Today is Flag Day & US Army Birthday

Wave Ol’ Glory proudly!

Flag Day commemorates the adoption of the flag of the United States, which happened that day by resolution of the Second Continental Congress in 1777. The United States Army also celebrates the Army Birthday on this date; Congress adopted “the American continental army” after reaching a consensus position in the Committee of the Whole on June 14, 1775.

Another way to display the “flag”!

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation that officially established June 14 as Flag Day; in August 1949, National Flag Day was established by an Act of Congress. The week of June 14 is designated as “National Flag Week.” During National Flag Week, the president will issue a proclamation urging U.S. citizens to fly the American flag for the duration of that week. The flag should also be displayed on all government buildings.

The U.S. Army was founded on 14 June 1775.  The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services.

The primary mission of the army is “to fight and win our Nation’s wars by providing prompt, sustained land dominance across the full range of military operations and spectrum of conflict in support of combatant commanders.”

During fiscal year 2010, the Regular Army reported a strength of 561,979 soldiers; the Army National Guard (ARNG) reported 362,015 and the United States Army Reserve (USAR) reported 205,281 putting the combined component strength total at 1,129,275 soldiers.

Hooah!

If you’d like to support a soldier serving in the Army (or any other military branch), visit Soldiers’ Angels or anysoldier.com.

DCG

Finally, a reality show worth watching!

Forget Dancing with the Stars, America Idol, and The Voice – we’ve got some real “reality” tv to watch!

Nine young men and women. 10 episodes. One big decision.  Watch this trailer to get a glimpse of what “Starting Strong” has in store! To join or not to join … that is the question.

“Starting Strong” is the U.S. Army’s all new reality-based content series, created in conjunction with Ricky Schroder, that follows nine potential recruits as they are immersed in an Army experience.  Airing in select markets on FOX affiliates, Sundays beginning 2 Jun–check your local listings or catch the episodes weekly here on YouTube!

Hoorah!

DCG

Hometown gives Afghan-war quadruple-amputee a hero’s welcome

Army Staff Sgt. Travis Mills (pic above) was his high school’s football star in the town of Vassar, Michigan. After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served two deployments to Afghanistan without suffering anything close to a major injury. But during his third tour, an IED tore through his athletic frame, leaving him a quadruple amputee.

In this video, he adamantly insists he’s not a hero:

But his hometown folk in Vassar think otherwise.

As Elaine Quijano reports for CBS News, Oct. 11, 2012, Vassar used their annual homecoming game to give their favorite son a hero’s welcome.

“This is awesome,” he told a crowd who cheered.

Mills was on his third tour in Afghanistan. In April, a bomb exploded beneath him. He recalls, “About 5-6 seconds later I woke up on the ground.” Mills’ six-foot-three, 250-pound body bore the brunt of the blast. Two other men were wounded.

“My medic came running up,” he said, “and I looked at him and I said, ‘You get away from me, you go save my men, leave me alone, let me go.’ He told me, ‘With all due respect, Sgt. Mills, shut up let me do my job.’ He put tourniquets on me within 20 seconds on all four limbs.”

Mills woke up at a military hospital in Germany four days later. He turned 25 on April 14 and was told he didn’t have any arms or legs.

“By that time, my soldiers –”how are they doing’?” Mills recalled on what was going through his mind then. “And then I guess I was ducking my wife’s phone calls because I felt embarrassed–I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I knew the possibility of getting hit was zero, but when you get hit, I guess I just felt like I was a horrible person or something I did wrong in life, and I was getting paid back for it. But that’s not it.”

He’s been recovering at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for six months. He’s learning to use four prosthetic limbs and to do things once routine, like feeding his daughter Chloe.

As far as what it’s like to be back to his hometown, Mills said: “Oh it’s great, I drove into town and I couldn’t believe the yellow ribbons, the signs — ‘Welcome home Staff Sgt. Travis Mills.’”

More than 6,000 people lined Main Street to honor Mills and his wife Kelsey. (That’s more than twice as many people as the total population of Vassar of 2,697 at the 2010 census.)

“‘Everything I was going through and all that,” he told the crowd, “my beautiful wife stood by my side the whole time. So I want to thank her real quick.”

Mills heard plenty of cheers when he played on this football field in high school. But never like this.

He’s still on active duty and hopes to one day train soldiers at Fort Bragg.

“This is not the end of my life, especially having my one-year-old there,” he said. “She’ll never see me give up or fail you know. I mean, she’ll see me fall down, but I’ll get back up and I’m just going to keep going.”

This isn’t how Staff Sgt. Travis Mills imagined his life. But it’s a life he is grateful to have.

Watch the news video of his homecoming here.

