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Tribute To Arlington National Cemetery BY
George J. Wilson,
Jr. George passed away July 2nd 2007 (see his bio here) On a cold and windy, but beautiful afternoon, in March, 1997, Gene Salay and I, both from Bethlehem, PA, visited Arlington Cemetery. Gene is the Director of Veterans Affairs for Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and I am a member of the Court of Veterans Appeals. Gene is a veteran of the Korean War and I was in WWII. We were both in the infantry, both wounded, and were prisoners of war. We visited the grave of Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and others, finally ending up at the former residence of General Lee. After a tour of the Lee house, we went to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We would like to tell you some things about Arlington Cemetery which you may not have been aware of. By the way, I picked out my grave site, but don't intend to use it soon! We have four Purple Heart medals, between us, so we both qualify for residency in Arlington. Gene hasn't made up his mind, yet, but odds are that he will wind up next to me. The one regret that I have about being interred in Arlington, is that it is a bit of a drive from Pennsylvania, and I will miss seeing my family, especially my three year old granddaughter, Ahnika. My wife, JoAnn, is keeping her opinions to herself, saying she'll "cross that bridge when she comes to it", in concert with Gene's wife, Ellie. We visited the Tomb of the Unknowns and watched in awe as Sgt. Danyell Wilson paces out 21 slow, precise steps, then stops, clicks her heels together with a sharp crack, pivots to her left, clicks her heels again, waits precisely 21 seconds, pivots left, switches her rifle to her left shoulder and begins another 21-step march, while we, along with the crowd of tourists, watches in hushed reverence. Inside, in a windowless room beneath the marble amphitheater a few yards away, Wilson's colleagues await their turn to guard the Tomb. A couple of them are sitting around eating microwaved lasagna and watching a TV screen that shows models sashaying down a runway, displaying mini-dresses with holes that reveal their navels. They laugh. Somebody flips the channel and the models disappear, replaced by cartoon spacemen. Pfc. Jeff Hojnacke glances at the TV, then steps around a corner to get ready to replace Wilson at the Tomb. He checks his shoes; they're impeccably spit-shined. He checks his pants; the crease could slice bread. He pulls on a pair of white gloves and fastens them with a pair of "keeps" that circle his wrists like sweatbands. He turns around and squares his shoulders while his buddy, Pfc. Stefan Still, grabs the top of his dark blue jacket and yanks down hard, tucking all the excess material under the jacket's belt so that it fits like second skin. Hojnacke steps to the water fountain, turns it on and sticks his hands under the running water until both gloves are thoroughly soaked -- a process that gives the guards a better grip on their custom-made wood-handled M-14 rifles. Now Hojnacke is ready. He raises one fist. So does Still. They punch each other's fists a few times for good luck, then slap palms. "Have a good one," Still says. Hojnacke smiles broadly and picks up his rifle. He inspects himself in the mirror and instantly his smile falls away, replaced by a look of utter solemnity, and he marches outside for the Changing of the Guard. Hojnacke is a member of the 3rd U.S. Infantry, which has been guarding the Tomb since 1948 and will no doubt guard it forever, or at least as long as the United States of America exists. Inside the Tomb are four unidentified bodies, Americans who died in the century's four wars. Standing sentinel 24 hours a day, every day of the year, the guards are eternal, like the flame on President Kennedy's grave a few hundred yards down the hill.
