USO Canteen FReeper Style ~ Military Valentines Day Project Thread 2 ~ January 22 2003

68-69TonkinGulfYatchClub and FRiends of the Canteen

[68-69TonkinGulfYachtClub]

The original idea about organizing a Canteen project to mail packages
to the military belongs to MoJo2001
What started out with a simple FReep mail to several people quickly became a hit.
My 2 cents was to suggest that we get this project underway
in time to get these packages to the military by Valentines Day.
I think there are many different ways to do this.
Our goal is get get packages and/or cards, letters and e-mails to the military
so thay do not feel alone or forgotten on Valentines Day.
If you have not been to the USO Canteen Post Office recently there are new links and info there.
Info on what to include in Care Packages, snail mail postcards, new e-mail links, phone cards, etc.
Several FReepers have obtained snail mail addresses for active duty military.
Some of you have family and friends serving right now.
As you can tell this project can go in many different directions.
Some of you may want to "team" up with others to send one big package.
Others may want to do this by themselves.
Some may just want to e-mail or snail mail Valentines messages.
What is needed now is to post approved snail mail addresses of military bases and/or individuals.
I propose that each Wed between now and Valentines Day the thread be used to update info and ideas.
So to qoute a great patriot of 9/11 "LETS ROLL" and get this project underway!

THREAD ONE

[Radix]

[MeekOneGOP]

Hey are you the one we have to thank for the high execution rate in Texas?

lol ! Nah ! That credit's due to President Bush, Rick Perry, et al...

[beachn4fun]

Well, thank you anyway for supporting the system. ;->

[beachn4fun]

I LOVE IT!!!!

[tomkow6]

Just in case you thought I wasn't paying attention!

[Kathy in Alaska]

"In A Perfect World!"

If only..........*sigh*

[Ceoman]

Does anyone know if airlines give refunds IF you need to cancel due to immediate family being called for service overseas now? I would appreciate knowing. I think the airlines are American and United. Thank you.

[Kathy in Alaska]

I just called American Airlines and she said, "It depends on what kind of ticket it is". You will need to call the specific airline and be prepared to answer questions about the ticket. Having the ticket in hand to look at while being asked questions is probably a must. She also said that if it is a non-refundable ticket, the answer is No! But, with all the call-ups, I would think that the airlines would do their part to be supportive of our military.

Please thank the family member for their service to our country.

[tomkow6]

DID YA KNOW?

The traditional sailors cap was designed to act as a floatation device. When wet, the cap would trap an air bubble and keep a sailor's head afloat.

(Source: Ever Wonder Why?)

[tomkow6]

From "Humor in Uniform":

FLYING into a Middle East airport, my co-pilot and I
reviewed our flight plan for the trip back to the USS
Enterprise. We were to pick up a Navy captain, and
experience had taught me that even seasoned vets turn
white-knuckled during carrier landings. Once the captain
was strapped in, I turned around to welcome him aboard.
"Sir," I asked, "will this be your first carrier landing?"
Looking at me with disdain, he opened his inflatable
vest to display gold wings above five rows of ribbons.
"Son," he said, "I have over 500 carrier landings in jet
fighters."
"That's good to hear," my co-pilot said, winking at
me, "because this will be our first."

[Kathy in Alaska]

Got my yellow ribbons for the trees. They will be going up this weekend.

[SAMWolf]

Radio just reported that Bill Mauldin has passed away.

No details yet.

Bill Mauldin - 1921 - 2003

[Kathy in Alaska]

Good to see you this fine day, Beth.

[Kathy in Alaska]

Wearing night vision goggles, 1st Sgt. James Carabillo, 82nd Airborne Division, Ft. Bragg, N.C., watches as his team sets off 60 mm mortars to illuminate the outer perimeter of Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan. Photo courtesy www.defendamerica.mil.

