We expect sneering contempt in headlines like “Iran makes a fool of Trump…” from Jen Psaki because she’s a female partisan hack from the progressive authoritarian wing of the Democratic Party. But search for Iran War news on Substack, and you will find dozens of articles written by men, often from Commonwealth countries, using emotion-laden, fact-free language. Excessive use of seething sarcasm is the mark of a weak mind and probably a very weak man.

As public discourse becomes more feminized, there has been a shift in language patterns. A massive study on the rise and fall of rationality in language found that male-dominated institutions and spaces will generally be much better at generating and managing feedback than female-dominated spaces. When people note that feminizing institutions and occupations tends to make them less functional, it is precisely because they are worse at generating and managing feedback and at generating and maintaining trust. Lower trust and the narrowing of acceptable feedback encourage safety through conformity.

This helps explain the dramatic rebound of our Department of War under Secretary Hegseth. Four years ago, the Pentagon was obviously a feminized institution caught up in DEI mania. Men with four-star rank said ridiculous things like “diversity is our strength”, “women can do anything a man can do,” or “We clearly recognize the threat from domestic extremists, particularly those who espouse White supremacy or White nationalist ideologies.” I spent 22 years in the military and never heard of anyone advocating for white supremacy or white nationalism. The idea that those ideologies were prevalent in the military at any time in the past 60 years was absurd.

When institutions stop thinking systematically and start thinking empathetically, they stop functioning as institutions. During the Biden administration, the Pentagon ceased to function as a healthy institution. Now all the services have met their recruiting and retention goals, which never happened under Biden. The military has chalked up an impressive string of unambiguous victories, yet SubStackers like Jeff Tiedrich continue to call Secretary Hegseth Piss-Drunk Pete.

Compare this fact-based article on the Iran punitive campaign by Green Beret Nap Time with this emotionally laden, fact-free, potty-mouth diatribe by Jonathan Larsen. One writes using logic and facts; the other doesn’t.

Mr. Nap Time may well have spent time in Kurdistan and have a good read on their capabilities, motivations, and feelings toward the Iranian regime. I’m one of the few Americans to have traversed the Dash T Margo with a Baluch Lashkar (War Party). In my case, they were in Afghan livery, but there was no question their loyalties lay with the Baluch people. They were disgusted with the Karzai regime in Kabul, antagonistic toward the Taliban (unless they were paid to smuggle drugs or arms for them), and they hated the Iranian regime.

What I don’t feel good about is the current trajectory of the conflict in Iran. I was fully behind the punitive campaign, which has now devolved into an endless cycle of ceasefires and negotiations by two of President Trump’s cronies. The optics are all wrong. Jared Kushner is a lawyer/real estate developer married to Trump’s daughter. Steve Witkoff is a lawyer/real estate investor who has been one of President Trump’s business partners for over forty years. Even if both are ten times better than your average senior diplomat, it’s a self-inflicted wound to have them be the face of our negotiating effort.

The problem is that we need things from the Iranian regime that it refuses or cannot deliver. The stunning tactical performance of both the American and Israeli militaries is about to be made irrelevant. Even if we arrive at a negotiated settlement that checks most of our stated objectives on paper, any agreement that allows the Iranian regime to survive contains a fundamental structural flaw.

The IRGC is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, not the Iranian Guard Corps. They remain willing to machine-gun 30,000 of their own citizens for the crime of protesting the regime. Our ability to negotiate with them will always be limited by our inability to understand them. The art of the deal – we concede something, they concede something- has no relevance when dealing with authoritarians who are willing to murder their own citizens to maintain their grip on power.

Most of the Iranian people hate the current regime for good reasons. Let’s put that number at 70 or 80 million. The problem is that it leaves 10 or 20 million people who are pro-regime, and they have all the guns. That segment of the Iranian society should be our focus. Most joined the paramilitaries because it was a ticket to a better way of life. Iran is not a great power; it’s a weak power, so there are few options for upward mobility. If you’re trying to uproot the anti-US phenomenon that is ruling Iran, it’s deeper than you think. It has roots that you don’t understand. And 10 million loyalists with guns is a lot to overcome.

We have probably permanently destroyed the Supreme Leader position and, with it, the arbiter of all the factions in Iran, leaving them with a classic scorpions-in-a-bottle dilemma. We could have forced the regime to confront its failures and illegitimacy while it lacked money, water, food, or fuel. We should have continued to apply unremitting pressure, but instead called a ceasefire and adjourned to Pakistan?

Pakistan gave the Iranians their nuclear bomb making ability, and we think they will help negotiate with Iran to take that away? In which alternative universe does that make sense? Pakistan is not our friend; they proved that with their support of the Taliban.

The only thing we now have going for us is Islamic extremist stupidity. By closing the Straits of Hormuz and attacking its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) neighbors, they forced the Gulf Arabs to either aid the United States or live with the ayatollahs pointing a loaded gun at their collective heads. Before this happened, the GCC was less than transparent about how much IRGC funding was held in its banks. Now they have become very compliant and are willing to help the US freeze all Iran’s bank accounts.

If our negotiators don’t give the regime a 300 billion reconstruction fund, we could see the ayatollahs and IRGC driven from power. But if we, once again, play Charlie Brown to Iran’s Lucy, they will pull the football at the last minute and we, once again, will look like total idiots. President Trump will pay a steep price for that failure during his remaining time in Washington DC. We all could pay a steeper price if the democrats ride this clown show into power. You can pray for the best outcome, but it is clear it’s time to anticipate the worst.

The 2d Battalion, 26^th Marines, rarely appears in the Marine Corps’ illustrious combat history. The battalion saw only brief service during World War II—long enough to land in the assault wave at Iwo Jima. Later, during the Vietnam War, it reappeared for a few years before its colors were once again returned to the museum curators.

Its daily Vietnam experience was usually far less stressful than the Iwo Jima operation, but Vietnam had its days – and when it did, the late 1960s Marine of 2/26 experienced the horrors of war at the same level of intensity faced by the generation that fought its way up the black ash terraces beneath Mount Suribachi. This is the story of one of those days: 16 September 1968.

Late 1968 found the 3rd Marine Division serving in the extreme north of I Corps, the northernmost corps in what was then the Republic of Vietnam, controlling ten infantry battalions: those of its organic 3rd, 4^th, and 9^th Marine Regiments, plus 2/26. The division’s operational concept - an effective one – was as easy to understand as it was difficult to execute. Relying on few fixed defensive positions and even fewer infantry units to defend them, the defense was offense. Battalions stayed in the bush for weeks on end, covering North Vietnamese Army (NVA) infiltration routes and, in general, looking for trouble. They moved constantly on foot or by helicopter, and when they encountered an NVA unit, all hell broke loose until it was destroyed.

Our battalion – I was the operational officer – celebrated the Fourth of July in an area near the coast called Leatherneck Square, where it was responsible for defending the square’s northern and western sides. In late July, the battalion was reinforced to conduct amphibious assault operations and designated Battalion Landing Team (BLT|) 2/26.

After training with the reinforcements, BLT 2/26 embarked on the Amphibious Ready Group Alfa ships, including the famous World War II Essex-class carrier Princeton (LDH-5), now an amphibious assault ship. Initially, there was talk of landings just south of the Ben Hai River inside the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), but the pattern of NVA operations had shifted westward, and the amphibious talk died out. An early-September landing well inland marked a temporary end to our amphibious experience and the beginning of service as one of the division’s maneuver battalions. Despite the change in mission, the battalion kept its reinforcements – among them a tank platoon, a 105mm artillery battery, and a 4.2 inch mortar battery.

Operational control shifted to the 3rd Marines, headquartered in Camp Carroll, but several days of aggressive patrolling yielded no enemy contacts. About 7 September, the BLTs’ field elements were trucked to Camp Carroll. They staged for two contingencies: a helicopter assault in Landing Zone (LZ) Margo, a barren hilltop just south of the DMZ, roughly 17 kilometers west-northwest of Camp Carroll – or a shift of operational control to the 4^th Marines and return to Khe Sanh, where the battalion had served throughout the early-1968 siege.

To the relief of those who had served at Khe Sanh, the Margo operation prevailed—an assault into the LZ followed by movement north to the high ground on the southern border of the DMZ, where the battalion was to turn east and sweep the high ground. The orders emphasized the need to take prisoners.

A typhoon brushed the coast, and although the tree-covered mountains inland showed no outward signs of rain, movement became impossible—the war ground to a halt. Finally, the weather began to clear, and on 12 September, the commanding officer of the supporting helicopter squadron flew in for the Zippo brief – a planning and coordination meeting attended by the battalion and squadron commanders and their staffs.

Zippos were businesslike affairs. Lives were at stake, and the assaulting battalion and supporting squadron had to reach complete agreement and understanding. On the plus side, Margo was easy to find due to its location on the north side of the Cam Lo River, inside a distinctive, kilometer-wide and more than kilometer-deep U-shaped bend. Unfortunately, this plus was offset by several minuses, most of which stemmed from the tiresome but necessary subject of terrain.

Margo, which resembled a broken bowl, was smaller than the maps indicated. Using north as 12 o’clock, the rim from 5 to 10 o’clock was the dominant piece of ground within the LZ. The southern side of the rim dropped sharply to the Cam Lo River, actually more stream than river at this point, while the interior slope provided good observation over the landing zone and north toward the DMZ. A spring near the center of the zone fed a stream that had cut a deep draw, which meandered eastward and exited Margo between 2 and 4 o’clock. From 10 to 2 o’clock, Margo’s northern rim varied in height but was lower than the southern rim. Its exterior sloped sharply downward for a kilometer or so before reaching the steep approaches to the terrain fingers that led to the high ground in the DMZ. At its highest point, Margo was about 150 meters above sea level. The hills to the north were three to four times that height, while the intervening terrain dropped to low points of about 50 meters.

It was rugged, forbidding country, made all the more so because, although Margo was clear, the heights and intervening areas were covered with double – or triple-canopy forest.

The terrain inside the LZ made Margo a “one-bird zone” – helicopters had to land and unload one at a time. This was hardly unusual, but it slowed the rate of assault dramatically. Margo was also too small to accommodate the entire BLT. Since the intent was to retain only G company, the BLT command group, along with the 81mm mortar, engineer, and reconnaissance platoons, in the zone for any length of time (a few days), the size of the LZ did not seem to be a major factor. Its rock-hard soil, however, was another problem. Digging in took time.

Finally, there was Margo’s history. For a brief period, some months before, it had been used as an artillery fire support base, and the North Vietnamese were known to keep such positions under observation. The terrain and history summed to the point that BLT 2/26 was landing, one aircraft at a time, into a zone that was:

• Too small to hold the entire BLT

• Dominated by high ground to the north

• Probably the subject of continuing NVA attention, at least to the point of registering mortar fires.

Not good . . . but not unusual.

Friday the 13th of September 1968, a date not lost on many of the Marines, marked the beginning of several days of cloudless skies and comfortable temperatures. By 0700, a thousand or so Marines and corpsmen were waiting quietly in the Camp Carroll pick-up zone, smoking, talking, thinking, and maybe – especially in Golf Company – which was landing first – praying. They were grunts, a term coined during the Vietnam War. While it may have been a derisive term, the sting was long gone. With a certain pride, it is what they called themselves.

