I copied this from another source, wanted to share.

—-A Response to the Blasphemy Portrayed in the Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Olympics in Paris:

There is one true God. There is only one Way to that God. There is one Savior. He came to sinners, lived, died, and rose again to take the sins of the world upon Himself to pay the penalty of sin for the world of sinners He loves. There is one Spirit that is revealing this incomprehensible grace, mercy, and love to those who will receive it.
Darkness knows this, Satan (the enemy) knows this, and on the world's biggest stages there is a reason that Atheism is not mocked, Hinduism is not mocked, Islam is not mocked, Daoism is not mocked, Spiritualism is not mocked, Buddhism is not mocked. Because they do not threaten the dominion of darkness.
Yet time and time again, Jehovah God is mocked by debauchery and blasphemy against His holy name and righteosuness. There is a part of me that wants to get angry, a part of me that is frustrated that I'm left once again to explain things to my boys that I shouldn't have to; but just as soon as I begin to get upset, I'm reminded by the Holy Spirit, that God is in control, Jesus is coming again, and my battle is not with the hearts of man, but with demonic forces along with the schemes and devices of the devil.
There is a reason why the Christian faith is constantly under ridicule, scrutiny, mockery, and attack on every platform all around the world. That's because there is only one faith that threatens the darkness, only one God that promises the demise of Satan, only one name that the demons fear and flee. Christianity offers the only hope of this world, because it professes the Son of God who came to be the Savior of the world, and His name is Jesus. He's the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Creator and Sustainer, the Author and Finisher of our faith. Mock Him, drag His name through the mud, dismiss His followers, but one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that He is the Son of God and He will judge all the earth, where everyone will give account of their lives before Him on His holy throne.
I'm no longer shocked by the things accepted by the world or what demonic things are celebrated. I'm not surprised by the satanic imagery included in pop culture, halftime shows, or Olympic opening ceremonies; because I know my enemy, the devil, is fighting to keep the world from knowing Jesus. Seeing such things only further invigorates and motivates me to take seriously my call to spread the Gospel, to be the light in the darkness, and to show others the love of Jesus. So let the world scoff, let the enemy parade his best efforts to hinder the Gospel, because in the end Jesus wins!
For daily prayers, Gods word and encouragement! Welcome everyone to add Pastor Alfred Nizeyimana as friends and as a brother in Christ service! It’s all about Jesus and his great commission
#Jesus #Olympics #GreatCommission
Ephesians 6:12, Philippians 2:9-11, 2 Corinthians 4:4, 1 Corinthians 9:25, Matthew 24:37-39—

https://youtu.be/wmNhlPFdNc8?si=uaHWsj-b6jMCxoaX

Start your day loquaciosly, and with intetionality.

Side note: Wisdom mixed with a British accent. ‘The Churchillian effect.’

I feel like it’s an unfair advantage in “rapidly establishing creditabilty.” Dang the Poms. ;)

https://www.instagram.com/nomadic.pasturestn?igsh=MTBhcG55MHEzNGZ1Mg==

SMOKED YARD BIRD!!!

These chickens are ORGANIC and delicious. Nomadic Pastures is Disabled Veteran Owned.

Adam Moma and Nomadic Pastures are leading with heart and healthy food (near Clarksville, TN).

EMayers

via: SEAL Of Honor
·
A dog tag found in the wreckage of a helicopter shot down during Operation Red Wings, where 8 Army Night Stalkers and 11 Navy SEALs died on June 28, 2005

I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10150974016904769&set=a.360794549768

We are migrating, and outages may be intermittent. Thanks for you patience. We’ll be RIGHT BACK!

All,

We are conducting a major migration. Outages expected over the next 24-48 hours.

Thanks for your patience.

Will report COMPLETE.

-Skipper

B.
Historical context
Pashtuns are historically the dominant ethnic community in Afghanistan, and they have actively fought to keep their predominance throughout Afghan history. In the years before 1978 Pashtuns made up about 40 per cent of the Afghan population. After the Soviet invasion in 1979, some 85 per cent of the more than 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan were Pashtuns. They have always played a central role in Afghan politics, and their dominant position has been a major catalyst in triggering conflict. For example, conflict arose between partners in the Mujahidin coalition which fought the Soviet troops and opposed the regime of President Mohammad Najibullah. Following Soviet withdrawal and that regime’s collapse, President Burhanuddin Rabbani represented the Tajik minority, whereas opposition troops led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and those of the Taliban, were mainly Pashtun.

The Taliban rule was based on a strict and controversial interpretation of Shari’a law and it was responsible, during its dominance, for grave human rights violations based on gender, and also for ethnic discrimination. This period brought severe poverty to Afghanistan, accompanied by food insecurity for most Afghans, and large-scale displacement and emigration, though some Pashtun communities were treated favourably and protected against the worst of the conditions. However, though Pashtuns were in power, the majority of the community nonetheless continued to suffer discrimination. This was particularly true for Pashtun families who had been moved to the north more than 100 years earlier by Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, as part of a state consolidation effort. They were left to the mercy of the Tajiks and Uzbeks who are the predominant ethnic groups in the area. There have been reports of ethnic massacres at Mazar-e-Sharif in 1997 and 1998 and continuing reports of violence targeted against the Pashtuns (whether or not formely Taliban supporters) as vengeance for the Taliban regime’s excesses.

With the collapse of the Taliban regime and the signing of the Bonn Agreement in 2001, Pashtun dominance over the other ethnic groups in Afghanistan came to an end. Of the estimated one million internally displaced at that time, most of those remaining in displacement were Pashtuns, who had been uprooted by ethnic violence in the north and the west of the country.

Current issues

Since the fall of the Taliban, there has a fundamental shift in the traditional power balance. Although the first post-Taliban president, Hamid Karzai, belongs to a prominent Pashtun family from Qandahar, the central government was largely dominated by the Uzbeks and Tajiks of the Northern Alliance. This less privileged position in administration and power has created obvious dissatisfaction among Pashtuns. Following the final results of the most recent 2010 parliamentary elections, Pashtun parliamentary candidates from Herat and several other provinces staged protests, claiming that they were systematically excluded from the election process through fraud and intimidation. Nevertheless, Pashtuns remain the largest ethnic group and therefore in an increasingly democratic system are likely to regain their influence. Indeed, Karzai’s successor, President Ashraf Ghani is also a Pashtun, although when he took office in 2014, he signalled his intention to break through ethnic barriers by dropping his tribal last name from official documents.

Nuristanis
Nuristanis arrived in Afghanistan fleeing the eastward spread of Islam. They speak a unique Indo-European-language. Nuristanis were conquered by Amir Abdur Rahman Khan in 1895-96 and were obliged to abandon their ancient religious beliefs in favour of Islam. They reside mainly in the east of the country – between the Pashtun tribes of Kunar, Kalash in Pakistan’s Chitral, and Tajiks of Badakhshan in the north. Nuristan (‘land of light’) is located on the southern slopes of the Hindu Kush mountain range and is spread over four valleys, with each valley having its own distinct language/dialect: Kati, Waigali, Ashkun and Parsun.

Nuristan has very little arable land, the vast majority of the territory being covered by forest. The main base of the economy is animal husbandry – mostly goat-herding. While maize and barley are grown in small quantities, the Nuristani people survive mainly on subsistence agriculture, wheat, fruit and goats. Very few Nuristanis have had access to education. Yet, among those who have travelled to Kabul and been able to gain access to schools, some have gained prominence as well-known figures in the army and the government in Kabul.

Historical context

The Nuristanis’ scattered settlement is another result of Amir Abdul Rahman’s late-nineteenth-century expansionism. During his rule, what was then called Kafiristan (‘kafir’ meaning non-believer as Nuristanis did not convert to Islam until the twentieth century) was renamed as Nuristan (‘land of light’) after the forced Islamization of the community. Nuristanis are still sometimes referred to as ‘Kafir’. Some Nuristanis claim to be descendants of Alexander the Great and his forces.

Nuristani men and women follow a strict division of labour with the men working in livestock herding, while the women work on grain production or irrigated terraces.

The province was the scene of some of the heaviest guerrilla fighting during the 1979-89 Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Nuristan is still used as a route by Taliban into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa of Pakistan.

Nuristan’s distinctive cultural heritage was under considerable threat during the period when the Taliban controlled Kabul. A collection of life-size wooden sculptures dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries was smashed by the Taliban in 2001 in their effort to destroy artistic expressions of the human form, as well as evidence that parts of Afghanistan had in fact followed other faiths than Islam until relatively recently. The collection had been brought back by the forces of Amir Abdul Rahman and housed at the National Museum. The statues depict ancestors as well as animistic and polytheistic divinities. Although some remain lost, others were hidden away by museum staff. Fourteen sculptures could be carefully restored and incorporated in an inaugural display at the newly reopened museum in 2004.

Current issues

The Constitution recognizes Nuristanis as one of the national minorities entitled to Afghan citizenship. However, Nuristan remains isolated and poverty-stricken, and due to the lack of regional institutions, there is a widespread lawlessness. As a geographically remote region, it has been difficult to establish a central government presence, and after it was virtually abandoned by NATO in 2009, many areas of Nuristan have come under the control of the Taliban. A Nuristani provincial governor commented that Nuristan province has been largely neglected by NATO and the central government as a symptom of long-term neglect and discrimination of the Nuristanis as an ethnic minority, who have not been able to represent themselves adequately in Kabul. In 2017, fighting between Taliban and ISIS erupted in the province, following a concerted effort by ISIS to recruit followers there.

Neglect from the central government as well as continuing violence and insecurity has produced extremely poor health, maternal health and education indicators. In March 2017, measles outbreaks reportedly killed 70 children in Nuristan province and schools were closed due to fear of an imminent Taliban siege in May. Community members reported a serious lack of qualified teachers and education facilities.

Kuchi

Kuchi means ‘nomad’ in the Dari (Persian) language. Kuchis are Pashtuns from southern and eastern Afghanistan. They are a social rather than ethnic grouping, although they also have some of the characteristics of a distinct ethnic group. Though traditionally nomadic, many have been settled in northwestern Afghanistan, in an area that was traditionally occupied by Uzbeks and Tajiks, after strong encouragement by the Taliban government. Nowadays only a few thousands still follow their traditional livelihood of nomadic herding. Others have become farmers, settled in cities or emigrated. The largest population of Kuchis is probably in Registan, the desert in southern Afghanistan.

Tribes are formed among the Kuchis along patrilineal lines. A clan is composed of a core family, their offspring and their families. The leader of the tribe, the Khan, is responsible for the general well-being of the community, for governing the group and for representing it to visitors. Tribes live communally, and on becoming too large separate in order to facilitate more efficient management. Typically, there are three types of Kuchis: pure nomads, semi-sedentary and nomadic traders. The majority are semi-sedentary, living in the same winter area year after year. The purely nomadic Kuchis have no fixed abode and are dependent on animals for their livelihood; their movements are determined by the weather and the availability of good pasturage. Traders constitute the smallest percentage of Kuchis; their main activity being the transport of goods. The semi-pastoral Kuchis are gradually tending towards a more sedentary way of life. The majority do so because they can no longer support themselves from their livestock.

The Kuchis constitute an important part of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. For centuries, they have migrated across the country in a search of seasonal pastures and milder weather. They were the main traders in Afghanistan, connecting South Asia with the Middle East. The livestock owned by the Kuchis made an important contribution in the national economy. They owned about 30 per cent of all the sheep and goats and most of the camels. Traditionally they exchanged tea, sugar, matches etc. for wheat and vegetables with settled communities. They also acted as moneylenders and offered services in transportation along with additional labour at harvest time. Kuchis have been greatly affected by conflict, drought and demographic shifts. Therefore, it is only a small number of Kuchis who still follow their traditional livelihood of nomadic herding. Despite their history and their traditional resources, the chronic state of instability in Afghanistan has left them among the poorest groups in the country.