[Kathy in Alaska]

During a New Year’s Eve dinner, Nigel Hook, world champion American Power Boat Association driver thanks U.S. Army soldiers stationed in Afghanistan for their work in the Global War on Terrorism. Hook, along with Winston Cup Series NASCAR drivers Jerry Nadeau and Geoff Bodine, Raybestos Northwest Busch Series driver Gary Lewis and U.S. Army sponsored National Hot Rod Association Top Fuel dragster pilot Tony Schumacher spent the holiday touring military bases in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kuwait. U.S. Army Photo By: CPL Keith A. Kluwe

Jerry Nadeau, driver of the Army sponsored Winston Cup Series NASCAR auto, dines with U.S. Army troops stationed in Afghanistan on New Years Eve, 2002. Nadeau debuts behind the wheel of the Army sponsored Winston Cup Series stock car, #01, in the February 16th running of the Daytona 500. U.S. Army Photo By: CPL Keith A. Kluwe

[tomkow6]

Our "new" revised weather forcast for Chicagoland:

Wednesday:
Mostly cloudy skies. High 13F. Winds NW at 10 to 15 mph.
Wednesday night:
LOWS:-2 °F Windy with partly cloudy skies. Dangerous wind chills approaching -30F. Low -2F. Winds NW at 25 to 35 mph.

Thursday:
Windy with a few clouds from time to time. Dangerous wind chills approaching -25F. High near 15F. Winds NW at 25 to 35 mph.
Thursday night:
Mainly clear skies. Low 2F. Winds WNW at 15 to 25 mph.

[SAMWolf]

World War II Cartoonist Bill Mauldin Dead at 81

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — Bill Mauldin, who dished out snippets of World War II reality laced with humor through cartoon soldiers Willie and Joe and became one of the 20th century's pre-eminent editorial cartoonists, died Wednesday. He was 81.

Mauldin died of complications from Alzheimer's disease, including pneumonia, at a Newport Beach nursing home, said Andy Mauldin, 54, of Santa Fe, N.M., one of the cartoonist's seven sons.

"It's really good that he's not suffering anymore," he said. "He had a terrible struggle."

Willie and Joe, a laconic pair of unshaven, mud-encrusted dogfaces, slogged their way through Italy and other parts of battle-scarred Europe, surviving the enemy and the elements while caustically and sarcastically harpooning the unctuous and pompous.

They were the vessels that Mauldin, a young Army rifleman, filled with wry understatement to portray the tedium and treachery of war, entertaining and endearing himself to millions of fellow soldiers in the war and to Americans at home.

Mauldin called himself "as independent as a hog on ice," and his nonconformist approach brought him a face-to-face upbraiding from Gen. George Patton. Mauldin continued to draw what he wanted.

In 1945, at age 23, his series "Up Front With Mauldin" won him the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning.

Mauldin won the second in 1959, while he was an editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for depicting Soviet novelist Boris Pasternak saying to another gulag prisoner: "I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?

Mauldin wrote and drew 16 books and acted in two movies, including John Huston's 1951 production of The Red Badge of Courage starring real-life war hero Audie Murphy.

Mauldin was born near Santa Fe, N.M., and spent much of his life in the West. He described his father, part Chiricahua Apache and part French Basque, as sort of a gypsy with an itchy foot, and recalled growing up as a child of the Depression on a hardscrabble farm.

"We ended up in Arizona because he had this idea that he was going to be a citrus farmer," he recalled in an Associated Press interview. "He never got around to it."

Mauldin said his father instilled a strong work ethic in him and his brother. While still a youngster, Mauldin took to drawing and saw it as his life's pursuit.

"It was a way to work without having to get off my ass," he said. "It's that simple. I just figured how I ought to make my living. It was a deliberate thing."

At Phoenix Union High School, a teacher nurtured his nascent talent for art and encouraged him to go to study in Chicago.

So Mauldin talked his grandparents into lending him all the money they had -- "their last 500 bucks" -- to grubstake him.

"All I could afford was one year," he said. "So I knew I had to make the most of it. And I did."

He repaid them with his support the rest of their lives.

Mauldin attended the Academy of Fine Art in Chicago, learning from such teachers as cartoonist Vaughn Shoemaker, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for the Chicago Daily News.

Then came the war.

Mauldin enlisted in 1940 and, assigned as a rifleman to the 180th Infantry, started drawing cartoons depicting training camp for the Division News, the newspaper for the 45th Division.

Through soldiers' eyes and pithy comments, Mauldin portrayed the miseries, the humors of military life, the tiny victories of common sense over the myopic bureaucrats and the horrors of war.

