A Girl and a Gun has a post up that is absolutely stunning… Go. Read. HERE
A Girl and a Gun has a post up that is absolutely stunning… Go. Read. HERE
A Girl and a Gun has a post up that is absolutely stunning… Go. Read. HERE
Another one that came over the transom from a mil email thread…
Your Congress is debating your benefits, your retirement, and your pay, while they ask you to do more.
Just that decision alone makes you part of an elite group.
h/t JP
This is part of an ongoing discussion I have been having with friends from all the services about the gulf that has existed between the military and civilian population. We are worried because, while it existed in my time, the gulf is growing exponentially and this note provides one of the reasons. I encourage you to read it.
It is forwarded (below) unedited.
To the vets from all the wars — those of us who saw combat know what it cost. THANKS!
To those who have not had the honor to serve, here is something to think about the next time you hear some ultra-liberal say that people who are actively trying to kill us are really “peaceful” or when one of the Republican candidates for President says that 9/11 was the fault of the United States, or when people say that people captured on the battlefield should be arrested and tried in US criminal courts rather than being treated as an enemy combatant, or when the man sitting in the White House occupying a chair he is clearly not qualified to fill then proceeds to apologize for America.
Remember ours is the only nation on earth that has established itself as the clear super power capable of totally conquering the world (post WW II) — and then disbanded their military asking as they departed the rescued nations only enough ground to bury the men and women who died giving them a chance at freedom while protecting our Nation, our People, and our Constitution.
Remember that while men and women were and are standing on the wall protecting the Constitution, we had politicians, abetted by citizens and the judiciary, who were at the same time willfully destroying that document AND STILL ARE.
————– as received ————–
I remember the day I found out I got into West Point.
My mom actually showed up in the hallway of my high school and waited for me to get out of class. She was bawling her eyes out and apologizing that she had opened up my admission letter. She wasn’t crying because it had been her dream for me to go there. She was crying because she knew how hard I’d worked to get in, how much I wanted to attend, and how much I wanted to be an infantry officer. I was going to get that opportunity.
That same day two of my teachers took me aside and essentially told me the following: Nick, you’re a smart guy. You don’t have to join the military. You should go to college, instead.
I could easily write a tome defending West Point and the military as I did that day, explaining that USMA is an elite institution, that separate from that it is actually statistically much harder to enlist in the military than it is to get admitted to college, that serving the nation is a challenge that all able-bodied men should at least consider for a host of reasons, but I won’t.
What I will say is that when a 16 year-old kid is being told that attending West Point is going to be bad for his future then there is a dangerous disconnect in America, and entirely too many Americans have no idea what kind of burdens our military is bearing.
In World War II, 11.2% of the nation served in four years.
In Vietnam, 4.3% served in 12 years.
Since 2001, only 0.45% of our population has served in the Global War on Terror.
Over time, fewer and fewer people have shouldered more and more of the burden and it is only getting worse. Our troops were sent to war in Iraq by a Congress consisting of 10% veterans with only one person having a child in the military.
Taxes did not increase to pay for the war.
War bonds were not sold.
Gas was not regulated.
In fact, the average citizen was asked to sacrifice nothing, and has sacrificed nothing unless they have chosen to out of the goodness of their hearts.
The only people who have sacrificed are the veterans and their families. The volunteers. The people who swore an oath to defend this nation. You.
You stand there, deployment after deployment and fight on. You’ve lost relationships, spent years of your lives in extreme conditions, years apart from kids you’ll never get back, and beaten your body in a way that even professional athletes don’t understand.
Then you come home to a nation that doesn’t understand.
They don’t understand suffering.
They don’t understand sacrifice.
They don’t understand that bad people exist
They look at you like you’re a machine – like something is wrong with you. Like you are the misguided one – not them.
When you get out, you sit in the college classrooms with political science teachers that discount your opinions on Iraq and Afghanistan because YOU WERE THERE and can’t understand the macro issues they gathered from books, with your bias.
You watch TV shows where every vet has PTSD and the violent strain at that.
Your Congress is debating your benefits, your retirement, and your pay, while they ask you to do more.
But the amazing thing about you is that you all know this. You know your country will never pay back what you’ve given up.
You know that the populace at large will never truly understand or appreciate what you have done for them.
Hell, you know that in some circles, you will be thought as less than normal for having worn the uniform. But you do it anyway. You do what the greatest men and women of this country have done since 1775 – YOU SERVED.
Just that decision alone makes you part of an elite group.
Not really politically correct (not that I really give a shit), but pretty much on point as far as the sentiment and the bottom line…
And all we are currently hearing is more cut the military language coming from the administration even Obama showing up at the Pentagon, but have you noticed you have not heard the FIRST word about cutting any entitlements in this round of ‘budget’ cuts???