Believing that the chances of infection dramatically increased with the amount of clothing worn when wounded, they were deliberately underdressed. Boots, socks, and trousers were the standard: no underwear and often no shirt during the day. Their faded helmet covers sported an elastic band around the outside intended to hold camouflage material when the wearer sought invisibility in the bush. More often, it held either a main battle dressing for use if the wearer’s luck turned bad or, in the case of optimists, a bottle of mosquito repellent. The graffiti on most of the covers addressed a variety of subjects, but many tended toward the religious. David Douglas Duncan’s striking photographs of the 26th Regiment Marines at Khe Sanh captured the phenomenon.

They all wore flak jackets, never zippered because shell or grenade fragments taken in the wrong place could jam the zipper, making it difficult for the corpsmen to remove the jacket and treat the wounded man in the field.

The flak jackets, if anything, were dirtier than the helmet covers. Sweat-stained from long wear by a series of owners, they had the same faded color as the camouflage covers, but their graffiti, for whatever reason, tended to more basic thoughts than those found on helmets.

They carried a haversack holding a box of venerable C-rations, a poncho, a poncho liner, and, most importantly, an extra two or three pairs of socks. They also carried extra radio batteries, mortar ammunition (although not mortarmen), rocket launchers, grenades, at least four filled canteens, and as much extra rifle and machine gun ammunition as possible.

They were typical grunts and corpsmen, normally unwashed, usually underfed, always overloaded, and, more often than not, tired. The lucky ones, those who avoided disease, wounds, or death, did not enjoy a hot meal or cold shower for weeks.

Shortly before 0800, the CH-46s began landing in the pickup zone with their distinctive whumping blade sound – unforgettable for those who rode them into combat. As the first wave launched, the sound of the artillery preparatory fires in the distance and the roar of the fast movers orbiting overhead helped ease the tension.

The actual landing was anti-climactic. Although there was no opposition, it still took a considerable amount of time. Echo, Fox, and Hotel companies quickly assembled and began moving north. Echo struck out for the finger on the right, which led to the high ground, while Fox and Hotel headed up the other finger on the left. Golf Company, the command post, the 81mm platoon, and others established defensive positions in the LZ and began digging in. Friday the 13^th passed quietly.

On Saturday, 14 September, the companies continued moving north at first light. While there were well-worn trails in the area and occasional sounds of movement ahead, there were no contacts. Even so, the companies called artillery fire on possible targets to keep the fire-support system active. About midday, Hotel Company’s point, leading movement up the left finger, saw movement ahead and signaled the company to move off the trail and wait. Their patience was rewarded as they watched a North Vietnamese soldier, weapon at sling arms, striding down the trail toward them.

The point team was in an excellent ambush position and easily could have killed him. That they didn’t was a testimony to discipline and the emphasis on taking prisoners. Waiting until the NVA soldier had passed, the point man re-entered the trail and, in Vietnamese, ordered him to halt, which he did promptly. The capture was reported to the company commander, relayed to battalion, and within a matter of minutes, the 3rd Marines had learned of a potential guest speaker. Within the hour, the prisoner had been flown to Camp Carroll for interrogation.

Throughout the war, most higher headquarters consistently failed to pass timely intelligence information down to the battalion level, where it could be acted upon. The 3rd Marines did not make that mistake. Just before sundown, 2/26 learned that the prisoner had intended to surrender because he had been at Khe Sanh when the Marines first arrived. Stating that he “had a love of life,” he added that he wanted no more of anything remotely resembling that battle, a confrontation that had a psychological hold on both sides. Of greater interest was his disclosure that the lead company – Hotel Company – would be attacked at about 2000 that evening. All three companies were alerted.

Echo, Fox, and Hotel halted for the night and began registering artillery defensive fires. Hotel Company’s artillery forward observer (FO), controlling a supporting 155mm howitzer battery, had just started registering fires to cover a listening post located on the western side of the finger when the Marines manning the post reported hearing movement through the draw to their direct front. Since the registration rounds were on the way, they could only wait. Seconds later, as the roar of the explosions died away, the listening post reported screams and other sounds of panic. The FO immediately called “fire for effect” and swept the draw with 155mm rounds. Other than some moans and the sounds of some movement in the draw, the remainder of the night was quiet.

15 September dawned clear and cloudless. Visibility was so good that Marines could watch outgoing 81mm mortar rounds until they reached their apogee. Again, keeping the mortar and artillery fire support systems active, E, F, and H companies resumed their slow climb toward the high ground. Signs of enemy presence were plentiful, but there was no contact.

The trouble started at noon, when a radio message from 3rd Marines ordered the BLT to pull its companies back to the LZ and prepare to shift operational control to the 9th Marines. The message was cryptic – it had to be because none of the radio transmissions with any of the battalions in the 3rd Marine Division’s area were secure. The encryption equipment of the day was too heavy to be carried in the field and, in any case, seldom worked in the heat and humidity of the bush. Problems with getting shackle sheets (code) down to the company level precluded using even decades-old encryption. Everyone assumed that the North Vietnamese heard most of the radio traffic.

Communications security problems notwithstanding, the order was received with incredulity. There was little doubt that the NVA would follow the companies back to the landing zone, and less doubt that mortar and perhaps infantry attacks would follow. The three rifle companies were told to halt and then move south to Margo; meanwhile, the order was strenuously argued. The regimental commander made it clear that he agreed with the battalion’s tactical assessment of what lay in store. Obedience would have a price; that much was obvious. What was not obvious was how much.

After a few hours, the three companies were instructed to halt, reorient, and resume their original northwest advance. We had to know if the trailing enemy theory was correct. The order did not specify how long to follow the reverse course, but did tell the company commander something they already knew – to expect contact. It came quickly on both ridges as small NVA units were surprised to find the Marines heading north again. Breaking contact, the companies once more turned south toward Margo. So far as 2/26 was concerned, the point had been proven. We reported this to the 3rd Marines and forcefully recommended cancellation of the withdrawal order.

The reply was more enlightening than helpful. The battalion was told that its arguing and temporary resumption of the offensive had caused some difficulties (it wasn’t phrased quite that way) and that there would be a 24-hour postponement. Furthermore, the entire battalion was to concentrate in LZ Margo, south of the 61 grid line – an east-west map line that split the LZ – by a specified time early the next afternoon, 16 September. In the meantime, the BLT was authorized to take whatever actions it deemed necessary to prepare for the return to the LZ. The maneuver companies were turned north again; within minutes, they bumped into NVA troops following them down the ridgelines.

The enlightening section of the order was the part about moving south of the 61 grid line. It made no sense because the area remaining in the LZ south of the grid line was too small to accommodate the BLT in anything resembling a tactical position. Even worse, it did not permit defense of the LZ, especially against infantry attacks coming from the most logical direction – north. It was apparent that the order had emanated from a headquarters other than regimental or division, neither of which would have displayed that level of tactical ignorance. This, and the urgency associated with the 61 grid-line provision, led to the conclusion that an Arc Light – a high-altitude B-52 area bombing mission – was imminent.

It might seem strange to those steeped in the traditions of obedience to orders, but the BLT now confronted a dilemma. If its tactical assessment were correct, the order returning the maneuver units to the LZ would result in some form of NVA attack: if, on the other hand, the Arc Light guess was right, there were other problems. The timing and target area were unknowns and, for security, would remain unknowns at the battalion level. Further, the tactically inane directive to move south of the 61 grid line indicated that the Arc Light was going in north of Margo – but close.

The dilemma was stark and straightforward: Comply with the order and risk NVA action, or move the companies toward Margo, retaining some semblance of tactical deployment north of the LZ, and risk the Arc Light. To those who have seen a proper Arc Light, the choice was easy. The companies were directed to hold in place and begin moving south to the LZ early the next morning. But as a concession to common sense, that portion of the order regarding the 61 grid line was interpreted rather loosely. We would defend Margo.

The weather on 16 September matched the brilliance of previous days. Today, the Vietnamese Bureau of Tourism would tout the weather; on that day in 1968, however, it turned into a scene from hell.

Occasionally stopping to engage the NVA units following them, the three rifle companies slowly made their way back to Margo. Echo company came in last. Commanded by Captain John Cregan, now a Roman Catholic priest, the company began to climb Margo’s northern slope and, by approximately 1430, was taking up its assigned defensive positions on the northern perimeter. Even after ignoring the order to stay south of the 61 grid line, there were too many troops in too small an area – and they had to contend with Margo’s rock-hard ground. Digging in took more time.

Early in the afternoon, ominous sightings of North Vietnamese soldiers with mortars fording the Cam Lo River west of Margo were reported. Artillery fire was called, probably without effect. At the same time, there was a minor flurry of activity as the BLT shifted to the operational control of the 9th Marines, and radio frequencies were changed and tested. That done, the chatter of troops and the clanging of their entrenching tools were the only sounds disturbing the quiet.

At 1500, Captain Ken Dewey, an F-4 pilot serving as the battalion’s air liaison officer, was looking north toward the left of the two hills that had been the original objectives when suddenly a mirror started flashing – followed immediately by the soft “thunking” sound of mortars firing in the distance. Within seconds, Margo was blanketed with exploding 82mm rounds from several compass points, especially the northern arc. The battalion began its “time on the cross,” as the French put it earlier in the Indochina War.

The noise was deafening. Each explosion filled the surrounding air with black, stinking, greasy-tasting smoke. The mortarmen poured it on until 200 to 300 rounds had pummeled the Marines and corpsmen, a good percentage of whom had no protection beyond that of shallow fighting holes. As the fire eased, the LZ sprang to life and First Lieutenant Al Green’s 81mm platoon began counterbattery fires, an action that won them concentrated NVA attention.

Battalion machine gunners on Margo’s southern rim saw some enemy mortarmen and began to engage them at long range – attracting in turn, their share of incoming. The exchange continued for a few minutes until a mirror on the high ground flashed again. The incoming barrage slowed, then stopped – but the noise in the LZ grew to deafening proportions as hundreds of rifles went into action. At first, it seemed as if frustrated Marine riflemen were wasting ammunition on out-of-range NVA mortarmen, but a radio query to First Lieutenant Bob Riordan, the Golf Company Commander, revealed that from his position on the southern rim, North Vietnamese soldiers could be seen moving uphill to assault the LZ’s northern side.

Then the rifle fire stopped abruptly, and, within seconds, the southern rim and center of the LZ was alive with Marines running to the northern side. Their fires had been masked by those manning the northern slope defenses, and they were leaving their own positions to get into the fight. The enemy never has a chance. The NVA commander who ordered the assault likely had fewer troops than he thought, due to previous contacts. In any case, the reactions of the defenders were too violent. No more than 20 minutes had elapsed. The cost to BLT 2/26 was more than 150 dead and wounded. The cost to the enemy was unknown.

At 1700, the mirror flashed again, and the mortars went to work. Once more, rounds rained down on Margo – fewer this time and without an infantry attack – but the BLT’s casualty list grew longer. For the first time since the attacks began, medical evacuation of the wounded now seemed possible. It was likely that the NVA had expended most of their mortar ammunition and would not interfere with the helicopter evacuation.

The casualties had been separated by category . . . emergency, priority, and routine . . . and the “permanent routine,” a euphemism for the dead that had crept into the radio operator’s lexicon. We hoped to medevac at least the emergency and priority wounded before nightfall. Several CH-46As and gunships arrived about 1830, and the laborious process of loading the casualties, one at a time, began as soon as the lead bird touched down.

As usual, the strength and example can be found in the casualties. I saw Staff Sergeant Donner from the reconnaissance platoon, covered in blood, as he was being escorted to the medevac staging area. He was refusing to leave, insisting that he was okay. I told him that he would leave.

