15-Month Adventure

…so read an email announcing my next assignment, thus commencing my “15-Month Adventure.”  This blog documents that service as a member of an Embedded Transition Team (or, “ETT”) to A...

https://petermolin.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/my-new-blog-time-now/

A vet’s list of important deployment dates is more vivid to him or her than the nation’s official holidays. The day you fly, the day you return. The day something big happened, something usu...

https://petermolin.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/journey-to-the-endend-to-the-journey/

Ulysses took twenty years to return to Ithaca after the Trojan Wars. When he arrived home, his wife Penelope didn’t recognize him and only slowly did he reveal himself to her.  The myth sugge...

https://petermolin.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/tales-of-brave-ulysses/

Commander James J. Galoppa, Jr. is retiring this week after a long career in the Navy, including a year as the team chief of the Navy element on Camp Clark, where I got to know him well.  Thes...

https://petermolin.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/anchors-away-memorial-day/

Adviser units were pick-up teams by military standards, cobbled together out of odd specialties from the different branches of service, mostly comprised of personnel who had never before deployed...

https://petermolin.wordpress.com/2012/05/17/war-horses/

Happy mother’s day, also my birthday this year. Moms come up quite a bit in writings about the war, I’ve discovered. Not surprisingly, authors are sensitive to how military service touches th...

https://petermolin.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/to-the-moms-the-whole-love/

“A rich indetermination gives them the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal meaning.” So it was for place names in Afghanistan. No one kn...

https://petermolin.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/tani/

So, Time magazine reports in an article on the year anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death that Bin Laden was living in Khowst when the Al Qaeda hijackers took down the Twin Towers.  He list...

https://petermolin.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/orientalism/

A couple of readers have told me they couldn’t post comments. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ll try to fix it. If you’ve had the same problem, or just want to be sure your message ...

https://petermolin.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/communication-breakdown/

Poet Brian Turner talks of a “little circle of stupidity” that lovingly enveloped his squad in Iraq.  By that he meant that their lives while deployed were saturated with comic moments and a...

https://petermolin.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/a-little-bit-of-afghan-goofiness/