Let's write about rare times when politics was fun!

When Maine Politics Was Fun—and Sometimes Funny
By Tom Porter published in Bowdoin News

Yours truly Maine Writer is among the contributors.

Chris Potholm ’62: government scholar, political strategist, and author

Politics is, of course, a serious affair, but that doesn’t mean it should be devoid of humor, says Chris Potholm ’62, Bowdoin’s DeAlva Stanwood Alexander Professor of Government Emeritus.

It was this rationale that prompted Potholm—a seasoned political strategist and former Maine guide as well as a Bowdoin scholar—to help compile a newly released collection of humorous essays called Real Life, Real Funny: The Way Maine Humor Should Be (Down East Books, 2026).

Potholm says the book came out of a conversation he was having with a couple of friends who are also old hands from the Maine political scene—PR guru Dennis Bailey, a veteran of many campaigns, and former Congressman David Emery, a GOP insider and political consultant.

“We were talking about how miserable politics is today and how when we were on opposite sides of a campaign, of course we wanted to win, but we didn't think it was ‘all or nothing.’ We had friends on both sides, and if you lost, it wasn’t the end of the world.” In fact, adds Potholm, you might even hire your opponent to work on your next campaign. Politics today, he laments, is much less convivial and more divided. “People just didn’t do the sorts of things that they’re now encouraged to do.”

As a result of their conversation, the three friends decided to put together a collection of more than forty essays from dozens of contributors. In addition to contributions from the book’s three editors, there are vignettes from a number of well-known political figures, such as former US Defense Secretary and US Senator William Cohen ’62, H’75, former Maine governors John Baldacci and Angus King H’07 (currently a serving US Senator), as well as the current state governor, Janet Mills.

Potholm visibly cracks up as he recalls some of the anecdotes: Bill Cohen trying for a photo opportunity with “Andre the seal” while campaigning in Boothbay Harbor and promptly getting bitten on the backside by said mammal; John Baldacci failing miserably in a cow manure throwing contest at a Maine county fair (“I never was good at slinging the bull,” quipped the politician); or Maine Governor Janet Mills being attacked by a goose!

“Angus King also had some great stories,” says Potholm, “as he used to roll around the state on a motorbike, dressed in leather.” Many of the people he encountered weren’t used to seeing a politician looking like that. Some were incredulous. “Yeah, sure, and I’m Queen Elizabeth,” said one woman after King introduced himself as the state’s governor.

On another occasion, King and his motorcycling buddies had pulled over at a rest stop when they met a couple of fellow bikers from Massachusetts. “Welcome to Maine, I’m the governor,” said King, only to be reminded that they were in still in New Hampshire at the time!

A number of Bowdoin alumni are featured in the book: Apart from Potholm and Cohen, there are contributions from Jed Lyons ’74, Spiros Droggitis ’74, Bob Whelan ’62, Kevin Delahanty ’74, and Edie Smith ’81. Also featured is Bowdoin’s longtime communications director Scott Hood, who writes amusingly about his dog’s tendency for bringing roadkill into the house.

The book also includes stories from outside the world of politics, several of them featuring stock Maine characters such as farmers, fishermen, and hunters. Many of the tales are imbued with the deadpan humor so common in the Pine Tree State, says Potholm. “For example, if a Mainer runs into a friend at Hannaford, a typical greeting might be, ‘Hey, I didn't know you were out on bail,’” (said with a straight face).

Mainers are known across the nation for their dry sense humor, he observes. As the opening sentence of the book notes, “Maine humor is not an oxymoron, whereas Utah humor is.” The key trait is its understatement, explains Potholm. “It’s just a couple of clicks from reality.”

Juliana L'Heureux of Topsham, Maine, is honored to be among the book's contributors. 

Lets write about how America's past has the power to frame our future: The American I Have Known

I Remember America Before the Measles Vaccine
And I wish Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did too.
By Fran Moreland Johns published in The Atlantic June 2026

Lately, I’ve come to notice that the strangest and most terrible pieces of my childhood are roaring back. I was born in 1933, and much of what I remember as a little girl was defined by either the war or what we called, simply, sickness.

I myself was blessed with exceptionally good health, but my friends, family, and community were regularly struck with childhood diseases. Neighborhoods were frozen in fear when maladies suddenly erupted: pool closures during polio epidemics, quarantines when mumps or measles raged. I remember one particularly galling time when my older sister Mimi and I were confined to the house, morosely watching our friends playing on the construction site of a new house across the street. We were fine; they all had whooping cough. Whooping cough was often deadly for babies and toddlers but among the less debilitating of childhood diseases past for older children, thus the freedom to play while coughing. Neither Mimi nor I ever caught it—a fact I was grateful for 40 years later, when I met with a pulmonologist about my cigarette-compromised lungs and he remarked, “At least you never had whooping cough.”

