Last night, I watched We Were Soldiers, a 2002 film produced by Randall Wallace and starring Mel Gibson, Sam Eliot, and Madeleine Stowe, three of my favorite actors. I’ve long been a student of the Viet Nam War, I and own the movie and the book it was based on, We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young.

There’s so many good lines in the movie, so many moving scenes. I especially like the song, “Sgt. MacKenzie,” written by Joseph Kilna MacKenzie. The song was written in memory of Joseph’s great-grandfather, Charles Stuart MacKenzie, a sergeant in the Seaforth Highlanders, and who fought in World War I. Wickipedia says “Sergeant MacKenzie was bayoneted to death at the age of 35, while defending one of his badly injured fellow soldiers in the hand-to-hand fighting of the trenches.”

You can find a good review of the movie written by a Viet Nam veteran here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0277434/ On this site, you can find tons of information about this first major battle of the Viet Nam War in the Ia Drang Valley in November of 1965: http://www.lzxray.com/

This morning, I did grandfather duty with my grandson, Mason Alexander Shelby. He’s two and a half, and so bright and so much fun. He calls me popi. The rest of the afternoon, I intend to work with my writing business (no shortage of work for sure) and then tonight, I’ll have a band practice. This Saturday night, Tom and I have a DJ gig, but other than that no appointments. I need to make plans to see my parents in Oklahoma soon. They live in a little town called Kemp, the setting of my novel, Red River Fever.

Today’s Writing Quote (from John Dufresne’s The Lie that Tells a Truth:

Jesus said, If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you—The Gospel According to Thomas