told the mark of a true gentleman is one who can play the accordion—and doesn’t. I’m not a fan of regional Mexican folk music, but those guys have it hard. President Trump, probably acting under a spell cast by Mexico’s chief Curandero, President Sheinbaum, won’t give corridor bands visas so they can’t rake in the big bucks playing venues in San Antonio, Houston, or Robstown. If they play their original ballads in Mexico, they’ll get arrested. If they don’t play them, they’ll be disappeared. It’s not like they can turn themselves into American law enforcement, confess to playing the accordion, and request asylum.
When Conriquez announced he would no longer sing Narco Corridos or corridos belicos (warlike ballads – a term he invented), his fans in Texcoco rioted, ran him and his band out of town, smashed their drum set and amplifiers, but didn’t trash his accordions. Can you believe that?
There are over 124,000 Mexicans listed as disappeared by Mexican authorities. Seven women go missing every day in Mexico. The usual fate for these poor souls is rape, torture, and a gruesome death. Protests and vigils by the family and friends of the missing are a near-daily occurrence, as is the discovery of mass graves, illegal crematoriums, or acid bath operations. There are thousands of heartbreaking stories about mothers dedicating their lives to organizations like Madres Buscadoras (searching mothers).
Cecilia Flores, a member of the “Searching Mothers of Sonora and Jalisco” group. Photo from Israel Fuguemann of NPR
The earliest known madre buscadora is Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, whose son Jesús Piedra Ibarra was forcibly disappeared in 1974. These women lead teams of volunteers on searches throughout Mexico for mass graves, and they stage protests at government offices or popular border crossings. They garner their share of sympathetic international press, but this has been going on for over 50 years and it is obvious the powerful elites of Mexico don’t give a damn about them or their missing children.
The last known photo of 18-year-old Debanhi Escobar, which went viral and was featured on the front page of many Mexican newspapers after she was kidnapped in April 2022.
The elites might give a damn now because Marco Rubio has quietly put them in a very uncomfortable position that will cost them the one thing they care about: money.
Our Department of State is revoking the US visas of Mexican politicians, police, and military officers linked to the Narco cartels and/or fuel theft rings. I have never seen our State Department working for the interests of the American people, or the Mexican people, for that matter. They have always pursued their own progressive globalist agenda, but now their agenda seems to be President Trump’s agenda, and President Trump is putting the American people first.
The most common drug war trope from Mexico is that America’s thirst for drugs fuels the drug war. That is nonsense. What Americans have is lots of money to pay exorbitant rates for drugs. Countries like Mexico don’t have people with much disposable income but they still have plenty of junkies who pay fire sale prices for the same poison that is smuggled into el norte. photograph by Teun Voeten
He is also lending a hand to La Presidencia, Sheinbaum, by placing pressure on bad actors. Not having an American Visa is, for the wealthy elites of Mexico, a serious problem. Being on an American revoked visa list negatively impacts banking and investment, hurts business relationships, and international credibility. I am not implying that every rich Mexican national has amassed their wealth illegally; that would be rude. There must be a way to accumulate millions of dollars in Mexico legally. . . I guess, but check out the names that have been published in the press:
Marina del Pilar Ávila, Baja California governor
Américo Villarreal, Tamaulipas governor
Rubén Rocha Moya, Sinaloa governor
Alfonso Durazo, Sonora governor
Samuel García, Nuevo León governor
Layda Sansores, Campeche governor
Mario Delgado, federal Education Secretary
Ricardo Monreal and Adán Augusto López, Morena power players
Several mayors from Tamaulipas and Chihuahua
At least four high-ranking generals
According to the Gringo Gazette Alberto Granados, the mayor of Matamoros, had his visa revoked while attempting to cross into Brownsville. He denied it. But the story didn’t go away.
The Mexican elite can find other countries to bank their wealth, educate their children, and purchase vacation properties. But the modern, enjoyable, safe, and investment-friendly places like Dubai or Singapore are off-limits to them. Those countries, mui eso no es bueno, the drug business. If they’re on the State Department shit list I doubt many European tax havens would welcome them either.
Will putting the soft power screws to the monied elites change anything in Mexico? Who knows, but the cartels are losing tons of money and the head Negros Brujos is keeping the pressure on them. Mexican Marines have been raiding “mega drug labs” in Sinaloa for months now, seizing tons of methamphetamine. Fentanyl seizures are plummeting at the border, although it is unclear why. Illegal border crossings are down 94%, and it is very clear why. The big question is how long the cartels will continue to lose money before they start getting dangerously desperate and resort to powerful IEDs for leverage in Mexico and revenge in the USA.
Famous son of the Rio Grande Valley, Joshua Trevino, the Chief Transformation Officer at the Texas Public Policy Institute, made a startling admission on the Hard Country podcast about Mexican Presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum. Joshua admitted he was wrong about the la presidenta, who is not a placeholder for the Morena party but a talented executive. She has better managed Mexico’s relationship with the United States than any Mexican president. Joshua observed that the Mexican government cannot guarantee public safety or clean water, but it is an expert at dealing with the United States Government.
My non-expert opinion is that Claudia Sheinbaum is a Brujas Negras (Black Witch) Curandera. Sheinbaum is a non-religious Jew and a lifelong leftist who reads every policy paper she is handed and is preternaturally alert for every second of hours-long policy meetings. She’s a disciplined, sober female version of Bill Clinton without the sex addiction or lazy disinterest in detail. The true face of evil can be found in any human who enjoys multiple, hours-long, policy meetings. It’s not natural.
