Veterans...Get the hell in here now!

BarnBuster said:
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Project Oxcart: Why you had to be married to fly the CIA’s fastest plane - Sandboxx

The SR-71 Blackbird remains the fastest operational military aircraft in history to this day, despite leaving service more than two decades ago, but its Lockheed predecessor in the A-12 was actually faster. The A-12 that would ultimately lead to the missile-packing Mach 3 interceptor YF-12 and...
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Crazy they engineered that with protractors, paper, rulers and American ingenuity....

"Though I Fly through the valley of death,
I shall fear no evil
For I am at 80,000 feet and climbing"
 
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Army Sgt. Seth Marshall, assigned to 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry Regiment, fixes a bike for an Afghan child at Fort McCoy, Wis., Oct. 8, 2021. Soldiers routinely walk through the neighborhoods to assist Afghan evacuees in any way they can as part of Operation Allies Welcome.


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Marine 1st Lt. Jacob Sugg, deputy director of communication strategy and operations for the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, left, and Karley Sirota, with Department of Homeland Security external affairs, read a book to Afghan children at Fort Pickett, Va., Oct. 26, 2021.
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Today in Military History:
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On November 5, 2009, 13 people are killed and more than 30 others are wounded, nearly all of them unarmed soldiers, when a U.S. Army officer goes on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in central Texas. The deadly assault, carried out by Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, was the worst mass shooting at a U.S. military installation.

Early in the afternoon of November 5, 39-year-old Hasan, armed with a semi-automatic pistol, shouted “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic for “God is great”) and then opened fire at a crowd inside a Fort Hood processing center where soldiers who were about to be deployed overseas or were returning from deployment received medical screenings. The massacre, which left 12 service members and one Department of Defense employee dead, lasted approximately 10 minutes before Hasan was shot by civilian police and taken into custody.

The Virginia-born Hasan, the son of Palestinian immigrants who ran a Roanoke restaurant and convenience store, graduated from Virginia Tech University and completed his psychiatry training at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2003. He went on to work at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., treating soldiers returning from war with post-traumatic stress disorder. In May 2009, he was promoted to the rank of major in the Army, and that July, was transferred to Fort Hood. Located near the city of Killeen, Fort Hood, which includes 340 square miles of facilities and homes, is the largest active-duty U.S. military post. At the time of the shootings, more than 50,000 military personnel lived and worked there, along with thousands more family members and civilian personnel.

In the aftermath of the massacre, reviews by the Pentagon and a U.S. Senate panel found Hasan’s superiors had continued to promote him despite the fact that concerns had been raised over his behavior, which suggested he had become a radical and potentially violent Islamic extremist. Among other things, Hasan stated publicly that America’s war on terrorism was really a war against Islam.

In 2013, Hasan, who was left paralyzed from the waist down as a result of shots fired at him by police attempting to stop his rampage, was tried in military court, where he acted as his own attorney. During his opening statement, he admitted he was the shooter. (Hasan had previously told a judge that in an effort to protect Muslims and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, he had gunned down the soldiers at Fort Hood who were being deployed to that nation.) For the rest of the trial, Hasan called no witnesses, presented scant evidence and made no closing argument. On August 23, 2013, a jury found Hasan guilty of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder, and he later was sentenced to death for his crimes.

Following his conviction and sentencing, Nidal Hasan was incarcerated at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas to await execution. According to Chris Haug, Fort Hood's Chief of Media Relations, Hasan was also stripped of his rank and dismissed from the US Army. Hasan would only be referred to as "Inmate Nidal Hasan" going forward. On September 5, 2013, it was reported that Hasan had his beard forcibly shaved. Fort Leavenworth authorities justified their decision by citing that Hasan would be subject to Army regulations even though he had been dismissed from the Army and forfeited all pay and allowances. Despite Army regulations banning personnel from having facial hair, Hasan had begun growing a beard following the Fort Hood Shooting in 2009 by citing his religious beliefs. Although no new photos of Hasan have been released since his incarceration, military authorities have confirmed that a video recording of the forced shaving exists, as per military regulations. In response, John Galligan, Hasan's former civilian lawyer, had planned to sue the military for violating his religious beliefs. Galligan argued that a military council in 2012 had allowed Hasan to keep his beard for the duration of the trial and dismissed the Army's actions as vindictive.

