This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Military issues

  • 112th Corpsmen Birthday

    CavRick writes to tell us that today is the 112th birthday of the Corpsman rating in the Navy. there’s a memorial being built in Jacksonville, North Carolina to commemorate that special relationship between Marines and their corpsmen. (JDNews link)

    [The vice president of the Corpsmen Memorial Foundation, retired 1st Sgt. Kevin] Howell said that countless Marines would attest to the honor that corpsmen deserve for their work.

    “I would have to say that 50 percent of the Marines that have been wounded and are alive today are simply because of the corpsmen in the field,” he said. “There are an awful lot of guys that are walking around today that would not be here with us without them, including me.”

    The picture above is a prototype of the proposed Corpsmen Memorial. I’ve always heard that Marines love their corpmen and I think that memorial shows it.

  • Discarded headstones at Arlington

    Following the news that Arlington National Cemetary was generally mismanaged by the people we hired to take care of our most honored citizens, the Washington Post has additionally discovered evidence of more disturbing news. A couple of piles of headstones have been found in creek beds ion the former plantation of Robert E. Lee.

    On Wednesday, after The Washington Post alerted the cemetery to their presence, officials there said they were shocked to find the gravestones lying in the muck near a maintenance yard. Already under fire in recent days for more than 200 unmarked or misidentified graves and a chaotic and dysfunctional management system, cemetery officials vowed to investigate the headstones along the stream and take “immediate corrective action,” said Kaitlin Horst, a cemetery spokeswoman.

    Officials said they do not know how the stones got there, whom they belong to, or how old they are. Horst could say only that “they appear to be decades old.”

    Doug Sterner (who sent us the picture and the link) and the Washington Post are asking us to put out our feelers and see if we can identify this particular hero whose name is obscured by decades of water damage. The symbol at the top of the headstone was discontinued in the early 80s, so you may know him or of him.

    It is worn and faded but seems to identify the person as a Navy captain, whose name is something like J. Warren McLaughlin.

    Or is it L. Warren McLaughel?

    If you have any idea who this might be, email me or the author of the WaPo article.

  • Updates on MacDill and Fort Gordon attempted breaches

    Yeah, OK, they probably aren’t terrorists but they weren’t all that balanced either. The AWOL soldier who tried to bring weapons on to MacDill AFB in Florida with his fake IDs was supposedly just trying to impress his girlfriend (Tampa Bay Online);

    Monday was not the first time Kilburn had gotten in trouble for fake documents.

    In 2005, Kilburn was arrested in Culpepper County, Va., and charged with forging a public record, unlawfully obtaining state motor vehicle documents and uttering a public record, according to court records. Kilburn had gotten a phony driver’s license in his older brother’s name in 2003, according to court records.

    Kilburn is charged with desertion and will be turned over to Army authorities, according to 6th Air Mobility Wing vice commander Col. Dave Cohen. Additional charges are pending as the investigation continues. The U.S. Attorney’s office is reviewing the case to see if there will be any charges brought against Goodier, according to spokesman Steve Cole.

    Military officials are releasing few details about the case, including any possible explanation offered by the pair, but stressed the incident did not appear to be terrorism. Thanks to the quick response by security, Cohen said, the base was never in danger.

    So I see nothing much has changed since the Fort Hood shootings. The Air Force admits that Kilburn was caught because of his fake ID – if he’d had legitimate ID, like Hasan, he would have been allowed through with his weapons.

    And the guy in Georgia (Christian Science Monitor):

    The U.S. Attorney’s office in Savannah named the man arrested Tuesday as Anthony Todd Saxon, 34. It said charges were expected to be filed Wednesday.

    Yarnell said a search of the civilian’s vehicle Tuesday uncovered a knapsack containing military hand grenades. He said the man arrested is a suspect in a theft of military equipment from Fort Gordon in April.

    Last night it was landmines and this morning it’s hand grenades in his knapsack. The media should really take classes in weapons ID. But, again, Saxon was on base with his knapsack of whatevers. If he’d just parked somewhere else, like in a parking lot full of cars, he wouldn’t have been caught, more than likely.

  • Goodbye Don

    Yesterday, I attended the funeral of Corporal Donald Marler, who was killed in action along with two other Marines in Helmand on June 6th. At the time he was serving with 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines (3/1), which was on its sixth combat deployment in support of the war on terror.  I served with Don for  two years, first at Marine Barracks Washington and then as part of the Marine security detail at Camp David.

    (more…)

  • Navy parachutists in the trees

    They should really stick to the “Sea” portion of their name. Five Navy parachutists required extensive help to extricate themselves from the trees on Fort Story, a postage stamp-sized post near Virginia Beach according to the Virginia-Pilot;

    It took about two hours to get them all down.

    The city was called to help military rescue workers about 9:30 a.m., said Bruce Nedelka, the city’s emergency medical services division chief.

