Salmon Slayer
New member
A salute to all veterans.
CAPT USMC 1977 - 1993
SFC (11B), AKARNG (AGR) 2002 - Present
CAPT USMC 1977 - 1993
SFC (11B), AKARNG (AGR) 2002 - Present
Veterans Day
- Thread starter dotnmarty
- Start date
patrick and linda
New member
USMC 4/1968 TO 1/1972 E-4 MOS/2531, #2456###
SEMPER FI TO ALL
MOST IMPORTANT LESSON LEARNED,
DON'T GIVE UP AND DON'T LET ANYONE STEAL YOUR DREAM.
HAVE A GREAT AND SAFE HOLIDAY
PAT
SEMPER FI TO ALL
MOST IMPORTANT LESSON LEARNED,
DON'T GIVE UP AND DON'T LET ANYONE STEAL YOUR DREAM.
HAVE A GREAT AND SAFE HOLIDAY
PAT
Anita Marie
New member
USN
ET1 1971-1977
73-77 USS Bainbridge (CGN-25) "35 Knots, no smoke"
ET1 1971-1977
73-77 USS Bainbridge (CGN-25) "35 Knots, no smoke"
OH, my; YES how the time flies by!
TDC USN(Ret)
04/59 to 10/81
Made CPO on, April Fools Day, 1 April 1971 and retired on, Halloween, 31 Oct 1981. Did not quite make it a full career.
I guess that is why I chose to retire from the broadcast TV station on 1 April 2007 to round out this April Fool.
TDC USN(Ret)
04/59 to 10/81
Made CPO on, April Fools Day, 1 April 1971 and retired on, Halloween, 31 Oct 1981. Did not quite make it a full career.
I guess that is why I chose to retire from the broadcast TV station on 1 April 2007 to round out this April Fool.
Alyssa Jean
New member
David McKibben RD2, USN
USS Oriskany CVA 34
1963-1965
USS Oriskany CVA 34
1963-1965
Today at the Kalama Middle and High school we had a three veterans speak at an assembly. I was proud the students behaved so well and understood the gravity of the event. The final speaker was an older guy who talked about what the VFW is and why it was created and the importance of the holiday. He only mentioned in passing that he was a WWII vet. The second speaker told me later that this man was one of 195 to hit the beach in Okinawa (where I was born in 1961) and one of just 5 to leave it.
My neighbor, a German Jew, saw her father dragged away from home. She lost all of her family and put into Dachau at the age of 13. She spent years there, helping run the death camp as a slave to who knows what horrors. She married an American G.I. and didn't talk of her past much. She still carries her tatoo on her arm used to identify her.
Though I've never volunteered at a V.A. hospital, I plan to, once I'm not so busy with my own family. These, and stories of my own from combat in Operation Just Cause in Panama, 1989, are what I try and share with my own students as we review current events like what is going on in Burma, Pakistan and Iraq.
I remember the black and white footage of the helicopters in Viet Nam as a child. What is amazing to me is that I was actually born closer to Hitler's time, than my own son George was to Viet Nam. It is all recent history.
Specialist Clinton C. Winn, U.S. Army Infantry, 4th Bn, 7th Infantry Division, 11 - C (mortar man); 1988-1990.
My neighbor, a German Jew, saw her father dragged away from home. She lost all of her family and put into Dachau at the age of 13. She spent years there, helping run the death camp as a slave to who knows what horrors. She married an American G.I. and didn't talk of her past much. She still carries her tatoo on her arm used to identify her.
Though I've never volunteered at a V.A. hospital, I plan to, once I'm not so busy with my own family. These, and stories of my own from combat in Operation Just Cause in Panama, 1989, are what I try and share with my own students as we review current events like what is going on in Burma, Pakistan and Iraq.
I remember the black and white footage of the helicopters in Viet Nam as a child. What is amazing to me is that I was actually born closer to Hitler's time, than my own son George was to Viet Nam. It is all recent history.
Specialist Clinton C. Winn, U.S. Army Infantry, 4th Bn, 7th Infantry Division, 11 - C (mortar man); 1988-1990.
I hesitate saying this because it is something I am not proud of.
David L Thompson 1959 to 1962 US Army Armored Calvary. Border patrol in Germany. Rank E5 for a day, then E2. I went to town and celebrated my third strip and missed bed check.