I sure as hell haven’t…
But the more interesting part is how the Pentagon brief is being ‘spun’, and how the “senior military leadership” was on stage with the president and ‘strongly’ behind his steps… Yeah, right…
They were there because they were told to be by Paneta, who has NO agenda for how to manage the hollow force other than ‘hope’ that requirements are lessened… Fat Chance…
China, North Korea, Iran??? And not enough troops NOW to fight two limited conflicts and we’re going to cut even more? And get rid of 20% of the contractor support? And what ‘real’ programs are going to get cut?
h/t JP
You “know” you’re in trouble when you check in and get a piece of paper with your key that says:
“Please to be adviced that you may experience momentary changes in water temperature and water pressure in the course of your abolutions.”
When you are the ‘last’ (literally) faucet on the pipe and furthest from the boiler and water line, EVERY @#^* room ahead of you DOES impact you… And those momentary changes?
Try full hot to full cold in about a millisecond… sigh… Talk about doing the St. Vitus dance in the shower!
So…. I get up at 0400 to do my ‘thing’, and wonder out to the smoke pit about 0430, only to find I’m not the only insomniac smoker…
There is a 50ish lady, in bathrobe and I kid you not, PINK bunny slippers with ears; a young couple in their 20’s (obviously newly married), a little (maybe 5’5″) old man with some OLD Navy tattoos and myself.
As usual, people started chatting, turns out the 50ish lady finished the housing pack out yesterday, and she and hubby are heading to Tucson after a 31 year career in the Navy, to a house they’ve never seen! They ‘traded’ houses with an Air Force Colonel about 4 years ago, who was renting their house in San Diego and liked it… Apparently neither of them have ever been to Tucson, but figured it wouldn’t be a bad place to retire 🙂
She did offer a couple of pieces of advice to the young lady, and those were shave your legs, and let him cuddle… LOL
The young couple (early 20’s) were just transferring in from Stateside, and are both active duty, he’s going to a ship, and she’s going to a shore command locally. And at the shaving comment, they both looked at each other and blushed… 🙂 They were grade school friends, and ‘found’ each other again in boot camp, and married in Norfolk where they were stationed before. Both of them want to make the Navy a career, and it turns out both are E-5s and pretty much on fast tracks to get their education and advancement.
The old man turns out to be 92 grew up in Texas (and retired back there), retired Navy Master Chief in the early 70’s, ex-Destroyerman (EM Mate), and over here to see his grand-daughter. He said he was stationed here in 46-47, and plans to show his daughter his old stomping grounds IF he can find them again… He said his wife passed two years ago, and he’s pretty much bored so decided to go see friends while they were still alive, and decided to come see his grand-daughter since he was ‘heading’ West. He was a veteran of TF 38, aboard USS Hickox, and retired out of San Diego as the Master Chief of DESRON Five. He also said he hadn’t been on a ship since he retired, so he was going to get his daughter to five him a tour 🙂
Flash forward to 0800, he and I are standing out in the smoke pit, chatting and smoking when I hear, “Grandpa!” and see a little blonde coming running up and hug him. Turns out his grand-daughter is early 30’s and a Chief herself! Something tells me those two are going to have fun!
Gonna go wash clothes and watch the games… Y’all have a good weekend!
Peter put up a post HERE about robots, and another HERE in response to Raven Prometheus, who put up a post on robots HERE. Now if I haven’t confused you enough…
Stepping back 38 years we had a P-3 Orion C/S YD-10 that was an alright bird, flew well, no real quirks; until…
In 1973 it had a mid-air with a C-130 off Guam during a search and rescue flight (Both acft made it back to Guam successfully). It was determined that there was ‘minimal’ damage (only 8 feet of the left wing missing), so a trim, lap patch, draining tank 4 and bringing in a test crew would allow the aircraft to be ferried back to Alameda for repairs…
I know the pilot who flew the ferry flights (Guam to Hawaii, Hawaii to Alameda) fairly well, and many years later he admitted he STILL has nightmares about those two flights (more on that later)…
So in late 1974 we get the airplane back, new wing tip, and a four foot wide, ten foot long bandaid painted on the underside of the wing. Now this airplane hasn’t flown an operational flight in almost two years, and equipment needs to be upgraded, and there are acceptance flights, etc. (e.g. a LOT of work to get the bird back up to ASW capable). So the squadron check pilot gathers a min crew to go fly the acceptance, and off they go; only to return with smoke/fumes in the tube in the middle of takeoff roll after a ‘shudder’ in the airframe…
Nothing found, out they go again, get in the air and everything works fine, so the in check is good…
Our crew draws YD-10 as an ASW trainer/ASW acceptance flight a few days later, and off we go, no problems on take-off, climb out, transit, descent to onsta. Down at altitude we power up all the equipment and the airplane literally shudders like a dog shaking off water…
Declare an emergency, climb out, run for base with everybody in parachutes just in case. Smoke and fumes in the tube, activated the fire bill, land safely, nothing found…
