"Well done, good and faithful servant . . . enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."
Jeremiah A. Denton Jr., a retired Navy rear admiral and former U.S. senator who survived nearly eight years of captivity in North Vietnamese prisons, and whose public acts of defiance and patriotism came to embody the sacrifices of American POWs in Vietnam, died March 28 at a hospice in Virginia Beach. He was 89.
Adm. Denton was widely known for his heroism as a naval aviator and prisoner of war, and particularly for two television appearances that reached millions of Americans through the evening news during the Vietnam War.
In the first, orchestrated by the North Vietnamese as propaganda and broadcast in the United States in 1966, he appeared in his prison uniform and blinked the word “torture” in Morse code — a secret message to U.S. military intelligence for which he later received the Navy Cross.
He further shocked his captors when answering questions about what he thought of U.S. actions.
“I don’t know what is going on in the war now because the only sources I have access to are North Vietnam radio, magazine and newspapers, but whatever the position of my government is, I agree with it, I support it, and I will support it as long as I live.”
For this singular statement of loyalty, Jeremiah Denton received a series of particularly brutal and horrific torture sessions that included beatings with iron rods, being suspended by his arms behind his back to the point where his shoulders dislocated, and cement rollers over his shins. During his time in Hanoi's infamous Hỏa Lò Prison (the Hanoi Hilton) and another prison known as Alcatraz - a punishment facility - Denton endured over four years in solitary confinement.
In February 1973, Admiral Denton was the first returnee to disembark from the Freedom Bird at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. I remember watching him walk down the steps of the Freedom Bird, dressed in what was obviously freshly issued Vietnam POW garments, and proudly saluting. Even though I was a kid at the time, and not yet an American citizen, I will never forget his words:
"We are honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances. We are profoundly grateful to our Commander-in-Chief and to our nation for this day. God bless America."
It was like he was THANKING America for the opportunity to serve, under such extreme hardship. This is heroism, defined.
Video Of Blonde Woman Walking Through Cairo University Shows Shocking Harrasment
This is outrageous, but its also nothing - this woman got off light, its a miracle she wasn't pack-raped like the women in Tahrir Square. Consider: this behavior took place in the leading university of what is considered the most cosmopolitan city of the Muslim world, and it was compounded by the Dean of the university, who essentially blamed the woman for what took place.
Women are enslaved and abused daily in every Muslim country. There is no more high point of Muslim culture - those days have come and gone if they ever existed at all beyond a few remote pockets of Sufi mysticism. Islam today has relegated itself into a misogynist suicidal death cult bent on taking over the world.
The only thing this man did that everybody else didn't do was to succeed. He was successful and for his sins he had to be punished. He did what Green Berets are supposed to do, I can't believe they burned him for his rank . . . S.L.
Journalist Ann Scott Tyson and Special Forces Maj. Jim Gant in eastern Afghanistan in 2012
A once-promising strategy for stability in Afghanistan ended badly two years ago, along with the career of its author and chief proponent, Army Special Forces Maj. Jim Gant. His gripping story is detailed in a new book, American Spartan, by Ann Scott Tyson, the former Washington Post war correspondent who interviewed him for an admiring story in late 2009. They fell in love. Tyson eventually joined Gant in an Afghan village, where he built a reputation mobilizing local tribes against the Taliban.
A tough, wiry Special Forces soldier, Gant was decorated and recommended for promotion over 22 continuous months of combat in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011. But in the end, the iconoclasm and disdain for military protocol that enabled Gant’s success were instrumental in his eventual downfall.
At his peak, Gant, now 46, posed such a threat to al Qaeda’s objectives that Osama bin Laden personally demanded his head, Tyson writes. Gant's lows came later, when he was accused by the military command of drinking and other violations, including keeping a "paramour,” and using tactics that recklessly endangered the lives of his troops. At the heart of the military's discomfort, Gant believes, was his insistence that he could trust his life, and those of his men, to the tribal Afghan fighters he'd trained and armed to reverse the Taliban’s spread across eastern Afghanistan.