Late in the afternoon of 16 September, I watched as an unwounded Marine rapidly searched the rows of wounded looking for a friend. Suddenly, a large arm reached out and waved. “There you are” said the first as he took the wounded man’s hand and squatted down to talk. They held hands quietly until the medevac helicopters arrived. The wounded Marine had been hit badly. I do not know if he survived. Nor do I know if his friend survived our subsequent encounters with the NVA. What I do know is that the wounded Marine was black and his buddy white. I remembered thinking at the time how much better people would be if we were all like those two.

Recently, we have been told that the best and the brightest did not go to Vietnam. When I heard that, I thought of those two Marines so long ago, the hardships they endured, and their obvious respect for each other. Maybe they weren’t the brightest, but they were the best.

Realizing that there would be no other medevacs from Margo that night, the last pilot insisted on overloading his aircraft with wounded. Over his objections, the loading stopped, and the pilot was told to launch. He must have been good. If not good, he was very lucky. The overloaded 46 resembled a giant praying mantis as it struggled into the air, tail down, nose swinging back and forth in a wide arc, as though searching for escape from a trap. Finally, he nursed it a few feet higher, leveled, and began slipping sideways, just above the trees, down the slope that formed Margo’s northern rim. Again, the LZ filled with Marines running north; convinced that the 46 was about to crash, they were moving to assist the survivors.

The helicopter disappeared from view behind the trees and, an eternity later, came back into view, this time in full flight, nose-high on a southernly course, jettisoning fuel to lighten the load and clear the ridge to Margo’s east. All movement stopped as everyone in the LZ watched the miracle claw its way over the ridge line, taking the wounded to safety.

Quiet settled over Margo. As the troops returned to their positions, the silence was broken by a single “thunk” off to the north. This time, it was only one round, but it landed precisely where the medevac birds had loaded. It was Charlie saying he knew what had been done and could have stopped it at any time. He was also saying he was a pro. We knew that already.

The XXIV Corps Commanding General visited Margo the following morning. His worries about morale evaporated as he watched the Marines improving their defensive positions. He then looked toward a large group of wounded waiting to be evacuated. In response to a question, he was told they were the routine medevacs. Behind them were rows of poncho-covered objects. He looked at them, saying nothing, knowing what they were. Finally, a Marine broke the spell. “The dead go last, sir.”

Epilogue

The Arc Light went in five or six kilometers north of Margo on the afternoon of 16 September. Maybe too much had happened, or maybe there was an unusually high number of duds. Regardless, it was unimpressive. Paradoxically, it hurt 2/26 more than it hurt the enemy.

Early on 17 September, Golf, Fox, and Hotel Companies returned to the familiar trails, attacking north. Echo Company, having lost nearly 70 Marines in the mortar and infantry attacks, remained behind. The LZ was mortared twice that day, but there were few casualties. Margo’s final toll will probably never be known precisely. We evacuated more than 200 dead and wounded, some of whom doubtlessly died later. Before we left, we filled 18 external helicopter nets with packs, weapons, and other equipment that was no longer needed.

Eventually, after another long period of torrential rains, the attacking companies reached the high ground, where Golf found a graveyard – 18 graves with markers aligned in rows near where the mirror had flashed before the mortar attack. They evacuated a few to confirm that it was a graveyard. They also traced the extensive writing on the markers and sent them to the rear for translation. The writings turned out to be a history of each of the casualties. We learned we had gotten the NVA battalion commanding officer and much of his staff. The CO had been a soldier since joining the Viet Minh in the late 1940s: he was a professional. I think whoever ordered all the writing put on the markers did so, at least in part, so that we would not dig up their dead.

We stood by to attack to the west. It never happened. Near the end of September, the BLT moved by helicopter into another one-bird zone in the DMZ just south of the Ben Hai River, nearly 15 kilometers north and east of Margo. In a series of assaults, BLT 2/26 routed an enemy force defending a headquarters complex and artillery positions. During the last assault, Marines of Echo and Hotel Companies were treated to the rare sight of North Vietnamese troops fleeing in panic.

The Marines and corpsmen of 2/26 formed a typical grunt battalion. They fought a dirty, unpopular war, and they did it well. They never claimed to be the best. All they said was that, if they met somebody better, they hoped he was on their side.

Hatred is not a healthy emotion. It has no place in the heart of the enlightened soul of Timothy P Lynch. In fact, here’s a story I read that sounds too good to be true, but one worth sharing. It’s about a World War II concentration camp survivor who was named Wild Bill Cody by the American troops because his real name was five unpronounceable Polish syllables. They thought he had been at the camp a short time before they arrived because his posture was erect, his eyes bright, his energy indefatigable. Since he was fluent in English, French, German, and Russian, as well as Polish, he became an unofficial camp translator.

Though Wild Bill worked fifteen or sixteen hours a day, he showed no signs of weariness. His compassion for his fellow prisoners shone on his face, which is why the GIs sought him out when their spirits were low. When they found his papers, they were astonished to learn he had been in Wuppertal since 1939! For six years, he had lived on the same starvation diet and slept in the same airless, disease-ridden barracks as everyone else, yet without the slightest physical or mental deterioration.

He had seen his wife and five children killed by the Einsatzgruppen, who spared him because of his language skills. After that traumatic experience, he decided to spend the rest of his life—whether it was a few days or many years—loving every person he encountered. The implication is that if you love everyone unconditionally, as a dog does, you can not only survive but thrive on a starvation diet in freezing, disease-ridden barracks surrounded by dying men. There is no question that dogs make the best people sometimes, but I’m not sure how humans can be as driven as a good dog to love everyone they meet. The story sounds suspect, but it is too good to fact-check.

It’s a comforting thought that is apropos for the moment because I’m feeling defeat is being snatched from the jaws of victory, and it is making my blood boil. Last February, I wrote how the current punitive campaign against Iran was long overdue. I’ve continued to support President Trump ever since, despite my reservations about the ceasefires. On the Mensa Brothers podcast, I echoed the dismay of Colonel Will Coistantini, USMC (Ret), about waiting 44 days to blockade Iran’s ports. Yes, that move will cause Iran to lose money and oil wells when they no longer have the storage capacity to keep them online. But that’s not the point. The time-tested Napoleon maxim: “When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna,” is the point. We should have blockaded their ports from day one instead of incrementally calibrating the pressure on whoever is ruling Iran now.

According to Robert Kagan, Iran has checkmated Trump and “this defeat will carry lasting consequences unlike any America has endured before.” There is no reason to pay attention to a cake-eating partisan shill. I don’t know what a “neocon analyst” is, but I doubt they sit in sinecures like the Brookings Institution preaching the gospel of military defeatism for a living.

The New York Times contends that Iran had 30 of its 33 missile sites up and running and has retained 70 percent of both its missile launchers and prewar missile stocks. That report is based on “people with knowledge of American intelligence assessments,” which renders it meaningless. In a demonstration of the negative effects of severe Trump Derangement Syndrome, the NYT doubled down on crazy with a report that the dastardly Jews have developed rape dogs to torment their peace-loving Palestinian prisoners. This obviously impossible use of dogs joins a long list of animals Israel has weaponized to torment Arabs. Pigs, dolphins, hawks, cows, sharks, squirrels, rats, hyenas, and vultures have all allegedly been trained to do the bidding of the Zionists. Is there anything they can’t do?

On the other side of the media spectrum, reports claim the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have been conducting air strikes inside Iran. Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have capable air forces and don’t need our help or permission to strike back at the Mullahs, who have been attacking them for months. The seemingly reliable and well-informed Zineb Riboua reports that Iran’s economy is collapsing. It is impossible to get a firm grip on what is really happening. But we don’t need accurate press reports to understand the truth behind military campaigns. The longer this goes on, the more anti-Trump propagandists will paint the effort as a failure.

So what’s going on? Without reliable media, we can only make educated guesses based on what we know about the central figures involved in this drama. I can’t speak to the Iranian side because nobody knows who is in control there. I can say this about President Trump: he is a politician who believes he is the greatest deal maker in history. He knows that the media and think tank historians will never recognize his genius unless he single-handedly defeats radical Shia Islam. He can only gain entrance to the pantheon of great statesmen by reconfiguring the Middle East. I don’t know what President Trump knows, but I do know his vanity is driving him to make a deal that will make him the greatest political leader of the modern era.

It is difficult for Americans to trust that our president and his cabinet know what they are doing and will deliver us a solid win against Iran. That has never happened in my lifetime. Hope is not a plan. Epictetus wrote, “Do not seek to have everything that happens happen as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it actually does happen, and your life will flow well.” I’m not sure how this sage advice helps with my fears of the Iranian situation imploding, but I’m not one to ignore Epictetus. It is not unreasonable to assume that what actually happens in Iran will work in our favor. Either way, the end state will soon be upon us, and maybe this time we’ll be the winners.

The 2026 hurricane season is predicted to have a below-average number of hurricanes due to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate cycle. Strong westerly winds generated by warmer waters in the Pacific Ocean, caused by El Niño, will hinder tropical storm development in the Atlantic. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but seeing the severity of a hurricane season prediction explained by normal weather phenomena that have nothing to do with man-made climate change seems like a sea change.

The climate change claim is that increased CO2 causes warming, and other natural greenhouse substances, including water vapor, clouds, and upper-level clouds, amplify that warming. This is an anti-scientific position because it contradicts basic scientific principles, such as Le Châtelier’s principle. That principle states that if a dynamic equilibrium is disturbed by changes in conditions (concentration, pressure, or temperature), the system shifts its equilibrium position to counteract the disturbance and restore balance.

When a credible scientist like Dr. Richard Lindzen, emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT, examined the feedback loops in climate modeling, he made a shocking (not) discovery. The key to constructing the man-made climate change narrative was to establish it and pepper it with obvious errors. Critics would then seize on the errors while failing to question the basic narrative.

This week, Americans who enjoy YouTube videos of congressmen beclowning themselves as they grill senior members of President Trump’s cabinet saw this dynamic in action. Representative Rosa DeLauro, the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, reacted like a vampire to sunlight, while the head of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, calmly explained the federal statutes and Supreme Court precedents governing the EPA budget proposal process.

Her official question about the EPA budget was that it “reads like a climate change denier’s manifesto”. When challenged to explain where in section 202 of the Clean Air Act, there was a requirement to fight global climate change, she exploded, shrieking that “climate change is real.” Exercising executive oversight by shrieking slogans based on midwit fantasy is why the approval of Congress is at an all-time low.

The basic narrative is that the climate is controlled by the greenhouse effect. That is a ridiculous assertion, as the Earth’s climate system has many regions, the two largest being the tropics (30°S to 30°N) and the extratropics outside 30°. These two systems have different dynamics. Within the tropics, the greenhouse effect is significant. But what determines the temperature change between the tropics and the poles has very little to do with the greenhouse effect. It is a dynamic phenomenon because temperature differences at extratropical latitudes generate instabilities.

These instabilities take the form of the cyclonic and anticyclonic patterns that you see on the weather map. Outside of the topics, weather systems travel from west to east. Within the tropics, they travel from east to west. Advocates of anthropogenic climate change claim that it is disrupting established wind patterns due to Arctic warming at both the North and South Poles. As Dr. Lindzen has pointed out repeatedly over the years, there is no physical basis for that statement.