Historical context

With the development of the road system in Afghanistan in the 1950s and 1960s and the formation of road transportation companies with fleets of trucks, the traditional Kuchi camel caravan gradually became obsolete, greatly impacting the income and lifestyle of the community. The situation for the Kuchis became even more tenuous during the prolonged periods of armed conflict and during the droughts of 1971-1972 and 1998-2002. These droughts are estimated to have caused the deaths of 75 per cent of Kuchi livestock. Furthermore, the combination of the intensive bombing campaigns by the US-led coalition as well as the spread of landmines during the 23 years of conflict decimated Kuchi herds, taking away their major source of income. Fighting and control by different warlords also often blocked their migratory routes.

Hazard

The size of the Hazara population, as with other communities in Afghanistan, is highly uncertain as the country’s authorities have never conducted a national census of the population. However, it is broadly recognized that none of the country’s ethnic groups form a majority, and the exact percentages of each group as part of the national population are estimates and often highly politicized.

The size of the Hazara community has also declined significantly as a result of forced migration, land grabbing and persecution. They were once the largest Afghan ethnic group, constituting nearly two-thirds of the total population of the country before the 19th century. Some estimates suggest that more than half of the Hazaras were massacred, forced to flee or taken into slavery during the 1891-93 Hazara War when the Afghan King Amir Abdur Rahman Khan (1880-1901) led a genocidal campaign of violence against Hazaras. Many of the Hazaras who fled the persecution by Amir Abdur Rahman Khan settled in the Indian subcontinent or Iran, laying the foundation of the Hazara communities that now live in the Pakistani city of Quetta and various districts in Iran’s eastern provinces. These communities have increased in size as more Hazaras who fled from Afghanistan over the past four decades have settled within them, especially in Quetta.

The origins of the Hazara community are much debated. Although a common myth suggests that Hazaras originated from a contingent of the army of Genghis Khan in the 13th century, there is no historical evidence to support these claims. Other more plausible theories suggest that Hazaras are more likely to have descended from communities that inhabited the region well before the advent of Genghis Khan.

Hazaras speak a dialect of Dari (Farsi dialect) called Hazaragi and the majority of them follow the Shi’a (Twelver Imami) school of Islam. As a result, Shi’a Hazaras constitute a religious minority in a country where the majority practice Sunni Islam. Significant numbers of Hazaras are also followers of the Ismaili Shi’a school of Islam or are Sunni Muslims. Within Afghanistan, Hazaras are known for their distinctive music and literary traditions with a rich oral history, poetry and music. Hazaragi poetry and music are mainly folkloric, having been passed down orally through the generations.

In Afghanistan, the majority of Shi’a Hazaras live in Hazarajat (or ‘land of the Hazara’), which is situated in the rugged central mountainous core of Afghanistan with an area of approximately 50,000 square kilometres. The region includes the provinces of Bamyan and Daikundi and several adjacent districts in the provinces of Ghazni, Uruzgan, Wardak, Parwan, Baghlan, Samangan and Sar-e Pul. There are significant Sunni Hazara communities in the provinces of Badghis, Ghur, Kunduz, Baghlan, Panjshir and other areas in the northeast of Afghanistan. Ismaili Hazaras live in the provinces of Parwan, Baghlan and Bamyan. In addition, Shi’a as well as Sunni Hazaras are based in substantial numbers in several urban centres of Afghanistan, including Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif and Herat.

Traditionally, the majority of the Hazara community were involved in subsistence farming or working as peasants and artisans. In Afghanistan’s cities, Hazaras traditionally engaged in unskilled labour as they faced discrimination in education and public sector employment. This has contributed to their further stigmatization, reflected in the low rate of intermarriage between Hazaras and members of other groups. Systematic discrimination, as well as recurrent periods of targeted violence and enforced displacement, have led the Hazara community to lose much of their population and standing in the social hierarchy of modern Afghanistan.

By Major Mark A. Smith Sr. (ret)
Note: Some decades ago, a friend in the Pentagon asked me to jot down a few Soldierly thoughts. Through the years I added a couple, but deleted none of the originals. They may not be modern or politically corrected, but they did make the rounds. I stand by them today.
- Mark
1. Never accept an officer as competent based on his source of commission.
2. Your right to influence the battlefield is diminished in ratio to the distance you are from the actual arena of action.
3. The battlefield selects its own Generals. No school or board can replace it.
4. Never call fire on your own troops, unless you stand among them.
5. Leaders are indeed born and no military school can provide what God did not.
6. Equipment procurement will always be compromised by not only being made by the lowest bidder, but by attempting to make it multi-functional.
7. Attempting to lighten the soldier’s load by diminishing the weight of any given weapon, will always result in shorter range and less firepower.
8. Excellent staff officers rarely make good battlefield commanders.
9. Outstanding commanders will surround themselves with excellent staff officers.
10. Never make command a reward for good staff work.
11. Discipline began its decline with the demise of the swagger stick and centralized promotion boards.
12. Outstanding NCO’s may make good officers. But, rarely will a riffed officer make a good NCO.
13. Atheists will never be trusted by their troops on the battlefield.
14. Women can do many things men do, except for a few days every month.
15. Going through the change, has nothing to do with the female senior officer’s uniform.
16. Sexual harassment is a two-lane road.
17. Soldiers tell the truth about good and bad commanders. Their opinion is the ultimate evaluation of an officer.
18. No commander was ever hated for being too hard. But, many are detested for trying to cultivate that image, without substance.
19. The maximum effective range of any weapon is that range at which the individual soldier can hit his target and not an inch further.
20. Pretty females rarely feel harassed by male counterparts.
21. Plain-looking female soldiers are usually the best performers and fit in.
22. Endurance should be judged on the bayonet assault course and not on a marathon run.
23. How far soldiers can run in shorts is unimportant, compared to how far they can speed march with full equipment.
24. Pregnant females are overweight soldiers. Thus, the US Army Weight Control program is not based on equal enforcement of the rules.
25. Tears on the cheeks of any soldier, regardless of gender, are only acceptable on the death of a relative or comrade and when “Old Glory” passes by.
26. Pregnancy is self-inflicted, thus abortions should be paid for by the soldier, as a non line of duty procedure.
27. Soldiers are not ‘sent into combat,” they are led.
28. Your worth as an officer should never be judged on how well you ran with a football in college.
29. West Point is a place of learning, as is any college. Both produce two types of officer; Good and Bad.
30. The computer will never be able to judge the content of a soldier’s spirit, as his Sergeant can.
31. Esprit De Corps cannot be attained at the Battalion picnic or Sports Day. It must be instilled by good leadership and belief in one’s fellow soldiers.
32. No new weapon or tactic will ever instill the same fear in the enemy that one Infantryman with a bayonet can.
33. He who drinks at lunch is a drunken soldier in the afternoon.
34. No soldier is so smart that his physical deficiencies can be overlooked in the Infantry.
35. Painting rocks and serving drinks to officers, have never been soldierly functions. And golf is not a required skill for officers.
36. Consolidation of all administrative personnel at battalion level has eroded accountability and proper reporting.
37. Anyone who thinks that future battlefields will not contain Infantrymen knows nothing about war.
38. Indecision kills more soldiers than any wrong decision. One can command his way out of a wrong decision.
39. The only mission of the Infantry Soldier is to kill the enemy. “Humanitarian Missions" are someone else’s job.
40. Only the Infantry and Armor can gain ground. Only the Infantry can hold it alone.
41. Special Forces are not Rangers or Light Infantry and should never be employed as such.
42. Rangers are light infantry and are not Special Forces.
43. Victory is not a limited objective. There is no other reason to engage an enemy, except victory.
44. Never shower or apply after-shave and cologne, forty eight hours prior to a night attack.
45. Sweat is the true lubricant of the Infantry fighting machine.
46. No American Soldier can be managed to victory. He must be led.
47. The only color in the U.S. Army is green.
48. Use of chemical weapons and biological weapons are a crime against humanity.
49. Not training your soldiers to protect themselves from them is a crime against your own troops.
50. Any tactic written in a book is known to your enemies.
51. If short hair is truly a matter of hygiene and discipline, then all soldiers must have it.
52. No member of a soldier’s family is more important than the mission.
53. No soldier can accomplish his mission if the Army neglects his family.
54. Any soldier who sleeps with another soldier’s wife or lover cannot be trusted on the battlefield and should be shunned.
55. Officers are more likely to wear unauthorized awards than any NCO or Private.
56. Any officer who claims he is accepting an individual award for the entire unit should allow his soldiers to wear it.
57. There can be no quota for awards.
58. Any award for Valor is of more value to the Army than any school diploma or certification.
59. Heroism cannot be taught. But, cowardice is a communicable disease.
60. The machine gun is too important a weapon to be used as a tool for punishing poor soldiers.
61. Precision weapons will jam, if the Commander demands communal cleaning.
62. No officer should be given a command, because, he needs one for his career.
63. No officer should be denied a command, because, he already had one.
64. The state of the Army can be evaluated by how its soldiers look in uniform, at any airport in the world.
65. No reporter can be trusted with operational plans. A reporter who reveals operational plans is a traitor to his country.
66. A combat veteran of any war should be respected by soldiers.
67. American soldiers do not lose wars. Leaders lose wars.
68. What a soldier saw with his own eyes, cannot be ignored or changed by higher headquarters.
69. If Special Forces are not assigned strategic missions, they are being misused.
70. The “Hummer” is a vehicle and is the only thing of that name allowed in the Infantry.
71. If you wish to learn about guerrilla warfare, study Francis Marion and not Westmoreland or Giap.
72. The one night you don’t dig in, will bring mortars on your position.
73. Taking the easy way will always get you killed.
74. Blank ammunition has no place in Infantry training.
75. The more you restrict Infantrymen possessing live ammunition, the more accidents you will have.
76. The Air Force and Navy are supporting arms.
77. Intelligence Officer is usually a contradiction in terms.
78. Inclement weather is the true Infantryman’s ally.
79. There is no special duty so important, that it takes the Infantry Soldier away from his squad.
80. Commanders who use the “Off Limits” authority to deny sex to combat soldiers will have a high V.D. rate.
81. A Commander’s morals are his own and cannot be imposed on his soldiers.
82. Chaplains must present themselves when the soldier has time, not because they have a schedule.
83. An officer must be judged on his ability and not on how many coffees his wife has attended.
84. Senior officers who allow discussions about a brother officer, not present, are not honorable men.
85. A Commander who bad-mouths his predecessor will never be truly respected.
86. Equal opportunity is guaranteed by the law and does not require a separate staff.
87. If a Sergeant Major suggests a unit watch, he is the supplier.
88. The quality of food went down, with the initiation of the consolidated mess.
89. No NCO or Warrant Officer outranks a Second Lieutenant.
90. Any officer who does not listen to NCO’s and Warrant Officers is a fool.
91. If you wish your subordinates to call you by your first name, go sell shoes. There is no place for you in the Army.
92. Any Army man who sneers at a Marine for being sharp and well turned out is no soldier.
93. Any Infantryman who must call higher headquarters before engaging the enemy has a fool for a commander.
94. Soldiers respect leaders worth emulating. They cannot be “ordered” to respect anyone.
95. No man who refused to serve his country in war should be elected or appointed over men and women being sent to fight.

https://youtu.be/tAgUQ7lMKOs?si=xX6jzBeZWbosSj_L

Take Advantage of years of wisdom!

Military Times Early Bird Brief 12 March 24: Pentagon releases its fiscal year 2025 budget

via: Commemorative Air Force
·
It was #OTD that Frank Piasecki piloted the first flight of the PV-3 prototype tandem rotor helicopter, in Morton Grove, Pennsylvania. Can you guess in what year? It may be earlier than you think!

