VFW

VFW
by catnapping
11/08/2008, 9:31 AM #

Sitting with friends
at a long table cluttered
with bowls of oatmeal
and cold stacks of pancakes,
he holds his coffee mug
with both hands.

And recites the memory
of a cold ditch in Korea,
of hot chinese metal
and smoldering wool,
and the certainty
that he would burst into flames.


© catnapping

An open letter to locdog

Subject: An open letter to locdog
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Feb 3 2006 8:48AM

Well, you're gone. If you're to be believed, one last time, you are now pulling on a uniform every morning. I've decided to post this letter to you now because there were still things to be said but I didn't want to talk to you. Talking to you had ceased being fun a couple of years ago. I'm not going to say good luck nor bon voyage nor thanks, I said all those things the first time you announced your imminent departure, and the second time and I was still saying some of them the third time. By the fourth going away party, I was starting to feel vaguely cheated, my arm sore from throwing confetti, my face tired from smiling that smile of gratitude saved for when the 'boys' go marching by. No, I thought the time had arrived to return the wedding gifts, call back the wedding invitations, cancel the caterer. The wedding was off, locdog was the runaway bride. But now you say you're 'in' and I'm willing to believe you one last time.

If it's true, you've begun to learn a few things you only suspected until now. At 28 you're too old. Doesn't seem fair does it? 28, too old. But the kids will be quicker and will heal faster and you can't do anything about it. Physically, you're going to work your ass off just to stay in the middle of the pack. Get used to it. Your advantage, if you have one, is maturity. You should 'see' things clearer than the kids, should understand the implications before they do. You should get a jump on the ball, a little head start. But just a little one. Don't waste it.

You are now seeing the reality of what 'the service' means in a way you never appreciated before. You raised your hand, took the oath and control of your life passed from your hands to the hands of an absolute stranger and, in some instances, a stranger who does not necessarily have your best interests at heart. You will look up, periodically, and find yourself taking orders from some mouth-breathing fucker who can't cut it on the outside, so he's hiding out in the service and now you're his meat. You'll see your welfare, maybe your very survival, depends on this prick making good decisions and he doesn't look like he could work his way through the menu down at the local Denny's. It will take your breath away.

You are going to see things and places you've only imagined. The reality will surprise you. You'll be struck at how completely different they are. How daydreaming about things, how theorizing, how hearing stories about things is no substitute for doing them. This should broaden you, should soften your view of the world, give you pause when you are ready to argue about what's right and wrong. You should begin to suspect you don't know everything, after all. 'Certainty' will make you uncomfortable. This is what should happen but there are no guarantees. I worry about you, worry about your doctrinaire view of the world. You may come back a renaissance man or a martinet. The issue is in doubt.

And finally, let me make you a promise. You are not forgotten. As control of your life passed into the hands of that stranger, a little corner of that control passed into my hands, too. You see, in a democracy, you are now my responsibility. Of The People, by The People and for The People is not an empty phrase. You are in my 'service'. I will do my best to raise a reasoned and persistent voice in your defense when I think unscrupulous men are unnecessarily placing you in danger. I will hold them accountable. I will be your advocate.

http://fray.slate.com/?id=3936&m=16812522

230 candles. Semper Fidelis.

Subject: 230 candles. Semper Fidelis.
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Nov 10 2005 12:57PM

Today, all over the world, Marines will eat birthday cake. It is being baked this morning on every Navy ship and in every mess hall in the Marine Corps. It will be placed on every table where a Marine comes for dinner. It will be placed in green tins and sealed against the flying dust or the rain and carried in trucks or helicopters or simply by hand, to every Marine who can be reached, and they will eat cake today.

It's hard to explain these things. I can't really remember a time I didn't want to be a Marine. I was raised in a family surrounded by veterans. My father and all of my uncles, most of the men who lived on our block had been in WWII. Every man who worked in my father's grocery store had been in the war except Charlie the baker who was too old and John Toyama and Art Yuba who had lost everything they owned and been sent to Manzanar. John and May's daughter Casey had been born at the county fair grounds where they were held before the buses took them up north. But mostly the men in my childhood had served. Lots of tattoos and a scar or two but very few stories except when my uncle Dick was around and then we'd all force him to tell some of his funny stories. And once in a while, my uncle Bob would say something about North Africa. But that was all. I guess that's how it starts. Little boys are wired that way.