The continued normalization of uninformed, anti‑scientific, almost religious zealotry over anthropogenic climate change allows climate scammers to keep grifting the most economically vulnerable members of our population. There is another revealing clip of Lee Zeldin trying to have a conversation with Bernie Sanders. In the clip below, he grandstands over his bill to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on solar panels for the poorest of the poor. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that a majority of poor Americans own their homes and are convinced that installing solar panels is a good idea that will save them money. What’s the downside?

We don’t have to imagine the outcome because that experiment has already been run in Texas. Between 2018 and 2024, solar panel companies launched a campaign targeting the elderly and non-English-speaking residents of Texas. Thousands of the most vulnerable homeowners were victimized and are now stuck paying monthly for solar panels that haven’t reduced their electric bills by a single cent. And they’re the lucky ones; the unlucky ones had heavy solar panels installed on roofs that couldn’t support the weight and are now homeless.

Keep the Texas example in mind as you watch wide-eyed, always wrong but never in doubt Bernie Sanders passionately advocate for residential solar panels he knows nothing about. Too many people in todays fragmented political landscape adopt positions that have serious consequences not because they believe them to be correct but they believe their side is correct. I am sure that not everything democrats believe is based on lunatic fringe theories, but it seems that following their policies is a good way to end up victimized and sliding down, not up the economic ladder.

These books could not have come at a better time. Colonel Will Costantini, USMC (Ret), explained why on a recent Mensa Brothers podcast. The topic was Iran, and Will commented:

“We have an opportunity to save our country; we closed the border and reduced stupidity and the size of the bureaucracy. We are opening America for business so people can find gainful employment and have a sense of optimism about their own and their children’s economic future. . . If we wait until the fall to win the Iran war, we risk losing the country next January.”

There is a good reason to be concerned if you live in an area that has experienced rapid demographic change due to the influx of illegal migrants sent by the government or economic refugees fleeing blue-state dysfunction and high taxes. The replacement of local populations in both major and minor urban landscapes risks turning those areas into “behavioral sinks”—a term coined by ethologist John B. Calhoun to describe the collapse of social behavior that occurs when a population is subjected to extreme overcrowding.

The official response to COVID-19 revealed how thin the veil of sanity or societal functioning really is. The media and members of polite society have tried to shove COVID-19 under the rug to pretend it never happened, but you must realistically see it as a foreshadowing of what is to come. It is important to remember how easily the government or your own neighbors can become staggeringly tyrannical or insane. The idea that a medical mask can protect you from a 3-micron virus is insane. The idea that our CDC can detect the index case of a highly contagious viral disease like COVID-19 is likewise insane.

By the time the CDC was reacting to COVID-19, the virus had been spreading across the countryside for months. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya demonstrated this with his COVID-19 antibody seroprevalence study in Santa Clara County, California, conducted in early April 2020. What did he get for trying to inject scientific reality into the COVID crisis? Intense criticism and ostracization from other epidemiologists and public health officials. Death threats, racist attacks, and pressure from Stanford University administration to change his study. Censorship, social media blacklisting, and personal attacks from people like Dr. Anthony Fauci.

My philosophy of life could once be summed up by the famous “Be Like Tim” meme. When I was younger, I would have encouraged everyone to be like Tim (Lynch). Now that I’m older and wiser, I would encourage everyone reading this review to be like Tim (Beard).

Tim Beard doesn’t stand out in a crowd; he hides in the middle of it. He’s 6’5”, so I don’t know how he doesn’t stand out, but he’s a trained CIA agent, so who knows. He’s an advocate of the gray man lifestyle; he goes to great lengths to blend in, but he stays armed and alert, keeping his cell phone in a Faraday bag. Most of you couldn’t do that; the thought of disabling your cell phone and being disconnected causes unimaginable distress for some of our fellow citizens. But you should do that, and Tim Beard explains why in simple, non-jargon-laced language that is calming to read but hard to put into practice.

Tim had a great 8-year run in the Marine Corps before being recruited into the CIA Directorate of Operations. He got into all sorts of mischief overseas as an operator, not some flunky hanging out in American Embassies. Readers who have followed me over the years know that I hold the CIA in low regard, despite knowing several high-caliber Marines who were recruited into its ranks. Tim is one of those Marines.

When Tim asked me to review his trilogy, I was happy to do so. But when I asked how long he had been in the CIA, his response (on the Signal app because he doesn’t do cell phone texts like a normal person) was “I had over 28 years between the US military and the intelligence community.” And that, my friends, is lesson number one: never reveal detailed information about yourself, even when you’re asking for a favor.

Not that Tim is rude or imperious in temperament. Given his profession, he can’t afford to be. He is very personable, asking questions about you and your opinions on matters great and small. He can put strangers at ease and get them talking for hours because who doesn’t like to talk about themselves? But I’m getting ahead of myself. His excellent advice on information management is in Volume II.

Volume I introduces the Look Twice Mindset. These books are not intended for people in law enforcement or the military. They were written for average, everyday Americans who have no security training but understand that learned helplessness is no way to live. For a highly trained international man of action who understands security fundamentals, this was still worth reading. Tim covers home security, work security, and what to do and what not to do when out and about in your hometown. He also explains how to detect threats while going about your normal daily routine. After reading Volume I, I realized I need to up my game by adding gear to my vehicle, like a glass-breaking hammer with a seat belt cutter and some caltops – you can get a bag of 20 on Amazon for $25. They will complement my tactical seatback rig, which is stocked with enough first-aid gear, edged weapons, and pistol ammo to earn the Tim Beard stamp of approval.

From my perspective, Volume II of Look Twice is the most important. It covers what Tim calls “Safe Tech,” which addresses everything you need to know, from data storage and encryption to VPNs, mobile devices, and social media. The reason he goes to great lengths to cover the best current IT security practices is revealed in the next section, which concerns fraud.

What concerns Tim is the future of malicious AI-assisted fraud, which is why he advocates strict security protocols for internet-connected devices. He is not a fan of household devices that connect to the Internet of Things, such as doorbells, climate control, washing machines, and refrigerators. I can tell you (because I have an excellent A/C guy) that using a Nest app (or similar product) to control your thermostats is hard on your central air units. Tim can tell you that having a smart meter that lets your utility company control your thermostat is reckless.

I’ve fallen into the habit of filling out questionnaires from various vendors, service providers, the VA, and the local government. I often wonder why I bother. Now, thanks to Tim, I’ll never fill out one again. As he points out, you have no idea what all that innocuous data can add up to when aggregated and analyzed by future AI programs. Whatever comes out the other end of that process will not favor you.

There are more handy tips, many of which have led my wife to say, “See, I told you so.” These tips include shredding every piece of mail with your name on it, using a password manager, changing every password you currently use, and always using two-factor authentication where available. If your wife has been bugging you about these or similar topics, now you can admit she’s correct and add that a career CIA agent is backing her up.

This brings us to Volume III, which covers guns, knives, blunt instruments, ammunition selection, and proper training. I know there are millions of Americans who have no practical knowledge of how to use firearms or edged weapons. I don’t personally know any of them, but I acknowledge they are out there, probably staring at a screen as I write this review. There is now an easily digestible, common-sense guide they can pull up on a screen if they wish, though I recommend going old-school and buying the series in book form.

Not only does Tim cover weapons and how to employ them, but he also covers some of my favorite topics, such as handling checkpoints and roadblocks. He explains how to conduct yourself in a foreign country that is not an ally of the United States and how to handle mobile, static, and technical surveillance, which you may encounter there or here in the United States. It is easy to find all sorts of advice on these topics, but it is rare to find advice that makes sense.

It is impossible to foretell the future, but it would be foolish to assume it will be bright and peaceful for ordinary Americans. You can choose to believe you are invulnerable to misfortune or to prepare to handle adversity. If you are not part of the 1% who have served in the military or the 0.25% working as sworn law enforcement, your options for learning to deal with serious adversity are limited. If you’re smart, you’ll recognize this and purchase Tim Beard’s Look Twice series.

Rubbish is the most charitable description of the pablum produced by the corporate media, progressive technocratic think tanks, SOF Vet Bro podcasters, and a legion of unhinged international loons on Substack. When Operation Epic Fury began, we were warned that dozens of Iran-backed terrorist cells inside the United States would be activated to carry out simultaneous Mumbai-style attacks. As I noted in my March 3^rd post, crying wolf incessantly doesn’t mean there are wolves in the area.

There has been a steady stream of uninformed speculation about impending catastrophes, especially if we put “boots on the ground.” Most focused on Marines being slaughtered when they land on Iranian soil. I heard Darryl Cooper, whom I admire, tell another podcaster that friends inside Tier 1 SOF units had told him they were concerned about being employed recklessly in poorly planned operations. I would not call that a lie, as Darryl is not here to defend himself, but, at the time, I found it less than believable.

After we put over 100 Special Operations boots on the ground for a day, built an expeditionary airstrip, and rescued a downed Air Force pilot without any casualties, how confident are SOF forces in the theater now? That was not a well-planned and rehearsed operation like the capture of Maduro. It was dynamic; there was no pre-planning or rehearsals, just the execution of branch-and-sequel audibles that demonstrated 4th-generation tactical brilliance. I admit I was stunned by CENTCOM’s ability and willingness to operate this way. After the fiasco of our Afghanistan exit, I had little faith in CENTCOM. I’m happy to be proved wrong about that.

The latest round of pearl-clutching started after President Trump’s threat to wipe out Iran’s civilization. But France already destroyed Iran’s civilization in 1979 when it allowed Ayatollah Khomeini to orchestrate the Shah’s overthrow from within its borders. Richard Fernandez, the undisputed champion of rational historical discourse, explains how this happened.

“Khomeini viewed Iran’s pre-Islamic past (Achaemenid, Parthian, Sassanid empires; Zoroastrianism) as an era of darkness or barbarism, to be eclipsed by Islamic rule. Universities were shut down for over two years to create “healthy environments for teaching advanced Islamic sciences” by expelling professors, students, and curricula tainted by “Western” or pre-Islamic influences. Persian culture—music, dance, mixed-gender socializing, dogs (as pets), certain poetry, and storytelling—when they conflicted with strict Shia rules, was banned.

Not content to wipe out Persian culture, the austere cleric did a number on the Marxists. Between June 1981 and March 1982, one of the largest massacres of leftists in modern history occurred: thousands of leftists and socialists were killed. The regime saw atheistic Marxism and organized leftist opposition as existential threats incompatible with Shia theocracy. It used torture, forced confessions, show trials, and extra-judicial killings. The Iranian left—once a major revolutionary force—was largely annihilated inside Iran.

But it didn’t stop there. Iran’s strategy of treating Lebanon and Syria as expendable forward bases against Israel and Sunni powers delivered the former to Hezbollah and precipitated civil war in the latter from which it has yet to recover.”

Nobody expects our media or credentialed elites to be honest or even knowledgeable about historical events that contradict their manufactured consensus. As a result, they are incapable of understanding or interpreting what has happened during the first 40 days of Operation Epic Fury. This void of fake news and misinformation needs some informed speculation from a military professional who spent a couple of years working on the Iranian border and dealing with Iranian security officials.

The stated objectives of this operation are as irrelevant as President Trump’s wildly fluctuating statements about Iran. What matters are the results of a 40-day-long, one-sided, high-tech assault on the foundations of the Mulla’s Islamic Republic. We have turned a regional power into Trashcanistan. Big Serge explains how:

“The American and Israeli air campaign is, in a very real sense, a try at manufacturing ungoverned space within Iranian territory — rendering the Iranian government unable to exercise effective control over large swaths of its own military and industrial infrastructure, unable to guarantee the security of its own leadership and command apparatus, unable to project force across its borders or even to defend its own airspace with any reliability. This is sovereignty denial as a strategic objective, achieved not by occupation but by aerial pulverization of the instruments through which sovereignty is exercised. The recent move to expand targeting to include infrastructure is perfectly consistent with this theory.”

