Eight Feet Deep

Ah, the paid fed­eral hol­i­day. Who loves you, baby? I do. Even if I am only a part-time worker, I get full time pay for sit­ting here and doing what I do, or don’t do.

One ter­rific ben­e­fit of the day off is the sleep-in. Sleep­ing in has increas­ingly become a trea­sured part of life lately. I am sure a thor­ough exam­i­na­tion of my mind — fright­en­ing as it is to imag­ine — might yield the cen­tral rea­son or rea­sons why only in a mat­ter of years I have become so fond of late sleep­ing. What­ever the rea­sons, I find dream­ing to be much richer dur­ing these series of morn­ing naps.

This morn­ing I drove to Indone­sia. Yes, it’s a neat trick if you don’t live in Indone­sia what with all the water sur­round­ing the 17,500-something islands that make up the South­east Asian-Oceanic nation. What’s more, I drove (actu­ally I rode with my friends War­ren and Stacy), then drove back and was get­ting ready for a return drive to Indone­sia when my dream ran out of tracks.

Dreams can be like a great, or a really bad, or ter­ri­fy­ing, movie. Of course, they are very short films which make “Let’s Go Out to the Lobby” seem like “Dances With Wolves.”

I don’t know why I dreamed of Indone­sia, much less dri­ving there from Whereverville. It’s strange to think how the mind gets around to the peo­ple you know and the places you’ve been. I can under­stand dream­ing of War­ren and Stacy. They are two of my clos­est friends. I think I intro­duced them 20-something years ago and it wasn’t long before they were together as a cou­ple and later mar­ried. Indone­sia is a bit more complicated.

If my mem­ory serves me. If my mem­ory serves me. What did I order any­way? As I was say­ing, if my mem­ory serves me I vis­ited Jakarta in Jan­u­ary 1978. My ship, well, the Navy’s ship, or the tax­pay­ers’ ship, spent about three or four days there on a port visit just after two months of dif­fer­ent port calls in New Zealand and Aus­tralia. Those “down under” coun­tries were some­what of a shock in that they were beau­ti­ful and had some of the nicest and friend­liest peo­ple one might see out­side Texas. Indone­sia was a whole dif­fer­ent load of cargo.

Of the places I vis­ited that year on my deploy­ment, which also included Fiji, Tai­wan, Guam and our “port away from home­port” Subic Bay, the Philip­pines, Jakarta was the most for­eign. In fact, Indone­sia was the most for­eign coun­try I have ever visited.

Per­haps I should only men­tion one of the odd expe­ri­ences I had in Indone­sia. This hap­pened on the very first day in port.

My ship­mates and I were loaded on a bus, pur­port­edly, on our way to a com­pound at the Amer­i­can Embassy. There was a fairly major prob­lem, how­ever. Our dri­ver spoke no Eng­lish and no one in our crew spoke what­ever his lan­guage might have been. While some of my fel­low squids tried to use sign lan­guage or Cha­rades to deter­mine just where the hell we were going, I heard a “thump” which was fol­lowed by a very disturbed-sounding mur­mur by some of my mates.

The street on which we were rid­ing had an out­side bike lane and appar­ently our run­away bus dri­ver pulled into this lane and struck a bicy­clist, then just kept going. I couldn’t see it because I was on the other side of the bus and there were guys stand­ing in the aisle. Those who did see the spec­ta­cle said it wasn’t pretty. About six or seven of us finally had enough as we were dri­ving through what appeared to be a cen­tral busi­ness dis­trict, what with sky­scrap­ers seem­ingly as far as the eye could see. (Jakarta is quite a large city which had a pop­u­la­tion then of about 5–6 mil­lion peo­ple. Today it has nearly 9 mil­lion.) Those of us who got off the bus went into the lounge of a Sher­a­ton and finally found an Eng­lish speak­ing man with an old car who agreed to be our com­bi­na­tion “taxi driver-tour guide” that day for what was a very rea­son­able sum. The rest I shall not divulge other than to say it was an adven­ture of “sailors being sailors.”