There's no mistaking the meaning of this place. Just inside the
iron gates where 4 million visitors enter every year, a sign
spells it right out: Tomorrow, President Clinton will come to this place where 240,000 Americans are buried. Like every president since Harding, he will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns and deliver a Memorial Day oration in an Amphitheater known as "America's Temple of Patriotism." Sacred. Hallowed. Temple: The language is self-consciously religious. No wonder Tom Sherlock, the cemetery's official historian, says that Arlington is "akin to Westminster Abbey." But Arlington National Cemetery is not just a secular church, a place of hushed reverence. Like the soldiers who guard its most famous tomb, it has another face that is seldom seen, less somber, more human. On its 612 acres of rolling hills, green grass and white stones, American history is visible in all its quirky glory; the tragic, the valiant, the depressing, the uplifting, the spiteful, the foolish, the bizarre, even the comic. And, because Arlington is, after all, a cemetery, there is also a touch of the macabre. John Metzler, the cemetery's superintendent, eases his big, black Ford slowly up the hill to Arlington House, the mansion that overlooks the graveyard. He leans out the window and points to a row of headstones that ends just a few paces from the house. "Most people who visit this house have no idea what these gravestones represent," he says. What they represent, Metzler points out, is an obscene gesture aimed at the former tenant Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Lee was married in that house. His wife, Mary Custis, was the daughter of the man who built it, George Washington Parke Custis, who was Martha Washington's grandson. Lee lived in the beautiful cream-colored, neoclassical mansion until 1861, when he resigned from the U.S. Army to take command of the rebel Army of Northern Virginia. A month later, Union troops seized the house and occupied it for the rest of the Civil War. In 1864, when the Union Army was looking for a place to bury its dead, Quartermaster Gen. Montgomery Meigs made a suggestion: Why not bury the dead in Lee's back yard? "The grounds about the mansion," he wrote, "are admirably suited to such a purpose." Meigs was a Georgian who'd remained loyal to the Union, and he regarded Lee as nothing more than a traitor to his country, pure and simple. When his suggestion was accepted, he decided to send Lee an unmistakable message of his loathing. "Meigs came over and personally oversaw the burial of a row of Union soldiers in Mrs. Lee's rose garden," Metzler says. He leans out the car window and points to the gravestones, which stand like sentries around a garden where purple and yellow flowers glow in the bright sunlight. "Here's that single row of headstones -- right up to the back door," he says with a sardonic little chuckle. If that gesture weren't enough to ensure that Lee would never again live in Arlington House, Meigs buried 16,000 other soldiers there, more than 7,00 of them in a field just below the mansion, blighting Lee's landscape with rows of crude wooden headstones that stretched to the horizon. Today, the headstones are made of white marble, and this "Field of the Dead" is a breathtakingly stark reminder of the cost of war. In October 1864, while Meigs was filling Lee's land with graves, his son, Lt. John Meigs, was shot by Confederate cavalrymen near Harrisonburg, Va. Meigs buried him on a hillside overlooking the Field of the Dead. Later, he marked the spot with a metal sculpture that shows the young man lying dead in his uniform and cape, his pistol near his boot, hoof prints from the Rebels' horses around his body. After the war, the Union Army gathered its dead from shallow, makeshift graves all over northern Virginia and sent their skeletons to Arlington. Meigs had his men dig a huge pit in Mrs. Lee's rose garden and into it they tossed the bones -- skulls in one section, legs in another, arms in a third. In September 1866, the soldiers sealed the vault and capped it with a granite sarcophagus. "Beneath this stone," the inscription reads, "repose the bones of two thousand one hundred and eleven unknown soldiers . . . " Meigs's spite proved successful. Lee never returned to his old home. His widow came once, took one look at the graves and left without even climbing out of her carriage. In 1877, Robert E. Lee's eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, sued the U.S. government, seeking to recover his family estate. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld Lee's claim to the land. It was an amazing ruling in a world where winners seize the spoils of war: The court said, in essence, that the government can't confiscate a man's land simply because he'd led an army of rebellion against it. For George Lee, though, the victory was hollow. Not eager to live in a graveyard, he agreed to sell the land to the government for $150,000. By then, the old Lee plantation was home to hundreds of former slaves, many of whom had fled their masters in the chaos of war and headed for freedom in Washington. The government permitted them to live on cemetery property, and they built a village complete with a school, a church and a hospital. At its peak, this freedmen's village stretched from what is now the Tomb of the Unknowns to what is now the Pentagon. But the cemetery kept expanding, and by the turn of the century the village was history. Today, the only sign of its existence is a small cluster of graves at the far northern end of the cemetery, in the Jim Crow section, where the United States Colored Troops -- the black men who died fighting for the Union, and their families -- are buried. Hard by the cemetery's brick wall, there are rows and rows of headstones, each identifying the occupant only as a "citizen": Betty Jones, Citizen; Mary Brown, Citizen; J. Alfred, Citizen. To cemetery historian Sherlock, that