The company CO (Commanding Officer) was so mad at me, because he and just been bragging about me and had put me in for OSC (officers candidate school). I was the highest paid E4 in our battalion because of proficiency pay that the Army had implemented at the time. The better job you did, the more pay (bonus) you received and I was the best tank gunner in the army.
If it wasn’t for my Platoon Sergeant, I would have spent time in the stockade, but as it was, I just got busted to the lowest grade possible. Six months later I was back to E4, my final rank when I wad discharged.
I was young and wild back then, now old and a little tamer.
________
Dave
David L Thompson 1959 to 1962 US Army Armored Calvary. Border patrol in Germany. Rank E5 for a day, then E2. I went to town and celebrated my third strip and missed bed check.
The company CO (Commanding Officer) was so mad at me, because he and just been bragging about me and had put me in for OSC (officers candidate school). I was the highest paid E4 in our battalion because of proficiency pay that the Army had implemented at the time. The better job you did, the more pay (bonus) you received and I was the best tank gunner in the army.
If it wasn’t for my Platoon Sergeant, I would have spent time in the stockade, but as it was, I just got busted to the lowest grade possible. Six months later I was back to E4, my final rank when I wad discharged.
I was young and wild back then, now old and a little tamer.
________
Dave
Robert C Austin, Major, US Army Medical Corp. 1967-1969.
Here's to all who have served!
Our major salute is on Pearl Harbor day. We have a close friend who was a naval aviator at Pearl Harbor. He was able to fire back on Dec 7 1941, hand holding the .30 cal machine gun, which they pulled out of the aft cockpit mount of the SBD Dauntlass, even though the runway was too damaged to get the plane off the ground. We enjoy escorting him to the NAS Pensacola each Dec. 7.
The number of WWII vets are decreasing fast. My uncle was also an Army aircraft aviator in WWII. (Major John M. Austin, now deceased)
I spent a number of months in my training and also working and attending on several occasions in VA Hospitals. There are some very interesting stories to be heard.
Here's to all who have served!
Our major salute is on Pearl Harbor day. We have a close friend who was a naval aviator at Pearl Harbor. He was able to fire back on Dec 7 1941, hand holding the .30 cal machine gun, which they pulled out of the aft cockpit mount of the SBD Dauntlass, even though the runway was too damaged to get the plane off the ground. We enjoy escorting him to the NAS Pensacola each Dec. 7.
The number of WWII vets are decreasing fast. My uncle was also an Army aircraft aviator in WWII. (Major John M. Austin, now deceased)
I spent a number of months in my training and also working and attending on several occasions in VA Hospitals. There are some very interesting stories to be heard.
Over There and Gone Forever
By RICHARD RUBIN
Published: November 12, 2007 NY Times
BY any conceivable measure, Frank Buckles has led an extraordinary life. Born on a farm in Missouri in February 1901, he saw his first automobile in his hometown in 1905, and his first airplane at the Illinois State Fair in 1907. At 15 he moved on his own to Oklahoma and went to work in a bank; in the 1940s, he spent more than three years as a Japanese prisoner of war. When he returned to the United States, he married, had a daughter and bought a farm near Charles Town, W. Va., where he lives to this day. He drove a tractor until he was 104.
But even more significant than the remarkable details of Mr. Buckles’s life is what he represents: Of the two million soldiers the United States sent to France in World War I, he is the only one left.
This Veterans Day marked the 89th anniversary of the armistice that ended that war. The holiday, first proclaimed as Armistice Day by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and renamed in 1954 to honor veterans of all wars, has become, in the minds of many Americans, little more than a point between Halloween and Thanksgiving when banks are closed and mail isn’t delivered. But there’s a good chance that this Veterans Day will prove to be the last with a living American World War I veteran. (Mr. Buckles is one of only three left; the other two were still in basic training in the United States when the war ended.) Ten died in the last year. The youngest of them was 105.
At the end of his documentary “The War,” Ken Burns notes that 1,000 World War II veterans are dying every day. Their passing is being observed at all levels of American society; no doubt you have heard a lot about them in recent days. Fortunately, World War II veterans will be with us for some years yet. There is still time to honor them. But the passing of the last few veterans of the First World War is all but complete, and has gone largely unnoticed here.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Almost from the moment the armistice took effect, the United States has worked hard, it seems, to forget World War I; maybe that’s because more than 100,000 Americans never returned from it, lost for a cause that few can explain even now. The first few who did come home were given ticker-tape parades, but most returned only to silence and a good bit of indifference.