On August 28, 2014, his attorney said Hasan had written a letter to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then head of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). In the letter, Hasan requested to be made a citizen of the Islamic State and included his signature and the abbreviation SoA (Soldier of Allah).

 
Today in Military History:
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On 6th November 1917, after three months of fierce fighting, British and Canadian forces finally took control of the tiny village of Passchendaele in the West Flanders region of Belgium, so ending one of the bloodiest battles of World War I. With approximately a third of a million British and Allied soldiers either killed or wounded, the Battle of Passchendaele (officially the third battle of Ypres), symbolises the true horror of industrialised trench warfare.

The Passchendaele campaign was preceded by what was then the largest planned explosion in history. For months, British, Canadian and Australian tunnellers had burrowed underneath the German defences on Messines Ridge in the Ypres Salient, where they planted 21 massive explosive mines. At 3 a.m. on June 7, 1917, 19 of them were detonated in rapid succession. The resulting blasts knocked waiting British troops off their feet; the rumble could be heard as far away as London. An estimated 10,000 German soldiers perished and the cratered landscape was soon in Allied hands. Amazingly, two of the mines failed to explode. One was detonated by lightning in 1955, killing a cow. The other, its location since discovered, lies underneath a Belgian farm. Authorities have declared it too difficult and dangerous to dismantle even 100 years later.

General Sir Douglas Haig, the British Commander in Chief in France, had been convinced to launch his forces at the German submarine bases along the Belgian coast in an attempt to reduce the massive shipping losses then being suffered by the Royal Navy. General Haig also believed that the German army was close to collapse and that a major offensive …“just one more push”, could hasten the end the war.

Thus the offensive at Passchendaele was launched on the 18th July 1917 with a bombardment of the German lines involving 3,000 guns. In the 10 days that followed, it is estimated that over 4¼ million shells were fired.

(WW1 artillery shells had a 30% detonation failure rate. Coupled with the fact that they buried themselves sometimes yards deep, areas of WW1 battlefields are off limits still today and farmers regularly turn up UXO (unexploded ordinance)/ERW (explosive remnants of war) The “Iron Harvest” is the annual “harvest” of war remnants including UXO, barbed wire, and shrapnel collected by Belgian and French farmers after ploughing their fields; see Red Zone below bb.)

The actual infantry assault followed at 03.50 on 31st July, but far from collapsing, the German Fourth Army fought well and restricted the main British advance to relatively small gains.

Shortly after the initial assault, the heaviest rains in more that 30 years began to fall on Flanders, drenching the soldiers and the low lying fields over which the battle was taking place. The artillery shells that had bombarded the German lines only days before had not only torn up the land but had also destroyed the drainage systems that were keeping the reclaimed marshland dry. With the continued pounding, the rain drenched ground quickly turned into a thick swamp of mud.

Even the newly-developed tanks made little headway; unable to move, they quickly became stuck fast in the liquid mud. With each new phase of the offensive the rain kept falling, filling the shell holes with water. The clinging mud caked the soldier’s uniforms and clogged their rifles, but that was the least of their worries as in places the mud had become so deep that both men and horses were drowned, lost forever in the stinking quagmire. It took six men to stretcher a wounded soldier across the glue-like surface. Many survivors recalled stumbling along, their boots being sucked off their feet and then came the sensation of sinking up to their waists in mud. Additionally, thousands of exhausted horses and mules died attempting to haul gun carriages across the devastated, cratered landscape which had been churned up by shelling.

The only solid structures in this sea of desolation were the enemy’s concrete pillboxes; from here the German machine-gunners could scythe down any Allied infantry that had been ordered to advance

With the hopelessness of the situation apparent, General Haig temporarily suspended the attack.

