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Oct. 26 falls on a Thursday this year. Ask the significance of the date, and you're likely to draw some puzzled looks — five more days to stock up for Halloween? It's a measure of men like Col. Mitchell Paige and Rear Adm. Willis A. "Ching Chong China" Lee that they wouldn't have had it any other way. What they did 58 years ago, they did precisely so their grandchildren could live in a land of peace and plenty. Whether we've properly safeguarded the freedoms they fought to leave us, may be a discussion best left for another day. Today...

Just a reminder... Photo Courtesy of Fontman.com

One Marine, One Ship by Vin Suprynowicz OCT. 22, 2000 Oct. 26 falls on a Thursday this year. Ask the significance of the date, and you're likely to draw some puzzled looks — five more days to stock up for Halloween? It's a measure of men like Col. Mitchell Paige and Rear Adm. Willis A. "Ching Chong China" Lee that they wouldn't have had it any other way. What they did 58 years ago, they did precisely so their grandchildren could live in a land of peace and plenty. Whether we've properly safeguarded the freedoms they fought to leave us, ...

Jefferson J. DeBlanc, seated in the cockpit of a F4F Wildcat fighter plane, found ways to beat death for three years. But on Thanksgiving Day, DeBlanc, a Marine pilot in World War II's Pacific Theater, passed away from complications related to pneumonia. He was 86. So many World War II veterans have died recently that we don't often pause to pay them the honor they're due. DeBlanc may provide a chance to make up for it. DeBlanc wore the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military honor. DeBlanc, born in Lockport, enlisted in the Marines five months before Pearl Harbor....

GUADALCANAL, Solomon Islands — Using a trowel to dig into the shadowy floor of the rain forest, pausing only to wipe away sweat and malaria-carrying mosquitoes, Atsushi Maeda holds up what he has traveled so far, to this South Pacific island, to find: a human bone, turned orange-brown with age. Mr. Maeda, 21, was looking for the remains of missing Japanese soldiers at the site of one of World War II’s most ferocious battles. Others have done this work before him, mostly aging veterans or bereaved relatives. But he was with a group of mostly university students and young professionals,...

Ed Berman doesn't just collect war stories. He rescues them from the scrapheap of history. Take the woman in World War II so slender she was lowered head first to weld between ships' hulls. Or the American captured by Italian troops, who escaped when his plane crashed on the way to a prison camp, then fought alongside Italian partisans until he was captured by the Germans. And the man whose combat wound saved him from making the Bataan Death March, but not from the tin mines in Japan, where he weighed 85 pounds when rescued. "His wife said afterwards, she...

Enter Stage Right - A Journal of Modern Conservatism Twenty-Five Yards of War The Extraordinary Courage of Ordinary Men in World War II By Ronald J. Drez Hyperion Books HC, 296 pgs. US$23.95/C$32.95 True grit By Steven Martinovich Until that first shot is fired in combat, no one can know what kind of soldier they will be. Our daydreams may cast us as Alvin York, the World War I hero who killed 25 Germans, knocked out 35 machine guns and captured 132 prisoners almost single-handedly at the battle of the Argonne Forest in the fall of 1918, but the grim ...

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) - Joe Foss, a former South Dakota governor and World War II hero who shot down 26 enemy planes, died Wednesday. He was 87. Foss had not regained consciousness after he suffered an apparent aneurysm last fall. He died at a hospital in Arizona, said South Dakota Gov. Bill Janklow. A Republican, Foss served in the state Legislature for five years before becoming governor in 1955. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor as a Marine pilot during World War II. He also earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. "I always had the attitude that every day...

, Calif.(Nov. 23, 2003) -- A quiet chill settled over the Riverside National Cemetery. Six Marines gripped the polished metal rails of a casket. They moved in unison, carrying the flag-draped coffin for one final honor for a Marine hero. Col. Mitchell Paige, recipient of the Medal of Honor, was laid to rest near the Medal of Honor Memorial here Sunday. Hundreds of mourners turned out to watch as an honor guard and honor platoon from 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment based at Marine Corps Air-Ground Center Twentynine Palms, the 1st Marine Division Band and Lt. Gen. James T. Conway,...

How gratifying to hear from so many veterans in response to my Oct. 25 column on Mitchell Paige and Guadalcanal. I heard from Clayton Fisher, 87, of Henderson, who served under Chesty Puller in the 1st of the 7th Marines, receiving his first purple heart at Guadalcanal (the night before the action I described in my column) and his second at Palau. I heard from Gordon Williams, now 92, who served on the destroyer Porter (DD356) in the Battle of Santa Cruz, which was being fought over the same two days -- Oct. 25 and 26, 1942 -- as the...

