Andy11M sends us a link to the story of Rebecca Lee, who was the director of the Pickaway County, Ohio Veterans Service office until she was fired in late 2014 for misusing her position and credit cards while she was being investigated for some domestic disputes with her husband. About five years before all of that, on the eve of his demise, Ernest “Snap” Ankrom, who had been a prisoner of war, captured by the Germans and kept in Poland, donated a Nazi flag to the office. The flag had been displayed in his prison, Oflag 64, and torn down by the allied prisoners when they were liberated. They had signed it an presented it to their commander, “Snap” Ankrom. Now the flag is missing;
After the death in 2009 of World War II veteran Earnest “Snap” Ankrom, Rebecca Lee promised to prominently display a Nazi flag that Ankrom took with him when the prisoner of war camp where he was held was liberated.
Now, Lee faces 10 years in prison after she was indicted Friday, accused of stealing the swastika flag from the Pickaway County Veterans Service office she had once directed.
Lee was indicted on seven counts, all involving allegations of her stealing from Pickaway County and its Veterans Service office. She will be served a summons and given a court appearance.
Employees at the Veterans Service office…say that they came to work one day more than a year ago and found that the flag and case had been removed. They say that Lee told them it had offended too many people, so she took it down.
Lewis Jordan, a Vietnam-era Air Force veteran who works at the office, said employees have searched everywhere, and the flag isn’t there. He said it offended no one.
“The flag was a nasty symbol of a nasty war, and those men turned it into a tribute,” Jordan said. “The signatures of those men might as well have been written in blood for their sacrifices.”
The flag has been appraised for thousands of dollars, so it’s plausible that Lee sold it. If you’ve seen it or know where it is, tell someone in Pickaway County.
This past weekend, Dionisio Garza III had a break with reality and for reasons as yet unknown, he went on a shooting spree in Houston. He killed one person, Eugene Linscomb, 57, and injured several others, including two police officers. Garza was a veteran of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and he’d been to Afghanistan at least once, according to media reports.
“We have not received confirmation, but I strongly suspect. I really believe this is a PTSD thing,” the man’s father said by phone, Monday.
[…]
Garza’s father said his son, although loving, had become increasingly troubled over the last few months and decided to travel to Houston to meet others who believed the United States was on the brink of collapse.
“On the internet he met some people or some people that believed like him.
It’s better to go to Texas. He was trying to get us all to go over there and you know go live in a compound. That kind of talk, you know? That wasn’t my son,” the man said.
Yeah, well, that’s not PTSD either. It’s confusion. People who claim they knew Garza blame PTSD, too;
“I would have never guessed Garza. Ever. I’ve seen him talk people down from PTSD moments I’m sure more than I could even count,” he said.
However, he told us PTSD was something Garza struggled with too.
“I never thought he had a serious problem with it, he chose to go on a second and a third deployment and not only go, but be a leader there,” he said.
Obviously, he was disappointed that country is headed in the wrong direction, but that doesn’t justify what he did.
Heavy.com notes that he was a Trump supporter – that doesn’t explain his actions, either, despite the fact that many would like it to.
Millions of veterans who are also Trump supporters didn’t take guns to the street this weekend.
We wrote about Joseph Chamblin back in February, but the story is making the circuit again. He was the platoon commander of the Sniper Platoon which ended up getting punished for urinating on the corpses of dead Taliban in Afghanistan a few years back. By all accounts, up until that incident, Chamblin was on his way to promotion to Gunnery Sergeant, but the outrage that the media generated over the video put the brakes on his career – he got a $500 fine and reduced one rank to Sergeant. Hardly commensurate with the worldwide outrage over the minor occurrence. So he left The Corps and met up with this former woman Marine, Laura A. Buckingham who owned a bakery and had a son with a former fiance. Chamblin and Buckingham fell in love, according to the Washington Post.
Buckingham was attractive, educated and ran her own bakery. Her customers and her town loved her. After all, she was something of a local celebrity in New Albany, Ind. — just last fall, she was on the cover of Southern Indiana Living with her son.