Last week, I thought the Brujas Negras had struck again when I saw Grubhub had declared McAllen the most overweight and obese city in America. How had the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) suddenly become populated by food blisters? I detected the hand of bad voodoo, only to remember that polite people here never mention obesity or its downstream effects. We’ve been the fattest city in America for years, but nothing is done about it, and nobody talks about it, so it’s easy to forget.
The RGV has been shrouded in a miasma of black magic fog, the fog of woe, that allows people to ignore the obvious. The average resident should stay the hell out of Starbucks, donut shops, and double-fried taco stands. But every day, a new Starbucks, donut shop, or taco stand opens to serve people a few years away from needing daily dialysis. The Catholic Church should be battling this obvious demonic assault on the faithful. But they’re focused on illegal migrant rights because that’s where the money is. . . Or was it before DOGE uncovered the billions of dollars flowing to the dioceses from USAID to facilitate human trafficking via dozens of ‘NGOs’.
Sister Norma Pimentel, Executive Director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, greets a group of some 25 asylum seekers at a bus station in Brownsville, Texas. No mention is ever made about the millions of dollars USAID has given her. That fact is lost in the RGV fog of woe (photo: John Moore / Getty )
This obesity epidemic in the Rio Grande Valley has disrupted the retirement plan I established in 1985, following my first reading of Lonesome Dove. After retiring, I wanted to be an old, tricky, tough bastard living on the Rio Grande River. But there are no cattle rustlers to fight, and I wasn’t sure my plan made sense until the Narco wars started and President Trump declared them terrorists. There was no doubt that all sorts of miscreants had invaded us. I saw it with my own lying eyes for four years running. Suddenly, my dream of replicating Gus and Captain Call seemed to be answered until I researched Narco sicarios.
What happened to the tough, self-reliant Mexican peasant? Where is the self-sacrificing ethos of the Mexican soldiers who overthrew the Spanish, defeated the French, and fought with courage against the Americans?
See what I mean? These two fat bastards couldn’t run 100 yards but still think they’re bad asses. Plus they have man boobs – a clear indicator of low testosterone.
I live close enough to the Rio Grande River to see the border wall lights at night. During the evening, I sit on my back porch, scanning the river bottoms, just like Augustus McCrae or Captain Call, but without a rifle or jug of whiskey, because I don’t want my neighbors to think I’m antisocial. This is Texas, where many people still carry a pistol, but who needs a gun to deal with pudgy nitwits? Having a charged AED at the ready, along with IV fluids, is more practical given the lack of desperados swimming the Rio Grande and the physical condition of the local population.
Who carries around an automated external defibrillator and IV kits? Sheepdogs – I know quite a few of them and we are all much happier to bring a cardiac arrest victim back to life than shooting a scumbag trying to take a life. The savings in legal fees alone make that a winning proposition. I still carry a concealed pistol in honor of Gus and Captain Call. Reality may have crushed my retirement plan, but a man can still dream.
Narcos are not a problem for the law-abiding citizens of the RGV. Many have vacation properties in the Valley and send their children to school here. Lots of Mexicans send their kids to school here, a constant source of aggravation for property tax-paying Winter Texans. This is another topic rarely discussed in polite company because it raises the ugly specter of racism, even though skin color has nothing to do with being Hispanic. Fluency in the Spanish language determines who is and is not Hispanic in the RGV.
The Narcos are a problem for local politicians, lawyers, and law enforcement. They have too much money, and finding a lawyer, politician, or police chief who would not sell their soul to the devil (or a Bruja Negra) for a few million dollars is as rare. The only defense against multi-million-dollar bribes is strong religious faith. A man alone cannot reject that level of illicit wealth; he needs a strong angel riding shotgun. I have St Michael, who I found guarding my six in Afghanistan. Hopefully vulnerable RGV titans have a similar guardian to with which to battle Santa Muerte.
The appearance of tranquil, law-abiding prosperity is another consequence of the invisible black magic fog that infects the RGV. Everything appears normal, which is abnormal given the corrosive effects of abundant Narco money. Lifting that fog falls in the realm of spiritual warfare, the province of curanderas, now that the Catholic Church has abandoned normal Americans.
Aztecs are all the rage in Mexico, given the popularity of Santa Muerte, a cross between the Grim Reaper and the Virgin of Guadeloupe, Mexico’s patron saint. But the Aztecs weren’t Mexican Amerindians; they were colonizers from the North. Their Náhuatl language is unrelated to Central Mexican Mesoamerican native languages but closely related to the Ute and Comanche languages. History has become a profound, dark mystery because it is actively subverted in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Understanding legitimate, verifiable history is a superpower that allows you to instantly cut through the bullshit inflicted on us by the elite managerial class.
Santa Muerte swag in Mexico City
If a culture that mocks tradition and devalues sacrifice fails to renew itself, what happens to a culture that calls for holy war against the catholic church while conducting human sacrifice? Mexican Narcos can’t grasp the concept of aspirational sacrifice because they are low-testosterone and low-IQ psychopaths. The Stoics tell us that rudeness, meanness, and cruelty are a mask for deep-seated weakness. You can add man boobs, the physical manifestation of low T, to that list.
Which brings up another crushing disappointment. Old retired guys can’t hang out in smoky bars dispensing the distilled wisdom of an aged International Man of Action. If they do, they risk looking like everyone else around here. Who wants to see another old fool with a beer gut thinking he’s a badass? Not looking like a dangerous man is no way to honor the memory of the best two fictional Texas Rangers in the Western canon, or the canon of Westerns. I’m not sure how to make that point. It is a vivid reminder not to base your aspirations on fictional characters created by the same author who wrote Brokeback Mountain.
