Free Republic

Such is the quality of American military leadership that generals and political appointees like McHugh will send courageous soldiers like Golsteyn into incredibly difficult (some would suggest impossible) circumstances, then invest years in second-guessing their actions after the fact—and then, finding no evidence of wrongdoing, still publicly dishonor the man without giving him a chance to defend himself.

Even as “American Sniper” breaks January box-office records and revels in six Oscar nominations, criticism over the subject of the film, sharpshooter Chris Kyle, is rising and reaching into the Academy of Motion Picture of Arts and Sciences, which votes on the Academy Awards. Over the weekend, multiple Academy members told TheWrap that they had been passing around a recent article by Dennis Jett in The New Republic that attacks the film for making a hero out of Kyle, who said: “The enemy are savages and despicably evil,” and his “only regret is that I didn’t kill more.” Kyle made...

A Texas judge has rejected the city of Houston’s demand to deny a jury trial to pastors fighting a controversial transgender ordinance. The ruling, released late Tuesday by Judge Robert Schaffer in the Harris County District Court in Houston, came in a case in which the city created a firestorm of controversy by issuing subpoenas for copies of pastors’ sermons. In its latest motion, the city claimed the pastors have no right to a jury trial, contending the decision should be made by a hand-picked “special master.” The pastors are opposing an ordinance adopted by lesbian Mayor Annise Parker and...

Chris Kyle was Derek's teammate through 10 years of training and battle. They both suffer/suffered from PTSD to some extent and took great care of each other because of it. 2006 in Ramadi was horrible for young men that never had any more aggressive physical contact with another human than on a Texas football field. They lost many friends. Chris became the armed services number #1 sniper of all time. Not something he was happy about, other than the fact that in so doing, he saved a lot of American lives. Three years ago, his wife Taya asked him to...

Navy veteran, 100, cheered for standing up to protesters at medal ceremony Published January 05, 2015 FoxNews.com A 100-year-old U.S. Navy veteran drew cheers from a crowd in Oregon Saturday after telling protesters shouting "hands-up, don't shoot!" to stop interrupting his medal ceremony and to “show a little respect.” Dario Raschio was at Portland Community College's Southeast Campus to be honored by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, at a public town hall meeting. But shortly after Wyden began speaking, more than 100 demonstrators in the back of the room started shouting, The Oregonian reports. After 15 minutes of chanting against the...

Do the right thing. Help others. Can heroism be as simple as that? Leo Thorsness swore an oath when he became a Boy Scout in Walnut Grove, Minn., eventually becoming an Eagle Scout. He took another oath when he joined the Air Force, eventually becoming a fighter pilot in Vietnam. He received the Medal of Honor for a mission in which he risked himself to help downed crewmen from another aircraft. But the only living Medal of Honor recipient from Minnesota said he later came to realize he could boil down those service oaths to a simple code: Do the...

American Sniper- The MovieI've read the book and passed it on to others

THE manager of the Lindt cafe who was fatally shot in the Martin Place siege is being praised as a hero, responsible for allowing others trapped in the cafe to escape. Tori Johnson, 34, was wrestling a gun from gunman Man Haron Monis when he was killed. It is understood the cafe manager decided to take action when the hostage-taker begun to doze off after the siege had been ongoing for 17 hours. He lunged at the gunman’s weapon, enabling others to flee.

When Capt. Derek Herrera was called to stand in the place of honor Friday at his retirement ceremony, he pressed buttons on what appeared to be a wristwatch as a fellow Marine came to his aid. After another push of a button and three short beeps, Herrera rose, legs shaking, and walked deliberately toward his commander. With each step, the exoskeleton he wore emitted a robotic whirring noise, as though it were Iron Man striding through the cordoned off parking lot in digital camouflage. Herrera was paralyzed from the chest down in June 2012, when he was shot in...

The Two Deaths of Crazy Fakhir Former Iraqi commander cleared booby-traps—until it finally killed him Many Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have died fighting Islamic State militants this year. But the news of Col. Fakhir Barwary’s death on Nov. 11 held special significance.That’s because Barwary’s death has been reported on two separate occasions. The media wrongly declared him dead in 2008 following a bomb blast outside Mosul.In fact, he’d only lost a leg—and even that didn’t end his soldiering days. After the fall of Ba’athist regime in 2003, many Peshmerga joined the Iraqi army in order to help protect civilians. Fakhir...

