Important Disclaimer: I have people of every form, fashion, and faith reading my blog and I’m happy more than you know that each and every one of you stop by and take the time to give GB & GSF a read. This particular post, however, is one of my more personal revelations so I’d like to ask the handful of atheists and agnostics who stop by from time to time if y’all wouldn’t mind just skipping this one. It’s just going to make you laugh at me and right now, I don’t need laughed at and while I’m a firm believer in free speech, it’s my blog and this is my heart I’m bearing here so any snarky comment is going in the circular file drawer. Having said that, let me tell you about breaking levees.

My life has slowly gone to Hell in a cheap Dollar General handbag for the last twelve years. It started with getting fired from Woodmont, but it’s steadily picked up speed until now I feel like I’m riding with a one way ticket on a runaway train, and to make matters worse, I haven’t had the foggiest idea why. I haven’t done anything that differently in my life, but stuff just keeps coming faster and faster and faster down the years. Now, I’m standing on top of my metaphorical levee, it’s leaking like a sieve, it’s going to break, and I know two things I didn’t know before: 1) This levee’s gonna break and 2) I know why. Let me enlighten you with what I’ve figured out.

I was literally prayed into this world, into my mama’s womb, and prayed out nine months later. Laugh if you want. I don’t care anymore. Mama told the story to me a million times how everyone else thought I was destined to be a girl, but Mama said, “No, I prayed for a big, healthy baby boy who would look just like his daddy.” Ask the people who still walk up to me in a store and say, “Hey, Frankie!” if she got her prayer answered.

When I got to this world, I dropped right onto a flood plain and great rivers of evil were rolling all around me and a black rain kept falling and still the deluge comes to this day. I never thought to worry though because even though I didn’t realize it at the time, I had one of the most massive spiritual levees this existence has ever seen. I had Big Granny and Aunt Lib. I had Granny Wham. I had Papa John. I had Mama, and by the time I was 25, I had Budge and those were just the main ones.

This was a crowd of praying people. Some people garden, some restore cars, some paint landscapes for hobbies, this bunch prayed . . . a lot . . . and a lot of those prayers were for me. Big Granny had retired by the time I was born so she’d pray hours and hours at a time for her family, but every now and again, she’d call Mama and pray for her special on the phone then she’d tell Mama to put the phone to my infant, then toddling body so she could pray for her “Shanlon” as she called me.

Aunt Lib worked second shift at one of the mills in Laurens. She lived and breathed the power of Pentecost and anyone who knew her knew she had the goods. She’d get off work after midnight and come home dog tired but instead of going to bed she’d pray for her family just to supplement the praying she’d done walking the floorboards of the weaving machines in the mill for the previous eight hours.

Next to my Mama, Granny Wham was the most formidable woman on this earth. She had an iron will that would not break even though it bent precariously a time or two, but she prayed Papa Wham home from Europe during World War II without a scratch on him and she prayed Daddy home from Vietnam without a scratch on him that anyone could see. If Granny Wham said she was going to pray for you, she wasn’t making idle talk. Your name was going on the list she would quietly and calmly review before her Lord every night before she went to bed. Everybody else on this page except for Budge and Granny Wham were all Pentecostal. Granny was a sprinkled Methodist turned dunked Southern Baptist Sunday School teacher and when she got on her knees she wasn’t talking to hear her brains rattle. She had every scrap of faith in the world that whatever she was praying for would come to pass no matter how improbable. Granny Wham was a serious prayer warrior.

I remember one of the last nights I ever spent the night at Granny and Papa Wham’s house. I was a teenager. Papa and I had watched a Braves game into the wee morning hours and instead of driving home I just laid down in Aunt Cathy’s old room and went to sleep. I sat bolt upright and looked at the clock on the headboard read 3:37 AM and I heard soft noise down the hall in the den. When I eased into the room, Granny Wham was on her knees at her favorite chair with her Oxford Blue Schofield Reference Bible laid out on the seat. She was praying and crying. I walked over and laid my hand on her back gently. She looked up towards me through pouring eyes and I asked her whatever was wrong. She said, “I had a dream I was in a wide open field and in the middle of the field was a mound of logs with a white sheet laying on it and as I walked closer to it I saw it was on fire, and when I got closer still I saw a body was under the sheet and it was on fire as well. Then I got right up to it and I was scared to pull back the sheet but I heard a voice telling me to.” Here she broke down for a minute and when she could speak again she said, “It was Frankie (my daddy). He was dead and burning and I don’t know what it means so I got up and came in her and I’ve been praying ever since.” When she reached a level of care need Cathy couldn’t give her at home, Granny moved to Martha Franks Retirement Center and even though a stroke left her barely able to speak intelligible words, God didn’t have trouble understanding her I know. Every time I went to see her, which was so very much less than it should have been, she was either napping in her bed or praying in her bed with her hands laying softly on the last bible I bought her to replace the Schofield that fell apart. Granny prayed.