This fictional short story first appeared in the Wrath Burning Tree in 2023
It was a typical Thursday night at the Taj Tiki Bar, tucked away off the Jalalabad–Kabul road in the Bagrami hamlet just outside the Jalalabad city limits. The Taj Guesthouse Tiki Bar was established by a UN road-building crew from Australia in 2003 and was the only bar in Eastern Afghanistan. The Taj was a three-building world-class guesthouse featuring a custom swimming pool that the Aussies built, which we filled with sand-filtered, freezing-cold well water. This being Afghanistan, Afghans were not allowed in the Tiki bar, and because Western NGO women frequented the pool, it was surrounded by a 40-foot bamboo screen. Bikini-wearing women cavorting in a pool with men is haram in Afghanistan and best kept out of public view.
During the summer of 2008, the Tiki Bar was busier than ever on Thursday nights during happy hour. The UN had withdrawn a year earlier, so the Taj became home to the Synergy Strike Force, an MIT FabLab, and the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club. My USAID-funded Community Development Program (CDP) was also located there. Since Jalalabad and San Diego are sister cities, the Rotarians actively funded projects to refurbish schools, build dormitories at Nangarhar University, and purchase modern equipment for the Nangarhar University Teaching Hospital.
The Synergy Strike Force was a San Diego-based group of high-end tech experts who aimed to “save the willing” by accessing unlimited funding from DARPA to refine their crowd-sourcing software. To bring the internet to the people, the founder of the Synergy Strike Force, a dual MD/PhD named Bob, convinced the National Science Foundation to fund the deployment of an MIT Fabrication Laboratory to the Taj Guesthouse, which came with two Graduate students to set it up.
The Tiki Bar had become so busy that I brought my son Logan, who had just graduated from High School, over to run the bar, allowing me to focus on supply. Buying beer was no problem, but getting it past the National Directorate of Security (NDS) checkpoint in the Kabul Gorge could be a real problem. I had already lost two sets of body armor and five bottles of booze to them, but they headed home early every Thursday, clearing the run back from Camp Warehouse long before the sun set.
There was a giant clay fireplace across from the bar for cold-weather operations, and the patio area between the main house, bar, and pool deck was filled with the usual suspects. NGO workers from the American aid giants DAI and Chemonics, two women from Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale, the attaché from the Pakistan consulate who had the hots for one of the German ladies, four agriculture specialists from the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the ever lovely and vivacious Ms. Mimi from Agence Française de Développement. Mimi had a male colleague who insisted on wearing a Speedo bathing suit in the pool area, but we let it slide because Mimi was a most attractive and agreeable guest who often stayed the night and spent Friday poolside.
A Blackwater crew from the Border Police training academy was there as usual, as was the brigade Human Terrain Team from FOB Fenty. There were two Air Force officers from the Nangarhar Provincial Reconstruction Team, technically in a UA status. One of them, an intelligence officer, was dating my Aussie running mate, Rory, which, in my opinion, was a lot of risk for marginal gain. As a retired Marine Corps grunt on the other side of 50 I might have been jealous; I was never sure.
The SSF crew was spending their last night in the country before heading back to the USA for the annual Burning Man festival. They were in rare form, as were the Rotarians from the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club, who were joined by Rotarians from Perth, Australia. Perth is a sister city to both San Diego and Jalalabad, who knew? The MIT grad students sent to start up the FabLab were immediately nicknamed the twins. They were TS (SCI) cleared rocket engineers from the Center for Bits and Atoms. Both were from New Jersey, both had long, jet-black hair, and smiled so much it made me uncomfortable; one was Chinese American, and the other was Indian American. They were seated at the bar with The Skipper – an EOD trainer who remained outside the wire, living with his Afghan trainees in a compound near the Jalalabad Teaching Hospital. The Skipper was a retired Navy Senior Chief EOD specialist who bore a striking resemblance to Alan Hale from the 1960s-era TV Show Gilligan’s Island. He had laid out a bunch of triggering switches he had collected from disabled IEDs and was taking notes as the Twins examined each with magnifying glasses. The Twins had the uncanny ability to recognize countries of origin and fabrication anomalies in the circuit work.
One of the Twins test-firing an old Soviet PPsH submachinegun she built from a bunch of junked weapons
The Twins were trouble from the start because they proved indispensable. We expected computer geeks from MIT, not engineers who could fix or build anything without apparent effort. They rebuilt the Tiki Bar because they found the original construction to be faulty; they built shelving from wood scraps that were so impressive, they looked like museum pieces. They got bored one day and started working on the War Pig, our up armored Toyota Hi Lux, fabricating a turbo charger and, with the help of our house manager Mehrab and a local diesel mechanic, super charged the engine and lifted the suspension 3 inches so the new tires they “found” would fit the truck. Once done, they surmised the War Pig would run hot and fast on the hairpin mountain turns, which were a feature of the Kabul – Jalalabad highway, and they frequently jetted out of the front gate to drive like maniacs on the mountain roads when unsupervised.
The Skipper was a regular at the Tiki Bar every Thursday evening, drinking exactly two beers regardless of how long he stayed. The Skipper was superstitious; he insisted on driving himself, just as I did, but he was the slowest and most cautious driver I had ever seen in Afghanistan. He also never missed church on Sundays. After documenting the Twins’ comments on trigger switch construction and anomalies, he told the Twins he was heading into Khogyani district in the morning to blow some dud ordnance at the Border Police Training Academy. Friday, a weekend day in Islamic lands, should be quiet enough for them to tag along.