She was also a veteran who could understand Chamblin’s experiences. The two fell for each other, and soon Buckingham was pregnant again.
Then Buckingham decided that her life would be simpler if she could rid herself of the ex-fiance, Bradley Sutherland, because of child custody issues;
While she wasn’t baking fresh loaves of bread, she was busy — busy allegedly trying to find someone to murder Sutherland.
The first person to whom she allegedly turned was Chamblin.
At first, when she allegedly asked him at the beginning of the year to make Sutherland “go away,” Chamblin thought she was kidding. A dark joke, no doubt, but a joke nonetheless. Slowly, though, her requests allegedly grew more detailed as she wondered aloud about the specifics — Where would it happen? How could Sutherland be killed?
Chamblin recorded those conversations and turned the recordings over to the authorities. Soon Ms. Buckingham was discussing the execution of her ex with an undercover detective. They faked his murder in order to get Buckingham to hand over the money to the detective (the amount fluctuates between news sources from $3,000 to $30,000). She’s looking at many years of nightly pillow fights in a woman’s prison.
But the most important part of the story, to me, is that this Marine, Chamblin was made out to be some kind of heartless sniper killer dude who tolerates urinating on corpses of his enemies, but obviously, he has limits. I’m sure most of the media is surprised that he didn’t make the dick decision to kill Sutherland on the orders of the smoking hot chick – like he would have done if it had instead been a Lifetime movie. Even actual highly-trained killers in the military have morals and they can make good, lawful, civilized decisions even after they’ve been screwed over by the government because of misplaced civilian outrage. Just like the rest of Americans.
The Washington Post reports about the night that District Court Judge Lou Olivera, in Cumberland County, North Carolina, spent the night in a jail cell. He had just sentenced 20-year Army veteran, Joseph Serna, to 24-hours in the local lock up for lying about a court-monitored urinalysis test;
Serna has fought to stay sober, appearing before Olivera 25 times to have his progress reviewed. He confessed to Olivera that he lied about a recent urine test last week, according to WRAL.
In response, Olivera sentenced Serna to one day in jail.
The judge drove Serna to the jail in a neighboring county.
Olivera had hoped to have Serna serve his time in a holding cell at the Fayetteville Police Department, but Chief Harold Medlock told the judge the cell is now used for storage.
“But I’m friends with the chief of police in Lumberton and called him, and he said he would call the Sheriff’s Office and they were willing to do it,” Medlock says.
Serna reported for his punishment, where he was met by the judge.
“When Joe first came to turn himself in, he was trembling,” says Olivera, a veteran, too, who served in the Gulf War. “I decided that I’d spend the night serving with him.”
And that’s what happened – the judge spent Serna’s night in jail with him;
Mostly, from five in the afternoon on April 13 until 6:30 a.m. the next day, the judge and the veteran talked about their respective military service, Serna’s post-traumatic stress disorder from three tours of duty in Afghanistan and how the inmate could turn around his downward spiral that had resulted in a driving-while-impaired charge and other serious traffic offenses.
According to the judge’s website, he is a veteran of Desert Storm and he did what I’ve been saying that we should do – veteran PTSD and suicide is “our problem” and we deal with it better than anyone else. We all have an opportunity at one point or another to reach out to the folks who need help and no one understands better than we understand.
Thanks to Chief Tango for the Washington post link.
Jamie and Andy11M send us a link to the Detroit Free Press about Anthony Gazvoda, a soldier still in the Michigan National Guard who went to work for the Homeland Security Department as a border patrol agent. They stationed him at Laredo, Texas;
He’s suing the Department of Homeland Security over a job assignment in Texas, saying the dry, hot state reminds him too much of Afghanistan, and it’s too painful to work there.
[…]
In 2009, Gazvoda served a nine-month tour in Afghanistan, where he worked as a road clearance specialist. His job was to go ahead of everyone else during missions, draw out the enemy and engage them in gunfights. He was shot 34 times and earned an Army Commendation Medal with Valor for rescuing a soldier from a bombed-out Humvee, while under enemy fire.