Ungoverned spaces normally result from an insurgency, but we are creating them from the opposite end of the technological spectrum. We have demonstrated the ability to attack a country of 90 million people with a large, potent military that has been preparing for decades to confront exactly this kind of attack while sustaining minimal casualties. This is a strategic innovation that will be studied in detail by our adversaries and ignored by our elites. The Iranian regime that emerges at the end of this conflict will be fundamentally different from the one that entered this conflict. If it is not replaced, it will be a hollowed-out shell of its former self. Unable to pay the thugs who keep it in power, and unable to control important provinces like Sistan-Baluchistan.

The only weapon Iran has left is to close the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused a serious decline in global oil stocks, triggering a chain reaction in the UK, Western Europe, and Australia. It has created fuel shortages that windmills and solar panels cannot offset. It is pushing governments that already heavily tax their workforce to support welfare, migrants, and renewables to contemplate higher taxes. It has created demands for more drilling and nuclear power, which is anathema to progressive elites. And exposed the inability of woke governments to provide energy or contribute to international security.

The international energy market is being forced to adapt to a constricted Persian Gulf, with both short- and long-term fixes. In the long term, we will see large pipelines stretched across Arabia to avoid the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. In the short term, we have seen every available large oil tanker and LPG carrier in the world change course and head toward the Texas coast at top speed. Russia is sanctioned, Venezuela is controlled by the Trump administration, and Iran cannot get a tanker on the open seas now that the US Navy has blockaded the Straits of Hormuz. The only major oil producer capable of increasing production and handling an increased flow of super tankers is in the Gulf of America, north of the Rio Grande.

The blockade of Iranian ports, which takes effect today, will cost Iran approximately $276M/day in lost exports and $157M/day in disrupted imports. The Iranian rial has dropped to 1.5M per dollar, and Iranian banks are limiting withdrawals to $30.00 a day. The blockade makes continued resistance economic suicide.

But that’s not all: Iran has around 55 million barrels of oil storage capacity, currently over 50% full. When it can no longer store the oil it extracts, it will have to shut down production. Maid Maleki explains what happens next:

… when mature oil wells shut down, bottom water rushes in, a process called water coning. Oil droplets get permanently trapped in rock pores. This oil can never be recovered. Iran’s fields already decline 5-8% annually. Forced shut-ins could permanently destroy 300,000-500,000 bbl/day of production capacity, that’s $9-15B/year in revenue, gone forever.

Once again, President Trump has shown that a media monetized to lie for clicks and drowning in partisan alt. media takes has only a fleeting relationship with reality. He has revealed that the cosmopolitan intellectuals who comprise the Democratic Party and the permanent DC managerial class are detached from America, viewing their fellow citizens through an anthropological lens colored by condescension. We can only pray that this truth emerges from the fetid swamp of our dumbed-down social media before the Trump train is derailed by MSM propaganda and democratic party election shenanigans.

When I was a child, I would spend hours looking through my father’s collection of World War I books. many of which were full of disgustingly graphic photographs of the trench warfare casualties and contemporary war propaganda posters. It was used again in World War II as a movie and comic book title, and as you can see in the nifty graph below, it remains in use to this day.

I was sure this phrase originated in 1914 and was associated with the United States Marine Corps. Turns out I was mistaken. The earliest use of the phrase was in The Post-Captain by John Davis in 1804, where he wrote: “He may tell that to the marines, but the sailors will not believe him.”

The version in use today came from a campaign journal written by John Marshall Deane, a private in the Foot Guards. Written in 1704 but not printed until 1846 as A Journal of the Campaign in Flanders. It included this story in the preface: If a soldier complained to the commanding officer of hardships which he could not comprehend, he would be very likely to recommend him to “tell it to the marines”!

As two Marine Expeditionary Units converge on the Persian Gulf, it is difficult to separate what we know from what is true. It is hard to believe that the Marines will be used in a combat assault role because there aren’t enough of them. Marine Expeditionary Units in the 1980s, when I was part of the 11^th MEU, were bigger and more capable than they are today. In 1988, our Battalion Landing Team numbered over 1,300 Marines and included tank, AAV, LAV, heavy engineers, and reconnaissance platoons. We also had four rifle companies, a sniper platoon, and a large weapons company with 81mm mortars, heavy machine guns, and TOW missiles.

Contemporary Marine Corps Battalion Landing Teams are much smaller. The weapons company has been eliminated, and the Marine Corps has divested itself of tanks, heavy engineers, and snipers. There are only three rifle companies in an Infantry Battalion, so contemporary Battalion Landing Teams are just over 1000 Marines who have significantly less firepower than we had 40 years ago.

The addition of the 82nd Airborne Immediate Response Brigade adds another 3,000 troops to deploy alongside the Marines, but they are not configured to do much beyond holding an airfield open for follow-on forces. And they lack the Marines’ firepower and mobility, as demonstrated in Grenada and Panama. Yet all I hear from the legacy media, YouTube Vet Bros, and many Substackers is that the impending seizure of Kharg Island will be a blood bath, and it’s all Trump’s fault.

Operation Epic Fury has, despite the legion of armchair strategists hyperventilating about the Kharg Island blood bath, been a splendid success. President Trump and his CENTCOM commander outlined their objectives on the first day. Destroy Iran’s nuclear weapon program. Eliminate Iran’s ability to manufacture ballistic missiles, destroy the Iranian ability to manufacture drones, and remove the Iranian threat to maritime commerce. Israel is working on a different set of objectives that are complementary but seem to focus more on modifying regime behavior.

Iran’s objectives are easy to interpret from its actions. Preservation of their theocratic authoritarian government, retention of their nuclear weapon program, preservation of their missile and drone manufacturing capacity, and the ability to use the Strait of Hormuz as a tool of economic coercion.

An accurate assessment of how Iran and the USA/Israel coalition are doing after one month of combat is simple. Which side has made the most progress in meeting their objectives? Iran’s nuclear weapons program has been comprehensively destroyed. American weapons have turned every important nuclear facility into rubble, and Israel has killed the senior scientists and other personnel associated with the program. Iran’s missile production and fixed-site storage caves have been destroyed, and the senior generals and scientists running the missile program are all dead. Same with the drones, and same with the Navy.

The Islamic clerics who have run the country since 1979 are all dead. Their replacements are also all dead, and the third-string mullahs last about 24 hours after being appointed before they are killed. The supreme leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is reportedly severely injured. He is a Hojjatoleslam (mid-ranking cleric), not an Ayatollah, which conflicts with the Iranian constitution written after the Ayatollah Khomeini took power in 1979. He is also a Nepo baby with extensive real estate holdings in London and is rumored to be gay.

According to the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN) polls, support for the principles of the Islamic revolution and the Supreme Leader has fallen to 11%. Between 70 - 80 % of Iranians would not vote for the Islamic Republic if given a free choice, and a majority of those polled favor the separation of religion from the state. As the citizens’ attitudes towards the Twelver Shia Islam foundation of the Islamic Republic have eroded, the regime’s core power base has hardened. Ideological political training dominates the training schedules of the IRGC and the Basij militia. Promotions reward doctrinal loyalty over technical competence.

The IRGC leadership resembles Mexican politicians by using their positions and power to accumulate vast personal wealth. I’ll let Grok summarize

Key Aspects of Corruption

• Economic Control: The IRGC has established a vast economic empire, controlling numerous sectors such as energy, construction, and transportation. This dominance has led to widespread corruption, theft, and nepotism.

• Black Market Activities: Estimates suggest that IRGC-related black-market activities could account for around $12 billion annually. This includes smuggling and illegal trade operations.

• Mismanagement of Resources: The IRGC’s involvement in large-scale projects, like dam construction, has been criticized for prioritizing profit over public welfare. This has contributed to environmental crises, such as severe water shortages.

The secularizing population of Iran is tired of being abused by a thoroughly corrupt regime. Now that Israel and the USA have severely degraded their military capabilities and caused visible desperation in their thuggish enforcer cadre, it is clear change is coming; the only question is how soon.

As one of the obviously knowledgeable and consistently reliable Substack writers, John Spencer observed about the targeted assassination of the Islamic Republic’s leadership:

This is not decapitation as historically understood. This is the systematic removal of entire echelons of leadership across political, military, intelligence, and internal repression structures.

We are in uncharted waters because there has never been a military campaign capable of killing so much of an adversary’s leadership. A regime that thrives on corruption and ideological purity tests by definition cannot develop capable leaders at scale like the American military. The only way the current regime in Iran will survive is by the legacy media, the democratic party, and social media influencers turning the continuation of our punitive campaign toxic with false framing, fabricated stories of insider conflict, and hysterical reporting based on the feverish creations of credentialed Trump deranged defeatists.

My message to the think tankers, Canadian Substckers, legacy media, and everyone who attended a No Kings rally is simple. Tell it to the Marines.

Strength is a valuable trait today amid a flood of fake news, uninformed opinion, and blatant lies that define the coverage of our Punitive Campaign against Iran. For 47 years, I’ve maintained that the Islamic Republic of Iran delenda est. I have taken great pleasure in watching the theocratic authoritarians ruling Iran being dismantled. Yet, like you, I have no idea how this campaign is progressing, which I see as a positive sign.

Pete Hegseth, who is despised by the credential experts who gave us fifty years of abject foreign policy and military failure, has built a strong record of military victories. His disciplined Department of War doesn’t leak, stays on message, and supplies the media with a steady stream of metrics on what it has achieved, providing plenty of information that means little. That is how we are supposed to fight, especially when the media and the Democratic Party do everything they can to ensure we lose.

The left opposes everything Trump does, so their reaction to Operation Epic Fury is to be expected. However, it’s clear that the Iranian Punitive Campaign has, to some degree, split the right. Most of President Trump’s supporters trust him to see this through to a successful outcome. The biggest drop in support comes from the Gen Xers and Millennials, who fought in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Those humiliating failures are still fresh in their minds, leading them to believe Iran might end up the same way.

The other drop is support comes from former MAGA stalwarts like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who have turned into virulent anti-Semites convinced that the little land of Israel controls the government of the United States. The idea is, on its face, preposterous. Israel, like the United States, is a divided country 48% conservative, 48% progressive, and 2% crazy. They have enough problems trying to hold a ruling coalition together, so how the hell could they be secretly controlling our government when they can barely control their own government?

Iran is not going to end like Afghanistan or Iraq because we are not going to commit massive ground forces to a regime change or nation-building mission. Yet there are ground forces heading toward Iran. On the 14th of March, the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) started steaming toward the Gulf of Oman from their home ports in Japan. It will take them about two weeks to get on station, putting them in play just days before President Trump meets with President Xi in Beijing.

They could be given the mission of taking and fortifying Kargh Island to secure the infrastructure through which 90% of Iran’s petroleum exports flow. That would require the elimination of Iran’s missile and drone capability, which, given the perceptible drop in Iranian attacks, is possible. The Marines also bring robust VBSS (Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure) and TRAP (Tactical Recovery of Aircraft and Personnel) capabilities that the CENTCOM commander could put to good use.

