My daughter, Michelle, married Nigel Howard, formerly British Army, Royal Engineers (Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD)). Think the movie Hurt Locker and Jeremy Renner,  the difference being the British Army does not provide metal full-body armor (makes the lads pay attention, eh?) . During the Invasion of Iraq, Mar 19, 2003, his unit, 49 EOD Squadron, Royal Engineers Corp was attached to Task Force TAWARA 1st Marine Expeditionary, under Brigadier General Rutowski.  In 2003-4 he was attached to Task Force Black clearing mines in Iraq, leaving the the military in April 2005. Subsequently, he worked with the company Mine Awareness Trust in mine clearing with the Counter-LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) task force, based in Uganda but also operating in South Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, and Kenya.

What recommends Nigel to me besides his warrior ethic, innate hospitality, and providing his father-in-law single malt scotch whiskeys is: 1) his gift of gab and 2) a redneck genealogy.

Coincidentally, his father, Jon Howard (RAF SIGINT), and I (USAF SIGINT) had overlapping long tours in Berlin and NATO headquarters, Ramstein AB.

Nigel’s mother, Kirstien,  was born and raised in a small mining village, Blaydon Burn, located just outside of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in Northumbria (slang sobriquet ‘Geordie’) ( a region south of Hadrian’s Wall), from whence the Townsends of Georgia and northern Florida emigrated. Thus, we are cousins, sort of.  The first Townsend emigrated as part of the great Scotch-Irish^⁠1 migration (1717-1775).  It is thus no great stretch to equate Geordie = redneck = Scots-Irish, of which she is not proud.

¹ Albion’s Seed, Four British Folkways in America; David Hackett Fischer   Borderlands to the Backcountry~The Flight from North Britain, 1717-1775

Early in the summer of 1717, the Quaker Merchants of Philadelphia observed that immigrant ships were arriving in more than their usual numbers. By September, as the first scent of autumn was in the air, the Delaware River was crowded with vessels. The came not only from London and Bristol, but from Liverpool and Belfast, and small northern outports with strange-sounding dames––Londonderry and Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland, Kirkcudbright and Wigtown in Scotland, Whitehaven and Morecambe on the Northern border of England. In October the same year a Philadelphia Quaker named Jonathan Dickinson complained that the streets of his city were teeming with “swarms of people… strangers to our Laws and Customs, and even to our language” The men were tall and lean, with hard, weather-beaten faces. They wore felt hats, loose sackcloth shirts close-belted at the waist, baggy trousers, thick yarn stockings and wooden shoes “shod like a horse’s feet with iron.”  The young women startled Quaker Philadelphia by the sensuous appearance of their full bodices, tight waists, bare legs and skirts as scandalously short as an English undershirt. page 605-60