rlfj: Blog

Some interesting feedback on the funeral episode. Several people wanted Carl to make up with his father at some point, but I always thought there was too much damage by that point. If he was going to hook up with his father again, it would have been back in the ‘80s, and that didn’t happen.

There were also some questions as to whether I have experience like this of my own. The answer is simple – no! I am no more a disappointment to my parents than any child is. By that I mean we all have hopes and dreams for our children, and they never turn out EXACTLY as you planned. I certainly didn’t, and neither did my children. As a rational adult, I simply smile and say, ‘So what? It’s their life!’ and then go play with the grandkids. That’s what my parents did with me. My father passed away 20+ years ago (dementia) but I still see my family when I can, and we talk every few weeks. We are normal people. Mom is not crazy, though as part of the ‘Mom’ job description she drives her kids crazy.

A reader recently commented on knee replacements and the length of time they take. Grayhut wrote: “And those that rush recovery have problems for the duration. I had a partial knee replacement on the left, a full knee on the right and rushed that one. It took me only 8 years of suffering before I let them "Fix" it. And it still aches every day. Don't rush your recovery or overdo therapy! You will regret it. Do what the doctors and therapists tell you to.”

The last cliffhanger proved so popular, I will have to find a few more! Also, for those who seemed to doubt it, my parents were married at the time of my birth, and even to each other, no less.

As for why Marilyn was jailed, the top reason suggested was that she punched out the reporter who wanted to see the dead body. A distant second was she punched out a reporter who was rude to Megan. Actually, I completely discounted the idea that she would punch out a reporter. By now she has a lot of experience ignoring them, and the Secret Service keeps them at a distance. What I needed was a scenario that would surprise even the Secret Service. I think what I proposed would be very surprising!

Several readers commented about having Westboro Baptist declared a ‘hate group’ and using that as some form of legal retribution. A few problems with that, specifically, we don’t have laws against hate groups in this country. In the US, the FBI has their own internal classification and tracks these guys, and both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center formally list groups as hate groups, but they don’t have any force of law behind them. Simply declaring a group a hate group has no legal power; there are no laws against being a hate group. As for what they spout, the First Amendment is an extremely powerful shield, and the laws against threatening federally protected individuals would probably fail in a Supreme Court test.

Several people commented that Marilyn could appear with the Patriot Guard Riders, a national motorcycle group who provide escorts for fallen servicemen to protect them from the Westboro Baptist Church. Whether the Secret Service would ever allow that is questionable, but there is one big difference. In this alternate timeline, Carl never went into Afghanistan or Iraq the way GWB did. He has had less than 10% of GWB’s casualties in his timeline. The PGR probably hasn’t been created. Interesting idea, though.

A few people contemplated that the time required for a knee replacement as I described (two weeks hospitalization and two months of rehab) was much too long. They knew people who had done theirs in half that time. I simply used the times broadcast on NBC News by Brian Williams when he had his knee replaced. Blame him!

More family fun in this chapter. The incident with Maggie’s wedding, with the 24 hours of vomiting, and Elspeth scratching her butt as the flower girl is what really happened when my youngest was married. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I laughed the entire time we followed her down the aisle!

I have gotten several good ideas from readers (of which at least half I already was working on when I wrote this story, but that just means we are all on the same path.) Some of the ideas I got were good, but impossible. Solve global warming – Carl is a billionaire, not a trillionaire, and billions of people won’t go along with this anyway. He can raise awareness, but he can’t fix it in two years. Nor can he go back to the Moon and Mars, or cure cancer and AIDS.

Other issues can’t be fixed without enough time passing. In the mid-2000s gay marriage was still very unpopular and there was no consensus to decriminalize pot. He can’t do these things on his own. To put it bluntly, a lot of old people will have to die off before we get some of these problems fixed.

Only Congress is allowed to tax, specifically the House of Representatives. Just because Carl thinks a tax is a good idea or a bad idea, he can’t unilaterally change the tax code! The same goes for various government agencies. Many readers have written that Carl needs to abolish the Department of Education, or Energy, or Whatever, depending on the reader’s leanings. That can’t be done without Congressional approval. It is one thing to not create an agency (Homeland Security, TSA) but it is quite another to kill an existing one off. Each agency has massive numbers of constituents, each of which want it to get bigger, not smaller, and each of which will fund lobbyists to fight any change. As for doing some of these things by Executive Order, it’s much easier to create something that way than it is to un-create it. That’s how GWB originally created Homeland Security.

A few questions on why Carl was shot. Why wasn’t he wearing his Presidential bulletproof underwear, issued to all Presidents after the Reagan shooting? Well, that’s a bit tougher to investigate, since the Secret Service really isn’t talking about this. A big chunk of the debate is because Obama reportedly wore a suit or overcoat at his inauguration from a famous producer of bulletproof clothing from Medellin, Columbia. They don’t really make the clothing from Kevlar but generally create a liner to the clothing. Kevlar as an undershirt would be very uncomfortable. Even if he had on a Kevlar liner to his tuxedo jacket, if he wears the jacket open, or the shot comes in at the right angle, it can easily slip past the Kevlar on a shot from the front.

Another question is why Carl uses the cane on the same side his leg is bad. You are supposed to use it on the opposite side. Well, not everybody is alike. When I’ve had to use a cane (trick knee - sometimes I need a knee brace, and I’ve used a cane on occasion) I’ve been more comfortable using it on the same side. This reminds me of the movie El Dorado, where both John Wayne & Robert Mitchum get shot in the leg, and end up using a single crutch each. Both actors spend the entire movie using it one side or the other, even joking about it in the last scene.

I know I am going to get some questions about Kurdish Dragon. Is the operational concept realistic? Could an American armored brigade and a light armor brigade actually attack an Iraqi division and destroy it as I describe? Could the casualty levels be that low? The answer is, yes. During the Gulf War once the ground forces were turned loose, American forces rampaged through Iraqi units. The most famous battle was at 73 Easting, but there were other battles as well. Company-sized American units destroyed battalion-size Republican Guard units, battalion-size units destroyed whole brigades, and battle casualties were almost non-existent, at least by historical records. In the fifteen years hypothetically intervening, American forces have gotten stronger and much more advanced. Most of the technical and military people all agreed the scenario could have unfolded the way I laid it out.

One of the problems with writing this chapter was that while the military advertises how fast they can mobilize a division and get it somewhere in the world, the figures they give are as fictional as this story. They might say that an armored division could be on board a ship in a few days, and at sea for 7-10, and then unload and immediately go into battle, but that’s not true. The only way it happens that fast is if everybody is on the base, the flatbeds and trains are lined up and ready to go, the ships are at the docks, the weather is perfect, etc. Real life is never like that. Add in the fact that moving this stuff is enormously expensive and time-consuming and is never actually practiced. To actually move a division from the U.S. to Turkey could easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take a month or more of time. Each way! Another issue is that the railroad network from Western Europe to Eastern Turkey is problematic at best. One of the reasons that American troops have been brought back from Europe to the U.S. is that following Gulf Storm they discovered that shipping troops from Germany to Iraq didn’t actually save all that much time compared to shipping them from America. Interesting.

I did receive several emails from various military and ex-military types, explaining about how it could have happened, pointing out this tank or that airplane or this intelligence should have been highlighted. These things were all true, but one thing I wanted to avoid was an overly technical ‘Tom Clancy’ or ‘Dale Brown’ style war. Carl is writing the story first person, and he would only see the operational and strategic levels. He just wouldn’t be getting into the nitty-gritty like some other writers would.