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Oct. 26 falls on a Thursday this year. Ask the significance of the date, and you're likely to draw some puzzled looks — five more days to stock up for Halloween? It's a measure of men like Col. Mitchell Paige and Rear Adm. Willis A. "Ching Chong China" Lee that they wouldn't have had it any other way. What they did 58 years ago, they did precisely so their grandchildren could live in a land of peace and plenty. Whether we've properly safeguarded the freedoms they fought to leave us, may be a discussion best left for another day. Today...

Just a reminder... Photo Courtesy of Fontman.com

One Marine, One Ship by Vin Suprynowicz OCT. 22, 2000 Oct. 26 falls on a Thursday this year. Ask the significance of the date, and you're likely to draw some puzzled looks — five more days to stock up for Halloween? It's a measure of men like Col. Mitchell Paige and Rear Adm. Willis A. "Ching Chong China" Lee that they wouldn't have had it any other way. What they did 58 years ago, they did precisely so their grandchildren could live in a land of peace and plenty. Whether we've properly safeguarded the freedoms they fought to leave us, ...

Jefferson J. DeBlanc, seated in the cockpit of a F4F Wildcat fighter plane, found ways to beat death for three years. But on Thanksgiving Day, DeBlanc, a Marine pilot in World War II's Pacific Theater, passed away from complications related to pneumonia. He was 86. So many World War II veterans have died recently that we don't often pause to pay them the honor they're due. DeBlanc may provide a chance to make up for it. DeBlanc wore the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military honor. DeBlanc, born in Lockport, enlisted in the Marines five months before Pearl Harbor....

GUADALCANAL, Solomon Islands — Using a trowel to dig into the shadowy floor of the rain forest, pausing only to wipe away sweat and malaria-carrying mosquitoes, Atsushi Maeda holds up what he has traveled so far, to this South Pacific island, to find: a human bone, turned orange-brown with age. Mr. Maeda, 21, was looking for the remains of missing Japanese soldiers at the site of one of World War II’s most ferocious battles. Others have done this work before him, mostly aging veterans or bereaved relatives. But he was with a group of mostly university students and young professionals,...

Ed Berman doesn't just collect war stories. He rescues them from the scrapheap of history. Take the woman in World War II so slender she was lowered head first to weld between ships' hulls. Or the American captured by Italian troops, who escaped when his plane crashed on the way to a prison camp, then fought alongside Italian partisans until he was captured by the Germans. And the man whose combat wound saved him from making the Bataan Death March, but not from the tin mines in Japan, where he weighed 85 pounds when rescued. "His wife said afterwards, she...

Enter Stage Right - A Journal of Modern Conservatism Twenty-Five Yards of War The Extraordinary Courage of Ordinary Men in World War II By Ronald J. Drez Hyperion Books HC, 296 pgs. US$23.95/C$32.95 True grit By Steven Martinovich Until that first shot is fired in combat, no one can know what kind of soldier they will be. Our daydreams may cast us as Alvin York, the World War I hero who killed 25 Germans, knocked out 35 machine guns and captured 132 prisoners almost single-handedly at the battle of the Argonne Forest in the fall of 1918, but the grim ...

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) - Joe Foss, a former South Dakota governor and World War II hero who shot down 26 enemy planes, died Wednesday. He was 87. Foss had not regained consciousness after he suffered an apparent aneurysm last fall. He died at a hospital in Arizona, said South Dakota Gov. Bill Janklow. A Republican, Foss served in the state Legislature for five years before becoming governor in 1955. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor as a Marine pilot during World War II. He also earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. "I always had the attitude that every day...

Autumn,1942: It came down to one Marine, and one ship. October 26 falls on a Thursday this year. Ask the significance of the date, and you're likely to draw some puzzled looks -- five more days to stock up for Halloween? It's a measure of men like Col. Mitchell Paige and Rear Adm. Willis A. "Ching Chong China" Lee that they wouldn't have had it any other way. What they did 58 years ago, they did precisely so their grandchildren could live in a land of peace and plenty. Whether we've properly safeguarded the freedoms they fought to leave us,...

, Calif.(Nov. 23, 2003) -- A quiet chill settled over the Riverside National Cemetery. Six Marines gripped the polished metal rails of a casket. They moved in unison, carrying the flag-draped coffin for one final honor for a Marine hero. Col. Mitchell Paige, recipient of the Medal of Honor, was laid to rest near the Medal of Honor Memorial here Sunday. Hundreds of mourners turned out to watch as an honor guard and honor platoon from 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment based at Marine Corps Air-Ground Center Twentynine Palms, the 1st Marine Division Band and Lt. Gen. James T. Conway,...

