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#1
05-29-2011, 10:39 AM
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A Sad Memorial Day
While tomorrow we take time to remember and pay tribute to those who have given their lives for this country, most recently engaged in the fight of arab/muslim terrorism, our President is engaged in backroom deals giving even more money away. Oddly enough to some of the same countries the arab/muslim terrorists are from.
BTW Are we broke or not? Here's a novel idea, instead of channeling efforts to give more money away through a popularity launderer how about using that money to pay down our own debt. I know that's next to impossible with the current administration so if it has to be 'given' away give it to surviving families of troops killed recently. But several G-8 nations are struggling with large public debts, making hefty foreign aid programs controversial. As a result, they are channeling their efforts through international institutions they fund, including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, African Development Bank and European Investment Bank. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...newsreel_world 
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#2
05-29-2011, 10:45 AM
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And you know I'm cool with you, but just felt you were mixing busines with pleasure, if that makes sense.
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#3
05-29-2011, 10:56 AM
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It's Fleet Week in NYC and every uniform I pass I say thank you to and so do tons of New Yorkers. You have to see how happy and thankful these kids get when people come up to them and thank them. It may not last long but while they are here in NYC they are treated with a lot of respect.
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#4
05-29-2011, 10:58 AM
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BTW great article on Jimmy Zwit front cover of the trib today. Going to make it down today or tomorrow prob tomorrow.
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#5
05-29-2011, 10:59 AM
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Instead of "sad", I prefer to be honored, grateful and proud of those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice. Because of their selflessness, my family and I are living a good life.
Wars are not always necessary or right, but this country was born by war and most certainly shaped by war. I am forever in debt to all who have given their lives, served and are currently serving our country.
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#6
05-29-2011, 11:13 AM
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#7
05-29-2011, 11:51 AM
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Well said bigs, captures the feelings of most of us....
__________________
"If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think" - Clarence Darrow, American lawyer (1857-1938) When you are right, no one remembers;when you are wrong, no one forgets. Thought for today.."No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong" - Francois, Duc de la Rochefoucauld, French moralist (1613-1680)
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#8
05-29-2011, 11:56 AM
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Pies are too gaudy for something this good. 
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#9
05-29-2011, 12:05 PM
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A#1 fine work.
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#10
05-29-2011, 12:06 PM
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One great war story. Fortunately numerous DTers have met Jim Zwit and once you do you'll never forget him...
The woman walks toward the wall. She presses a fingertip into the shiny, dark stone, traces it down the wall, left to right, left to right, name after carved name, a roster of the dead palpable against her skin. Vietnam War Jim Zwit is about to leave when he catches sight of the woman. He has been on the Washington, D.C., mall with two old Army buddies for several hours on this sunny April day, the 40th anniversary of the 1971 firefight that killed eight of his fellow soldiers. He has cried a little, reminisced and prayed, talked to the kids who arrive by the busload to see the memorial and learn what the Vietnam War was really like. He's ready to go home. The woman bends, her eyes scan lower. Zwit, noting that she is middle-age and black, thinks: It can't be. Can it? Zwit knows this stretch of wall as well as he knows his scars, the pink welts that run from below his navel to his right nipple, the sinkhole of puckered skin where he once had ribs. This is Panel 4W. The names of the eight men who died the night he earned his scars begin close to the bottom, at Line 123. Robert. Jerry. Charles. Terry. Ronald. Rex. Paul. William. Over the past four decades, Zwit has dedicated himself to finding their families so he could tell their mothers or fathers, their brothers or sisters or cousins, how they fought, how they died, and that they weren't alone. He has tracked down relatives of all the men. All except one. William. William Ward. No matter how he searched, every clue went cold. The woman drops onto a knee. Zwit walks over, kneels down next to her, rests a hand on her shoulder. He feels the rustle of a dormant hope. "Can I help you find something?" he says. In April 1971, Jim Zwit, the second in a family of nine children from Chicago's South Side, trekked with his infantry company down into the A Shau Valley and up onto an enemy ridge to retrieve the body of a soldier killed two days before. Like the other 77 men known as the Delta Raiders, he carried 80 pounds in his rucksack. His M60 