Turn back around, go back out, and lose the pitot static system on takeoff (e.g. no airspeed, VSI, important instruments)… Come back around and land, nothing found again…
Jump forward a month, another crew takes the airplane and again it shudders like a dog, the crew comes off station and 15 minutes out of base, the aileron power pack in the service center explodes…
Crew makes it back and lands safely, again no proximate cause found to a one in a million failure…
We take the airplane on deployment to SE Asia in 1975, fly the hell out of it (at one point the acft is never shut down for four days), and no problems. Another crew takes YD-10 for a MAP track off Vietnam, three hours out the airplane shudders and the crew tries to turn around and finds the rudder is locked up… They used differential power to turn the airplane around and fly back to Cubi, only to find the rudder is fine on the descent and landing…
Nothing found…
Lastly, we took off for a similar MAP track, descended onstation (200 feet off the water, 200kts). As we burned off fuel, we would shut down engines to conserve fuel, started to do that, and the airplane shuddered again… Pilots kicked off the autopilot and were hand flying the airplane as #1 was shut down, and we got a prop failed to feather, prop overspeed…
NOT a good situation, as the prop continues to rotate albiet much slower than the other props, and is now disconnected from the engine, and is putting one hellva lot of drag on the airframe. Not to mention the massive amounts of vibration caused by said prop…
Which popped circuit breakers throughout the airplane, cutting comms with homeplate…
We never got high enough to bail out (1000 feet), and never got more than 5kts above stall speed, but the pilots managed to hand fly the bird all the way back to Cubi and land it successfully…
(Note: another crew in another squadron had a similar situation, which ended up with them crashing and loss of 5 personnel)
So yes, inanimate objects CAN have a personality… I’m firmly convinced YD-10 ‘knew’ when things were going to happen, and warned the crew with that shudder…
And the pilot who flew it back to Alameda? He told me in 1998 he STILL has nightmares about looking out the side window and not seeing a wingtip, knowing he was going to crash and all of them would die. He also told me the airplane did shudder occasionally on both flights, for no apparent reason, and the airplane actually flew ‘normally’ with that much wing missing and no aileron on that side…
And no we didn’t name her…
Over at a Girl and a Gun, she’s giving $300 toward a female getting gun training… Link HERE
For any of you females who wonder by, this is well worth it for protection of yourselves, and your loved ones…
A few of us are ponying up ammo and other stuff to help out, and want whomever wins to get good training at minimal cost out of pocket.
On the road, yet again, so light blogging for the next week or so… As it worked out, house sitter (buddy having plumbing work done on his place) needed a place to crash for a week or so, and his wife was going to visit family, so he’s sitting at my place, watching TV and building out another .45 for his collection. I told him if he used any of mine, he had to do the paperwork AND clean the damn things… 🙂
As others have noted, and as is all over the news, guns ARE being used to defend folks, and the cops are 15-20 minutes away… sigh…
At least I’ll get some good sushi this trip 🙂 Y’all take care and go read the folks on the sidebar!
A new law in Illinois now requires you to show photo ID and have your name, address and DOB recorded to buy drain cleaners, and other caustic chemicals…
“Buying a bottle of Drano won’t be the same in Illinois beginning Sunday.
A new state law requires customers purchasing products containing sodium hydroxide, or lye, and other corrosive chemicals to show a legitimate photo ID and to write their name, address and date of birth. And the store clerk will log the time and date of purchase.
Intrusive? Illinois lawmakers said Friday they agree that regulating drain cleaners and other products is needed to protect the public from those who may use them to harm.”
Entire article is HERE.
And HERE is a link to one of the sponsors with a rather interesting statement in it…
An acid attack victim who underwent 17 skin grafts, after burns disfigured 25 percent of her body “led us to this bill,” Mendoza said.
Chicago resident Esperanza Medina, who lobbied on behalf of the bill, was injured in an attack orchestrated by her lover’s wife. The woman who organized the attack was sent to prison for 44 years.
Edit- Bold/underline is mine.
Um… so her lover’s wife got even, went to jail for it, and they STILL voted this in??? I cannot find any statistics as to the actual number of occurances, but still…
Now we CAN’T require people to actually have a valid photo ID to vote, so what’s going to happen when these same people want to buy a can of Drano?
Is the ACLU going to jump in and sue the state for disfranchisement of their poor people who can’t buy their Drano???
What about just prosecuting the perps to the limit of the law, like the lady that got 44 years???
I mean really, where does this crap end???
While my previous post was all about the positive, THIS article at National Review sadly presents the other side of the spectrum we are seeing today.