There was no G.I. Bill of Rights to see that they got a college education or vocational training, a mortgage or small-business loan. There was nothing but what remained of the lives they had left behind a year or two earlier, and the hope that they might eventually be able to return to what President Warren Harding, Wilson’s successor, would call “normalcy.” Prohibition, isolationism, the stock market bubble and the crisis in farming made that hard; the Great Depression, harder still.
A few years ago, I set out to see if I could find any living American World War I veterans. No one — not the Department of Veterans Affairs, or the Veterans of Foreign Wars, or the American Legion — knew how many there were or where they might be. As far as I could tell, no one much seemed to care, either.
Eventually, I did find some, including Frank Buckles, who was 102 when we first met. Eighty-six years earlier, he’d lied about his age to enlist. The Army sent him to England but, itching to be near the action, he managed to get himself sent on to France, though never to the trenches.
After the armistice, he was assigned to guard German prisoners waiting to be repatriated. Seeing that he was still just a boy, the prisoners adopted him, taught him their language, gave him food from their Red Cross packages, bits of their uniforms to take home as souvenirs.
In the 1930s, while working for a steamship company, Mr. Buckles visited Germany; it was difficult for him to reconcile his fond memories of those old P.O.W.’s with what he saw of life under the Third Reich. The steamship company later sent him to run its office in Manila; he was there in January 1942 when the Japanese occupied the city and took him prisoner. At some point during his 39 months in captivity, he contracted beriberi, which affects his sense of balance even now, almost 63 years after he was liberated by the 11th Airborne Division.
Nevertheless, he carries with aplomb the burden of being the last of his kind. “For a long time I’ve felt that there should be more recognition of the surviving veterans of World War I,” he tells me; now that group is, more or less, him. How does he feel about that? “Someone has to do it,” he says blithely, but adds: “It kind of startles you.”
Four years ago, I attended a Veterans Day observance in Orleans, Mass. Near the head of the parade, a 106-year-old named J. Laurence Moffitt rode in a Japanese sedan, waving to the small crowd of onlookers and sporting the same helmet he had been wearing in the Argonne Forest at the moment the armistice took effect, 85 years earlier.
I didn’t know it then, but that was, in all likelihood, the last small-town American Veterans Day parade to feature a World War I veteran. The years since have seen the passing of one last after another — the last combat-wounded veteran, the last Marine, the last African-American, the last Yeomanette — until, now, we are down to the last of the last.
It’s hard for anyone, I imagine, to say for certain what it is that we will lose when Frank Buckles dies. It’s not that World War I will then become history; it’s been history for a long time now. But it will become a different kind of history, the kind we can’t quite touch anymore, the kind that will, from that point on, always be just beyond our grasp somehow. We can’t stop that from happening. But we should, at least, take notice of it.
By RICHARD RUBIN
Published: November 12, 2007 NY Times
BY any conceivable measure, Frank Buckles has led an extraordinary life. Born on a farm in Missouri in February 1901, he saw his first automobile in his hometown in 1905, and his first airplane at the Illinois State Fair in 1907. At 15 he moved on his own to Oklahoma and went to work in a bank; in the 1940s, he spent more than three years as a Japanese prisoner of war. When he returned to the United States, he married, had a daughter and bought a farm near Charles Town, W. Va., where he lives to this day. He drove a tractor until he was 104.
But even more significant than the remarkable details of Mr. Buckles’s life is what he represents: Of the two million soldiers the United States sent to France in World War I, he is the only one left.
This Veterans Day marked the 89th anniversary of the armistice that ended that war. The holiday, first proclaimed as Armistice Day by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and renamed in 1954 to honor veterans of all wars, has become, in the minds of many Americans, little more than a point between Halloween and Thanksgiving when banks are closed and mail isn’t delivered. But there’s a good chance that this Veterans Day will prove to be the last with a living American World War I veteran. (Mr. Buckles is one of only three left; the other two were still in basic training in the United States when the war ended.) Ten died in the last year. The youngest of them was 105.