This helicopter, later designated as XHRP-X by the United States Navy, earned the nickname "the Flying Banana" due to its unique fuselage design facilitating vertical clearance between its rotors.

Piasecki also became the first pilot to receive a helicopter license from the C.A.A. without having a prior airplane license.

https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/tag/p-v-engineering-forum-pv-3/

Military Times Early Bird Brief 6 March 24: “Alarming” percentage of vets, troops accept conspiracy theories: Military Times survey

FB comms back up this AOR - all appears back online:
NOTE: FIV unaffected during blackout - Well Done Staff Duty!
NSDQ!
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/california/story/2024-03-05/facebook-instagram-messenger-and-threads-down-in-widespread-outage

Super Tuesday Shenanigans? - Hhhmmm...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-facebook-instagram-down-thousands-downdetector-shows-2024-03-05/

Fall In America standing strong from this AOR.

NSDQ!

SITREP OP Vista, CA, 5 MAR, 24
SUBJECT: Facebook Outage
FACEBOOK connectivity went not operational at approx 0500PST this morning for my AOR (OP SoCal), a complete blackout is current state. Reason unknown. Other social media platforms are also experiencing same issue, reason(s) for Outage or anticipated time that user services will be restored is unknown at this time. Cellular services, radio and television broadcasting capabilities are still operational.
https://downdetector.com/status/facebook/

via: Medal of Honor Valor Trail
5h ·
#OnThisDay

In early March 2002, coalition forces launched Operation Anaconda to encircle remaining Taliban forces in Paktia province, Afghanistan. On March 3, a seven-man team of Navy SEALs and one Air Force combat controller John Chapman left by Chinook helicopter for a reconnaissance mission on the Takur Ghar mountain. Reaching the deployment ridge on the morning of March 4, the team, led by Senior Chief Britt Slabinski, came under heavy fire. Petty Officer First Class Neil Roberts fell from the helicopter, which was soon forced to crash-land three miles away.

Quickly, the team decided to return for Roberts, unaware he had been killed. Immediately coming under attack after re-engaging, Chapman and Slabinski charged up an incline in deep snow to successfully clear an enemy bunker. Soon after, a machine gun in a nearby strongpoint opened fire on the team. Chapman assaulted this bunker, exposed himself to the automatic fire, and was wounded in his efforts. Despite his injuries, Chapman kept fighting until mortally injured. For his bravery and ultimate sacrifice, Chapman was posthumously decorated with the Medal of Honor.

With his team suffering casualties, Slabinski moved them to a stronger position and ordered nearby close air support. Enemy mortar attacks commenced at daybreak, forcing the group further down the mountain. Across rough terrain, Slabinski carried a seriously wounded comrade while directing airstrikes. For 14 hours, he helped stabilize casualties and battled off enemy attacks. Despite suffering killed and wounded men, a quick-reaction force of Army Rangers and Air Force troops moved up to Slabinski’s team. Together, they fought against Taliban assaults until 8:15 p.m. when all personnel, including the seven men killed, were extracted by helicopter.

For his leadership and courage throughout the battle, Slabinski received the Navy Cross, which was upgraded to the Medal of Honor in 2018.
Photo: "The Battle of Takur Ghar" by Keith Rocco, National Guard Heritage Painting

via: S.Burke Artwork

I was recently inspired by a friends photo to create a painting of the Night Stalker Memorial. Her picture captured it beautifully, here is my painting version.

The Night Stalker Prayer came to mind as I was painting this. Especially the second half:

“Watch over our families when we can not.

May Your presence give them comfort, and Your love lend them the courage to face each day, confident in the knowledge that You will never leave them nor forsake them.

Protect them with Your unfailing mercy and grace.

Grant that wherever we serve, we may be loyal to our proud heritage.

Make us to choose the harder right over the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half truth when the whole can be won.

May we ever embody the principles upon which the Night Stalkers are founded and serve proudly with the memory of those who have gone before.

Give us the courage to fight to win and the faith to die rather than quit.

Because, Night Stalkers Don’t Quit!”

I will do a limited number of prints if anyone is interested.

https://checkout.square.site/buy/XZLF53Q4DL57YJJED4DB4D5L

How do you get information on communication?

If you want to learn more about civilian comms and the capabilities of different equipment, Ham Radio Crash Course on YouTube is one of the best places to start! Never stop learning, knowledge is the lightest preparedness equipment you can get!

https://lnkd.in/e2H_MrNk

hashtag#America hashtag#hamradio

Too soon?

Today's cell phone network outage should be raising some questions. Do you have a way to communicate with your local support network? Do you have ways to power those methods of communication? Do you have designated frequencies for everyone to meet on? DO YOU EVEN HAVE A COMMS PLAN OR LOCAL SUPPORT NETWORK?!

If we do not learn and adapt from our life experiences we are failing to grasp the most important lessons! NSDQ!

hashtag#America hashtag#Comms hashtag#preparedness

The Enduring Solitude Of Combat Vets:

Retired Army Special Forces Sgt. Maj. Alan Farrell is one of the more interesting people in this country nowadays, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War who teaches French at VMI, reviews films and writes poetry. Just your typical sergeant major/brigadier general with a Ph.D. in French and a fistful of other degrees.

This is a speech that he gave to Vets at the Harvard Business School last Veterans' Day. I know it is long but well worth the read:
--------
"Ladies and Gentlemens:

Kurt Vonnegut -- Corporal Vonnegut -- famously told an assembly like this one that his wife had begged him to "bring light into their tunnels" that night. "Can't do that," said Vonnegut, since, according to him, the audience would at once sense his duplicity, his mendacity, his insincerity... and have yet another reason for despair. I'll not likely have much light to bring into any tunnels this night, either.

The remarks I'm about to make to you I've made before... in essence at least. I dare to make them again because other Veterans seem to approve. I speak mostly to Veterans. I don't have much to say to them, the others, civilians, real people. These remarks, I offer you for the reaction I got from one of them, though, a prison shrink. I speak in prisons a lot. Because some of our buddies wind up in there. Because their service was a Golden Moment in a life gone sour. Because... because no one else will.

In the event, I've just got done saying what I'm about to say to you, when the prison psychologist sidles up to me to announce quietly: "You've got it." The "it," of course, is Post Stress Traumatic Traumatic Post Stress Disorder Stress... Post. Can never seem to get the malady nor the abbreviation straight. He's worried about me... that I'm wandering around loose... that I'm talking to his cons. So worried, but so sincere, that I let him make me an appointment at the V.A. for "diagnosis." Sincerity is a rare pearl.

So I sulk in the stuffy anteroom of the V.A. shrink's office for the requisite two hours (maybe you have), finally get admitted. He's a nice guy. Asks me about my war, scans my 201 File, and, after what I take to be clinical scrutiny, announces without preamble: "You've got it." He can snag me, he says, 30 percent disability. Reimbursement, he says, from Uncle Sam, now till the end of my days. Oh, and by the way, he says, there's a cure. I'm not so sure that I want a cure for 30 percent every month. This inspires him to explain. He takes out a piece of paper and a Magic Marker™. Now: Anybody who takes out a frickin' Magic Marker™ to explain something to you thinks you're a bonehead and by that very gesture says so to God and everybody.

Anyhow. He draws two big circles on a sheet of paper, then twelve small circles. Apples and grapes, you might say. In fact, he does say. The "grapes," he asserts, stand for the range of emotional response open to a healthy civilian, a normal person: titillation, for instance, then amusement, then pleasure, then joy, then delight and so on across the spectrum through mild distress on through angst -- whatever that is -- to black depression. The apples? That's what you got, traumatized veteran: Ecstasy and Despair. But we can fix that for you. We can make you normal.

So here's my question: Why on earth would anybody want to be normal?

And here's what triggered that curious episode:

The words of the prophet Jeremiah:

My bowels. My bowels. I am pained at my very heart; my heart maketh a noise in me... [T]hou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Destruction upon destruction is cried; for the whole land is spoilt and my curtains... How long shall I see the standard and hear the sound of the trumpet?

I dunno about Jeremiah's bowels... or his curtains, but I've seen the standard and heard the sound of the trumpet. Again. Civilians mooing about that "Thin Red Line of 'eroes" between them and the Darkness. Again. ‘Course it's not red any more. Used to be olive drab. Then treetop camouflage. Then woodland. Then chocolate chip. Now pixelated, random computer-generated. Multi-cam next, is it? Progress. The kids are in the soup. Again. Me? I can't see the front sights of me piece any more. And if I can still lug my rucksack five miles, I need these days to be defibrillated when I get there. Nope. I got something like six Honorable Discharges from Pharaoh's Army. Your Mom's gonna be wearing Kevlar before I do. Nope. This one's on the kids, I'm afraid, the next generation.

I can't help them. Not those who make the sacrifice in the desert nor those in the cesspool cities of a land that if two troopers from the One Oh One or two Lance Corporals could find on a map a few years ago, I'll be surprised. Nobody can help... except by trying to build a society Back Here that deserves such a sacrifice.

We gonna win the war? I dunno. They tell me I lost mine. I know I didn't start it. Soldiers don't start wars. Civilians do. And civilians say when they're over. I'm just satisfied right now that these kids, for better or worse, did their duty as God gave them the light to see it. But I want them back. And I worry not about the fight, but about the after: after the war, after the victory, after... God forbid... the defeat, if it come to that. It's after that things get tricky. After that a Soldier needs the real grit and wit. And after that a Soldier needs to believe. Anybody can believe before. During? A Soldier has company in the fight, in Kandahar or Kabul, Basra or Baghdad. It's enough to believe in the others during. But after... and I can tell you this having come home from a war: After ...a Soldier is alone. A batch of them, maybe... but still alone.

Years ago, maybe... when I was still in the Army, my A Team got the mission to support an Air Force escape and evasion exercise. Throw a bunch of downed pilots into the wilderness, let local guerrillas (us) feed them into a clandestine escape net and spirit them out by train just like in The Great Escape to... Baltimore, of all places. So we set up an elaborate underground network: farmhouses, caves, barns, pickup trucks, loads of hay where a guy can hide, fifty-five gallon drums to smuggle the evadees through checkpoints in. We've even cozened the Norfolk and Western Railroad out of a boxcar.

Sooooo... come midnight, with our escapees safely stowed in that car, we wait for a special train to make a detour, back onto the siding, hook it up, and freight the pilots off to Maree-land. Pretty realistic, seems to us.

Now, for safety's sake the Railroad requires a Line Administrator on site to supervise any special stop. Sure enough, just before midnight two suit-and-ties show up toting a red lantern. Civilians. We sniff at them disdainfully. One of them wigwags to the train. With a clank she couples the boxcar and chugs out into the night. The other guy -- frumpy Babbit from the front office -- shuffles off down the track and out onto a trestle bridge over the gorge. He stands there with his hands behind his back, peering up at the cloud-strewn summertime sky, a thousand bucks worth of Burberry overcoat riffling in the night breeze. I edge over respectfully behind him. Wait. He notices me after a while, looks back. "You know," he says, "Was on a night like this 40 years ago that I jumped into Normandy."

Who'da thought?

Who'da thought? Then I thought... back to right after my return from Vietnam. I'm working nights at a convenience store just down the road from this very spot. Lousy job. Whores, bums, burnouts, lowlifes. That's your clientele after midnight in a convenience store. One particular guy I remember drifts in every morning about 0400. Night work. Janitor, maybe. Not much to distinguish him from the rest of the early morning crowd of shadows shuffling around the place. Fingers and teeth yellowed from cigarette smoke. A weathered, leathered face that just dissolves into the colorless crowd of nobodies.

