Marine Corps Association & Foundation

Back in 1974-5 I served my first of three tours of duty as a member of the famed 3d Marine Division, based on Okinawa, Japan.  I served all of two of those tours and part of the third at Camp Schwab, aka “Schwabu-by-the-sea”, the northernmost of the major Marine base camps located on “The Rock.”  During my first 3d MarDiv tour on Okinawa, I had the early misfortune of being assigned as a battalion S-1 – the only assignment I ever held in my career in the Corps that I really hated (I learned a lot, but had no fun at it).  Still a seco

I am a lifelong student of both language and military affairs.  They are not necessarily mutually related topics of interest, but neither are they necessarily mutually exclusive.  Military life is so rich, full and dynamic that it creates a lexicon all of its own, words that often eventually disseminate into the everyday language of the people at large, with such words often losing their military origins in the process of evolution.  Such could be happening here in Iraq in the latter first decade of the 21^st Century.

The other night I finally figured out my I-Pod well enough to listen to some tunes to lull me to sleep.  I listened to one by famed Canadian folk-rock singer Gordon Lightfoot, who has put a lot of good songs on the air over the years, though I haven’t heard any new material of his recently.  My favorite of his songs is “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” a ballad about a maritime tragedy that occurred on Lake Superior in 1971 in which the ship of that name and all hands were lost at sea, er lake, in a savage gale.  One line of the lyrics is “…and the gales of November come

In 2006 I spent a few months on assignment in Kabul, working at a training facility outside the city, but commuting from a compound in the capital.  We rode to and from work every day in an armored SUV (useful in Kabuli traffic) and always went to and from in our flak jackets, armed with M-4’s and Glocks.  One of the guys was an inveterate “tourist” who never went anywhere without a camera.  This guy wanted to snap photos of everyone and everything.