Free Republic

LANCASTER - The joint-Lancaster-Palmdale "Salute to Troops" event scheduled for July 10 at JetHawks Stadium will include a visit by the commanding general of a storied California National Guard division and a star of the Iraq war, an M-1A Abrams battle tank. National Guard troops from Lancaster, Palmdale, and all across the Antelope Valley have served in Iraq. A Marine Corps Reserve helicopter squadron from Edwards Air Force Base is serving in Iraq now, and the other Marine Reserve helicopter unit based at Edwards served in Afghanistan last year. The Lancaster-based National Guard 756th Transportation Co. is back in Iraq,...

PALMDALE - For Phelan resident Kevin Scott, it means seeing his 1-year-old daughter walk. For Tehachapi resident William Maybee, it's a new appreciation of what family and friends mean. For Wrightwood resident Adam Gorey, it means a honeymoon. For soldiers from Bravo Company, 185th Armored Regiment of the California Army National Guard, it means they can move on with their lives after more than a year. Two buses carrying the soldiers from the Palmdale Armory arrived in Poncitlan Square on Monday to a throng of supporters and to the arms of their families. "Today, we welcome soldiers who have fought...

Where danger is all around They started arriving in this dark and deadly part of the world a year ago. Young and old. Men and women. Plumbers, police officers and prison guards. The Virginia National Guardsmen from the 276th Engineer Battalion left their families. They left their jobs. They left their homes to help rebuild and protect Iraq, a country struggling with a robust insurgency. They found and destroyed roadside bombs. They protected other U.S. troops from suicide car bombers. They gave children school supplies and soccer balls. Meanwhile, insurgents persistently attacked the Virginia engineers with rockets, mortars and improvised...

TWENTY YEARS AGO today, San Francisco auto broker Paul Cosner disappeared. Cosner's sister Sharon Sellitto told the police her brother was missing, but they wouldn't come to his apartment. Police, however, did show up when she reported his 1980 Honda Prelude stolen. It was that car that ended one of California's most heinous killing sprees seven months later. Killers Leonard Lake and Charles Ng had been driving the car when they were caught shoplifting in South San Francisco. Ng escaped, but police nabbed Lake, who swallowed a cyanide pill and died. Police then traced the bullet-riddled car to the missing...

126th National Guard Association of the United States General ConferenceFor Immediate Release Las Vegas, NV - I’m honored to be here today at your 126th Convention.  I can’t tell you how proud I am to stand before you – and how grateful I am to have the opportunity to talk with you today. I came out here because I wanted to look you in the eye and say thank you.  Thank you for your service; thank you for caring; thank you for the sacrifices you and your families make for our country. I come from a state with a great...

EDWARDS AFB - In support of real-world operations, testers from the Global Power Fighters Combined Test Force performed accelerated testing to equip the F-16, for the first time ever, with a 500-pound Joint Direct Attack Munition, or GBU-38, that was completed July 16. The 416th Flight Test Squadron built up to the release of three inert, guided GBU-38 weapons from a Block 30 F-16 at China Lake Warfare Center Weapons Division Range from July 13 through 16, and successfully completed developmental testing. "In 30 days, operational and developmental testing was completed, which is a huge success highlighting the abilities of...

Thom Shanker's story in the Sunday New York Times explores how post-9/11 commitments will require a rethink of the National Guard and National Reserves in defese planning: The National Guard and Reserves must be fundamentally revamped if they are to carry the growing burden placed on them in support of the administration's military strategy, according to many commanders, Pentagon officials and respected national security experts. With hundreds of thousands of these citizen-soldiers having deployed in the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and others engaged in missions related to the global campaign against terrorism overseas and here at home, these...

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - Military officials and the FBI are investigating a series of suspicious phone calls to families of recently-activated Tennessee Army National Guard soldiers possibly bound for Iraq. The wife of a soldier in the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment told WVLT-TV this week her daughter had taken strange calls from a man with an accent who questioned her about the unit's deployment itinerary. R. Joe Clark, special agent in charge of the FBI's Knoxville office, said he was not aware of similar phone calls reported elsewhere in the country. "It's not as much an investigation as it is a...

SACRAMENTO - The California National Guard's 1498th Transportation Company will return from their Iraq tour, flying in to March Air Reserve Base in Riverside. Soldiers are scheduled to return on two flights - at 5:20 and 6:25 p.m. today. Approximately 220 soldiers in desert camouflage uniforms are expected to be greeted by family and friends, and will be welcomed home with a barbecue and bagpipe music. The mission of the 1498th, which includes dozens of Antelope Valley residents as well as reservists from across the Southland, was to use its heavy equipment transporter systems to move equipment and supplies from...

CAMP VICTORY, KUWAIT - Along Iraq's dangerous roads drive the convoys of the 1498th Transportation Co. of the California National Guard. About a third of the soldiers in the company of more than 200 Guard troops hail from the Antelope Valley. Other units that make up the company come from Riverside and Sacramento, but soldiers from across California are assigned to it. One soldier is Sgt. Peter Mavropoulos of Riverside, whose father resided for many years in Lancaster. Mavropoulos and Sgt. Doug Duhaime of Hesperia escorted the Valley Press editor on a combat support convoy across Iraq in 2003 in...

