J.S. Bateman's Blog

  Hint: He is German, born in Cologne in 1862. Still nothing? OK, now peek.   Kaiser Wilhelm? Oh, that’s an excellent guess if you made it, and you played right into my hands. Exxxxcellent. But wrong. His name was Joseph Havertz, Sr. We came across Mr. Havertz in our research for our book, No [...]

        When I retired from the military in 2010 I left many things behind. Some of them I miss a great deal. Superb friends, interesting, challenging assignments, and most of all the privilege of serving with such committed men and women. There are things I don’t miss. Minor things like PT tests [...]

I’m thrilled to plug the debut novel of E.B. Wheeler! She is a friend and fellow historian. I’ve had the privilege of reading parts of this novel and if you like a cracking good ghost story written with skill and faithful to the history of the period – this will be a fun read. It [...]

  Trailer park tabby cat, Bubba by name, Big and strong, hunting small game.   Old habits we’ve lost, whole families sing, around the piano, carols did ring.   One magical moment, around our green tree, our child started singing, then so did we.   Neither planned nor expected in holiday rush, “On dancer, on [...]

Yes Dear.  Except, I just can’t stop myself.  I don’t know why some people blog, but I know why I do.  I started because it is the cool thing for new writers to do in order to build a social network following.  This would, presumably, help book sales.  Not so much.  But along the way, [...]

I love living in Utah, but sometimes I don’t feel very Utahn.  As laws prohibiting same sex marriage fail to pass Constitutional muster in various federal courts across the nation, my adopted state has vowed to fight the good fight for its version—to the tune of millions spent on lawyers arguing that current Utah law [...]

  I’ll admit that all the media coverage of former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ new book, “Duty,” is tempting.  There he is, complete with post-retirement cervical collar, promoting (and defending) his book’s evidently withering critique of Obama administration policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Even harder is resisting the urge to devour all the analysis [...]

So the chattering classes of defense “experts” are lining up to defend the cuts to military pensions made in the recently passed NDAA. I get a news compilation via daily  email of what we used to call the “Early Bird,” a listing of top defense-related news stories from around the world.  In the past week, [...]

Dana Milibank’s recent opinion piece in the Washington Post got some national attention the last week or so.  His argument is that universal military service might be the silver bullet we need to fix the dysfunction in Washington.  The percentage of members of Congress with military service has declined steadily since a high of 77% [...]

Some thoughts on President Obama Purging All Those Generals! Maybe it’s the company I keep, but I see this story pop up over and over again on FB and elsewhere.  It’s like Groundhog Day for nonsense.  The gist of the story is that President Obama is purging the military of senior officers who disagree with [...]