We did, however, catch chicken pox simultaneously with our older sisters, Jane and Helen; we were then 5, 7, 11, and 13. Just thinking of it can resurrect the itch. (And lest I forget, some 70 years later, following a time of extended stress, that long-dormant varicella-zoster virus returned as a bout of shingles.) But that was nothing compared with the measles Jane contracted. Memories of those days, among the most vivid of my early life, still evoke tremors in the bottom of my stomach. There was widespread fear of measles causing blindness, which had indeed happened to a young family acquaintance. So for several days at the height of her illness, Jane was quarantined in one bedroom while Helen moved in with Mimi and me. The shades were drawn and curtains closed in Jane’s room, and the door was opened only after the hallway was darkened. She survived—and later went on to become a wife, mother, and well-regarded artist. But that was just the luck of the draw. Measles killed some 10,000 American children in the 1930s and ’40s—roughly 500 kids died every year. In my generation, we were the guinea pigs for what science would soon discover: This pesky childhood sickness increases the risk of stroke, chronic lung problems, and impaired neurodevelopment.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was not born yet when all of this took place. By the time he turned 13, in 1967, most of the diseases that ravaged my childhood had been eradicated by the vaccines he now disdains. The unfortunate thing about that disdain is that Kennedy has the power to impose his bizarre notions on the entire country. It’s too bad that we have no way to time-capsule him back several decades (or time-travel forward, for that matter) in hopes that he might understand the havoc he will wreak upon future generations.

RFK Jr. would have liked my friend Jack, a rambunctious child given to sudden mischief. Jack was part of a foursome, the others being Mary Sue and Tommy and me. We bonded days after I arrived in Ashland, Virginia, having just turned 6. For several years we were inseparable, even when Jack developed rheumatic fever and was bedridden for weeks. We simply detoured from climbing trees and playing ball into spending afternoons staging battles with toy soldiers on his bed or listening, enraptured, to his favorite radio serials, including The Lone Ranger and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. Jack was isolated even from the three of us when whooping cough rampaged through the town, but he still managed to catch that too. He died of heart failure at age 19; how much of that good young heart’s failure was due to those earlier illnesses, we’ll never know. That was more than half a century ago. 

I never forgot Jack. I wish I could tell JFKjr, Kennedy about him, and the pain his death caused everyone who loved him.

The other childhood friend I would most like our health secretary to know is Susan, who moved to our neighborhood in second grade and contracted polio when we were in our early teens. I remember being taken to visit her when she was in an iron lung. Though she was in a highly restricted part of the hospital, I was allowed to visit, largely because she was not expected to live and we were desperate to see each other. In those days of family doctors who made house calls for everything but major emergencies, I had been in a hospital once or twice at most. I knew all about the iron lung and was thoroughly familiar with Susan’s precarious state; still, I was not prepared for the sight of a giant monster of a machine on sturdy legs, with only my friend’s head protruding from one end.

There were six of them in all, I think, in a cold room smelling of ether and rubbing alcohol: six futuristic creatures with human heads. Nurses in starched white uniforms and rubber-soled white shoes walked wordlessly among the machines, which kept up a steady thrum as they forced air in and out of failing lungs. Susan’s mother stood on one side, stroking her daughter’s hair, while Susan and I talked in voices just above a whisper, as if we were in church. She wanted to tell me about the boy who had been in the iron lung behind where I sat, who was there when she arrived but a few days ago had vanished. There was only one other visitor, another mother stroking another small head. Happy as I was to see Susan, I couldn’t help wondering if I would be able to summon the courage to endure such hardship just to survive. But survive she did, unexpectedly, to live to adulthood with some disabilities.

The disabilities resulting from those childhood diseases far exceeded the recorded life-and-death statistics: the compromised lungs, the weakened hearts, the bones and muscles and systems unable to develop as they might have. It’s impossible to calculate the awful toll. Vaccines, though, changed it all, essentially vanquishing those diseases in the United States and much of the rest of the world. The rejection of science is sending us back to those dark ages.

When I was 12 years old, Americans everywhere threw what can only be described as a two-day party. It was 1945, and Japan had surrendered. Euphoria swept across the country, including in small towns like Ashland, where my friends and I had pulled red wagons around to gather scrap for the war effort. There had been a slight exhaling of breath the previous May, on what came to be known as V-E Day, and another one after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. (Only later would I learn the grim moral complexity of such weapons.) 

Yet, the end of the two front devastating war brought a widespread belief that lasting peace was no longer just a dream. Flags went up on every front porch, the sounds of long-hoarded firecrackers pierced the air, perfect strangers hugged each other on sidewalks, and high-school bands paraded in the streets.

Those of us who are now in our 90s might be forgiven a twinge of nostalgia for that moment. But this is no plea to return to some imaginary good old days. Indelibly etched into my brain are memories from the decade leading up to our entry into the war. I was 4, at most, the night my father awakened Mimi and me in what seemed the middle of the night and gently carried us downstairs into the living room. He deposited us on the floor in front of the Philco radio. We sat at the feet of our mother, who was on the sofa darning socks. There were crackling sounds coming from the radio, someone speaking over the noise of a crowd. My father explained that we were in no danger but that terrible things were happening in the world, largely because of one very bad man, and he wanted us to hear what this madman sounded like: Adolf Hitler on a shortwave-radio broadcast. We, of course, had no idea what Hitler was saying. But the angry shouts to a cheering crowd, sounds reinforced later in newsreel clips shown at movies we occasionally attended, carried a powerful message I have never forgotten. They were the sounds of evil, the antithesis of “Love thy neighbor.”