To reach these tribes, Gant took a few seasoned Special Forces warriors "downrange," deep into rural communities where the Taliban held sway. He spent hours drinking tea and listening to village elders. He and his men grew beards. They wore Afghan clothing and learned to speak Pashto. They trained and armed village tribesmen and pledged their lives to one another. In the nonconformist tradition of the Green Berets, Gant shrugged away the U.S. military bureaucracy, with its thickets of regulations, codified as official Tactics, Techniques and Procedures. Among them: rules for specific combat operations that dictate the number of troops, types of vehicles and types of weapons used -- requirements often ignored by Special Forces teams, and especially by Gant.
America has lost its will to win and Mullholland is a tool. If Churchill was running this war, Gant would have been made a General. But he's not and the piss-poor excuse for a human being we've got at the very top hasn't got a clue what a hero looks like and could care even less.
I'm a Green Beret and you earn the Green Beret every day. Mullholland needs to turn his Green Beret in he forfeited it the day he burned Major Gant . . . DISGRACEFUL . . .
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the death of Orde Wingate, arguably the most innovative and certainly one of the most eccentric senior soldiers the British have ever produced . . .
Wingate's legendary Chindits make a river crossing in Burma.
Today Ron Dermer will cross the Potomac over the Arlington Memorial Bridge to visit the National Cemetery where the murdered Kennedy brothers lie among some of the casualties from every conflict America has ever fought. There he will do something that Israeli ambassadors to Washington have been doing on March 24 for 40 years. At the headstone of a British war hero he will lay a wreath for the man who in Hebrew is called HaYedid: the Friend.
Even more unsettling for many of the officers in the Palestine Britain ruled after 1918, where a visceral anti-Semitism was not unknown, were Wingate’s Zionist sympathies. Although distantly related on his mother’s side to Lawrence of Arabia and himself an Arabic speaker who practised it at every opportunity, his unalloyed support for its Jewish settlers was considered contrary to British interests.
Winston Churchill himself famously eulogised him: “. . . a man of genius who might well have become a man of destiny . . .”
Wingate died on March 24, 1944 on a night flight in an American crewed bomber that crashed in the Naga Hills on India’s northeastern border. He was en route to one of the strongholds established well behind Japanese lines in Burma by the British troops he named Chindits, a corruption of the Burmese word for the mythical griffin like stone sentinels outside their temples: Chinthé. He was 41.
Update: Civilian Explains Why He Donned Military Uniform
Two weeks ago, Scott, 22, was confronted by veterans on the Delta College campus for wearing an Airborne Rangers uniform. Scott never served in the military. The confrontation with campus veterans escalated, and eventually led to the arrest of one man by Delta College police officers for disturbing the peace and making threats.
Total maroon toolkit claims he "failed ASVAP because he has PTSD from something that happened to him when he was three" - what? did they drop him on his head?
"I was just supporting my cousins and my family in the military. And to those who I upset and made mad, I do apologize," Scott said from outside his grandfather's Modesto home.
"[U.S. Attorney General's office] states, there is no enforceable action we could have taken against [Scott] without violating his constitutional rights," Delta College police officer Jim Bock explained.
I guess they didn't find 10 USC Sections 771 and 772 nor did they realize the Stolen Valor act had been re-born . . .
"I want to apologize to the Delta police officers for the threats they've been getting," Scott said.
Scott said he has wanted to join the U.S. Army for a long time, but failed his Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test. He took special education classes and never graduated from high school.
Scott's grandfather Joe Scott said his grandson suffered a serious event at age three that left him with post-traumatic stress disorder.
You've got to be stupider than dirt to flunk the ASVAP which is a vocational test not a pass / fail test of academic knowledge . . . I mean is it even POSSIBLE to fail the ASVAP???
