Veterans Day

Washington State is a worrisome window into the future

SeattleI have seen the future, and it looks much like Washington State.But let’s get there by steps. The Pacific Northwest, for much of its history dominated by the logging and fishing industries, has an aggressive blue-collar tradition. Radical groups like the Industrial Workers of the World — or so-called Wobblies — used to congregate there. Sometimes on a Saturday night in downtown Seattle old anarchists can still be found singing their ballads of longshoremen’s revolts. The place has been called 'the hideout capital of the USA’, a far-flung outpost where generations of the nation’s failed, fed-up, and felonious have gone to disappear.

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How the Atlantic twisted the truth

The Atlantic has stunk up an otherwise beautiful Labor Day weekend with a uniquely ugly story. Anti-Trump editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg claims that Donald Trump snubbed a World War One American cemetery in France because ‘it’s filled with losers’, and the Doughboys buried there are ‘suckers’. Goldberg also asserts that ‘Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain’ on November 10, 2018.President Trump categorically rejected the Atlantic’s tale. He called it a ‘total lie. It’s fake news. It’s a disgrace.’‘I was ready to go to a ceremony,’ Trump told journalists at Joint Air Base Andrews Thursday night.

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Six poems for Veterans Day

James Jeffrey served in the British Army for nine years, from his commissioning as a second lieutenant shortly after 9/11 to leaving as a captain in 2010. He served in Iraq in 2004 as a tank commander with the Queen’s Royal Lancers, providing armored support to the 1st Battalion, The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, followed by another tour in 2006. He deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 with the headquarters of the Welsh Guards Battle Group on Operation Herrick 10, during which the regiment’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. Rupert Thorneloe, was killed by a Taliban IED and became the first commanding officer killed in action since the 1982 Falklands War. Jeffrey now works as a writer and a journalist. Read his Veterans Day essay on al-Amarah here.

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Gunning it into al-Amarah

James Jeffrey served in the British Army for nine years, from his commissioning as a second lieutenant shortly after 9/11 to leaving as a captain in 2010. He served in Iraq in 2004 as a tank commander with the Queen’s Royal Lancers, providing armored support to the 1st Battalion, The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, followed by another tour in 2006. He deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 with the headquarters of the Welsh Guards Battle Group on Operation Herrick 10, during which the regiment’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. Rupert Thorneloe, was killed by a Taliban IED and became the first commanding officer killed in action since the 1982 Falklands War. Jeffrey now works as a writer and a journalist. Read his Veterans Day poems here.