simple word represents the beginning of a revolution in the American mind. "When you see the word `citizen,' it's hard to realize everything that implies," he says. "What a tribute to the disenfranchised to be called `citizen'! What a real sign of what the Civil War was fought for -- to go from being called `slave' to being called `citizen.' This bitter war was fought to abolish slavery, and the blacks buried here had that wonderful word `citizen' on their headstones." Up in the sky, an angel watches over the affluent souls of the officer corps. It's a stone angel, clutching an anchor, perched atop a huge shaft that towers above the grave of Robert B. Watkins. There's another angel nearby, a human-size seraphim standing on the top step of the stone staircase leading to the huge cross that stands over the grave of Thomas Hudson McKee. These wildly opulent graves are clustered in Section 1 of the cemetery -- the Officers Section -- where veterans who died in the Gilded Age flaunted their wealth in one final gesture of conspicuous consumption. "They could afford to put up monuments to themselves," Metzler says dryly, "and they did." These days, officers and enlisted men are buried together, and oversize gravestones aren't permitted in Arlington, but a century ago officers could put anything they wanted atop their graves, and some of them got carried away. These were the men who'd whipped the Rebels and conquered the Indians and then made a pile of money in the era of the robber barons and they damn well weren't going to spend eternity lying beneath a plain white, government-issued gravestone. Instead, they erected angels, obelisks, gargantuan crosses, replicas of the Washington Monument. Joseph Cates Ramsey was a colonel in the 7th Artillery, and before he died in 1890 he arranged to top his grave with a huge cannonball made of polished black marble. Wallace Fitz Randolph went Ramsey one better: He arranged to have an actual Civil War-era cannon mounted atop his eternal resting place. He told his wife that he'd slept under a cannon all his life and he wanted to be buried under one. She didn't spend her life sleeping under a cannon, but she's spending eternity under one anyway. So are their daughters.
Nearby is the grave of an Indian fighter named Robert Goldthwaite Carter, topped by a five-foot-high monument that spells out his exploits in a long narrative etched in metal. It quotes liberally from the commendations he received: "Joint Resolution by legislature of State of Texas -- expressing the `Grateful Thanks' of its people for `prompt action and gallant conduct in inflicting well-merited punishment upon these scourges (Indians) of our frontier,' etc." It's probably the only epitaph in Arlington cemetery, maybe in any cemetery, that ends with "etc." Audie Murphy didn't want a huge monument on his grave, although he certainly deserved one. Murphy, a Texas boy who lied about his age to get into the Army, was the most decorated U.S. soldier in World War II. He won 20 combat medals, including the Congressional Medal of Honor, which he earned by climbing into a burning tank destroyer and single-handedly fighting off six German tanks with a machine gun, despite a wounded leg. He went on to star in a movie based on his life and then appeared in 40 other films. When he died in a plane crash in 1971, a lot of people wanted to erect an elaborate memorial on his grave at Arlington. His widow refused to permit it. She wouldn't even allow the gold leaf that traditionally gilds the graves of the men who won the Medal of Honor. Audie didn't want anything ostentatious, she explained, so he's buried under a simple white headstone, the one the government provides free to anybody buried at Arlington. That kind of humility is far more common than the Gilded Age braggadocio found in the Officers Section. Gen. John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, the only man since George Washington to hold the title General of the Armies, is also buried under a plain white stone. So is Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, the Medal of Honor winner who led the famous 1942 air raid on Tokyo. And Adm. Richard Byrd, the antarctic explorer. And Lee Marvin, the actor. There's a democracy of the dead at Arlington. Tom Sherlock remembers escorting a European defense minister around the cemetery. The man wanted to see the grave of Henry "Hap" Arnold, the five-star general known as the father of the U.S. Air Force. When Sherlock showed him Arnold's grave, topped with the standard government-issued stone, the visitor was shocked. "This gentleman was so impressed that there wasn't an enormous tomb, just a small white headstone," Sherlock recalls. "Two graves over is the grave of a private, and he couldn't believe that. He was very impressed. He said, `Rank has nothing to do with it here.' I said, `No, it doesn't.' " In Arlington National Cemetery, only one tomb is guarded with pomp and ritual, and that's the Tomb of the Unknowns. "We don't march in front of five-star generals' tombs," Sherlock says. "We march in front of the tomb of four common soldiers." John Metzler stops his car at a field where grounds keepers are attacking the grass around the gravestones with roaring weed whackers. "This is an area I used to play in as a youngster," he says. "This was all woods in here." That was back in the '50s and '60s, when his father, Jack Metzler, was the cemetery superintendent, and John and his three brothers grew up roaming the graveyard, playing tag among the tombstones, collecting the shells left after salutes were fired at funerals. "The cemetery wasn't as developed as it is today," Metzler says. "We played in the woods. Back then, the headstones used to come in wooden crates, so we'd pick up scrap pieces of wood, straighten out the nails and we'd have our building supplies and we'd build forts and treehouses in the woods." Most of those woods are gone now, replaced by forests of