OK so this guy is basically a booger-eating moron drool cup candidate . . . but this NEXT guy is involved in criminal fraud and methinks he is destined for The Big House:
A Sonoma County man is accused of using a phony military background to convince people to invest in a phony business. Investors say this man used all sorts of stories -- that he's a Navy SEAL, a Special Forces sniper, a member of the Coast Guard, and the Army Corps of Engineers. All of it, not true. And now, law enforcement is investigating.
Alden Feldon told Marin County Small Claims Court, "For the $6,000 I gave him, he was going to give me $18,000 back."
Chuck Lyman has a small claims case pending against him in Marin County. Feldon says Lyman convinced him he had a deal to buy containers from the Port of Oakland, refurbish them, and sell them to the Army to help bring American troops home from Afghanistan.
That story worked with Feldon and several others, who gave Lyman money to invest. He insisted on cash.
Alden Feldon told Noyes he gave Lyman "$6,000 over time."
Susan Ferrell: "$2,500."
Darlene Stone: "$17,000."
Beth Mullen: "$30,000."
Lyman was able to draw them in, because of his tall tales of military service.
Alden Feldon told Noyes, "He said he had worked in the service and that he was currently employed in the Coast Guard."
Darlene Stone added, "When I first met him, he brought up Navy SEALs and Special Forces."
Susan Ferrell said, "I thought it was the Army Corps of Engineers, and he was like an ex-Navy SEAL."
Lyman's records that Noyes obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show all of that is not true. He spent six years with the Army National Guard Reserves as a mechanic - "no active duty".
National Guard mechanic jumps into a phone booth, come out a Special Forces, Navy SEAL Army Corp of Engineers kinda guy, and then with said new titles, scam people out of tens of thousands of dollars. I'm in the process of standing up a business right now and I need investors, and because of shitstains like this tool it's no wonder people are apprehensive about helping Vets these days . . .
Some of the best officers I ever worked for were ROTC's . . . driving into work this morning I watched the ROTC's doing PT, running down the streets . . . they are our future leaders . . . support them . . . S.L.
I want to tell you about a pair of $500 scholarships to ROTC cadets that the AmmoMan people are hoping to award this summer. I'm told they're struggling to get applications in and so I'm helping spread the word. So far, they haven't received any applicants and nobody knows why.
If you know some worthy kids, help spread the word - we'd really appreciate some applicants. All the details and the application are available here:
A fine and fitting funeral after 99 years for British WWI soldiers killed in battle and buried in a mass grave.
Twenty British soldiers killed in action during the First World War have finally been laid to rest with full military honors, almost 100 years after they died.
The soldiers who perished in the Battle of Loos in 1915 were found in 2010 during clearance work for a new prison near Vendin-le-Vieil, north of Arras, in France.
Ruins of Loos: The battle featured the first British use of poison gas, and followed a four-day artillery bombardment along a six-and-a-half-mile front.
Only one of the troops discovered has been identified - Private William McAleer, of the 7th Battalion the Royal Scottish Fusiliers, part of the 45th Brigade, 15th (Scottish) Division.
Born in Leven, Fife, 22-year-old McAleer died shortly after the battle began and he was identified due to his body being found with his small home-made oval metal tag with his name on it.
Sacred ground: The Dud's Corner graveyard in Loos-en-Gohelle, near the site of the battle.
All 20 soldiers were given full military honours. Private McAleer's coffin was given his own burial plot, with his headstone reading ''13766, Private W. McAleer Royal Scots Fusiliers, 26th September 1915, age 22''.
Many of those buried in the cemetery are unidentified.
NRA Life of Duty presented by Brownells, Inc. - Frontlines sponsored by FNH USA
Bombs targeting Christians have been a peril that other countries have faced for many years. Now, some experts believe that a similar threat for churches on U.S. soil is vastly approaching.
Hey Team: if you're wondering where is STORMBRINGER . . . ?
