From the generous folks at Blackfive, we got alerted to a trailer for a new HBO movie “Taking Chance” coming soon;
HBO gets it right sometimes (Band of Brothers). Read the background on the true story from Blackfive.
Category: Support the troops
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ProTroopsTube
I just got this email;
Dear Friends and Pro Troop Supporters,
Have you ever visited YouTube and noticed there is no specific category for “Military?”
Have you also noticed that while there are tens of thousands of military videos, you have to wade through group and video titles such as “Gays in the Military,” “Military Fairy,” “Gangs in the Military,” or “Military Air Drop Bloopers?”
Finally, have you noticed that some excellent military videos seem to disappear because they offended someone’s politically correct sensibilities?
Well now there is a new place for patriotic Americans, who support our troops, to post and categorize all of their videos to share with their pro troop friends. It is now available for loading your favorite military videos
The email is from my boss at Talon, Mike Connelly from Eagles Up. The website URL is at www.protroopstube.com. So use it and visit it when you get a chance. I’m going to put a link in the sidebar.
Speaking of links, TSO got us a coveted link in Iowahawk‘s list of Superfriends. Visit the funniest guy on the internet every time you get a chance.
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10 Silver Stars
Last night Just A Grunt emailed me about the 10 Special Forces operators that are being awarded Silver Stars today for a raid they conducted in conjunction with their Afghan commando trainees. The Washington Post writes this about the action;
After jumping out of helicopters at daybreak onto jagged, ice-covered rocks and into water at an altitude of 10,000 feet, the 12-man Special Forces team scrambled up the steep mountainside toward its target — an insurgent stronghold in northeast Afghanistan.
“Our plan,” Capt. Kyle M. Walton recalled in an interview, “was to fight downhill.”
But as the soldiers maneuvered toward a cluster of thick-walled mud buildings constructed layer upon layer about 1,000 feet farther up the mountain, insurgents quickly manned fighting positions, readying a barrage of fire for the exposed Green Berets.
A harrowing, nearly seven-hour battle unfolded on that mountainside in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province on April 6, as Walton, his team and a few dozen Afghan commandos they had trained took fire from all directions. Outnumbered, the Green Berets fought on even after half of them were wounded — four critically — and managed to subdue an estimated 150 to 200 insurgents, according to interviews with several team members and official citations.
There’s more of the story at WaPo and there’s supposed to be a video of the battle floating around and I’ll try to find it. In the interim, here’s a video report from MSNBC with some of the combat footage;
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Captain Rob Yllescas
(Picture courtesy of The American Legion Department of Nebraska)
Captain Rob Yllescas was laid to rest yesterday in Nebraska, and many veterans of all wars showed up to pay their respects.
Rob’s wife over at her blog says:
Yesterday was Rob’s funeral. It was beautiful. Again, the Patriot Guard showed up holding flags outside the auditorium and a bell was being rung. During the service they had a 16×20 photograph of Rob in uniform in front of a flag. I looked at it most of the service. That picture made it feel like he was right there. They played a slide show before and after the service. My friend Nancy is going to put it on here when she gets the chance so everyone can see it. She did an amazing job. Thanks, Nancy. After the service we went to the cemetery. The police were in front with the Patriot Guards on their bikes, then Rob, and then more Patriot Guards leading us to the site. It was so surreal that the 21 gun salute and presentation of the flag was for MY husband. I still can’t believe he’s gone. Even though I was there when he passed away, to me it feels like he’s still deployed. So many people were there. It’s just unbelievable the amount of support.
Rest in Peace Captain.
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Scout’s out
I’m terrible at announcing this kind of news, so I’ll let Blackfive do it.
Yes, the news is not something that I wanted to have to share. After surgery to remove a blood clot in his brain (surgery was the only option), Rob passed away this morning.
Keep checking the Yllescas family blog for updates.
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The War Against Terror, in case you forgot
It’s been easy to forget that the war against terror is actually a war against terror the last few years while Iraq and Afghanistan became (and still are) political footballs. With the Left trying to call the war “imperialistic” and “immoral” they seem to forget that there are folks out there trying to kill us all. The action in Mumbai last week has brought that home to those of us who remain sane. While IVAW and World Can’t Wait (the Maoist-rooted communist organization) were protesting the war in San Francisco, innocent people were dying in Mumbai for no other reason than to shock the world. Gateway Pundit writes that the death toll may reach 300 after scores of bodies were found stacked in some of the hotel rooms.
At least four of those killed were Americans. Not American spies, or American military personnel, but just Americans. Alan Scherr and his 13-year-old daughter Naomi were probably the same types who were protesting in San Francisco (Washington Post);
Alan Scherr was an art professor with a comfortable life in the Maryland suburbs, but he spent 25 years studying Transcendental Meditation in a quest for something more. The search took him and his family to Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where they shed their old life in Silver Spring and meditated in the complex of a New Age mystic.
Rabbi Gavriel N. Holtzberg, 29, and his Israeli wife, Rivka, 28 were apparently bound with telephone wires before they were executed in the Mumbai Jewish Center (Washington Post);
“They were killed,” whispered Yeshiva boys just out of school, holding scooters and book bags.
Grown men turned and strode away, suddenly tearing up.
“I don’t understand how this works,” said Yosef Rodal, 18, a yeshiva student who said Gavriel Holtzberg was a distant relative. “How do bad things happen to good people?”
