Here is an update from our regular blog reader known as “Doc”.  His expertise is psychology and he is on a secret mission with the U.S. Military.  He is trying to keep us up to date without revealing too much.  I’m honored he checks in here from thousands of miles away.

Happy New Year Maureen~

Code, honor and respect is all that we have these days.
Code is something that we live by and talk in, so I trust that you are able to follow what I am saying to you and everyone.

The U.S. has opened up yet another front in the war on anti-​​American extremists: Yemen.

It ‘s going to be a shadowy war, with the U.S. providing funding and firepower, and it’s helping to keep al Qaida on the run, even as the terrorist group plots new attacks.

Dad packed up the house again and we have moved somewhere in southwest Asia.

The neighborhood was too hot and mom and the kids were getting hurt too often. A neighbor came in just the other day and disrupted our family time.

I hope to bring more later on. Know that all is well as it can be and finally, the world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
Pray that we all can live through this one.

Doc

Doc, Happy New Year to you too.  I know you’ll be on your mission for all of 2010.  You take care.  We enjoy your updates, however cryptic they may be.  I can read between the lines.  I’m sure others can too.  God bless.

Our loyal reader known as Doc has checked in from his secret military mission overseas.  For more about Doc, scroll down to the article “God-speed Faithful Reader and Friend”.

Merry Christmas Maureen~

In less than 6 hrs it will be Christmas here….
I got to speak to my family for about 25 seconds before holy heck rained down.
The nicest thing I can say is this is a beautiful country.
I have been on 17 missions since my arrival and we are heading out soon.
This will be my last “blog” for a few weeks as we are, well you know what we are about to undertake.
Thank you for your reference to me, it was heartwarming.
I will send you our APO soon so that we can send pictures through the snail mail, it seems that we tend to get in trouble when we post to much as we are censured through the wonderful world of the internet.
I am with a great group of men and women who call me “popz”, but thats ok, if they do what I ask then we will all be home in a yr.
Got to run, we are having a Christmas dinner at midnight, beats the MRE’s!

Doc

Merry Christmas Doc!

You have well-wishers here on the blog who all pray for a safe mission for you.  Do check in when you can.  I’m not sure if you’re in Afghanistan or Iraq or someplace else even, but if you say it’s beautiful, I’m happy for you.  Even war zones have pockets of beauty.

Enjoy that Christmas dinner.  Plenty of MREs await you in the New Year.  Hugs from home,  Maureen and your blog friends.

Whenever it rains, as it did throughout the day yesterday, weeding follows.   The more it rains, the softer the ground, and the easier the weeds are to pull.  Quite literally the enemy is softened; the enemy being the firm hold of the soil on roots sprouting unwanted plants in the flower beds, but as you know “softening the enemy” is really a military term that euphemistically describes the death of enemy troops before our guys move in.

We softened the enemy guarding Hitler’s Atlantic Wall on the bluffs above the beaches in western France on D-Day in 1944.   Within days all those “softened” Germans lying dead at their posts allowed the allies to march into Paris and liberate France.

We softened a bunch of Iraqis, twice, in 1990 and again in 2003 when we rolled into Baghdad, but we find eight years on, some fanatical jihadists insist on softening us right back.

With the weather so uncooperative yesterday, I drifted to the little TV on my kitchen counter all day as the funeral for Ted Kennedy began in the morning and ended with burial after nightfall at Arlington National Cemetery.  I felt sad for his widow, interested in spotting the Kennedy heirs of my generation Caroline and Maria, and pleasantly surprised to see Kennedy’s son Ted Junior perform so well eulogizing his dad.  Could he be the next Eulogizer in the family?  Ted Junior runs an investment firm and hasn’t signaled any desire to run for office so we might not see him on Capitol Hill but we may see him at Kennedy funerals of the future.  Perhaps he’ll share remembrances at the funeral of that last surviving Kennedy of the second, most accomplished generation, Jean Kennedy Smith.  Hope so.  He was inspiring.

Much of the analysis of Senator Kennedy’s record focused on his work to provide universal health care for all Americans, a “right” he called it, like public education, and not a privilege.  In this way, with so much goodwill for the “greatest legislator of our time”, could the enemy be a little softened?

Conservatives and some of my family members say we can’t afford to insure all Americans.  But we’re already paying for it in the form of a stunningly inefficient health care system right now.  Even on “fair and balanced” Fox News, every expert agrees the existing system cannot sustain itself.  Deductibles and co-pays will continue to spike and the choices will decline.  So if you’re fully employed and insured and happy with what you have, don’t get too comfortable.  It can’t last even if President Obama resigns from office tomorrow.

The New York Time’s Nicholas Kristof writes in today’s Op-Ed section that 62 percent of bankruptcies are linked to medical bills and among the filers, an astonishing 78 percent have health insurance but were financially devastated by gaps in coverage.  A lack of health insurance results in 18,000 unnecessary deaths per year.

How can this be?  This country spends more money per capita on health care than any other country in the world, but since our life expectancy ranks 36th, there’s a discrepancy that’s costing us much more than money.  What well-informed conservative can argue we’re getting our money’s worth?

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel to get out of this expensive mess.  Most industrialized countries domore for their citizens with less money, and indeed for anyone who finds the European models scary and not applicable, we have some cities in the U.S. that deliver better results for less.

I know change is tough.  For some people change is impossible even when the status quo is paralyzing.  I hope everyone who watched the coverage of Ted Kennedy’s funeral yesterday, and all who waited hours to view the casket in the Kennedy Library, and the spectators who lined the route of travel for Kennedy’s final trip through Massachusetts and Washington, applauding and waving little American flags, will honor the legacy of Senator Edward Moore Kennedy and push for universal health care, the “cause” of his long and fruitful life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/opinion/30kristof.html?em