The USS Tripoli LHA 7 is similar to the old rust bucket USS Tripoli LPH 10, on which I deployed during the first MEU (SOC) WESTPAC in 1987. It has no well deck. The old World War II era LPH ships had no well deck because they were designed to be escort carriers. Modern helicopter carriers were designed with well decks to facilitate the ship-to-shore flow of troops and logistics. The first two America-class ships, LHA 6, USS America, and LHA 7, USS Tripoli, were built without well decks until Congress mandated that the remaining LHA-class ships be redesigned to include well decks. I’m not sure why they were designed that way, but, until now, they have been considered expensive mistakes.

The non-well deck design doubles the hangar bay space, significantly increases aviation maintenance facilities, adds a full surgical hospital, and increases jet fuel storage. It can accommodate 20 F-35Bs, which is almost half of a super carrier air wing, and it costs 3.5 billion, compared to 13 billion for a super carrier. That makes it, in the cold calculus of war, more expendable than a carrier. Thus, it can operate much closer to the Straits of Hormuz, which closes the huge gaps in air coverage over the strait.

Iran bet that we did not have enough interceptors to stop every drone or enough missiles to sink every speedboat. They were right. At the tactical level. But we aren’t fighting at the tactical level; we’re fighting at the industrial level. Iran believed cheap weapons would always defeat expensive ones. At the tactical level, that was true. But we are not firing Tomahawks at fast boats. Instead, we bolted a $20,000 GPS guidance kit onto a $4,000 bomb and dropped it on the factories that built every weapon Iran owns. A $25,000 package erased decades of investment. That is the payoff for stand-in versus stand-off bombing.

USS Lincoln and USS Ford are approximatly 4oo nautical miles away from the Hormuz staight. The USS Tripoli could operate within 100 nautical miles, reducing transit time and increasing coverage to fight the only threat Iran has left: speedboats. But speedboats that have no missiles to shoot are fishing boats with machine guns, and those can’t close the straits of Hormuz.

Three fortified islands—Abu Musa, Greater Tumb, and Lesser Tumb—sit directly inside the Hormuz shipping corridor. Iran has fortified them with anti-ship missile batteries, coastal radar, artillery positions, and IRGC garrisons. These are fixed platforms capable of launching ordnance into the shipping lanes at close range. Even after Epic Fury’s air campaign, any remaining capability on these islands threatens every vessel passing through the corridor. Marines from the Tripoli can insert via vertical envelopment, flying over the minefields Iran has spent decades preparing in the waters around their static defenses. They don’t need to garrison these islands—just kill all the IRGC troops while destroying the missile launchers and radar installations, as they did during Operation Praying Mantis in 1988. Killing people and breaking things is what the Marine Corps does best.

There is an additional capability the 31st MEU brings to this fight: the ability to establish multiple HIMARS (the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) positions with FARP (forward arming and refueling) sites on abandoned islands or sparsely populated shorelines inside the Hormuz Straits. This is how you can control the six miles of open water inside the straits without jeopardizing expensive surface combatants. The 31st MEU often deploys with a battery of HIMARS (six launchers), and that battery can operate in a distributed manner with 3 sections of 2 launchers operating independently. That would establish a tight shore-based kill zone inside the Hormuz Straits that Iran could not counter with their emimic ground forces.

It is clear that the United States will not deploy significant ground troops to Iran. Without boots on the ground, regime change is doubtful. We can deduce that any more talk from President Trump about regime change or unconditional surrender is him introducing friction into the Iranian regime’s OODA loop. Trump is the only modern President who can personally employ that level of psyops against his enemies. Israel has also stated unequivocally that regime change is not one of its objectives.

It appears Iranian rats are jumping ship to Canada. A member of Canada’s Parliament, Melissa Lantsman, wrote an Op-Ed claiming there were hundreds of IRGC agents fleeing to Canada, where the Carney government welcomes them with open arms. Why welcome those same terrorists who are shooting at your troops in the Middle East? Muh racism, of course, plus the Orange Bad Man is beating them like a drum, so they must be defended. Despite Canada’s stupidity in accepting these dirtbags, it is a good sign pointing towards a positive ending to our punitive campaign.

Doran Kempel, former Deputy Commander of Israel’s elite Sayeret Matkal special forces, contends key IRGC generals—frustrated and cornered—are primed to defect and turn against the regime. That would be the most positive outcome we can hope for. The alternative is to turn Iran into Iraq by comprehensively destroying its infrastructure to the point they can never again hope to develop an organic nuclear or ballistic missile capability. That is not what we want to do, but it could be what we have to do if the mullahs insist on holding onto power despite the strong objections of over 80% of the population. This would be much easier if the citizens of Iran were protected by the Second Amendment.

I have always been firmly behind President Trump because he’s not a politician and drives the political class, the foreign policy establishment, DC think tanks, and the legacy media crazy. I despise all those institutions because I hate chronic losers, compulsive liars, and people whose gross incompetence got friends of mine killed for no damn reason.

Having said that, President Regan, whom I admire greatly, was also guilty of paying too much attention to national security intellectuals. Regan’s famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” line was delivered despite the strenuous objections of those credentialed idiots. I only wish he had ignored their advice about Beirut, too, because it was clear nobody knew why we were there or what we were supposed to accomplish. Beirut was an eerie harbinger of the pointless waste of men, money, and material in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Within hours of the launch of Operation Epic Fury, the foreign policy establishment took to the op-ed pages and green rooms in a desperate attempt to frame the operation with their preferred narrative: Orange man bad, Iran bad, Epic Fury reckless. Nobody outside the NE Acela corridor was listening. The Democrats obviously think we are stupid and don’t remember their failure to invoke the War Powers Act during the 20-year-long disaster in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the dozens of countries Obama bombed. They immediately started their tired, preening, performative para-empathy routine of Oikophobia bigotry, which resonates only with die-hard Democrat clusters inside dysfunctional shit-hole urban centers.

There are no longer credible elite media gatekeepers who can curate the news and craft a narrative for the public. The COVID-19 fiasco revealed our credentialed managerial class to be incompetent, anti-American, if not anti-human, pompous buffoons. Thanks to Elon Musk, we now see think tank mouthpieces warning us about Trump’s recklessness, side by side with Iranian Americans flooding the streets of LA and Washington, DC, waving American flags and shouting God Bless the USA.

But the hardest hit by this reality bomb have been Special Forces Vet Bro Podcasters. Shawn Ryan has spent months showcasing former CIA officers warning us about tens of thousands of well-trained, dedicated terrorist sleeper cells in our midst that are going to rise up and simultaneously unleash Mumbi-style attacks across the fruited plains. Where are they? The recent Jihadi-style attack in Austin, Texas, by 53-year-old Ndiaga Diagne of Senegal was clearly a lone-wolf attack carried out by an obese dimwit. It is a safe bet that the massive attack on American cities by Iranian-sponsored sleeper cells is not going to happen, or it would have happened already.

Sgt. Valhalla VFT posted a video titled Operation Epstein Coverup, but he probably took it down because he was losing clicks. Since then, he’s posted videos bitching about the 6 KIA we have sustained, being snarky about the American F-15 jets Kuwait shot down, and claiming multiple US bases in the region have been “completely destroyed.” I thought SF Vet Bros were supposed to be warfighting experts, cold, steely-eyed professionals who know better than to believe initial reports from distant battlefields they know nothing about. I’m no Vet Bro, but I know better than to make hay from the deaths of US servicemen for personal profit. I also know Iran doesn’t have the ability to “completely destroy” a military base with poorly aimed ballistic missiles and drones.

Non-Vet Bro podcasters Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly are also firmly against Operation Epic Fury, but they have slipped into the George Will levels of irrelevance, so who cares?

The CIA is also irrelevant in this operation, despite planting stories in the New York Times about helping pinpoint the gathering of Iranian leaders we bombed last Sunday. The CIA is good at planting stories in the New York Times, but not so good at intelligence. CIA incompetence led to the creation of the Eclipse Group in Afghanistan, which was sunk by stories leaked to the New York Times. I wrote about my experience as an Eclipse operative here and explained why the Netflix show “Spy Ops” proved the CIA was worthless at human intelligence here. I don’t believe anything I read about the CIA, and I believe the entire organization should be disbanded.

My take on Operation Epic Fury is that it could well go pear-shaped. President Trump, like me, is uninterested in regime change, so we have little influence over what follows if the Iranian Mullahs are toppled. I personally don’t give a shit what follows, but President Trump will not get off easy if Iran implodes like Libya did when Obama bombed the shit out of them. If the Iranian military takes over, so what? There isn’t much of a military left. The Iranian Navy is sitting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf, and the Iranian Air Force has no planes. Iran is rapidly depleting its stocks of ballistic missiles and has no ability to produce or procure more. If the military takes over from the mullahs, there is little they can do besides plead for peace and reconstruction money.

If the Iranian people rise up and take over, it is going to be messy. Iran is a Persian country with many non-Persian minorities. Azerbaijanis, who live mostly in the northwest of Iran, comprise 25–30% of the Iranian population. Another 10% of the population is Kurdish, and they live in the west along the border with Iraq. In the east, the province of Sistan and Baluchistan is home to the Balochis, and the northeastern province of Golestan is full of the Turkmens. None of these minorities are Shia Muslims – they are Sunnis.

The Kurds and Baloch have large, well-armed, experienced militias. The Kurds have been fighting Turkey and the Baloch in Pakistan for decades to create their own autonomous countries. Most multicultural countries in the world are not happy places where citizens experience the joy of living in diversity alongside neighbors from different cultures. The only way multicultural countries function effectively is through strong laws that severely limit religious and cultural expressions, like Singapore, or through ruthless suppression of minority populations by internal security forces, like Iran. With the implosion of Iran’s authoritarian theocratic regime, it is likely that the Kurds, Baloch, and Azerbaijanis will try to break away from the Persian republic.

The worst (and least likely) outcome would be the mullahs hanging on to power. The mullahs don’t need to win; they only need to survive. If they do, we know they will sue for peace and promise not to enrich uranium or build more ballistic missiles. We also know they will immediately start trying to enrich uranium and build more ballistic missiles. Leaving the authoritarian theocratic regime in power could be the end state, which would be bad. But that would justify going back for another punitive raid, which would be good. That’s the advantage of being the hegemon. As long as you don’t surround yourself with whiny Ivy League pussies, you can punish the shitheads who spent the past 47 years killing American servicemen while chanting “death to America.”

The hydrologist, who I think was a USAID guy, asked what that was, and I replied that the Taliban had just blown up a fuel tanker with a limpet mine. My buddy Chris added, “They get the magnets from old desktop computers that the Air Force DERMOs in Bagram.” Our DC friend asked if we were in danger, and Chris replied that as long as we weren’t driving a fuel tanker, we would be fine. Another thud and another spiral of thick black smoke followed, and Chris smirked and said to our DC-based companion, “Jalalabad Rocks.”

Since last Sunday, Mexico has been rocking on a much grander scale. Drug cartels in Mexico have more firepower, money, and freedom of movement than the Taliban had in 2010. Thanks to the FJB administration and their hand-picked, DEI-obsessed, food-blister general officers, the Taliban now has more firepower than any three Mexican cartels combined. But in 2010, they didn’t have the billions in high-end military gear we left behind. And not until the very end of the Afghan war could they simultaneously shut down a half-dozen provinces with roadblocks and gunmen.