I agreed to join them to provide an extra hand if things went pear shaped so as dawn broke across the Nangarhar Valley on a scorching hot Friday I was poking along in The Skippers armored SUV with the twins. I was wearing body armor, with my 1911 pistol mounted in a chest holster, and I had my Bushmaster rifle with its 10.5-inch barrel and Noveske Vortex pig snout flash suppressor. We had discovered regular bird cage flash suppressors kicked too much gas and noise back into a vehicle, but the pig snout kicked it all out the end of the barrel, which resulted in a little additional muzzle flip but no gas blowing back in your eyes.
The Twins carried Glock 19s with two extra magazines in Kydex holsters, and they both sported WWII-era M3 .45-caliber Grease Guns. There were hundreds of old M3 submachine guns and 1911 pistols circulating in Afghanistan at the beginning of the War, and we had obtained more than our fair share somehow. The M3 was the only weapon that could be fired out of the muzzle port in the windshield of the War Pig. The poorly designed add-on armor from South Africa featured a V-shaped windshield with a firing port on the passenger’s side. But the angle of the bulletproof windscreen was so steep that the only weapon we could fire out of it was an M3 subgun held upside down with the bottom of the magazine facing the roof. The Twins liked them because it was easy to modulate the trigger and control them when firing on full auto.
We were poking along the hardball road leading into the foothills near Tora Bora when The Skipper stopped dead in his tracks. His Afghan EOD team driving behind him must have anticipated this because they stopped on a dime, too. “You smell that?” he asked as he opened his door, letting in an overpowering smell of cut hay and shredded leaves. His Afghans were out of their truck, looking up and down the road. The Skipper looked over at me and said, “IED”. That perked the Twins up as the Skipper explained that we should see a carpet of leaves covering the road ahead.
The road doglegged to the right, crossing a large culvert that channeled a fair-sized stream under the asphalt-paved road. The road was covered in a several-inch carpet of leaves, but I could detect no blast signature. We got out of the trucks and started looking around, trying to figure out what had happened, when an Afghan National Army (ANA) patrol pulled up with many villagers in the back of their pickups. The villagers told us there is a bomb in the culvert we’re standing on. The Afghan team leader asks what had just blown up, and an elder pointed downstream and said, ‘The man who put the bomb in the culvert.”
The Skipper was called out to arm caches like this often by locals who didn’t want their children handling old corroded Russian ordinance.
The Skipper retrieved one of those fisheye mirrors used for vehicle searches from the back of his truck, along with a powerful Surefire flashlight, and gave them to his EOD techs. One of the EOD techs lay on his belly and held the mirror in front of the drainage pipe while one of the other EOD men shined the flashlight into the culvert pipe. They spot the IED immediately – The Skipper and the Twins look and see it too; a pressure cooker on a vehicle jack stand jammed up against the top of the culvert pipe with a blasting cap inserted into a hole in the lid and wire running out of the drainage pipe heading downstream.
The Skipper called the IED into the American Army brigade headquarters at Forward Operating Base Fenty, and they instructed us to stay on scene and wait for the route clearance package to lead the EOD team out to recover the IED. The Skipper acknowledged them, but we knew waiting for the army was a non-starter. They would take at least 8 hours to roll out of the gate and another two to get to us; there was no way the ANA would keep a road closed that long. He looked at the Twins and said, “let’s blow this bitch up”. They broke into radiant smiles and immediately started organizing a work area on the tailgate of our truck.
The Skipper retrieved four bricks of C4 and handed them to the Twins, who taped them tightly while he unspooled some detonation cord. The Twins then wrapped the bricks tightly with the det cord and gave them to the Afghan EOD techs. Along with the ANA troops, they glued the charge to a piece of cardboard and then taped it to a five-gallon water jug some local kids had taken down the creek to top off.
The Twins conned The Skipper into giving up his blasting caps so they could prime the charge. The Afghan EOD men attached about 10 feet of shock tube to the charge and, using 550 cord, lowered the water jug over the mouth of the culvert. A few of the ANA troops and some local teenagers had stopped up the downstream end of the pipe that was now filling with water. The other ANA troops were with the EOD techs in the stream bed, making a big show of lining up the shot correctly. Once the shot was perfectly lined up, they threw a yellow smoke grenade into the pipe and scrambled up the stream bank.
When the smoke flowed out of the pipe, the senior Afghan EOD tech looked at the Skipper, who nodded his head while putting on a set of high-end hearing protectors. The Twins and I had foam earplugs, which we fished out of our pockets before sitting on the folding beach chairs the Skipper carries around for such occasions. With the smoke billowing out, the techs and ANA soldiers yelled ‘fire in the hole’ three times (in English) and the senior EOD man shot the charge.
The C4 went off with a giant WHOOMP; it’s a slow-burning explosive, so it doesn’t evaporate the water, but instead pushes it down the pipe at around 26,000 feet per second. The kinetic energy neutralizes the IED, and the water renders the explosive components inert. A giant gush of yellow-tinted water erupted out of the downstream end of the culvert pipe, arcing over the creek bed for about 100 feet before slamming into the trees like a wave. The water then exploded into the sky, slowly dissipating in a rainbow of colors suspended in the air for 45 seconds.
There were dozens of local people from nearby villages, and the stalled traffic, watching us, erupted in cheers, laughter, and shouts. Their kids were excitedly dancing, laughing, and clapping; local men came up to take pictures with the ANA troops and the EOD team. The Skipper looked over with a big broad smile and said to me “can you believe we get paid to do this shit”? I could not, nor could the Twins who were self-funded volunteers and not making a dime during their time in the Stan but still happy to be here with us.
