From Afghanistan (HT Instapundit):

July 1, 2009

For several nights he has walked down an empty, wooden hallway partially lit by a mixture of moonlight and a spotlight off in the distance, stopping sporadically to observe different sections of the structure. After he moves on, he leaves the building as calm as it was when he found it.

Being at a construction site before anyone else arrives is a nightly routine for Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Landon Church, an electrician from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion-5.

Church, a native of Byron, Mich., is the project lead electrician in building the combat operation centers here. Since March, his knowledge and experience have been essential in the progress made here by Marine Expeditionary Brigade-Afghanistan and its subordinate elements.

“This has been the opportunity of a lifetime,” Church said. “I knew in the beginning that the MEB project was crucial to the beginning of operations here and it has been an honor to head up and manage the electrical portions of the project.”

Church, 24, has less than four years in the Navy and is in charge of planning and estimating the electrical requirements of the three buildings.

He and his team of four electricians completed the electrical portions of the brigade’s command center less than two weeks ago and installed more than 10,000 feet of wiring throughout the building that will run power to hundreds of computers, telephones and more.

“I spent many hours reviewing building codes for electrical components and making sure I had an overall knowledge of every aspect of the project, down to the very last detail,” Church said. “With that knowledge, I had the best idea of how to go about tasking, coordinating and managing my troops.”

Church was trained as an electrician in Wichita Falls, Texas, from May to July 2006. It was then where he learned about electrical distribution and interior wiring, motors and controls, and how to climb utility poles and troubleshoot electrical problems.

From Texas he was then sent to his current duty station at Port Hueneme, Calif., and deployed to Kuwait from September to November 2006, and later to eastern Afghanistan’s Camp Salerno from December 2006 to February 2007.

Nine months before coming here he was assigned to his battalion’s convoy security element. There he focused on weapons training, improvised explosive device awareness and urban combat.

Shortly after arriving here, he was handed the blue-prints for three of the largest projects he’d ever fathomed, even though he hadn’t worked as an electrician for almost a year.

“I kind of stared at the blue-prints for a while, wondering how I would ever plan this out,” Church reminisced. “I chose to push through it one item at a time, and pretty soon the plan came together and eventually evolved into one of the biggest projects the Seabees have seen in quite some time.”

Petty Officer 1st Class Garrison Hardisty, project supervisor, said he had no doubt in Church’s ability to adjust to the challenge, and proof of that is the recent completion of the MEB-Afghanistan COC.

“That’s what Seabees do, we make do with what little we have,” Hardisty said.
Church attributes his success to the hard work and commitment of the electricians in his team. He said he’s happy with the results he’s produced so far, but said that wouldn’t be the case if not for his men.

“I’ve tasked them, and they haven’t let me down yet,” Church said. “They put in the extra effort to get the mission done.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

This video is two years old, but I wanted to document the fact that before they sold their souls to become the “All Barack Channel,” ABC News actually produced a 3-minute segment worth watching…and repeating:

Person of the Week - Bert Brady - Welcome Home (audio saved at host) —

BTW, Barack’s “Prescription for America” infomercial came in dead last (HT The Live Feed via Michelle Malkin) …along with some re-runs.

Link:

(begin sarcasm)

Thanks to Leon Panetta’s comment about Dick Cheney (”he’s [almost] wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point”), I finally have a grasp of history as revised by the Left.

You see, I now know that Winston Churchill wanted to see the Nazis rise in Germany.

I now know that Churchill wanted Hitler to break his word in that Sudetenland “peace in our time” deal the Fuhrer made with Neville Chamberlain. Not that Churchill expected Hitler to keep his word; he knew he wouldn’t. He wanted Hitler to break his word.

I now know that Churchill wanted Hitler to roll the tanks into Poland in 1939.

Churchill wanted the German tanks to run right around the supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line through Holland and Belgium and have them roll into Paris, so Hitler could then turn his attention to taking out Great Britain.

Isn’t it obvious? Churchill warned that these or very similar things would happen, and they did. Thus World War II is clearly all his fault. Chamberlain’s off the hook, a misunderstood hero.

(/sarcasm)

Seriously, if Churchill really wanted these events to happen in the name of partisanship or power, he would have shut his trap during the 1930s and waited for history to catch up with him. But he didn’t, because he was first and foremost a patriot and a statesman.

Likewise, if he really wanted to see another serious terrorist attack or a North Korean nuke on our own soil, Dick Cheney would shut his trap and let the Obama administration continue to demonstrate weakness, cut funding to key defense efforts, give more respect to our enemies than to our friends, and release the Gitmo terrorists without uttering a word.