Papa John (Mama’s daddy) was a Pentecostal preacher and a loom fixer at a cotton mill. People laughed at him and ridiculed him and put him down as tongue tied and uneducated. They didn’t know the pain that seared Papa’s soul and mind. Papa fought his own personal demons all his life and even though they broke his body with multiple strokes and multiple heart attacks and a car wreck or two for good measure, they never broke his spirit. He preached God’s word on Sunday morning and Sunday night with all the fervor and fire of a John Wesley or Charles H. Spurgeon right up until he had a big stroke in the church parking lot that left him unable to speak above a whisper. People gave up on him and people thought he was odd and funny, but Papa never gave up on God. The last several years of his life, Papa couldn’t get out or get up much without help. Instead of watching the old westerns he loved with Roy Rogers and Lash LaRue, he’d sit from late afternoon until dawn with his father-in-law’s ancient family bible on his lap reading and praying, mostly for Mama and me. The last words I heard him speak were a prayer.

Then . . . Mama. All my life Mama drilled into my head I didn’t belong to her I belonged to God and He had just allowed her to raise me. I once asked Mama if she loved me more than anything or anyone (I may have been five) and she replied without pause, “Everything and anyone except Jesus. I don’t love you more than Jesus, little man.” Jesus was the center of Mama’s universe no matter what anyone else may have ever believed about her. In all three trailers we lived in together, Mama wore a low spot in the carpet at the foot of her bed where her knees rested. She literally had callouses on her knees from kneeling before the Lord in prayer. When the COPD put her in a recliner for good, she couldn’t do anything else so she sat all day and long into the night watching the Gaither Gospel Homecoming series on DVD and praying, even though she couldn’t get to her knees anymore. The last three years of her life, she seldom left her chair except to use the bathroom. She couldn’t even get a shower unless the hospice nurse helped her she was so weak, but she still prayed for me. She was praying for me when she lost consciousness that final time.

Now, they’re all gone. Aunt Lib died September 3, 1997; I preached her funeral. Big Granny died February 9, 2001; I preached her funeral. Papa John died October 16, 2006; I preached his funeral, Granny Wham died February 5, 2008; she had wanted me to preach her funeral but Daddy and Cathy wouldn’t allow it so the idiot passing himself off as a pastor at her church who never darkened the door of her nursing home room the entire three years time she was there preached it, and so that left Mama and she went home March 25, 2013 . . . two years and two months from tomorrow.

All my levees broke, but the storm never let up. Looking back, I could feel a change after Big Granny died, but the hits really started pouring in after Papa John died and when Granny Wham died in February, I had my first stay at Charter Behavioral that November. The five years between Granny Wham’s death and Mama’s death saw my life seriously go into decline emotionally and mentally. Mama was strong praying for her little man though. With help from Budge, she almost single-handedly kept the darkness away from me. So that’s how I noticed what was happening . . . Mama knew she was going to die and she spent so much time praying for me that, with Budge adding a wife’s prayers along too, it took the darkness two full years to finally leak past the prayer levee Mama laid down.

But now she’s gone and my precious Budge is trying to hold back alone what the combined effort of the five greatest prayer warriors I’ve ever known could barely keep at bay. It’s a testament to her own strength that I’m still standing instead of cowering under the kitchen table in the fetal position. I feel it though. I hope no one thinks I’m casting aspersions on my precious wife’s praying ability. It’s just harder for one pillar to hold up what six once held.

I don’t know what is going to happen, but I know it’s going to be bad. My head stays in a whirlwind; thoughts will not settle down, some days motivation to MOVE is impossible to scrounge up. I am on the brink of tears every moment of every day. My decision making ability is becoming suspect. I’m having trouble getting out of the house. Pack after pack of black dogs chase me and The Tape plays over in my mind almost constantly. I live afraid of what comes next and I know some of you won’t understand that or will think I’m wallowing in self-pity. Honestly, I don’t care what you think. I know what’s in my head and guts. I know what I’ve faced WITH help and now I’ll face worse WITHOUT help.