[…]
After a few months in Texas, Gazvoda began having panic attacks and sleep issues. He visited the VA there but to no avail. He took an unpaid administrative leave and moved to Michigan, where government doctors would eventually diagnose him with PTSD and recommend he not be stationed in Texas. They found a number of similarities between Texas and Afghanistan: Both were hot, dry and heavily populated. Both also had non-English speaking residents, which doctors concluded was another trigger.
Gazvoda asked to be reinstated last year, and he asked for a compassionate reassignment to be near his doctors. Homeland Security denied his request and gave him three days to show up at work. He got a lawyer instead. I’m no doctor, but I’m thinking that he needs another job, because whenever I think of border patrol agents, I picture them working in a hot barren terrain, you know, along the southern border. If that triggers his PTSD, another occupation seems appropriate. Then again HSD, should take his problems into account and there are enough positions in more hospitable climes, I’m sure they could accommodate him, if they really wanted to do so.
The other day, one of our feel good stories included one from a Waffle House in Fayetteville, North Carolina where a youngster tried to rob the restaurant with what was being described as an AK-47 rifle. CCO sends us a link to the latest on that story; it was 70-year-old Vietnam veteran Phillip Brooks who thwarted the robbery, according to WRAL;
Brooks said, however, that he immediately realized the AK-47 the would-be robber was brandishing wasn’t real.
“This thing was wood almost all the way up to the end of the barrel. No trigger guard, no trigger,” he said. “All the working parts were missing, so I just told the girls, ‘Don’t give him anything. That’s a fake gun.’”
“Well, I’m for real,” the robber said as he swung around and pointed the weapon at Brooks.
“I showed him how real I was,” Brooks said Friday with a chuckle. “I hit him in the nose with my cane.”
The two then engaged in a bizarre duel, using a cane and a phony firearm.
“He kept batting it away with the barrel of the rifle, and I kept batting the barrel of the rifle away,” Brooks said.
Other customers then jumped in and chased the robber out of the restaurant. Fayetteville police are still searching for him.
Mr Brooks says that he was in Vietnam so he got to see a lot of AK-47s – he knows what a real one looks like. Fayetteville is right outside the Fort Bragg main gate, so it’s probably a bad idea to use a fake gun to commit a crime there anyway.
According to ABC15, Army combat veteran Brandon Jenkins was stopped at a traffic light on his motorcycle when Joshua Michael Monigold, who was trying to evade police, jumped from his pickup and tried to take Jenkins’ motorcycle from him.
Jenkins, a combat veteran, fought back. He wasn’t going to let his bike, which he purchased with money earned during his time in the military, get stolen.
“One minute this dude is trying to rip me off my bike and I’m trying to fight him,” Jenkins said. “And then I see two cops pull up and draw their firearms.”
Jenkins said he wasn’t sure what was going on, he just thought he was being attacked.
During the altercation, Monigold was able to get on the motorcycle, but not before being knocked down by the veteran.
Jenkins said that he he’d bought the motorcycle with money he’d saved from his tour in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, when Monigold jumped back into the truck to escape the police, he ran over the motorcycle during his flight.
The views expressed here are personal and do not represent the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the United States government.
I’ve recently written about Brandon Bryant, ex-Air Force drone sensor operator (or as they apparently call them in Norway, a “pilot”) over on my blog, PickYourBattles.Net. Brandon is the star of a new Norwegian documentary called Drone, where his personal story is apparently the meat of the flick. There is just one problem. Brandon Bryant is a liar.
In the short video embedded above, at one point Brandon claims, to an audience in New York City, that the FBI called him to inform him that he was being targeted by ISIS. Then the video shows him telling that exact same story to an audience in Germany, where instead of ISIS he says that the FBI told him he was being targeted by a conservative right wing “Christian Patriot” group. This is par for the course. Sadly, most in the media seem to ignore Brandon’s utter lack of credibility. Or at least they don’t carefully research him. I guess I can’t really blame them. After watching more than forty videos of Brandon running his yap, I do not begrudge them for passing up on the experience. Still this charlatan needs to be exposed.