But Dick Cheney has spoken out, precisely because above all he is a patriot and a statesman. God bless Dick Cheney.

Leon Panetta, in turning his critical office into yet another political arm of the Democratic Party, has shown himself to be unfit for that office. He should resign. An administration with even the slightest grasp of the importance of Panetta’s job would fire him. Neither will happen.

Dick Cheney forever; Leon Panetta, NEVER.

From Gulfport, Mississippi and Ravenna, Ohio:

May 24, 2009

A Ravenna native is being hailed in his Gulf Coast adopted hometown as a hero after saving the lives of four people who were missing at sea.

Petty Officer Levi Willett, a Ravenna native and member of the U.S. Coast Guard, helped rescue four people who had been floating in the water at least 18 hours.

Willett said five people, including three police officers had been boating when their boat crashed near Horn Island, about 20 miles off the coast of Gulfport, Miss. The four people who were rescued all were wearing life jackets, and had floated about 16 miles away from the site of the boat crash.

The rescue attempt is big news in the Gulf Coast area, Willett said, because successful rescues are rare.

“Everybody goes out to the Highlands to party for the weekend, and they end up getting caught in the high seas,” he said. “Usually we never find them. Most of the time it’s just disappointing.”

Willett’s team went in search of the lost boaters in their jet. Other members of the team were Commander O’Brien and Lt. Commander Fields, pilots of the jet; Petty Officer Hamilton, the drop master, and Petty Officer Friese. Willett’s role was as one of the observers and a member of the air crew.

The crew’s job was to locate the boaters and toss items to them, such as rafts, so they could be spotted by a rescue helicopter.

The crew had been searching for 3 1/2 hours, and decided to go off the grid to search for them.

“If we hadn’t gone off the grid, we never would have found them,” he said.

Willett looked into the water and saw a small dot, which he said was about the size of a pencil. As the jet drew closer to the boaters, he spotted four red life jackets and the lost boaters frantically waving for help.

“I’ve never been involved in anything like that in my life,” he said. “My adrenaline was going. Everybody was screaming.”

Typically, people can survive at sea only about 18 hours before succumbing to hypothermia, although the time frame varies depending on the water temperature, he said.

Willett said most people don’t realize how important it is to follow proper safety rules when boating. Lifejackets can be important not only to stay above water, but also so rescuers can spot people lost at sea. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

From Kearneysville, West Virginia:

As the minutes slowly crept past the noon hour above the skies of Nazi-occupied Holland in early fall 1944, nothing could prepare Jefferson County native Allen Russell for what fate had in store for him.

Russell, a Purple Heart recipient, along with 10,000 to 12,000 of his fellow paratroopers with the 101st and 82nd Airborne Division, would soon parachute to the ground below to secure what Allied troops would come to know as “Hell’s Highway.” The fateful jump would mark the start of a journey that would see Russell saved from certain German capture by a courageous village girl, bitter cold and fighting in the Battle of Bulge. His journey would culminate with the occupation of Hitler’s vacation retreat.

“I landed in Holland on the 17th of September 1944, five minutes after 12 in broad daylight, and that’s when all hell broke loose,” Russell said. “From then on I guess it was every man for himself.”

All stories have a beginning, however, and Russell’s began in late November 1943 when he was called up for active duty at the age of 22.

Married and expecting his first child, Russell was sent to Camp Croft, S.C., for basic training After completing basic training he volunteered for paratrooper school and was sent to Fort Benning, Ga. where he completed jump school.

“The only reason I volunteered was because it paid $50 extra a month. I was sending a lot of it home to my wife,” Russell said.

After qualifying, he was sent to communications school and from there was sent to Fort Meade, Md. His journey then led him to New York where Russell and 8,000 to 10,000 other soldiers boarded the Ile De France, a converted luxury liner, for the four-and-a-half week trip by sea to Britain. Once they landed troops began conducting dry runs of forthcoming combat jumps.

“We didn’t know what was going on,” Russell said.

The only thing he and his fellow paratroopers were told, was, sooner or later, they would see combat. The 101st, nicknamed the Screaming Eagles, were to play a vital role in Operation Market Garden, a two-phase operation involving paratroopers and ground forces. The paratroopers were to jump into Holland and secure a corridor for advancing ground forces.

Russell was dropped 120 miles behind enemy lines where paratroopers were tasked with keeping the roadway and bridges open for advancing troops.

“We named it Hell’s Highway because first the Germans had it and then we had it,” Russell said.

His unit’s main objective once they landed was to secure a highway bridge south of the village of Son, which has also gone by the name Zon.

