Posted on 08/23/2004 4:44:37 AM PDT by The Mayor
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THE WEEKEND THREAD
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 1) Click on the graphic to open the Calendar. |
That girl had a worse injury than Kerry's Purple Heart injuries!
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On a tour of Texas, the Pope took a couple of days off to visit the
coastal area for some sightseeing. He was cruising along the sea wall
on Galveston Isle in his Pope mobile when suddenly he notices a frantic
commotion just off shore.
There was John Kerry struggling frantically to free himself from the
jaws of a 25-foot shark. As the Pope watched, horrified, a speedboat came
racing up with two men aboard. One of the men, President George W.
Bush quickly fired a harpoon into the shark's side while Dick Cheney
reached out and pulled the bleeding, semi-conscious John Kerry from the water.
Then using (autographed Round Rock Express) baseball bats, the two heroes
beat the shark to death and hauled it into the boat.
Immediately the Pope shouted and summoned them to the beach. "I give
you my blessings for your brave actions," he told them. "I heard that there
was some bitter hatred between President Bush and John Kerry, but now I have seen with my own eyes that this is not true."
As the Pope drove off, President Bush asked Dick "Who was that?"
"It was the Pope," Dick replied. "He is in direct contact with God and
has all of God's wisdom."
"Well," President Bush said, "he may have access to God's wisdom,
but he doesn't know squat about shark fishing................how's the
bait holding up?"
Your very welcome, my Freeper Friend. God bless. :)
Read: John 16:25-33
You will be scattered, each to his own, and will leave Me alone. And yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me. —John 16:32
Bible In One Year: Psalms 116-118; 1 Corinthians 7:1-19
Her brief note to me spoke volumes. "I am a handicapped person in a wheelchair," she wrote. "I am very lonely even though I know I'm never alone. God is always there. I don't have a lot of people to talk to."
Loneliness has been termed the most desolate word in the English language. It is no respecter of age, race, economic status, or intelligence. Albert Einstein said, "It is strange to be known so universally, and yet to be so lonely."
God made us for intimacy and companionship with others. Even before sin entered the world, He declared that it is not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). That's why many people often feel so empty inside.
Jesus knew loneliness too. He surely must have felt it when His disciples deserted Him (Mark 14:50). The Father's presence more than compensated for this, however. He said, "I am not alone, because the Father is with Me" (John 16:32). That intimacy with the Lord is available to all who put their trust in Him and His Word (14:16-23).
We can lessen our feelings of loneliness by reaching out to others. But even more important, we must reach out to the Lord. He is always with us, and He wants us to fellowship with Him throughout the day. —Dennis De Haan
Today is about the crybaby who didn't really mean it when he said "Bring it on"!
good morning
(& thanks for the ping)
hope you have a very nice day
Aug. 24, 2004
Deadly ambush
By David Swanson;Joseph L. Galloway
Knight Ridder News Service
RAMADI, Iraq - The first of 2nd Lt. John T. Wroblewski's three Humvees slowed as it entered the Ramadi marketplace, where about 50 insurgents waited behind machine guns and grenade launchers. Earlier that day, the fighters had vowed to cut down Americans in the streets.
Seven Marines and a Navy medic, ranging in age from 18 to 28, were inside the unarmored green vehicle.
Most were following in their family's footsteps. The driver, Lance Cpl. Kyle Crowley, 18, of San Ramon, Calif., had a great-grandfather who was a Marine in World War II. The radio operator, Lance Cpl. Travis Layfield, 19, of Fremont, Calif., had a grandfather who was a Seabee.
The father of machine-gunner Pfc. Ryan Jerabek, 18, of Oneida, Wis., served in the Army during Vietnam. Ryan Jerabek had pre-enlisted in the Marines with his friend Mike Andrews when he turned 17.
"He had the sweetest smile," said Faye Girardi, one of Jerabek's teachers at Pulaski High School, who thought that he was "too gentle" to become a Marine.