Americans survived those years on kindness and collective effort. In the 1930s, when hunger, poverty, and despair were at levels hard to imagine today, you could have nothing and still be kind. As a child who never went hungry, I was spared the traumas suffered by many, but I witnessed hardship in the nation’s psyche. My father had a job that paid enough to feed four daughters and cover the mortgage on our tiny three-bedroom house, albeit just barely. Several times a week, men in worn coats and brown fedoras in search of food and work would knock on our back door. My mother would make peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, hand them to me with glasses of milk, and instruct me to be very polite to “our visitors.”

Throughout World War II, we knitted socks for soldiers and went with our mother to deliver hot cross buns to neighbors when a new Gold Star was hung in someone’s front window. 

We kids were also serious about collecting scrap and were occasionally enlisted to help watch the skies from a small rural hut for the rare passing airplane, whose description we would carefully record in a government logbook. My memories of these long-ago years are spotty; I was just a child.

Far more clearly I recall the aftermath, when all of those men (and a few women) in uniform came home—Jane married one of them—and war stories were left behind. Everyone was in a hurry to move forward into a newly peaceful world, a world without the tragedies of war abroad and the curse of sickness at home.

It was a time of singular, optimistic patriotism. No one thought the road ahead would be easy; everyone believed that peace and shared prosperity were possible. For nearly a century, I’ve been privileged to watch the fits, starts, and swings of that optimism: the forward leaps of science and technology, the backward falls into tragic wars, the sidesteps into misguided ideologies. But the collective effort behind those hot cross buns and front-porch flags? That is still who we are, if we choose to be.

Let's write a different point of view about the American Revolution and the 250th national anniversary

Why the American Revolution Brought
Liberty — And the French Revolution a Reign of Terror

“Oath o

“Oath of La Fayette at the Fête de la Fédération,” Unknown, ca. 1790-91, Musée Carvavalet, Paris

Echo COMMENTARY by Solène Tadié
published in the National Catholic Register: 

The experiences of Lafayette and other veterans of the American War of Independence reveal why many came to see the French Revolution as the opposite of the freedom they had defended across the Atlantic.

“Humanity has gained its suit. Liberty will never more be without an asylum.”

When the Marquis de Lafayette wrote these words in 1781, shortly after the Continental Army’s victory at Yorktown, he believed he had witnessed an event that the rest of the world would emulate: a people freeing themselves from tyranny to govern themselves as they had always wished.

Within a decade, this Frenchman would be forced into exile from his homeland, which was tearing itself apart in the name of the very ideals his example had helped inspire, and would spend years in an Austrian prison.

The 250th anniversary of American independence is an occasion to celebrate the long-standing Franco-American friendship. But it is also an opportunity to address a question absent from official commemorations: Were the American and French revolutions truly events of the same nature, separated only by time and geography?

The men who lived through both knew the answer. Many of the French officers whom King Louis XVI sent across the Atlantic to fight alongside the colonial insurgents found themselves on the other side of the barricades when revolution broke out in their own country (1789-1799) — hunted down, imprisoned and executed by a regime that proclaimed itself the legitimate heir to the freedom for which they had fought in America.

Political vs. Ideological Revolutions

“People are wrong to compare the two revolutions,” historian Reynald Sécher, one of France’s foremost scholars of the counterrevolutionary movements and author of A French Genocide: the Vendée, told the Register. “The American Revolution had for its sole aim to free itself from the tutelage of the king of England — a tutelage that expressed itself almost exclusively through fiscal obligations. Fundamentally, the insurgents did not call into question the nature of society.”

France was a very different matter, Sécher said.

“The revolutionaries had a specific program,” he explained, “which consisted of destroying the divine right monarchy and the traditional, ordered society, to replace them with a new world, a new order, a new man.”

He argued, moreover, that the American Revolution was political in nature — aimed at breaking away from a distant crown that had overstepped its rights — while the French Revolution was purely ideological. In Sécher’s view, it was a project of fundamental transformation that targeted everything beyond its control, including the faith of ordinary people.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the systematic persecution of resistant priests, and the forced de-Christianization of entire regions were not merely excesses of this movement, Sécher insisted, but its natural corollary. This campaign against the Catholic faith also resulted in the public execution of the 16 Carmelite nuns of Compiègne during the Reign of Terror in 1794 for refusing to renounce their religious vocation.

King Louis XVI had entered the war in the U.S. for reasons that were far less philosophical than strategic; the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) had cost France its first colonial empire, and supporting the insurgents was a way to settle scores with England.

But what the officers sent across the Atlantic discovered would leave a lasting impression on them. They encountered a society that aspired to autonomy without, however, upending the world in which it existed. Churches remained active and local institutions retained their vitality, even playing a key role in the independence process. 

Actually, it was this experience of an orderly and deeply rooted freedom that these men brought home with them. And it was precisely this that enabled them, when the time came, to recognize the opposite.

The Men Who Knew the Difference

France officially allied itself with the American insurgents in 1778. Among the officers deployed alongside the Americans were several men who would later become leading figures in the armed resistance against the French Revolution. “In reality,” noted Sécher, “the majority of the French Royal Navy officers rejected the revolution in their own country, which led to mass resignations and numerous exiles.”