The Skipper lost his dream gig in 2011 when the position was eliminated, and he moved onto the big box FOB on Bagram. His company felt it was no longer safe for him to free range outside the wire, and they were probably right. Someone in Nuristan had taken a shot at the Skipper that missed due to a low-order detonation caused by incompetent and poor waterproofing. So, despite his willingness to stay, it was time for him to go. For the three years he roamed around Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, and Laghman provinces, removing the boom from local towns and villages while making a lasting impression on the Afghans. They loved him and he, in return, posed for hundreds of pictures, while patiently fielding complaints about ISAF, the Afghan government, and various American administrations from local elders. The Skipper had balls the size of grapefruit, and he never hesitated to go into Indian Country with just his Afghan EOD crew when called.
The Skipper, like every heavily armed humanitarian I knew, made it home safe and sound after staying in Afghanistan (on FOBs) until 2015. He never talked about his free-range past because none of the people he worked with believed his stories. That was a common occurrence among us, outside-the-wire contractors in Afghanistan. Only a few of us invested the time it took to learn the language and put our skin in the game. Like the Skipper, those who did were rewarded with a veil of protection by the local people. That may have been a minor accomplishment in the big scheme of things, but it was a worthy one that came with no small amount of pride. We were able to go places and do things that would have gotten us killed ten times over had we still been in uniform. And that little bit of special pride is borne in silence by us these days because nobody believes that we lived outside the wire with the Afghans, for years, and enjoyed every minute of it.
*Although based on actual events, this is a fictional story of love and forgiveness that seems timely on Easter Sunday. But this is a man’s story, so there is no actual love or formal forgiveness, because that is not how men love each other.
When the 1MC (ship loudspeakers) erupted with “Mass Casualties Inbound,” I hustled down to the hangar bay and started to set up stretcher stands. Ship-to-shore communications were not robust in 1983, so we had no idea how many wounded we would see when the elevator came down from the flight deck. It was just one Marine on a stretcher; the red shirts from the flight deck deposited him in front of us; one of the squadron corpsmen was with him, and as he talked with the surgeon, the other corpsmen and I started prepping him for the Operating Room.
The Marine was a sergeant, but he didn’t look like any of the Marines from Beirut International Airport that we had previously treated. His camouflage utilities were clean and starched, and the boot he still wore was shined. He didn’t smell from weeks without showering, yet he was lying before us, missing a good bit of his right hand and left foot. The battalion aid station had administered morphine before he flew out to us, so although alert, he wasn’t feeling any pain. When I removed his boot, I gasped in amazement. The surgeon and Marine looked at me, so I pointed to the intact foot, saying: “Holy shit, his feet are clean, and toenails trimmed; he doesn’t even smell bad. I’ve never seen a wounded Marine who wasn’t filthy; I think he might be a homosexual.”
I made the joke because the sergeant was starting to freak over the severity of his injuries; getting him focused on something else was a professional move. Back then, you could joke about the gays without fear because the military was male-dominated. Men don’t coddle other men – they teased them, often unmercifully, even if they were friends. The Foot Sergeant was a public affairs Marine assigned to the USS New Jersey and had been riding a CH-53 ashore to do man-on-the-street interviews of the grunts for his ship’s newspaper. The pilot thought he saw an RPG grenade launched at his aircraft as he was landing and dumped the collective, skipping his tail rotor off the deck. The rotor shattered on impact, and pieces flew into the big airframe, hitting the Sergeant, the only passenger. When the sergeant heard my allegation, he protested his innocence as expected, starting a heated back and forth with me until the Anesthesiologist put him under. We were professionals, after all, and knew how to handle injured Marines, even clean ones.
The surgeons trimmed up his lower leg stump and right hand, and both were elevated with Penrose drains inserted in the wound tracts to facilitate proper healing. The sergeant joined another recently wounded Marine in the USS Guam’s seven-bed sick bay. The other Marine was a machine gunner from New York City nicknamed Second Best. He had been wounded in the right leg by First Best, a Syrian machine gunner. They had been dueling for fifteen minutes before Second-Best, who was lying prone behind his gun, was hit by a round that traveled the length of his leg. Although the wound track was long, the injury was minor, allowing Second Best to return to duty in a few weeks for another attempt at his Syrian nemesis.
The Foot Sergeant would be sent back to Bethesda Naval Hospital at some future date. For now, he was stuck on the USS Guam because all our helicopters were ferrying the equipment and entertainers for a Bob Hope Christmas Special to the ship. The lineup included TV stars Brooke Shields, Cathy Lee Crosby, Ann Jillian, and Miss USA Julie Hayek. This would be the last Bob Hope Christmas Show for service members deployed in a war zone, making it a big deal. Not that the Pentagon was admitting Beirut was a war zone, but the loss of over 250 Marines, sailors, and soldiers over the months made it seem damn close to one.
The big show was on Friday, the 23rd of December, and was impressive. The Marines had flown a few hundred of the grunts in from the beach, and they were given the front-row seats. I had a dirty pair of Marine Corps cammies stashed in my locker for just such an occasion and was hanging out close enough to the stage to be selected to go up and get a Christmas present from Brooke Shields, who kissed me on the cheek on national television. I couldn’t have had a better day before Christmas Eve.
On Christmas Eve, I strolled into the ward to check on the Foot Sergeant and Second Best, who were restricted to their racks while their wounds drained. The Foot Sergeant asked if one of the Hollywood stars or Miss USA would be dropping by, and I said they would, but added, “Not to see you; they want to see wounded Marines, not a closet homo injured by a shitty pilot.” My joke was not well received; instead of calling me foul and filthy names, the Foot Sergeant started to cry. I didn’t know what to do and looked to Second Best for some guidance, but he called me a motherfucker for teasing the Foot Sergeant until he cried. I felt like shit and apologized profusely, but the Foot Sergeant was inconsolable.