“Our main objective when we jumped into Holland was to take the bridge in Son,” he said. “When the first parachute opened up in the air, the Germans blew the bridge.”

With the bridge destroyed, Allied engineers constructed a wooden plank bridge allowing troops to cross. From there, troops were able to secure the area and later liberated the town of Eindhoven.

At one point during the long campaign in Holland, Russell was tasked with climbing a telephone pole to cut a telephone wire so it could be used it to establish a communications line.

“They had radios, but the Germans could pick up a radio just as well as we could. It’s not like the radios that we have today,” Russell said.

As he climbed the pole, the top suddenly broke off, forcing Russell to jump to the ground. The broken portion of the pole fell across his back, leaving him hardly able to move. At first, the injured Russell was to be taken to a first aid station, but he refused until his fellow soldiers could continue establishing the communications line.

He was eventually carried to an old building filled with straw where he could rest and recover.

“They used it to sleep on. It was the only thing we had,” Russell said.

That night, as Russell lay on the makeshift straw bed recovering from his back injury, German forces staged a counterattack and were able to push forward, retaking the building where Russell lay helpless. That’s when he said a local village girl literally saved his life.

“This girl came over and she put a blanket over top of me and put this stuff over top of me. The Germans didn’t know I was in there and I laid there in that stuff that night,” Russell said.

From his hiding spot that night he spied a crack in the building’s foundation where he saw two German soldiers standing, smoking a cigarettes.

“I laid right there and they didn’t know I was in there,” he said. “They came in right over top of me. That (blanket) was the only thing that kept me from being a prisoner of war.”

Go here for the rest of the story.

From Milwaukee, Wisconsin:

POSTED: 3:28 pm CDT May 22, 2009
UPDATED: 4:45 pm CDT May 22, 2009

Teaches Life Saving Skills From Battlefield

An Iraq war veteran is teaching local law enforcement officers some life saving techniques from the battlefield. The skills that saved his life could also save officers caught in extreme situations.
Chris Cook knows the heat of battle and what it takes to save a life.

“We have to turn the heat up a little bit.” Cook said, “Knowing that the techniques we’re talking about today actually work, obviously I’m evidence that I’m standing here today.”

On Sept. 11th, 2004 Cook was serving in Iraq with the National Guard when his unit was attacked by a suicide bomber.

Cook shot the bomber, saving his unit. After the explosion, Cook said he (applied a) tourniquet on his own shattered leg. It probably saved his life.

Cook and others started a company, Medicor Proeliator, and today they’re teaching officers battlefield tested techniques that are now used to save lives on the streets, when a shooter is still out there.

“It has such greater meaning for me than just a class,” Cook said, “We arm officers with the tools to save other people’s lives, but we don’t arm them with the ability to save their own.”

The key is committing these techniques to muscle memory so they become instinct when the bullets fly for real, he said.

Go here for the rest of the story.

From Waltham, Massachusetts:

Posted May 23, 2009 07:02 AM

In January 1945, Edward A. Cloonan Jr. was a staff sergeant with the 70th Infantry Division in Europe during World War II when he and other US soldiers were ambushed. As bullets flew, one struck him in the chest, tearing into a Catholic daily missal.

“It was a prayer book that his mother had sent to him,” said Mr. Cloonan’s son Richard, of Manassas, Va. “Basically it saved his life. He had it in his upper left chest pocket, right over his heart, and he would have been mortally wounded.”

Spared on the battlefield, Mr. Cloonan went home to the job he had started just before joining the Army and rose to become chief of the Waltham Fire Department, a position he held for 20 years. Mr. Cloonan, who lived in the city of his birth his entire life, died Tuesday in his Waltham home. He was 90.

“It’s an incredible story,” said Mr. Cloonan’s son Ned of Greenwich, Conn., calling the prayer book a kind of spiritual body armor.

“I’ve seen this missal,” he said. “There’s a hole and burn marks all around, but it acted as the very first Kevlar. I mean, it was God’s Kevlar.”

Mr. Cloonan graduated in 1936 from St. Mary’s High School.”His father was a policeman for the city of Waltham,” Richard said. “I think that’s where he got his sense of service to the community.”

Joining the fire department in 1941, Mr. Cloonan was a call firefighter before leaving to fight in World War II. He served in the 275th Infantry Regiment of the 70th Infantry Division, which was known as the Trailblazers, and fought in France, Germany, and the Battle of the Bulge.

For helping to lead troops under heavy fire on three separate days in Philippsbourg, France, and Saarbrucken, Germany, Mr. Cloonan was awarded a Bronze Star for his heroism. Despite the honor, he was reticent about discussing his wartime service.