Thousand Yard Stare
There's been some rather heavy psycho-drama going on around here and to make matters worse it involves serious business operations and watching an old friend self-destruct . . . so much science fiction I simply have not had the bandwidth to post the simplest analysis on Putin and the Crimea, the Malaysian jet or my usual posts re: the Liberals cutting up this country piecemeal and giving it away to the Unworthy Ones . . .
I'm a busy guy on a slow day and the past week has been anything BUT slow . . . things will rebound to normal, they always do . . . let us look for inspiration to one of the great films of the Seventies:
"There's Got To Be A Morning After" - Theme from the Poseidon Adventure
. . . which is to say one of the worst movies ever . . .
Staff Sergeant William J. Guarnere (April 28, 1923 – March 8, 2014) was an NCO with Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division during World War II
His awards and decorations.
SSG Guarnere is the definition of an American Hero . . . God Bless him and all his Brothers of the Greatest Generation . . .
The Democracy Monument was commissioned to honor the coup d-etat of 1932, also known as the Siamese Revolution, when Thailand became a constitutional monarchy. There have been fifteen military coups d-etat since 1932, and three unsuccessful coup attempts. The Democracy Monument is usually center stage for political demonstrations and street protests in Bangkok.
I was in a lot of those coups and revolutions in Thailand.
In 1970 I was in 6th grade at the International School Bangkok.
1970 was a bloodless coup . . .
They rolled the tanks out and the King blessed the coup, which is the way they do it in Thailand. Without the Royal Blessing, any coup will fail. With the King's Blessing, Thailand became a military dictatorship under the Triumvirate of Thanom Kittikachorn, his nephew Narong, and Narong's father-in-law General Praphat.
The Three Tyrants
In 1973 the students rose up and things got bloody, downtown in the political part of town. The military flew helicopter gunships & fired into the crowds.
This was a bad coup.
The King withdrew his Blessing from the Kittikachorn/Praphat team, they left the country and for awhile Thailand enjoyed democracy, with heavy leftist influence. Three years of radical academic-inspired leftist policies followed and Thailand became very dangerous. Several bomb and grenade attacks against students protesting the government and US policies.
One attack originated from the roof of Siam Center (above).
There were bus bombings and the US embassy was laid siege to . . . During this time Saigon & Phnom Penh fell and hordes of refugees showed up telling horrific stories of the communist bloodbaths in Vietnam and Cambodia.
I was in high school at this time, dating girls, going out to the movies and nightclubs in the wildest city in the world.
We all felt like we were living in a movie.
Then in 1978 the right wingers laid seige to Thammasat University - political HQ of the student radicals running the country - and in the ensuing battle - extremely bloody - they revealed TU to be a hive of communist activity.
After they sorted that out there followed a decade-plus of relative stability, until the coups of the early 90s.
By that time I was back in the Kingdom, this time as a military advisor. The guys we were training became a part of the coup activities and so we had to distance ourselves from them. We shut down operations, parked our kit at JUSMAG, went downtown & partied because the airport was shut down and nobody's flying.
It was beyond strange to be there in the city where I'd been an Australian ex-patriate kid, now as an American military advisor . . . hanging out in a hotel room with the local talent . . . watching the columns of smoke rising over the political part of this Southeast Asian city which just so happened to be my home town . . .
The Achille Lauro Cruise Ship Hijackers were Muslims.
The September 11th 2001 Airline Hijackers were Muslims.
The simple things are very important.
We are at War and They are The Enemy:
The "Global War On Terrorism" is a misnomer. We are not at war with "Terror". Terror is a tactic, and we don't make war with tactics. We are at war against Fundamentalist Islam. The dilemma is that if we admit this, then the other side has just won; for we will have become as intolerant as they are and our struggle will become fueled by hate.
The way I look at it is that war and conflict are a constant, they've been with us since Cain and Abel and it will not stop this side of the Second Coming. I make my living at it, what's that make me? I like to think I conduct myself with honor and that I'm about defending good and decent people against the evil that is out there.