So that’s the story and I don’t know why I didn’t realize it sooner but it’s like the old axiom “You don’t miss the water ’til the well runs dry.” I don’t want to carry on, but I don’t have a choice until I’m hammered down so hard I can’t rise anymore.

Until then, I still love y’all and hope y’all still keep your feet clean.

Of all the issues I have to deal with, and believe me I have more issues than National Geographic, the most pernicious and debilitating is what I affectionately refer to as “The Tape.” That’s the short name. It’s full name is The Grievous Recitation and Replay of Misery, Misfortune, Doom and Failure Inside My Head. So, see, it’s much easier to just say “The Tape.”

The Tape consists of basically everything bad that I’ve ever said or done AND everything bad that has ever happened to me as far back as I have memory. I realize some of you will read that and think it impossible, but ask people who know me and they can assure you I am quite capable of remembering all that and more. What many people wrongly believe to be a superior intellect on my part is actually just an above average memory. It’s not photographic or eidetic like Dr. Spencer Reid on Criminal Minds, but it’s been a true blessing to me in my academic career . . . and a blackened curse on my emotional life.

The Tape functions like so, all my bad memories are stacked like cord wood inside my brain. One really old one is me falling into the man eating rose bush outside Aunt Mary’s back door. One minute I was standing on the top step waiting on her to open the door and the next I was bum over teakettle in a rose bush that could have made an admirable crown of thorns for an Easter Passion Play. Another one — a seriously horrible one — is of me feeding one of our bulldogs when Rusty, a fat little waddling beagle puppy stuck his nose in the food dish and Lady snatched him up and tore his throat out right before my four year old eyes. My fault because I knew better than to let any beagles near the bullys and I should have been paying attention. I never knew what happened to Lady. Daddy told Mama he gave her away, but Mama always believed he took her out and shot her.

Tons of episodes just like those, or worse, all stack up in my memory just as crystal clear as if it were yesterday. I’ve got all the usual biggie baddie things: Daddy leaving, reading the divorce papers, every death of every pet, every friend who moved away, every time I was bullied or embarrassed in elementary school . . . the usual. I’ve got some HUGE ones like breaking up with the first girl I ever loved and ever made love to just because I thought I was getting “cool enough” to “play the field” only to find out just how stupid that move was within only a few weeks. Then I have senior year high school which seemed to be one train-wreck after another from January til graduation, including finding out the aforementioned girl was pregnant and it wasn’t mine.

Every stupid thing I’ve ever done, every time I made Mama cry by hurting her feelings, Every girl’s heart I ever broke along with every girl who ever broke my heart . . . and I had six engagements counting Budge, all of it is sitting on those brain cell reel to reels waiting along with my hearing before the Greenville County School Board that ended my teaching career in Greenville County AND the nice, terse “we don’t have room for you next year” email that effectively ended my teaching career once and for all. The current reigning champion is listening and watching Mama rasp out her last breath and not being able to do anything about it but weep and howl.

It’s all sitting up there waiting for the right time.

The right time is usually a stressful period or a bout of depression, but truly anything can trigger it and when it’s triggered, something in my brain hits “Play” and we’re off on a trip down memory lane only this one is the Poop Colored Road instead of the Yellow Brick one. Once it starts, it’s a doozy of a ride. Bad memory after bad memory followed up with mistake after mistake flash through my head in an unbroken, dizzying swirl of negative emotion complete with voice over narration by people who hate my guts with a passion. Sometimes, I get lucky and it’s just a two minute teaser trailer; usually, it’s a double feature of Gone with the Wind and Ben-Hur; however, every so often, and it’s been much more often since Mama died, that tape will settle in for a genuine combination Sundance, Cannes and Telluride jumbo festival of woe. Those bouts are the killers. They damn near shut me down because one can only take so much.

Historically, only two things have been successful at derailing a lengthy Tape run — obscene amounts of very good (or very bad, brain’s not picky) alcoholic beverages OR some nifty and not always legally obtained pharmaceuticals. Unfortunately, both those solutions closed to me. Budge will put up with a lot of my wild hairs, but me being drunk is not one of them — she’s heard a few too many stories from people who REALLY needed to keep their mouths shut. So now, all I can do is white knuckle it through with some wimpy anti-anxiety meds and poor attempts at sleeping, which brings it’s own bag ‘o fun in the form of trippin’ nightmares.

That’s how The Tape works and it’s a bitch and a half, let me tell you.