Hanson is a long time resident of the San Joaquin Valley, and this is almost painful to read…
No question California is on it’s last legs, but the points he raises in this article are worth thinking about regardless of where you live…
Read it and weep, unless you’re a liberal… They will be rejoicing…
This is a good little story about a vivid memory of a P-51 and its pilot, by a fellow who was 12 years old in Canada in 1967.
The Mustang was sitting on the ramp, they said it had flown in during the night from some U.S. Airport because the pilot had been tired.
I marveled at the size of the plane, dwarfing the Pipers and Canucks tied down by her. It was much larger than in the movies. She glistened in the sun like a bulwark of security from days gone by.
The pilot arrived by cab, paid the driver, and then stepped into the pilot’s lounge. He was an older man, his wavy hair was gray and tossed. It looked liked it might have been combed, say, around the turn of the century. His flight jacket was checked, creased and worn- it smelled old and genuine. Old Glory was prominently sewn to it’s shoulder. He projected a quiet air of proficiency and pride devoid of arrogance. He filed a quick flight plan to Montreal (Expo-67 Air Show) then waled across the tarmac.
After taking several minutes to perform his walk-around check, the pilot returned to the flight lounge to ask if anyone would be available to stand by with fire extinguishers while he “flashed the old bird up, just to be safe.” Thought only 12 at the time, I was allowed to stand by with an extinguisher after brief instruction on its use- “If you see a fire, point, then pull this lever. I later became a firefighter, but that’s another story.
The air around the exhaust manifolds shimmered like a mirror from fuel fumes as the huge prop started to rotate. One manifold, then another, and yet another barked- I stepped back with the others. In moments the Packard-built Merlin engine came to life with a thunderous roar, blue flames knifed from her manifolds. I looked at the others’ faces, there was no concern. I lowered the bell of my extinguisher. One of the guys signaled to walk back to the lounge. We did.
Several minutes later we could hear the pilot doing his pre flight run-up. He’d taxied to the end of runway 10 out of sight. All went quiet for several seconds; we raced from the lounge to the second story deck to see if we could catch a glimpse of the P-51 as she started down the runway. We could not. There we stood, evels fixed to a spot half way down 19. Then a roar ripped across the field, much louder than before, like a furious hell spawn set loose- something mighty this way was coming. “Listen to that thing!” said the controller.
In seconds the Mustang burst into our line of sight. Its tail was already off and it was moving faster than anything I’d ever seen by that point on 19. Two-thirds the way down 19 the Mustang was airborne with her gear going up. The prop tips were supersonic; we clasped our ears as the Mustang climbed hellish fast into the circuit to be eaten up by the dog-day haze.
We stood for a few moments in stunned silence trying to digest what we’d just seen. The radio controller rushed by me to the radio. “Kingston tower calling Mustang?” He looked back to us as he waited for an acknowledgement.
The radio crackled, “Go ahead Kingston.”
“Roger Mustang, Kingston tower would like to advise the circuit is clear for a low level pass.” I stood in shock because the controller had, more or less, just asked the pilot to return for an impromptu air show! The controller looked at us, “What?” He asked. “I can’t let that guy go without asking, I couldn’t forgive myself.”
The radio crackled once again, “Kingston, do I have permission for a low level east to west across the field?” “Roger Mustang, the circuit is clear for an east to west pass.”
“Roger Kingston, I’m coming out of 3000 feet, stand by.”
We rushed back onto the second-story deck, eyes fixed toward the eastern haze. The sound was subtle at first, a high-pitched whine, a muffled screech, a distant scream.
Moments later the P-51 burst through the haze. Her airframe straining against positive Gs and gravity, wing tips spilling contrails of condensed air, prop-tips again supersonic as the burnished bird blasted across the eastern margin of the field shredding and tearing the air.
At about 500mph and 150 yards from where we stood she passed with the old American pilot saluting. Imagine. A salute! I felt like laughing, I felt like crying, she glistened, she screamed, the building shook, my heart pounded.
Then the old pilot pulled her up and rolled, and rolled, and rolled out of sight into the broken clouds and indelibly into my memory. I’ve never wanted to be an American more than on that day. It was a time when many nations in the world looked to America as their big brother, a steady and even-handed beacon of security who navigated the difficult political water with grace and style; not unlike the pilot who’d just flown into my memory. He was proud, not arrogant, humble, not a braggart, old and honest, projecting an aura of America at it’s best. That America will return one day, I know it will. Until that time, I’ll just send off this story; call it a reciprocal salute to the old American pilot who wove a memory for a young Canadian that’s lasted a lifetime.
For those who’ve never heard a P-51 Mustang in full ‘song’, you don’t know what you’re missing…
Jets are loud, but jets are for kids.
The old Mustangs and their brothers are the TRUE sound of Freedom!
h/t JP
This one is making the rounds of the mil email and was sent to me by an old Vet who got it from a WWII vet…
Nuff Said…