"If the Arabs laid down their weapons, there would be peace tomorrow. If Israel lays down her weapons, there will be no more Israel." - Benjamin Netanyahu
The same applies to our operations, only difference is they can nuke two of our most important cities and there will still be a United States of America. They take out Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and its over, khalas.
OK - I gotta go . . . busy busy busy today . . . no rest for the wicked . . .
This is pathetic: a serving commander in the Coast Guard auxiliary posing as a SEAL . . . a phony wannabe . . . they busted him out right there on national TV . . . S.L.
The question of course is why? This man had no need to embellish his resume . . . the work he was involved in with the Coast Guard Auxiliary was noble and legitimate . . . why embellish it with fake tin & fruit salad?
Every year they bust out a new one that's been going around like this - guys with standing in the community based on fake medals and fake veteran status. Jim Van Fleet's saga more extraordinary than most because he pulled it off for twenty years in a very public role in a big Navy town, and he got busted during the course of a TV interview. They built him up like its a human interest story, let him lie his ass off then ZING! I never quite saw it done that way before.
They used to get away with it because America is so big and relatively few have served in elite units. The internet has changed the landscape, however. These days we're finding them more & more and busting them out via sites like Veri-SEAL and Stolen Valor.
The craziest episode I'm aware of has to be the case of Admiral Boorda, the Chief of Naval Operations back in the early nineties. Boorda was celebrated because he'd worked his way up from enlisted to 4-star admiral - unheard of in the class-conscious Navy.
Admiral Jeremy M. Boorda
A distinguished soldier-turned-journalist. Colonel David Hackworth, busted Admiral Boorda out for wearing false decorations: phony V for valor devices on the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal and Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal service ribbons he wore on his uniform. Boorda was apparently so distraught at these revelations that he committed suicide.
Admiral Boorda had a real cult following, in hindsight I suspected this was self-generated because the Navy brass viewed him as an upstart and an outsider. Boorda got himself in the press, they made a big deal about him chumming it up with the enlisted ranks. "The CNO is just like them and he understands them because he was one of them . . . blah . . . blah . . . blah . . ."
Boorda was a politician - not surprising, that's what it takes to make it to the very top of the heap in the military. In the wake of the Tailhook scandal, Boorda faced unrelenting hostility from a majority of Navy flag officers who believed he had betrayed the Navy by allying himself with Clinton administration demands for reform of the Navy's officer corps. In other words, he was a Liberal, and following his suicide the friends and supporters of Admiral Boorda went after Hackworth.
Colonel David Hackworth was the most decorated US soldier since World War II. He served in Korea & Vietnam, and his accomplishments were legendary. Hackworth was run out of the military on a rail because he criticized the military establishment on how they were mismanaging the Vietnam War, he spoke up about it on television, and then he wrote a bestseller about his odyssey.
Colonel Hackworth was later vindicated because everything he said & wrote about was true. When the Boorda episode played out, CNN and the CBS Evening News questioned the accuracy of Hackworth's own military decorations. Dan Rather tried busting Hackworth out for wearing a Ranger tab when he never went to Ranger school. Hackworth said OK fine you can have it, tossed it down on the table during a TV interview.
The truth of the matter - once they did their homework - was that Hackworth earned that Ranger tab serving in combat in a Ranger unit as an enlisted man in Korea. That was before Ranger School existed. Given how quickly the Korean conflict evolved, Special Operations units were being put together on the ground & thrown into combat.
There are Green Berets who served in joint CIA/Special Forces units with behind-the-lines Korean partisans who never set foot in Fort Bragg, did their Airborne training in Japan, never went through jump school at Fort Benning.