“This is a guy who never spoke about the war until five or six years ago,” Ned said. “He always participated in the various alumni services, but never talked about what he saw. He basically went to honor all those people who didn’t come back.”

Mr. Cloonan had specific plans for his return to Waltham.

“When he was in the war, he said to guys in the service, ‘This is what I want. I’m going to go home, I’m going to join the fire department, and I’m going to marry an Irish girl,’ ” his son said.

The Irish girl turned out to be Patricia Sullivan of Wellesley, whom he met through a relative. They married 61 years ago.

But before marrying, he was already back with the Waltham Fire Department, where he was promoted to lieutenant in 1948, to captain in 1951, and to deputy fire chief in 1954. Ten years later, Mr. Cloonan was named chief of the department, a position he held until 1984.

“He came up through the ranks very quickly,” said Waltham Fire Chief Richard Cardillo, who joined the department while Mr. Cloonan was the boss and became chief in 2005. “He was chief for 20 years. I can’t even imagine that.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

From Richmond Hill, Georgia (related picture here)

Monday, May 25, 2009

Chris Carter loves the Army, but he might love the University of Georgia a little more.

When his unit (Alpha Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division) entered Baghdad in the spring of 2003, he hoisted a UGA flag over one of the presidential palaces.

In a less puckish moment on the same tour, he jumped out of his Bradley Fighting Vehicle in the middle of a firefight to rescue an Iraqi woman on a bridge near the Euphrates.

That event was captured by an embedded Associated Press reporter and broadcast around the world, putting Carter in the uncomfortable position of being an early hero in a war with few heroes. A standing ovation at his church upon his return to the United States embarrassed him. “I’m just a small-town guy who probably got more attention than he deserves,” he said back then.

Today, Carter has been promoted from captain to major. He is preparing to embark on his third tour of Iraq and for the birth of his second child; both events are scheduled to occur around the same time in October.

Between the first and second tours, he met his wife Celeste at a wedding of mutual friends. “When I met him, I didn’t put two and two together,” she said. “I didn’t know who he was until later. You’d never know it, because he didn’t talk about it.”

Married in 2005, they have a 10-month-old boy, Jackson, and one on the way. Currently they live outside the Fort Stewart Army base, in the Richmond Hill community.

Carter was in on the ground floor of the Iraq war, and he may be there as the United States winds down its involvement. He has mixed feelings about that possibility: he knows the war is stressful to troops and their families, but he wants the mission completed before the U.S. leaves. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

From Blackfive (direct YouTube link; HT Michelle Malkin):

At RealClearPolitics, and surely many other places:

The Bush policies in the war on terror won’t have to await vindication by historians. Obama is doing it day by day. His denials mean nothing. Look at his deeds.

It must be heck to have spent the last 6-plus years waiting for your guy to come in and undo all of George Bush’s supposed evil, only to see the guy who you thought would do the undoing largely do the opposite.

I’m not under any illusions that Obama isn’t a weakling in many foreign-policy areas, or that his public poses as a hawk will be reflected in key or even day-to-day decisions. Sadly, he is a weakling, and has shown it in several ways already, and his advisers will virtually always recommend that he take the appease-y way out.

Still it’s fun to watch the guy directly contradict so many things he said on the campaign trail and fail to do so many of the things he promised he would do to return us to a pre-9/11 mentality, while the left is forced to swallow it with minimal objection — lest they too offend Dear Leader.

Rephrased, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is very imperfectly trying to apply the Three Steps of Super-sized Lying I discussed yesterday in presidential terms at Pajamas Media to her knock-down, drag-out spat with the CIA:

1. First, you have to have the nerve to state what you know is an obvious falsehood without betraying any hint that you realize it is false, and in a way that causes virtually all who hear it to instinctively believe it.
2. Sadly, more often than not, Step 1 is enough, because the second step requires actual follow-up by someone who heard it. That someone has to discover, document, and prove beyond doubt that the statement or contention made by the person involved is not true.
3. Sometimes Step 2 occurs, but the truth-tellers’ proof gets little or no attention. But if it does, the third step requires the person to cling to their guns, so to speak, using a variety of tactics that effectively amount to saying, “Who are you going to believe, me or the irrefutable evidence?”

Step 1? Well, she tried, but too many people weren’t buying.

Step 2? There’s been enough follow-up to show that she has indeed been lying. That knowledge, while not particularly widespread, has gone well beyond what little people know about the whoppers Obama and his peeps have foisted on us that were noted at the PJM column.

Step 3? She’s trying, but the video below would seem to indicate that it’s not working particularly well. A long holiday weekend will help her cause.