I had to make things right; it was Christmas Eve, a time to share joy and love with your fellow man, even those with clean feet and trimmed toenails. I glanced into our two-room ICU and was suddenly inspired. I told the Foot Sergeant to calm down as I was moving him into the ICU, where we could cover him with bloody bandages, hook him up to the EKG, and lure a Hollywood starlet in to spend some time comforting him. The sergeant thought about it for a minute and decided he liked the idea, so I got a wheelchair and moved him over to the ICU.
Pulling Liberty in Haifa, Israel, with one of the Foot Sergeants’ Marine buddies
In 1983, the ICU aboard the USS Guam had an illegal washer and dryer set up in its bathroom. The washer and dryer ran 24/7, except when patients were in the ICU, so the room was hot, and the floor was covered in dust bunnies from the dryer vent. The ICU beds were bigger and taller than the medical ward racks, so the foot sergeant fit comfortably in one, wearing just his pajama bottoms. I covered up his chest and head with gauze, poured a little blood on him, hooked up the EKG monitor, and put an oxygen mask on him without connecting the hose to oxygen (that required doctor orders), so it hung down on the deck.
I sat at a portable stand with a logbook open, mimicking the ICU critical patient watch because the Foot Sergeant looked like a goner. A chair was between the two ICU racks for the Hollywood stars to use if they felt compelled to comfort the fallen warrior. The Foot Sergeant was happy; Second Best was delighted too but bitching about not being in the ICU with us, and I felt like I had made up for teasing the Foot Sergeant until he cried (which was gay, as I pointed out to him later). The stage was set, and we didn’t have long to wait.
The first VIP to wander down the passageway was Bob Hope, who appeared to have had too many celebratory drinks. He was escorted by the Surgeons from Mobile Medical Team 11 and my boss, Dr. Derbert. Fortunately, they, too, had been drinking because they overlooked the missing Foot Sergeant when they escorted Bob Hope to meet with Second Best. I had closed the door to the ICU when I saw them coming, saving the Foot Sergeant for one of the starlets. When I saw a gaggle of news photographers in the passageway, I opened the ICU door and told the Fort Sergeant to stand by. Brooke Shields was the first celebrity to poke her head in, but she immediately decided against entering. Miss USA did the same; looking at the bloody, bandaged spectacle of the Foot Sergeant, she took a pass. But not Ann Jillian. She and her husband immediately entered the ICU, asking how badly the Foot Sergeant was injured. I made up some bullshit about him being shot multiple times when he ran into the no man’s land to rescue a small child in the middle of a firefight. I finished my report, telling the couple we did not expect the Marine to survive the night.
The story moved Ms. Jillian; she had wedged herself into the chair between the ICU beds and was stroking the Foot Sergeant’s blood-matted hair while whispering in his left ear. As I watched, I realized that the Foot Sergeant may not handle this attention well. The room was hot, so he just had a thin sheet covering him; his pulse was starting to skyrocket, which we could hear on the monitor, and suddenly his breathing became labored. That was most likely due to dryer lint clogging the open end of the O2 mask tubing. Then nature stepped in to refute my claims about his sexual orientation. Suddenly, the Foot Sergeant had a massive, rock-hard erection that lifted the sheet covering him like a tent pole.
When that happened, the poor guy turned bright red and began making strange noises as he struggled to breathe. Being a sharp lad, I shouted, “Oh my God, he has a priapism. I’m afraid you must leave now.” I thought I was home free as I escorted the pair to the passageway. But when they left the ICU, they ran into the ship’s doctor, who looked in to see what was happening. “What the fuck is going on in here?” He shouted, probably because he, too, had been drinking.
As the other physicians crowded into the ICU, I explained that some of the corpsmen had been teasing the Foot Sergeant about maybe being gay for some reason. I wanted to make amends for their despicable behavior by getting him some one-on-one attention from a Hollywood starlet. My boss, Dr. Derbert, wasn’t having it; “Bullshit, Lynch, you’re the one who started that rumor when he arrived in the hangar bay, and you’re the only corpsman to tease him about it ever since.” That wasn’t true; one of the other corpsmen occasionally teased the Foot Sergeant, but I was still screwed. The only thing that saved me was the propensity of the American military to cover up embarrassing incidents.
When the officers piled into the ICU, one of the nurses escorted Ann and her husband from the room. He confirmed to them that the badly wounded Marine would probably not survive, while Dr. Derbert read me the riot act. The medical men then gathered in a scrum to get their story straight before heading to the bridge to report to the Captain what had happened. When everyone cleared out of the ICU, our charge nurse, Frank, stood there looking at me with a wry smile. He was a good man, and we got along well, but I was still surprised by his following comment.
“Look at the bright side, Lynch; you got the physicians so pissed off they didn’t notice the washer and dryer. Your illegal laundry is safe for the time being.”
That was a big deal; clothes washed in the ship’s laundry returned damp, smelly, and wrinkled. If I had been responsible for losing our machines, I might have been even less popular with the crew. My new reputation for being the guy who took advantage of Ann Jillian’s kindness and sympathy was bad enough.