Jerabek's sense of humor survived boot camp. He called his military-issue glasses "BC glasses" -- birth-control glasses -- because they were so effective at keeping girls away.
When Travis Layfield was about 9, his family visited an air show at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif.
"He saw kids in uniform and he said, 'I want to sign up,' " said his sister, Tiffany Bolton. "That's where it started."
The driver of the Humvee, Kyle Crowley, had been something of a troubled youth who drove around San Ramon in the San Francisco Bay area in a 1980s Cadillac he'd inherited from his grandmother. He signed up in a pre-enlistment program when he turned 16, over the objections of his father, Mark, a sheet-metal worker who'd raised Kyle by himself from age 4.
Navy medic Fernando Mendez-Aceves had been a scrawny boy, but boot camp changed him. His biceps grew so big that he had to wear oversize shirts. At the Naval Medical Center in San Diego they called him Rocky, the Muscle Man or Hulk. He volunteered for duty with the Marines in Iraq because he didn't want his combat training to go to waste.
They called Staff Sgt. Allan Walker, at 28 one of Echo Company's senior noncommissioned officers, the Beast. At 6 feet 2 and 230 pounds, he'd played high school football and flipped burgers in the Mojave Desert town of Palmdale, Calif.
Walker "had all these little twists and turns," said Jim Root, his old football coach and friend. Walker was a high school jock who also hung with the drama students, and a rebellious teen-ager who wore punk rock T-shirts and spiked hair but loved poetry.
"The Marine Corps was his intervention program," said his father, Kenneth Walker.
When the war came, Allan Walker volunteered to go.
"How can I teach a corporal how to take a hill if he's been there and I have never?" he asked his father. "How can I teach men to fight if I've never been to battle?"
Deadly attack
As the green Humvee neared the T-intersection at the Ramadi marketplace, the insurgents hidden on the rooftops opened fire. Bullets plowed through the windshield and the metal doors.
Crowley, the driver, was killed, and the truck canted sideways. Jerabek opened up with his machine gun, but he, too, was quickly cut down.
Lance Cpl. Deshon E. Otey, 24, of Louisville, Ky., leapt from the Humvee and fired from behind a low wall. The others stayed in the truck and were quickly gunned down.
"We all took cover," Otey said. "There was firing coming from all directions. They were shooting AK-47s, RPK machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades."
Mendez-Aceves, the Navy medic, was killed next to Walker, apparently as he worked to save the sergeant's life.
Wroblewski was behind them in the second Humvee. He was hit in the face by a bullet that smashed through the radio handset he was holding.
Reinforcements led by Capt. Kelly Royer, Echo Company's commander, moved toward the firefight. They quickly came under fire, too.
Running toward the cover of nearby houses, Royer yelled at his radio operator to keep up with him: "Suck it up, find it. ... Find it, son. Your Marines are being shot at!"
Royer's Iraqi translator, a man everyone called "007," was smiling as he ran, in tan sandals, a sleeveless jogging outfit and a navy blue T-shirt that said "Operation Iraqi Freedom" across the front. Wearing neither a helmet nor a protective vest, he was blithely fatalistic: "Inshallah," he said. God willing.
Royer and his men reached the relative safety of a house. Other Marines were already there, and so was an Iraqi family, huddled in the living room. Bullets smacked into the side of the house as Royer led his Marines up the stairs to the rooftop to begin returning fire.
Royer got on the radio and called for air support, but the helicopters were in action elsewhere, circling over firefights in the center of the city.
Royer sent a team to silence the insurgents' Russian-made machine gun on the corner rooftop. But by the time the Marines got there, the Iraqi machine-gunners had vanished, leaving only a pile of spent shell casings.
Fallen comrades
Other Marines entered the marketplace and began removing the bodies of dead Americans from the green Humvee. Royer and his men joined them.
Remnants of trauma supplies littered the ground. The truck bed was littered with empty water bottles and exploded green packages of meals-ready-to-eat mixed among brass shell casings. The handle of an M-16 was sheared off in a pile of debris.
