Today is 112 days before the 250th birthday of the United States of America.  Commit yourself to extra effort to save our democracy between now and then, especially.

Today, March 14, 2026, begins the third week of “Epic Fury”.

I have near 86 years of experience as a United States citizen and what we seem to have now, which is new, is a reality tv production: the first War produced as a made-for-TV Video Game.

Frankly, my frame of reference now is to calendar time: “Fury” had been unleashed two weeks as I started to calendar events.  This happened for me a couple of weeks after September 11, 2001.  Both dates  – 9-11-01 and 2-28-06 were ground zero catastrophes, in my opinion.  We’ll see what the future holds.

This post purposely redirects “War Stories” relating to 9-11-01/Afghanistan/Iraq/Afghanistan (2001-21) and Vietnam (1961-75).  There is such a glut of information (and misinformation) available about the brand-new Iran War which remind of the information we were dealing with after September 11, 2001.  What follows is a small diversion of sorts from the daily ‘blizzard’ of ‘news’.

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Here is another old (1982) map of the setting for Epic Fury.  See also earlier posts (Feb 24 and Mar 3, 2026)

Below map in pdf format: Iran 1982 focus Saudi Arabia.  Note especially Kuwait and the Strait of Hormuz at opposite ends of the Persian Gulf.

I have noticed that the official conversation about the history leading to today’s war seems to focus on events about 47 years ago – 1979, the year the U.S. Embassy staff were taken hostage in Teheran.  I was in my 30s then, and followed political developments carefully.  Of course, there is lots of preceding and subsequent history in the country and region, but that gets little emphasis.  The apparent coalition of Israel and the U.S. and history with the government of Iran is also in the forefront.  (Of course, the other 47, influencing the defining of contemporary history, is the 47th President of the United States.  Everything for PR….)

With this in mind, I offer a couple of short ‘snips’ about IranI took from the 51 pages in my 1978 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica: Iran 1978 Britannica.

1978 was the year before the hostage stage, thus the article from which the snips were taken is silent on that specific event and is also silent on important facts like Mosadegh, the Shah, the CIA, 1954….

The snips – the pdf is about one page – relate to the people of Iran, and Iran petroleum  history.  Remember, this information is now near 50 years in the past.  It is only a small part of a much longer article about Iran, a large country with lots of history.

Personal thoughts as of March 14, 2026: Our country is no stranger to war; and my family is no stranger to military service, including myself in the earliest Vietnam era years of 1962-63 (Cuban Missile Crisis happened on my watch as an Army Private at Ft. Carson, Colorado).  Here’s what we read in the Rocky Mountain News the day after President Kennedy addressed the nation: Cuba002

Currently, my nephew is a Marine Sergeant who’s been on active duty since 2018.  In about three weeks we’ll be at his wedding.  His spouse to be is daughter of a Marine family.

On and on.  The military, and how it functions,  is not something abstract to me.

For whatever reason, my thoughts recently have gone back to another less sexy U.S. war called Desert Storm,   It was a short war in early 1991, and it involved aggressive moves by Iraq towards neighboring Kuwait.  (The battle theater then was probably generally from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait.  For the combatants, their theater was a tiny speck of sand, even as compared with Kuwait, small as it is.)

I don’t recall many judgements against that war in 1991.  I’ll leave that to individual opinions.  It wasn’t an impulsive move.  Desert Storm was so short that the anti-war coalition had little time to get organized and do anything.  Best I recall, Iraq didn’t really. jump into the public war conversation again until after 9-11-01, 10 years later, when Iraq/Saddam became the U.S. target even though they seemed to have nothing to do with 9-11 itself.

For me, in Jan. 1991,I remember being in my car in early evening when the war began.  I recall where I was at the time. The car radio announced beginning of U.S. action against Iraq.  Back home I quickly got familiar with Wolf Blitzer, who was just getting started with the also youthful CNN, giving non-stop reports on what he was seeing on the ground in Saudi Arabia.  Wolf was at the right place at the right time for a young journalist.

The next morning I was going down the stairs from my condo and there was a strong smell of alcohol.  In the stairwell I came across a paper bag full of empty booze bottles.  Probably, somebody had had far too much to drink the night before, and I was smelling the remnants of last night.  Whoever had the bag was probably still drunk, and dropped the bag enroute to the dumpster in the garage.  I’m guessing the bombing and the booze had some direct relation to each other.  At least that’s my story, over 30 years later.

In the next days, I happened to be at the West Bank of the UofM and an anti-war presence had settled in.

Back home, Newsweek included an invitation to write letters to soldiers at the front.  I wrote, and early on got a reply from a guy who’d dropped out of the UofM months earlier and went in the Army to what he had anticipated to be safe duty in Germany.  He was about finding himself – an honorable course for lots of young people then and now.

Bruce found out what those in service all learn.  Your assignment is part of your responsibilty – you go where you are told.  In his case, it was the dismal sands of the Arabian peninsula, dealing with all the uncertainties and indignities facing a ‘boots on the ground’ GI.  From Germany he’d been assigned to war in the desert.

Apparently, Bruce shared my address with another GI, who also wrote me a letter.  In all there were several letters from the front, and they all came in envelopes like this:

Years later I tracked found where Bruce lived and sent the letters to him.

He responded.  By then he was apparently pretty successful, I gathered, in the money business.  We had only that single exchange.

I wonder what he thinks of what is going on today in the same area of the world?

That’s my “war story” for now.  Does it remind you of one or more of yours?

Etcetera

Paul Krugman and Heather Cox Richardson discuss the oil situation, March 10, 2026

Friday, March 6, was Jesse Jackson’s memorial in Chicago.  Here is President Barack Obama’s powerful eulogy.

COMMENTS (more at end)

from Chuck: “What we really have here is a vast war machine, a false neocon foreign policy narrative and an infrastructure of Empire so deeply embedded in the very warp and woof of America’s process of governance that the outcomes of elections have become essentially immaterial.” – David Stockman,  “The Stupidest — and Potentially Most Dangerous — War Since 1945” [2026]