I probably blew the format for starting a thread...and didn't see posted elsewhere. A true hero has moved on. My 56 year old self just went outside, faced the sky, and offered the best salute I've snapped in 35 years. Rest In Peace, Mitch....proud and honored to have had your aquaintance.

G.I. Joe was just a toy, wasn't he? VIN SUPRYNOWICZ Hollywood now proposes that in a new live-action movie based on the G.I. Joe toy line, Joe's -- well, "G.I." -- identity needs to be replaced by membership in an "international force based in Brussels." The IGN Entertainment news site reports Paramount is considering replacing our "real American hero" with "Action Man," member of an "international operations team." Paramount will simply turn Joe's name into an acronym. The show biz newspaper Variety reports: "G.I. Joe is now a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international...

Oct. 26 falls on a Thursday this year. Ask the significance of the date, and you're likely to draw some puzzled looks — five more days to stock up for Halloween? It's a measure of men like Col. Mitchell Paige and Rear Adm. Willis A. "Ching Chong China" Lee that they wouldn't have had it any other way. What they did 58 years ago, they did precisely so their grandchildren could live in a land of peace and plenty. Whether we've properly safeguarded the freedoms they fought to leave us, may be a discussion best left for another day. Today...

--link only to Vin Suprynowicz editorial column--LVRJ-- -http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/steal-from-the-rich-give-it-all-to-me-181734921.html

I don't know how it facilitates a sober, studious, academic environment to allow kids at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Calif., to either wear American flag gear or paint their faces and bodies in red, white and green to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Though perhaps it's my use of adjectives like "studious" and "academic" in connection with a modern, government-run high school that's really absurd. At any rate, it surely showed the "Three Stooges" level to which current "multicultural" political correctness has descended when Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez, at said youth propaganda camp on May 5, told a...

Last week, we were discussing the Obama administration's anti-freedom, anti-capitalist agenda. When a political leader snidely characterizing those who challenge his initiatives to vastly expand federal regulation and management of the economy as being in the pay of "greedy insurance executives," "big bankers," and the like, I don't see how anyone can argue he's not against the free market. In fact, they don't. Mr. Obama's champions respond by citing all the injustices which they believe are wrought by the free market. Therefore, by their own words, their agenda is anti-freedom. Their fall-back position appears to be, "It had to be...

President Barack Obama said some interesting things in his Jan. 27 State of the Union address. They're interesting not so much because they're lies, but because the political class -- the kind of people who field lobbyists in Washington and file lawsuits for the ACLU and edit major American newspapers -- was so confident that these utterances were lies that it simply ignored what might otherwise have been some earthshaking developments. For instance, the president said, according to the White House's prepared transcript: "We should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system -- to secure our borders, enforce...

Charlie Mitchener, the Las Vegas business owner who was handcuffed and disarmed after presenting a concealed weapons permit along with his driver's license to a police officer responding to a burglary call at his place of business Jan. 3, has provided me with his Jan. 19 follow-up letter to Metro. Mitchener says he decided to write police about his ordeal, detailed in this space on Jan. 10, lest his "silence may put someone else at risk." "Shortly before 5 a.m. Jan. 3, the alarms in my office sounded and notified TSI, our security provider, that a break-in had occurred," Mitchener...

Here in Las Vegas, Star Nurseries had a problem. Last fall, customers began complaining about the "day workers" -- mostly illegal aliens who have snuck across our borders from Mexico and points south -- who would gather by the dozens in and near the nurseries' parking lots, trampling the landscaping, relieving themselves in the bushes, leaving litter and other "waste" behind. When Review-Journal reporters tried to interview the men, few would talk, and none would give their full names. The few who were willing to talk did so in Spanish. Customers complained the men were so aggressive in offering their...

Charlie Mitchener is a 61-year-old general building contractor with an office near Patrick Lane and Fort Apache Road in Las Vegas. He holds permits allowing him to legally carry concealed weapons in Nevada, Florida and Utah. Over the past three years, his office has been broken into five times. "Three of those occasions involved me interacting with Metro," he wrote to me recently. "Each of the occasions began the same: my introduction, my presentation of my Nevada drivers license and my concealed firearms permit. Prior to today, each Metro officer simply replied thank you, proceeded with his work and then...