For a new security program, I encourage starting with what you have. To explain, I turn to an American experience over 100 years old. On July 1st, 1898, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt led the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry (aka “Rough Riders”) under the U.S. Cavalry’s 2nd Brigade in the Spanish-American War. The unit was in Cuba close to Santiago where they determined to take an enemy stronghold atop San Juan Hill (aka Kettle Hill). Roosevelt’s Rough Riders had taken heavy fire from the hill all day, and despite the title cavalry – had only one horse among them (Roosevelt’s). Inferior US equipment in 1898 included .30 Cal bullets pushed out of a cartridge with 40 grains of powder in Krag rifles. The enemy could shoot 7 mm rounds, 8 times faster in their Mausers over our .30/40 Krags. Roosevelt gathered the three units around him — his own 1st Volunteer Cavalry unit…
2022 August
Every August we hear how America is awful because of what we did to innocent Japanese by dropping the atomic bombs to end WWII in August of 1945. In 2016, the U.S. President at the time, chose Memorial Day to apologize to Japan for our role in ending the war they started. Speaking of the bombs, he told the Japanese people, “How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.” Then, to make sure he fully insulted America (and Christianity), he proclaimed, “…no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill.” Recently Aljazeera News jumped all over the recent question posed by UN Secretary General Guterres (while visiting Hiroshima) of, “…What have we learned from the mushroom cloud that swelled above this city?” Then Aljazeera eagerly pointed out that, “The US remains the only country ever to…
40 years ago I was on the north shore of Grapevine Lake in Texas fishing with my lifetime friend, Ron Thomas. A friend of my older brothers when I was born, Ron is a man who has been in my life for my entire life. Ron is a battle-scarred warrior, having served with the 173rd Airborne in Vietnam. Over campfires in the Rockies, coffee in Whataburgers and that day fishing on Grapevine Lake, I have been a student of his life-lessons. From that day in Texas, it isn’t the fish I recall, but our conversation. Ron was speaking of the concept of “strong men armed.” I hope to unpack what that term meant to him then and what it has meant to me in the years since. Real relationships take work. The stronger the natures of those involved in the relationships, the stronger the outcomes. While “Strong Men Armed” was…