Unfortunately and unlike President Obama, who along with former president Bill Clinton has the Three Steps down cold, she’s just not that good at it. Anyone familiar with the dispute knows she’s lying, at this point, that has to include her Democratic Party colleagues. There are simply too many others with sufficient credibility who have contradicted her, and she has produced no evidence to support her contentions.

What will be the consequences? I’m guessing you won’t hear the word “ethics” much from the Democratic Party for a while. Beyond that, who knows? Watch this YouTube, and decide for yourself (HT Hot Air):

UPDATE: For the slow of learning, the Pajamas Media column also referenced above identifies the five biggest alleged lies of the Bush administration and shows that they weren’t, and still aren’t.

TOPSIDE NOTE: I don’t think I have ever seen any of the major networks, cable shows, or so-called newspapers of record link to an important speech as a PDF. If anyone can cite a specific example besides the one cited here, let me know.

If there isn’t one (and I don’t think there is), that would make the speculations here that much more plausible.

_______________

At the right is an enlarged screen cap of part of the home page at the New York Times taken at about 4 p.m. yesterday afternoon.

Hmm. Obama’s speech was right there, one-click ready. Cheney’s is a clunky, clumsy PDF, even though:

• Bill Kristol, who wrote for the Times until recently and has contacts there, had the remarks as prepared for delivery at the Weekly Standard at 10:30 in the morning.
• The American Enterprise Institute also presumably put their pre-speech transcript up in the morning.
• Text-only PDFs can be converted to HTML pretty easily.

Did the Times link to a PDF because Cheney was so verbose? Nope: Cheney’s speech weighed in at about 5,500 words. Barack Obama’s was over 6,500.

Since the Cheney speech was clearly and readily available in HTML, process of elimination for motivation pretty much leaves slant, slight, pettiness, or laziness.

But why would the Times want readers to go to the more easily accessed Obama speech and make them work to get to Cheney’s? The first three of the items mentioned in the last paragraph would explain it.

I would suggest that there is motive. After all, as far as the Old Gray Lady is concerned, the fewer readers who saw this excerpt from Cheney’s speech the better — especially while it was the topic du jour:

Our government prevented attacks and saved lives through the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which let us intercept calls and track contacts between al-Qaida and persons inside the United States. The program was top secret, and for good reason, until the editors of the New York Times got it and put it on the front page.

After 9/11, the Times had spent months publishing the pictures and the stories of every single individual killed by al-Qaida on 9/11. Now here was that same newspaper publishing secrets in a way that could only help al-Qaida. It impressed the Pulitzer committee, but it damn sure didn’t serve the interests of our country or the safety of our people.

The Politico put the full Cheney speech up at 4:45 yesterday afternoon in user-ready form.

The Times finally posted the Cheney speech transcript from the Associated Press in HTML at 9:44 last night after the buzz died down. Mission accomplished?

Exit speculation: Did the Times convert a reader-ready HTML to PDF in the name of obstruction? Given the petty people there, that’s not inconceivable.

Speaking of speculation: Jimmy Orr at the Christian Science Monitor wonders if Obama started late to prevent the networks from covering Cheney. I wonder if Obama rambled on and on for the same reason. This is what you do when you know your ideas are weaker. Cheney waited until Obama was done. Surely a lot of people with afternoon plans who attended the AEI event had them messed up. That’s just another day in Obama’s it’s-all-about-me world.

Sensible conservatives have been waiting for the appearance of another Ronald Reagan-like figure on the national scene. We’re learning that he’s actually been here all along.

Objective history will identify Dick Cheney as a successful Congressman; Defense Secretary; Vice President; and — largely thanks to this speech — patriot and statesman (Update: President Obama’s speech follows Cheney’s; thus we can see later who history vindicates):

Thank you all very much, and Arthur, thank you for that introduction. It’s good to be back at AEI, where we have many friends. Lynne is one of your longtime scholars, and I’m looking forward to spending more time here myself as a returning trustee. What happened was, they were looking for a new member of the board of trustees, and they asked me to head up the search committee.

I first came to AEI after serving at the Pentagon, and departed only after a very interesting job offer came along. I had no expectation of returning to public life, but my career worked out a little differently. Those eight years as vice president were quite a journey, and during a time of big events and great decisions, I don’t think I missed much.

Being the first vice president who had also served as secretary of defense, naturally my duties tended toward national security. I focused on those challenges day to day, mostly free from the usual political distractions. I had the advantage of being a vice president content with the responsibilities I had, and going about my work with no higher ambition. Today, I’m an even freer man. Your kind invitation brings me here as a private citizen – a career in politics behind me, no elections to win or lose, and no favor to seek.