Now, before anyone gets the genius idea to make an asinine comment, think about this: if I had a dime for every time some well meaning person without an obnoxious tape in his or her head has said, “Well when those thoughts come, you just need to push them aside and think of something pleasant,” I could make Warren Buffett look like a beggar. Similarly, if I had just a nickle for every well-meaning, super spiritual fellow Christian who has told me, “If you just pray about it, it’ll all go away and be fine,” I would have a fortune making Bill Gates look like chump change.

Before you quickly judge my inability to conquer this tape once and for all as some form of attention seeking or self pity, try this little experiment. Picture a purple pig riding a unicycle in a pink tutu playing “It’s a Small World After All” on a ukelele. Focus that in your mind. Experience that imaginary pig . . . now, forget about it. I command you to think of ANYTHING but purple pigs, unicycles, ukeleles or pink tutus. If a violet porker slips through your mind just for a second, you lose. Forget the pig! Hurry up! It’s only a memory. Why can’t you forget it and move on?

Harder than it seems it should be, isn’t it? That’s an imaginary thought exercise. Try REAL events that resulted in REAL negative consequences, sometimes physical scars, and always emotional scars and pair them with a mind that doesn’t seem to have a “Delete” function and see what you can do. In short, it’s not like I WANT TO THINK ALL THESE THOUGHTS!! I am not a masochist. I don’t enjoy misery or pain, so if it was as easy as “just thinking of something pleasant” don’t you think I’d have done it already? Do you not realize how many times I’ve tried in over 30 years?

No, you don’t realize it because you’re still thinking about the pig!

Anywho, love y’all and keep those feet clean.

By the spring of 1915, both sides in the conflict were desperate to find a way to break the stalemate on the Western Front because, while it hadn’t occurred to the top brass, others in and out of the military began realizing the carnage of the repeated forays into the meat grinder which was No-Man’s Land was ultimately unsustainable. The impetus for launching another front perforce came from outside the military because the highest generals in charge could not be swayed from their conviction that the sole path to Allied victory lay through the mud of France and Belgium. The idea came from a British politician, Sir Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. He proposed a campaign that nearly cost him the rest of his political career, launched three nations forcibly onto the world stage, and ultimately proved no less bloody than the bloodiest battles along the Western Front. What Churchill proposed was an amphibious assault aimed at bolstering the flagging Russians and knocking the Ottoman Empire out of the war. The place he picked was a small peninsula in modern day Turkey called Gallipoli.

ANZAC Cove today.

In the world before air power, Gallipoli was a small piece of land bearing supreme importance. It guarded two narrow straits called the Bosporus and the Dardanelles which in turn connected the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Since ancient days when Xerxes marched his Persians to Thermopylae, whoever controlled the straits controlled access to the Black Sea and a huge swath of Russia’s interior. In fact, the only port the Russians had (and still have for that matter) which did not ice over completely in winter was located on the shores of the Black Sea. During the First World War, with the Ottoman Empire firmly in control of the straits, the entire not inconsiderable might of the Russian Black Sea Fleet was essentially unavailable to the Allies because no ship afloat could force the passage of the two straits. Churchill’s plan aimed to change that.

Map of the area of the campaign.

Unfortunately, the Gallipoli Campaign — also called the Dardanelles Campaign — encountered serious problems from the very beginning. The first part of the plan called for a naval bombardment by a combined British and French fleet with the twin aims of knocking out the string of fortifications protecting the straits and guarding the civilian manned trawlers which acted as minesweepers for the larger battleships. This attempt met with disastrous results. Initially, the battleships were able to punish the forts with accurate and overwhelming battery fire and this enabled the trawlers to remove many mines standing in the fleet’s way. What the commanders could not know however, was their magnificent firepower was reducing mostly abandoned and de-armed forts to dust.

In a brilliant move, the Turks had stripped the forts of most of their guns and mounted them on movable carriages. They added these guns to the highly mobile batteries of howitzers well hidden and back from the shore. After the fleet let up its bombardment, it began taking indirect fire from previously unknown gun locations behind a line of screening dunes. To make matters worse, a terribly brave Turkish destroyer captain slipped behind the fleet under the cover of darkness and laid mines in areas previously cleared and therefore thought to be safe. When the flying batteries ashore began dealing serious blows to the attacking ships, the French admiral in charge ordered a strategic retreat . . . and backed his ships right into the newly laid minefield. The naval campaign had failed miserably.

Well, that’s one way to land troops.

Unfortunately, the lack of naval success in no way diminished the planned invasion. In the next war, amphibious assault would be developed to a high art form. That would be the next war though. In this war, what passed for an amphibious assault meant landing men and materiel on shore through the surf zone in small motor launches whilst under murderous fire from the Turkish positions on the high bluffs overlooking the landing site. The Allies would have been hard pressed to find a less hospitable area on the whole of the Gallipoli peninsula to land their forces than what would come to be called Anzac Cove.

