Big Red Car here.  Sad news, Glen Campbell has been admitted to an Alzheimer’s treatment clinic.  He recently courageously revealed the existence of his illness.

Armies go to war on the music of their times. Glen Campbell’s 1969 hit, Galveston, was the music of those times.

In the mid-1970s, The Boss was a young Lieutenant in Korea serving in the 2nd Combat Engineer Battalion of the Second Infantry Division along the DMZ.  It was a great duty assignment to learn the business of soldiering.  The war in Viet Nam was not quite over but was in sight of an inglorious end.

Duty was destroying fortifications at likely North Korean river crossings on the Imjin River and rebuilding them with thicknesses of reinforced concrete able to withstand then modern artillery shells, taking out old Korean War minefields and reinstalling them, building timber trestle bridges that could carry two American tanks, taking patrols out of the two American forward outposts (Collier and Oulette) and hunting down infiltrators.

Here’s a picture of a blast to remove an underwater bridge column at a river crossing location.  The Boss took a dive to set the explosives.  Not wanting to take a second dive, he installed a case of C4 where a much smaller amount would have sufficed to do the job.  He liked to round up.  It rained fish for a few minutes thereafter.

Everywhere you went, you were armed and dangerous because you never knew when the NKs were coming down to Seoul for a visit.  It was damn good duty.

The Indianhead Division sat astride the road to Seoul across Freedom Bridge like a trip wire to ensure American involvement in the event of an attack.

God bless you, Glen Campbell.  Good luck and Godspeed.  Thanks for the music.

But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway?  I’m just a Big Red Car.  Be kind to yourself and someone you love this weekend; you deserve it.