I actu­ally had kind of a cul­tural over­load dur­ing my time in Jakarta. I saw some unbe­liev­ably majes­tic struc­tures which, I can only sup­pose, had some­thing to do with Indone­sia hav­ing the largest Islamic pop­u­la­tion in the world. I also saw some of the most abject poverty I had ever wit­nessed includ­ing sights you’d only see in “National Geo­graphic.” On a pedes­trian over­pass cross­ing a major high­way sat an arm­less and leg­less woman on a cart, with a can next to her for dona­tions. Then, of course, I men­tioned the hit-an-run by our bus dri­ver. In more recent times, these mem­o­ries have kind of made me won­der if Pres­i­dent Obama viewed such scenes when he lived in Indonesia?

For­tu­nately, I rarely have bad or even dis­turb­ing dreams thank­fully. So my foray into Indone­sia in slum­ber was more detailed with con­cerns about time or other engage­ments, those things we deal with in rou­tine. All in all though, some of those things which go on in your brain dur­ing down­time can yield some pretty fas­ci­nat­ing stuff. Writ­ten on the bath­room wall of our thoughts: “For a good time call 1–800-THE-MIND.”

Meet one of my home­town folks. Well, it seems like a have a lot of home­town folks because, in addi­tion to my home­town, I have a sec­ondary and ter­tiary home­town. I plan on writ­ing about my sec­ondary one later this week. Or that’s the plan. Beau­mont, Texas, is my ter­tiary home­town. Any­way, this home­town folk I intro­duce today (I don’t know him but wouldn’t mind) has the improb­a­ble name of Brent Coon.

Coon, who plays in a rock band and hangs around with knock­out women, and (he also has a music com­pany and a whole flock of bikini-clad “coon­pups”) is a big dog in tort law right now. This is because in the court room he cleaned BP’s — yes, that BP — clock over the Texas City refin­ery explo­sion in 2005 that killed 15 and injured 170.

The head Coon­dog has a reveal­ing, “as told to,” story about BP that can be found right here on Esquire’s Web site. Yes, that Esquire. One of my favorite mag­a­zines in the whole wide world.

Now you can dis­miss Coon totally or par­tially, if you want, because he is a plaintiff’s lawyer from one of the most plaintiff-friendly towns on Earth — that is if you believe the anti-plaintiff U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce (not the guys and gals who wel­come you to town and has all the great maps and brochures but the cham­ber that owns one of the news­pa­pers they pub­lish nation­ally to try and scare poten­tial plain­tiffs’ juries.) But, to par­don the bad and poor tast­ing pun, where there is smoke there’s fire — and oil in BP’s case. That is what some friends and rel­a­tives, one with a Ph.D. in geol­ogy who works in deep drilling, tell me about BP’s rep­u­ta­tion in the oil and gas indus­try. These peo­ple say, basi­cally, “BP sucks” when it comes to safety.

So say what you want about Coon­dog, but this guy has got it going on when it comes to BP. And appar­ently to liv­ing la vida!

It was nice hav­ing the clouds today that are part of TS/TD — or what­ever — Alex. It was still humid and sticky but at least the clouds shielded the sun. Hope­fully, Alex will not develop into more than a Cat 1 hur­ri­cane and will not head toward the Upper Texas Coast while all the fore­casts call for it to stay in South Texas and Mex­ico. We could use a lit­tle more rain although the show­ers and thun­der­show­ers we got today were not unwelcome.

Now for some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent. I was dri­ving east on I-10 just west of Vidor when I saw cars slow­ing down and quickly com­ing to a crawl. Any­one who lives around South­east Texas prob­a­bly knows I-10 has been in a state of per­pet­ual con­struc­tion for quite awhile. This is true espe­cially in spots east of Hous­ton, such as at the Trin­ity River bridge, and between Beau­mont and the Texas-Louisiana border.