I probably blew the format for starting a thread...and didn't see posted elsewhere. A true hero has moved on. My 56 year old self just went outside, faced the sky, and offered the best salute I've snapped in 35 years. Rest In Peace, Mitch....proud and honored to have had your aquaintance.

G.I. Joe was just a toy, wasn't he? VIN SUPRYNOWICZ Hollywood now proposes that in a new live-action movie based on the G.I. Joe toy line, Joe's -- well, "G.I." -- identity needs to be replaced by membership in an "international force based in Brussels." The IGN Entertainment news site reports Paramount is considering replacing our "real American hero" with "Action Man," member of an "international operations team." Paramount will simply turn Joe's name into an acronym. The show biz newspaper Variety reports: "G.I. Joe is now a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international...

It's hard to envision -- or, for the dwindling few, to remember -- what the world looked like on Oct. 26, 1942, when a few thousand U.S. Marines stood essentially stranded on the God-forsaken jungle island of Guadalcanal, placed like a speed bump at the end of the long blue-water slot between New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, the most likely route for the Japanese Navy to take if they hoped to reach Australia. On Guadalcanal, the Marines struggled to complete an airfield. Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto knew what that meant. No effort would be spared to dislodge these upstart...

Oct. 26 falls on a Thursday this year. Ask the significance of the date, and you're likely to draw some puzzled looks — five more days to stock up for Halloween? It's a measure of men like Col. Mitchell Paige and Rear Adm. Willis A. "Ching Chong China" Lee that they wouldn't have had it any other way. What they did 58 years ago, they did precisely so their grandchildren could live in a land of peace and plenty. Whether we've properly safeguarded the freedoms they fought to leave us, may be a discussion best left for another day. Today...

If I invoke the phrase “Greek debt crisis,” do your eyelids start to grow heavy? Do you somehow find it difficult to summon up a fresh wave of outrage if someone mentions that when Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (better known as the Democratic Tax-Hike Justification Front) convened for its second monthly meeting last week, Congress was already 41 days past its April 15 deadline for passing a budget resolution — scared to death to admit, in an election year and the third year of the Second Great Depression, just how much new debt and spending...

Charlie Mitchener is a 61-year-old general building contractor with an office near Patrick Lane and Fort Apache Road in Las Vegas. He holds permits allowing him to legally carry concealed weapons in Nevada, Florida and Utah. Over the past three years, his office has been broken into five times. "Three of those occasions involved me interacting with Metro," he wrote to me recently. "Each of the occasions began the same: my introduction, my presentation of my Nevada drivers license and my concealed firearms permit. Prior to today, each Metro officer simply replied thank you, proceeded with his work and then...

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: 'The institutionally indolent' Last week, we started dealing with the mail on my Sept. 11 column about the fading American virtue of self-sufficiency, as hastened by the growth of the welfare state, on display courtesy of the mendicant class of New Orleans in the days immediately following Hurricane Katrina, complaining that their government handouts had not arrived with sufficient alacrity.

I was condemned by the governor of New Hampshire last week. It started when the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire invited me to give the dinner speech at their annual convention in Nashua Sept. 28. I spoke about my latest book, "The Ballad of Carl Drega." Roger Talbot, a reporter for the Manchester Union-Leader, took me aside and suggested the controversy now raging over the book in New England may result as much as anything from the cover. It features a painting by Scott Bieser which depicts Boston rebels in a darkened church in the early 1770s, passing out muskets...

Autumn,1942: It came down to one Marine, and one ship. October 26 falls on a Thursday this year. Ask the significance of the date, and you're likely to draw some puzzled looks -- five more days to stock up for Halloween? It's a measure of men like Col. Mitchell Paige and Rear Adm. Willis A. "Ching Chong China" Lee that they wouldn't have had it any other way. What they did 58 years ago, they did precisely so their grandchildren could live in a land of peace and plenty. Whether we've properly safeguarded the freedoms they fought to leave us,...

Pete the Pilot, who I interviewed on Sept. 12, 2001, for the "Sept. 11" chapter of my latest book, had a layover in Vegas a short time back, so I asked him how things were going with arming America's commercial airline pilots. "You see, the airline executives were against it, and the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) was against it -- the pilots were the only ones who wanted it." So, although Congress overwhelmingly mandated the program, "they've already run into some problems with it. The original TSA guy didn't want the pilots to be armed, so he set out to...