Post by Ed V.

“SHOOT OR MOVE?” THERE’S A WUMPUS IN GRANDMA’S LIVING ROOM. As America celebrates its 250th, I’ve found myself thinking back to our Bicentennial 50 years ago, asking which moments from that year quietly shaped the rest of my life. Like most boys, I spent my time playing baseball, football, fishing the Hillsborough River, and roaming my grandma’s Tampa neighborhood. One experience mattered far more than I realized. In the late 1970s, my Aunt Annette carried something extraordinary into Grandma Velna’s Tampa living room: a computer terminal. She set the heavy box beside Grandma’s favorite chair, dialed a number, and settled the handset into an acoustic coupler. After the beeps and static, green letters appeared on the black screen. Suddenly, Grandma’s house—with its kumquat tree and carport nursery—was connected to a room-sized computer across town. That’s where my cousin Danny and I met the Wumpus. Hunt the Wumpus was brilliantly simple. Twenty rooms. Three tunnels each. An unseen Wumpus. Bottomless pits. Giant bats. No map. Only clues: “I feel a draft.” “Bats nearby.” “I smell a Wumpus.” Everything else had to be inferred. Sometimes Aunt Annette would ask one question: “What do you know for sure? What do you only think you know?” She never gave us the answer. She was teaching us how to think, not what to think. Decades later, flying an F-16, the problem hadn’t changed. A radar warning chirps. The threat is invisible. Air or ground? Targeted or merely observed? You build a mental picture from bearing, timing, terrain, and experience, then act before your adversary does. Whether he ever played Wumpus or not, Col John Boyd would have recognized it instantly: Observe. ORIENT. Decide. Act. The player who updates the picture survives. The one who mistakes assumptions for facts gets eaten. Danny, now Dan, built an amazing career across law, intellectual property, venture capital, and eventually became CEO of a successful tech company. I became an engineer, pilot, and later worked at the intersection of national security, DIB production, and capital. Different fields, same lesson: the most important things are rarely seen directly. They are inferred from signals at the edges. Looking back, I appreciate, and miss, Aunt Annette even more. She never lectured us. She simply did exceptional work, invited two curious boys to watch, then slid over and let us take the keyboard. As the technology evolved, the lesson remained. Every meaningful decision I’ve made, in a cockpit, the Pentagon, or a boardroom, has been some version of standing in a numbered room, feeling a draft, smelling danger one tunnel away, and choosing anyway. Aunt Annette’s terminal taught inference. As America begins its next 250 years, I hope we keep giving young people opportunities to learn not just what to think—but how to think. Looking back, that may have been the greatest lesson of America’s Bicentennial for me. Hunt well. Mind the draft.