Perhaps one of the most revealing examples of this paradox is that of Armand Tuffin de La Rouërie. A nobleman and personal friend of General George Washington, he distinguished himself by fighting in America, forging a reputation as a courageous commander.

“A parliamentarian and heir to an illustrious family, this man was a rebel who had risen up against his own world — the world of tradition — in the name of individual and collective freedom,” explained Sécher. “It was with this logic that he enlisted alongside the American insurgents.”

Yet, as soon as he set foot on his native soil again, a bitter reality dawned on him.

“He immediately understood that the nature of the revolution underway was contrary to natural law — and that the only true guarantor and protector of this natural law was the king, the divine right monarchy.”

He organized the resistance in his native province of Brittany and founded a counterrevolutionary movement that would come to be known as the Chouannerie.

Another veteran of the American campaigns, François-Athanase de Charette de la Contrie, would go on to become the most iconic figure of the Vendée counterrevolution. In 1793, this French naval officer was approached by Vendée peasants to lead their uprising against a republic that was closing their churches and conscripting their sons. The army he commanded called itself the Catholic and Royal Army.

“He did not fight for the monarchy out of nostalgia,” Sécher insisted, “but because it seemed to him the regime best suited to defend the natural rights set forth by Christ, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. This is the paradox that his contemporaries struggle to grasp.”


At the Treaty of La Jaunaye in 1795, the terms he secured for the Vendéens were unambiguous: freedom of worship and exemption from conscription — the defense of local rights and individual freedoms against a revolution that, in his experience, was synonymous with de-Christianization, authoritarian centralization, and conscription forcibly imposed on the countryside. He was captured and executed by republican authorities in 1796.

This story remains in the collective consciousness of a segment of the country. At Puy-du-Fou, the famous historical theme park in the Vendée where Charette’s epic is reenacted every year before hundreds of thousands of visitors, Nicolas de Villiers — whose father Philippe, the park’s founder, considers himself an heir to the White Vendée fighters — keeps a certificate on his office wall attesting that his family is among the “Sons of the American Revolution.” This paradox, it seems, has never required explanation.
Burke’s Verdict

No contemporary grasped the stakes more clearly than Edmund Burke, one of the greatest minds of his time, as early as 1790. The Irish statesman and philosopher who had passionately defended the American colonists in the British Parliament — while opposing their complete independence — was dismayed by what he saw unfolding in France, viewing the revolution as the end of chivalry and the extinction of the glory of Europe.

As he wrote in his pamphlet “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” the revolutionaries were jeopardizing their posterity by failing to preserve the legacy of their ancestors, unlike the Americans. 

Burke put into powerful and definitive words what figures such as La Rouërie and Charette had already come to understand through experience on the ground.

“You began ill,” he wrote, “because you began by despising everything that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital.”

To Burke, freedom detached from moral restraint inevitably became destructive: “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

These reflections remain as relevant as ever 250 years later.

What set the American Revolution apart from the French Revolution was, above all, a conception of freedom that Western societies are now compelled to reconsider: the idea that freedom without roots, without heritage, and without a moral order is merely a prelude to tyranny.

Keywords:
liberty
american revolution
french revolution
marquis de lafayette
united states
freedom


Solène Tadié Solène Tadié is the Europe Correspondent for EWTN News. A French-Swiss journalist based between Rome and Budapest, she has covered religious, political, and cultural affairs across Europe for several years. She previously worked on the Culture section of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s Italian-language daily newspaper. In addition to her reporting, she is a frequent speaker and moderator at international conferences on major societal and civilizational issues. She is the author of a forthcoming book-length interview with Cardinal Péter Erdő, Le Royaume et le monde (Cerf, 2026), and is currently working on a book on the renewal of the Catholic faith in Europe, to be published in the U.S. in 2027. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Roma Tre University (Italy) and a degree in philosophy from the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum, Italy).

Let's Write about protecting the rights of trees! Who speaks for the trees?

Who Speaks for the Trees❓ 🌲🌳A Tiny Quebec Town.

Echo report by Ephrat Livni published in The New York Times.

QUEBEC- Terrasse-Vaudreuil has adopted a resolution to protect trees, which its mayor called “indispensable allies,” as living beings.

The small town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil, Quebec, was carved out of the forest about 75 years ago. But until recently, the trees had no rights.

A few countries and local jurisdictions around the world have recognized the rights of nature to varying degrees. This town of about 2,000, just west of Montreal, is the first governing body to adopt the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Trees, according to the global environmental law tracker, Eco Jurisprudence Monitor. The resolution recognizes that trees, as living beings, have the right to exist, thrive and receive protections in the law.

“If we live in Terrasse-Vaudreuil, it’s because we love trees,” said Sylvie Trépanier, a member of the town’s environmental committee, which drove the resolution. “We want to keep what we have.”
Trees, Please

Last spring, about 60 residents attended a screening of “Des Arbres et Des Arts,” or “The Trees and the Arts,” a documentary by the Quebec filmmaker André Desrochers that proposes trees should receive legal rights. “We decided we really need to do something,” Ms. Trépanier said

The town’s environmental committee wrote a proposal to prioritize tree protection for the health of the canopy and the broader community, and it gained widespread support.