Never says a word. Buys his margarine and macaroni and Miller's. Plunks down his cash. Hooks a grubby hand around his bag and threads his way out of the place and down the street. Lost in another world. Like the rest of the derelicts. One night, he's fumbling for his keys, drops them on the floor, sets his wallet on the counter -- brown leather, I still remember -- and the wallet flops open. Pinned to the inside of it, worn shiny and smooth, with its gold star gleaming out of the center: combat jump badge from that great World War II... Normandy maybe, just like the suit-and-tie.

Who'da thought?

Two guys scarred Out There. Not sure just where or how even. You can lose your life without dying. But the guy who made it to the top and the guy shambling along the bottom are what James Joyce calls in another context "secret messengers." Citizens among the rest, who look like the rest, talk like the rest, act like the rest... but who know prodigious secrets, wherever they wash up and whatever use they make of them. Who know somber despair but inexplicable laughter, the ache of duty but distrust of inaction. Who know risk and exaltation... and that awful drop though empty air we call failure... and solitude! They know solitude.

Because solitude is what waits for the one who shall have borne the battle. Out There in it together... back here alone.

Alone to make way in a scrappy, greedy, civilian world "filching lucre and gulping warm beer," as Conrad had it. Alone to learn the skills a self-absorbed, hustling, modern society values. Alone to unlearn the deadly skills of the former -- and bloody -- business. Alone to find a companion -- maybe -- and alone -- maybe -- even with that companion over a lifetime... for who can make someone else who hasn't seen it understand horror, blackness, filth Incommunicado. Voiceless. Alone.

My Railroad president wandered off by himself to face his memories; my Store 24 regular was clearly a man alone with his.

For my two guys, it was the after the battle that they endured, and far longer than the moment of terror in the battle. Did my Railroad exec learn in the dark of war to elbow other men aside, to view all other men as the enemy, to "fight" his way up the corporate ladder just as he fought his way out of the bocages of Normandy? Did he find he could never get close to a wife or children again and turn his energy, perhaps his anger toward some other and solitary goal Did the Store/24 guy never get out of his parachute harness and shiver in an endless night patrolled by demons he couldn't get shut of? Did he haul out that tattered wallet and shove his jump badge under the nose of those he'd done wrong to, disappointed, embarrassed? Did he find fewer and fewer citizens Back Here who even knew what it was? Did he keep it because he knew what it was? From what I've seen -- from a distance, of course -- of success, I'd say it's not necessarily sweeter than failure -- which I have seen close up.

Well, that's what I said that woke up the prison shrink.
And I say again to you that silence is the reward we reserve for you and your buddies, for my Cadets. Silence is the sound of Honor, which speaks no word and lays no tread. And Nothing is the glory of the one who's done Right. And Alone is the society of those who do it the Hard Way, alone even when they have comrades like themselves in the fight. I've gotta hope as a teacher that my Cadets, as a citizen that you and your buddies will have the inner resources, the stuff of inner life, the values in short, to abide the brute loneliness of after, to find the courage to continue the march, to do Right, to live with what they've done, you've done in our name, to endure that dark hour of frustration, humiliation, failure maybe... or victory, for one or the other is surely waiting Back Here. Unless you opt for those grapes...

My two guys started at the same place and wound up at the far ends of the spectrum. As we measure their distance from that starting point, they seem to return to it: the one guy in the darkness drawn back to a Golden Moment in his life from a lofty vantage point; t'other guy lugging through God knows what gauntlet of shame and frustration that symbol of his Golden Moment. Today we celebrate your Golden Moment. While a whole generation went ganging after its own indulgence, vanity, appetite, you clung to a foolish commitment, to foolish old traditions; as Soldiers, Sailors, Pilots, Marines you honored pointless ritual, suffered the endless, sluggish monotony of duty, raised that flag not just once, or again, or -- as has become fashionable now -- in time of peril, but every single morning. You stuck it out. You may have had -- as we like to say -- the camaraderie of brothers or sisters to buck each other up or the dubious support (as we like to say... and say more than do, by the way) of the folks back home, us... but in the end you persevered alone. Just as alone you made that long walk from Out There with a duffle bag fulla pixelated, random computer-generated dirty laundry -- along with your bruised dreams, your ecstasy and your despair -- Back Here at tour's end.

And you will be alone, for all the good intentions and solicitude of them, the other, the civilians. Alone. But...together. Your generation, whom us dumbo civilians couldn't keep out of war, will bear the burden of a soldier's return... alone. And a fresh duty: to complete the lives of your buddies who didn't make it back, to confect for them a living monument to their memory.

Your comfort, such as it is, will come from the knowledge that others of that tiny fraction of the population that fought for us are alone but grappling with the same dilemmas -- often small and immediate, often undignified or humiliating, now and then immense and overwhelming -- by your persistence courting the risk, by your obstinacy clinging to that Hard Way. Some of you will be stronger than others, but even the strong ones will have their darker moments. Where we can join each other if not relieve each other, we secret messengers, is right here in places like this and on occasions like this -- one lousy day of the year, your day, my day, our day, -- in the company of each other and of the flag we served. Not much cheer in that kerugma. But there's the by-God glory.

"I know..." says the prophet Isaiah:

... I know that thou art obstinate, and thy neck is an iron sinew, and thy brow brass...I have shewed thee new things, even hidden things. Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have [refined] thee...in the furnace of affliction...

Well, all right, then. Why on earth would anybody want to be normal? Thanks for Listening and Lord love the lot of youse."

Most people won't take the time to read this all the way to the end. I hope that you will.

17 INCHES" - you will not regret reading this

An excellent article to read from beginning to end.

Twenty years ago, in Nashville, Tennessee, during the first week of January, 1996, more than 4,000 baseball coaches descended upon the Opryland Hotel for the 52nd annual ABCA's convention.

While I waited in line to register with the hotel staff, I heard other more veteran coaches rumbling about the lineup of speakers scheduled to present during the weekend. One name kept resurfacing, always with the same sentiment — “John Scolinos is here? Oh, man, worth every penny of my airfare.”

Who is John Scolinos, I wondered. No matter; I was just happy to be there.

In 1996, Coach Scolinos was 78 years old and five years retired from a college coaching career that began in 1948. He shuffled to the stage to an impressive standing ovation, wearing dark polyester pants, a light blue shirt, and a string around his neck from which home plate hung — a full-sized, stark-white home plate.

Seriously, I wondered, who is this guy?

After speaking for twenty-five minutes, not once mentioning the prop hanging around his neck, Coach Scolinos appeared to notice the snickering among some of the coaches. Even those who knew Coach Scolinos had to wonder exactly where he was going with this, or if he had simply forgotten about home plate since he’d gotten on stage.

Then, finally …

“You’re probably all wondering why I’m wearing home plate around my neck,” he said, his voice growing irascible. I laughed along with the others, acknowledging the possibility. “I may be old, but I’m not crazy. The reason I stand before you today is to share with you baseball people what I’ve learned in my life, what I’ve learned about home plate in my 78 years.”

Several hands went up when Scolinos asked how many Little League coaches were in the room.

“Do you know how wide home plate is in Little League?” After a pause, someone offered, “Seventeen inches?”, more of a question than an answer.

“That’s right,” he said. “How about in Babe Ruth’s day? Any Babe Ruth coaches in the house?”

Another long pause.

“Seventeen inches?” a guess from another reluctant coach.

“That’s right,” said Scolinos.

“Now, how many high school coaches do we have in the room?”
Hundreds of hands shot up, as the pattern began to appear.

“How wide is home plate in high school baseball?”

“Seventeen inches,” they said, sounding more confident.

“You’re right!” Scolinos barked. “And you college coaches, how wide is home plate in college?”

“Seventeen inches!” we said, in unison.

“Any Minor League coaches here? How wide is home plate in pro ball?”............“Seventeen inches!”
“RIGHT! And in the Major Leagues, how wide home plate is in the Major Leagues?

“Seventeen inches!”

“SEV-EN-TEEN INCHES!” he confirmed, his voice bellowing off the walls. “And what do they do with a Big League pitcher who can’t throw the ball over seventeen inches?”

Pause. “They send him to Pocatello!” he hollered, drawing raucous laughter. “What they don’t do is this: they don’t say, ‘Ah, that’s okay, Jimmy. If you can’t hit a seventeen-inch target? We’ll make it eighteen inches or nineteen inches. We’ll make it twenty inches so you have a better chance of hitting it. If you can’t hit that, let us know so we can make it wider still, say twenty-five inches.'”

Pause.

“Coaches… what do we do when your best player shows up late to practice? or when our team rules forbid facial hair and a guy shows up unshaven? What if he gets caught drinking? Do we hold him accountable? Or do we change the rules to fit him? Do we widen home plate? "

The chuckles gradually faded as four thousand coaches grew quiet, the fog lifting as the old coach’s message began to unfold.

He turned the plate toward himself and, using a Sharpie, began to draw something. When he turned it toward the crowd, point up, a house was revealed, complete with a freshly drawn door and two windows.

“This is the problem in our homes today. With our marriages, with the way we parent our kids. With our discipline.

We don’t teach accountability to our kids, and there is no consequence for failing to meet standards. We just widen the plate!”

Pause.

Then, to the point at the top of the house he added a small American flag.
“This is the problem in our schools today. The quality of our education is going downhill fast and teachers have been stripped of the tools they need to be successful, and to educate and discipline our young people.
We are allowing others to widen home plate! Where is that getting us?”

Silence.

He replaced the flag with a Cross. “And this is the problem in the Church, where powerful people in positions of authority have taken advantage of young children, only to have such an atrocity swept under the rug for years. Our church leaders are widening home plate for themselves! And we allow it.”

“And the same is true with our government. Our so-called representatives make rules for us that don’t apply to themselves. They take bribes from lobbyists and foreign countries. They no longer serve us. And we allow them to widen home plate! We see our country falling into a dark abyss while we just watch.”

I was amazed. At a baseball convention where I expected to learn something about curve balls and bunting and how to run better practices, I had learned something far more valuable.

From an old man with home plate strung around his neck, I had learned something about life, about myself, about my own weaknesses and about my responsibilities as a leader. I had to hold myself and others accountable to that which I knew to be right, lest our families, our faith, and our society continue down an undesirable path.

“If I am lucky,” Coach Scolinos concluded, “you will remember one thing from this old coach today. It is this: "If we fail to hold ourselves to a higher standard, a standard of what we know to be right; if we fail to hold our spouses and our children to the same standards, if we are unwilling or unable to provide a consequence when they do not meet the standard; and if our schools & churches & our government fail to hold themselves accountable to those they serve, there is but one thing to look forward to…”

With that, he held home plate in front of his chest, turned it around, and revealed its dark black backside, "We have dark days ahead!.”

Note: Coach Scolinos died in 2009 at the age of 91, but not before touching the lives of hundreds of players and coaches, including mine. Meeting him at my first ABCA convention kept me returning year after year, looking for similar wisdom and inspiration from other coaches. He is the best clinic speaker the ABCA has ever known because he was so much more than a baseball coach.

His message was clear: “Coaches, keep your players—no matter how good they are—your own children, your churches, your government, and most of all, keep yourself at seventeen inches."
And this my friends is what our country has become and what is wrong with it today, and now go out there and fix it!

"Don't widen the plate."

via: History in Color
·
The result of the Ordnance Department body armor test that demonstrated the effect of pistol, rifle, and machine-gun fire on heavy body armor. Photograph taken at Fort de la Peigney in Langres, France, in c. 1918.

Credit: timcolorization on Instagram
historycolored.com
#history #ww1 #historycolored

via: Special Operations Association
February 18, 2019
·
Today we pause to remember SFC William “Buck” M. Fernandez, TF2A3 Covey Rider, and 1LT James L. Hull, Pilot.