I know Brandon hates him some TAH so I had to show up over here. And when asked to pile on as a guest blogger, I just couldn’t say no. Kind of like Bryant couldn’t say no to violating his oath of office because he was scared that he might be “ridiculed.” Yeah he said that. In public.
To be fair, those of us in the defense business know that ridicule strikes fear into the hearts of even the most courageous soldiers, strike that, “warriors.” Mortars, rockets, small arms, and anti-aircraft artillery are one thing, but we’re talking about ridicule here. This ain’t X-box, ridicule is the real deal, it’s like being in “the shit.” In fact, I may have just now developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) simply from the thought of ridicule. I am viewing a computer screen right now, so there is a case to be made. If you’re Brandon Bryant, of course, or one of his Legion of Jerkoff superhero sidekicks.
Not only does Brandon claim PTSD from being a drone operator with only a handful of lethal actions from ten thousand miles away from the battlefield, but he has also publicly stated that he’s waiting on his VA benefits so that he can have a place of his own. He’s too good traumatized to get a job and he claims to be homeless. Never mind that he lives with his mother in Missoula, or at least he did, and was using the generous GI Bill to go to school; a bounty that comes not just with full tuition, but also with more than $1000 a month in Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH). Still, Brandon will tell ya, he’s homeless and he’s a “disabled veteran” with no income. He says he has nothing. He touts a “physical injury” from his time in the service, but somehow that doesn’t keep him from literally doing back flips on internet video. If you don’t watch this video for any other reason, it’s worth watching just to see that. But to be fair, I can’t swing a stick without hitting a homeless disabled veteran doing gymnastic maneuvers. So there’s that.
But show some compassion, dear reader. Brandon is too disabled to work. Especially not while also fitting in his globe trotting and fine foreign dining, and giving speeches and attending long Q&As about his European film. That poor bastard really pulls on my heart strings.
I’ve known Brandon online for some time now. When I first became acquainted with him, I thought he might have something of substance to offer to an important discussion. Turns out I was wrong. His story morphed over the years from wanting to be a voice for drone operators serving under bad leadership, to him later claiming that distance technology is cowardly and bad. Of course, there are many who agree with him on that point. We in the biz call them the enemy. They hate our distance warfare capability as much as Brandon does, and they prefer making hand-to-hand IEDs. You know, what Brandon would call honorable combat. Practically a fist fight.
Now this self-proclaimed expert on war is writing letters to the President of the United States, as though he has some kind of moral authority despite the fact that he directly violated his oath of office while he was serving. That doesn’t stop him from making lofty proclamations, though.
Not only have I learned that Brandon will lie without a second thought, as the video above demonstrates, but his motivations are not pure. They weren’t pure when he was in the military, and they’re not pure now. It’s still all about him. He knows nothing of service despite his collection of Reader’s Digest quotes to the contrary. He admits that he’s always wanted to be a hero and that he grew up with comic books. I think it’s fair to say that him plagiarizing the words of Captain America from a Marvel comic both at his Tedx talk, as well as during his ramblings at the Drone documentary premiere in New York City, shows that he hasn’t lost that love of fiction. Brandon is all about spreading fictions.
But public service and public discourse are not the stuff of fairy tales. And there is an important discussion to be had about our nation’s national security and how our military capabilities are utilized. Sadly, Brandon is hurting this discussion and the credibility of better people who inexplicably enable his shenanigans. For some reason, these more serious people are not relegating Brandon to the kid’s table where he belongs. Perhaps these journalists and lawyers are just taking their time, as I did, figuring out his lack of character. I suspect, however, that many of Brandon’s foreign friends, like Tonje Hessen Schei, are not too troubled by his character so long as he follows a particular script.
And that script is infecting and hurting an important discussion all over the internet. Hopefully the fine folks at TAH can help foster and improve the discussion by continuing their fine tradition of exposing this guy for the fraud that he is. Brandon likes social media and a lot of people are eating up the piles of manure he’s feeding them. I hope that those who hate liars as much as myself, and who love their country and want our capability to remain strong while we debate the proper use of that capability, will help get the word out on Facebook and Twitter about this scoundrel.