    One of the five service members fell to the ground when a tree limb broke, Nedelka said, and was taken to a Norfolk hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

    Three ambulances, two fire engines, two ladder trucks, two specialty rescue trucks and two battalion chiefs were dispatched to the scene, Nedelka said.

    It’d be a lot funnier if someone hadn’t got hurt (and I hope he has a speedy recovery).

    I’ve landed in the trees a few times and I was always able to free myself without all of the first-responder drama. One particularly comfortable landing at Husky DZ in Alaska left me with my parachute in one tree and my WICI bag (CIWI bag?) in another – like a big hammock. Best landing ever. I deployed the reserve parachute and climbed down the OUTSIDE. It was a little harder getting the platoon’s radios and M60 tripod and ammo out of the WICI bag, though – but that’s why they paid me that extra $55/month..

  • More mismanagement in DC

    I’m sure you’ve all read about the mix up at Arlington that forced the new Army Secretary, John McHugh to apologize for empty graves, mismarked graved, urns buried with no markings, soldiers buried on top of others…the list goes on. Thurman Higginbotham is on administrative leave pending his fate. Retiring Arlington Superintendent John Metzler is looking at a slap on his wrist – that’s all well and good. They were ultimately responsible for mismanagement at Arlington Cemetery.

    However, this won’t fix the problem, just like firing people at Walter Reed didn’t fix anything. What kind of incompetent boob drives some urns out in the middle of a field and buries them thinking he’ll never be found? The same kind of boob who ignores leaking pipes in a barracks room.

    The problems aren’t at the top – the problems lie with an incompetent workforce more concerned with pay checks than doing an honest days workd for an honest days pay.

    The Military District of Washington needs to clean out it’s bottom-feeding workforce and find some people that appreciate their jobs. It’s not the military that’s ate up with the dumbass, it’s those civilian workers that need the boot. And this is the perfect economic climate to weed out the boobs.

    If you’re worried about a family member that may be interred at Arlinton, the Army Secretary has set up a hotline. Accept my apologies on behalf of a grateful nation that we hired some serious fuckwads to care for your beloved.

  • Email from Bradley Manning

    The email from Bradley Manning, the leaker of the “Collateral Murder” video appeared in the Washington Post this morning. Of course the Post tries to make him appear to be a sympathetic figure from a broken home, homeless at one point until he found the Army. Then the Army tossed him aside when he struck a fellow soldier recently.

    “I’m an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern baghdad, pending discharge for ‘adjustment disorder,’ ” Manning said by way of introducing himself to Lamo, who had recently been profiled on the Web site of Wired magazine.

    “If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?” he wrote.

    Turns out that Manning isn’t “pending discharge for ‘adjustment disorder…”, or at least he wasn’t when communicating with Lamo.

    In a phone interview, Lamo said he does not know what prompted Manning to allegedly leak. “I think it was a confluence of things — being a thin, nerdy, geeky type in an Army culture of machismo, of seeing injustice,” he said.

    Guess what? There are thousands of “thin, nerdy, geeky types” in the Army who don’t leak classified material.

    It’s “important that it gets out . . . i feel, for some bizarre reason . . . it might actually change something,” he said.

    Everyone wants to change something these days. Some shit is better off left alone, but you can’t tell that to idiots and fools out to make a name for themselves. They should toss this 22-year-old deep under ground for a few decades so he can see how much shit changes without him.

  • Union thugs demand dues for nothing

    Major Stephen Godin, a retired Marine JROTC instructor in Massachusetts is being mugged by union thugs (Boston Herald link);

    A retired U.S. Marine who runs a high school ROTC program in Worcester says he faces the boot for refusing to pay local union dues, leaving the 58-year-old father of two crying foul and school administrators bewildered.

    “It just seems crazy that they’re gonna fire me over $500,” said Maj. Stephen L. Godin, senior naval science instructor at the Naval Junior ROTC Unit of North High School. “Everyone’s talking about finding good teachers – I haven’t missed a day in 14 years.”

    Indeed, North High School Principal Matthew Morse praised Godin yesterday as an “excellent” instructor who has turned his program into a top junior ROTC academy.

    Godin claims that he receives no benefit from the union, since he gets retired military medical care and does his own mediation with the school system. Of course that won’t the unions from extracting money from an individual’s pocket for nothing. Massachusetts Republicans are trying to protect Godin with legislation while union leadership is making excuses.

    Union president Cheryl DelSignore, under withering fire from ranking state pols, claims retired USMC Maj. Stephen Godin sent his requests to an inactive e-mail account, but she’ll address them now that the matter’s been brought to her attention.

    In a statement released by the Massachusetts Teachers Association yesterday, DelSignore said, “I am reviewing those e-mails and will reach out to Major Godin (today) to determine how to resolve this dispute swiftly.”

    Yeah, I’ll bet it was an inactive email account – the complaint department. It was Major Godin’s fault that he sent the email to an inactive email account. I’m sure he didn’t pull the address out of thin air.