So today they'll have their cake. Some of them will look up and be surprised that they weren't forgotten, that somebody took the time to bag up those little green tins and ride a helicopter or a truck out to their foxhole or bunker so they could have a piece of overly sweet white cake.

It's hard to explain these things. My bus pulled through the main gate at MCRD, San Diego at about 10 o'clock on a Friday evening, passed under the Spanish arches, swung left and skirted the parade ground and came to a stop in front of the receiving barracks. We were like sightseers, tourists, everybody craning their necks, looking around, talking excitedly, until a drill instructor stepped onto the bus and shouted, 'Shut your fucking mouths! Now clear this bus!' Total silence. Guy next to me looked like he'd been punched in the gut.

In the next three hours, we boxed up our civilian clothes, took our first Marine Corps shower, pulled on our first baggy green uniforms and stood in line to get our haircuts, eight chairs, no waiting, fifteen seconds under the cutters, three seconds under the air hose and out the hatch to your left and get on the yellow footprints. Except when we cleared the hatch, a drill instructor stopped us from getting on the yellow footprints.

He stood in the dark street with his hands on his hips and watched us form into a crowd at the edge of the light from inside the barbershop.

'Do not stand on my yellow footprints. Stay off of them,' he said. There was some whispering and he shouted, 'Shut the fuck up! Just stand there like the mob you are.' When we'd all come out, he said, 'Now listen up, scum! You're a sad fucking bunch. I see fear in your faces and confusion and I can see some of you are feeling sorry for yourselves already. Here three whole fucking hours and already feeling sorry for yourselves! Well, let's get something straight. I want you to look at these foot prints and I want you to know they've been here all along, from the fucking beginning. Year after year, generations of boots have stepped onto these footprints. When we get you stinking civilians in here, we have to have a way to start the process and it starts right here with these footprints. When you step onto them you're going to form up into an actual formation, a platoon. The footprints are here because you can't do it by yourself and we don't have the time to go through all the words it would take to get you into an actual, fucking formation, so we have these foot prints painted on the ground. From now on, every single time you form up, this is how you'll form up, in this shape, with this spacing. When I, or one of your other D.I.'s, call you out, this is how we want to find you. But there's something else these footprints should tell you. When you're feeling sorry for yourself, that it's oh so hard, that maybe you made a mistake, that you won't make it, remember this, thousands of men have passed through here, thousands of men who wanted that uniform just as bad as you want it and they made it and they started by stepping onto these painted footprints. Men headed for China, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and then the men headed for the Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal, Tarawa and yes, Iwo Jima. Some of the feet that stepped onto these footprints were later wrapped in rags and walked out over the ice of the Chosin Reservoir carrying their dead and wounded. Those men were here once looking at these footprints. Now you will stop being civilians and start trying to be Marines. Form up!' And he stepped back, out of the way and we moved onto the footprints. I found myself in the first rank, second man from the left. I looked down at the painted footprints one last time and he grumbled, 'Turn to the right, forward march!...'

Two days later, we got our dog tags. No big deal. We were told to slip them around our necks and feed them into our shirts and get back to work. That night, after lights out, I could hear guys pulling them out and looking at them. In the dark, I could just barely see mine, four lines embossed on thin metal. Name, service number and blood type, religious affiliation and the fourth line, four letters, USMC. In the dark, I ran my thumb over and over those four letters.