Blood, water and diesel oil drained into the ground.
A Marine passed by slowly, carrying the body of a fallen comrade on his shoulder. He gently placed the heavy, dark green bag in the back of a Humvee.
A pair of military-issue eyeglasses lay smashed on the ground by the lead Humvee, blood drying on the right lens.
Jerabek's birth-control glasses.
"I talk with some of the other guys in the platoon about what happened, but it still hurts," Otey, the lone survivor from the green Humvee, said later. "Every time I walk into our living space I see the empty racks [bunks]. Those were guys I used to talk to about my problems. Now I don't hear their voices anymore."
Two months later, Otey was killed on a rooftop in Ramadi with three other Echo Company Marines.
As they took the rooftops of nearby houses that April day, the Marines gained control of the intersection, and the sound of gunfire died down.
A sergeant arrived from headquarters. He said he'd seen Wroblewski and that he would be OK.
He was wrong.
Wroblewski died as a helicopter was evacuating him. An enemy bullet had severed an artery, and the medics couldn't control the bleeding.
The bodies of four Iraqis lay in the street, one beside a red-and-white taxi. Royer stood over one of the dead men for a few seconds, then stepped over the body. The translator, trailing Royer, kicked the body hard and muttered, "Bastard."
The evening light was growing softer, cooler.
Editor's note: Echo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, has lost 22 of its 185 men in Iraq, more than any other Marine or Army company. On April 6, the company ran into disaster in the streets of the central city of Ramadi.
Aug. 25, 2004
Those left behind
By David Swanson;Joseph L. Galloway
Knight Ridder News Service
RAMADI, Iraq - U.S. soldiers and Marines have stopped patrolling large swaths of western Iraq's Anbar province, where more than 129 U.S. service members have died since President Bush declared the end of major combat on May 1, 2003.
After losing dozens of men to a "voiceless, faceless mass of people" with no clear leadership or political aim other than killing Americans, the U.S. military had to re-evaluate the situation in and around Ramadi, the provincial capital, said Maj. Thomas Neemeyer, the head intelligence officer for the 1st Brigade of the Army's 1st Infantry Division, the main military force in the area.
"They cannot militarily overwhelm us, but we cannot deliver a knockout blow, either," he said.
The Marine force in Ramadi, the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marines, nicknamed "the Magnificent Bastards," has had the most casualties of any U.S. battalion since the war in Iraq began: at least 29 killed and 175 wounded, roughly 20 percent of the battalion's 1,000-man strength.
Among the dead are 22 men of Echo Company, including several who were killed in an ambush at the Ramadi marketplace on April 6.
Second Lt. John T. Wroblewski was fatally shot in the face by a bullet that smashed through his radio handset. Joanna Lynn Wroblewski said farewell to her husband in a letter she read at his funeral. It began:
"Hey babe. I saw you today. We were taking one of our usual strolls with the dog and the sun was shining all around you. You looked at me again the way you always did, with that handsome, cool smile. That look that told me how much you love me, and how everything was going to be OK. 'We're OK,' that was what we kept saying the day you left for Iraq. You were always right. My brave warrior."
Fernando Mendez-Aceves' mother, Sandra, got a letter from his platoon leader after "Doc" Mendez, a Navy corpsman, was killed, apparently as he tried to save a Marine's life in the marketplace: "He never complained at all, even if he went on missions that lasted day and night. ... I could tell he was a good man, and whoever raised him did a good job."
In the family's small apartment, a candle burns on a memorial. Fernando watches over them from a half-dozen photographs. There's a bottle of Corona beer, a deck of playing cards, a last letter from a girlfriend, unopened, and a plain blue sack with a box that contains Fernando's ashes.
"Fernando believed that all things happen for a reason, and that it is not our place to question God's plan," his mother said.
His younger brother, Kenneth, 15, wears Doc's old oversize T-shirt and baseball cap when he runs and lifts weights. "I'm so proud of him," Kenneth said.