Of all the Allied forces involved in the campaign, the most remembered was the combination of the Australian Expeditionary Force and the New Zealand Expeditionary Force into one unit known as the ANZACS. The ANZACS were supposed to land at Anzac Cove and push inland, overrunning the Ottoman forces as they went. Two fatal flaws became immediately apparent in this plan. First, pushing “inland” was more like pushing up a mountain. The Aussies and Kiwis landed on a nice smooth sand beach, but 100 yards away the Turks held the high bluffs and their machine guns were lethal to the invaders from Down Under. Second, no one informed the Turks they were supposed to be overrun.

Much of the planning for the Gallipoli Campaign predicated on the Ottoman Empire being a spent force, a kind of paper tiger. Sure, it appeared large and imposing, but the Turkish soldiers couldn’t match the British and French Empire troops in courage and fighting ability. Several thousand graves on the land overlooking Gallipoli give the lie to that fatal presumption. The Turks were far from paper tigers. While they may not have had all the modern weaponry available, they had made strides towards modernization with liberal German help. What is more, these were the descendents of the men who fought for and against Genghis Khan. No tougher men lived on the planet. One amazing example is the order given by one commander to his troops in the face of a massive Allied attack. The Turks had expended all their ammo and had nothing left but bayonets. Their commander gave the order to fix bayonets and shouted his last order to his men, “Men, I do not order you to fight! I order you to DIE! In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can come forward and take our places.” His regiment fought til the last man was killed.

The main Gallipoli memorial in Turkey. The inscription is a quote from Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and says: “Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours … You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

Nothing Churchill envisioned in the Gallipoli Campaign went as planned. By the end of the month, the operation which was supposed to relieve pressure on the Western Front had dissolved into a stagnant version of the Western Front, South. Allied troops would attack from their precariously situated bases on the beachheads they managed to hold and the Ottomans would counterattack downhill and attempt to drive the invaders into the sea. As summer descended, the heat and humidity became nearly unbearable. Sanitation was mostly unknown and the presence of so much human waste added to the massive amounts of putrid, rotting unburied bodies killed in the fighting gave rise to a biblical plague of flies which then spread diseases among both camps.

The ANZACs at Anzac Cove had much of the worst time of it. Where they were situated, no cooling sea breezes managed to penetrate to give even momentary respite from the flies and the stench. What’s more, several of the Turks on the bluffs overlooking the ANZAC beachhead were excellent shots and possessed extremely accurate modern rifles. Sniping casualties piled up each day as staying hunkered down under cover meant suffocation in the stale, rancid air. The ANZACS even lost a major general to sniping as he tried to review his troops to raise morale.

By the end of August, the Allies were done. They’d had enough. Bulgaria had entered the war on the German side opening up a flank and giving the Germans breathing space to rearm the Turks. Also, the French High Command announced their plans for what was becoming an annual fall offensive on the Western Front and demanded the British send the troops they had promised late in the previous year. The Gallipoli Campaign was abandoned and the remnants of the attackers got off the peninsula in the same small boats under the same withering fire that had greeted them almost nine months before. Back in London, Sir Winston Churchill was sacked as First Lord of the Admiralty and by his own account figured his political career had come to an end. Of course we know now his “finest hour” was still to come.

The legacy of Gallipoli probably casts its longest shadows over the ANZACs and what would become the country of Turkey. The First World War in general and the Gallipoli debacle in particular marked the last time Australians and New Zealanders would take the field beneath the Union Jack. From World War Two onward they would fight as separate and fiercely independent countries, still loyal to the mother country, but unwilling to take orders from her to slaughter her sons. Since 1916, April 25 is celebrated in both countries as ANZAC Day, sort of a Memorial Day and Fourth of July all rolled into one.

For the Ottomans, Gallipoli was the end. Commanding the troops on the peninsula was a young ethnic Turkish general named Mustafa Kemal. He would rise to great power during the three year Turkish War of Independence that followed the Great War. His guidance and vision combined with the respect he had among his countrymen earned him the rulership of Turkey and the honorific surname “Ataturk” which means “Father of the Turks.” In many ways, he is the Turkish version of George Washington.

The Gallipoli Campaign is entirely too complex and interesting to hope for one blog entry to do justice. If you find your curiosity about this seminal part of the Great War, I invite you to read probably THE definitive account of the events around Gallipoli. The book is simply titled Gallipoli by Robert Rhodes James.