At the end of his documentary “The War,” Ken Burns notes that 1,000 World War II veterans are dying every day. Their passing is being observed at all levels of American society; no doubt you have heard a lot about them in recent days. Fortunately, World War II veterans will be with us for some years yet. There is still time to honor them. But the passing of the last few veterans of the First World War is all but complete, and has gone largely unnoticed here.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Almost from the moment the armistice took effect, the United States has worked hard, it seems, to forget World War I; maybe that’s because more than 100,000 Americans never returned from it, lost for a cause that few can explain even now. The first few who did come home were given ticker-tape parades, but most returned only to silence and a good bit of indifference.
There was no G.I. Bill of Rights to see that they got a college education or vocational training, a mortgage or small-business loan. There was nothing but what remained of the lives they had left behind a year or two earlier, and the hope that they might eventually be able to return to what President Warren Harding, Wilson’s successor, would call “normalcy.” Prohibition, isolationism, the stock market bubble and the crisis in farming made that hard; the Great Depression, harder still.
A few years ago, I set out to see if I could find any living American World War I veterans. No one — not the Department of Veterans Affairs, or the Veterans of Foreign Wars, or the American Legion — knew how many there were or where they might be. As far as I could tell, no one much seemed to care, either.
Eventually, I did find some, including Frank Buckles, who was 102 when we first met. Eighty-six years earlier, he’d lied about his age to enlist. The Army sent him to England but, itching to be near the action, he managed to get himself sent on to France, though never to the trenches.
After the armistice, he was assigned to guard German prisoners waiting to be repatriated. Seeing that he was still just a boy, the prisoners adopted him, taught him their language, gave him food from their Red Cross packages, bits of their uniforms to take home as souvenirs.
In the 1930s, while working for a steamship company, Mr. Buckles visited Germany; it was difficult for him to reconcile his fond memories of those old P.O.W.’s with what he saw of life under the Third Reich. The steamship company later sent him to run its office in Manila; he was there in January 1942 when the Japanese occupied the city and took him prisoner. At some point during his 39 months in captivity, he contracted beriberi, which affects his sense of balance even now, almost 63 years after he was liberated by the 11th Airborne Division.
Nevertheless, he carries with aplomb the burden of being the last of his kind. “For a long time I’ve felt that there should be more recognition of the surviving veterans of World War I,” he tells me; now that group is, more or less, him. How does he feel about that? “Someone has to do it,” he says blithely, but adds: “It kind of startles you.”
Four years ago, I attended a Veterans Day observance in Orleans, Mass. Near the head of the parade, a 106-year-old named J. Laurence Moffitt rode in a Japanese sedan, waving to the small crowd of onlookers and sporting the same helmet he had been wearing in the Argonne Forest at the moment the armistice took effect, 85 years earlier.
I didn’t know it then, but that was, in all likelihood, the last small-town American Veterans Day parade to feature a World War I veteran. The years since have seen the passing of one last after another — the last combat-wounded veteran, the last Marine, the last African-American, the last Yeomanette — until, now, we are down to the last of the last.
It’s hard for anyone, I imagine, to say for certain what it is that we will lose when Frank Buckles dies. It’s not that World War I will then become history; it’s been history for a long time now. But it will become a different kind of history, the kind we can’t quite touch anymore, the kind that will, from that point on, always be just beyond our grasp somehow. We can’t stop that from happening. But we should, at least, take notice of it.
Marty
Thanks for posting this very good and interestin write up on Frank Buckles and WW1, which is the forgotten war and many don’t realize its repercussions led directly to WW11. I appreciate your work researching this subject.
I didn’t have a military photo of the first generation family member whom I mentioned in the first page of this thread, so couldn’t add it with the rest.. He was my Great Uncle and the most influential person in my life. His father was a Homeopathy Physician who had left Germany to escape becoming the Kaisers cannon fodder, so was fluent in speaking German. He survived five major campaigns during this war in which for the most part his duty was a Company Runner (this was before radios) delivering messeges. The same job Hitler had on the other side. When very young I spent several years living in his home and listening to His many stories from basic training (Fort Lewis-Washington State) to his return home. He had a piece of shrapnel go through his helmet and lodge in his skull by his temple. Even after being hit He said He always felt there was lots of room around Him and in the end would return home. I remember His concern for and no blame directed to the individuals who mentally broke under the constant artillery shelling.