Staff Sgt. Allan Walker also died in the Ramadi firefight. His mother, Nancy, got in his little red Chevy pickup and drove from her home in Lancaster, Calif., 60 miles north of Los Angeles, to Texas and Iowa and Minnesota. She visited mothers and fathers of Echo Company Marines she'd written to by mail and e-mail since her son's death.
She's angry. She hates the war in Iraq and disagreed with it from the start. She's fiercely proud of her son and has no trouble speaking out against the war and Bush. Doing so, she said, honors the values her son fought and died for.
Her ex-husband, Allan's father Kenneth, who supports the war, has begun a journey inward to a respite from his pain: the Hindu teachings he's embraced for decades.
"There is no such thing as death," he said one afternoon at his home in Palmdale, where Allan had played football and flipped burgers. "So if you really believe that, I mean really believe that in your gut, then it makes the death of someone you care about and love easier to deal with."
Lance Cpl. Kyle Crowley, who drove a Humvee into the marketplace, and his dad had parted ways before he left for boot camp. He spent some nights at friends' homes, others in his old Cadillac, but he found refuge at his girlfriend Trisha Johnson's home. Her parents, Steve and Gail Johnson, welcomed Kyle. "He told us: 'I want to go fight to protect families like yours,' " Steve Johnson said.
Nelson Carman goes alone to his son Ben's grave in Jefferson, Iowa. He tries not to grieve in front of his family. He finds comfort at the grave, where tiny American flags have sprouted and someone has stuck a fishing pole in the ground. Some days, he finds a glass of brandy and a cigar butt.
Pfc. Ben Carman's favorite spot was an overlook on the Carman farm, on a bluff 60 feet above the river. Eagles soar there, and deer roam. Ben and his siblings and friends camped there summer and fall, fished the river, hunted the woods and looked for arrowheads. It's sacred ground for all of them now.
"What he could have been," said Ben's mother, Marie. "You just don't know."
A month after Pfc. Ryan Jerabek was killed, a package arrived at the Jerabek home. It was a late Christmas present that Ryan, who was fascinated with his Irish ancestry, had ordered from Ireland before he left for Iraq. Inside the box was a curved white shield with the family crest painted on the face, and a silver and gold sword for Ryan's younger brother Nick.
His mother, Rita, said simply, "He was a gift."
On April 3, Lance Cpl. Marcus Cherry and his older brother, Andre, both Marines, had met at division base camp in Iraq and had a final few hours together.
After Marcus was killed three days later, Andre escorted his casket home.
Marcus and Andre were running backs for the Imperial High Tigers in Imperial, Calif. Marcus was No. 34. The school has retired his jersey. Next season, the players will wear the initials "M.C." on their helmets.
Lance Cpl. Travis Layfield was a radio operator in the marketplace firefighter.
Diane Layfield remembers a slow dance with her son under the stars at a Brooks & Dunn concert last year. She remembers thinking how lucky she was that her son would dance with her in public. She spends her free time filling boxes in her Fremont, Calif., home with photos, letters, articles, anything she can find that has a connection to her "Travi."
Travis' dad, John Layfield, 47, a forklift operator, has restored his son's most prized possession, a sky-blue 1962 Ford Galaxy, to keep his memory alive.
He carries Travis' last letter home with him. It arrived the day they buried his son.
Neither of the Layfields has ever voted. Both now question what their country is doing in Iraq. John says "babies" are dying in Iraq, and he thinks about running for president just to get Bush out of office.
Some mornings, Diane wakes up thinking how her lovely son will never marry or give her grandbabies. And how there will never be another mother-son dance under the stars.
Editor's note: Echo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, has lost 22 of its 185 men in Iraq, more than any other Marine or Army company. On April 6, the company was ambushed by about 50 Iraqi and foreign fighters in the streets of Ramadi, west of Baghdad.
www.star-telegram.com
Experience a multimedia presentation including photographs, profiles of the dead Marines and interviews with the reporters and photographers.
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