Category: War

Taking care of business

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
“What, you think I’m some sort of putz like that Trump character?”

Well. Seems the Israelis went and stole some of the pomp and circumstance from Der Trumpenführer’s little parade.

Saturday’s expensive, theatrical pud-pulling in DeeCee will soon be forgotten, even by fanboys, late-show wiseguys, and meme-makers. But people will be talking about what Israel just did to Iran for the better part of quite some time.

Discussing the differences between preemptive strikes and preventative war in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols likened the Israeli decapitation of the Iranian military’s chain of command to Michael Corleone’s settling of the family business near the end of “The Godfather.”

But Trump is straight out of Jimmy Breslin’s “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” A guy who, like Kid Sally Palumbo, couldn’t even promote a bicycle race worth a damn.

Remember the Tour de Trump? Yeah, neither does anyone else. That little Tour de France thing he promised to topple is still ticking along nicely, though.

He kept his big bazoo shut for hours after the Israeli strikes on Iran — yeah, I know, Fatso keeping it buttoned sounds like fake news to me, too — and when he finally got medicated enough to fart out a few syllables they were all about “deals,” as if the existential Israeli-Iranian saber dance on the razor’s edge of Armageddon were just another real-estate pitch.

You want a bomb shelter with that casino? There will be a small additional charge.

In memoriam

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 36 Comments
The colonel’s final deployment.

Not all of the fallen are found on the battlefield.

Some don’t turn up until later.

Less of both sorts, please.

Toward that end, what say we give our men and women in uniform better civilian leadership? It’s not much to ask of those of us here in the rear with the gear where there is no fear.

Closed on Thanksgiving

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

There’s a chain across this dump and a sign that says “Closed on Thanksgiving.”

The tears in your eyes notwithstanding, you’re gonna have to find another place to put the garbage.

Hope you have a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat. Keep an eye out for Officer Obie. You know what to tell the shrink.

Blank Friday

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Chicken cacciatore with succotash.

Another Thanksgiving feast has come and gone (though leftovers aplenty remain) and here it is Blank Friday already and I haven’t snapped up a single solitary bargain, not one.

Herself had requested Emeril Lagasse’s chicken cacciatore for dinner, and I decided to add the traditional accompaniment, Martha Rose Shulman’s stir-fried succotash.

Butter cookies.

Somewhere along The Path for reasons unknown we got detoured into butter-cookie construction, and as a consequence I was a wee bit tardy getting started on my own preparations, which are extensive.

These dishes are not complex — the succotash needs just four minutes in the wok — but they involve more than a few ingredients, among them Emeril’s Essence, a spice mix with eight components.

The cacciatore itself has 20 more. The succotash? Eleven. Many cups and bowls for the mise en place, many, many of them.

For the cookery I needed a large Dutch oven, a pasta pot, and a wok. Knives, spatulas, spoons, graters, cutting boards, colander, oven mitts, rubber gloves, yadda yadda yadda. Clean as you go, etc. Stand back, gimme room, and so on.

A memory with fewer holes in it would have been nice, too. For some reason I had it in my head that the simmering phase of the cacciatore would last only 20 minutes, which was 40 minutes short of actuality. This put a slight hitch in my culinary gitalong and thus we were late sitting down to the actual eating, which annoyed Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who is a stickler for schedules (her own).

Didn’t matter. We’d lunched on eggs over medium and pan-fried potatoes, so we weren’t drooling and ravenous. We didn’t have two-legged guests waiting, growing surly with drink, reawakened memories of past slights, and plans for vengeance. And we didn’t have to drive home afterward.

During the final cleanup, which was extensive, we sang along with Arlo, singing loud to end war and stuff. We hope yous all did likewise. There’s a lot of it about.

A tale of two Harolds

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments

“I would like to tell you how genuinely proud I am to have men such as your son in my command, and how gratified I am to know that young Americans with such courage and resourcefulness are fighting our country’s battle against the aggressor nations.”
—Lt. Gen. George C. Kenney, Allied air chief in the southwest Pacific, in a 1943 letter to my grandmother, Clara Grady, noting her son’s receipt of the Distinguished Flying Cross

Kind of a gloomy November morning here in The Duck! City.

But not as gloomy as it must have been back in the Forties, when the men of the 433rd Troop Carrier Group were fighting the Japanese in and around New Guinea.

I was surfing lazily across the Innertubes when I stumbled across a Library of Congress collection of interviews with some of the men who served in the 433rd with then-1st Lt. Harold Joseph O’Grady, who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1943 but rarely discussed his wartime service, even with family.

One of the interviewees, another Harold — Harold E. “Vick” Vickers — discussed his service from right here in Albuquerque back in 2005, and again in 2012. What a small world it is.

Vick wanted to be a pilot like my old man, but didn’t have the vision for it — “You had to have perfect eyes,” he said — and so he served in a support role, in operations, with the 433rd.

And he had to take ahold to get that job. He enlisted in what then was called the U.S. Army Air Corps (later the Army Air Forces), but instead found himself in the Signal Corps. Vick wasn’t having any of that — he fought to be Air Corps and got his wish.

“Be careful what you wish for,” they say. And they ain’t just a-woofin’.

Vick was supposed to ship out — for real, on an actual ship out of San Francisco — but wound up ordered to travel to New Guinea with the air crews in a formation of brand-new C-47s.

His plane blew an engine and missed the departure, and once the aircraft was squared away his crew had to play catchup, solo, with a brand-new navigator, island-hopping across the Pacific to Brisbane and finally to Port Moresby, New Guinea, which had yet to be pacified by the Allies.

And that’s where things got really hairy. Not a memoir for the faint of heart. It gave me some idea of why the old man might not have been eager to share his war stories with snot-nosed kids.

Here’s to Vic, Hank, and all the rest of the men and women who did their best in far-off lands, especially the ones who never came back to tell their tales.