1LT Hull was a Covey Forward Air Controller assigned to the 20th Tactical Air Support Squadron at Da Nang. 1LT Hull and SFC Fernandez were flying an O-2A (#68-11001) searching for an Army helicopter shot down in southern Laos. They were shot down and crashed near Ban Pelou, 55 miles west of Da Nang. Neither survived the crash. An Army Special Forces team reached the crash site and recovered SFC Fernandez’s body, but 1LT Hull’s body was trapped in the wreckage and could not be recovered.

William Fernandez was born into a military family. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, he was raised on various Army posts, both overseas and stateside. He had four brothers and four sisters. His father, CSM George Fernandez , and three of his brothers also served in Vietnam (all in Airborne units).

He entered the Army 1956 in Richmond, Virginia and was on his third tour in Vietnam. A brief history of his assignments are Basic Training at Ft Jackson, SC, AIT at Fort Gordon, GA, Airborne School and assigned to 2d Battalion 327th Infantry, 101st Airborne Div, Fort Campbell Ky. Around 1960, he joined the Special Forces at Fort Bragg. His first Special Forces assignment was in Panama. He was later assigned to Special Forces in Okinawa and Korea. Between Vietnam tours, he served at Bragg as a Special Forces instructor. He was survived by two children, his parents and siblings. He is buried in the Fort Bragg Main Post Cemetery, Fort Bragg, NC.

In 2006, it was announced that 1LT Hull’s remains had been located and positively identified and would be returned to his family for burial. Between 1993 and 1997, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command led three investigations with U.S. and Socialist Republic of Vietnam (S.R.V.) teams, and one trilateral investigation with a Lao People's Democratic Republic team. During the first investigation, the team interviewed a Vietnamese citizen who produced human remains and an identification tag for Hull that he claimed to have recovered from a crash site located just inside Laos. The joint team was not allowed to cross the border and the investigation was suspended. The Vietnamese turned over the bone fragment to U.S. officials, but the ID tag's whereabouts are still unknown. Additional investigations yielded some information concerning a crash site located just inside the Laotian border. The S.R.V. allowed a Vietnamese national to walk to the purported crash site and collect a fragment of the wreckage. Based on the location, type of aircraft and retrieved wreckage, analysts determined it was Hull's crash site. In May 2006, a joint U.S. and L.P.D.R. team excavated the site where they recovered additional evidence and human remains. He was awarded the Silver Star, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, a Purple Heart, and nine Air Medals.

via: Rebel History
February 19, 2022

80 years ago today in 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This executive order led to the mass internment of Japanese-American citizens in ten camps spread out across the American countryside west of the Mississippi River, most infamously the Manzanar and Tule Lake camps in California.

This executive order was passed in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack of December 1941 and allowed for the removal of any and all Japanese-American citizens from their homes and their property confiscated. The text of the order itself did not actually single out Japanese-American citizens specifically, but instead delegated the authority to do so to the Secretary of War. Who did indeed single out the entire West Coast as a military zone and subsequently had 110,000 Japanese-American citizens forcibly removed from their homes and businesses and shipped to these ten camps: Manzanar, Tule Lake, Minidonka, Heart Mountain, Topaz, Gila River, Poston, Granada, Jerome and Rohwer.

This internment proved later to be a massive violation of the rights of a group of American citizens based on war hysteria. Aside from the removal of these citizens from their homes, civil rights violations within the camps were rampant. In addition to stories of occasional abuse from military personnel, there were also major riots at times. The most famous of these was the Manzanar Riot of December 1942, when the leader of the Kitchen Workers’ Union was arrested for exposing the creation of artificial shortages of meat and sugar by camp administrators, who had been stealing these food rations and selling them on the black market. Several thousand internees marched in protest of his arrest, and were attacked as a result by military police with tear gas. Two marchers were also fatally shot in the confrontation.

In December of 1944, Major General Henry C. Pratt issued Public Proclamation No. 21, which stated that all internees were free to return to their former lives, which in most cases either no longer existed or would never be the same as of January of 1945. Only ten U.S citizens were arrested as Japanese informants throughout all of World War Two, and not a single one was Japanese. Eventually, an investigation by the Carter administration concluded that the internment of these citizens was unwarranted, and Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Rights Act of 1988, which paid twenty thousand US dollars to each surviving internee and issued a public apology from the federal government.

[Online References]
(https://www.history.com/.../roosevelt-signs-executive...)
(https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=74 )
(http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5154 )
Authored by DK

The Enduring Solitude Of Combat Vets:

Retired Army Special Forces Sgt. Maj. Alan Farrell is one of the more interesting people in this country nowadays, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War who teaches French at VMI, reviews films and writes poetry. Just your typical sergeant major/brigadier general with a Ph.D. in French and a fistful of other degrees.
This is a speech that he gave to Vets at the Harvard Business School last Veterans' Day. I know it is long but well worth the read:
--------
"Ladies and Gentlemens:
Kurt Vonnegut -- Corporal Vonnegut -- famously told an assembly like this one that his wife had begged him to "bring light into their tunnels" that night. "Can't do that," said Vonnegut, since, according to him, the audience would at once sense his duplicity, his mendacity, his insincerity... and have yet another reason for despair. I'll not likely have much light to bring into any tunnels this night, either.

The remarks I'm about to make to you I've made before... in essence at least. I dare to make them again because other Veterans seem to approve. I speak mostly to Veterans. I don't have much to say to them, the others, civilians, real people. These remarks, I offer you for the reaction I got from one of them, though, a prison shrink. I speak in prisons a lot. Because some of our buddies wind up in there. Because their service was a Golden Moment in a life gone sour. Because... because no one else will.

In the event, I've just got done saying what I'm about to say to you, when the prison psychologist sidles up to me to announce quietly: "You've got it." The "it," of course, is Post Stress Traumatic Traumatic Post Stress Disorder Stress... Post. Can never seem to get the malady nor the abbreviation straight. He's worried about me... that I'm wandering around loose... that I'm talking to his cons. So worried, but so sincere, that I let him make me an appointment at the V.A. for "diagnosis." Sincerity is a rare pearl.

So I sulk in the stuffy anteroom of the V.A. shrink's office for the requisite two hours (maybe you have), finally get admitted. He's a nice guy. Asks me about my war, scans my 201 File, and, after what I take to be clinical scrutiny, announces without preamble: "You've got it." He can snag me, he says, 30 percent disability. Reimbursement, he says, from Uncle Sam, now till the end of my days. Oh, and by the way, he says, there's a cure. I'm not so sure that I want a cure for 30 percent every month. This inspires him to explain. He takes out a piece of paper and a Magic Marker™. Now: Anybody who takes out a frickin' Magic Marker™ to explain something to you thinks you're a bonehead and by that very gesture says so to God and everybody.

Anyhow. He draws two big circles on a sheet of paper, then twelve small circles. Apples and grapes, you might say. In fact, he does say. The "grapes," he asserts, stand for the range of emotional response open to a healthy civilian, a normal person: titillation, for instance, then amusement, then pleasure, then joy, then delight and so on across the spectrum through mild distress on through angst -- whatever that is -- to black depression. The apples? That's what you got, traumatized veteran: Ecstasy and Despair. But we can fix that for you. We can make you normal.

So here's my question: Why on earth would anybody want to be normal?

And here's what triggered that curious episode:
The words of the prophet Jeremiah:

"My bowels. My bowels. I am pained at my very heart; my heart maketh a noise in me... [T]hou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Destruction upon destruction is cried; for the whole land is spoilt and my curtains... How long shall I see the standard and hear the sound of the trumpet?"

I dunno about Jeremiah's bowels... or his curtains, but I've seen the standard and heard the sound of the trumpet.

Again. Civilians mooing about that "Thin Red Line of 'eroes" between them and the Darkness.

Again. ‘Course it's not red any more. Used to be olive drab. Then treetop camouflage. Then woodland. Then chocolate chip. Now pixelated, random computer-generated. Multi-cam next, is it? Progress. The kids are in the soup.

Again. Me? I can't see the front sights of me piece any more. And if I can still lug my rucksack five miles, I need these days to be defibrillated when I get there. Nope. I got something like six Honorable Discharges from Pharaoh's Army. Your Mom's gonna be wearing Kevlar before I do. Nope. This one's on the kids, I'm afraid, the next generation.

I can't help them. Not those who make the sacrifice in the desert nor those in the cesspool cities of a land that if two troopers from the One Oh One or two Lance Corporals could find on a map a few years ago, I'll be surprised. Nobody can help... except by trying to build a society Back Here that deserves such a sacrifice.

We gonna win the war? I dunno. They tell me I lost mine. I know I didn't start it. Soldiers don't start wars. Civilians do. And civilians say when they're over. I'm just satisfied right now that these kids, for better or worse, did their duty as God gave them the light to see it. But I want them back. And I worry not about the fight, but about the after: after the war, after the victory, after... God forbid... the defeat, if it come to that. It's after that things get tricky. After that a Soldier needs the real grit and wit. And after that a Soldier needs to believe.

Anybody can believe before. During? A Soldier has company in the fight, in Kandahar or Kabul, Basra or Baghdad. It's enough to believe in the others during. But after... and I can tell you this having come home from a war: After ...a Soldier is alone. A batch of them, maybe... but still alone.

Years ago, maybe... when I was still in the Army, my A Team got the mission to support an Air Force escape and evasion exercise. Throw a bunch of downed pilots into the wilderness, let local guerrillas (us) feed them into a clandestine escape net and spirit them out by train just like in The Great Escape to... Baltimore, of all places. So we set up an elaborate underground network: farmhouses, caves, barns, pickup trucks, loads of hay where a guy can hide, fifty-five gallon drums to smuggle the evadees through checkpoints in. We've even cozened the Norfolk and Western Railroad out of a boxcar.

Sooooo... come midnight, with our escapees safely stowed in that car, we wait for a special train to make a detour, back onto the siding, hook it up, and freight the pilots off to Maree-land. Pretty realistic, seems to us.

Now, for safety's sake the Railroad requires a Line Administrator on site to supervise any special stop. Sure enough, just before midnight two suit-and-ties show up toting a red lantern. Civilians. We sniff at them disdainfully. One of them wigwags to the train. With a clank she couples the boxcar and chugs out into the night. The other guy -- frumpy Babbit from the front office -- shuffles off down the track and out onto a trestle bridge over the gorge. He stands there with his hands behind his back, peering up at the cloud-strewn summertime sky, a thousand bucks worth of Burberry overcoat riffling in the night breeze. I edge over respectfully behind him. Wait. He notices me after a while, looks back. "You know," he says, "Was on a night like this 40 years ago that I jumped into Normandy."

Who'da thought?

Who'da thought? Then I thought... back to right after my return from Vietnam. I'm working nights at a convenience store just down the road from this very spot. Lousy job. Whores, bums, burnouts, lowlifes. That's your clientele after midnight in a convenience store. One particular guy I remember drifts in every morning about 0400. Night work. Janitor, maybe. Not much to distinguish him from the rest of the early morning crowd of shadows shuffling around the place. Fingers and teeth yellowed from cigarette smoke. A weathered, leathered face that just dissolves into the colorless crowd of nobodies.

Never says a word. Buys his margarine and macaroni and Miller's. Plunks down his cash. Hooks a grubby hand around his bag and threads his way out of the place and down the street. Lost in another world. Like the rest of the derelicts. One night, he's fumbling for his keys, drops them on the floor, sets his wallet on the counter -- brown leather, I still remember -- and the wallet flops open. Pinned to the inside of it, worn shiny and smooth, with its gold star gleaming out of the center: combat jump badge from that great World War II... Normandy maybe, just like the suit-and-tie.

Who'da thought?

Two guys scarred Out There. Not sure just where or how even. You can lose your life without dying. But the guy who made it to the top and the guy shambling along the bottom are what James Joyce calls in another context "secret messengers." Citizens among the rest, who look like the rest, talk like the rest, act like the rest... but who know prodigious secrets, wherever they wash up and whatever use they make of them. Who know somber despair but inexplicable laughter, the ache of duty but distrust of inaction. Who know risk and exaltation... and that awful drop though empty air we call failure... and solitude!