Until next time, love y’all and keep those feet clean.

I had long planned for today’s post to be an ANZAC Day post about how today is the 100th anniversary of the Australian and New Zealand part of the invasion of Gallipoli that is such an important watershed in the history of those two former colonies . . . that was the plan.

Then came last Sunday night. Ringo Starr became the last of the Beatles to enter the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame with his own discography finally joining bandmates John, Paul, and George as double inductees. Then, Paul gave the induction speech and talked about how great a drummer was. THEN, the two of them performed a couple of songs together.

One of those songs happened to be “Photograph,” which is an absolutely amazing song Ringo co-wrote with his best friend George Harrison and which, since George’s 2001 death from cancer, Ringo ALWAYS dedicates to George.

Three things . . . Ringo was always Mama’s favorite Beatle because she loved drummers, “Photograph” was Mama’s favorite solo song by her favorite Beatle, and – in addition to being 100 years since Gallipoli – today is also 25 months since Mama left me in this foreign country almost all by myself.

So that shot the plan all to Hell.

If I can, I’ll get out a Great War Wednesday post about ANZAC Day and Gallipoli.

Until then

Love y’all and keep your feet clean.

For 250 years, the Ottoman Empire was a force of great power, influence, and expansion in Eurasian affairs. The sultans in Constantinople ruled over one of the ten largest empires the world had ever known. Her art was highly esteemed, her coffers awash with coin, and her military a mighty and feared corps of hardened fighting men. Unfortunately, those 250 years were almost another 250 years in the PAST in the early 20th Century.

Once, the Ottoman Empire represented the height of Islamic power in the world. She boasted a powerful navy and well trained army. She held territory from the Horn of Africa to India and to the borders of Russia. European leaders once feared a Muslim takeover of Vienna, but, somewhat like the Mongols before them, the ancient walls of Vienna stood as a high water mark and not a new conquest. By 1915, the empire was in precipitous decline. Years of corruption, stagnant policy, and inept rulers had carved out the heart of the once proud sultanate. As the 20th Century dawned, far from her glorious past, the Ottoman Empire was widely called the “Sick Man of Europe.”

Still, for a continent locked in a war which now seemed locked in unbreakable stalemate on the Western Front where hundreds of thousands of soldiers already lay dead in futile assault after forlorn hope, the prospect of new allies seemed the highest priority. Even in her drastically diminished state, the Ottoman Empire boasted two cards vitally important to the other players in the Great War — a hugely strategic position astride three continents and a somewhat modernized military of around one million men.

Ottoman Empire circa 1914. Kuwait, Persia, Egypt, and Sudan are all areas that provided Britain with oil.

Both the Central Powers and the Entente Powers wooed the Ottomans, but the prize eventually went to the Central Powers due in no small part to the heavy influence Germany already held in the country. Beginning in the late 19th Century, German military advisers were greatly involved with training the new generation of Ottoman troops in an effort to modernize the military. Following the victory by the Young Turks in 1908-1909, Germany’s advice — and arms and cash — were even more welcome in Constantinople. This growing attachment to the Kaiser’s forces culminated in the Three Pashas signing a treaty with German and Austro-Hungary in November 1914, officially bringing the Ottoman Empire into the Great War as allies of the Central Powers.

The Ottoman entry into the war had three immediate effects. First of all, Russia now had a second front to contend with at a time when she was doing quite miserably with ONE front of fighting. The Russian Empire and Ottoman Empire were ancient enemies going back to the medieval era. They share a border thousands of miles long and held similar interests and goals in the central and eastern European region. Instead of being able to concentrate on holding the Germans at bay along the Eastern Front, the Russians now had a million Ottoman troops poised to invade along her southern border. In fact, the first aggressive action the Ottomans took following their entry into the war was launching an invasion of the Ukrainian region across the Caucasus Mountains. In short, with one stroke of the Pashas’ pens, the allies had a lot more territory to worry about.

The second effect of the Ottoman entry into World War One also affected Russia most of all. Instantly, the passage from the Black Sea through the Sea of Marmara via the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits became a suicide run. For Russia, this was a disaster. One goal Russia has striven towards from the depths of the murky haze of time is a port that doesn’t become an ice shelf in winter. For most of her history, Russia has held two main ports: Vladivostok halfway around the world on the Kamchatka Peninsula and Arkhangelsk / Murmansk above Moscow and above the Arctic Circle. The former port is essentially useless in any European campaign because any supplies landed there had to make a three thousand mile journey across the frozen wastes of Siberia before getting to where they could be of any use. In a country as logistically challenged as Russia, this was a near impossibility. On the other hand, the window in which shipping can land in Arkhangelsk is incredibly small. That part of Russia really only has two seasons, winter and July.