When councilors adopted the resolution unanimously, Mayor Michel Bourdeau declared, “Today, we affirm that trees are not merely a backdrop in our community. They are indispensable allies for our health, our climate resilience, and our quality of life.”

The Universal Declaration on the Rights of Trees was drafted in France in 2018, and 2019, by lawyers, ecologists and lawmakers. It mandates that humanity “act with the Tree in a spirit of fraternity and solidarity” and has been presented as a petition to the United Nations and the European Parliament, among others.

Adopting the resolution was not merely symbolic, Mr. Bourdeau said in an interview. In Terrasse-Vaudreuil, practically, the resolution requires the town to prioritize canopy protection across all municipal planning. The next step is to review existing regulations and strengthen tree protections, the mayor said, followed by plans to plant and distribute trees to schools, businesses and residents in an ongoing effort to protect and diversify what has now been deemed a collective asset.

This month, a bill was introduced in the British Parliament to recognize the rights of nature. More than three dozen communities in the United States, and a handful in Canada, Mexico, Peru, Australia, Ireland, and Northern Ireland have adopted laws or nonbinding resolutions recognizing such rights, according to Mari Margil, who heads the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights. And Ecuador enshrined rights of nature in its Constitution in 2008.

Nature has long been considered property in legal systems around the world and treated as a resource. The rights of nature movement advances laws recognizing nature’s independent right to exist, thrive and regenerate.

In 2008, the organization Ms. Margil leads worked with delegates to Ecuador’s constitutional convention to develop rights of nature provisions. Since then, laws and court rulings in Panama, Colombia, Bolivia, Uganda, Bangladesh, and Spain “have recognized that nature possesses legally enforceable rights — including the most basic of rights, the right to exist,” she wrote. “This is a movement that has grown quickly,” she added.
But it took decades to gain traction.

Once Unthinkable:  “Throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, theretofore, a bit unthinkable,” wrote Christopher D. Stone in a 1972, Southern California Law Review article proposing legal rights for “natural objects” like trees.

He argued that “the rightlessness of rightless ‘things’” seems inherent or fundamentally true, rather than “a legal convention acting in support of some status quo.” Just as laws denying rights to women, children and people of various abilities, races, ethnicities, nationalities and religions were once considered just before becoming unacceptable, views on nature could similarly change, Mr. Stone suggested.

“It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak,” he wrote. “Corporations cannot speak either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities or universities. Lawyers speak for them.”

That same year, United States Supreme Court Justice William Douglas echoed this view, dissenting in a case that ruled the Sierra Club lacked standing to challenge development in California’s Sequoia National Forest. Justice Douglas argued people should be able to sue on behalf of “environmental objects” for their preservation, and that if inanimate objects, like ships, can be parties in litigation, “so it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life.”

The justice’s stance more than a half century ago is “still pretty far out,” said Carl R. Gold, a Maryland lawyer and naturalist who has written about tree rights. But, he praised Terrasse-Vaudreuil for taking “a terrific first step.”

“Trees need someone to speak up for them,” he said.

Ephrat Livni is a Times reporter covering news around the world. 

Let's write about the horrible Vietnam War

VIETNAM-MY OPINION by Colonel Keith Nightingale

Occasionally, I am asked to describe my experience and opinions regarding my time in Vietnam, during the Vietnam war. 

Over time, I have developed distilled thoughts on both. My time was my service as it was for the almost 3 million other people that served there. Like most, I have very mixed feelings.

I am proud of my military service, sickened by the senior leadership that sent us and kept us going there in a knowingly lost cause-knowing to them, not to us. As hogs in the processing plant, we climbed the chartered aircraft and flew west to do the Nation’s bidding.
But ultimately, I am proud and satisfied with my time spent. How many Vietnamese and American lives were spent to maintain our leader’s deception❓
I would designate a special place in hell for LBJ, Robert MacNamara and several of the Generals and admirals who knew we were throwing good lives against great lives-afraid to reveal the truth and unable to answer the basic moral call of ethical leadership.
Westy and Depuy who refused to recognize the war for what it was and insisted on throwing good soldiers and Marines toward their vision of the conflict that existed only in their minds. To us that went, we saw the truth in our own microcosms of reality.

I know of few other instances where the leaders were so consistently unworthy of the led.

The people of Vietnam were and are a strong resilient people with much of our values-their lives squandered by venal toadies and our disinterest in influencing quality rather than loyalty in positions of national responsibility.
Despite that, we went, generally positively initially, and later in resigned loyalty. Our lodestone was always the people we were with and the shared experiences.
Experience writ large was different for each of us and yet much universally the same.
Vietnam was highly personal for each of us and grossly impersonal for us all. It was a war.

Overall, I think Vietnam, writ large, was and is a highly personal experience and largely determined by the makeup and attitude of each of us that went there and came home, still retaining some form of cognitive processing capability.

Experience and perception-as reality, depended upon the time, location and unit of assignment. Experience differed by mere days or physical location. Some generally rested in a year of boredom while others would be routinely torn asunder.
Life was truly luck and timing.

We arrived, were processed with studied practice, issued generally common equipment and sent to our fates.
We learned the intricacies of reading a 1 over 50,000 map with check points and impossible contour lines. Maps became our compass and sweat the fuel of progress.