They know solitude.
Because solitude is what waits for the one who shall have borne the battle. Out There in it together... back here alone.

Alone to make way in a scrappy, greedy, civilian world "filching lucre and gulping warm beer," as Conrad had it. Alone to learn the skills a self-absorbed, hustling, modern society values. Alone to unlearn the deadly skills of the former -- and bloody -- business. Alone to find a companion -- maybe -- and alone -- maybe -- even with that companion over a lifetime... for who can make someone else who hasn't seen it understand horror, blackness, filth Incommunicado. Voiceless. Alone.

My Railroad president wandered off by himself to face his memories; my Store 24 regular was clearly a man alone with his.

For my two guys, it was the after the battle that they endured, and far longer than the moment of terror in the battle. Did my Railroad exec learn in the dark of war to elbow other men aside, to view all other men as the enemy, to "fight" his way up the corporate ladder just as he fought his way out of the bocages of Normandy?

Did he find he could never get close to a wife or children again and turn his energy, perhaps his anger toward some other and solitary goal Did the Store/24 guy never get out of his parachute harness and shiver in an endless night patrolled by demons he couldn't get shut of? Did he haul out that tattered wallet and shove his jump badge under the nose of those he'd done wrong to, disappointed, embarrassed? Did he find fewer and fewer citizens Back Here who even knew what it was? Did he keep it because he knew what it was? From what I've seen -- from a distance, of course -- of success, I'd say it's not necessarily sweeter than failure -- which I have seen close up.

Well, that's what I said that woke up the prison shrink.

And I say again to you that silence is the reward we reserve for you and your buddies, for my Cadets. Silence is the sound of Honor, which speaks no word and lays no tread. And Nothing is the glory of the one who's done Right. And Alone is the society of those who do it the Hard Way, alone even when they have comrades like themselves in the fight. I've gotta hope as a teacher that my Cadets, as a citizen that you and your buddies will have the inner resources, the stuff of inner life, the values in short, to abide the brute loneliness of after, to find the courage to continue the march, to do Right, to live with what they've done, you've done in our name, to endure that dark hour of frustration, humiliation, failure maybe... or victory, for one or the other is surely waiting Back Here. Unless you opt for those grapes...

My two guys started at the same place and wound up at the far ends of the spectrum. As we measure their distance from that starting point, they seem to return to it: the one guy in the darkness drawn back to a Golden Moment in his life from a lofty vantage point; t'other guy lugging through God knows what gauntlet of shame and frustration that symbol of his Golden Moment. Today we celebrate your Golden Moment. While a whole generation went ganging after its own indulgence, vanity, appetite, you clung to a foolish commitment, to foolish old traditions; as Soldiers, Sailors, Pilots, Marines you honored pointless ritual, suffered the endless, sluggish monotony of duty, raised that flag not just once, or again, or -- as has become fashionable now -- in time of peril, but every single morning. You stuck it out. You may have had -- as we like to say -- the camaraderie of brothers or sisters to buck each other up or the dubious support (as we like to say... and say more than do, by the way) of the folks back home, us... but in the end you persevered alone. Just as alone you made that long walk from Out There with a duffle bag fulla pixelated, random computer-generated dirty laundry -- along with your bruised dreams, your ecstasy and your despair -- Back Here at tour's end.

And you will be alone, for all the good intentions and solicitude of them, the other, the civilians. Alone. But...together. Your generation, whom us dumbo civilians couldn't keep out of war, will bear the burden of a soldier's return... alone. And a fresh duty: to complete the lives of your buddies who didn't make it back, to confect for them a living monument to their memory.

Your comfort, such as it is, will come from the knowledge that others of that tiny fraction of the population that fought for us are alone but grappling with the same dilemmas -- often small and immediate, often undignified or humiliating, now and then immense and overwhelming -- by your persistence courting the risk, by your obstinacy clinging to that Hard Way. Some of you will be stronger than others, but even the strong ones will have their darker moments. Where we can join each other if not relieve each other, we secret messengers, is right here in places like this and on occasions like this -- one lousy day of the year, your day, my day, our day, -- in the company of each other and of the flag we served. Not much cheer in that kerugma.

But there's the by-God glory.

"I know..." says the prophet Isaiah:
... I know that thou art obstinate, and thy neck is an iron sinew, and thy brow brass...I have shewed thee new things, even hidden things. Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have [refined] thee...in the furnace of affliction...

Well, all right, then.

Why on earth would anybody want to be normal?

Thanks for Listening and Lord love the lot of youse."

Pilgrim’s Progress
By MATT GALLAGHER

Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.

I’m one of the lucky ones.

War destroys without regard to what’s fair or just. This isn’t a new or terribly profound revelation, but witnessing it, and sometimes participating in it, makes it seem like both. In a professional military, the entire point of training is to minimize the nature of chance in combat. But all the training in the world will never eliminate happenstance in war, or even render it negligible.

I returned from Iraq with all of my limbs, most of my mental faculties and a book deal. I wake up every morning in an apartment in New York City. I’m working toward a graduate degree. I have a beautiful fiancée who reminds me to slow down when I’m drinking. And every day I feel more and more detached and removed from the Iraq dustlands I promised myself I’d shed like snakeskin if I ever got back home.

Like I said, one of the lucky ones.

I didn’t really appreciate the concept of becoming ‘unstuck’ in time until I returned from war.

Meanwhile, the black bracelet on my wrist carries the names of four individuals who weren’t so lucky. One got shot through the armpit with a ricocheting bullet and bled out on an outpost roof. Two drove over the wrong piece of street at the wrong time and likely didn’t even know it was a roadside bomb that ended it all. The last one made it through 15 months of war only to get drunk one night back in the States and shoot himself in the face during an emotional breakdown.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel “Slaughterhouse-Five,” the protagonist Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time.” Much of the novel focuses on Pilgrim’s experience of the fire bombing of Dresden in World War II, something Vonnegut himself survived as an American prisoner of war. Like many American literature students, I was required to read “Slaughterhouse-Five” in high school, and if memory serves, I even enjoyed that assignment at 16. But I didn’t really appreciate the concept of becoming unstuck in time until I returned from war. Just like anyone who poured blood, sweat and tears into missions in faraway foreign lands, I left part of myself over there, and it remains there, while the rest of me goes about my business 6000 miles away — a paradox of time and space Vonnegut captured all too brilliantly.

I’ve walked by manholes in New York City streets and smelled the sludge river I walked along in north Baghdad in 2008. I’ve stopped dead in my tracks to watch a street hawker in Midtown, a large black man with a rolling laugh and a British accent, who looked just like my old scout platoon’s interpreter. And I’ve had every single slamming dumpster lid — every single damn one — rip off my fatalistic cloak and reveal me to be, still, a panicked young man desperate not to die because of an unseen I.E.D.

Despite these metaphysical dalliances with time travel the names on my black bracelet are, in fact, stuck in time. Or, more accurately, stuck in memory, where they’ll fade out and disappear like distant stars before becoming shadows of the men we served with and knew.

So it goes.

So it went for my friend Rob. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003 his unit drove through a neighborhood near Baghdad airport in doorless Humvees. A civilian vehicle pulled out in front of them, temporarily blocking their path. A group of teenage boys stood aimlessly on the street, and one exchanged nods with Rob, who sat in the front passenger seat. Rob glanced away quickly, to see if the civilian vehicle had moved yet, and then, suddenly, a grenade bounced off of the inside of the windshield and into the vehicle. Rob followed the small plume of smoke and rattling noises, grabbing the grenade from behind the radio to his left. He picked it up, intending to throw it back out of the vehicle, but it slipped out of his hand and dropped, landing between his feet. He reached back down for it, fingers just meeting casing when it exploded. He lost a hand and suffered severe nerve damage in his right leg as a result.

Back from Iraq, I carried my self-righteousness around in the form of a portable soapbox.

Recounting the story over drinks one night Rob said he wished he and the other soldiers in his Humvee hadn’t taken their eyes off of the Iraqi teens. Then he added that “luck was for sure on our side that day,” because had he not dropped the grenade but tossed it away as planned, it would’ve exploded at head level, likely killing him and possibly the Humvee’s driver, as well. He laughed deeply, and clinked his prosthetic hook against my pint glass.

Everything’s relative, I guess. Especially luck.

If chance is war’s dirty little not-so-secret, self-righteousness is the veterans’. Upon returning to American society, it’s all too easy to fall into pitfalls about what civilians get or don’t get. Nine years of war fought by an all-volunteer force that constitutes less than 1 percent of the total population has augmented this disconnect between soldier and citizen; in many ways, a separate warrior caste has evolved into being. The impact on our republic of fighting protracted, landlocked wars with an all-volunteer force can be debated. The impact of it on those actually fighting can’t be.

After returning from Iraq and separating from active duty, I carried my self-righteousness around in the form a portable soapbox for many months. Occasionally this proved necessary — sometimes the pejorative “they” really didn’t get it. There was the drunk Wall Street-type who told me, without a trace of irony but with plenty of faux-jingoist twang, “it must be awesome to kill hajjis.” And there was the too-cool-ultra-progressive who couldn’t help but smirk condescendingly while pointing out that “we” signed on the dotted line, after all, so “we” should’ve been ready for anything and everything before we departed for Iraq. Then, as passive-aggressively as possible, he analogized modern American soldiers to mercenaries.

Though I’m certainly no tough guy, the primal urge to put both of these guys’ faces through the nearest window was very real and very pointed. I didn’t do that though, for better or worse. Instead, I told the former that some of my best friends were Muslim and that such a black-and-white understanding of the war is what got us into so much trouble over there in the first place. For the latter, I nodded and smiled, telling him that for someone who hadn’t left the borough of Brooklyn in over a decade, he certainly possessed one hell of a world view.

Neither talked to me again. So it goes.

Most of the time though, my soapbox and self-righteousness and sardonic wrath were unnecessary. Not because people didn’t get it, but because I finally realized it wasn’t their fault they didn’t get it. They’re not supposed to get it — this isn’t Sparta, nor is it even post-World War II America. Sometimes — many times, actually — they wanted to get it. Slowly and surely, I found the all too obvious solution of simply answering people’s questions as considerately as I could, careful not to ascribe my experiences as universal to all of Iraq or all of Afghanistan. I’d rather ramble, I reasoned, and provide nuance and opinion than serve as the representational hollow caricature born only to sacrifice for fast food and online shopping and general postmodern excess.

Just one man’s solution to a litany of complexities, I guess.

I got unstuck in time again last month, right when winter graced the Eastern seaboard with its presence. I was getting out of the Union Square subway station, headphones in, mind tuned out, stomach craving a cheeseburger. I don’t qualify as a full-fledged New Yorker yet, but I’ve lived here long enough not to be disturbed by the sight of a cold and decrepit-looking homeless person. So, coming up the subway steps, I strolled by a young man with a scraggly yellow beard wrapped in an urban camo jacket without anything more than a passing glance. He held a cardboard sign marked in black marker with the words “IRAQ VET, HOMELESS, PLEASE HELP.” I didn’t help, nor did I give the man a second thought until two blocks later, when I cynically scolded him in my head for using the veteran title to his advantage.

Coming to terms with this permanent state of combat readiness has made me realize just how much I miss war (or parts of it).

“But what if he really is an Iraq vet?” I asked myself. I’d read the statistics — according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, more than 100,000 veterans are homeless on a given night in America; the figure is twice that over the course of the month. Not all of the unlucky ones are dead, after all. So the old platoon leader in me kicked in, and I turned back around, to see if I could verify any of this. Certainly a legitimate vet would remember names, units, places … something. And then? And then I’d help. Or I’d bring him to the people or organizations who could help. Maybe, if he seemed legit and came across as relatively stable, I could talk my fiancée into letting him sleep on the couch for a night or two. Just to get him back on his feet, of course.

