These are the men of 60th Company, OC 504-68, who were killed in Vietnam. We graduates of that 1968 class of Infantry Officers Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, commemorate them each Memorial Day weekend.
One graduate: 1LT Jacob Lee Kinser.
Two Tactical Officers: CPT Reese Michael Patrick and 1LT Daniel Lynn Neiswender.
Four drop-outs: CPL Sherry Joe Hadley, SP4 Reese Currenti Elia Jr., CPL Robert Chase, and SP4 Jeffrey Sanders Tigner.
Comments Off on Our war dead
Posted in Infantry OCS, Troops, Viet Nam
Tagged 1LT Daniel Lynn Neiswender, 1LT Jacob Lee Kinser, CPL Rovert Chase, CPL Sherry Joe Hadley, CPT Reese Michael Patrick, Infantry Officer's Candidate School, Jr., Memorial Day 2010, OC 504-68, SP4 Jeffrey Sanders Tigner, SP4 Reese Currenti Elia
Pilot Gordon Bennett Robertson Jr.’s first fire-bomb run over Tokyo in March, 1945 took him through boiling thermals produced by the burning city about 5,000 feet below. They bounced his B-29 up and down and then flipped the sixty-ton bomber onto its back. He was able to recover only through a Split-S maneuver he’d practiced flying fighters in training.
And so it goes through thirty-five missions over the Japanese Empire in Robertson’s always tense, sometimes thrilling 270-page memoir which kept me up late finishing it over several nights. I’ve long had a special interest in the B-29, but never before felt that I was on the flight deck with the pilots in their helmets and flak suits threading their way through blinding search-light beams and a hail of shrapnel from anti-aircraft bursts.
Robertson, president of the 29th Bomb Group’s reunion association, helped put it to rest last year after twenty-two years because the surviving membership is getting too old to cope with it any more. Their memorabilia is on display where most of them first met the big bomber, in a museum at their old training field in Pratt, Kansas. But this book surely will live on, a testament to the young men who flew the big silver birds that finally helped bring Imperial Japan to its knees.
Comments Off on Bringing The Thunder
Posted in Library
Tagged B-29, Bringing The Thunder, Gordon Bennett Robertson, Jr.
Not exactly, but close. Mr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that is. The big shot who decides to argue with a cop and try to pull rank on him. Then, when he’s arrested for disorderly conduct, he cries racism. Figures.
What else is new? Barry, our alleged post-racial president, admitting he doesn’t know the facts, but immediately siding with Gates. Whoa. The only person looking good here, so far, is the cop. Until his bosses dropped the charges, making Gates look justified. It all would be silly if it wasn’t so sad.
UPDATE: The cop’s police report with addendum by a second officer who also heard Gates.
AND: VDH– "There were no winners in this comic tragedy — but one clear loser: last night, the president of the United States."
Comments Off on Haavard’s Tawana Brawley
Tagged Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Obamalot, Tawana Brawley
Not that we don’t remember and appreciate the dead of both older and more recent American wars and campaigns. We just tend to think of our own first.
Soldier, rest, thy warfare o’er,
Dream of fighting fields no more.
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,
Morn of toil, nor night of waking.
–Sir Walter Scott
Comments Off on Our War Dead
Posted in Viet Nam
Tagged 1LT Daniel Lynn Neiswender, 1LT Jacob Lee Kinser, CPL Robert Chase, CPL Sherry Joe Hadley, CPT Reese Michael Patrick, Infantry Officer's Candidate School, Jr., Memorial Day 2009, OC 504-68, SP4 Jeffrey Sanders Tigner, SP4 Reese Currenti Elia, Viet Nam, Vietnam war
Used to be (and probably still is) that any appearance at the LBJ Library by PBS poohbah Bill Moyers drew an SRO crowd. Mainly aging, LBJ liberals yearning for the Great Society. They apparently never knew this side of the old Baptist hypocrite:
"His part in Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover’s bugging of Martin Luther King’s private life, the leaks to the press and diplomatic corps, the surveillance of civil rights groups at the 1964 Democratic Convention…"
That’s from CBS newsman Morley Safer’s memoir Flashbacks. Liberal fascists do make strange bedfellows.
Comments Off on Dr. King’s wiretapper
Posted in Blogosphere, Library, Texana
Tagged Bill Moyers, Dr, Jr., Martin Luther King, Morley Safer
If anyone ever deserved the guilt for his racist, crooked, terroristic, and slimy friends, it’s Barry. If he was a Republican, you’d know all about them. But he isn’t. So you have to sniff a little to smell him out. But not to worry, we can do it. We sniffed out Kerry and he lost by five million votes.
UPDATE: Yipes, even CafePress is in the tank for Barry. No Barry-related satire, please. Good grief.
Comments Off on Guilt by association
Posted in Scribbles
Tagged Antoin Rezko, Emil Jones, Jr., Obama, Rashid Khalidi, The Rev. Michael Pfleger, William Charles Ayers
When Dr. King was murdered, forty years ago today, a pall of shock fell over our almost-entirely white class at Infantry Officer’s Candidate School at Fort Benning, Ga. His goal of changing hearts and minds certainly had affected all of ours. If anyone was racist enough to be glad–and many of us were Southerners–they hid it well. They knew they would find no approbation. We knew that a giant had passed. We didn’t guess there would be only midgets to follow.
MORE: The detail nobody remembers: Dr. King was a Republican. Or that a Republican won passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act that banned segregation in stores and other "public accomodations."
Comments Off on Giants to midgets
Posted in Infantry OCS, Obituaries, Scribbles
Tagged Dr. Martin Luther King, Infantry OCS, Jr.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 