Last Sunday, after the Mexican military decapitated the Cartel Jalisco New Generation (CJNG) by killing Nemesio “El Mencho” Ruben Oseguera Cervantes, his sicarios shut down several Mexican states with roadblocks of burning vehicles and road spikes, and they also torched multiple buildings, including the Puerto Vallarta Costco. El Mencho was tracked down by the U.S. Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel after one of his girlfriends led them to a secluded resort compound in Tapalpa. The Mexican Army raid force that took him out was trained in Mexico by U.S. Navy SEALs. President Sheinbaum said she would not allow armed American military inside Mexico, but something has clearly changed.

The CJNG’s reaction made the bombing of a few tankers on the Jalalabad bypass road look like child’s play. Footage of burning vehicles, stores, and sicarios strutting about as if they owned the country generated hysterical reactions in the legacy media. Speculation that Americans vacationing in Puerto Vallarta would be kidnapped or murdered in retaliation was rampant, though there are no credible reports of American or any other tourists being targeted.

But in a demonstration of never letting a crisis go to waste, the American Private Military Corporation, Sabre Defense, is offering multiple extraction options for American executives and anyone else with a large expense account. Their menu of extraction options includes a two-man executive protection detail for three days for a mere $10,800. An extraction from Kabul by road over the Khyber Pass cost $150,000 in 2010. I’m guessing the PMC business isn’t nearly as remunerative as it was during its heyday in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The CJNG temper tantrum lasted less than 24 hours, and now the roadblocks have been cleared, extra troops have been deployed (mostly to Jalisco), and calm has been restored. President Sheinbaum has promised that there will be no risk to foreign fans attending the 2026 FIFA World Cup matches in Mexico this June or to Americans spending their Spring Break in Mexican coastal resorts. She may or may not be correct in her wishful thinking, but the real question is, what the hell is going on in Mexico?

Since President Trump began his second term, Mexico has turned over 92 high-ranking Narcos to the United States. That list includes former Olympian Ryan Wedding from Canada, who has been hiding from the DEA in Mexico for the past ten years. Wedding was wanted for smuggling massive amounts of cocaine, money laundering, and witness intimidation. President Sheinbaum claimed Wedding turned himself in and provided an AI-generated photograph of him standing outside the U.S. Embassy as proof. The photograph proved she was lying, but that is to be expected given her tenuous situation.

Mexico is the land of wolves, and Sheinbaum is not a wolf. She is a far-left progressive feminist who spent four years studying sustainable energy at UC Berkeley. She was elected in a landslide as the Morna Party’s candidate. They selected her to do their bidding, which is why she is cooperating with the hated Yankies by turning over cartel leaders. But ordering the death of the head of the most powerful cartel, and it’s been reported that the Mexicans had no intention of taking El Mencho alive, is not the act of a Berkeley feminist.

Killing El Mencho was payback from Mexico’s head of Security and Civilian Protection, Omar Garcia Harfuch. Six years ago, CJNG gunmen attacked Harfuch’s convoy in Mexico City, killing two of his guards, one innocent bystander, and hitting him three times. According to astute observers of Mexico, such as Joshua Trevino of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Harfuch enjoys a sterling reputation with the current American State Department. He also has a strong working relationship with President Sheinbaum, dating back to her days as the mayor of Mexico City. Although reading the power dynamics of the Mexican Federal government is harder than the old Soviet Kremlin, it is a solid bet that Omar Garcia Harfuch hung the death sentence on El Mencho.

He had good reasons to go medieval on CJNG; they were hyperviolent, which is saying something in Mexico. They had a unique management theory for seizing new territory. First, they eliminated the other cartels, then they killed the local police chief in his office in broad daylight. Then they killed anyone who might get in their way, and maybe 5 people on the side just to be sure. They wanted everyone to be so terrified of them that they would never even consider standing against them. It’s very different from the plata o plomo (silver or lead) hearts-and-minds strategy that El Chapo followed.

The CJNG should have known better than to spend 24 hours on the streets trying to intimidate the Mexican government. They have enough former soldiers and spies to understand the new U.S. Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel’s ability to intercept their communications, identify their soldiers, and build a comprehensive database of their hideouts. If the U.S. military were running the show, it would launch a sustained series of raids targeting the CJNG and kill them by the score. There is no reason to think the Mexicans lack the same capabilities. But they clearly don’t have the will to use the Carthaginian Solution to rid themselves of a menace to their society.

The reasons for Mexico’s sudden cooperation with the Trump administration are straightforward. Mexico’s economic growth is anemic, inflation is high, and the peso is weak. What they cannot afford is for President Trump to raise the tax on remittances above the 1% rate that took effect on January 1st. More importantly, Mexico and the United States are set to begin formal USMCA trade negotiations this summer.

Last year, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on all goods that do not qualify for preferential origin treatment under USMCA. Now, Mexico has to deal with Marco Rubio if it wants to retain its preferential origin treatment. Unlike virtually every Secretary of State in my lifetime, Marco Rubio is not a clown, not an ideologue, uninterested in the opinion of globalist elites, and solidly behind President Trump’s America First agenda. Mexico is going to have to do better than sending us old Narcos and washed-up Canadian Olympic stars to receive anything remotely resembling a good deal from Secretary Rubio.

For now, we have been able to get Mexico to cooperate with us in dismantling some of the designated narco terrorist networks. But there is no reason to think that they are willingly cooperating or serious about wresting control of their territory from the Narcos. When Mexico starts arresting the Narco Politicians who enabled the cartels to dominate so much of the countryside, we will know they are serious about ending the Narco reign of terror against the Mexican people.

I live in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), where views on illegal migration are nuanced. The RGV population is overwhelmingly Mexican American, yet President Trump won all four RGV counties (Starr, Hidalgo, Willacy, and Cameron) in this former Democratic stronghold. The Democratic Party in its current form is woke, which is now synonymous with feminization. Feminized organizations are primarily motivated by group conformity. But the RGV mores are Hispanic, a masculine culture in which respect is earned through a hierarchy of competency. 

The anti-ICE-fueled rage spreading through large, poorly managed Democratic cities is easy to ignore because, with the progressive left, the issue is never the issue. The issue in vogue shifts rapidly; one day it’s climate denial, the next it’s vaccine deniers refusing to wear masks. Then Black Lives Matter is the most important thing ever, until Israel started cleaning out the PLO in Gaza.

The issues change constantly, but the target is always President Trump. The second Trump administration has made remarkable progress in dismantling the federal bureaucracy and freeing us from the mandates of anti-scientific, anti-human globalist climate-change grifters. The Department of Defense is gone, and the Department of War has demonstrated the remarkable ability to launch punitive raids that achieve their announced objectives in hours, not years. The tactical competence shown in the capture of Maduro was stunning.

It appears that the tough enforcement of our immigration laws is keeping illegal aliens out of the country, while a sizeable number of illegal aliens already in the country are self-deporting. Yet it is clear that the Trump administration is using up its political capital to conduct aggressive ICE raids. If Trump and his team have calibrated the loss of political support against the results of highly visible, tough enforcement operations, he can still win the midterms. But he would need a clean election with legitimate voter rolls, limited mail-in ballots, and voter ID. 

Mexican citizens with a valid passport can cross the border to shop, visit, or conduct business in the Rio Grande Valley without a visa. They can’t travel past the Border Patrol checkpoints, which are 40 miles inland. They also can’t stay indefinitly but many do, so local attitudes about illegal migrants are nuanced, especially when applied to Mexicans. That being said, enough of the Mexican American population immigrated here legally to temper sympathy for people who jump the line without paying their dues.

The flow of illegal migrants has decreased, but illegals are not the primary problem at the border in the RGV; cartels are. Mexican cartels have so much money that they easily buy influence from the powerful, well-connected RGV elites. A raid by federal agents wearing IRS and HSI windbreakers on the law firm of Palacios, Garza, and Thompson in Edinburg illustrates the problem. 

The Palacios family of Edinburg is a political powerhouse. The law partner was a former DA; his uncle is currently the Hidalgo County District Attorney; he has a cousin who is the former DA and current Pharr City Attorney; and a brother who served on the Hidalgo County Commissioners Court for eight years. Finding someone who is well-connected under a federal investigation isn’t a huge surprise. That nothing was ever heard about the matter afterward is no surprise either.

The linked report indicates that the target of this 2024 raid inside the offices of Palacios, Garza, and Thompson was Ricardo “Ricky” Palacios. We will never know what triggered that raid because the story disappeared. The Palacios, Garza, and Thompson firm’s website indicates they are open for business. Ricardo and his partners each have their own page on the website, and none of them appear to have been battling the federal government for the past two years.

The problem is that the Narcos have enough money to corrupt anyone they target. They have no trouble attracting American mules, who are routinely detected at the inland Border Patrol checkpoints. This story about a family from the RGV town of Los Fresnos, caught with 26 pounds of cocaine at the Sarita Border Patrol checkpoint, is typical. That checkpoint is outside Kingsville on US Highway 77, which parallels the coast. The other major highway out of the RGV, Highway 281, has a large Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias. Both checkpoints find plenty of drugs, but the smugglers who get caught seem inexperienced and amateurish. 

The only way to stop drug cartels from smuggling drugs and buying influence along the Southern Border is to put the Mexican Border back under the control of the United States Army. I listened to Colonel Dougals Macgregor talk about this on a recent Sentinel podcast about national priorities. He pointed out that the Army controlled the Mexican Border from 1846 to 1948. Border duty has always been one of the best ways to develop junior officers, junior non-commissioned officers, and soldiers. 

As long as legal border crossings are controlled by customs and local police, the cartels will be able to ship whatever they want across the border. They can easily pay American officials $60,000 or more in cash each month. If the border is placed under military control, infantry and support units can rotate in every three to six months to conduct squad-level distributed operations. The border is large, and contemporary military units are small, so small-unit leadership will be critical.

The International Boundary and Water Commission lands on the American side of the border were designated a National Defense Area and turned over to the military last July. In theory, the military could use its impressive electronic warfare capabilities to intercept email, text messages, cell phone calls, and two-way radio conversations along the border. We know they have been flying RC-135 airborne surveillance planes and MQ9 Reaper drones for over a year. They could be doing much more, but if the military were responsible for the border again, what would that mean?

Army or Marine Corps infantry battalions can get up to all sorts of mischief if they’re given a free hand. Suppose units on the border are supplemented with a portion of the cash they capture, which they can use to buy items such as drones. During their rotation, the United States Naval Academy Student Unmanned Aerial Flight Team (the country’s best, according to The School of War podcast) works with them to figure out how best to use and modify off-the-shelf aerial and river drones. 

Even better, what if brigades started deploying RIAB (radio in a box) along the border, broadcasting the most popular music while criticizing the cartels and the Mexican government? They could give away millions of dollars in confiscated funds through radio call-in segments to boost listener engagement. It worked in the hills of Eastern Afghanistan, and it would work on the border too, but I don’t think the Department of War is there yet.

The point is, we cannot only dry up smuggling profits but also cause a ton of mischief inside Mexico with our military. Mischief has been given a bad rap by our legacy media, which are incapable of recognizing the genius behind military mischief makers. Give some enterprising Lance Corporals their own radio station to blast into Mexico and stand by. The shit they’ll get into will defy imagination, but as long as they’re not shooting people, who cares? Mexico has been up to all sorts of mischief inside the United States for years; it would be gratifying to return the favor.

Unless we get very serious about protecting the Mexican boarder drugs and corruption will continue to plague the country. We have plenty of our own corruption to deal with in Minnesota, Maine, and California. Shutting the border down will be great for Americans and could help the average citizen of Mexico, too, by financially starving the cartels. It’s a win-win, and it is entirely possible that Secretary Hegseth will order the military to the border to close it. That would be an honorable mission, a great leadership incubator, and a way to integrate the latest technology into our fighting forces.