The Liberals of the mainstream press tried to bust Hack because he'd outed their darling CNO whom they'd built a cult around. Hack just laughed in their faces. When he threw down that Ranger tab and took it off his official website & records, the truth emerged about how incredibly heroic his service was in Korea. Nothing they dredged up could stick just because he didn't go through a school that didn't even exist during time of his combat service in a Ranger unit.
Col Hackworths awards and decorations. Ten Silver Stars - count 'em - TEN.
What was weird about the whole thing was the Chief of Naval Operations committing suicide over a couple of V devices on some green weenie ribbons that were otherwise legit. It didn't add up, and that's when the rumors started flying . . .
This whole episode was right on the heels of the USS Iowa incident. The USS Iowa was a World War II era battleship, a huge behemoth, one of the last of the dreadnoughts. It was a naval gunnery exercise, off the coast of Puerto Rico. Something went horribly, horribly wrong, and turret #2 blew up, killing 47 men.
The final independent post-incident investigations determined the explosion was caused by 'pressure ramming' bags of powder charges too fast and hard into a hot breech, and the charge bags spontaneously detonated. As any demo man knows, all it takes is heat and pressure to set off explosives - it does not always require a detonator.
But in the immediate aftermath of the incident, the Navy came up with this whopper of a tall tale about how it was a homosexual love affair gone bad, that a sailor, Clayton Hartwig, who died in the explosion, had deliberately caused it. During the investigation, numerous leaks to the media, later attributed to Navy officers and investigators, implied that Hartwig and another sailor, Kendall Truitt, had engaged in a homosexual relationship and that Hartwig had caused the explosion after their relationship had soured.
On no evidence whatsoever, the Navy brass tarnished this poor kids name and his family suffered for it. They sued and the Navy had to back down their allegations, but the damage had been done. So right after that Admiral Boorda comes along - prior enlisted, he's "really tight with the men" - then he gets busted for the fake V's for Valor . . . then right away he suicides . . .
Right on the heels of all this shame & dishonor with the Iowa incident . . . so the rumors were that he was gay and you can't keep THAT a secret in the Navy, and that was about to come out so he committed sideways . . . none of this was ever substantiated by the way.
Do I believe Admiral Boorda was gay? It's certainly believable and I've seen crazier stuff in the military. Why else would an extremely successful man do such a thing? If he was it doesn't take anything away from his honorable service. Boorda even had a plausible excuse for wearing the V's; the ship he was on at the time - during the Vietnam War - was decorated - ships get medals just like people, they paint them right up there on the superstructure . . . Naval Commendation Medal, Naval Achievement Medal with E for Excellence . . . in this case Boorda received his award at the same time - true, apparently - and he thought he got the V with it.
A close look at his citation would determine the accuracy, but this was by no means a career-ender. In fact former CNO Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who was Boorda's commander during the Vietnam War and who authorized these devices for Boorda and many others, wrote a letter to the effect that Boorda's wearing of the devices was "appropriate, justified and proper." All Boorda had to do was adjust his rack and drive on. Why would a guy kill himself over a such a relatively little thing like that? It simply does not make sense . . .
Shame and dishonor are powerful drivers. The only possibilities that make sense are that either Boorda was a Russian spy, or he had a few shipboard romances in his sea locker that preceded the Coed Navy - no big deal in the Navy but NEVER DISCUSSED.
"The Navy? Bah! Nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash!" - Winston Churchill
All this on the tail of the Iowa scandal where Navy brass basically scapegoated an innocent man who - because he was dead - couldn't even defend himself.
Admiral Boorda's V devices pale in comparison to the Coast Guard commander's SEAL impersonation . . . his suicide was absolutely tragic, of course, and absolutely unnecessary. Regarding Colonel Hackworth, I'd say he earned that Ranger tab. Ten Silver Stars . . . I've heard of guys with two but even that is extraordinary.
Sean Linnane is the pseudonym of a retired Special Forces career NCO (1st SFG, 3d SFG, 10th SFG). I served with honor on five continents; I continue to serve in other capacities.
