Pearl Harbor
On December 7, 2016 my wife and I were visiting the Pearl Harbor Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii for the second time. We had been to the museum during my Army R&R in May 1969 when I was nine months into my combat tour in Vietnam. On both occasions we spent time at the USS Arizona…Read More
What I Am Thankful For
Note from Author: This was written for Thanksgiving, 2018. What could be more cliché or grammatically incorrect than to ask, on Thanksgiving Day, “What are you thankful for?” I had four years of Latin in high school and an exceptional English teacher. Ending a sentence with a preposition was strictly forbidden in both disciplines, and…Read More
The Blank Check
“A veteran—whether active duty, retired, or national guard or reserve—is someone who, at one point in their life, wrote a blank check made payable to ‘The United States of America,’ for an amount of “up to and including THEIR LIFE.” – Unknown Though I don’t agree entirely with the statement above, I appreciate its sentiment….Read More
An Idea for Our Immigration Problem
Policies that address multiple problems in a positive way are seldom executed. But there may be a way to approach three serious issues in a way that benefits everyone. It is widely reported than more than 100,000 people crossed our southern border illegally in the month of March 2019. We are not prepared for this…Read More
Our National Anthem
I’m sitting in a crowded gym with parents, grandparents, cheerleaders, students, and others. My interest is a handsome young man with long, curly hair, killer blue eyes that warm his grandmother’s heart, and a pretty good follow-through that reminds me of his father. He’s my grandson. Directly in front of me a large American flag…Read More
They Come in Search of a Better Life
Sometime in middle part of the nineteenth century a skinny young man named McMahan crammed himself into a famine ship in Northern Ireland. In the course of the following days his body was ravaged further by the hunger he fled. His life was threatened by typhus and dysentery. Many fellow travelers died at his side….Read More
My Experience Living and Editing The Little Orangemen
There was a time in Gaston County when young teenage boys from poor mill villages gathered on street corners after school. There we waited for a truck or a van or Coach Bennie Cunningham’s big station wagon to pick us up for football practice. We jostled and joked about our athletic skills, sometimes in the…Read More
My Books