A fresh British offensive was launched on the 20th September under the command of Herbert Plumer which eventually resulted in some small gains being made including the capture of a nearby ridge just east of Ypres. General Haig ordered further attacks in early October which proved less successful. Allied troops met stiff opposition from German reserves being poured into the area, and many British and Empire soldiers suffered severe chemical burns as the Germans employed mustard gas to help defend their position.

Unwilling to accept failure, General Haig ordered three more assaults on the Passchendaele ridge in late October. Casualty rates were high during these final stages, with Canadian divisions in particular suffering huge losses. When British and Canadian forces finally reached Passchendaele on 6th November 1917 hardly a trace of the original village structures remained. The capture of the village did however give General Haig the excuse to call an end to the offensive, claiming success.

In the three and half months of the offensive the British and Empire forces had advanced barely five miles, suffering horrendous casualties. Perhaps their only consolation was that the Germans had suffered almost as badly with around 250,000 killed or injured. In the aftermath of the battle, General Haig was severely criticized for continuing the offensive long after the operation had lost any real strategic value.

Perhaps more than any other, Passchedaele has come to symbolize the horrors and the great human costs associated with the major battles of the First World War. British Empire losses included approximately 36,000 Australians, 3,500 New Zealanders and 16,000 Canadians – the latter of which were lost in the last few days / weeks of the final bloody assault. Some 90,000 bodies were never identified and 42,000 never recovered.

61 Victoria Crosses were awarded during the entire Passchendaele campaigns​

These battles and the British Empire soldiers that perished in them are today commemorated at the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, the Tyne Cot Cemetery and Memorial to the Missing.

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Passchendaele: they called it ‘the Battle of the Mud’

Officially known as the Third Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele became infamous not only for the scale of casualties, but also for the mud…
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www.nationalgeographic.org

Red Zone

France's Zone Rouge is a lingering reminder of World War I's Battle of Verdun.
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militaryhistorynow.com

Passchendaele – Inside the First World War's Infamous Slaughter in the Mud - MilitaryHistoryNow.com

“The appalling casualties, the mud and the overall futility of the offensive have made Passchendaele an emblem of the mind-boggling waste of the First World War.” By Darrell Duthie “I DIED IN HELL,” wrote famed...
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Today in Military History:

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Lawrence Joel was a United States Army paratrooper who served in the Korean and Vietnam wars. Joel received the Silver Star and the Medal of Honor for his heroism on November 8, 1965, in a battle outside Bien Hoa against the Viet Cong. At the time, he was serving in South Vietnam as a medic with the rank of SP5 assigned to the 1st Battalion of the 503rd Infantry in the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

He was the first medic to earn the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War and the first living black American to receive the medal since the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Joel was born in 1928, the third of 16 children in a family that grew up very poor in Winston-Salem, NC. His family was in such poverty that he was raised by his next-door neighbors until he had reached the age of 18. He then joined the Merchant Marine. A year later, in 1946, he joined the U.S. Army.

When the Vietnam war started his unit deployed to the country. By November 1968, although his unit had been in Vietnam for nearly four months, combat with the enemy had been sporadic and light. That was all about to change.

Joel’s unit was conducting an all-day patrol searching for the Viet Cong. Joel recalled the initial operation as “fairly routine… just like back at Ft. Bragg — going to play war games.” But soon his unit was ambushed by a Viet Cong battalion that outnumbered the American paratroopers six to one.

When the Viet Cong sprang their ambush, nearly every soldier in the lead squad was killed or wounded. Joel was wounded twice in the initial burst of fire. He bandaged his own wounds, gave himself a shot of morphine, and set about taking care of the many wounded troops.

Ignoring the calls from his commander to stay down, Joel moved amongst 13 wounded men, including one soldier who was suffering from a “sucking chest wound” and provided him with a makeshift bandage to keep his lung from deflating. Once he ran out of medical supplies, he went to the rear to get more and resumed taking care of his wounded paratroopers, hobbling along on a makeshift crutch while the battle raged around.

“I found a stick on the ground with a little crook in it,” he recalled. “I broke it about waist high and sort of cradled my arm in it so I could hobble around. That way I could make it from one man to the next — sort of fall down beside him, then pull myself up on a tree or something when I finished.” A fellow paratrooper, SP4 Randy Eickhoff, was running ahead of Joel providing covering fire to protect the unarmed medic who was treating the wounded.