machine gun weighed 28 pounds more. He had just turned 20 years old. At dusk on the second day, the men trudged up a trail littered with trees toppled by American bombs, swatting machetes at the suffocating jungle. They could sense, but couldn't see, the underground tunnels and bunkers of the North Vietnamese soldiers who had lured them deeper into danger by moving the body they came to get. Shortly before 7 p.m., in the dying light, the quiet jungle erupted. Explosions, the pop of machine guns, shouts and screams, bullets, blood, shrapnel, the stench of sweat and burnt gunpowder. Then silence. From up the trail, in the kill zone, a voice floated back toward the men hunkered behind a felled tree. I'm hurt. I need a medic. Zwit recognized the voice. It belonged to Paul McKenzie, the only black lieutenant in the company, a guy who never put you in danger without standing next to you. Zwit was big and blond in those days, a wrestler and a hockey player whose Chicago friends called him a Pollock even though his parents were of Slovakian and German stock. He'd also been called hyperactive. Outgoing. Life of the party. Now he jumped over the protective log and darted up the trail. From the brush, he heard Vietnamese chatter. Spying the entry to a camouflaged bunker, he walked over, aimed his gun into the hole and fired. Forty years later, in his La Grange Park kitchen, he will close his eyes and squeeze his crossed arms tight across his scarred chest when he recounts how the bunker suddenly went quiet. He had never killed before. Zwit lugged McKenzie over his right shoulder and was halfway down the trail when the second mad minute that's what the soldiers called the bursts of violence struck. McKenzie died almost instantly, hurled to the ground, riddled with metal fragments and looking Jim Zwit in the eye. Without the shield of McKenzie's body, Zwit may have been killed too. As it was, he was just bloodied and broken. When the rescue helicopter finally arrived, it couldn't land, so Zwit was reeled up, slamming from tree to tree as the chopper lurched to avoid gunfire from the ground. This is how Zwit remembers it. Others who were there that night tell a similar story. There are a few hard documents that testify to what happened, like the handwritten military report for April 15, 1971, that noted Zwit's condition when he arrived at the hospital: "Multiple frag wounds to chest ... Doctors do not believe he will live." He lived. He lost his right kidney, a piece of his liver and four ribs. He would spend the rest of his life with shrapnel in his abdomen. But he did what eight men he fought beside that night weren't allowed to do. He lived. After a couple of years of surgeries, he got a job as a Chicago cop. He married, had two kids, divorced, remarried in 1987, would soon have two more kids. He left the police force to go into business as a process server who also did investigations for law firms. And through it all, he kept thinking about the promise he'd made to Bob Hein. Hein was one of the men who'd carried him over the log to safety the night of the firefight. In the hours before the rescue helicopter came, Hein dashed back repeatedly from the combat to bring Zwit water, until, at some point, he didn't come back. Months earlier, the two had made a pact: If only one of us gets out, the survivor has to find the family of the other guy and tell them how it happened. Somewhere between Vietnam and home, Zwit lost Hein's address, and in those days, it was hard to find people. There was no Internet, no Facebook, no email. War documents were classified. Nothing was digitized. Zwit remembered Hein was from Sacramento, though, and once a friend visiting California ripped the "Hein" pages from the Sacramento phone book. Zwit called every one. No luck. When he heard about a Sacramento TV anchor involved in a California memorial for Vietnam vets, he wrote and asked for help. The anchor sent his letter to the commission handling the memorial. One of the men on the commission was a vet and a property appraiser; he scoured property tax records. No luck. Finally, in 1988, a chain of coincidence led Zwit to Hein's mother. She still lived in Sacramento, but she'd remarried and changed her last name. The day he called her, she told him that Bob had received a posthumous medal for carrying one of his comrades to safety. "Mrs. Hein," Zwit remembers saying, "I'm the guy he carried back." After that, Zwit went, in his words, a little bonkers. He vowed to find the families of the other seven dead soldiers. He made call after call to the National Archives in pursuit of leads. He phoned newspapers in tiny towns, searching for obituaries. He narrowed one search with the help of a private investigator buddy who had access to a credit-check company. One by one, he found the dead men's relatives. In West Virginia. Oklahoma. New York. One by one, they thanked him, for giving them more details than what came in the curt government notification, for bringing what was lost briefly alive again. "We got no personal belongings of Terry's back," one mother wrote him in a shaky hand, from Nashville, N.C. "Not even his glasses. He had worn them since 2nd grade and wore them all the time except when sleeping or bathing. I'm sure he died with them on his face ... I am sending a picture of Terry that I have cherished for years." Only once did Zwit feel that his overture was unwelcome, and he understood. And only one family's whereabouts eluded him. William Ward's. "Can I help you find something?" the man asks. But Lois Daniels has just seen the one name, the one out of the more than 58,000 names on the black wall, that she's looking for. "William Ward," she murmurs. She points her camera. The gleaming stone reflects the image of the big guy in blue jeans, with wispy faded