marble. That was inevitable, given the reality of human mortality, but the process was hastened immeasurably by a bullet fired in Dallas in 1963. "The event that thrust us into the national spotlight was the burial of President Kennedy in 1963," Metzler says. "That took this cemetery out of its prior existence as just one of the national cemeteries." The president's funeral was televised live and nearly everyone in America saw Jacqueline Kennedy, her face obscured with a black veil, clutching the flag from her husband's coffin, lighting the eternal flame over his grave. The television coverage served as an inadvertent advertisement for Arlington National Cemetery, instantly transforming it into Washington's busiest tourist attraction. In the year before the assassination, a million people came to Arlington; in the next six months, 9 million came. Five years later, the Kennedy grave site was still attracting 7 million people a year. Many of those people were not satisfied with a brief visit. They wanted to remain in Arlington National Cemetery. Forever. The Kennedy charisma turned Arlington into America's favorite place to spend eternity. Requests for burials rose by 400 percent. It was too much to handle. In 1967, faced with filling all its empty space within a year, the cemetery had to tighten its entrance requirements: Instead of accepting any veteran with an honorable discharge, like every other national cemetery, Arlington was forced to limit burials to those who died in active duty, those who won high military honors or veterans with 20 years of active service. In 1980, the cemetery added a columbarium, where the cremated remains of any veteran with an honorable discharge can be interred. Those changes have enabled Arlington to remain a working cemetery. At the current rate -- about 20 burials a day -- the space is expected to last until 2020. In 1991, after serving a tour of duty in Vietnam and an apprenticeship running national cemeteries in New Jersey, Arkansas and South Dakota, John Metzler took over his father's job as Arlington's superintendent. He soon learned that the toughest task is fending off folks who want him to bend the rules to admit their loved ones. It's the kind of problem familiar to Ivy League admissions officers and country club presidents, but not one he frequently faced back in Arkansas and South Dakota. "Everybody sees Arlington National Cemetery as the place where they'd like to see their loved ones interred," he says. "And of course they use their congressman or senator or any influence they have at the Pentagon." He smiles slightly, then returns to the careful understatement favored by the funeral trade. "From time to time," he says, "it gets extremely difficult." The same mystique that draws tourists and mourners to Arlington occasionally attracts less desirable visitors, including the intoxicated and the insane. In 1972, a 23-year-old Army veteran from Michigan knelt down on Kennedy's grave and plunged a kitchen knife into his chest while tourists watched in horror. He died seven hours later. In 1981, someone sneaked into the cemetery at night and stole the plain white cross and the tombstone that marked the grave of Robert F. Kennedy. They were never recovered and the thief was never caught. One cold, rainy, winter morning in 1982, Sherlock found the burned corpse of a man lying in the eternal flame on Kennedy's grave. He was a Salvador an immigrant. He had been carrying a cigarette and a rolled-up newspaper. He was grotesquely burned. An autopsy determined that he'd died of a heart attack, that he'd been extremely intoxicated, that he'd been dead since the middle of the night. As near as Sherlock can figure, the man had had his heart attack while trying to ignite the newspaper so he could light his cigarette in the drenching rain. Perhaps the strangest incident of all occurred in the spring of 1983, when a man with a gun took a guard hostage at the Tomb of the Unknowns. The cemetery had just closed when the man walked up to the guard. He was wearing a business suit and he was staggeringly drunk. He pulled out a pistol and held the guard prisoner for 10 minutes while he mumbled something about a military ceremony. Finally, another guard dropped a ceremonial sword, startling the intruder, and then wrestled him to the ground. The gunman turned out to be a car salesman from Virginia Beach, an Air Force veteran who'd served in Vietnam, a man who had been watching a video of "Apocalypse Now" over and over again. He told his wife that during his days in 'Nam he'd been captured by the Viet Cong and held for days in a tiny box before he'd managed to escape. He wanted a medal for his exploits but the Air Force said it had no record of them. So he went to Arlington National Cemetery. "I was going to kill myself and I was going to do it there," he told a reporter, from the hospital where he was placed under psychiatric observation. "Nobody would believe me about Vietnam. I thought maybe if I killed myself, why I was there would be recognized." The sun is beating down hard and hot, but under the big old oaks, the grass is dappled and damp and the air is cool. By the side of the road in Section 3 is a headstone, a little bigger than those around it. Into its marble face is etched one word: HERO. On the other side, there is a little more information:
Andrew Hero, III Overhead, a jet glides silently toward National Airport. A bird chirps in a tree. In the distance is the muffled sound of taps. Away from the Tour mobiles and the tourists, Arlington National Cemetery is as deserted and quiet as a church in the afternoon. "You can walk off the road a little bit," says Sherlock, "and it's like you're in a forest. You'll come across a man or a woman standing alone at a grave and the birds are chirping and it's beautiful. To me, that's Arlington." Sherlock has been working there for 22 years, half his life, but he still loves to explore the place. "I like to get off the beaten path and walk and read the headstones," he says. "You see some incredible things. You'll see the name of a 20-year-old and you can tell by the dates that he died during the Normandy invasion. Or you'll see a date and you know he died during the Tet Offensive. For every general whose name you'd recognize, we have thousands of people who are heroes only to their families. That's what I like to look for when I walk around here. "Strolling around the cemetery one day, Sherlock saw a beer can on the grave of a man who died in the Persian Gulf War. He reached down and picked it up. It was full. There was a note attached to it, saying "I told you we would have a beer when you got home". Sherlock put the beer back on the grave, with a mixed feeling of gratitude and pride. The sun sets, taps sound, and another day is gone forever. The quiet is deafening. Freedom is not free!
TO THE EDITOR I am a disabled veteran of World War II. I was awarded three Purple Hearts and was wounded and captured by the enemy during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. In October 1944, prior to the Bulge, my outfit was in Aachen, Germany, for the purpose of taking the city back from the Germans. Aachen was a large city with many holes to hide in and the Germans found them all. Street fighting is not easy, especially under these conditions. One thing we had in our favor was that we could, without reprimand, shoot anything in front of us including pigeons, dogs, cats, horses, and of course, the enemy. If we could not get them with our rifles, we called for mortar, artillery, or even air support. Even then it was not easy to take back the city, but we did, but with many losses. Most of our wounded and killed were from sniper shots, since we didn’t know where the shots were coming from, until they fired. Once they fired, we were on them, and got them. I have a grandson in Iraq. He has been exposed to combat but under different conditions. His squad or platoon will be walking down a street with civilians in the front of them, back of them, side by side of them, not knowing if any of them are the enemy, and in many cases, they are. They are fired upon, or attacked with grenades by individuals, in civilian clothes, who are trained terrorists, dedicated to kill the Americans, and others, who are attempting to “conquer” their country. In my war, we faced SS Troopers who were zealots and committed, at any cost, to kill us before we killed them. At least the SS were in uniform for us to recognize them. Not so, with these bastards. They will kill members of their own family, if necessary, to accomplish their goals. They have proved how ghoulish and barbaric they are by the beheading of innocent people. You cannot fight this type of enemy without resorting to his kind of war, and this we are not about to do. These young service men and women who have to expose themselves to this kind of enemy are being wounded every time they go on patrol or face an ambush or battle. When they withdraw from fighting and lay their heads down to rest, they can’t sleep. The din and clamor of combat rings in their ears and “flashbacks” of the sight of their friends being blown to pieces, sometimes right in front of them, preclude them from getting proper rest to continue the next day. In my war (WWII) they referred to this as “battle fatigue”, then in 1980, the government came out with a medical explanation called “post trauma stress disorder”. Many combatants, discharged from WWII, Korea and Vietnam left the service with a mind that was befuddled, confused, and tormented because of what happened during combat. Some filed claims for disability but were denied because the VA didn’t even have a name for their disability. They tried to call it “Shellshock” as they did for WWI, but that didn’t do it. Hundreds of thousands of our veterans were not awarded any disability until 1980, when the “post trauma stress disorder, delayed (PTSD)” was promulgated. What about the years between 1946 and 1980? PTSD is an invisible wound that does not get better with time. It gets worse. The government did not have to pay disability to these hundreds of thousands of combat veterans between 1946 and 1980, thereby avoiding the debt owed to our warriors. It was thirty four (34) years later that the VA opened up and started really recognizing the fact that we had many heroes in our midst from WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam, who weren’t being recompensed for their service. Now we are facing a similar problem. These young warriors from the Middle East are coming home and many of them are in need of financial and medical assistance because of their “bloodless” wounds. Please do not turn your backs upon these warriors. They are in Iraq because they are following orders from an administration that, in my opinion, jumped the gun by invading Iraq unilaterally, without help from the United Nations. Our President and Vice-President assured us that we would be greeted with flowers and respect, from the Iraquis, but not so. We are faced with murderers and assassins who kill and maim without reason. Perhaps if Bush and Cheney had not dodged the war and had faced actual combat (getting shot at and shooting back) they might have seen things differently about jumping into Iraq. We were not welcome then and are not welcome now. We are losing many of our youngsters, whose lives will never be the same, and the cost of this debacle will overwhelm us. GET OUT OF IRAQ WHILE THE GETTING'S GOOD!! George Wilson, Bethlehem, PA Messages From The Troops April 2004
The Marines Are Fighting for our Freedom I hope they heard President Bush last night on TV 4/13/04, "We are staying the course and supporting our troops." All Wimps stand aside while the U.S. Marines and other services proceed to make the world safer. Please do everything you can to support our troops and our President. Tom Twitty, Editor From: Major Stephens - USMC Active duty
Semper
Fi....
