Greetings From Grand Isle, Louisiana!

Barrier island is the site of Jean Lafitte's "Red House"

"There's a red house over yonder.
It's where my baby stays.
I ain't been home to see my baby
in 99 and one-half days..." - traditional blues lament

The beer joints don't close and the shrimpers sell their
catch in sheds on the bay side of the island.

It's the capitol of the supply bases for all the major oil
companies. You find everything from oil tools to drilling
mud, diesel fuel, strings of pipe and groceries, choppers
and ships and tugs with barges in tow coming and going up
and down the channel at all hours of the day.

The pirate Jean LaFitte and his lieutenant Nez Coupé, old
Cut Nose, built a red brick fort to guard the inlet that
leads to Barataria Bay, Grand Bayou and the inland route to
the west bank of the Mississippi at New Orleans and Empire.

In its store rooms they traded chandlery items from ships
they had plundered and burned, cargo, supplies and groceries
- all for sale at a high price to captains with a need for
speedy resupply on their way somewhere else.

They used their local knowledge of the back routes across
the bayous and bays to encircle, surround and ambush the Red
Coats during the War of 1812 when they worked for General
Adndrew Jackson as intelligence and special ops types during
the seige and Battle of New Orleans.

To the northwest is the channel that leads to the Bayou
LaFourche with its canal-side towns of Cut Off, La Rose,
Galliano, and Golden Meadows, the back door to the
Atchafalaya and Terrebonne Bay, the shipyards of Morgan City
and Houma where they build the offshore rigs and supply
boats.

Roustabouts and worms drink at one place, pushers, mud
engineers, fracturing and logging crews at another,
shrimpers, king fishers, and bottom fishermen there company
men and Coast Guardsmen there, federal agents and cops at
yet another.

Smugglers and outlaws drink at blind pig joints in the
trailer parks and fish camps. They rarely show their faces
amongst the establishment types and their employees.

But they all belly up to the bar and take a load off their
minds come beer thirty.

The talk was free and easy before Deepwater Horizon blew
out, burned and sank in mile-deep water 50 miles offshore
after the well blew out on Earth Day, April 20.

In the beer joint used by the oil executives, cops and
Coasties, 30 years ago, I learned about the Nicaraguan raid
on a Navy Seal base across the Gulf of Fonseca in Honduras
in which commandos stole three of the special ops unit's
boats to use for their own.

Embarrassing. Oh, how the commo types from the Coast
Guard's knee-deep Navy hooted and clucked over that one.

Later, the officer in charge of the Seal unit took back his
boats, secured from the operation and got in his Toyota
to go get his wife when she got off work, only to be shot in
the back of the head by a stranger passing by on the street.

Bad day at the office, to say the least.

Radio. It's red hot, they say.

Then there was the surprise exercise and raid on a
production platform mounted by a unit of Britain's Special
Air Service, the precursor and prototype of Charging Charlie
Beckworth's Delta Force.

They parachuted from a high altitude, navigated to the rig
with their square parachutes and blithely took everyone
hostage, demanding they contact their government to let them
know the situation.

In the aftermath, people swore up and down that President
Ronald Reagan sat in the Situation Room at the White House
laughing up a storm as government agency after government
agency passed the oil company's representatives off from one
to another. The Coast Guard referred to the Navy; the Navy
said they don't do that kind of work, try the FBI; the FBI
referred them to the CIA; the CIA had them contact the
Pentagon; the Pentagon said try the White House; the White
House referred them to the National Security Council; the
National Security Council had them talk to the National
Security Advisor who chuckled and said things were just the
way he had suspected.

There was no policy, procedure or plan in place to deal with
a happening of that type.

What happened?

Who knows?

It's not the kind of place where you ask questions and
certainly no one is eager to give answers, in any case.

The wise man drinks his brewski and sticks to ball games,
divorce lawyers and the accursed IRS when the conversation
lulls.

What you don't know sure as hell won't get you in any
trouble if you just keep your mouth shut.

It's a dangerous place filled with men who don't take kindly
to questions. Funny things happen. Heavy objects fall out
of the sky and land on a man on the drilling floor. I once
saw the remains of a man, a rigger on a shrimp boat, whose
body had been pulled through all three winches. The only
thing left was hunks of meat and bone clinging to the wire
spooled on the drums.

The same dynamic goes double today.

It's best to keep one's mind on the business at hand. Let
the world solve its own problems. Keep your mind on the
good news. That is usually enough of a challenge for a
working man.

That is, a working man with no access to information, no news.

Reports are starting to filter out on the radical internet
sites about BP threatening to fire anyone who wears a
respirator to keep from breathing the noxious fumes while
working on cleanup crews.

You don't catch that one on the evening news, nor do you see
it on CNN or read it in "The New York Times" or "The Wall
Street Journal."

The speculation runs this gamut. They, the BP executives, must
fear that to condone the practice would constitute some kind
of admission on the part of the company that it knew or should
have known that long term health hazards will haunt those who
work doing the messy, smelly job.

Militia types speculate that an enforced evacuation of the
area will lead to mass arrests and the internment in
concentration camps of those who make waves.

There are many reports of National Guard and Airborne, Air
Cavalry and straight leg infantry outfits going through
operations to train them how to handle troublemakers, arrest
them and move the refugees along in an orderly fashion.

Televised reports from the Kenai Correctional Facility near
Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska, Ft. Knox and Ft. Richard-
son, Arkansas, pepper the internet on sites like Prison Planet
and World Net Daily.

And how did they come to be there, the Acadian people, at
"the end of the world" in the bayous and bays of south Louisiana?

Why, the nation of France lost a war to the British and relin-
quished all claim to the province of Quebec. That meant the
Cajuns had to go. So, they surrendered their firearms to the
Red Coats and accepted transport to a new province in Louisiana.

That's just where the Brits put them, smack dab in the middle of
the swamps and bayous where many of them died of exposure.

It's a thriving culture, complete with big-paying jobs in the oil
patch, plenty of seafood and wild hog meat, gators and crawfish.

Y'all come take their aromatic shoot gun and they twice-barrel
carbine away from them now. Oh, yeah. Come see. Uh huh.

The Posse Comitatus Act?

Oh, they say, the Presidential powers afforded by the
Insurrection Act supersede that antiquated old relic. It's
okay to use federal troops against American citizens in a
time of a natural disaster declared by the President of the
United States of America.

The Constitution?

Some say since they didn't sign it, they aren't all that
impressed with what it says.

One thing for sure, everyone seems to agree, police, SWAT
teams and the Office of Homeland Security won't be able to
handle the massive security problems resulting from such a
disaster...

That's when the Army of the United States of America will
have to go to war against its own citizens.

War? Hell, yeah, cousin. That's what the fella said.

Pshaw! Talk some kind of crazy, too. That's when he will
have a war and you know that's right.

As the Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his "Meditations,"
always there will be war and rumors of war.

Certainly, that's true in Grand Isle, Louisiana, today.

Things have not changed much. Conditions are very much the
same as I remember them from my experience of 30 years ago.

Bon appetit!