“Security incident rates across Afghanistan are skyrocketing, and this year it appears that Jalalabad will, for the first time, receive its fair share of attention. This unfortunate reality is forcing outside-the-wire implementers to spend an inordinate amount of time drinking tea and chatting with various local officials and ISAF personnel to calibrate the threat level in Jalalabad. We’re in for a bad summer.”

During the 2010 Fighting Season, the Taliban unleashed a wave of fuel tanker attacks, bombing of kiosks and small businesses. Stores selling movie DVDs, cell phones, and photography equipment were heavily targeted, but so many of them are still operating that those targeted could have been in a business dispute. If the Taliban were trying to intimidate businesses that were “haram” under their rule, it wasn’t working.

What was working was the Taliban’s newest fuel tanker tactic: Limpet mines. They are now making small, powerful mines with military-grade plastic explosives they salvaged from Russian PTM mines or Chinese type 66 hand grenades. They then use electric or non-electric blasting caps, a time fuse, and powerful magnets to build the mine. The magnets they get from the American military, which auctions hundreds of used desktop computers a month at both Bagram and Kandahar Air Fields.

Back in 2010, these were my observations concerning the sudden appearance of the Taliban inside of Jalalabad:

Despite all the talk of ‘focusing on the population” and “population-centric warfare,” ISAF is doing nothing of the sort. The Americans have a unit on the border crossing at Torkham, but those guys just sit on the road all day doing nothing, and they go back to the FOB every evening. They inspect nothing, they mentor nobody, they serve little purpose outside of providing an armed American presence at that crossing. The Americans have “rule of law specialists” who are fobbits – they drive to the Nangarhar Afghan National Police HQ about two to three times a month when they can get enough MRAPs and security to leave the wire. They drink tea and chin wag with their ANP counterparts, but what is the point? What the hell can you accomplish in a three-hour visit?

Until our actions on the ground include teaming up with the ANP, embedding into their units, and patrolling with them, we will continue to see tons of explosives rolling into the country via the Torkham border daily. We’ve known since Vietnam that answering tactical problems with technology is a waste of time, money, and lives.

It is easier to lose more troops trying to protect them with a passive operational posture and “advanced” technology than using aggressive tactics to solve tactical dilemmas.

If we’re here to fight, let’s fight – if not, let’s go home – it’s that simple.

That assessment certainly stood up to the test of time. And my forecast about the Summer of 2010 proved prescient; the Taliban attacked and killed several of my International NGO friends and kidnapped another, who, unfortunately, was mistaken for a combatant by the SEALs sent to rescue her. It was a long, hot, and discouraging summer.

The first phase centered on the Tangi Valley, outside the town of Surobi, halfway between Kabul and Jalalabad. That phase, which lasted about a year, was marked by precision RPG fire and effective machine gunnery and was deadly. The team responsible for these attacks was reportedly targeted and killed by French Special Forces operating in Surobi and the surrounding area.

The next phase moved out of the Tangi Valley and toward Jalalabad, lasting exactly one day, as documented below. As an aside, Tangi is Dari for Dam, so there are many “Tangi Vallies” in Afghanistan. The one I’m referring to is the Kabul River valley between Surobi and the hydroelectric dam at Duranta, a few miles west of Jalalabad. After the tanker ambush documented below, the Tanker Wars went on a hiatus for most of the 2009-2010 winter but roared back during the 2010 fighting season with a different set of tactics that proved, for a few months, very effective.

I was enjoying a morning cup of coffee on the Taj baba deck on a crisp fall morning in early November 2009. I had some guests just in from the States and was showing off my new Nikon camera when we saw the signature of a tanker attack just up the road. That had never happened this close to Jalalabad before. I told my buddies that some fuel tankers had just been ambushed near the Duranta Dam, then hurriedly grabbed my weapons and body armor from my room, invited my guests to ride along, and ran down to my SUV. We shot out of our driveway onto an empty stretch of the Jalalabad-to-Kabul highway and sped down the road to investigate.

The Afghan National Police (ANP) had closed the Duranta Dam tunnel, but upon recognizing me, they promptly waved us through the checkpoint. We continued at speed through the tunnel, only to have the ANP on the other side wave us right down the road and into the kill zone.

We saw a string of tracers stitching the road ahead and immediately pulled a hard left into dead space, well short of the burning trucks, to continue on foot. The firing was sporadic, with only a few incoming rounds cracking well over our heads, and we were not sure whether it was aimed at us or spilled over from the firefight we could hear in the hills above. The villains had a belt-fed machine gun (probably a PKM), which fired a few bursts in our direction during the 5 or so minutes it took us to work our way around their flank to join up with the Blue Compass guards. Just shy of the ridge they were on, the Taliban spotted us and concentrated their fire on us. I thought the rounds were so high we remained in dead space, but my companions, no strangers to firefights, insisted the rounds were closer than I thought, so we withdrew.

There were two sections of Army OH58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters circling overhead at a very low altitude as they worked out who was who on the ground. I tried taking pictures of them, but they came out crappy because I hadn’t figured out the right shutter speeds on my new Nikon. I wanted to get into position to film the Kiowas when they opened up, but I couldn’t abandon my friends, who were new to the country and not happy with all the lead being thrown our way.

There were no villages in the hills above the Duranta Dam, little vegetation, and no cover. Once the Kiowas gained good situational awareness, they engaged the ambush team. The bad guys were toast. They couldn’t go to ground; they couldn’t hide; they were in the open and forced to move under pressure from a convoy security team.

This was not an effective ambush like those we normally see further west on the Jbad/Kabul highway. The terrain forced the shooters to be much closer to the road than they had been when they ambushed from the heights of the Tangi Valley. Once uncovered, they had no way to protect themselves from helicopter gunships. The Taliban had hit six tankers; the three in the southern portion of the kill zone were spilling copious amounts of JP-8 but not burning. Three tankers in the northern portion of the kill zone were bullet-riddled and burning fiercely. That usually means they were hit by an RPG after they started leaking. My guess was that the security team had forced them back before they could rocket the trucks stranded further south.

What the villains failed to anticipate was that Army attack helicopters would stumble upon them after they initiated the ambush. That was piss-pour planning. Army helicopters fly over the Duranta area every day on their way to Kunar Province, responding to TICs (troops in contact), which are common there. They could have seen the same signature I did as soon as they lifted off the Jalalabad airstrip (FOB Fenty).

Shortly after the photograph above was taken, the OH-58s got a firing solution and let rip with rockets and gun pods. Kiowa pilots seem to like getting close and personal, and these guys weren’t staying above a hard artificial “ceiling”. They were on the deck, spitting venom like a good gunship should, and I missed some Pulitzer-winning photographs, damn it. The Taliban never stood a chance; the four-man team was wiped out in about 45 seconds.

After the Kiowas ended the fight, efforts on the ground focused on separating the leaking fuel tankers from the burning ones. This was best viewed from at least two ridge lines away, and we had work to do, so we headed back to Taj, noting that at least 50 fuel tankers lined the road just outside the kill zone. In the big scheme of things, these attacks are meaningless; the loss of fuel is absorbed by the contractor, who is paid only for what he delivers. The number of trucks lost is likewise a problem for Pakistani truck companies, not Uncle Sam. The American taxpayer can’t buy a break like that in most of the country.

Napoleon reportedly said, “moral power is to the physical as three parts out of four.” Attacks like the one we witnessed this morning are always moral victories for the Taliban. That is the problem with our efforts in Afghanistan in a nutshell. The Taliban don’t have to be tactically good or win on the physical level; they don’t have to be smart or survive half-assed ambushes. They just need to attack, and if they lose every battle in the end, it won’t matter; they’ll still win.

The ambush squad that sortied out this morning to burn fuel trucks was clueless. They shot up 6 trucks in a convoy of around 60, then found themselves flanked by armed guards and forced into open terrain, where Kiowa helicopters hunted them down like rabid dogs. This was also a good demonstration of using PSCs to perform tasks that are not cost-effective for the military. The pressure applied by aggressive maneuver from the convoy escort security element helped the Kiowa’s PID (positive ID) the bad guys and obtain permission to smoke them. It is rare to see that work out so smoothly. Too bad it’s not always this easy with the Taliban.

Fridays are always laid-back, as it’s the one day off we get each week. We had our usual complement of French and German aid workers visit for drinks and a dip in the pool.

If you can’t tell, my French friend Pierre is in flagrant violation of the ’no Speedo’ rule at the Taj. Every time we try to explain the rule to him, he pretends not to understand English. However, he and his crew are great folks who pay their bar tab in Euros, which makes them especially popular with me, so we let him slide on the speedo issue.

The interesting news of the day comes from the lady on the right. She is German and works for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). She requested our assessment of last night’s attack on the Dih Bala district center, which is 300 meters from one of her offices. Like many international NGO workers, she has a high tolerance for risk. She has been here a long time, knows Dih Bala and the surrounding area well, and is completely freaked out because there have been no problems with the Taliban before.

Dih Bala is about 10 miles to the east of us and is home to many large clans of land pirates. They never molest NGOs, as reconstruction makes it easier for them to smuggle goods across the frontier, which is how they have earned their living for the past 2 to 3 thousand years. The Governor of Nangarhar Province has successfully eliminated the cultivation of opium poppy in the area. However, there is still a lot of opium there because of the smuggling expertise of people in the Dih Bala district. If the Taliban are attacking the district center, it means something.

It could be the elders’ posturing with weapons to get the governor’s attention. The governor, Gul Agha Sherzai, is from Khandahar Province, and the local tribal chiefs have a tenuous working relationship with him. One way to get the big man’s attention and a little love is to have your district center attacked, then say you drove the bad guys out when the Afghan Army arrives to investigate. Or it could be that the Taliban has moved into the district, which is always bad news for the elders.

The Taliban typically dismantles the local power structure to establish dominance in a district. The elders can pledge allegiance to the Taliban or be targeted for assassination. If the Taliban are not strong enough or miscalculate when dealing with certain elders, the villagers will grab their rifles and fight. Intimidation of an armed population is a dangerous game - the Taliban sometimes screw it up.

Our assessment of Dih Bala district is that the Taliban are back and strong enough to challenge the provincial government for control of the district center. Our German friend agreed, which was a bitter admission for her to make, with the Taliban back, her work here is at an end.

As the security situation continues to deteriorate, we have been making a point to look at every tanker and police check post attacked by the Taliban.

The tanker pictured above was attacked from across the river, and the cab was peppered by 60 to 70 machinegun rounds and an RPG. The RPG shot was either beginner’s luck or we have one hell of a pro RPG gunner working the area. The machine gun team was also disturbingly proficient. The closest probable ambush site is 300 meters away and 200 meters above the truck.

The tanker pictured above had 10 bullets and one RPG hit; all the rounds came in from the left rear from close range. There are ANP checkposts 500 meters behind us and 500 meters ahead - an ambushing party can’t cross the river or set up on the side of the road without being detected. All the Taliban attacks come from across the river and include enough firepower to fix the checkposts while they go after fuel tankers. That didn’t happen this time, and there is also little fuel left in the tanker. We guess that it was emptied in Laghman Province and then shot up in the same spot as the previous two Taliban attacks. The criminals were probably mounted in local vehicles, and they and the driver escaped after paying off the cops. This is our Occam’s razor assessment, and we could be wrong because, at the end of the day, this is Afghanistan, where it is difficult for Westerners to read the tea leaves.