The company street became our resort living-clean fatigues, semi-shined boots and mess hall chow. Hootch maids giggling over laundry tubs. Thoughts of home and those behind.

The firebase, piss tubes, incoming, outgoing, swarms of rats, antenna farms over conex containers, emplacing fougas and claymores, the shit burners and tornados of dust kicked up by sling loaded chinooks and inbound Hueys shaking and vibrating to take us elsewhere.

The lifers with starched fatigues, shined boots, soft hats and soothing words………unless you were 3,000 feet below and not moving fast enough.

The calendar was our common denominator-12 months for Army and 13 for Marines-unless wounded or killed sooner.

We saw and tasted our own dictated geographical and situational environment as well as the deep green, open delta’s and rugged green mountains and blasted hills of the land.

We saw the effect of our various technologies in application and thanked God we were not on the other end. Occasionally, they had better.
We gained a great respect for the small, dirty, half-starved and fully competent enemy we met-as worthy as we.

Some of us, operating with the indigenous population, uniformed and otherwise, saw the extent of human nature on the population, the venal, the sublime and those most worthy of our trust. 

It was an experience and exposure that most sequestered in their camps, would not see. For that, I am most grateful. I gained immense respect for those of a different color but with the same shared values. They became our refugees and greatly enhanced our population and National character.
Regardless of time and place, we, the Infantry, the Grunts, Marine and Army, generally rucked up with incredible loads, mounted the UH1H helicopter steed, shook and shuddered our way to a place we did not know but would always remember. We experienced heat, thirst, cold, wet, hunger and a myriad of uncivilized events and personal insults. We slogged and climbed and slid and saw all of the green and none of the green. We just did it.

We explored the wonders and degradations of C rats and 20 year old cigarettes. Warm beer made worse by the lowest procurement bid.
We learned to make do in a million different ways and eagerly learned the vets tips on alternate uses for mosquito repellent, toilet paper and peanut butter.
Swiss Miss and C rat coffee would be our ambrosia in the deep green or the creosote reeking bunkers.
We felt the sudden cacophony of fire at the initial contact, the discordant explosions of both side’s weaponry and the deep fear and demands on self control.

Boots under the ponchos, parts scattered in trees and craters and lumps of flesh, cotton and swarming flies.

The immensely satisfying Crump of friendly artillery and the showers of leaves, bark and mud. A warm blanket for the soul.

The face once seen for a nano second of combat time to be remembered forever from a deep long-retired sleep.
The knowledge that race, religion and social standing is 100% irrelevant in the corpus of combat.

The ville with its exotic mysteries, ao dais flowing behind the vespa’s, grasping hands from the recesses of thatch bars with booming music accented our time.

The smokey warm broth of pho in the early morning and the exotic accompaniments so foreign to the Western soul.

Picking out the baked in weevils from the morning ben my and enjoying the crunch of the crusty cover.

Cold 33 Beer served in a large glass with a chunk of ice-ambrosia.

The blue sick smell of rotting straw, fish parts and the detritus of life on the edge greeted us at every rural ville.

Water buffalo, deadly to men, docile to children, ploughed dank heated paddies.
Some heard the screams of nurses to get help in staunching the flows of a dozen deep penetrations and to fight the deepening shadow of life within the eye of the teenager on the canvas.

Others saw the doctors just point to the hall for some and the operating room for others-The Medevac takes all sorts.
We learned the sound of the small red bubble hiss of the sucking chest wound and the sudden clack of the claymore before it detonated.

We understood the time between the clunk of the VC mortar and the impact was less than the time it usually took to hit the ground.

We learned that the Red Cross donut dollies and the AFVN weather girls were more rumor than confirmed fact. Ditto the USO shows.
R&R was a treasured seven days that seemed to take less than 24 hours. Usually, two of them would be on a plane-wishing and hoping.
We experienced both the exhilaration and the fear of contact and wondered in our deepest souls-Will I fail them❗ ❓

Will I do my part❓
Respect of the small band of brothers became the lodestone of our lives.

We felt exquisite loneliness in the crowded company of others.
Above all else, we learned to cope. Some did it with drugs and ill-discipline, liquor binges and disruption. Others turned inward and found solace in quality companions or contemplative outlets.
Drugs provided a momentary fog but with potential future consequences.

The Vietnam war enshrouded all of its participants with a potential future of bad dreams, bad behavior and helpless management. Coping would be forever.

The human toll and emotions of the tour were not dependent upon the location-the enemy was the same everywhere. 

Only the numbers differed and the manner of encounter. Regardless, mortality was always a momentary thing and then it passed………for the moment.

The Delta was flat, wet and incredibly hot with only the occasional snatch of village shade or deep swamp canopy. The air reeked with primordial mud hidden by chocolate grey waters enriched with a thousand years of organic deposit.

III Corps was a mix of heavily urbanized and the grossly primordial. Civilization coalesced with all its smells, colors and exotica-so foreign to the western experience. The jungle was deep, obscure and decidedly deadly with an arsenal of human, animal and insect predation.

