Free Republic

Fifty thousand 'Vikings' landed on the shores of a small village in northern Spain on Sunday, as part of an annual festival which commemorates a Scandinavian invasion which took place a thousand years ago. On the first Sunday of August, Catoria is flooded with ‘blood-thirsty’ men and women from all across Europe. Dressed in animal skins and armed with the finest plastic weaponry, they disembark on the rugged Galician coast with the aim of capturing the Towers of the West, just as Norway’s King Olaf did a millennia ago. The ‘blood’ spilt during the simulated battles does taste distinctly like...

A Texas Goodbye --a class event I just wanted to share with you all that out of a horrible tragedy we were blessed by so many people. Chris 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...

In the mid ‘90s the Marine Corps decided Doom II might make for an excellent training supplement. It did so for two reasons—a forward-thinking commandant and a budgetary shortfall. The Marines have always had to make due with little financial support compared to the other military branches. The USMC budget often lands somewhere around four percent of the Defense Department total. In 2010, that budget was about $40 billion. Back in the ’90s, it hovered around $10 billion. The Corps also needs to train all its troops with limited cash. Regardless of their specialization, every Marine is a trained rifleman.

The U.S. Air Force Academy’s superintendent is calling for a full investigation into cadet athletes after reports of sexual assaults, drugs and cheating, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported. According to documents released to the newspaper through the Freedom of Information Act, parties dating to 2010 included cadets who were smoking synthetic marijuana, drinking until they became ill, and possible use of date-rape drugs to incapacitate women for sexual assaults. The troubled group – which reportedly included two Air Force football stars who were court-martialed – created such a wild culture that leaders at the academy canceled an undercover sting planned...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k9Si28k0Fk&app=desktop A remarkable young American remembers D-Day. Please watch!!

We have been reminded of the one thing we knew with absolute certainty, that Jesse Ventura is a winner. He has been a professional wrestler, a mayor, a radio talk show host, the governor of the state, a television star, a best-selling author and even, for a brief spell, a Harvard professor, although a photo taken at his academic desk showed one Post-it note stuck to a blank computer screen. And now, Jesse Ventura has won again, probably as big a shock as his election win to the state's highest office in November 1998. Jesse Ventura won his defamation case...

The pair served side-by-side in Afghanistan for seven months as an IED detection team Smiling from ear-to-ear, a U.S. military sergeant was reunited with his four-legged best friend Friday: a contract dog that served side-by-side with him in Afghanistan. It is estimated that dogs like Belle save the lives of up to 200 troops during their service. Organizations like the American Humane Association and Mission K-9 Rescue help connect these dogs with service members through generous donations.

Even the American left is finally realizing that this is the strangest administration in living memory. Obama simply has no real precedents, which is why he seems so utterly foreign. American presidents tend to be pragmatists, but Obama is locked into a simpleminded ideology of Good vs. Evil. Obama is Good, and anybody who disagrees with him is Evil. Much of this oddity stems from the president’s personality, which many people have described as a mix of major narcissism, borderline personality disorder, and oppositional defiant disorder. Personality disordered people can be very functional in their jobs. But they are very...

"The magnates of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff and Foreign Ministry now had their Pan-Slavic provocation. In one of the many pigionholes of the Ballplatz there lay a document three years old. This was the notorious ultimatum, drawn up to be used against Serbia when occasion should arise....So consistent had been Vienna's Great-Serbian grievance that a few minor changes in the phrasing of the ultimatum would bring it up to date.... The illustrious Count Leopold Berchtold ordered the ultimatum to be presented in Belgrade at six o'clock in the evening of Thursday, July 23. The ultimatum required Serbia's submission within forty-eight...

