Speaking of God, preparing for war
JUAN O. TAMAYO
Knight Ridder, 19 May 2003

CAMP COMMANDO, Kuwait - On the brink of war, chaplain Doug Dowling is thinking about the sermon he will deliver today to American leathernecks in his sandbagged chapel a few miles from the Iraqi border.

He will urge the Marines to treat enemy bodies with respect, to look away from the grotesque mutilations of war. He will tell them the war is not about getting even for 9/11. And he will tell them that amid the horror of war they may find the beauty of valor and comradeship and, perhaps, the presence of God.

A stocky Navy lieutenant with a blond mustache and bare-walls haircut, the 42-year-old Milwaukee native looks like a Marine in his digital desert camouflage uniform, floppy "boony" hat and military web gear.

But he wears a tiny black metal cross on his shirt and speaks with the fervor of a former Navy warplane navigator who was stationed in Kuwait during the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, who fought in the 1991 Gulf War and then became a pastor for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

"There is a God who is a warrior, but God is the same always," Dowling said. "The God you believe in as you may go to war is that same God you believed in yesterday and the day before, so nothing changes for me on this day."

Dowling has baptized 32 people here, including a Navy officer he met briefly in a military base parking lot and christened with water from a plastic bottle.

He will hold one more service today in his tiny chapel with a cross on top, really a bunker dug halfway into the desert sand and then sandbagged for protection.

"I will pray for our men and for theirs, too," he said. "And I will pray especially for peace."

"It's really about the mind games," Doug Walker, co-president of the Toronto-based World Rock Scissors Paper Society, which sponsored the annual contest, told the Associated Press, according to a story in today's Kansas City Star. "There's a lot of trash talking and mental intimidation."

You might also say that about the diplomacy of the US War Party in recent months, days, hours.

Sad days for another Doug...

[...] In televised comments memorializing the shuttle crew, Allen, R-Va., described a telephone conversation with the brother of mission specialist David Brown, an Arlington County native. Brown's brother Doug could not be reached for comment. Yesterday, Doug Brown sat in the first row of a national memorial at Johnson, along with his mother, father, two cousins and 22 other family members of Columbia's crew.

Just a few hours after the service, Allen spoke from the Senate floor. His comments were broadcast on C-SPAN2. According to Allen, Doug Brown told the senator that in private e-mail messages during the mission, his astronaut brother said the crew was "concerned" about the shuttle's left wing. Allen spokeswoman Carrie Cantrell confirmed that the senator stood by his recollection of the conversation.

In the conversation, Doug Brown said the crew photographed the left wing, which was struck shortly after launch by a piece of foam insulation that fell from one of the shuttle's external fuel tanks, according to Allen. Allen said Doug Brown told him he never received any such photos.

NASA "is trying to track what if any e-mails were sent to the family," said Jacobs. The agency is examining NASA computer equipment to see if the e-mails can be tracked, he said. NASA officials investigating the accident have said engineers initially dismissed the insulation incident, but in hindsight are reconsidering whether it might have damaged the craft and contributed or led to the catastrophe. Crew members were told about the insulation during the mission, according to NASA, but they were not alarmed by the falling debris, which had occurred on earlier missions.

"All indications that we had from the crew was that they were not concerned about the insulation strike and if there is new information suggesting otherwise we would be interested in hearing from the family," said Jacobs. [...]

from:
Allen: Crew worried about wing damage
Richmond Times-Dispatch, 5 February 2003

Condolences, on a very sad day for Doug Haviland, and all who have been touched by the Columbia tragedy.

"Just Friday night, Doug Haviland says he read an e-mail from space from his niece Laurel Salton Clark. 'She was thrilled by the whole thing,' said Haviland, 76, of Ames, Iowa, where Clark was born. 'She loved the views. She said she could see lightning flash over the Pacific Ocean.' His wife, Betty, added, 'She talked about the wonders she saw up there and how proud she was to represent her country and how blessed she felt to have this experience.' The family was on an e-mail network, where they would circulate her messages from space. It turned out to be their last message from her. Clark, 41, was one of seven astronauts on board the space shuttle Columbia yesterday. It was her first mission. A commander in the U.S. Navy and a naval flight surgeon, she was part of a crew working on more than 80 experiments including studies of astronaut health and safety.

'It's a tragedy,' said Haviland, who lost his son Timothy in the World Trade Center disaster. "

from:
'The Seven Souls We Mourn Today'
By Jamie Herzlich and Patricia Kitchen
February 2, 2003
Newsday

It's difficult not to feel anger on learning that the White House, according to the British newspaper, The Observer apparently ignored safety warnings about the Space Shuttle as recently as last fall.

A Doug Mood: what I'm in today, and every day, but this Doug expresses it with Energizer Bunny energy. Says the Great Falls Tribune: "the new speaker of the Republican-controlled House [...] likes to test himself -- and he's spent no small amount of time doing it. The 59-year-old Mood has run in five marathons and competed in several triathlons, the grueling event where competitors swim a mile, ride 50 miles on a bicycle and run the final six miles. He plays and composes music on a trio of guitars and also plays or has played the accordion, saxophone, violin and mandolin. As a skier, he pushed himself to become better so he could ski with his expert-skier son."

The wolf -- known as No. 2 -- who led that species to successful re-establishment in Yellowstone has died, pushed aside by the next generation that No. 2 made possible, says Doug Smith, Yellowstone's lead wolf biologist, in a Billings Gazette story published today. "He was not a strong presence but a solid one," Doug told the newspaper. "He was a great hunter and a great provider for his pups. He did his job. [...] He was a mammoth wolf with one of the biggest, bushiest tails I've ever seen. But he was old, 8 years old, and a step slower."

