Thanks for the clip from Saving Private Ryan.

I lost my veteran Father May 1. He fought in the 8th Army Air Force out of Norwich. I took him and my Mother back to England in 1979 and found his old base. They were the Greatest Generation.

To all our Veterans: Thank you for your service. I just wish we had the leadership to match our soldiers’ committment and sacrifice.

I just wish we had the leadership to match our soldiers’ committment and sacrifice.

Seconded.

I’d never heard of Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan ’til I went to Nam.

There’s a Wall in Washington with the names of 55,000 of my brothers who made the ultimate sacrifice for failed leadership.

Travelin’ Soldier.

I’m listening to Chalmers Johnson on another window. He sez that the precident to Obama is LBJ, who did a lot of good stuff domestically but lost his administration on an unwinnable war.

Fools always believe they can prevail by force. Causing the death of millions and maiming millions more is not civilization.

But it IS empire, as Chalmers Johnson would hastily add.

It’s not a question of “when will they come home.” It’s — when will they leave?

Off to swim in the great capitalist cesspool, where money is more important than life.

Be good to yourselves, and all other living things.

Namaste

It’s quite sad to see how ill advised these many wars are and how many soldiers sacrifice their lives for their country as they call it.

There needs to be another way to serve one’s country then bombing and killing others in far off lands who in reality are no threat the our life.

We have been scared by these over blown threats again and again. People believe the lies, die for them, and most who return are not honored for their sacrifice. Use, abuse and discard and replace with a newer model.

When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?

Nowadays, nobody is held accountable for policy disasters, not even wars that are both unwinnable and unnecessary and were launched on false/mistaken premises.

There needs to be another way to serve one’s country then bombing and killing others in far off lands who in reality are no threat the our life.

Soon, it’ll be our drones against their drones. And the nation that can manufacture more drones will win. And then the citizens of the other nation will have to line up to be “processed.”

Ah…. Rick Steves is touring in Greece…..

Bushco kept the wars off the standard budget, it was always an emergency supplemental…. NOW Obama has it in the budget……

That is the big sucking sound that is driving up the deficit that the wingnuts complain about. Elmore was going on about how some guy was going on about how the country will pay it back.

The issue is that either you strangle the economy to “reduce the deficit” OR you grow a healthy economy, stabilized the country and jobs.

wig

At the bottom of this is money to be made. War is money and the MIC is not going away quietly as long as they are sucking from the tit of the nation.

It’s rather disgusting that these “leaders” use emotional pulls like “patriotism” and love of country to induce the people to act irrationally, to kill, to oppress, to torture, rape all in the name of country while corporations cash out.

Our empire, for that’s what it is, will fall because of it’s militarism and greed which is taking us to war again and again.

Really… what group of people want to come to these shores and “take over”??? What group wants to destroy “us” out of complete animus?

But what groups wants us out of their lands?

Star Trek episode: the computers told the people of two warring planets which were to report to the killing centers for termination on any given day. Captain Kirk was of a mind to desanitize the process by destroying the computers so they’d be forced to face up to their war in order to find peace.

are we there yet?

My father’s father was an underage soldier in the US Army and fought in France during World War I. I’m taking the kids to visit his grave today, and then report back to my 80 year old father who did a medical internship with the US Navy during peacetime. In addition to his medical degree, my father had a Masters in Public Health and the Navy sent him to Guantanamo Bay in 1959-1960 to investigate and determine whether Fidel Castro was responsible for the rise in sickness and morbidity there. After a thorough investigation, my father determined that it was the Navy’s failure to clean drapes throughout the hospital/infirmary that was the proximate cause of the rise in morbidity and that Fidel had not compromised the base’s water supply, as some had suspected, or otherwise introduced any biological agents intended to sicken military personnel. My father was pleased with the results of his work, but he also felt there was enough informal feedback to indicate some frustrated longing for a different outcome.

Opportunism and empire building is an ever present danger for our military men and women. It always has been and always will be whether it is because our political leadership is corrupt and manipulative, or weak and susceptible to manipulation.

Many thanks to all US military personnel for their brave service on our behalf. My deepest sympathies to the courageous families of our fallen servicemen and women on this Memorial Day.

i look forward to the day that honors those who opposed all killing. Have a parade for those who understand and follow the constitution. No declaration of war no no following the ” leaders” who never survived a battle field test.

Dedicated to Raven and Southern Dragon among many others,

A great story and I WILL read it again and again. It should be part of history in the schools so kids understand war.

Six Boys And Thirteen Hands…

Each year I am hired to go to Washington , DC , with the eighth grade class from Clinton , WI where I grew up, to videotape their trip. I greatly enjoy visiting our nation’s capitol, and each year I take some special memories back with me. This fall’s trip was especially memorable.

On the last night of our trip, we stopped at the Iwo Jima memorial. This memorial is the largest bronze statue in the world and depicts one of the most famous photographs in history — that of the six brave soldiers raising the American Flag at the top of a rocky hill on the island of Iwo Jima , Japan , during WW II.

Over one hundred students and chaperones piled off the buses and headed towards the memorial. I noticed a solitary figure at the base of the statue, and as I got closer he asked, ‘Where are you guys from?’

I told him that we were from Wisconsin . ‘Hey, I’m a cheese head, too! Come gather around, Cheese heads, and I will tell you a story.’

(James Bradley just happened to be in Washington, DC, to speak at the memorial the following day. He was there that night to say good night to his dad, who had passed away. He was just about to leave when he saw the buses pull up. I videotaped him as he spoke to us, and received his permission to share what he said from my videotape. It is one thing to tour the incredible monuments filled with history in Washington , DC , but it is quite another to get the kind of insight we received that night.)

