Free Republic

Actress Inga Swenson has passed away at the age of 90. The screen star died on Saturday, July 22, 2023 of natural causes, according to TMZ. Inga’s son Mark announced the news on Friday via the outlet. Her husband Lowell Harris, whom she married in 1953, was by her side at a “board and care facility” when she died, her son said. Inga became a household name playing the character Gretchen Kraus on the hit ABC sitcom Benson, which aired from 1979 until 1986. …

A Pentagon probe into the mishandling of hero Army Capt. William Swenson's Medal of Honor nomination found retired Army Gen. David Petraeus had sought to downgrade it, but shed no light on why the soldier's file was scrubbed from military computers and never passed up the chain of command. Swenson, who was nominated for the military's most prestigious award for helping to extract fellow soldiers from a 2009 ambush in Afghanistan's Ganjgal Valley, was given the medal last month by President Obama based on a duplicate file. He and his advocates have expressed bitterness over the fact that his nomination...

WASHINGTON — Retired Army Gen. David Petraeus recommended that the Medal of Honor nomination of former Army Capt. William Swenson be downgraded to a lower award, according to a Pentagon investigation that failed to resolve how Swenson’s papers then disappeared instead of being sent up the chain of command.

During last night’s World Series opener Major League Baseball staged a salute to our military heroes, complete with three living Medal of Honor recipients, including the newest, Will Swenson. Likely similar tributes will take place two or three times during the remainder of the National Football League season too. Giant flags will wiggle across the fields. Color guards will parade. The broadcast team will cut away to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan where troops in camo uniforms will wave at the cameras. There may or may not be a flyover by fighter-jets; those are mostly on hold because of...

WASHINGTON — The former Army captain who received the Medal of Honor on Tuesday has asked to return to active duty in the Army, a rare move by an officer who has lived to wear the military's highest award. Two U.S. officials tell The Associated Press that William D. Swenson has submitted a formal request to the Army and officials are working with him to allow his return. Swenson was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Barack Obama in the White House Tuesday afternoon for risking his life to recover bodies and save fellow troops during a lengthy battle...

... On the morning of the attack Swenson and his team moved on foot into the rural community of Ganjgal for a meeting with village elders. He and his team were ambushed there by more than 50 well-armed, well-positioned insurgent fighters. As the enemy unleashed a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades, mortar and machine gun fire, Swenson returned fire, coordinated and directed the response of his Afghan Border Police soldiers, and simultaneously tried to call in suppressive artillery fire and aviation support. ... With complete disregard for his own safety, Swenson voluntarily led a team into the kill zone, exposing himself...

Sandy Koufax pitches a perfect game against the hapless Cubs while Gemini 4 astronaut Ed White executes the first space walk above the Earth. The Beatles play the first “stadium concert” in New York; Lyndon Johnson is sworn in for a full-term as president; and the first Colt M1911 Government Model is “combat customized.” The year is 1965, and the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill captures far more attention than the ministrations of Swedish gunsmith Armand Swenson. His remarkable modifications to a Colt Government Model, however, are proving to be a watershed event in the development of the M1911. Swenson...

Goldman Executives Cheered Housing Market's Decline, Newly Released E-Mails Show By Zachary A. Goldfarb Sunday, April 25, 2010 As the U.S. housing market started to slide, executives at the most legendary investment bank on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, were trading e-mails in which they cheered the declines, even when those declines meant some of their clients were taking major losses, according to newly released documents. The documents show that the firm's executives were celebrating earlier decisions in which they bet against the housing market, a Senate investigative committee found. In a fall 2007 e-mail, for example, top mortgage trader Michael...