It's always DougDay at Doug Bay -- that's what the locals call Douglaston Bay, "which overlooks the marshes of Little Neck Bay and is within walking distance of the Long Island Rail Road," according to a story today in the local Times Ledger newspaper.

Forget your proverbial sticky wicket, this Doug is dealing with a real one, over there in New Zealand. "Head groundsman Doug Strachan says bad weather has meant they have lost two days of preparation on the wicket and play will not start before the umpires' inspection at 2pm," NZOOM.com reports today.

Doug Anderson -- he's the County Administrator down in Florida's St. Lucie County -- says $8 million is expected to be available in the 2003-04 fiscal year to build a new housing pod at the Rock Road jail, according to today's Tribune. And it sounds like a good deal all around. The Trib reports that "an extra pod could pay for itself if the county made enough money housing federal prisoners," and that "The county could reportedly make an annual profit of more than $1.8 million if it installed 100 extra beds to rent to the federal government."

....Not to mention being able to grow all those new pod people....

One Doug's making his chocolate dream come true, in Bucks County. Soon, they'll be going nuts, too, along with "marzipan, old-fashioned hard candy, chocolate-covered espresso beans and gummy candy," sez thrill-seeking Doug.

Let's hear it for Doug Niesen and wife Jan. Jan came to the Lord in 1961 and started praying for Doug's salvation. Jesus came into Doug's life about 15 years ago and took away his desire for alcohol and nicotine. Doug and Jan recently completed eight weeks of lay ministry work in remote Alaskan villages, living their faith. "Doug said he’d be ready to go back to Alaska on a moment’s notice because their experience there was so meaningful," reports The Pine Journal of their home town, Cloquet, Minnesota. 'The people there love the Lord, they love to sing and they’re just so hungry for the Word,' he said. 'We will be going back– the good Lord willing – because he has certainly blessed us, and to God be the glory. And if Jan and I can do it, anybody can, because we do not have any special skills and we only made it through high school. Maybe it will be an encouragement to other people in Cloquet to do something like this.' "

Amen, Doug.

Today brings a double-Doug-twist with Bushes shaken lightly and not stirred. Doug Racine received a letter from Presidential bro' Jeb congratulating him on his victory in the Vermont gubernatorial race, but Bush was blowing smoke in the wrong man's ear. Jim Douglas, who ran Slayer of Evil-doers' Vermont Presidential campaign, actually won the election.

Parents are up in arms because Santa Fe High School band director Doug Morris told band members some dirty jokes, reports KTRK TV in Houston, Texas. A dozen parents wanted him fired but the school board is sending Doug for sensititivity training instead. No word yet on where the parents will go to remedy their humor deficiency. Nobody's laughing in another sensitive spot down south, either -- Washington State Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald discovered that the hard way after he declared, "We are the Mississippi of roads," according to the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce. It turns out that Mississippi recently decided to spend nearly $9 billion on roads while Washington voters rejected an $8 billion road construction program. Still, it's hard to beat a good Mississippi joke. My personal favorite, heard frequently while growing up in yet another southern state: There are a lot of dumb people in Louisiana, but the dumbest are the ones who moved there from Mississippi.

Walmart or bald eagle habitat? St. Lucie County County Administrator, Doug Anderson is working with a real estate developer to make both possible, says the Press Journal of Vero Beach, Florida. If Flagler Development balks at donating the land necessary to protect the bald eagle nesting site, Walmart can always plaster some pictures of the endangered species on the Web site touting its commitment to the environment.

Dr. Doug Travis knows what's needed, but is the head of Western General Hospital's urology unit just pissing in the wind with his ideas on how to improve health Down Under?

President (that's got a nice ring to it) Doug Bennet banned chalk talk on sidewalks at Wesleyan University, because of "explicit sexual messages" he said. No word yet on what the anonymous chalksters suggested that President Doug do.

Doug James confirms it, in today's Dispatch Online: "The municipality is experiencing an increase in the theft of guard rails from bridges," says the acting director of engineering services, referring to the Buffalo City area of East London in South Africa. Doug failed to speculate why but does observe that the thefts endanger the lives of pedestrians and motorists. Meanwhile, a "concerned citizen" told authorities that he caught a man in the act of smashing guard rails into small pieces near a bridge. The man said he was going to sell it as scrap metal because he was hungry.

The good news, according to Doug Nyman, is that the trans-Alaska oil pipeline survived a 7.9 magnitude earthquake on November 3. The temblor "struck Alaska's interior, producing a 145-mile-long crack across the landscape and sending boats bobbing on lakes more than 3,000 miles away in Louisiana," reports today's San Diego Union Tribune. Doug was the pipeline's seismic design coordinator from 1973 to 1977.

The bad news is that we still have to worry about the oil spill that might happen if an even bigger quake shakes the pipeline, which crosses the Denali fault -- all the more so, given the wishful thinking that seems to have informed the pipeline's construction in the first place. "Before Nov. 3, seismologists didn't think the Denali fault could produce a really big earthquake, even though it had historically been very active, said Roger , state seismologist for the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska," reports the newspaper. "Indeed it was a sleeping giant so far," Hansen said.

Doug Millroy worries about wastewater, in Sault Ste. Marie.

This Doug fights molds and flesh-eating fungus, like the one that attacked Mark Tatum's face.