Category: Blue Skies

We got the sad news that 101 year-old World War II veteran, Emma Eliza Ball Pogge has passed in Lawrence, Kanasas. From an interview in the Lawrence Journal two years ago;

“Everybody seemed to have boys (in their families), but my mother had five girls” Pogge said. “And so I put my name on the list, and we had somebody in the service.”

A coal miner’s daughter with four sisters, Pogge was sent for training in Colorado, where she served as a typing clerk.

During her time there Pogge maintained her Methodist faith at the on-base chapel and started a choir. She would do stints during the next couple of years at multiple bases across the country, including Iowa, Pennsylvania and Maryland, singing in every chapel along the way.

A table scrapbook from those years contains several black-and-white shots of a younger Pogge, with dark hair and a shy smile.

ROS passes along the sad news that Lowell Steward, a member of the Tuskegee Airman of World War II aviation fame has passed at the tender age of 95 years old.

He joined the Army Air Corps after graduating from Santa Barbara College in 1941. He subsequently trained at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama.

In 1944, he was shipped to Italy and flew missions over Germany in P-39 Aircobras, P-40 Warhawks and ultimately, P-51 Mustangs, arguably the most advanced American fighter of the war. Among other things, the unit scored three kills of the German Me-262 jet fighter in a single day in 1945.

Now, there are nothing but blue skies ahead, Mr. Steward.

Command Sergeant Major Wardell Turner was killed by an IED that was hidden in a median along a convoy route in eastern Kabul. CSM Turner was the senior enlisted advisor of Combined Security Transition Command–Afghanistan (CSTC-A) in Kabul. From the Army Times;

Turner graduated from Bennett High School in 1984 and was a member of the 1983 championship football team.

He attended Towson University on a football scholarship, graduating in 1989 with a bachelors degree in management.

Turner later earned a master’s degree in criminal justice from Central Missouri State University in 2011.

Turner had served in several military police units since 1993, most recently in the 720th Military Police Battalion. He was promoted to sergeant major in July 2013.

His aunt, Cynthia Johnson told his local newspaper, DelMarvaNow that CSM Turner’s son is serving in Afghanistan, too.

Also killed in the attack was 27-year-old Joseph Riley. From his hometown, in Grove City, Ohio;

A hometown hero, Joey made the ultimate sacrifice. But people who knew him said Joey wanted to give back to his country. While the Riley family said they are heartbroken at the news, they are proud of the sacrifice Joey made. Rodney Riley said his son loved the Army and felt strongly that freedom is worth the fight.

When there are fewer targets, I suppose the casualties are going to be higher ranks. CSM Martin Barreras was killed in Afghanistan in May.

According to the Hartford Currant, John T. Downey, the longest held American POW has passed at the age of 84. Downey joined the CIA after college in 1951, and he was in an aircraft that was shot down by the Chinese in November 1952;

He was sentenced to life and spent the next 20 years in Chinese prisons. When President Richard Nixon re-established relations with China in 1971, Downey’s sentence was commuted. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated Downey’s release on March 9, 1973, and Downey was reunited with his sick mother, Mary Downey. Three years after his release, Downey graduated from Harvard Law School at the age of 45.

His son, Jack Downey, recalled his father Monday as a patient and humble man who might have been a little “rabid” about Yale football, but who never dwelled on his years of captivity.

“For a lot of people, especially of a certain generation, he was this enormous, larger than life person,” Jack Downey said. “But he never made it a big thing. There was very little fanfare. He would just tell me a story about it like he was talking about baseball.”

We got the sad news today that Lieutenant Colonel Edward W. Leonard passed on Veterans’ Day, which is appropriate because he was shot down over Laos on Memorial Day 1968 and he remained n the enemies’ hands for nearly five years. Lt Col Edward W. Leonard, Jr., graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1960, and was a Prisoner of War from June 1968 to March 1973. He was awarded 4 Silver Stars, the Legion of Merit, 3 Distinguished Flying Crosses for Valor, the Bronze Star Medal for Valor, 2 Purple Hearts, and 23 Air Medals for his service as a pilot in Vietnam and as a Prisoner of War at the hands of a brutal enemy.

From his biography at POW Network;

What a contrast with the memories of the nearly five years of imprisonment.
After being shot down while flying a rescue mission over Laos, I managed to
avoid capture for two days. While sitting in a tree, a Communist soldier
Iying in a hammock, looked up and saw me.

In the summer of 1969 for some unknown reason I was interrogated about a
possible escape attempt. They did not appreciate my answers and as the
saying goes, they tortured me until I was guilty.

I have no regrets over any of the twelve years of military service. In fact,
I regard my time as senior officer in the compound as the most important job
I ever had, and in the glory of the company of some of the most magnificent
men I have ever known. Those years gave me the opportunity to know how to
use freedom.

Tracy Leonard writes, on his passing;

He was proud that he never deserted his brothers-in-arms. He was proud that they never abandoned him. And he always said that he would do it all over again: the fear, the hunger, the humiliation, and the pain, just to save even one of these men, these brothers-in-arms, all of whom he loved dearly and with his whole heart.

And, knowing my dad, he would do it all over again with the same irreverence, the same aplomb and the same wise-ass sense of humor that frequently cost him a rifle butt to the spine, or a broken jaw, or the inability to think straight for weeks on end as he lay splayed out on a rack at the back of his cell, knocked senseless and incapacitated, but still snickering quietly inside.

The measure of any man is whether he leaves this earth having added more than he extracted. My father positively changed the lives of numerous men for the better. In many cases they were strangers and he risked his life for them, prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, so that they could live.

He loved them UNCONDITIONALLY and GENEROUSLY and without regret. He was resolute in his dedication to his country, to his brothers-in-arms, to his fellow cellmates, and to his mission. My dad and all of these men returned home with honor.