Once Mauldin's 45th Division shipped overseas, Stars and Stripes, the servicewide newspaper, began publishing his drawings, without his permission.

"Eventually my stuff took hold to the point where they realized they couldn't live without it," Mauldin said, "which is exactly what I had plotted."

His career took off and his freedom grew through Stars and Stripes.

Mauldin spent most of his time with the 45th Division, where his material came from, he said. He ended his five-year military career as a staff sergeant. After the war, Mauldin free-lanced for a time, producing cartoons focused on the fiery social issues and political commentary of the times, most prominently civil rights, the Vietnam War and Watergate.

He joined the Post-Dispatch in 1958. After a falling out with publisher Joe Pulitzer, he went to work for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1962.

It was at the Sun-Times that he drew one of his most poignant and famous cartoons on the day of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. The drawing showed a grieving Abraham Lincoln, his hands covering his face, at the Lincoln Memorial.

During the mid-1990s, Mauldin suffered a debilitating injury to his drawing hand while working on the engine of a jeep he was issued while in the military. The block fell, mangling several of his fingers and costing him the end of one.

He spent years rehabilitating his hand, continuing after he moved to Tucson, in an effort to draw again.

Late in life, Mauldin remained amazed that the Army had let him portray soldiers as he did -- unshaven, disheveled, irreverent, not easily impressed.

He said a colonel once told him, "There will never be another Mauldin. We would never let it happen."

"And that's basically the truth," Mauldin said. "I was a fluke, I was an accident. It never should have happened."

Mauldin's father was the model for Willie and he used himself as the pattern for Joe. Yet he never intended either to be the everyman.

"I've never been an advocate of the common man theory," he said. "I don't like common men. I like and admire uncommon men, and I always have."

In his classic book Up Front, Mauldin wrote that the expressions on Joe and Willie are "those of infantry soldiers who have been in the war for a couple of years."

"If he is looking very weary and resigned to the fact that he is probably going to die before it is over, and if he has a deep, almost hopeless desire to go home and forget it all; if he looks with dull, uncomprehending eyes at the fresh-faced kid who is talking about all the joys of battle and killing Germans, then he comes from the same infantry as Joe and Willie," he wrote.

Author David Halberstam wrote: "One senses that if a war reporter who had been with Hannibal or Napoleon saw Mauldin's work he would know immediately that the work was right."

More than a half-century after World War II, NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw espoused the belief, in the best-selling book The Greatest Generation and two sequels, that World War II's veterans represented the nation's greatest generation.

Mauldin disagreed.

"I don't think we were all that special," he said. "But it's nice of him to say so. Don't think I don't appreciate it.

"They were human beings, they had their weaknesses and their flaws and their good sides and bad sides," Mauldin said. "The one thing they had in common was they were a little too young to die."

[Kathy in Alaska]

Tony Schumacher, driver of the U.S. Army sponsored Top Fuel Dragster "The Sarge," signs autographs for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan on December 31st. Schumacher joined Jerry Nadeau, newly announced driver of the U.S. Army sponsored Winston Cup Series auto, #01, in a tour of military bases in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kuwait during the new year holiday. U.S. Army Photo By: CPL Keith A. Kluwe

(Right to left) Geoffrey Bodine and Jerry Nadeau, Winston Cup Series NASCAR drivers shake hands with U.S. Army soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. Bodine and Nadeau, along with drivers Gary Lewis from the Raybestos Northwest Busch Series, Tony Schumacher, pilot of the Army sponsored Top Fuel Dragster "The Sarge," and Nigel Hook, world champion American Power Boat Association driver, spent the new year holiday touring military bases in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kuwait. U.S. Army Photo By: CPL Keith A. Kluwe

[Kathy in Alaska]

[Kathy in Alaska]

The MC-130E Combat Talon I and MC-130H Combat Talon II provide infiltration, exfiltration and resupply of special operations forces and equipment in hostile or denied territory. Secondary missions include psychological operations and helicopter air refueling.

Air commandos perform mission of mercy

by Master Sgt. Michael Farris
353rd Special Operations Group Public Affairs

01/22/03 - KADENA AIR BASE, Japan (AFPN) -- Quick actions of three airmen helped save a Japanese woman's life following an auto accident outside the base gate here Jan. 15.