Two years later, I sat in a bunker on the south face of Charlie 2 with fifteen other Marines and listened to the artillery shells impacting Con Thien to our north. The deep 'whump, whump, whump' went on and on. They had been taking nearly a thousand rounds a day, every day. Someone finally muttered, 'Jesus!' and the explosions just continued. By this time, we were getting shelled everyday and when they paused with Con Thien, we knew it would take the gunners in North Vietnam about four minutes and then we'd start to take incoming. Guys gathered in the doorways of the bunker and waited. 'Whump, whump, whump, whump' I looked over at Spike and he just shook his head. 'Whump, whump' and then silence. I swallowed. It was our turn. A couple of guys skidded through the door, looking for a place to sit it out. Then another guy comes running in dragging a duffle bag. Outside someone yells 'incoming' and then a moment of absolute silence, then three enormous explosions and the bunker shudders and dirt cascades from the roof and we all sit quietly taking it...the air coursing with more impacts, everybody mainlining adrenaline. Eight minutes, ten, maybe more. Someone outside yells for a Corpsman, Doc John moves to the door and waits for just a second, 'Whump, whump...' and he disappears out into the battery, wiremen crouching in the doorway hesitate and then leave to find and repair broken communications wire. The shelling goes on. Whump, whump...Then finally a shell explodes outside the bunker door and then the quiet and we all wait listening...ten seconds, fifteen, thirty...is it over? I find Spike and he shrugs. They've done this before. We wait a little longer, my ears ringing like fuckers. Finally someone looks at the guy with the duffel bag and says, 'Where ya goin'?' and everybody laughs. But he smiles and loosens the top of the bag and reaches in and pulls out a bent green tin of birthday cake. In the bag, he's got twenty five pieces of birthday cake.

It's hard to explain these things.

http://fray.slate.com/?id=3936&m=16173325

A short comment on spitting.

Subject: A short comment on spitting.
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Apr 21 2005 3:45PM

Happened to catch this morning's interview on The Today Show (with MattLaurer&KatieCouric) with Michael A. Smith, who is in the news for having stood in a bookstore line for 90 minutes so that he could spit a mouthful of tobacco juice in Jane Fonda's face. He was unrepentent, saying when he returned from Vietnam through LAX in Los Angeles, he was confronted with a 'line of anti-war protestors who proceeded to spit on me'. His grievance with Ms. Fonda is, of course, for her ill-conceived trip/photo-op to North Vietnam at the height of the war. One photograph shows her sitting, laughing, on an anti-aircraft gun, surrounded by her amused and delighted hosts. It was, and remains, a hurtful image to most vets. It seems the sleek Ms. Fonda, who has led a materially privileged life, suffers from a remarkable paucity of taste and decorum but has now, with a book to hawk, come to her senses and recognises that grainy photograph and the trip it frames, to have been a monumental lapse of judgement (although, I must say, one is hard pressed to find sufficient evidence that she's displayed good judgement frequently enough to make this occasion a 'lapse'). In any event, she's now sorry and can't we all be friends and just read a good book ('like, for instance, this one I'm holding') or maybe aerobicize together. But I really don't have a problem with Jane and, frankly, I didn't have a problem with her back when she took her trip to North Vietnam. I didn't much care one way or the other. She's always seemed kinda transparent to me, she still does. But Mr. Smith is another kettle of fish. I don't know if he's really a Vietnam veteran or not. He's 54 which puts him at the youngish margin for having served in the Nam but it's possible. This morning, he was wearing a sweatshirt with an embroidered Eagle,Globe&Anchor and the word 'Marines' under it. So I guess he's saying he was in the Marine Corps. I don't know, maybe. But this makes it even more difficult for him to have been in the Nam because in 1972-73 (he'd have been 18) there were few Marines left in South Vietnam but like I say it's possible. And I hope so because in the next few days, people are going to be digging into his background. It will be simple enough to find his service records and then we'll all know if he went to Vietnam and in which branch he served. My problem with Mr. Smith is his story about the lines of anti-war protestors he found waiting for him at LAX and that they 'spit' on him. I came back from overseas through Los Angeles and no one spit on me, there were no lines of antiwar protestors and if truth be told, no one seemed to notice me at all even though I was wearing a dress uniform with appropriate rank insignia and ribbons. No one even glanced at me. Further I'll say this, if anyone had spit on me (or at me) there'd have been an old fashioned melee, someone would have needed stitches and I'd have spent some time in the brig. I don't know where that part of Mr. Smith's story is. Did he just 'take it' passively? In all my friends who are veterans, we've heard this spitting story over and over again and none of us had a similar experience, not one. And if returning Vietnam vets had been faced with this kind of treatment at the airport, I'd have gone down to the airport to be with them and I wouldn't have gone alone. But no such incidents were reported in the Los Angeles Times, no local news anchor mentioned it, Los Angeles Police and airport security make no mention of it in their histories of the period. In fact, no such story appears in the New York Times either. It was a bad time for the country.
Even after all these years, its still painful to think about. But if we're going to think about it and talk about it, let's keep it real. Mr. Smith says he was acting on behalf of all Vietnam veterans upon whom Ms. Fonda spit all those years ago. Well, he's not doing it on my behalf, I'll be responsible for my own dance card, thank you very much. I think Jane Fonda and her opinion about Vietnam are and were nearly irrelevant. I can't imagine standing in a line for an hour and a half to be close to her for any reason. I think Mr. Smith needs to get over it and move on.