~Eowyn

A Hero to Remember

Sgt. Basil Plumley

Basil Plumley, legendary combat vet whose story was told in book is dead at 92

New York Daily News: Basil L. Plumley, a renowned career soldier whose exploits as an Army infantryman were portrayed in a book and the movie “We Were Soldiers,” died Wednesday. He was 92 — an age his friends are amazed he lived to see.

Plumley fought in World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam and was awarded a medal for making five parachute jumps into combat.

Friends said Plumley, who died in hospice care in west Georgia, never told war stories and was known to hang up on people who called to interview him. Still, he was near-legendary in the Army and gained more widespread fame through a 1992 Vietnam War book that was the basis for 2002’s “We Were Soldiers,” starring Sam Elliott as Plumley alongside Mel Gibson.

Plumley didn’t need a Hollywood portrayal to be revered among soldiers, said Greg Camp, a retired Army colonel and former chief of staff at neighboring Fort Benning, who befriended Plumley in his later years. “He’s iconic in military circles,” Camp said. “Among people who have been in the military, he’s beyond what a movie star would be … His legend permeates three generations of soldiers.”

Debbie Kimble, Plumley’s daughter, said her father died of cancer after spending about nine days at Columbus Hospice. Although the illness seemed to strike suddenly, Kimble said Plumley’s health had been declining since his wife of 63 years, Deurice Plumley, died last May on Memorial Day.

A native of Shady Spring, W.Va., Plumley enlisted in the Army in 1942 and ended up serving 32 years in uniform. In World War II, he fought in the Allied invasion of Italy at Salerno and the D-Day invasion at Normandy. He later fought with the 187th Airborne Infantry Regiment in Korea. In Vietnam, Plumley served as sergeant major — the highest enlisted rank — in the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment.

“That puts him in the rarest of clubs,” said journalist Joseph L. Galloway, who met Plumley while covering the Vietnam War for United Press International and remained lifelong friends with him. “To be combat infantry in those three wars, in the battles he participated in, and to have survived — that is miraculous.”

After Plumley became ill, Galloway mentioned his worsening condition on Facebook. Fans of the retired sergeant major responded with a flood of cards and letters. The day before he died in hospice, Camp said, Plumley received about 160 pieces of mail.

“He was dad to me when I was growing up,” said Kimble, Plumley’s daughter. “We are learning every day about him. He was an inspiration to so many. He was a great person, and will always be remembered.”

Thanks to a great man who sacrificed so much. Rest in peace fine soldier.

DCG

Army officer fired for teaching truth about Islam

Remember that jihadist US Army psychologist Nidal Hasan who perpetrated the worst shooting ever to take place on a U.S. military base?

On November 5, 2009, armed with a pistol and a revolver, Hasan entered his workplace — the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, where personnel receive routine medical treatment immediately prior to and on return from deployment — shot and killed 13 innocent people and wounded another 29.

Despite internal Army reports indicating Hasan’s fellow officers had reported his outspoken sympathy with radical Islam since 2005, and despite eyewitnesses saying that Hasan had shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before opening fire, the U.S. Army and the POS’s administration refused to call the shooting an Islamic terrorist act or even a hate crime.

Now we have more evidence that the U.S. Army is infested with politically-correct “tolerance” fear of offending Islam. An 18-year veteran Army officer was fired from teaching a course on Islam because he had the temerity of actually teaching the truth.

Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley

Chad Groening reports for OneNewsNow.com, September 20, 2012, that Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley — a highly-decorated 1994 graduate of the US Military Academy who has been deployed to Bosnia, Kuwait, and Iraq for 6 combat tours — was relieved of a teaching assignment because he discussed negative aspects of Islam in an elective course entitled “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism” at the Joint Services Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.

Richard Thompson, President and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, says a letter sent out by 57 Islamist groups to several government agencies, including the Pentagon, had demanded that action be taken against Lt. Col. Dooley’s teaching. “All information that is offensive to Islam is to be removed,” Thompson summarizes the letter. “And any instructors [of the course] should be disciplined.”

Thompson concludes that the U.S. Army’s dismissal of Dooley was a direct result of the Pentagon bending to Muslims’ will: “the Department of Defense is following the instructions they got from these Muslim organizations.”

To please Muslims, the Army has chosen to scapegoat Lt. Col. Dooley. Thompson says Dooley’s career is being adversely affected: “He was slated to become a colonel and assume a command position. But because they did not like the way he taught the class and the way he portrayed Islam, they have stopped this whole procedure. They decided they were going to give him a negative evaluation and red-flagged his promotion.”

The Thomas More Law Center, a law firm that specializes in the defense of the civil rights and liberties of Christians, is considering a federal lawsuit aimed at vindicating Dooley’s rights to free speech and academic freedom.