Major S
Gentlemen, When you watch the news and read the papers remember they only tell one side of the story and that's usually the one they want to tell. Here is the Bn Cmdr of 2/4 telling it like it is. The Marine Corps reputation is not founded on myth or folk lore but on blood and guts and bringing the fight to the enemy... Update from Lt Col Kennedy Dear Ladies, the last two days have been the hardest two days this battalion has faced in over 30 years. Within the blink of an eye the situation went form relatively calm to a raging storm. You've known that since arriving there has been violence; attacks have been sporadic and mostly limited to roadside bombs. Your husbands have become experts at recognizing those threats and neutralizing them before we are injured. Up to this point the war has been the purview of corporals and sergeants, and the squad they lead. Yesterday the enemy upped the ante. Early in the morning we exchanged gunfire with a group of insurgents without significant loss. As morning progressed, the enemy fed more men into the fight and we responded with stronger force. Unfortunately, this led to injuries as our Marines and sailors started clearing the city block by block. The enemy did not run; they fought us like soldiers. And we destroyed the enemy like only Marines can. By the end of the evening the local hospital was so full of their dead and wounded that they ran out of space to put them. Your husbands were awesome all night they stayed at the job of securing the streets and nobody challenged them as the hours wore on. They did not surrender an inch nor did flinch from the next potential threat. Previous to yesterday the terrorist thought that we were soft enough to challenge. As of tonight the message is loud and clear that the Marines will not be beaten. Today the enemy started all over again, although with far fewer numbers, only now the rest of the battalion joined the fight. Without elaborating to much, weapons company and Golf crushed their attackers with the vengeance of the righteous. They filled up the hospitals again and we suffered only a few injuries. Echo company dominated the previous day's battlefield. Fox company patrolled with confidence and authority; nobody challenged them. Even Headquarters Company manned their stations and counted far fewer people openly watching us with disdain. If the enemy is foolish enough to try to take your men again they will not survive contact. We are here to win. The news looks grim from back in the States. We did take losses that, in our hearts, we will always live with. The men we lost were taken within the very opening minutes of the violence. They could not have foreseen the treachery of the enemy and they did not suffer. We can never replace these Marines and Sailors but they will fight on with us in spirit. We are not feeling sorry for ourselves nor do we fear what tomorrow will bring. The battalion has lived up to its reputation as Magnificent Bastards. Yesterday made everyone here stronger and wiser; it will be a cold day in Hell before we are taken for granted again. Paul Kennedy and Jim Booker -- Tony C. Once a Marine... ...Always a Marine OOORAHHH !!!!! Saepe Expertus - Semper Fidelis - Fratres Aeterni "Often Tested" - "Always Faithful" - "Brothers Forever" http://www.Vvof.org/ Vietnam Veterans of Florida Inc., State Coalition
OK, I'm up out of my hole---at least for now. Nick called last night. His
MAP-3 (Mobile Assault Platoon {replaced the 1980's-90's CAAT that was
designed for armor threat vice threat they are facing now}) was brought back
for a few hours to refuel/rearm/eat chow and he got a few minutes.
What you won't hear on audio-bites "...parts of Falluja/Ramadi still under
enemy control..." or from those fat phoney ..... Kennedy and Kerry et.al. is
this: "Dad, we are kicking the living shit out of those .............."