II Corps was rolling grass and tree covered hills and plains. Coastal villages reeking of nouc mam and salt air. Mountains in the west bordering the unpromising land and sanctuaries beyond. The Kraken’s lurking in their caves occasionally to come forward and feast on our remains.
I Corps was the conventionalists paradise-unless you were there. Big units and big guns-mostly theirs and not ours. Not a fun place unless you were a senior with ice cream, air conditioning and an office at 3,000 feet.
Universal to all was the red laterite dust and dense humid tendrils seeping from the ground. The pounding rain of the monsoon and the incredibly dancing vermillions and gold of a sunset.
We all awaited the dawn-that meant life. And dreaded the coming dark-the color of potential death.

In sum, Vietnam was an experience and each participant held his or her own unique thoughts about the subject-often in simultaneous conflict.
Through the progress of time, I have reached some clarity in my ambivalence.

• Now, I detest those that sent us-shrouding their knowledge with the untruths of purpose foisted upon us.

Neverhteless, I am immensely proud of those that served with me-from the dedicated professional to the unwilling dodgeless draftee-they gave 100% when they had to and understood that each was a crucial part of their very small whole. For whatever was their future life, they served us well then.

I am equally proud of the service of the hundreds of Vietnamese troops that served with me as a junior officer. Through a disastrous event in the jungle to the grinding urban combat of Tet, they were consistently stellar soldiers and led by a man of amazing professional quality that became the model for my future service.
Quality knows no ethnicity.

And I am forever grateful that I had the experience of Service and performed reasonably well in a land that could have been much more honored by our presence than it was.

Most of all, and I believe speaking for most us, we did it for the children.

31 Jan 1968. By the time we quit Tet in Mid-May, we knew we kicked their ass and had a major victory and its opportunity. 

But, Cronkite killed it and LBJ concurred. The generals kept on sending us into a lost cause losing a lot of good folks to the detriment of the Nation later. We have a wall of heroes. But, we need a wall of shame.

Let's write about environmental protection of world turtles!

Reported in the South Florida Sun Sentinel news

by Genia Naro-Maciel

This World Sea Turtle Day is as much a cause for celebration as a call to action. 

On South Florida's beaches, turtle mothers are coming ashore to nest, and many populations are recovering. After decades of protection, green sea turtles are rebounding and no longer classified as endangered on the global Red List of Threatened Species. These rare beacons of hope amid otherwise dire forecasts illuminate paths to a sustainable future, one that could benefit endangered organisms, fragile ecosystems and human societies alike.

This is also a call for action. 

Many will remember the viral video of a sea turtle having a plastic straw extricated from its nostril, sparking numerous anti-pollution campaigns. But this was just the tip of the iceberg. Conservation funding remains limited and uneven, yet pollution, coastal development, climate change, harvest, bycatch and disease continue to threaten sea turtles.
In the Gulf, the catastrophic 2010, Deepwater Horizon oil spill killed hundreds of thousands of animals, including sea turtles, destroying livelihoods and ecosystems.
Even so, on April 12, just 10 days before Earth Day, the oil industry gained full exemption from protecting endangered species there, casting a shadow over near-extinct Rice’s whales and critically endangered sea turtles.
The Kemp’s Ridley is the planet’s most endangered sea turtle, due primarily to intense historical egg harvest. Containing one of only two global nesting sites, the Gulf’s Padre Island offers essential protection from habitat loss and ongoing threats. The people and ecosystems that rely on them are affected too. These beautiful organisms sustain economies through fisheries and tourism, and help many who depend on thriving marine life. They support healthy oceans and coasts by indicating environmental health as sentinel species, engaging people in the planet as iconic flagship species, and maintaining food web balance as keystone species.
In South Florida, globally renowned rescue and educational centers like Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach, Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton, Broward County Sea Turtle Conservation Program, Miami-Dade County Sea Turtle Conservation Program, Mote Marine Lab, and Turtle Hospital in Marathon bring turtles to safety. With local Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Networks and committed volunteers, government and commercial partners, they have rehabilitated and released thousands of vulnerable turtles while educating the public and protecting key areas.
With the support of both Floridians and visitors, Florida now represents the complex promise of endangered species recovery, with nesting numbers for some loggerheads, leatherbacks and green turtles rising significantly over the past few decades amid fluctuations. These gains reflect long-term protections such as safeguarding nesting beaches and reducing fisheries bycatch, including banning disorienting light pollution.
At local through international levels, ingredients for success center on local community involvement, supported by volunteers, scientists, governments, businesses and other professionals, in legally protecting species and areas. 

Over 50 years of conservation efforts reveal that individual through federal actions have a good chance of attaining win-win situations benefiting local communities, endangered species and the planet.

Even so, arguments against environmental protection focus on prioritizing economic progress and industrial deregulation over conservation. This is a false either/or choice. There are numerous well-documented ways to support economies, ecosystems and society at once through sustainable development. Interconnected, healthy systems offer many jobs, and protecting life on Earth helps keep our planet healthy and safe, as extinctions and ecosystem collapses disrupt food systems, the climate and economies.

So on World Sea Turtle Day, enjoy and support your sea turtles and protected areas. Watch turtles nest or release hatchlings with the Loggerhead Marinelife Center, which may well be one of the most inspiring experiences of a lifetime. 

Visit a turtle hospital, get a Florida sea turtle specialty license plate to support conservation, use turtle-friendly lights, take a run for sea turtles, think about what you buy, or whom you plan to vote for in this year’s elections. Governments and businesses can sustain local, national and international conservation organizations, including those outlined above, and federal efforts can focus on balanced development and planetary health, working inclusively towards a sustainable future.