While returning to Kadena from another military installation about 4 p.m., three members of the 353rd Special Operations Group were stopped at a traffic light about a mile from the base.

"We heard tires squealing and then saw a dark blue (car) fishtailing through the intersection," said Tech. Sgt. Frank Hill, an MC-130H Combat Talon II flight engineer with the 1st Special Operations Squadron. "I was pretty sure it wasn't going to hit any other cars, and then it smashed into the guard rail on the opposite side of the road."

Capt. Christian Lichter, an aircraft commander with the 1st SOS, said the car rode up onto the curb and the guardrail sliced it from the door post to the back of the passenger door.

"It seemed as if a giant can opener peeled the car open (on) the passenger side," he said. "Frank and I immediately jumped out of the truck and ran across the street to assess the situation."

The driver appeared uninjured, but was shaking his front-seat passenger who was unresponsive and bleeding from the mouth.

Staff Sgt. Michael Maroney, a pararescueman with the 320th Special Tactics Squadron, was also in the truck with Lichter and Hill. He pulled their military vehicle out of traffic and sprinted to the scene.

"We were coming home from Camp Hansen where we were completing a weapons-qualification course," Maroney said. "Fortunately I had my medical (bag) with me and was able to start treatment quickly."

The passenger, a female Japanese teenager, was pinned between the dashboard and a guardrail post. Her breathing was shallow and her pulse was very weak, said Maroney. Her face was turning purple because her heavy parka was twisted around the guardrail post. According to Hill, the car, the guardrail and the woman were so intertwined it was difficult to discern where one ended and the other began.

Lichter and Maroney knew she needed to be cut loose from the jacket, which was threatening to strangle her.

"With my trauma scissors, I began cutting through the jacket," said Maroney. "It was coiled around the post and very thick. At my angle, I couldn't make a lot of progress so I passed the scissors to Captain Lichter, who had taken the driver out of the vehicle and was now kneeling in the driver's seat."

The captain said slicing the jacket was like cutting through rope.

"Her jacket and shirt were woven into the wreckage and pinned her neck against the inside of the car," he said. "I cut through her clothes and around her neck as her face turned darker shades of purple."

"We couldn't see anything but this thick jacket and were concerned she might have more injuries," said Maroney. "But knowing the (airway, breathing and circulation) basic lifesaving fundamentals, we realized the futility of looking for further injury if she couldn't breathe."

Two workers from a nearby car dealership used a jack to help stabilize the crumpled car, which was teetering on the curb. After about 15 minutes, Japanese paramedics arrived and quickly delivered oxygen to the fading patient. Her pulse had stopped and blood continued to run from her mouth. A rescue crew also responded and brought the jaws-of-life to extract her from the car. By now, traffic was snarled and Hill helped direct traffic around the scene.

"On several occasions cars slammed on their brakes and skidded to avoid rear-end collisions as drivers rubbernecked to get a glimpse of the scene," said the sergeant.

After the ambulance raced away, the three air commandos breathed a collective sigh.

Maroney, who has only been at Kadena for six months, recently returned from a three-week ride-along program with New Orleans paramedics.

"My trauma skills are as sharp now as they've ever been," said Maroney. "I felt very confident and knew exactly what had to be done at that accident site. The training paid off."

For Lichter it was a rewarding way to spend his 33rd birthday.

"There's no such thing as a good accident," he said. "But when you can help someone out who's in a life-or-death situation, it's not something you contemplate -- you just do it. Once they pulled her out of the car, I realized she would probably live, and my day got much better."

While the group of bystanders watching the airmen work said little, Maroney said he could tell from their faces "they were grateful we were trying to help."

"I was exhausted when I got home," Hill said. "I had a long talk with my 11-year-old daughter about cruising around in cars. I was hungry, had a headache and just felt drained when the phone rang."

The Japanese police called Hill to let him know the girl was in intensive care, she was stabilized and given the best chance for a full recovery.

For three Kadena airmen who fought to save her life, those words validated their mission of mercy. (Courtesy of Air Force Special Operations Command News Service)