It seems that the group that got ambushed were elements of 'G' 2/4. The rags
set up diversional ambush sites elsewhere in Ramadi to draw attention and
devoted their main effort on the Golf's routine foot patrol. Nick has been
told that the Ramadi front is designed to take heat off Falluja (2/1 and
1/5...1st recon is there as well). MAP 3 was called to provide relief to
'G.' Nick says that as they moved up, the rags were performing disciplined,
as he calls it, "bounding fire and movement---they knew what they were
doing---even when we knocked them back, they were 'bounding' "
When I asked if he had cranked-off any rounds he replied with disgust,
"Uhhh...yeahhhhh" (a version of 'no duh')...Dad our platoon alone has killed
over 200 of those (again) .............."
Relates that he got 4 in a taxi cab delivering ammo, several in door-ways,
as well as several who were actually in friggin trees.
Heroism: One of Nick's Sgts got an AK round through shoulder and disobeyed
LT's order for MEDEVAC. Remained with MAP for 4 hours and used an M-203 to
continue fight.
Humor: Wounded rag runs in building. Marines pursue, apprehend. Rag is
shrieking hysterically. "A big black Cpl puts barrel in rag;'s chest while
screaming, 'Shut-the-....-up!' " Rag grabs weapon. Cpl levels him with a
straight right hand to the face. Another Marine pounds rag over the head
with a 5-pound bag of flower that breaks, thus creating a Three
Stoogesque-scene when white-face rag is led out of house.
USMC Lore: As MAP was entering Ramadi on Wed minaret loudspeakers were
pronouncing, "This is the day you die, come forward and we will kill you in
name of Jihad, bla, bla." Wpns Company Commander grabs interpreter, puts him
on OUR loudspeaker and begins, "Come out and fight you goddamn ...... and
fight us in the streets like ....... men!" Nick relates that some did and,
"We mowed them down."
There was much, much more but you get the drift. Nick was was very tired but
pumped. He spoke in a very matter-of-fact tone like the old WWII guys
talking about the Tenaru River Banzai at G-canal...no angst or 'what have I
done' nonsense. They have been so frustrated and angry losing friends to
IEDs and other sneaky shit that I believe they do not consider the foe as
human...and they're not. Nick says he was buddies with many KIA of Tues. A
boot camp buddy from Illinois (PFC ......) was KIA RPG last Sat.
Sun they went in to escort food hand-out amidst screaming and rock throwing.
PAO Capt was along for ride and expressed aloud that this food stuff was a
swell idea. On the way out, the rags blew an IED and KOed the 'skipper's'
vehicle. Two WIA including our young reporter...numerous shrapnel wounds to
face and "blood all over the place," according to Nick. I guess 'skipper'
has adjusted his stance.
Well, those "devils in yellow leggings" seem to be making an impression.
Nick asserts that the rags are figuring out that there is a new sheriff in
town and they are becoming more cowed. States that they are "blowing the
shit out of everything." Of course, he knows that the cellar is still full
of rats and every day you enter the cellar they will try and bite
you...especially those that came to Iraq to die.
I know that he is fine because he signed-off with, "Semper Fi Dad, I love
you."