At Captain’s Mast, the skipper fined me three hundred bucks for being a dumb ass but suspended half of it after Nurse Frank read a statement from the Foot Sergeant about the impact Ann Jillian had on his flagging morale. The Foot Sergeant was a stand-up guy, and we stayed in touch. He married and left the Marine Corps for the big leagues in 1990. In 1992, he won a Pulitzer while writing for the New York Times. Then the son of a bitch got leukemia and died in 1995. I don’t think I ever cried as hard as I did the night his wife called to tell me. The fucking Foot Sergeant was a good man, and It’s been lonely growing old without him.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made headlines last week for ordering the military services to review their fitness standards for troops assigned to combat arms units. His goal is to create uniform standards to replace gender-based fitness tests. Although Hegseth is on record as being against women in combat, this (in theory) wasn’t about that. Hegseth reinforced his order with a video on X where he stated:
“We need to have the same standard, male or female, in our combat roles; soon, we’ll have nothing but the highest and equal standards for men and women in combat.”
That is great news, except it won’t work because standards can be waived, exceptions made, and rigorous standards challenged when senior officers or SNCOs cannot meet them. We didn’t end up with female officers graduating from the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course because IOC lacked standards. General officers of my generation seemed to honestly believe that introducing women into the infantry was a good idea as soon as they were selected to flag rank. But I don’t want to explore flag officer complicity because some of the men involved are friends of mine, and Marines have rules about what one says about one’s friends in blog posts.
Except for Joe Dunford, the best Marine Corps Commandant in my lifetime, who designed and authorized the 2015 Marine Corps Force Integration Plan experiment. That rigorously controlled, detailed experiment showed that forcing females into the combat arms would degrade overall performance and lethality.
Here is a sample of the data collected during the study:
Female Marines averaged 15 percent lower anaerobic power and capacity levels than their male counterparts.
In anaerobic power performance, the top 25 percent of female performers and the bottom 25 percent of male performers overlapped.
Female Marines demonstrated levels 10 percent lower on average in aerobic capacity than male Marines.
Over the course of the assessment, musculoskeletal injury rates totaled 40.5 percent for women, more than double the 18.8 percent rate for men.
In all, female Marines sustained 21 “time-loss” injuries, which took them away from task force duties for a day or more. Nineteen of the women’s injuries were lower extremity injuries, and 16 percent took place during a task that required movement while carrying a load.
Here are some highlights from the nine-month, 36-million-dollar study:
All-male squads in every infantry job were faster than mixed-gender squads in each tactical movement evaluated. The differences between the teams were most pronounced in crew-served weapons teams, which had to carry weapons and ammunition in addition to their individual combat loads.
Male-only rifleman squads were more accurate than their gender-integrated counterparts on each individual weapons system, including the M4 carbine, the M27 infantry automatic rifle, and the M203 grenade launcher.
Male Marines with no formal infantry training outperformed infantry-trained women on each weapons system at levels ranging from 11 to 16 percentage points.
The detrimental effects of forcing women into ground combat units were beyond dispute, and the way forward for then-Secretary of the Navy Ray Maybus was crystal clear. Maybus ignored the study (pilloried in mainstream media), and the standards for IOC were dropped so women could make it through. Putting those standards back will not fix the problem because they never were the problem; women were.
How can the senior flag officers insist it is imperative to put females into every combat formation when they would never force women onto the football teams of West Point or Annapolis? Is winning football games more important than the lives of the men and women they command? Of course not. If you forced a woman into the starting lineup of the Army or Navy, the ensuing disaster would play out on national television, and the ridiculous experiment would be terminated.
The same dynamic will play out if we ever expose our mixed-gender combat units to the sustained ground combat we experienced in Vietnam, Korea, or World War II. During the twenty years we spent fighting the Global War on Terror, the military fought a few battles, lots of firefights, and hundreds of ambushes, but it did not engage in sustained ground combat. When faced with the tactical problem of improvised explosive devices or separating insurgents from the local population instead of tactical solutions, the Pentagon made the money printers go brrr. They purchased thousands of gigantic Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles to protect every fireteam leaving the wire. When we abandoned Afghanistan, we also abandoned the MRAPs. They were no longer needed, and there was no budget or manpower to maintain them.
The Pentagon has lost the ability to make the money printers go brrr. In the future, tactical problems will need tactical solutions, which will be easier to find without the self-inflicted wound of women on the front lines.
I was watching one of the more popular Special Forces influencers, Nate Cornacchia, at the Valhalla VFT channel explain that the Special Forces Q course and Ranger School have already returned to the original, rigorous standards, effectively eliminating women from those courses. Nate explained in great detail why he believes in returning to the former standards. I think I agreed with everything he said, but he took so long to explain things that I skipped through the video. Too much computer screen time has reduced my attention span so much that my wife calls me Desi. My 2 ½ -year-old grandson Desi is not known for sitting still in quiet contemplation for longer than 5 seconds. But he’s cute as shit and can climb like a monkey because he’s fit, just like his granddad.
So I’m watching Nate, who looks like your typical former Special Forces operator. He’s wearing a tank top, has the tats, is jacked, and has the obligatory beard and ball cap. I was wearing a tank top, too, and I have a couple of tattoos but no beard, and I don’t habitually wear ball caps. I take a screenshot of myself watching Nate to compare, thinking I might be able to duplicate his SF mojo and become a corporate-sponsored military influencer. I might have a shot if all it takes is being fit enough to wear a tank top and some military tattoos.
Retired Special Forces operator Nate Cornacchia
Retired Marine infantry officer Tim Lynch watching Nate and realizing he was in grade school when Lynch retired from the Marine Corps
So, with a little more color in the background, I’m one expensive microphone away from the influencer lifestyle. Then, I remembered that America already has a retired Marine Corps infantry officer influencer, my friend Asad Khan. I then went over to his Sentinel 360 YouTube page to grab a picture of Asad in mid-rant.