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that somebody like Jesse Ventura is also a major fan of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara? (Or claims to be for the publicity value among the “hip”?) Recalling his visit to Cuba and meeting with Fidel Castro in 2002 Ventura grew misty-eyed: “Fidel Castro looked into my eyes and told me I was a man of great courage…Maybe he (Castro) saw a little of him in me.” Recall the Cowardly Lion’s reaction when the Wizard grants him “the NERVE.” Well, Jesse Ventura’s moronic gloating outdoes even the lion’s (“Shucks, folks, I’m speechless..ha-ha…Ain’t it the truth!...

Updated: August 1, 2014 11:32 AM The striking power and stealth of the U.S. Navy’s Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) concept was reduced to protect the role of the service’s next-generation of manned fighters, USNI News has learned. In particular, the change in UCLASS from a deep strike stealthy penetrator into the current lightly armed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) focused aircraft was — in large part — to preserve a manned version of the F/A-XX replacement for the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, several Navy, Pentagon and industry sources confirmed to USNI News. Industry, Pentagon and Navy...

The Senate gave final approval Thursday to sweeping legislation aimed at fixing the troubled Department of Veterans Affairs, marking a rare moment of bipartisan accord triggered by the widespread treatment delays veterans faced at agency facilities. The legislation passed 91-3 a day after the House overwhelmingly approved the package. It now goes to President Obama’s desk. The $17 billion measure is intended help veterans avoid long waits for health care, hire more doctors and nurses to treat them, and make it easier to fire senior executives at the Veterans Affairs Department. …

The story of Fr. Kapaun, 2011 recipient of the Medal of Honor.

<p>JERUSALEM - Despite Israeli casualties and world criticism, a near-consensus in Israel supports the government's conduct of the Gaza war, views Hamas as the aggressor and considers outsiders' moralizing as hypocritical, ignorant or both.</p>

In the first minutes of the writer-director David Ayer’s “Fury,” about American soldiers slogging through Europe in the final days of World War II, Brad Pitt, as the tanker Don Collier, slides his knife behind the eye of a German lieutenant.“Piercing his brainpan with a CRACK,” is how Mr. Ayer’s screenplay describes the move. (In Dolby Digital sound, it will be a very loud crack.) Mr. Pitt, our hero, then calmly wipes his blade clean on the German’s uniform.The Good War this is not.In what promises to be one of the most daring studio movies in an awards season that...

ATLANTA – The last surviving member of the crew that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, hastening the end of World War II and forcing the world into the atomic age, has died in Georgia. Theodore VanKirk, also known as "Dutch," died Monday of natural causes at the retirement home where he lived in Stone Mountain, Georgia, his son Tom VanKirk said. He was 93. VanKirk flew nearly 60 bombing missions, but it was a single mission in the Pacific that secured him a place in history. He was 24 years old when he served as navigator on the Enola...

(language warning) A .50 gunner takes a ricochet or shrapnel to the neck and starts putting rounds back down range quickly.

Although many consider the opening act of World War I to be the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo - its centennial was just a month ago (28 June) - the first actual declaration of war took place a hundred years ago today, when Austria-Hungary initiated hostilities against Serbia, after the latter rejected a draconian Austrian ultimatum intended to give Austria a free hand in bringing Franz Ferdinand's killers to account. As a result, Russia - self-appointed protector of the "South Slavs" - mobilized against Austria, which panicked the Germans (fearful of a two-front war against both France...

"But when the men and women take off their uniforms and return to their homes and assume responsibility for their own and their families’ safety, suddenly the politicians don’t trust them to own a gun. This is pure elitism. … Gun control is not about guns or crime. It is about an elite that fears and despises the common people.“ .....;

They’re the four-legged veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – military war dogs, doing everything from sniffing out explosive devices on the battlefield to providing companionship to soldiers during wartime. Three of these dogs traveled to Washington, D.C., Wednesday with the same service members they served with on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan, raising awareness about the need to reunite military war dogs with their handlers. Since 9/11, over 3,600 dogs have served in the military, with close to 2,000 dogs currently serving through various branches of the military. Earlier this year, the Army said 578 dog...