EDITOR'S NOTE: Valley Press Editor Dennis Anderson, who embedded with a California National Guard unit deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom last year, has rejoined them as they near the one-year mark in Iraq and Kuwait. CAMP VICTORY, Kuwait - It was nearly Easter Sunday and Sgt. John O'Hern declared a small victory in Operation Iraqi Freedom. "I managed to send flowers home to my wife and daughter," O'Hern said, grinning. During his tour, O'Hern, of the Riverside area, managed a couple of other small victories. He alerted the higher levels of command, right up to Congress, that National Guard troops...

CAMP VICTORY, KUWAIT - "The Things They Carried" was the title of a well-known Vietnam war reminiscence by Al Santoli that told the story of the war by describing the things the soldiers carried. Almost a year after deployment to Kuwait and Iraq, the tales brought home by soldiers of the California National Guard are among the things they carry. They carry other things, too. Laptop computers. Cell phones with expensive overseas "minutes plans." An endless succession of liter bottles of "Haji" water, mineral water bottled in Gulf states. Kool-Aid and Tang to flavor the water. Of course, DVD movies...

Often, on waking, my first thoughts roam to the desert, like a waking dream. Not the Mojave Desert of my Antelope Valley home, but the Iraqi desert where our local National Guard troops traverse the sand and pitted roads in convoys that sometimes fall under attack from the thugs who once served Saddam Hussein. Nothing exists out there as an attraction. As winter months end, the temperatures will climb from the daytime 90s past the 100-degree mark, then past 110, 120, 130, and finally past 140 degrees. Troops live in shelters ranging from palaces of the former dictator to canvas...

Most of the National Guard soldiers from the Antelope Valley who deployed as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom are posted near Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit on this Valentine's Day. It's a bittersweet anniversary for many of the spouses, relatives and the soldiers themselves. On Feb. 14 one year ago, the troops of the 756th Transportation Co. assembled at Lancaster City Hall. There they gave the most hurried of goodbyes to wives, and in some cases, husbands, and of course, children. From City Hall the soldiers traveled by bus to Camp Roberts on the central California coast, and on...

Statement from Governor Marc Racicot, Chairman, Bush-Cheney `04 Tue Feb 3 2004 12:31:55 ET ``Sen. Kerry is supporting a slanderous attack on the President by refusing to repudiate comments by DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe who on Sunday accused the President of being AWOL and said that his service in the National Guard did not qualify as service in the military or service to his country. ``President Bush served honorably in the National Guard. He was honorably discharged. To suggest, as Sen. Kerry has, that the military should 'answer questions' about President Bush`s honorable discharge is an outrage. The furtherance of...

FORT POLK, La. (AP) - Men in Arab headdress detonate a homemade bomb along a roadway used by U.S. convoys. A suicide truck bomb rips through a troop encampment, killing dozens. An insult triggers fighting between Iraqi Kurds and Arabs. These events, staged at Fort Polk to replicate the dangers facing U.S. forces in Iraq, made clear to the 4,800 National Guardsmen training at this remote Army base that preparing for a postwar tour of duty is unlike anything they have done before. "We got a very big wake-up jolt" when the training kicked off in mid-January, said Brig. Gen....

PALMDALE - The guy who was blinking back tears was a veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division, a paratrooper from Desert Storm, and joining him was another Army veteran married to a soldier serving in Kuwait and Iraq. Pretty soon, they were both misty. Offices of the Palmdale Chamber of Commerce might have seemed an unusual locale for such public display of emotion, but it resulted from the joy attached to a big "Thank You" shipment going to local troops overseas engaged in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Staff Sgt. Charles Brown, the Desert Storm vet, got something in his eye during...

Mystery illness kills Missouri soldierJosh Neusche died Saturday; his family waits for answers.By Eric EckertNews-Leader Staff July 16, 2003   Montreal, Mo. — Seventeen-year-old Jacob Neusche spent Tuesday morning packing up his big brother's belongings — books, a high school letterman's jacket and a Class A uniform.  "That's what Josh will be buried in," the teenager said, referring to the uniform.   Missouri National Guard Spc. Josh Neusche, 20, died Saturday at the Homburg Hospital in Germany from a mysterious illness. A member of the 203rd Engineer Battalion, he is the only Missouri National Guardsman on the Department of Defense's...

TIKRIT, Iraq - Troops from the California National Guard running truck convoys in Operation Iraqi Freedom encountered an ambush that resulted in wounds to one sergeant and less serious injuries to two other soldiers. A convoy from the 1498th Transportation Company was leaving Tikrit Airport on Sunday when one of the vehicles in the convoy struck a mine, witnesses at the scene said. The explosion, coupled with a secondary explosion, resulted in a vehicle fire that caused the loss of the heavy equipment transportation truck. Exiting the stricken vehicle, Staff Sgt. Anthony Arrington, 36, suffered burns. They were described as...

ALTERNATE SUPPLY ROUTE IRON HORSE, Kuwait - This sergeant could cuss a blue streak. You'd think he had Tourette's but everyone knew he was too wily a gambler and too tough an old campaigner to be so disabled. Sgt. William "Bill" Anderson elevated cussing to an art. On this particular evening, the subject of the sergeant's fury was a young lieutenant. I called the lieutenant Captain Ahab with freckles because a number of times in previous days it felt as if same lieutenant was determined to lure us to our doom out in the wilds of the Saudi desert. There...