This is my favorite story, He told about the war;
He had been up for many hours and finally fell into a very deep sleep. When He awoke the only language being spoken around Him was German. It was night his unit had withdrawn and the German Army had moved in. Due to his being a runner, He was often gone and not in the normal military loop when there, so nobody awoke Him to inform Him of the pull back. When He awoke on his own, startled, with German being spoken He jumped up and took off running. He only made a few steps and ran into a linked wire chicken fence. The force of hitting the fence through him back flat on the ground. This was very fortunate because before He could jump back up the allies opened up with artillery on the Germans directly where He was. He said one gas shell hit so close He could put his arm in the small crater it left. Again fortunately it didn’t explode. Said He knew it was a gas shell by the sound it made coming in. By that time He could distinguish from the sound all the different type artillery rounds from both sides. During all the confusion from the barrage, He was able to make it back to his unit. He was unhappy about being left, but felt to good about the outcome to complain.
When Jo-lee and I was in Germany and France in the late 60's we visited some of these battle sites and cemeteries. There were many thousands not as fortunate as my Uncle. He died in his sleep at the age of 95 in l986. I still miss him just as much today as ever.
Jay
Thanks for posting this very good and interestin write up on Frank Buckles and WW1, which is the forgotten war and many don’t realize its repercussions led directly to WW11. I appreciate your work researching this subject.
I didn’t have a military photo of the first generation family member whom I mentioned in the first page of this thread, so couldn’t add it with the rest.. He was my Great Uncle and the most influential person in my life. His father was a Homeopathy Physician who had left Germany to escape becoming the Kaisers cannon fodder, so was fluent in speaking German. He survived five major campaigns during this war in which for the most part his duty was a Company Runner (this was before radios) delivering messeges. The same job Hitler had on the other side. When very young I spent several years living in his home and listening to His many stories from basic training (Fort Lewis-Washington State) to his return home. He had a piece of shrapnel go through his helmet and lodge in his skull by his temple. Even after being hit He said He always felt there was lots of room around Him and in the end would return home. I remember His concern for and no blame directed to the individuals who mentally broke under the constant artillery shelling.
This is my favorite story, He told about the war;
He had been up for many hours and finally fell into a very deep sleep. When He awoke the only language being spoken around Him was German. It was night his unit had withdrawn and the German Army had moved in. Due to his being a runner, He was often gone and not in the normal military loop when there, so nobody awoke Him to inform Him of the pull back. When He awoke on his own, startled, with German being spoken He jumped up and took off running. He only made a few steps and ran into a linked wire chicken fence. The force of hitting the fence through him back flat on the ground. This was very fortunate because before He could jump back up the allies opened up with artillery on the Germans directly where He was. He said one gas shell hit so close He could put his arm in the small crater it left. Again fortunately it didn’t explode. Said He knew it was a gas shell by the sound it made coming in. By that time He could distinguish from the sound all the different type artillery rounds from both sides. During all the confusion from the barrage, He was able to make it back to his unit. He was unhappy about being left, but felt to good about the outcome to complain.
When Jo-lee and I was in Germany and France in the late 60's we visited some of these battle sites and cemeteries. There were many thousands not as fortunate as my Uncle. He died in his sleep at the age of 95 in l986. I still miss him just as much today as ever.
Jay
tom&shan
New member
THE ARMY HONORS THE NAVY: Lt. Gen. Delos C. Emmons, commanding general of the Hawaiian department, decorates the officers and men of the submarine Trout at ceremonies held today at Pearl Harbor, in recognition of their successful performance of a mission for the war department in enemy controlled waters. At the left is Lt. Cmdr. Frank W. Fenno, captain of the Trout. Standing behind the general is Lt. Col. E.B. Whisner, secretary of the general's staff.
Shannon's uncle served on the Trout - she never knew him unfortunetly.
On 8 February, the submarine began her llth and final war patrol. Trout topped off with fuel at Midway and, on the 16th, headed via a great circle route toward the East China Sea. She was never heard from again.
Japanese records indicate that one of their convoys was attacked by a submarine on 29 February 1944 in the patrol area assigned to Trout. The submarine badly damaged one large passenger-cargo ship and sank the 7,126-ton transport Sakito Maru. Possibly one of the convoy's escorts sank the submarine. On 17 April 1944, Trout was declared presumed lost.
Trout received 11 battle stars for World War II service and the Presidential Unit Citation for her second, third, and fifth patrols.
So, from Tom and Shan - a couple of civilians - Thanks - your sacrifices are appreciated and honored.
Cheers.
