Free Republic

Nearly 1,000 New York National Guardsmen, state police, and MTA cops are being deployed to carry out bag checks in the Big Apple’s crime-ridden subway system, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday. In total, 750 guardsmen and 250 cops will help NYPD officers patrol the “the city’s busiest transit stations,” Hochul said.

As flames advanced on the wealthy vacation community of Sun Valley, real estate agent Todd Conklin sent his wife and kids to safety, then offered spa treatments to some of the more than 1,600 firefighters and National Guardsmen arriving in town. “They said, ‘No, we don’t need that,”’ Conklin said. “So we just started buying them dinners.” Conklin’s offer is emblematic of how this town where Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Kerry, Demi Moore, Jamie Lee Curtis and Tom Hanks have second homes has dealt with a 78-square-mile wildfire that broke out more than two weeks ago. As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously...

How You Can Help Thank you for joining millions of your fellow Americans in wanting to find ways to show support for our military. Whether you want to send a care package to a soldier, donate airline miles to help reunite returning military men and women with their families, support scholarship funds or send support to wounded service members, on this page you will find over 150 non-profit organizations dedicated to helping our troops and their families. If you know of a non-profit organization in your community focused on helping our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Coast Guardsmen, Marines and National Guardsmen...

The piece is available by subscription only. Given its importance, I have taken the liberty of publishing it in full: Just over a year ago Charles Duelfer was almost murdered by a suicide bomber in Baghdad. He was saved by the Kansas National Guardsmen in his security detail, who sacrificed their lives for his. The incident provides an allegory for what is happening in Iraq — a struggle, in Duelfer’s words, between ‘the worst of humanity and the best of humanity’, a war between the forces of destruction and creation. It is a struggle in which there can be no...

<p>Alan Grover, WABI-TV: "What the kids are facing is hearing that their mother or father is a bad person for taking part in the confrontation with Iraq; comments that are coming from teachers. That's according to officers with the Guard's Family Assistance Program who've been traveling throughout the state this week. The officers report that such incidents are relatively few in number but that they've occurred in practically every region of the state."</p>

Thanks for serving your country. Now get a job. Across the nation, hundreds of National Guardsmen are making the difficult transition from the mandates of military life back to the mayhem of the job market, where soldiers like Cpl. Moss Waldock have found themselves searching the want ads. Waldock, a two-year employee at BellSouth, was laid off Monday after his two-month stint guarding Palm Beach International Airport. The 31-year-old career military man from Lake Worth was infuriated by his discharge. "Here I am, doing my duty for our country and then BellSouth comes along and says I'm out of work,"...