He was no longer there. Or anywhere nearby. Maybe someone else had helped him. But probably not. I initially breathed out a sigh of relief, and then a sigh of shame. I thought about how these wars may be coming to some sort of end, but veterans’ issues for my generation are really just beginning. I only deployed for 15 months, and had all kinds of support systems in place upon my return. What about the men and women who have done nothing but deploy, redeploy, rinse and repeat since 9/11? What about those soldiers who return to broken homes, mountains of debt, no professional goals beyond not going to war again? What about them?

I smacked my lips and tasted guilt. Then I walked to a restaurant and ate a cheeseburger.

Like the veterans who came before and the ones who will come after, I walk the streets of New York City forever the soldier I no longer am. Oh, I’m no longer lean, hungry, or clean-cut — I’ve put on a little weight, grown my hair out and sport a patchy beard that can best be described as pirate-fashionable. But I still scan crowds for suicide vests, seek out corner vantage points like a bloodhound and value competency in a human being above all else. Jumping back into civilian life headlong, like I originally attempted, proved both disastrous and shortsighted. And coming to terms with this permanent state of combat readiness has made me realize just how much I miss war (or parts of it), and how lucky — and twisted — I am to be able to even write those words. I miss the camaraderie. I miss the raw excitement. I miss the Iraqi locals, from the kids who walked our daytime patrols with us to the frightened mothers who just wanted us to go away. I miss the soldiers, the N.C.O.’s, and even some of the officers. I miss that daily sense of purpose, survive or die, that simply can’t be replicated in everyday existence. I miss standing for something more than myself, even if I never figured out just what the hell that something was supposed to be.

I don’t miss all of it, of course. I got out of the Army for some very good reasons. Love. Sanity. Bureaucracy. A Holy Trinity for our time. But there is a messy ambiguity at the core of this that must be conveyed, if not necessarily understood.

I’m one of the lucky ones. Unstuck in time. Stuck with chance. Stuck at war. Considering the alternatives, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

🇺🇲 WWII uncovered: 11th Airborne Division's Rod Serling, Hollywood's "Angry Young Man"

Before he became the well-known creator of "The Twilight Zone," Rod Serling was a young, 5'4" paratrooper in the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 11th Airborne Division. As one of "The Angels", Rod did not meet the height requirements for the parachutes, but talked his way into the regiment anyway.

While the division was on New Guinea, Jack Benny came by to perform for the Angels and Rod was able to write and perform in a small skit that was broadcast on Armed Forces Radio. It was a sign of things to come for Serling.

During the Angels' campaign on Leyte in late 1944, T-4 Serling and the Suicide Squad kept busy eliminating enemy bunkers and defensive positions. While high in the island's mountains, the regiment could only be resupplied by air and one day Rod watched in horror as a heavy crate landed squarely on his good friend PVT Melvin Levy's shoulders, killing him instantly. Rod marked Melvin’s grave with a Star of David in honor of his friend’s Jewish heritage. It was the first of the war's many difficult experiences that affected, perhaps even haunted, Rod, in addition to a wound to his knee that plagued him for the rest of his life.

During the Angels' campaign to liberate Luzon, Rod and the Demolitions team kept busy with the dangerous job of blasting countless grass-covered pillboxes and blockhouses, many of which were heavily defended. On one occasion, Rod found himself staring down the barrel of a Japanese rifle. Luckily one of his buddies was quicker and shot the enemy soldier.

In one Manila neighborhood, Rod and the other Angels were enjoying an impromptu celebration by the newly-liberated Filipinos when the Japanese began shelling the area. Noticing a wounded Filipino woman out in the open, Rod rushed into the fire to carry her to safety, an action to earned him the Bronze Star.

After the war, Rod turned to writing to "face his demons" and went on to become one of televisions most well-known, and award-winning, screenwriters, playwrights, television producers, and narrators. He also was a passionate teacher at Antioch College (Ohio) and Ithaca College (New York).
Known to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day, Rod died on June 28, 1975. May we all remember these words spoken before his death: "for civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized".

For more information on Rod's experiences in World War II, please visit 511pir.com or 11th Airborne Division Association - "Angels"
#ww2uncovered #honorourveterans #ww2 #WorldWarII #worldwar2 #worldwartwo #paratrooper #paratroopers #airborne #greatestgeneration #ww2veteran #WWII #WWIIveteran #AATW #twilightzone #Airborne #rodserling #LestWeForget

Original description and photo submitted by Jeremy Holm ©️ author of "When Angels Fall: From Toccoa to Tokyo: The 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment in World War II MacArthur’s Secret Weapon & Heroes of Los Baños"

Awesome read; if it doesn't bring a tear to your eye, you're not human; I am so proud to have been in an organization that instilled the values described in LTC Lofaro's speech below:

Dining-in speech at U.S. Military Academy
by LTC Guy Lofaro:

"Let me say before beginning that it has been my pleasure to attend several dinings-in here at West Point and hence I have some basis for comparison. You people have done a fine job and you ought to congratulate yourselves. In fact, why don't we take this time to have the persons who were responsible for this event stand so we can acknowledge them publicly.

I guess I am honored with these invitations because there exists this rumor that I can tell a story. Cadets who I have had in class sometimes approach me beforehand and request that, during my speech, I tell some of the stories I've told them in class. For the longest time I have resisted this. I simply didn't think this the right forum for story-telling, so I tried instead, with varying degrees of success, to use this time to impart some higher lesson - some thought that would perhaps stay with one or two of you a little longer than the 10 or 15 minutes I will be standing here. I tried this again last week at another dining in and I bombed. Big time. Of course, the cadets didn't say that. They said all the polite things- "Thank you, sir, for those inspiring words" - "You've provided us much food for thought" - "We all certainly learned something from you tonight, sir." And I'm thinking - yeah - you learned something all right. You learned never to invite that SOB to be a dining in speaker again.

So in the interim I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about what I would say to you to night. What can I say that will stay with you? And as I reflected on this I turned it on myself - what stays with me? What makes a mark on me? What do I remember, and why? How have I learned the higher lessons I so desperately want to impart to you? Well - I've learned those higher lessons through experience. And as I thought further, I realized that there's only one way to relate experience -that is to tell some stories. So I'm going to try something new here this evening. I'm going to give you your stories and attempt to relate what I've learned by living them. I'm going to let you crawl inside my eye-sockets and see some of the things I've seen these past 18 years.

Imagine you are a brand new second lieutenant on a peacekeeping mission in the Sinai Peninsula. You are less than a year out of West Point, and only a few weeks out of the basic course. You are standing at a strict position of attention in front of your battalion commander, a man you will come to realize was one of the finest soldiers with whom you've ever served, and you are being questioned about a mistake - a big mistake - that you've made. You see, your platoon lost some live ammo. Oh sure, it was eventually found, but for a few hours you had the entire battalion scrambling. Your battalion commander is not yelling at you though, he's not demeaning you, he's simply taking this opportunity to ensure you learn from the experience. And you do- you learn that people make mistakes, that those mistakes do not usually result in the end of the world, and that such occasions are valuable opportunities to impart some higher lessons. Then, out of the corner of your eye, you see your platoon sergeant emerge from behind a building. He's an old soldier - a fine soldier though - whose knees have seen a few too many airborne operations. He sees you and the colonel - and he takes off at a run. You see him approaching from behind the colonel and the next thing you see is the back of your platoon sergeant's head. He is now standing between you and your battalion commander - the two are eyeball to eyeball. Your platoon sergeant says, a touch of indignance in his voice "Leave my lieutenant alone, sir. He didn't lose the ammo, I did. I was the one who miscounted. You want someone's ass, you take mine."

And you learn another lesson - you learn about loyalty.

It's a few months later and you are one of two soldiers left on a hot PZ on some Caribbean island. There's been another foul up - not yours this time, but you're going to pay for it. It's you and your RTO, a nineteen-year-old surfer from Florida who can quote Shakespeare because his Mom was a high school literature teacher and who joined the army because his Dad was a WWII Ranger. The last UH-60 has taken off on an air assault and someone is supposed to come back and get you guys. But the fire is getting heavy, and you're not sure anything can get down there without getting shot up. You're taking fire from some heavily forested hills. At least two machineguns, maybe three, maybe more, and quite a few AKs, but you can't make out anything else. You and your RTO are in a hole, hunkered down as the bad guys are peppering your hole with small arms fire. Your RTO is trying to get some help - another bird to come get you, some artillery, some attack helicopters - anything. But there are other firefights happening elsewhere on this island involving much larger numbers.

So as the cosmos unfold at; that particular moment, in that particular place, you and that RTO are well down the order of merit list. You feel a tug at your pants leg. Ketch, that's what you call him, Ketch tells you he got a "wait, out" when he asked for help. The radio is jammed with calls for fire and requests for support from other parts of the island. "What we gonna do, sir?' he asks. And all of a sudden, you're learning another lesson. You're learning about the weightiness of command, because it's not just you in that hole, it's this kid you've spent every day with for the last five months. This kid you've come to love like a kid brother. There is only one way out and that's through the bad guys. You see, you are on a peninsula that rises about 100 feet from the sea. The inland side is where the bad guys are. You figure you are safe in this hole, so long as they don't bring in any indirect fire stuff, but if they come down off those hills, onto the peninsula, then you're going to have to fight it out. And that's what you tell your RTO. We either get help or, if the bad guys come for us, we fight. He looks at you. You don't know how long. And he says only four words. Two sentences. "Roger, sir. Let's rock." Appropriate coming from a surfer. Then he slithers back down to the bottom of the hole. Staying on the radio, your lifeline, trying to get some help. You are peering over the edge of the hole, careful not to make too big a target. You're thinking about your wife and that little month-old baby you left a few days ago. It was two o'clock in the morning when you got the call. "Pack your gear and get in here." You kissed them both and told them to watch the news. Hell, you didn't know where here you were going or why, but you were told to go, and you went.

Then all of a sudden it gets real loud, and things are flying all around and then there's a shadow that passes over you. You look up and find yourself staring at the bottom of a Blackhawk, about 15 feet over the deck, flying fast and low, and as it passes over your hole you see the door gunner dealing death and destruction on the bad guys in those hills. It sets down about 25 meters from your hole, as close as it can get. You look up and see the crew chief kneeling inside, waving frantically to you, the door gunner still dealing with it, trying to keep the bad guys' heads down, who have now switched their fire to the bird, a much bigger, and better, target. You look at Ketch and then you're off - and you run 25 meters faster than 25 meters have ever been run since humans began to walk upright. And you dive through the open doors onto the floor of the Blackhawk. There are no seats in the bird since this is combat and we don't use them in the real deal. And you are hugging your RTO, face-to-face, like a lover, and shouting at him "You OKAY? You OKAY? You OKAY?" but he doesn't tell you he's OKAY since he's yelling the same thing at you -- "You OKAY? You OKAY? You OKAY?" And then the pilot pulls pitch and executes a violent and steep ascent out of there and had you not been holding on to the d-rings in the floor and the crew chief not been holding your legs you might have fallen out. Then you're over the water, you're safe, and the bird levels out, and you roll over to your back and close your eyes - and you think you fall asleep. But then you feel a hand on your blouse, and you open your eyes and see the crew chief kneeling over you with a head set in his hand. He wants you to put it on so you do. And the first thing you hear is "I-Beamer, buddy boy. I Beamer." You were in I-4 while a cadet, and that was your rallying cry. And you look up to where the pilots sit and you see a head sticking out from behind one of the seats. He's looking at you and it's his voice you hear, but you can't make out who it is because his visor is down. Then he lifts it, and you see the face of a man who was 2 years ahead of you in your company. He tells you that he knew you were there and he wasn't going to leave an I-Beamer like that. And you learn about courage, and camaraderie. And friendship that never dies.