H/t FOTM’s Christy

~Eowyn

A Hero to Remember

Rest in peace soldier. Photo courtesy US Army

Rhode Island Guard Soldier makes selfless, ultimate sacrifice for Afghan child

US Army: The actions of one Rhode Island National Guard Soldier epitomized the Army Value of selfless service, “doing one’s duty loyally without thought of recognition or gain,” as he heroically saved an Afghan child without regard for his own life.

Sgt. Dennis P. Weichel Jr., 29, of Providence, R.I, died March 22, from injuries sustained when he was struck by an armored fighting vehicle after moving an Afghan child to safety.

“Sadly, today we realized the death of a Rhode Island National Guard Soldier in a combat zone, and we are once again reminded of the enduring sacrifice our Soldiers and Airmen have made, and continue to make, in service to this great country,” said Gen. Kevin McBride, adjutant general of Rhode Island and commanding general of the Rhode Island National Guard, in a press release March 23.

Weichel, an Infantryman, mobilized with Company C, 1st Battalion, 143rd Infantry Regiment, 56th Troop Command, to Camp Atterbury, Ind. in November 2011, and then deployed forward to Afghanistan in early March.

On the morning of March 22, Weichel and members of his unit were leaving the Black Hills Firing Range in Laghman province, Afghanistan, when they encountered multiple Afghan children in the path of their convoy. Weichel was among several Soldiers who dismounted to disperse the children away from the vehicles.

As one child attempted to retrieve an item from underneath a U.S. Army mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle, , known as an MRAP, Weichel moved her to safety and was struck by the MRAP in the process. Weichel was evacuated to the Jalalabad Medical Treatment Facility where he succumbed to his wounds.

The circumstances of Weichel’s death speak to his character, said Staff Sgt. Ronald Corbett, Weichel’s mentor who deployed with him to Iraq in 2005.   “He would have done it for anybody,” said Corbett. “That was the way he was. He would give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. He was that type of guy.”

Weichel was posthumously promoted from the rank of specialist to sergeant, March 26.   He had been a member of the Rhode Island Army National Guard since 2001. He deployed to Iraq in 2005 as a member of Company D, 3rd Battalion, 172nd Infantry (Mountain) Regiment, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Weichel was considered a fun loving guy yet a model Soldier, according to Corbett and 1st Sgt. Nicky Peppe, who also served with Weichel in Iraq.  “When I first heard, I kept expecting him to jump up and say, ‘Oh, I got you guys,’” said Corbett. “The last few days have hit me hard.”

“He was a big kid at heart. He always had a smile on his face and he made everyone laugh,” said Peppe. “But as much as Weichel was funny, he was also a professional. When it was time to go outside the wire for a combat patrol, he was all business.”

Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee has ordered U.S. and Rhode Island flags across the state to be flown at half-staff until Weichel is laid to rest.   Weichel is survived by three children, his fiancée, and his parents.

“Tragically, Sergeant Weichel has made the supreme sacrifice, and at this time, we are mindful of the impact of that sacrifice on his family and friends,” said McBride. “I pledge this command’s perpetual support to Sergeant Weichel’s family. We leave no Soldier behind, and we will not leave Sergeant Weichel’s family behind.”

DCG

Happy Veterans’ Day!

Today is Veterans’ Day, the day when we honor all the men and women who had served in our country’s Armed Forces.

The United States Army

The United States Army is 236 years old. It considers itself to be descended from the Continental Army and dates its inception from June 14, 1775, when the Continental army was formed even before the establishment of the United States, in order to fight for American Independence.

The United States Navy

The US Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States armed forces. The Navy traces its origins to the Continental Navy, which was established during the American Revolutionary War and was essentially disbanded as a separate entity shortly thereafter. Depredations against American shipping by Barbary Coast pirates in the Mediterranean Sea spurred Congress to employ this power by passing the Naval Act of 1794 ordering the construction and manning of six frigates. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined.

The United States Marine Corps

The U.S. Marine Corps, a branch of the U.S. armed forces responsible for providing force projection from the sea, is 236 years old. It was founded on November 10, 1775, in Philadelphia, by Captain Samuel Nicholas. The USMC is famous for its expertise in amphibious warfare. Though the smallest of the US armed forces in the Department of Defense, the Marine Corps is nonetheless larger than the armed forces of many significant military powers; for example, it is larger than the active duty Israel Defense Forces and the entire British Army!

The United States Air Force

The US Air Force (USAF), the lead aerial warfare and space warfare service branch of the United States armed forces, is 64 years old. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947 under the National Security Act of 1947. It is the most recent branch of the U.S. military to be formed.