Genia Naro-Maciel is a sea turtle biologist, clinical professor of sustainability, environmental justice and health in liberal studies at New York University, and an OpEd Project Public Voices Fellow.

Let's Write about Maryland's affection for Ocean City

Ocean City is just a tiny dot on the map of Maryland's Eastern Shore; but Marylander's support generations of nostalgic memories "Down the Ocean".

Memories reflected in "Down the Ocean" by my high school friend, a prolific author and poet, Michael Wright. We grew up in the shadow of a culture where going to Ocean City, was more or less a right of passage during of our teen age years.

Check out this link to take a virtual tour of the Ocean City Life Saving Museum at this link here.

Plus, an interesting history article published in the Baltimore Sun by Josh Davis. Ocean City demolition unearths piece of Senior Week history. Remnants of a 1930s, garage tied to early Senior Week history found on Fifth Street.

Ocean City Museum, Maryland

OCEAN CITY Md.- Hal Adkins has developed a reputation for uncovering pieces of Ocean City’s past during major construction projects. Last year, crews building a new police substation unearthed the town’s original 1929, electrical substation, once responsible for powering all of Ocean City, said Adkins, the Public Works Director, told the Ocean City Council on Tuesday.

Now, another demolition project has revealed a different chapter of the resort’s history. Workers tearing down the former Fifth Street Post Office last week discovered remnants of the Safe Garage, a 1930s-era building, linked to the early days of Senior Week — the long-standing tradition that draws thousands of graduating high school students to Ocean City each year.
“That lot has an interesting history before the post office building opened there in 1962,” Katz said. “As the late George Hurley was fond of saying, ‘Gordon, there is a story under every lot in Ocean City.’”
The lot, at Philadelphia Avenue and Fifth Street, was vacant until 1928, Katz said. E. Preston Disharoon, a lumber dealer in Berlin, bought the three contiguous lots that make up the property and built a 65-car parking garage.
Disharoon sold the garage in 1930, to husband and wife Samuel and Dellie Ayres, who renamed it the “Safe Garage,” a mechanic shop with rooms to rent and parking. Katz said it was advertised in a local chamber of commerce booklet in 1937, as “Safe Garage and Rooms. Fireproof Storage Garage. Nice cool rooms.”

An advertisement published in The Baltimore Sun in May 1947, promoted the “Safe Garage” as a lodging spot for young men visiting the beach resort.
“Boys, we have lots of improvements that consist of new floors, newly painted walls, hot showers and Englander Innerspring mattresses with rates the same,” the ad stated.
The concrete slab of the old building was still intact beneath the former post office, Adkins said.
He reached out to local historian Gordon Katz, of the Ocean City Life-Saving Museum, who shared the story with The Sun.
Collins Ayres, the couple’s son, took over management in 1940 and bought the building a year later. An ad in The Sun on June 30, 1945, read “STOP at safe garage. Storage. Simonizing, washing & greasing, also rooms for rent.”

According to Katz, the 1947, ad in The Baltimore Sun is notable because it mentions, “We will cater to fraternities this season,” likely a reference to an early version of Senior Week.
“The first such documented event in Ocean City took place in June 1946, when college students and ex-servicemen descended on the town in an impromptu pilgrimage that is now repeated (and expanded to include high school seniors) annually,” Katz said. “The Safe Garage offered 15 rooms to house the ‘boys’ for their romp in Ocean City.”
The building was sold to Frank Baker in 1948, and renamed Columbus Garage, though the same services continued, Katz said. During the 1950s, Baker offered the property to the town for $55,000 as a possible location for a new convention center. The town passed.
Baker had several run-ins with local police in 1957, Katz said. In early June, he was denied a permit to convert the garage into a service station but did the alterations anyway until a Circuit Court halted the project with an injunction.
“That the site had been the location of Ocean City’s first electric power plant, built in 1892, which had been converted to an oil-fired engine in 1923,” Katz said. “The power plant burned down in 1925, taking with it the Atlantic Hotel, the neighboring Seaside Hotel, much of the south side of Wicomico Street, and the pier.”
Future owners “simply covered the old tanks when erecting their new structures,” until Public Works discovered it in 2024.
In another example, Katz said the north side of Worcester Street between Baltimore and Philadelphia avenues once housed a thriving Black community in the late 1890s and early 1900s.
“You would never know it today,” Katz said. “You can pick almost any site in Ocean City, especially in the area south of 15th Street, and there is likely a story there, even if the lot is vacant today.”
“Just a few weeks later, Baker was back in court, this time accusing four teenagers from Washington with malicious destruction at his rooming place,” Katz said. “The underage boys had persuaded someone to buy them beer and then apparently went on a rampage – not an unusual occurrence.”
The building was sold again in 1961, mostly torn down and leased to what was then called the U.S. Post Office Department, Katz said.
“These stories come up quite often, given Ocean City’s 150-year history,” Katz said. “Ocean City is almost continuously reinventing itself.”
Katz pointed to another recent discovery: the town’s first substation, unearthed at the southwest corner of Baltimore Avenue and Somerset Street near the Boardwalk.