So I wasn’t very taken aback when I saw a sign that said: “Left Lane Closed.” I’m sure I mut­tered an exple­tive though. But what raised my con­cious­ness to the WTF? level was then see­ing a portable road sign indi­cat­ing traf­fic should move to the left. I thought: “Huh?” Now if the left lane was to be closed shouldn’t the traf­fic shift right rather than left?

Imag­ine how meta­gro­bi­lized I was when next I came across one traf­fic sign say­ing “Left Lane Closed” in the left lane and “Right Lane Closed” in the far right lane. Just how per­plexed this all left me is a lit­tle rem­i­nis­cent of the joke about a truck­load of the­sauruses crash­ing. “Peo­ple were aston­ished, bewil­dered, bewil­dered, blown away, bowled over, con­founded, dazed, dumb­founded, flab­ber­gasted, floored, over­whelmed, shocked, star­tled, stu­pe­fied and thunderstruck.”

Yes, it even blew my mind.

It seems like a “One Lane Road” sign would have been more explana­tory in this sit­u­a­tion. But there wasn’t one and I will even­tu­ally get over it.

The sack­ing of Gen. Stan­ley McChrys­tal by Pres­i­dent Obama as com­man­der of inter­na­tional forces in Afghanistan was not the only choice the CINC could make. But even if one dis­agrees with the out­come it was clearly a right choice.

Gen. Stan­ley McChrys­tal receives tips from an Afghan gov­er­nor on grow­ing a beard once his days as an active duty gen­eral are over. That might not be too long.

McChrys­tal, and his entourage to a greater degree, shot off their mouths to an irrev­er­ent writer for a Rolling Stone piece. That arti­cle said some unflat­ter­ing things about Obama and his entourage. The rest is, of course, his­tory now as Obama accepted the general’s res­ig­na­tion — the age-old way of dis­miss­ing a top gen­eral — and has appointed Iraq surge archi­tect and cur­rent Cen­tral Com­mand leader Gen. David Petraeus.

Gen. David Petraeus, at mod­i­fied “parade rest.”

The man­ner in which Obama relieved the gen­eral and the way in which McChrys­tal han­dled his fir­ing was hon­or­able, which was to be expected in proper military-civil deco­rum. I would guess that some on the right, some on the left and even some in the mid­dle may have objected to the out­come. For those peo­ple, I would ask that they bear in mind that our mil­i­tary is con­sti­tu­tion­ally led by civil­ians. For top mil­i­tary lead­ers and their staff to make dis­parag­ing state­ments in pub­lic about their chain of com­mand is not only wrong-headed in the sense that it does not con­tribute to the well-oiled mil­i­tary machine, it is also illegal.

Any buck pri­vate or sea­man recruit should remem­ber the so-call “puni­tive arti­cles” of the Uni­form Code of Mil­i­tary Jus­tice. Those are the mil­i­tary laws for which one can be pun­ished by actions rang­ing from non-judicial pun­ish­ment to court mar­tial. Recruits are taught that when a mil­i­tary mem­ber disses a gov­ern­ment offi­cial, those offenses are seen as espe­cially heinous in the eyes of a mil­i­tary that prides itself on being dif­fer­ent from mil­i­tary jun­tas found in banana republics.

Tech­ni­cally, Gen. McChrys­tal could have or still could be charged with Arti­cle 88 of the UCMJ, which pro­hibits com­mis­sioned offi­cers from talk­ing smack about gov­ern­ment offi­cials. It doesn’t come with a very heavy sen­tence and I don’t know if any offi­cer has been con­victed of it in years. In the case of senior offi­cers such as McChrys­tal, he pretty much received the max being forced to fall on his sword, although it is yet to see what hap­pens to his career or if he will retire.

