Free Republic

WASHINGTON, March 18, 2007 – U.S. military officials refuted a Taliban claim that they shot down a U.S. helicopter in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province on March 16. The claim is being made on an extremist Web site. U.S. forces have no reports of a downed aircraft and all coalition forces aircraft are accounted for, officials said. Also in Afghanistan, a United Nations mine-clearing worker was wounded by extremist small-arms fire during an ambush in Afghanistan’s Kapisa province yesterday, U.S. military officials reported. In the same incident, Afghan and coalition forces were also ambushed with rocket-propelled grenade, machine gun and small-arms...

During his days as a Navy pilot, Randy "Duke" Cunningham headed a squadron whose members poked fun at each other by writing humorous entries in a journal dubbed the "hit log." Cunningham would make entries in the book from time to time, singling out his subordinates for good-natured ribbing. But his writing was so riddled with misspellings and tortured punctuation that a junior officer took to diagramming the sentences, describing Cunningham's grammatical mistakes as "Dukelexsia." Miffed at the insult, Cunningham got rid of the logbook, said a former member of the squadron, Bob Clement. "Everybody knew he was a nice...