Memorial Day Missives

Soldiers of 2nd Platoon Battle Company 173 ABN on a mission out of Restrepo. No, the soldier who got the blood all over this warrior did not get to come home.

Close call- helmet tore up by an AK round.

The stress of combat shows after 2 days of heavy fighting.

If you were ever a combat arms soldier and fired a M-2 .50 cal machine gun this image will get a rise out of you like any pin up poster girl. Well, nearly that good. It's been trusted by our warfighters for nearly a hundred years now. It is nearly incomprehensibly powerful. I once shot a truck with one at nearly 600 meters (6 football fields essentially) and was so surprised to see the tracers fly right through it striking behind it, bounce off the ground and go straight up into space- I stopped shooting and looked over the gun with my mouth hanging open.

Wounded soldier being recovered by his buddies at Restrepo in the Khorengal valley Afghanistan a place which if forgotten years from now- we deserve whatever fate has befallen us by then and deserve none off the freedoms we have. None.

All pics from Newsweek

• Good what it's really like video from Afghanistan.






• Too much is made of arbitrary numbers as milestones in our wars, but a Marine from Texas was the 1000 death in Afghanistan.





• My son and nephew both want to enlist in the Army and each could be in in Afghanistan within about two years (or wherever men way too young may be dying then).





• I don't know whether to be sick at myself or proud that I had something to do with their desire to serve, but yeah, I'm proud of them.
• The only thing I can think of to say to them right now if they were watching over my shoulder? It is better to live one day as a lion than a 1000 as a lamb.





• My uncle Orville was a Marine who fought at Tarawa, Guadalcanal and Okinawa- I kid you not. I've mentioned this before, but he's the only man I ever saw my dad defer to- in any way. People often comment on elder warfighters who, "Never talked much about the war". Uncle Orville was a little different- I was raised on stories of him beating Japanese soldiers to death with shovels and after his hole was assaulted at night by them finding, "bodies stacked on top of bodies around our foxholes when the sun came up." He was wounded twice. After the war he drove a truck for years.
• I have a pic of a B Model Mack that he folded up around a telephone pole in the fifties. It degrades over the years and when I pull it out of my treasure chest every so often it's more and more faded- soon you won't even be able to tell what it is.





• When unable to drive any more he lived in the stock room of Diamond Jim's Tavern in Madison? Wisconsin.





• He died in the VA hospital in Dallas TX of a documented brain infection that started in his ear on Okinawa.





• I loved and respected that man like no other I've met in my life and still miss him terribly.





• My dad started the war as an infantryman and moved over to air defense. When I was I kid I asked directly if he ever shot down any German planes- he said,"A few left our area trailing smoke, but no, never brought one down that I saw." This morning, I wondered, is there a crusty old great granddad in a Frankfurt suburb thinking about that day his ME 109 got perforated by US .50 rounds while he was strafing a column of vehicles? Did he wad his aircraft up on his own base in Germany after nursing it home? Fall short and get rescued by his own troops? Spend the rest of the war in a British POW camp? Did any of them die?
• I know something related to the death of one of our men in the Iraq war that only a handful of people in the world know. I hope the others will let it die with them- as I will.
• If you have time watch the PBS special on the Medal Of Honor on HULU. You can mark it for watching later- good, powerful stuff. Really, even if you don't have a lot of time watch the first few minutes or so and listen to the first two men describe the medal its self and then what it was like to receive it.





• Recently, I bumped into a kid who was in my platoon during the war at of all places- a Wal Mart in Weatherford TX. We visited a long time. At one point he said,"Do you remember that time we were under that rocket attack, you looked up and said,"Get down!" and threw yourself on top of me? I'll never forget that."





• I hadn't thought about that night since it happened- literally, until he mentioned it, but I'll never ever forget the fact that it made such an impact on him that he mentioned it years later in that parking lot.