Eickhoff was awarded the Silver Star and the Purple Heart for his own actions. After the battle, Joel was medevaced first to Saigon and then to Tokyo to recover from his wounds. He was initially awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart for his actions.

His commanding officer said of the medic’s actions that day, “Joel was definitely not worried about getting wounded. Usually, when you hear metal flying, the normal inclination is to get as low as you can or to get something between you and the flying metal. But not Joel.”

After three months of recovery, he was told that he was being put in to upgrade his Silver Star to the Medal of Honor. On March 9, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a White House ceremony, presented Joel with the medal.

President Johnson spoke of Joel’s “very special kind of courage — the unarmed heroism of compassion and service to others.” “I’m glad to be alive,” Joel said before the ceremony. “I just wish I could have done more. I never say that I deserved the medal. That’s just not for me to say. It was just my job.” Later, the city of Winston-Salem gave Joel a large parade to honor his heroism. It was the first time the city had conducted a military parade for a single individual.

Joel was married to Dorothy Region and had two children—Tremaine and Deborah Louise. After his retirement from the army, he worked for the Veterans Administration in Hartford, CN. However, he returned to Winston-Salem in 1982. Two years later he died from complications caused by diabetes. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. In 1986 the Winston-Salem Board of Aldermen voted to name the city’s new coliseum the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

The Citation:​

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Sp6c. Joel demonstrated indomitable courage, determination, and professional skill when a numerically superior and well-concealed Viet Cong element launched a vicious attack which wounded or killed nearly every man in the lead squad of the company. After treating the men wounded by the initial burst of gunfire, he bravely moved forward to assist others who were wounded while proceeding to their objective. While moving from man to man, he was struck in the right leg by machine-gun fire. Although painfully wounded his desire to aid his fellow soldiers transcended all personal feeling. He bandaged his own wound and self-administered morphine to deaden the pain enabling him to continue his dangerous undertaking. Through this period of time, he constantly shouted words of encouragement to all around him. Then, completely ignoring the warnings of others and his pain, he continued his search for wounded, exposing himself to hostile fire; and, as the bullets dug up the dirt around him, he held plasma bottles high while kneeling completely engrossed in his lifesaving mission. Then, after being struck a second time and with a bullet lodged in his thigh, he dragged himself over the battlefield and succeeded in treating 13 more men before his medical supplies ran out. Displaying resourcefulness, he saved the life of one man by placing a plastic bag over a severe chest wound to congeal the blood. As one of the platoons pursued the Viet Cong, an insurgent force in concealed positions opened fire on the platoon and wounded many more soldiers. With a new stock of medical supplies, Sp6c. Joel again shouted words of encouragement as he crawled through an intense hail of gunfire to the wounded men. After the 24-hour battle subsided and the Viet Cong dead numbered 410, snipers continued to harass the company. Throughout the long battle, Sp6c. Joel never lost sight of his mission as a medical aidman and continued to comfort and treat the wounded until his own evacuation was ordered. His meticulous attention to duty saved a large number of lives and his unselfish, daring example under most adverse conditions was an inspiration to all. Sp6c. Joel's profound concern for his fellow soldiers, at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty, are in the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.​
 
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On November 10, 1775, the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia passed a resolution stating that "two Battalions of Marines be raised" for service as landing forces with the fleet. This resolution established the Continental Marines and marked the birth date of the United States Marine Corps.​
 
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The first military guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on March 25, 1926. To prevent visitors from climbing or stepping on the tomb, soldiers from Fort Myer, Va., were assigned to guard it during daylight hours beginning in 1926. In 1937, the guard became a 24/7 presence.
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A casket containing the unidentified remains of a World War I soldier was carried in a horse-drawn wagon through Washington, D.C., across the Potomac River, and into Arlington National Cemetery on Nov. 11, 1921.

Thousands of dignitaries, veterans and American citizens packed into the Memorial Amphitheater at the cemetery, where then-President Warren G. Harding led a state funeral for the unknown soldier. When the ceremony began at noon, bells tolled, and Americans across the country observed two minutes of silence for the fallen man.