Enlisted and non-commissioned offi­cers have a sim­i­lar offense although it is one that might be dif­fi­cult to sus­tain in court these days as it falls under the so-called “catch-all” Arti­cle 134, a.k.a. the Gen­eral Arti­cle, to wit, as the “Man­ual for Courts Mar­tial” says quite frequently:

“Though not specif­i­cally men­tioned in this chap­ter, all dis­or­ders and neglects to the prej­u­dice of good order and dis­ci­pline in the armed forces, all con­duct of a nature to bring dis­credit upon the armed forces, and crimes and offenses not cap­i­tal, of which per­sons sub­ject to this chap­ter may be guilty, shall be taken cog­nizance of by a gen­eral, spe­cial, or sum­mary court-martial, accord­ing to the nature and degree of the offense, and shall be pun­ished at the dis­cre­tion of that court.”

Keep in mind this arti­cle takes in the kitchen sink from “Abus­ing Pub­lic Ani­mals” to wear­ing an unau­tho­rized badge or medal.

I read the offend­ing arti­cle in Rolling Stone and found it to be mostly flat­ter­ing for McChrys­tal. He is a rare “snake-eater” Spe­cial Oper­a­tions type who rose to the high­est ranks. He is well-liked by troops and is known for “lead­ing from the front.” I did not find many of the com­ments very offen­sive at all. But I can see how they were per­ceived as being over the top because they were directed at Obama and his peo­ple. The most damn­ing com­ment I saw was in a sub­ti­tle and I am not sure that came directly from McChrystal.

One also must remem­ber that some of history’s best gen­er­als have been every­thing from reck­less to insub­or­di­nate to down­right insane.

How­ever, our Con­sti­tu­tion takes prece­dence over one indi­vid­ual no mat­ter how good a fel­low he or she may be. I hope Petraeus does as well with Afghanistan as he appeared to do with Iraq. My only ques­tion is, will he also be han­dling duties as CENTCOM com­man­der simul­ta­ne­ously with his Afghan lead­er­ship role? If so, that could be a problem.

Here comes the “scrub­bers.” These are the polit­i­cal pro­fes­sion­als who come in to scrub up the messier parts of a candidate’s life. I  don’t know if that’s what they are really called, but that is the job of many oper­a­tives when they have a can­di­date whose past or past state­ments are as messed up as soup sandwich.

The scrub­bers have a chal­lenge on their hand with Repub­li­can Sen­ate can­di­date Sharon Angle. The for­mer Nevada assem­bly­woman will face Sen­ate Major­ity Leader Harry Reid in the Gen­eral Election.

While many of those pro­mot­ing the Tea Party points of view have as of late sought to soften the nut­ti­ness in some of their kin­dred spir­its some of the nuts unfor­tu­nately make it out of their shell and gets them­selves into a real polit­i­cal race. Angle is one, the son of peren­nial pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, Dr. Rand Paul, is another.

Angle is going to take some extra scrub­bing with her desire to end Social Secu­rity noted in past state­ments as well as allud­ing to armed rebel­lion. With that lat­ter thought, if peo­ple — Democ­rats — weren’t so afraid of their shad­ows, they haul about half a thou­sand folks or so up before fed­eral courts on trea­son charges. Angle has also shown sym­pa­thy for the Church of Sci­en­tol­ogy. And the beat goes on …

Good luck to our (Texas’) white-haired Sen. John Cornyn, who is head­ing the GOP’s National Sen­a­to­r­ial Com­mit­tee for this year’s elec­tions. He and the paid pro scrub­bers are going to be scrub­bing day and night. You know, of course, I’m kid­ding about wish­ing Cornyn good luck.

So what if he uses his toe?

Okay, I bet no one has thought of this yet as a solu­tion to plug­ging the run­away oil leak in the Gulf of Mex­ico: Find a lit­tle Dutch boy some 5,000 feet tall who can stick his lit­tle toe into the blowout pre­ven­ter or wher­ever the oil is com­ing from.