For ages, Russia coveted a warm water port on the Black Sea. In 1783, she founded the city of Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula to serve as headquarters for the Black Sea Fleet. Unfortunately, if any hostile force holds the Bosporus and Dardanelles, the Black Sea Fleet is just and ONLY that . . . a fleet only capable of action on the Black Sea. The Bosporus and Dardanelles are so narrow they can be easily shut to shipping by shore guns, mines, or — in desperate times — by sinking several ships in the narrows. While the Ottoman Empire was neutral, the allies had access to Sevastopol, enabling them to supply Russia rather easily, but with the Ottomans now an enemy, it was back to schlepping across Siberia or hazarding the ice fields of the Arctic Sea.

Any ship going into or out of the Black Sea has to get through that spot.

Finally, the Ottoman entry into the war meant the Allies, especially Great Britain, had to use men and resources to defend vital interests in the hereto neutral areas of the Middle East. In 1911, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill ordered the Royal Navy to switch from coal fired boilers to oil fired. Then, as now, vast reserves of oil lay underneath the sands of the Middle East, sands which the British Empire firmly controlled . . . as long as she could defend them. As long as the Ottomans stayed out of the war, Britain had little to worry about in the region but now the Ottomans could easily shut down British access to the oil fields of Arabia and the Middle East and the Grand Fleet would starve from lack of fuel.

So even though the Ottoman Empire was a pale shadow of its classical greatness, it was still a formidable addition to the Central Powers. The Turks were well known for their fighting spirit and would prove to be tough opponents throughout the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Theaters of the Great War. In addition, the excesses and prejudices of the Young Turks would result in the first of a long string of atrocities in the bloody history of the 20th Century to go by the name genocide. More on that later.

Love y’all, and keep those feet clean.

Hopefully surprising no one, Fifty Shades of Grey tanked in its second week at the box office, but before the lines of voyeuristic housewives and notebook carrying college students dried up, the movie version of the best selling novel series since Harry Potter grew up unleashed a bee in the collective bonnets of moral conservatives throughout this great nation. I’ve read blog post after blog post and listened to sermon podcast after sermon podcast denouncing E.L. James’ books and the movie based upon the first novel as the latest sign the Apocalypse is upon us, Christianity has lost the culture war, and America has officially gone the decadent way of ancient Rome. While I agree with all three of those assessments, my reasons have nothing to do with this hideously written fan fiction masquerading as some sort of modern Anais Nin novel. I think we’re doomed, but that’s the subject of other posts for other times.

The segment of the blogosphere and Facebook most incensed by Fifty Shades of Grey is the group made up of parents of daughters — especially Christian parents of, ostensibly, Christian daughters. Fathers and mothers are posting and reposting their fears of some Christian Grey-esque person insinuating himself into their little girls’ lives and using his wiles to turn them into latex gimp suit clad BDSM sex slaves imprisoned in a Red Room of Pain somewhere far from their chaste upbringing. I’m here to tell you that fear is wrong on every level that matters.

First of all, the majority of people terrified of BDSM have no idea what the BDSM lifestyle is all about. It’s a lifestyle. It’s weird to us who don’t live that way, but lots of lifestyles are weird to people not living them. I for one am completely mystified at the vegan lifestyle. I have great respect and love for all animals except mosquitoes and roaches, but God did not put Adam at the top of the food chain so his descendents could eat rabbit food. Still, I don’t knock vegans because I believe what a grown, educated person puts on his or her plate is not my business and doesn’t affect his or her salvation in any way. By the same token, what a husband and wife choose to do for pleasure in the privacy of their own bedroom . . . or red room . . . is none of my business either. It’s not something I would choose, but I don’t see it affecting salvation either; unless, of course, it becomes an idol, but that’s a whole ‘nother can o’ worms.

My church did not one but two entire series on The Theology of Sex and I’d put our two teaching pastors’ exegetical ability up against anyone past or present. Make no mistake about it, the Bible has a lot to say about sex. Rape? Explicitly Forbidden. Bestiality? Explicitly Forbidden. Incest? Explicitly Forbidden. Polygamy? Explicitly Forbidden. Adultery? Explicitly Forbidden. Homosexual Sex? Explicitly Forbidden. Sex before and outside of marriage? Explicitly Forbidden, and that means “swinging” or “wife swapping” is forbidden too.