Millions of YouTube viewers have been captivated by the 'Syrian hero boy' who manages to rescue a little girl while under gunfire. Now a group of Norwegian filmmakers have told BBC Trending they are behind it. They say it was filmed on location in Malta this summer with the intention of being presented as real. Lars Klevberg, a 34-year-old film director based in Oslo, wrote a script after watching news coverage of the conflict in Syria. He says he deliberately presented the film as reality in order to generate a discussion about children in conflict zones.

f you really care for our fallen heroes, then do something to thank them: love your country, put up a fight for our veterans and protect the gift of freedom. Never give up He was an unknown soldier. A warrior, who sacrificed his life for our freedom. As rightly said by General MacArthur:” However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind”. There were tears and hope and years of waiting, because he wasn’t “known but to God”.

Hearing gunshots, Vickers grabbed his side arm, a semi-automatic pistol, and immediately ran out. His security team, who had been chasing Bibeau, yelled to Vickers that the suspect was hiding in the alcove Vickers immediately ran behind the other side of the pillar. That put him an arm's-length away from Bibeau. According to guards, Vickers actually could see the barrel of Bibeau's gun pointing out, a foot away. Vickers did not hesitate. In one motion, sources told CBC News he dove to the floor around the pillar, at the feet of Bibeau, turning on his back as he landed and...

In the middle of life’s struggle, it is stories like these that come along to prove that, while so many of us wait for heroes to deliver us from the evil of current Western society, we have bypassed the real Hero of all life on Earth Even amid the doom and gloom seeping out from the deliberate destruction of America by its own president; even in the despair that comes along with the increasing perversion of the current Pop Culture, the Hand of God is always at work. Yes, the Marxists, who have thrown in with ISIS, are on a...

Five Christian pastors will no longer have to turn their sermons over to attorneys for the city of Houston. Instead, they will be forced to turn over their speeches related to the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO). I don’t mean to point out the obvious here—but what do those attorneys think a sermon is? It’s a speech. According to an amended motion filed Friday in Harris County, Texas court, the city’s attorneys will no longer demand sermons related to homosexuals, gender identity, or Mayor Annise Parker—Houston’s first openly lesbian mayor. The amended subpoenas do require the pastors to turn over...

Last night I shook hands with the son of one of my favorite heroes. The Holocaust Memorial Center in metro Detroit hosted Nick Winton, who gave a most inspiring presentation on the life of his father, Sir Nicholas Winton. Sir Nicholas, who prefers to be called Nicky, was a 29-year-old London stockbroker who gave up a skiing holiday to visit Prague and witness firsthand the refugees who were fleeing Nazi tyranny. That visit led to his heroic deeds which enabled 669 children to escape. Parents, desperate to save their children, sought his assistance and he established an organization to aid...

“God would never be cruel enough to create a cyclone as terrible as that Argonne battle. Only man would ever think of doing an awful thing like that. … And I’m telling you the little log cabin in Wolf Valley in old Tennessee seemed a long, long way off.” With those words, Sergeant Alvin C. York recalled the intensity of the October, 1918 battle that defined him for generations of Tennesseans as the most highly decorated American soldier of World War I, earning the Congressional Medal of Honor among numerous other awards. In those moments of battle, York, of Fentress...

A man who was seriously wounded by a Hamas rocket Thursday had been shielding children with his own body. The attack took place at about 10:20 a.m., at one of the communities in the Eshkol region. Magen David Adom (MDA) crews gave initial treatment to the man, who is 33. He was seriously wounded by shrapnel that struck his chest. MDA paramedic Oren Vacht, who treated the man before his evacuation to hospital, described him as having been hit in the chest by a shell fragment, “fully conscious and in great pain.” "Civilians who had been at the scene told...

A Navy diver died at the bottom of a Maryland pond last year after refusing to leave his trapped fellow sailor to drown alone. Petty Officer 2nd Class Ryan Harris, 23, and Petty Officer 1st Class James Reyher, 28, were sent to dive in the Aberdeen Proving Ground on February 26 2013, but their lifeless bodies were pulled to the surface just 31 minutes after they started the dive. No one knew what had befallen the pair until an investigation, completed last year but only recently released, pieced together the final 31 minutes of the young men's lives.

There was a pro-Hamas Jew-hating protest-cum-riot near the White House yesterday There was a mob attack on a single pro-Israeli counter protester near the White House. The counter protester is an Iraq vet, a Puerto Rican, non-Jewish. But he was having a civil conversation with one Muslim and then, incapable of controlling their savage instincts, antisemitic American haters started attacking him. Islamic thugs and their leftist jackboots. Islamic/leftist axis: Cosponsors of the rally are below. Co-sponsors: - ANSWER Coalition - American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) - Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) - American Muslim Alliance (AMA) - Al-Awda: Palestine Right...