No ball cap, wife beater, or Tats for Asad, who, like me, is just a regular infantry officer. If you can’t tell, he is a no-nonsense, very bright guy who can be a scary dude when aggravated. He took his battalion into Afghanistan back in 2004 and battled the Taliban to a standstill in Uruzgan Province.
When I went to fetch a shot of Asad, I noticed that Nate Cornacchia had another video up about the same topic. This time, he has another former Green Beret dude on, and they spent almost two hours going over the same territory. Once again, I agree with everything they said in principle because I skimmed through the video. Those guys sure can talk a lot, and I wonder if it’s the ADHD meds that seem prevalent in Gen Z, not that there is anything wrong with getting treatment for ADHD. It would explain why they are both wearing their ball caps backward while getting pedantic over what women can and can’t do in the SF community.
Then it dawned on me why I find the generational differences perplexing.
Chivalry.
Chivalry was taught to boomers at a young age as the masculine way of maintaining social decorum. Men were expected to protect women, children, and the elderly. Before you can protect your community, you must be able to protect yourself, so fistfights were expected as part of coming of age in the 60s and 70s. Our teachers taught us that violence never solves anything but our archaic masculine culture taught us it is really the gold standard.
An armed society is a polite society
Generation Z was taught that chivalry was an archaic, misogynistic artifact of Western European colonizers. They were taught manners instead of chivalry, with schools instituting zero-tolerance physical altercation policies. Chivalry is concerned with the right behavior; manners are concerned with the right appearance. One is the product of a masculine society, the other of a feminized culture. This might explain why testosterone levels are plummeting in younger Americans.
What happens to a military that denounces masculinity as toxic? Mannerism as disconnected from reality today as it was during the Italian High Renaissance. Colonel Susan Myers, commander of the 821st Space Base Group in Greenland, recently displayed classic girl boss mannerism. Col. Myers wrote this in an email to her command last week after hosting the Vice President and his lovely wife.
“I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the U.S. administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base. I commit that, for as long as I am lucky enough to lead this base, all of our flags will fly proudly — together.”
No adult who has taken a hard, straight right to the face would ever talk like that. As the ancient stoic Mike Tyson observed, “Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth.” So what was Col. Myers’s plan with her girl boss email? She had no plan. I’m uncomfortable with military commanders who continue to use passive-aggressive, malicious compliance to ‘flex’ against the bad orange man.
It is not only cowardly but also ungentlemanly to voice your personal “concerns” about the Vice President of the United States when you are in command of a military establishment. Military officers are taught from a young age that with politicians, they are to respect the office, not the man, which was a useful heuristic when serving under Clinton or Obama. As I sat here ruminating about loquacious Green Berets and shit-bird Space Force Colonels, a notification popped up that Sentinal 360 had posted another video. I checked it out, confident it wasn’t another 2 hours about women in combat.
Asad is interviewing retired Marine Colonel C.J. Douglas, who went through IOC when I was on the staff. C.J. is a great Marine and funny as hell, but as you can see, Asad is a serious-looking dude.
I was not disappointed because Asad had one of his generation’s best-retired infantry colonels, C.J. Douglas. Colonel Douglas distinguished himself during five combat tours and with his all-source intelligence-gathering capabilities. He consulted Free Range International for Afghanistan updates prior to deploying there, which he revealed by mentioning his old mentor (me) during his first interview with Asad, which automatically put him into the Free Range Hall of Fame.
And I know CJ Douglas can think after taking a punch to the mouth because I put him through the Room of Pain at IOC. The room of pain was designed to exercise decision-making while exhausted and fighting an enlisted close combat instructor, followed by an IOC instructor after being thrashed to the point of exhaustion by calisthenics.
As you look at the picture above, C.J. is smiling and is genuinely happy because he’s talking about killing bad guys. Asad is being Asad – interesting and candid, but not somebody you’d want to provoke because he’s a hard dude. CJ is, too, and if you’re not a personal friend and he’s looking at you with that big happy smile, he’s probably working his day job with the New York State Police, and you’re probably going to jail. Chivalrous men delight in tales about well-laid ambushes or nailing a high-value target and are genuinely happy when incarcerating anti-social drunks or petty criminals.
Then, praise the Lord, I found an article that might wrap this rambling post up nicely. It’s too late for me, Asad, CJ, or the Green Berets to be legitimate influencers because influencers are now considered obnoxious. I had no idea there were male fitness influencers who filmed their 6-hour morning routine. Another fitness guru (Dr Edward Group) drinks his urine every morning, claiming it’s the best source of stem cells. Is it possible that Dr. Group is correct? Of course. Should you drink your own urine every morning? No. Chivalrous men don’t drink their own urine or concern themselves with self-improvement via injections.
The antidote to influencers is authenticity, which is why the podcast market is booming. That’s why I enjoy the Sential 360 channel so much—Asad is fun to listen to because he is authentic, interested in the military, knows his history, and has great sea stories. As you watch him interview CJ Douglas, you can see the mutual respect and genuine love of the country and the Marine Corps in both of them.
Increased fitness standards will not rid the military of females in combat arms occupational specialties because they make meeting arbitrary fitness standards the issue. As Saul Alinsky, the patron saint of DEI, noted, “The issue is never the issue.” The issue of women in combat isn’t about fairness and equity for women; it’s about political power and the maintenance of the progressive elites’ narrative. Secretary Hegseth should announce the removal of women from all combat arms occupational specialties, not because they can’t meet some standard but because they have no business being there in the first place. It is high time to make Army infantry look like the West Point football team, not some utopian vision of a color-stratified America.