http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=14450054

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Subject: the spitting urban legend
From: Fracas
Date: Apr 21 2005 3:55PM

Sociologist Jerry Lembcke who wrote The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam thinks that it didn't. When a NYT columnist repeated the story in 2000, Lembcke challenged it:

I faxed a letter to the Times letters' editor saying that, "in research for my book….I found no evidence that such incidents ever took place. It would have been impossible for protesters with rotten vegetables to get close to a wounded soldier returning from Vietnam." I pointed out that, "stories of spat-upon veterans are apocryphal. They discredit the Americans who opposed the war and help construct an alibi for why we lost, namely, that we were betrayed on the home front by disloyal fifth columnists." My letter was never printed.

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Subject: I got a kick out of Sean Hannity last night..
From: Jack_Dallas
Date: Apr 21 2005 4:26PM

He kept showing pictures of Fonda sitting on the AA Battery and called it a "Tank".

I hate the bitch, but I wouldn't stand in line for an hour and a half to see someone I like, much less someone I detest, just to tell her off. We do need to move on.

Our side lost, Fonda's, Kerry's and Ramsey Clark's side won. Let's get over it.

Jack

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Subject: RE: A short comment on spitting.
From: zinya
Date: Apr 21 2005 4:32PM

hi rye,

thanks much for this posting. And for any of us who have followed and 'absorbed' your past postings about your vietnam years, i know and appreciate (well, as much as a contemporary who angsted from these shores, not those could) what it represents to you to relive those experiences and their fractured counter-interpretations then and still now...

Part of my response to your post is already in my reply above to Fracas' post.

What i decided to add here is that i had first-hand experience with something related which i can attest is NOT 'urban myth': In 1976, i volunteered in the US Senate campaign of Tom Hayden, already then married to Jane Fonda, an ultimately losing campaign. But one afternoon after work during the primary campaign, i was standing on the street in Westwood handing our campaign brochures, and out of the blue a relatively petite clearly upper-middle-class, well-dressed woman spit at ME as she looked at our signs for Hayden, seethed out the words "Jane Fonda" and her spittle landed at my feet. It was stunning.

Such was the venom then .. and i dare say the chances of more than just this one woman turning their hatred for Jane Fonda into their own spittings on whoever they came to view by association as the 'internal enemy' (us liberals!! eek!!) made me wonder to what extent the stories of servicemen being spit on were, instead, projections as 'cover stories' over conduct which instead was going in the opposite direction, toward -- not from -- the "left." Maybe my experience was a fairly isolated experience, i don't know, and it only happened once, most stunningly because of the appearance of 'decorum' from which it spewed ...

again, rye, a heartfelt appreciation for the thoughtful sincerity of your post ... good to see ya.

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Subject: RE: I've no idea whether or not anyone
From: Ele_
Date: Apr 21 2005 4:56PM

sput on veterans upon their return from Vietnam. Yet, even if someone did this is no excuse for a man to spit on an old lady - and that's what Ms. Fonda is, regardless of her facelifts - thirty years later. I hope she will press charges and the brute will get something other than probation.