The United States Coast Guard

Founded by Alexander Hamilton as the Revenue Cutter Service on 4 August 1790, the Coast Guard is the United States’ oldest continuous seagoing service. As of August 2009, the Coast Guard had approximately 42,000 men and women on active duty, 7,500 reservists, 30,000 auxiliarists, and 7,700 full-time civilian employees. The Coast Guard motto is “Semper Paratus“, Latin for “Always Ready” or “Always Prepared”.

We thank you for all the sacrifices you made for America.

We admire you for your honor, courage, and spirit!

We love you for loving America so much you were willing to die to secure our freedom.

May God bless you and your family on this day and always!

P.S. A special “Thank You” to Tom in NC, GrouchyFogie, Vic Bailey, Bob Keyser, and all the other veterans of Fellowship of the Minds!

~Eowyn

Life in Jail…

Isn’t good enough for this dirtbag.  But it’s the way our justice system works, so I’ll take it.

Man Sentenced to Life in Arkansas Military Recruiting Station Shooting

 

Via Fox News: man who confessed to shooting two soldiers outside a military recruiting station in Arkansas struck a plea deal with prosecutors Monday to avoid the death penalty.

Abdulhakim Muhammad pleaded guilty in the middle of his trial to capital murder and attempted capital murder charges. Pulaski County Judge Herbert Wright then sentenced Muhammad to life in prison without parole for capital murder, with 11 more life sentences for the remaining charges against him plus an additional 180 years in prison.

Muhammad was charged with the killing of Army Pvt. William Andrew Long. He also was charged with attempted capital murder for wounding Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula in 2009.

He confessed to the shootings in phone calls to The Associated Press, and also admitted his deeds to the judge overseeing his case and to authorities. Muhammad said he was acting in retribution for the deaths of Muslims in U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ezeagwula’s mother, Sonja Ezeagwula, testified Monday afternoon shortly after Muhammad pleaded guilty. “I want you to feel the bullet in his head,” she said.

Muhammad and investigators said he drove up to a military recruiting station in Little Rock in 2009, where two soldiers — Long, 23, and Ezeagwula, then 18 — were smoking cigarettes outside. They’d recently completed basic training and had volunteered to work as recruiters. Neither had seen combat. Muhammad fired an assault rifle, killing Long and wounding Ezeagwula.

After the shooting, I sent a sympathy card to the Long family.  They replied back:

Army Pvt. William Andrew Long

“During a time like this we realize how much our friends really mean to us. Your expression of sympathy will always be remembered. Daris, Janet, Vanessa and Robert”

I pray now that the Long family finds comfort in knowing that justice has been served.

DCG

Medal of Honor

Obama awards JBLM sergeant with Medal of Honor

President Barack Obama awarded the Medal of Honor Tuesday to a Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) Army sergeant who lost his hand in Afghanistan when he tried to toss an enemy grenade away from himself and two colleagues.

“Today, we honor a singular act of gallantry,” Obama said. “The Medal of Honor reflects the deepest gratitude of our nation.” Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Arthur Petry is the second living, active-duty service member to receive the nation’s highest military decoration for actions in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars.

Petry was being recognized for courageous actions during combat operations against an armed enemy in the eastern Afghan province of Paktia in May 2008. The 31-year-old was shot in both legs and then lost a hand while throwing an enemy grenade away from himself and two fellow Army Rangers – all the while continuing to call out orders so that his unit could fulfill its mission, according to soldiers who served with him. “Leroy Petry showed that true heroes still exist and they are closer than you think,” Obama said.

Petry was serving with the 75th Ranger Regiment when he was wounded during a rare daylight raid to capture a high-value target. Petry was clearing the courtyard of a targeted compound with Pvt. 1st Class Lucas Robinson when they came under fire. A bullet pierced both of Petry’s legs, and he and Robinson took cover by a chicken coop. As Sgt. Daniel Higgins arrived, a grenade was thrown from the other side of the coop, landed about 30 feet away and exploded, wounding Higgins and Robinson. A second grenade landed even closer to the three wounded Rangers – just a few feet away. Petry grabbed it and tried to toss it away, but it exploded in his hand.

“To be singled out is very humbling. I consider every one of our men and women in uniform serving here, abroad, to be our heroes,” Petry said. “They sacrifice every day and deserve your continued support and recognition.”

Despite being eligible for a medical discharge, he has chosen to stay on active duty and is working near his unit at JBLM helping injured soldiers adjust to life after battle.

What a true hero and an inspiration for us!  God Bless him and his family.

DCG

Dad in a Box

If this doesn’t make you tear up, you have a heart of stone….

Freedom is not free.

God bless our soldiers!

H/t Daily Mail.

~Eowyn