Sunday, July 28, 2013

Uncle Cran's Family Outdoes Mine Again!

Colonel James C. Hodges
Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst Commander
Photo from PhillyBurbs

Just as I was basking in the glory of my daughter's achievement in winning the EBS Janghak Quiz for a grand prize of three roundtrip tickets to the Ozarks from Seoul, Uncle Cran's son, Cousin James, has enjoyed the honor of assuming command at the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst and thereby achieved a glory that outshines my daughter's own. According to the base website (July 25, 2013):
• Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst personnel and community members gathered to witness Col. James C. Hodges assume command of the 87th Air Base Wing and JB MDL from Col. John Wood during a change of command ceremony at the VR-64 Hangar here today.
• Hodges will provide installation support to more than 80 mission partners at the joint base and generate mission-ready expeditionary warfighters to combatant commanders in his new role.
• Hodges is entering a role in which he will be supporting all service branches of the military. He will be working alongside members from different service branches every day.
More details and more photos are available at the aforementioned site. Or one can also read more -- and see more photos -- in the PhillyBurbs news site: "Joint base gets new commander" (July 26, 2013).

Inquiring readers will want to know how Cousin James managed to achieve such high military standing. Was he specially trained in his youth? The answer is: "Yes. Yes he was." Uncle Cran began early in training Cousin James for the rigors of military life, as we see in photo below showing Cousin James busy learning to swim the hard way, namely, splashing down into deep water without any prior instructions on how to swim:


Cousin James was a mere thirteen years old at the time, but Uncle Cran -- undeterred by his son's tender years -- had already begun training Cousin James in wilderness survival skills as preparation for the military and its hardships!

That turned out well, so I reckon ol' Uncle Cran is pretty smart after all . . .

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4 Comments:

At 12:36 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for the kind notice, but comparing High Schooler Sa-Rah's great accomplishment to that of Air Force Acadamy graduate James Hodges, a 22 year veteran with the rank of full Colonel, who possesses 3 earned Master's degrees...one each from two major universities, plus one from the Air Force air academy in Alabama, and a large number and variety of military decorations just isn't fair to Sa-Rah.

Again I offer congratulations to Sh-Rah, and maybe in the future she will rise to great heights in this world.

Cran

 
At 12:40 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sorry about the mis-spelling in my previous comment of Sa-Rah's name.

Cran

 
At 4:13 AM, Blogger Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

Thanks, Uncle Cran -- and I didn't even notice the misspelling!

Cousin James has three MAs? I think I was aware of two. Isn't one in engineering? What are the other two in?

Jeffery Hodges

* * *

 
At 9:11 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The two Masters are from Washington University, St. Louis, MO and George Washington University, Washington, DC.
They have to do with management and similar subjects, rather than military.
The War College in Montgomery, Al,is not a secular degree as such, but I believe it is a Masters equivalent in content.
I don't know if it would be recognized as an actual secular degree.


Cran

 

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