Having said that, I shall breathlessly wait for this top poster's article condemning delinquents who have thrown pies at Ms. Coulter

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Subject: I heartily condemn anyone who would waste
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Apr 21 2005 6:19PM

a pie on Ms. Coulter. There, take a breath.

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Subject: RE: A short comment on spitting.
From: GeminiToo
Date: Apr 21 2005 5:48PM

I don't remember hearing about protesters spitting on vets until many years after the fact (in the eighties, I think). I knew a number of vets who returned and none of them reported being spat on. I also do not remember any contemporaneous reports of spitting, and I'm sure given the passions back then such incidents would have been reported had they occurred.

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Subject: Well,
From: HawkEye
Date: Apr 21 2005 7:58PM

The Department of Veterans Affairs can't seem to find independent corroboration (or any Police Reports) for Vietnam Veterans getting "Spit On" upon returning to the United States of America.
There are Vietnam Veterans who "claim" (in more ways than one, as they file a claim for it) they were Spit On though... and say that they can no longer sleep well at ngiht thinking about it, or work, so they would like to be Service Connected for the injury suffered.... which they believe falls under PTSD. It does seem to have messed up Michael Smith, I wonder if he is getting Tax Payer Funds for the "Event"?

You know, a guy just off the plane from Vietnam getting spit on would most likely cause a little trouble... and there would have been a Report.... and strangely enough it is Republicans (or those who openly support Republicans) who most often report getting "Spit On" you would think they would have fought back a little bit.



HawkEye

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Is Combat Fun?

The Prisoner

Subject: The Prisoner
From: MichaelRyerson
Date: Jan 13 2005 8:57AM

THE PRISONER
I could hear the chopper. I could see the grunts coming up the hill with the kid trussed up; stumbling, blindfolded, head bent forward, elbows wired behind his back.

Rod came over: they got a prisoner this morning, he said. Who? The guys over on the knoll, they got a prisoner from the probe last night, found him in their wire this morning. Is he wounded? No, I don't think he's hurt at all. How the fuck did they do that? I don't know, all I know is they got him and they need to get him back to Dong Ha, turn him over to the VN Marines for questioning. Yeah, I laughed; the VN Marines and the spooks. Rod frowned and shook his head, yeah, probably the spooks, too.

Hey Chris, pop a smoke will ya? Chris looked up at us and nodded, reached up and pulled a smoke grenade from his suspender strap, pulled the pin and underhanded it onto the LZ. Yellow smoke billowed up and drifted quickly off to the south.

Rod lit a cigarette. They're going to kill him, sure as shit. Yeah - maybe. No maybe. Remember when we took that woman down to their barracks in Quang Tri and turned her over? Did you see the cells? How many were there, five, maybe, six? And how many prisoners do you think we gave them during Hastings? Twenty, thirty? Where the hell do you think they went? They went in the ground, man, in the fucking ground. The French taught them how, they question them and then they squeeze them and question them some more and when they're done, they go in a hole.

The Huey came up the valley about fifty feet above the trees, fast, maybe 70, 80 knots, then rose up and swung across our position in a wide arc with the starboard door facing straight down. He leveled off about a quarter mile to the south and came in quick with the sun glinting off the canopy and a guy hanging out the starboard door grinning. Christiansen stood at the north side of the LZ holding his rifle up over his head with both hands. The pilot dropped his tail to scrape off some speed and the yellow smoke separated into two symmetrical columns curling up into the rotor wash. The skids came to within an inch of the ground and paused before they settled down.

So they drop this kid's blindfold so he can help get into the chopper and I see he's about sixteen and his eyes are flying all over the place. And the grunts are talking to the crew chief and he's nodding and they're pointing at me. And Rod comes over and says they're going to have you escort him to the rear and turn him over. I glance at the kid with the wild eyes and know he's going to be beaten senseless and there isn't a fucking thing I can do about it. Maybe he'll talk real quick and they'll just blow his brains out. But maybe he thinks he's a tough guy or worse, maybe he doesn't know anything, and they have to be sure they've got everything he's got, so they hurt him, use the hotwires, smother him with the wet mask, beat him with the canes, revive him and punch him bloody until somebody decides he's got no more to give.