When all had gathered around, he reverently began to speak. (Here are his words that night.)

‘My name is James Bradley and I’m from Antigo, Wisconsin . My dad is on that statue, and I just wrote a book called ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ which is #5 on the New York Times Best Seller list right now. It is the story of the six boys you see behind me.

‘Six boys raised the flag. The first guy putting the pole in the ground is Harlon Block. Harlon was an all-state football player. He enlisted in the Marine Corps with all the senior members of his football team. They were off to play another type of game. A game called ‘War.’ But it didn’t turn out to be a game. Harlon, at the age of 21, died with his intestines in his hands. I don’t say that to gross you out, I say that because there are people who stand in front of this statue and talk about the glory of war. You guys need to know that most of the boys in Iwo Jima were 17, 18, and 19 years old – and it was so hard that the ones who did make it home never even would talk to their families about it.

(He pointed to the statue) ‘You see this next guy? That’s Rene Gagnon from New Hampshire. If you took Rene’s helmet off at the moment this photo was taken and looked in the webbing of that helmet, you would find a photograph… a photograph of his girlfriend. Rene put that in there for protection because he was scared. He was 18 years old. It was just boys who won the battle of Iwo Jima . Boys. Not old men.

‘The next guy here, the third guy in this tableau, was Sergeant Mike Strank. Mike is my hero. He was the hero of all these guys. They called him the ‘old man’ because he was so old. He was already 24. When Mike would motivate his boys in training camp, he didn’t say, ‘Let’s go kill some Japanese’ or ‘Let’s die for our country.’ He knew he was talking to little boys.. Instead he would say, ‘You do what I say, and I’ll get you home to your mothers.’

‘The last guy on this side of the statue is Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona . Ira Hayes was one who walked off Iwo Jima . He went into the White House with my dad. President Truman told him, ‘You’re a hero’ He told reporters, ‘How can I feel like a hero when 250 of my buddies hit the island with me and only 27 of us walked off alive?’

So you take your class at school, 250 of you spending a year together having fun, doing everything together. Then all 250 of you hit the beach, but only 27 of your classmates walk off alive. That was Ira Hayes He had images of horror in his mind. Ira Hayes carried the pain home with him and eventually died dead drunk, face down at the age of 32 (ten years after this picture was taken).

‘The next guy, going around the statue, is Franklin Sousley from Hilltop, Kentucky . A fun-lovin’ hillbilly boy. His best friend, who is now 70, told me, ‘Yeah, you know, we took two cows up on the porch of the Hilltop General Store. Then we strung wire across the stairs so the cows couldn’t get down. Then we fed them Epsom salts. Those cows crapped all night.’ Yes, he was a fun-lovin’ hillbilly boy. Franklin died on Iwo Jima at the age of 19. When the telegram came to tell his mother that he was dead, it went to the Hilltop General Store. A barefoot boy ran that telegram up to his mother’s farm. The neighbors could hear her scream all night and into the morning. Those neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away.

‘The next guy, as we continue to go around the statue, is my dad, John Bradley, from Antigo, Wisconsin , where I was raised. My dad lived until 1994, but he would never give interviews. When Walter Cronkite’s producers or the New York Times would call, we were trained as little kids to say ‘No, I’m sorry, sir, my dad’s not here. He is in Canada fishing. No, there is no phone there, sir. No, we don’t know when he is coming back.’ My dad never fished or even went to Canada . Usually, he was sitting there right at the table eating his Campbell ’s soup. But we had to tell the press that he was out fishing He didn’t want to talk to the press.

‘You see, like Ira Hayes, my dad didn’t see himself as a hero. Everyone thinks these guys are heroes, ’cause they are in a photo and on a monument. My dad knew better. He was a medic. John Bradley from Wisconsin was a caregiver. In Iwo Jima he probably held over 200 boys as they died. And when boys died in Iwo Jima , they writhed and screamed, without any medication or help with the pain.

‘When I was a little boy, my third grade teacher told me that my dad was a hero. When I went home and told my dad that, he looked at me and said, ‘I want you always to remember that the heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who did not come back. Did NOT come back.’

‘So that’s the story about six nice young boys. Three died on Iwo Jima , and three came back as national heroes. Overall, 7,000 boys died on Iwo Jima in the worst battle in the history of the Marine Corps. Thank you for your time.’

Suddenly, the monument wasn’t just a big old piece of metal with a flag sticking out of the top. It came to life before our eyes with the heartfelt words of a son who did indeed have a father who was a hero. Maybe not a hero for the reasons most people would believe, but a hero nonetheless.

We need to remember that God created this vast and glorious world for us to live in, freely, but also at great sacrifice .

Let us never forget from the Revolutionary War to the current War on Terrorism and all the wars in-between that sacrifice was made for our freedom. MANY HAVE DIED FOR OUR FREEDOM!

Remember to pray praises for this great country of ours and also pray for those still in murderous unrest around the world.

STOP and thank God for being alive and being free at someone else’s sacrifice.

God Bless You and God Bless America .

REMINDER: Everyday that you can wake up free, it’s going to be a great day.

One thing I learned while on tour with my 8th grade students in DC that is not mentioned here is . . that if you look at the statue very closely and count the number of ‘hands’ raising the flag, there are 13. When the man who made the statue was asked why there were 13, he simply said the 13th hand was the hand of God.

Great story – worth your time – worth every American’s time