What a HUSBAND AND WIFE, aka. “Happy and Healthfully Married Couple” do to give each other pleasure is none of my business. If they are Christians, and that’s who I’m primarily talking to, their sexual appetites are bound only by the dictates of Scripture and some may disagree with me, but I’ve never read anything in the Holy Bible — and I’ve read it cover to cover many times — about BDSM being forbidden to a married couple.

This guy is not your problem . . . .

Now, THERE’S the rub! Every post I read and every sermon I listen to speaks with abject horror about the evils of BDSM but no one yet has said anything about the fact Christian and Anastasia are NOT MARRIED! It doesn’t matter WHAT kind of sex they have; it is wrong according to the Bible and it’s THAT kind of thinking that has so many of our teens and young adults screwed up today. They try to use the slipperiness of words to justify having a sip of forbidden waters without the commitment of marriage. If BDSM is wrong, we just won’t do that and we’ll be okay. Sex means vaginal intercourse, right? Well then, oral isn’t really sex, right; anal isn’t really sex, right; *blank not involving her vagina and my penis” isn’t really sex, right? So, we just won’t do “that” and we’ll be okay AND have a good time as well . . . right?

Not according to the Scriptures.

. . . . but this guy could turn out to be a dad’s worst nightmare.

My second point is this — if parents are worried about a theoretical Christian Grey introducing their daughter to the wide world of kink, they are worried about the wrong guy. A saying I am fond of from the world of medicine goes, “When you see hoof prints, look for horses before you look for zebras.” It’s highly unlikely your little girl is going to catch the eye of some philandering, kinky billionaire. If she does, worry about it then. On the other hand, it is extremely likely she has already caught the eye of the cute boy next door or the sweet guy who sits near her in biology class or maybe even Dreamy McDreamerson sitting across the room in her youth group. THOSE are the guys you have to worry about, teach about, and plan against. Horses, not zebras.

The worst enemy of a girl’s chastity is neither some mythical billionaire dom nor some leather jacket wearing motorcycle riding bad boy. The worst enemy to a girl’s chastity is the good guy, the nice guy, the guy YOU like and trust. I know what I’m talking about because I WAS THAT GUY. {If you’re a family member of mine or an ex-girlfriend, now would be a good time to quit reading unless you want to learn some things about me you’d probably live just fine until death without knowing. You’ve been warned.}

Bad choices are made here way more often than . . .

My beloved wife of almost 20 years is not the first woman I ever had sex with. She knows this. Actually, she wanted it that way, but that’s another story ENTIRELY. I had sex with five other girls / women before her. Four of the five were while I was in high school and college. Believe me when I say I was not a billionaire playboy. I wasn’t even especially good looking. I was NICE, KIND, THOUGHTFUL, and TRUSTWORTHY. At least that’s what two sets of parents and two single moms thought anyway.

They were right about that too . . . except for the trustworthy part. I’ve never been physically, mentally, or emotionally abusive to any woman, much less a girlfriend. I loved to send cards and flowers and other little gifts to make them feel special because first and foremost I DID want them to feel special because of what I’d seen my mother go through but I’d be lying if I said the possibility of sex wasn’t lit up like a bright neon sign in the hormone soaked nether regions of my adolescent brain. So, after holding hands, then kissing, then heavy petting, the next order of business in the fulness of time was sex. More than once, it was the girl’s idea, not mine.

. . . here. Keep that in mind.

Keep this in mind, too. My papa was a Pentecostal preacher. I was raised in church and when I say raised in church, I mean I was born on a Friday and Mama took me to our little white church the following Sunday. I had been taught by many adults I respected and loved that sex before marriage was wrong. I wouldn’t have called myself a Christian back then, but I knew right from wrong; however, when the time was right, I JUST DIDN’T CARE and neither did the “she” of the moment.

I’m not saying this to brag or air my dirty laundry unnecessarily. I suffer the consequences of my youthful wrong decisions on a daily basis. What I’m saying is all you parents need to quit worrying about the Christian Greys of the world and start worrying about the guys in your daughter’s life whom you really like because those guys, like it or not, are the ones most likely to end up in a situation with your daughter that’s going to end in one hell of an emotional train wreck, and if you’re lucky that train wreck will be ALL. Much worse things can happen.

So go out and rail against Fifty Shades of Grey, not because of the BDSM, but because it makes sex outside of marriage seem okay and without consequence and both those assumptions are dead wrong.

Love y’all and keep those feet clean.