It's a few years later and you've already had your company command. You're in grad school, studying at Michigan. You get a phone call one night, one of the sergeants from your company. He tells you Harvey Moore is dead, killed in a training accident when his Blackhawk flew into the ground. Harvey Moore. Two time winner of the Best Ranger Competition. Great soldier. Got drunk one night after his wife left him and took his son. You see, staff sergeants don't make as much money as lawyers, so she left with the lawyer. He got stinking drunk, though it didn't take much since he didn't drink at all before this, and got into his car. Then had an accident. Then got a DUI. He was an E-6 promotable when this happened, and the SOP was a general-officer article 15 and a reduction one grade, which would really be two for him because he was on the promotion list. But Harvey Moore is a good soldier, and it's time to go to bat for a guy who, if your company command was any sort of a success, played a significant part in making it so. And you go with your battalion commander to see the CG, and you stand at attention in front of the CG's desk for 20 minutes convincing him that Harvey Moore deserves a break. You win. Harvey Moore never drinks again. He makes E-7. And when you change command, he grabs your arm, with tears in his eyes, and thanks you for all you've done. Then the phone call. And you learn about grief.

And then you're a major and you're back in the 82d - your home. And one day some SOB having a bad week decides it's time to take it out on the world and he shoots up a PT formation. Takes out 20 guys. You're one of them. 5.56 tracer round right to the gut. Range about 10 meters. And you're dead for a little while, but it's not your time yet - there are still too many lessons to learn. And you wake up after 5 surgeries and 45 days in a coma. And you look down at your body and you don't recognize it - it has become a receptacle for hospital tubing and electronic monitoring devices. You have a tracheotomy, so there's a huge tube going down your throat and you can't talk, but that thing is making sure you breathe. And there's a tube in your nose that goes down into your stomach - that's how you eat. And there are four IVs - one in each arm and two in the veins in the top of your feet. There is a tube through your right clavicle - that's where they inject the high-powered antibiotics that turns your hair white and makes you see things. But disease is the enemy now and it's gotta be done. And there are three tubes emerging from three separate holes in your stomach. They are there to drain the liquids from your stomach cavity. It drains into some bags hanging on the right;side of your bed. And they've shaved your chest and attached countless electrodes to monitor your heartbeat, blood pressure, and anything else they can measure. They have these things stuck all over your head as well, and on your wrists and ankles. And your family gathers around, and they are like rocks, and they pull you through. But there's also a guy, dressed in BDUs, with a maroon beret in his and, who stands quietly in the corner. Never says anything. Just smiles. And looks at you. He's there every day. Not every hour of every day, but he comes every day.

Sometimes he's there when you wake up. Sometimes he's there when you go to sleep. He comes during his lunch break. He stays an hour, or two, or three. And just stands in the corner. And smiles. No one told him to be there. But he made it his place of duty. His guard post. You see, it's your sergeant major, and his ranger buddy is down, and a ranger never leaves a fallen comrade. And you learn, through this man, the value of a creed.
(Note from Guy): if you've never read the Ranger Creed, Google it. The men of the Ranger Regiment live this creed every day. It is probably more powerful than wedding vows, and once you've lived by it, it's part of your life forever)

And every four hours two huge male nurses come in and gently roll you on your side. The bullet exited through your left buttock and made a hole the size of a softball. The bandages need to be changed. Take the soiled wads out and put clean ones in. And a second lieutenant comes in. She seems to be there all the time. She's the one changing the bandages. And it hurts like hell, but she, too, is smiling, and talking to you, and she's gentle. And you know you've seen her before, but you can't talk - you still have that tube in your throat. But she knows. And she tells you that you taught her Military Art History, that now it's her turn to take care of you, that she's in charge of you and the team of nurses assigned to you, and she won't let you down. And you learn about compassion.

And then it's months later and you're still recovering. Most of the tubes are gone but it's time for another round of major surgeries. And you go into one of the last, this one about 9 hours long. And they put you back together. And you wake up in the ICU one more time. Only one IV this time. And when you open your eyes, there's a huge figure standing over your bed. BDUs. Green beret in his hand. Bigger than God. And he's smiling. "It's about damn time you woke up you lazy bastard" he says. And you know it's your friend and former commander and you've got to come back with something quick - something good. He's the deputy Delta Force commander, soon to be the commander. And you say "Don't you have someplace else to be? Don't you have something more important to do?" And without skipping a beat, without losing that smile he says "Right now, I am doing what I consider the most important thing in the world."

And you learn about leadership.

So there you have them. Some stories. I've tried to let you see the world as I've seen it a various points in time these 18 years. I hope you've learned something. I certainly have."

For the record, I know these men personally, and I served during these times the writer is describing, I was there @ Hill AFB that dark night on 29 Oct '92 during the final hit of Operation Embryo Stage when RANGER Moore departed this rock, he was my buddy... I also recall very clearly that damn sniper doing his evil down @ Bragg... this world just never quits jackin with the good folks seems like. My point of all of this is while you are in the middle of it all, this Serving stuff, pay attention to those around you, that is what is Truly of most importance, gubmints will come and go, Honor, Courage, being Solid under extreme pressure and circumstance will be your test... make this world a little better of a place while you are among the living... and Never Forget the RANGER Harvey Moore's that you will meet along the way...

HOOAH!
RLTW! - NSDQ!

A messenger pigeon being released from a port hole in the side of a British Mark V tank of the 10th Battalion, Tank Corps. Photograph taken near Albert, France on the 9 August 1918 during the Battle of Amiens (1918).
Credit: timcolorization on Instagram.

Stars and Stripes Museum
December 21 at 4:00 PM

**The Birth of The Stars and Stripes: A Civil War Legacy**

On November 7, 1861, Federal soldiers from Illinois and Iowa made their way into the nearly abandoned town of Bloomfield, Missouri. Little did they know that their actions would set the stage for the birth of an American military legacy - the military newspaper, The Stars and Stripes.

Colonel Richard J. Oglesby, commanding officer of the 8th Illinois Infantry Regiment, received orders to lead an expedition to destroy rebel forces in Stoddard County. With approximately 2,200 men under his command, they embarked on a journey through a swampy terrain to reach Bloomfield.

As Union forces converged on Bloomfield from different directions, General Thompson of the Missouri State Guard realized his predicament and withdrew further south. The first Union force to enter Bloomfield was the 10th Iowa Infantry, followed by Colonel Oglesby and his Illinois troops.

During their occupation of Bloomfield, some of the Illinois troops engaged in looting, prompting Colonel Oglesby to intervene and put a stop to it. Meanwhile, another group of soldiers discovered the abandoned newspaper office of the Bloomfield Herald.

In the evening hours, ten soldiers, including some printers from the regiment, took over the printing office and decided to publish a newspaper. They named it THE STARS AND STRIPES. The following morning, carriers distributed the first issue to the troops in and around Bloomfield.

Today, you can visit our museum to read what the first Stripers wrote. We proudly display an original copy of The Stars and Stripes and offer reprints for purchase in our gift shop for $2. Come and immerse yourself in the history of this remarkable Civil War legacy.
**Visit our museum to learn more about The Stars and Stripes and the Civil War.**

Hhhmmm... interesting read, click on pic to read full article:

"In these days when our history and heritage are being aggressively stripped from us for malevolent ends, it is all the more important that we recover a healthy appreciation for those on whose broad shoulders we stand."

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2023/12/26/how-the-byzantines-saved-civilization-n4925019

"If the United States were to last as long as the Roman Empire, including its Byzantine period, it would have to continue as an independent country, with political and cultural continuity, until the year 2899. To maintain a unified nation state for over eleven hundred years is a remarkable achievement by any standard, and the Romans accomplished it while facing existential threats and efforts to extinguish their polity during virtually every period of their existence. Now, nearly six hundred years after the demise of the empire, its influence still resonates in a number of fields, albeit almost entirely unnoticed and unappreciated."

Know who you are, your role and your responsibility. Join your tribe and help start the Fall In Legacy!

The importance of the veteran community and its impact on American society is a multifaceted topic, worthy of deep exploration. Veterans, having served their country in various capacities, hold a unique position in the societal fabric, contributing in numerous ways that often go beyond their military service.

### Historical Context

The veteran community has been an integral part of American society since the country's inception. From the Revolutionary War to recent conflicts, veterans have shaped the course of American history. Their experiences in service and the skills acquired therein have often been transferred to civilian life, enriching various sectors.

### Economic Contributions

Veterans are known for their discipline, leadership skills, and technical expertise. Many transition into the workforce, bringing these qualities to the private sector, government roles, and entrepreneurship. Their presence in the workforce helps to diversify and strengthen it, driving innovation and economic growth.

### Social Impact

Beyond economic contributions, veterans often engage in community service and advocacy. Many work with organizations that focus on issues like homelessness, mental health, and veterans' rights. Their firsthand experiences lend a unique perspective to these issues, facilitating more effective solutions and raising awareness in the wider community.

### Educational Influence

Veterans in educational roles, whether as teachers, administrators, or students, bring a wealth of real-world experience. This perspective can enrich academic environments, fostering a deeper understanding of global affairs, civic responsibility, and leadership among students.

### Psychological and Health Perspectives

The veteran community also plays a critical role in advancing the understanding of mental health and physical challenges associated with service. Their experiences have led to increased awareness and advancements in treating conditions like PTSD and combat-related injuries, benefiting broader society.

### Bridging Civil-Military Divides

Veterans act as a bridge between the military and civilian populations, helping to foster mutual understanding. In a society where a small percentage of the population serves in the armed forces, veterans provide a crucial link, sharing their experiences and viewpoints, thus enriching the national dialogue.

### Cultural Contributions

The stories and experiences of veterans have deeply influenced American culture, from literature and film to art and music. These narratives not only preserve historical truths but also offer insights into the human condition, resonating with broader audiences.

### Policy Influence

Veterans often play pivotal roles in shaping policies related to national defense, foreign affairs, and veterans' benefits. Their insights, born out of real-world experience, ensure that policies are grounded in the realities of those who serve.

### Conclusion

The veteran community is a vital part of American society, not just in terms of past sacrifices, but in ongoing contributions across multiple facets of life. Their experiences, skills, and perspectives enrich the nation, fostering a more resilient, informed, and cohesive society. The purpose and impact of this community are dynamic, evolving with each generation, but its significance remains a constant, integral part of the American narrative.

Big Al’s Ready Room. PRODUCT FEATURE - COMING SOON.

Opportunity for On-line sellers. Non-profit partners and consumers to take advantage of their community’s high demand items.

We’re thrilled to announce a game-changing partnership with Big’s Al’s Virtual Store that will revolutionize how veteran-owned businesses operate on our platform.

Big’s Al’s Virtual Store Integration:
Get ready for an enhanced experience as we integrate Big’s Al’s Virtual Store into Fall In! This integration will empower veteran-owned businesses with advanced logistics capabilities and a scalable model for success.

Free ERP Solutions for Veterans:
As part of our commitment to supporting veterans, we’re offering ERP solutions completely FREE for veteran entrepreneurs on Fall In. This powerful tool will help streamline their operations and drive growth.

Partners Discount:
Our partners will enjoy exclusive discounts on ERP solutions, making it even easier to collaborate with veteran-owned businesses.

Giving Back:
We believe in giving back to our veteran community. That’s why a portion of the proceeds from our affiliates will be donated to Veteran Non-Profits, helping those who have served our country.

COMING SOON:
Get ready for the future of veteran business logistics on Fall In! The integration is on the horizon, and we can’t wait to share more details with you.

Stay tuned for more information, as we’re gearing up for an incredible journey of empowerment and support for our veterans. Together, we’ll make a difference. #FallInForVeterans #ComingSoon