blond hair, who has mysteriously appeared beside her. "Did I hear you right?" the man says. "Did you say, 'William Ward?'" Does he say it before she stands up? After? When they tell it later, they won't remember it exactly the same. But he has heard her right. She says she grew up in the North Carolina countryside near Ward's family, is married to his cousin. She says Ward's mom and six younger siblings are still alive, though no longer on the North Carolina farm. Two men who have come to the wall with Zwit today join them. One is the helicopter pilot who pulled Zwit out after the firefight. The other is Bob Gervasi, a platoon buddy who carried Ward's body away. Soon, they're all hugging and, as Gervasi will say later, a little wet behind the eyeballs. "It's great you came for the anniversary," Zwit tells Daniels. She says, "What anniversary?" She doesn't realize that April 15, 2011, is the 40th anniversary of Ward's death. She's here only because it's grandparents day at her grandkids' school. Her daughter in nearby Maryland has invited her to join them on a drive to D.C. It is her first visit to the wall. "It was," she'll say afterward, "a divine appointment." A month later, in May 2011, the Ward family held a reunion. Among other events, they gathered to watch a video Jim Zwit sent of the slim, young guy they called Spooky. For years, Ward's family didn't talk about his death, though year after year, on the anniversary, his mother placed a photo of him, in uniform, in the local paper. They knew little about how Ward died, nothing about his comrades. They are grateful for what Zwit has told them, especially for the reassurance that, unlike so many other men, he went fast and didn't suffer. "It feels good to know the full story," said his sister, Ethel Carter. "Maybe that's why I couldn't talk about it. I didn't know what I was talking about. Now I know." When they played the video at the reunion, several people whooped in delight. Look. Spooky, in Vietnam, down by some water, in his green uniform. Smiling, just like he did the day he left for the airport and said, "I'll see you all." But then someone noticed Ward's mom. The video had upset her. They cut it off. Later, several of William Ward's siblings made plans to go to the wall this Memorial Day, for the first time in many years, for which they thank Jim Zwit. Remembering is a mixed blessing. Some people like to remember what's difficult as a way to preserve life or to understand it. Others try to forget. Jim Zwit has wanted the knowledge he has shared with the families of eight dead soldiers to give them a choice about what and how they remember. And he has, no doubt, wanted something for himself, too, something to do with his own memories, even if he's not sure what. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...47,full.column
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#11
05-29-2011, 12:06 PM
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kissy-kissy
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#14
05-29-2011, 12:40 PM
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Pat Tillman...we speak your name.
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#16
05-29-2011, 03:18 PM
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__________________
"If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think" - Clarence Darrow, American lawyer (1857-1938) When you are right, no one remembers;when you are wrong, no one forgets. Thought for today.."No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong" - Francois, Duc de la Rochefoucauld, French moralist (1613-1680)
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#17
05-29-2011, 03:41 PM
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__________________
"Have the clean racing people run any ads explaining that giving a horse a Starbucks and a chocolate poppyseed muffin for breakfast would likely result in a ten year suspension for the trainer?" - Dr. Andrew Roberts
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#18
05-29-2011, 03:43 PM
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__________________
"Have the clean racing people run any ads explaining that giving a horse a Starbucks and a chocolate poppyseed muffin for breakfast would likely result in a ten year suspension for the trainer?" - Dr. Andrew Roberts
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#19
05-29-2011, 04:12 PM
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BTW Didn't know you had relatives that died in service. God Bless and I thank them! Even if they would want our money sent to Egypt.
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#20
05-29-2011, 04:36 PM
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It Is The Veteran.. War makes strange giant creatures out of the little routine men who inhabit the Earth. --WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle. It is the VETERAN , not the preacher, who has given us freedom of religion. It is the VETERAN , not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the VETERAN , not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the VETERAN , not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to assemble. It is the VETERAN , not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial. It is the VETERAN , not the politician, Who has given us the right to vote. It is the VETERAN who serves under the Flag.
__________________
"If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think" - Clarence Darrow, American lawyer (1857-1938) When you are right, no one remembers;when you are wrong, no one forgets. Thought for today.."No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong" - Francois, Duc de la Rochefoucauld, French moralist (1613-1680)
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