---
Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2004 11:53 AM
Subject: The Fighting at Fallujah: Reports from a
USN-USMC Chap lain
>Sent from a hometown pastor. >all, >Hot and sunny on Good Friday...quiet in Fallujah and Ar Ramadi. The >Coalition has announced a pause in offensive operations. Humanitarian aid is >being searched and then allowed into the city of fallujah. Defensive >operations continue 24/7.it is all war, all the time. The bad guys are >regrouping. So are the Marines. The brawl will begin again...probably >tonight. All intel points to the bad guys redistributing ammo, enlisting >kids in the fight and moving for new cover. Convoys are limited..danger of >ambush is high. Life in Blue Diamond continues, with an edge. Imagine a >place the size of Lakeland Shores with 5 times the population. One asphalt >street, two dirt roads. Due to the siege..no sanitation service for three >day..that includes pumping satellites...We are on the edge of the town..we >see the minirets of the city and we hear the immams sermons as they rail >against us....good thing few here understand ARabic cause I can tell you the >preachers weren't teaching the golden rule today. Morale, sky high...extra >intensity..friends are on the line. the senior nco's and officers here, feel >the pull the most. They have served with or trained everyone on the >line..The Corps is a small community. This is very personal. If a person can >do something to help the outcome of the fight..they'll find a way..it's that >kind of day..all for one, one for all. I divide the day; Holy Week service >planning, convoy prayers, and COC intercessory prayers. First, I go to the >DIV Chaplain office to meet with the command Chaplain, CHaplain Divine..the >fighting Irishman. What a man. RC Christians...be proud..you've got a great >priest here. He spares nothing to get to his marines. He loves marines and >he loves God. He waded into Ar Ramadi during the fire fight, three days >ago...to provide ministry at the aid station...came back weary but satisfied >he was where he was needed. He's on the road, to all the FOB's ministering >to marines. I had the privilege of praying for him, this morning. If he goes >down the morale in this Division would take a huge hit. They love him. >Second, I work to coordinate Good Friday, Easter Sunrise and Protestant >Easter Service. Having services in a war zone is a little different. A)we >have to worry about getting large numbers of people in one place. One mortar >round into the right place and you could kill alot of marines. B)organists >are in sort supply and we don't have an organ. Music? C)We are going to >worship and it will be well attended...we need Easter..because we live in >the valley of the shadow of death..we need the resurrection. Third, twice a >day I go to the 'Cave'..the combat operations center..which is housed in a >former palace..poorly lit and the hub of fighting the battle...I stand in >the corner and pray for each person/position and those they represent. I >don't know many of them, but God does. I pray for wisdom, strength, mercy, >endurance and God's presence for each warrior all those they serve or >represent. I cover the Cave and the battle field as I look at live imagery >projected on the wall. I don't know how the marines do it..but the COC is >loaded with strack looking marines. The senior NCO's all look like NFL >lineman. The junior officers look like marathon runners and the mid-grade >officers look like NFL halfbacks...the senior officers are lean, tanned and >serious..deadly serious. The place exudes the warrior spirit. If you are a >civilian I can't explain it and won't apologize for it. If you are a veteran >you don't need to have it explained..the warrior spirit. These marines are >in a street fight. They don't have the word 'lose' in their vocabulary. >They've been bloodied and their anger is up. The intensity in the COC is >contagious. >This is a tribe of warriors. They exist to close with and destroy the enemy. >They have their tribal mores, rituals and rites. Their enemy has desecrated >members of the tribe and taunted the marines. They've asked for a fight. The >marines are in full pursuit and absolutely determined to annihilate their >foe. >I'm sure that sounds harsh to politically correct ears and those for whom >this type of violence is anachronistic. It does not sound foreign here...it >is status quo. We are in a violent land, with an evil element and they are >having violence visited upon them. There is no room here for half measures. >This is a test of wills...one side will prevail. That is clearly understood >and never discussed. it is obvious. We aren't playing paintball., we are at >war. Fourth, Convoy prayers...convoys go out of here regularly. I hunt them >down..pass out a small card with a convoy prayer on it and then gather >whoever wants to pray and we pray. The number of prayers is going up, >hourly, as the ambushes continue. Here's how intense it has become..today's >standard preconvoy brief now includes the following: "If you drive into the >kill zone..two options..drive through and on, or reverse and drive out. Do >not stop. If you are blocked into the kill zone..displace from the vehicle, >find cover, fix the target, engage, manuever and destroy the hostile forces. >Target selection..rules have changed...avoid civilians, if possible. Hostile >forces are now using civilians as shields. We are not interested in losing >more marines. If you can avoid putting civilians in your line of fire, avoid >it. If not,fire to take out the hostile forces." Implication? >Chilling...we've entered a new dimension. We are fighting an enemy who >respects no laws of humanity, knows no rules of landwarfare and gives no >quarter. How do we fight, without become barbarians ourselves? Fifth, >ministry of presence..in a place this small..I walk from shop to shop and >just say, 'hi'..can't tell you the number of times someone says..."Hey, >chappy..it's great to have you here." Something about seeing a chaplain is >calming to folks this close to the fight. Good Friday in Ar Ramadi..while >you're having lunch I'll lead the evening Good Friday service. We will >remember our Savior who willingly laid down His life that we might live..and >we'll be thinking about young marines and soldiers who are willingly putting >their lives on the line so Iraqis can be free...no great love hath a man >than to lay down his life for his brother... >Good Friday to you, >John
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last updated Wednesday, 28. February 2007
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