Free Republic

Some of you asked me to write some more about my experiences all those years ago. This one is about a close call and my memories of it.

General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, was apparently the second coming of Patton, a real world walking, talking version of Frederick the Great’s maxim, “L’Audace, L’Audace, Toujours L’Audace”, a well-read grunt who spit napalm and ingested cut glass, a Marine who made Dan Daly and Chesty Puller look like campus snowflakes. During more than 30 years on active duty as a gyrene, the Mad Dog said many classic statements, but these were some of his favorites: ‘It’s quite fun to shoot them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people.’ In 2005, he offered this...

SAS soldier 'chopped off ISIS thug's head with SHOVEL and used his gun to kill more militants' The British sergeant was said to have run out of ammunition during a bloody battle in Afghanistan By Chris kitching Updated 20:40, 7 JAN 2018 An elite SAS soldier cut off an ISIS fighter's head with a spade after he ran out of ammunition during a bloody six-hour battle, it was claimed. After killing the jihadist, the British sergeant used the enemy's gun to kill more militants. The brutal battle is said to have occurred six weeks ago in war-torn Afghanistan. The British...

Click on YouTube link. These guys are getting prepared and ready for civil war. We can't just sit back and take it for granted that we can defeat them.

In today’s wars, American troops face not one enemy, but three: jihadists, infiltrators, and lawyers. Today, our soldiers and Marines are held not just to the laws of warfare, but to unprecedented standards of criminal law, even though they are operating in a combat environment,” said John Maher, a former Army attorney and current reserve lieutenant colonel who specializes in the defense of military accused. Incidents that in the past would have been viewed as collateral damage in the ‘fog of war’ are now being prosecuted as war crimes. Texas defense attorney Colby Vokey, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel, considers...

Last Saturday, the 13th of May, I posted my article about the day I was wounded in Vietnam. hereBecause I had such wonderful responses and because a flood of memories have come back, I decide to write the next part of the story, my time in the hospitals after that pivotal day all those years ago.As I described before, I had been shot on May 13th, 1967 and underwent surgery that evening in Charlie Med, Danang Vietnam. That following morning I woke up in a Spica cast, a plaster sheath that enclosed my whole body from the top of my...

A new TV ad from the U.S. Marine Corps focuses on a woman in combat, the first commercial of its kind for the military branch. The woman starring in the new spot, Marine Capt. Erin Demchko, has served in Afghanistan and was a logistics officer on a Female Engagement Team, according to the Marine Corps website. “FETs build trust with local civilians to gather information and improve relations with the community,” says the website. “Capt. Demchko worked side by side with her fellow Marines to complete missions in the region.” The ad follows a young girl who stands up...

On May 13th, 1967, I was shot through my upper right thigh, shattering my femur and almost severing my leg. I celebrate this day every year because it was the day I almost died but through God’s grace, I have lived this half century more. I was a twenty-one year old Lance Corporal (E-3) in the Marines serving as an Artillery Scout (an enlisted Forward Observer) with Golf Company 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines (2/1) about 16 kilometers Southwest of Danang, Vietnam. Our company was on a local sweep a little north of Hill 55, following the edge of the Song...

ELVERUM, Norway — An explosion just a few feet away rocks the unmarked station wagon as it travels along a dirt road in the Norwegian woodland. Immediately, two soldiers jump from their front seats and run for cover behind the carcass of an old, rusty tank. Firing their weapons at targets along the snowcovered hillside, they call for support from the rest of their unit. This firefight is just a drill, but the soldiers taking part are battling to break down one of the final barriers to women serving in the armed forces. They are training to become part of...

It's been at least 24 hours since any further sabers were rattled between China, US, South Korea, and North Korea (oh and Japan), but it according to DailyNK.com, Kim Jong Un has ordered the entire North Korean army into "combat mode" to tighten security and consolidate sentiment in response to military drills conducted by South Korea and the US, which began in early March. A source in South Pyongan Province told Daily NK that following the order from Kim Jong Un, every last soldier-- even if away on business, on leave, off-base for training, or even those with a recent...

"The continued attempts to integrate women into combat units has completely failed," Colonel Raz Sagi told "Haboker Shel Keshet" on Sunday morning television. Sagi said the IDF has conducted decades of extremely extensive research which proves the attempts to integrate women into combat units has failed every time and caused failed mission and combat deaths, but it continues to ignore the obvious conclusions and continues the integration attempts "as if previous attempts had succeeded." "They're not giving us the real statistics," Sagi said. "That's very problematic. The real test is in the field, and it's not about pushing the absolute...