“The name of him whose body lies before us took flight with his imperishable soul,” Harding said. “We know not whence he came, but only that his death marks him with the everlasting glory of an American dying for his country. He might have come from any one of millions of American homes.”

Thursday marks 100 years since the remains were entombed at Arlington, creating the iconic Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The tomb, which attracts millions of visitors every year, now includes the remains of soldiers from World War II and the Korean War. In the past 100 years, it has become a symbol of American service and sacrifice, as well as a place for mourning and reflection.

To mark the anniversary, Arlington National Cemetery planned a series of events, including a procession Thursday that is intended to evoke elements of the unidentified soldier’s funeral procession from 1921. For the first time in decades, visitors to the tomb this week will be allowed to approach it and place flowers near its base.

“One hundred years ago, we laid to rest an unidentified American who fell in the First World War. He has been in our charge ever since,” said Karen Durham-Aguilera, executive director of Army National Military Cemeteries. “The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier stands, physically and symbolically, at the heart of the cemetery — and the heart of the nation.”

The idea for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier came from Britain and France, which created similar tombs in 1920. Unidentified remains of fallen World War I soldiers were buried that year at Westminster Abbey in London and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. In both countries, one unidentified soldier symbolized all the unknown troops who were killed in action.

In December 1920, New York Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., a World War I veteran, proposed legislation that ordered the entombment of one unidentified American soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. Its purpose was to “bring home the body of an unknown American warrior who in himself represents no section, creed or race in the late war and who typifies … the soul of America and the supreme sacrifice of her heroic dead,” according to the legislation.

Congress approved the burial on March 4, 1921. In October of that year, four bodies of unidentified soldiers were exhumed from American military cemeteries in France. Sgt. Edward Younger, a World War I veteran, selected the soldier who would be sent to Arlington National Cemetery by placing white roses on one of the caskets. Younger was given the honor because of his superior service record.

The remains arrived in Washington by ship on Nov. 9, 1921. The casket lay in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Nov. 10, where about 90,000 people came to pay their respects before the remains were taken to Arlington the following day.


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A guard of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier marches at the back of the tomb on Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2021. While they typically guard the front of the tomb, the sentinels were moved to the back during a two-day ceremony that allowed members of the public to place flowers at the tomb’s base. (Nikki Wentling/Stars and Stripes)​
 
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Flowers surround the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, Va., Nov. 11, 2021.
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Participants march with The Ground Zero Flag during the annual New York City Veterans Day Parade, Nov. 11, 2021. The parade is the largest of its kind in the nation and has been held every year since 1919.​
 
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Near the end of a weeklong national salute to Americans who served in the Vietnam War in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated in Washington, D.C. after a march to its site by thousands of veterans of the conflict. The long-awaited memorial was a simple V-shaped black-granite wall inscribed with the names of the 57,939 Americans who died in the conflict, arranged in order of death, not rank, as was common in other memorials.

The designer of the memorial was Maya Lin, a Yale University architecture student who entered a nationwide competition to create a design for the monument. Lin, born in Ohio in 1959, was the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Many veterans’ groups were opposed to Lin’s winning design, which lacked a standard memorial’s heroic statues and stirring words. However, a remarkable shift in public opinion occurred in the months after the memorial’s dedication. Veterans and families of the dead walked the black reflective wall, seeking the names of their loved ones killed in the conflict. Once the name was located, visitors often made an etching or left a private offering, from notes and flowers to dog tags and cans of beer.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial soon became one of the most visited memorials in the nation’s capital. A Smithsonian Institution director called it “a community of feelings, almost a sacred precinct,” and a veteran declared that “it’s the parade we never got.” “The Wall” drew together both those who fought and those who marched against the war and served to promote national healing a decade after the divisive conflict’s end.

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The First and the Last Names on The Wall

Scholars debate about when the Vietnam War really began and in many ways it has never ended. It’s still fought in the bodies and minds of the men who waged it all those decades ago. Little about it is concrete.
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