It's different with dead people, you know, different with corpses. You forget about their politics, forget about them being mean or stupid or eating with their mouth open, forget that maybe you didn't like them very much. On the ground they just seem, well, dead, like you're kinda looking at yourself maybe, but like an empty sack, sad, pathetic even. Petty differences are gone. I guess pathos is what's waiting for us all. I remember seeing a guy I knew one time on the ground dead and he had this kind of goofy last name, you know - the kind that he probably got ribbed about a lot but now, on the ground, I could read his last name on his shirt front and there wasn't anything funny about it anymore. Gook bodies are the same, except when you just finished killing them and your blood is still up, like maybe they were trying to kill you, too. So maybe then you take a leak on the body or stub out a butt on them, you know, something to reinforce your disconnectedness from the whole thing. A gesture of disrespect really meant for the living, for anyone who sees the callousness, for your own sense of lawlessness. But even then, after you calm down, when you look at them, you just see a fucking sack of meat, some poor bastard who's never going to laugh or belch or see his home again. And then you have to back up from that real quick, 'cause you can't be looking down into that hole, feeling sorry for anybody. You've got to hold your trim. Can't spend a quiet minute looking 'cause you might see something you'll have to carry around. Yeah, that's it, you've got to look hard 'at' things because you've got to do your job but you can't really afford to 'see' anything, because that's too much to carry around. You've got to see what you need to see to do your job and no more.

But with the prisoners it was really different. They were in your control. They were no longer a threat, past being able to hurt you and if they'd survived the rage of their capture, weren't bleeding to death and no one blew them to kingdom-come, then you had this guy, living and breathing and the question became what do you do with them, what good could they do you? What use were they? Did they have something you needed? How do you get it? And once you've got it, how can you be sure you got it all? And what follows is an ugly fucking business, cold, calculated. No way to avoid what it is; what it really is. This was part of it, business, maybe survival. Nobody talked about it or almost nobody. There's no adrenalin-rush-movie-music to cover up what has to happen, no posturing. This is not God's work.

Then the tail lifts and we rise into a sharp left bank and for a second I think this guy's taking us out the same way he came in and I feel my stomach knotting up and I glance quickly at Rod and he's looking down into the trees and I think we're going to take fire any fucking minute and I feel my buttocks pulling together but then the pilot swings us into a hard right and we climb up the ridge, the green curtain of hardwood trees streaming past the open door and we drop down the other side into the Ngan River Valley and level off just above the treetops and he's cranking at eighty knots and I settle back.

So this kid's going in the chopper with us and nobody's really looking at him and I'm thinking how fucking easy it would be to kick this poor bastard out, save him a lot of pain, save him from a long night under the lights at Dong Ha. How he'd be a lot better off if he'd just been killed last night in the wire and what can we get from this kid that's going to be worth a shit to us anyway. And I glance up at the crew chief and he's looking right into my eyes and he knows exactly what I'm thinking and I know he's thought the same thing before and he shakes his head as if to say it's not worth it, don't even think about it. The rotor wash is pulsing through the open door and this kid's long black hair is swirling around his face and lifting the bottom of the blindfold but he can't see anything except maybe the aluminum deck and the toes of my boots and he's shivering.

Yeah, this is what it's come down to, I'm thinking about murdering him to save him or, more likely, to lessen my own guilt from turning him over to the interrogators. What a noble bastard I am. And what if he knows something, maybe even knows something which seems insignificant to him but when you put it side-by-side with something else, it makes a picture and we avoid being overrun somewhere. Then how noble am I? No, he's going to stand it as long as he can stand it and then he's going into the ground and I'm going to live with it.

Now we're coming up on the mouth of the valley, the east end, the place where the north slope is covered with NVA antiaircraft and heavy machineguns and nobody goes through here at low-level no matter how much airspeed you've got and right on cue we rise up suddenly, pulling pitch, an express elevator, through twenty five hundred, cool air rushing in, three thousand, ears popping, air going cold, and level off at maybe four thousand feet and still pumping hard. LZ Crow is down there someplace, I used to be able to pick it out every time through here but it's harder and harder to see. Hastings was a long time ago and the jungle just keeps taking back the clearings, taking back the LZ's.