Putting females into those positions may give some a warm and fuzzy feeling, but it's a recipe for mission failure and the needless deaths of good men and women. And that's far too high a price to pay to make anyone feel good The highly emotional debate over whether women should be allowed in combat positions in the U.S. military is back. The latest firefight was prompted when the only female officer enrolled in the Marine Corps’ Infantry Officer Course dropped out after failing to complete two conditioning hikes, according to Corps’ Training and Education Command. As a result, “There...

U. S. Marine Capt. Katie Petronio was a dynamo upon graduation from Bowdoin College in 2007. Standing 5 feet 3 inches, she could squat 200 pounds, and she seemed as ready for a combat role as many men were. But just five years later, her body had figuratively started crumbling under the stress of service in Iraq and Afghanistan as a combat engineer officer. Her spine had compressed her nerves to the point of causing neuropathy. Her thigh muscles started to atrophy. She lost 17 pounds and was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome, which led to infertility. The experience prompted...

Ash Carter’s announcement December of 2015 demonstrated the Obama’s Administration attachment to a political ideology fueled by arrogance and premeditated ignorance. His direction of any long period of study and vigorous debate has been among those mutually supportive creatures that have metastasized throughout the military to serve a social agenda bringing future needless devastation. Most of the points I highlight about women in combat arose first when the decision was made to do away with DADT. A lot of good men are going to have to die in years to come to cover up this disaster. This tragedy of women...

Since 2014, three U.S. service members have been killed in the war against ISIS in Iraq. Earlier this week, the Pentagon confirmed Navy SEAL Charles Keating IV was killed during operations with peshmerga fighters. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter specifically referred to the loss of life as a combat death. Despite Americans being killed on the battlefield with ISIS, the White House has maintained U.S. troops are simply acting as advisors in a dangerous region but are not involved in combat. "What I think is true is that Iraq and Syria are dangerous places and our men and women in...

Imagine your seventeen-year-old daughter fighting for her life in hand-to-hand combat with battle-hardened enemy soldiers. How long would she survive? Two minutes? One minute? There is a resurgent movement to push female military personnel into ever more intimate contact with hostile forces. The few arguments mustered in support of doing this focus narrowly on manpower issues or misplaced feminist vanity. In all the literature on this subject that I have collected over several years, not once have I found a proponent of women in combat who would speak honestly about the consequences of thrusting our daughters into man-against-woman festivals of...

The U.S. Army on Friday announced it has approved the first 22 women to be commissioned as infantry and armor officers after new rules issued last month opened all combat roles to female service members. The move is a major milestone on the road to fully integrating women into combat jobs. The Army is taking a leadership first position by first placing female soldiers in leadership roles in combat roles that were not previously open to them, then allowing those women to train and mentor female enlisted combat soldiers. The 22 women are near completion of their officer training and...

On April 1st, the combat exemption for women in the U.S. military was lifted. This means women can and will be involuntarily assigned to infantry and ground units. This also means that brutal and horrific violence against women is now legal as long as it comes from the hands of the enemy. The American public is largely removed from the military and we didn’t even hear a whimper from the fathers and mothers of America that their daughter on active duty now can potentially be assigned to a combat unit. It’s called orders. Choice is gone. This isn’t about women...

Navy Petty Officer Lentoyi White, 26, feared she’d be dismissed from the service after twice failing the Navy’s body composition assessment (BCA), which measures body fat percentage. But in January, the Navy loosened its body fat restrictions for both men and women, giving White and thousands of other sailors another chance to stay in the Navy. “I am very grateful for a second chance with this new policy,” said White, a single mother with a 5-year-old daughter. White has gone from 212 pounds to 188 and is optimistic she’ll pass this spring under the new standards. Under the Navy’s previous...

Forcing military women into dangerous combat roles traditionally assigned to men is so potentially disastrous that the next president should waste no time reversing this wrong-headed Obama administration edict, a military advocate recently told Congress. Of course, parachuting women into combat roles is what happens when fevered left-wing utopianism takes over the Pentagon. Radicals on the Left are animated by a morbid obsession with equality, not by results or even by helping people. To them rigid adherence to politically correct fantasies trumps all other concerns. If soldiers die as a result of nutty policies, left-wingers rationalize that --damn the torpedoes!--...