Four peaceful people murdered purely for the shock value – no military goals, no tactical advantage. Just mass murder – and the 200 known dead weren’t enough. The only terrorist captured alive claims they were going for 5,000 dead (Daily Mail);
Azam Amir Kasab, 21, from Pakistan, said the attacks were meticulously planned six months ago and were intended to kill 5,000 people.
He revealed that the ten terrorists, who were highly trained in marine assault and crept into the city by boat, had planned to blow up the Taj Mahal Palace hotel after first executing British and American tourists and then taking hostages.
Well, no they weren’t really highly trained – anyone can pull a trigger and pull pins on grenades. A highly trained force would have gotten out alive after killing a lot more people. As Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive wrote last night these ten people were “not much more than chimps with an evil purpose”. Curt at Flopping Aces says they’re just run-of-the-mill cowards.
Does anyone think that ANSWER or World Can’t Wait or Not In Our Name are going to protest the people who sent the ten chimps out to kill innocent people? Not on your life. A few days ago, I got to listen to the same types defending Bill Ayers’ domestic terrorist activities as a logical result of American foreign policy. They damn sure aren’t going to condemn foreign terrorists.
In fact, The Nation finds a Pakistani to condemn American and Indian State terrorism as the reason for the attacks. In between rants about ‘Hindu facism” and in the typical sleight-of-hand language of the terrorist apologists in this country to which we’ve become accustomed, Humayun Gauhar writes;
Group terrorism is a last-resort cry of a people long oppressed. Poorly armed, in utter desperation, they turn their own bodies into bomb delivery systems for lack of cannons, missiles, Predator drones and helicopters armed with Hellfire Missiles, fighter jets and bombers that State Terrorists have. They don’t have Daisy Cutters so they make ‘Improvised Explosive Devices’. India is one of the biggest State Terrorists of them all. Pakistan is the biggest victim (and sucker) of both State Terrorism and group terrorism, a hapless country that always becomes a frontline state in a superpower imperialist adventure gone wrong in return for millions of ingrate refugees to share scare food with and thousands of foreign terrorists and freedom fighters pushed in by the failure of State Terrorism.
So as long as it remains perfectly legitimate to kill innoncent people in large numbers to make a point, we can’t expect the Left to engage in meaningful discussions about how to defend ourselves since everything we do in that regard seems to be the wrong answer. If we can’t agree that there’s no rational justification for murdering innocents, I guess there’s nothing to talk about.
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The new caste system of wounded troops
In 1993, President Clinton began his term by finding ways to save money for his planned social programs. The first place he looked (like all Democrats) was at the military. He began by slashing manpower, offering early retirement and buy-outs. Two years later he discovered that he’d slashed manpower too deeply and asked some of those he bought out to return.
The next thing to suffer cuts was military health care. They moved 65-year-olds from military healthcare to Medicare. Well, it seems this past January Democrats started cutting military health care again – by differentiating between combat-related injuries and non-combat injuries. From Blackfive and Ace of Spades, I picked up this story from the LA Times;
In a little-noticed regulation change in March, the military’s definition of combat-related disabilities was narrowed, costing some injured veterans thousands of dollars in lost benefits — and triggering outrage from veterans’ advocacy groups.
The Pentagon said the change was consistent with Congress’ intent when it passed a “wounded warrior” law in January. Narrowing the combat-related definition was necessary to preserve the “special distinction for those who incur disabilities while participating in the risk of combat, in contrast with those injured otherwise,” William J. Carr, deputy undersecretary of Defense, wrote in a letter to the 1.3-million-member Disabled American Veterans.
The group, which has called the policy revision a “shocking level of disrespect for those who stood in harm’s way,” is lobbying to have the change rescinded.
To say the least. The Democrats claim this wasn’t their intent;
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said the Pentagon’s “more conservative definition” limited benefits for some veterans. “That was not our intent,” Levin said in a statement.
He added: “When the disability is the same, the impact on the service member should be the same no matter whether the disability was incurred while training for combat at Ft. Hood or participating in actual combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.”
Given Democrats’ past behavior, it’s difficult to believe that wasn’t their intent.
Blackfive quotes a source that wrote him; Bush-appointee David Chu, the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel “hates EVERYTHING to do with military health care, and the costs. So he essentially tries to screw us at every opportunity.” Regardless of who is responsible, it’s detestable.
The example in the article is one Marine Corporal who has been attacked by IEDs twice, yet he’s not considered a combat-related injury. Honestly, i don’t care if he was wounded in an IED attack or fell into a foxhole on a training assault range – the fact remains that he was doing his duty when he was injured. He was preparing for combat – which is dangerous in itself.
I’ve seen people permanently injured and even killed while training because that’s the nature of the business. If the military wants people to train like they’ll fight, they need to do away with these distinctions. Daily I engaged in activities that were dangerous at the first step, that I might not have engaged in if I knew I was going to be penalized for doing that in a combat climate. A broken leg, a shattered pelvis, a missing hand remains the same no matter how it occurred. The cost to the servicemember for the rest of their life remains constant.
My wife’s friend, a nurse, was killed in a mortar attack after finishing her PT session in the middle of a military compound in Iraq. If she had only been injured, would she have been penalized for not being engaged in a firefight when she was injured?
There’s already a medal to distiguish combat injuries from non-combat injuries. I’m sure any Purple Heart awardee would like to see someone injured similarly under peaceful conditions paid the same for the same type of injury.