We pick up the Cam Lo River, Camp Carroll down below, off to the right, and I flash on one of those 155mm shells coming through the aircraft and I shiver involuntarily. Out the left side, in the distance, I can see dust rising from Charlie Two and beyond it, the dark outline of Con Thien. The kid has settled down, maybe accepting his fate. Do they believe in fate? Do we? Do I? And we start the long descent into Dong Ha, the engine powering back, the pitch lowering, the guy next to me fumbling for a smoke, clicking a Zippo open and, cupping his hands against the wind, taking a long, deep drag, sucking the smoke way down into his lungs with that tiny smile of satisfaction we all save for our private pleasures. I wonder if he realizes that could kill him in twenty or thirty years.

The crew chief grabs the overhead and swings in toward me; we're going to drop these other guys at Dong Ha, his face right up against mine. What? He shouts, we're going to drop these other guys at Dong Ha before we take you on to Quang Tri, he's nodding. Quang Tri? Yeah, they want this guy; he nods toward the prisoner, down there. Okay, I answer not sure how I'm going to get back up to Dong Ha. I look at Rod, Quang Tri, I shout and point at the prisoner and my chest. Rod laughs and says, I'll ride along, don't want you to get lost.

We come to a hover west of Delta Med and settle onto the pad nearest the regimental FSCC. Guys start swinging out, the prisoner moves slightly and I put my hand on his shoulder and he settles back. The door gunner leans out and looks to the rear and speaks into his microphone clearing his side of the aircraft for the pilot, the crew chief leans out on his side and does the same and we lift into a slow bank to the right, across the runway, Rod sitting on my right with the kid on the deck between us. Rod holding the radio between his feet.

I'm going to hell.

http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=13531356

Fuck Memorial Day

(i hope i'm not mistaken, but i seem to remember that deepak chopra was aka judah benhur...and lately, fritz gerlich.)

Active Military Member Response

Subject: Active military member response
From: Doug
Date: Apr 4 2001 8:13PM

1) Naval aircrew only cary arms in a hot zone. I have installed the pistol holsters into theyre survival equipment before in the Gulf. It is also optional to the aircrew. There is no threat where the P-3 was flying until the event ocurred. They were not in a position to resist, other than to hold the aircraft door handle manually.

2) This kind of intercept is common to U.S. Navy planes. We do it, they do it, everybody does it. It is military flexing known as Power Projection used to show all nations of our naval presence. This keeps countries in check. The Soviets have just recently caught us off guard and buzzed the flight deck of the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk. I was on the flight deck when it happened so I know it to be true. When a Soviet Recon Plane, very simaler to the P-3 Orion now in custody, flew into Kitty Hawk airspace, we reacted just as the Chinese have here. We intercepted and flew adjacent to them for great distances, taking photographs of it as we went. My point, Naval aviators repeatedly see this kind of contact. They are trained to deal with it. They would never manuever and place their aircraft at risk causing this incident. Especially in a slow moving P-3 aircraft. Now if you were in a hotrod fighter aircraft men/boys, might you do a little hot dogging to show your strength. Possibly. Would you try to out manuever a Ferreri in a Greyhound bus? My guess is the Chines airman was responsible. 23 aircrew to 1, I'll bet on the U.S. Why, I know the integrity of a Naval Aircraft Commander, 1st hand. I live and work with them daily, and I respect them for the harm they face on a day to day basis.

3) Ignorance, ignorance, ignorance. Someone on this even used the word "Chink" on this post page. People like you are causing half the problems in this world. And you are a veteran. I'm ashamed to be associated with you. We are not out here protecting you from a "race". But from agression. Keep your racist remarks to yourself. I'm out here defending our wonderfull melting pot called the U.S.A. You are holding freedom back with your comments. I would go on, but I have to get back to work. I have a nation to defend. You go head to the bar and do your bitching from there.

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