Category: Real Soldiers

The folks at ABC News send us a video of their interview with Captain Will Swenson who was awarded the Medal of Honor yesterday at the White House;

You may have been inundated with Will Swenson news the last few days, but I think you need to watch this video. I hope the Army lets him rejoin the service, because we need more leaders with this kind of vision of military service. Thanks to ABC for sending this magnificent video to us, they did an uncharacteristically outstanding job on this subject.

Our buddy, ROS has a long piece at Victory Girls Blog on Captain Will Swenson who was awarded the Medal of Honor today in the White House. You should go read it.

Captain Swenson has asked to return to active duty, according to a Breitbart link sent to us by SGT K.

Meanwhile, Mary sends us a link to McClatchy, which for some reason doubts accounts that led to the award of the Medal of Honor for Dakota Myer, who was alongside WIll Swenson for that battle.

Sworn statements by Meyer and others who participated in the battle indicate that he didn’t save the lives of 13 U.S. service members, leave his vehicle to scoop up 24 Afghans on his first two rescue runs or lead the final push to retrieve the four dead Americans. Moreover, it’s unclear from the documents whether Meyer disobeyed orders when he entered the Ganjgal Valley on Sept. 8, 2009.

The statements also offer no proof that the 23-year-old Kentucky native “personally killed at least eight Taliban insurgents,” as the account on the Marine Corps website says. The driver of Meyer’s vehicle attested to seeing “a single enemy go down.”

McClatchy was unable to find anyone who would to say that Myer didn’t deserve the medal, and they probably won’t find anyone here either. Not from me anyway.

Hours before this McClatchy report was published, the Marine Corps inserted a disclaimer into its official online account of Meyer’s heroic actions. The Web page now reads that the summary “was compiled in collaboration” with Meyer and Marine Corps Public Affairs.

A prominent historian of military medals, Doug Sterner, expressed disbelief at the idea that the Marine Corps would publicize an account of a complex battle based solely on the recipient’s recollections.

“Give me a break,” Sterner said. “A recipient is responsible for writing his narrative? I have never heard of such a thing.”

In my opinion, there’s no one at McClatchy qualified to pass judgement on any award that the military awards, right down to my Army Achievement Medal, so whatever it is they’re trying to do, they’d better back right the f*ck off.

So I agree with Doug Sterner;

Sterner said errors in citations had always haunted recipients and that many Medal of Honor winners had been cited for things they didn’t do. He added that the mounting pressure to find a living recipient has made mistakes in details almost inevitable.

“Did this man deserve the Medal of Honor? If the answer to that is yes, then the details of the citation become secondary,” Sterner said. “But we do need to keep the record as accurately as we possibly can.”

Video feed will supposedly be available at this link.

Kudos, CPT Swenson.  Awe-inspiring.

Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer started a minor furor on Twitter today when he tweeted “Congress 2016. POTUS 2024!” to his followers on that website, according to the Military.com folks;

The simple tweet immediately drew hundreds of positive responses, many of which Meyer retweeted to his more than 23,000 followers. Earlier in the evening he said he was thinking about a run, which was also followed by encouragement from his followers.

On Tuesday afternoon, Meyer appeared to remain resolute in his interest to run for political office as he tweeted: “I want to thank everyone for the overwhelming support & encouragement about my decision to pursue elected office!

I don’t know how he feels about issues, or which party he claims, and I don’t know him personally, but we certainly do a lot worse as far as genuine Americans are concerned. I’ve read his book and if he’s only half the guy in that book, he’s ten times better than anyone currently serving in Congress. And I use the term “serving” in the most remote sense of the word.

Thanks to the Quinton Report for bringing this story to my attention.

Hondo sends us a link about Col. (Dr.) James Ruffer’s mission prior to Operation Just Cause. According to the article in The Army Times, Col. Ruffer spent time as a Marine pilot in Vietnam, a Navy flight surgeon and an Air Force doctor during his thirty years of service. But he earned a Bronze Star with a “V” for his work in Panama;

I worked with Delta Force as I planned the rescue of Kurt Muse from my vantage point within the prison. (The regime had been forced by President George H. W. Bush to allow an American doctor to provide care for the hostage.) … [I] was to know where Muse was being held and where his intended assassin was located; for Muse was “promised” death by the regime. With my help, Delta Force would be looking for the intended assassin’s location upon entering the prison on the night of 19/20 December 1989. … Kurt Muse was rescued without the loss of an American life.

During the Modelo Prison mission I was always at some risk of being detained either upon my approach to the prison within Panama City’s squalorous Chorillo District or within the prison during the visit or upon my departure. A gun was directed to my head, during one departure, along with the voiced declaration of the guard, “I’d like to blow your head off.”

Yeah, I know Carcel Modelo pretty well, but my stay there was measured in days rather than months. I was there for kidnapping, but when the Canal Zone Provost Marshall told the Panamanians that the person who I supposedly kidnapped was in custody in the CZ, they let me go. But, it’s not a very friendly place. My toilet was a quart-sized milk carton, my bed was a couple of sheets of newspaper spread out on the concrete floor. Breakfast was a small roll and a cup of warm brown-colored water that they called coffee. Lunch was usually fish head soup, with real a fish head to prove it. So I have a sense of the conditions that Colonel Ruffer confronted. It was pretty scary and I wasn’t an undercover spy or anything.

So congratulations on your award, Col. Ruffer.

We’ve crossed paths with John Perozzi in the past, twice last year here and here. ROS sends us a link to a local Fox affiliate’s interview with him;

Perozzi didn’t have to go into the Army during World War II.

In 1943, at age 23, he worked his way through night school to become the high-level welder, a certified Navy welder, building warships at the Navy Yard and making 10 times average pay for everybody else working then.

“When a guy was making $18 a week, he was making a ton of money. I was making $140, $150 a week. I bought me one of those six-wheel Buicks,” Perozzi said, laughing.

Doing his part as a civilian by building the best warships came with being exempt from the draft, and that just didn’t seem right to Perozzi. So, he voluntarily went into battle.

His first mission was to be among the first men to invade Normandy on D-Day, parachuting in behind Nazi enemy lines.

In my pinion, Perozzi personifies the Greatest Generation. Watch this seven minute interview.

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