Hagel Orders Review of Drone Medal Ranking

Mar 12, 2013

Stars and Stripes| by Leo Shane III

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered a review of the new Distinguished Warfare Medal following complaints from veterans groups and lawmakers about its ranking above the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, a senior defense official said Tuesday.

The review, to be led by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, will look at whether the order of precedence for the new medal should be changed, but will not consider eliminating it. A report is due back to Hagel in early April.

The new medal, announced last month, is designed to honor “extraordinary actions” of drone pilots and other off-site troops performing noteworthy deeds on far-away battlefields. Continue reading →

REMEMBERING THOSE WHO FOUGHT

Ground was officially broken for the Education Center at the Wall, to be located across Henry Bacon Drive from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, on Nov. 28.

Northeast of the Lincoln Memorial, the 35,000-square-foot underground museum will display photos (“Wall of Faces”) of the 58,282 Americans killed in the war and otherwise honor their sacrifices.  Showcased, too, will be samples of the hundreds of thousands of mementos left at the memorial.

The memorial, dedicated in 1982, cost a mere (by today’s standards) $8.2 million to build.  The center, scheduled for completion in 2014, will cost about $85 million – $48 million of which has already been raised.

SOURCE: VFW Magazine, February 2013

The first picture and the last picture are taken at the beach in Santa Barbara right next to the Pier. There is a veterans group that started putting a cross and candle for every death in Iraq and Afghanistan. The amazing thing is that they only do it on the weekends.

They put up this graveyard and take it down every weekend. Guys sleep in the sand next to it and keep watch over it at night so nobody messes with it. Every cross has the name, rank and D.O.B. and D.O.D. on it.  Very moving, very powerful. So many young volunteers. So many 30 to 40 year olds as well.

Amazing!

A big Hoo-Rah and thanks to Bill French for sending this information.

As a member of the VFW, I was able to place a notice in VFW Magazine about our 2013 Reunion in Tulsa.  It was published in the March 2013 issue.

Click on the picture to see a larger version

I did not think that anyone would call regarding the notice.  But – surprise, surprise – I got a telephone call Saturday afternoon from Dale Fleming of Blackwell, OK.  He does not have an email address or even a computer.  He told me he plans to attend the reunion.  I sent him reunion information in the mail.

How the jeep * got its name…..

by Ray Cowdery

Few would have guessed when the military jeep was being developed in the early 1940s, that nearly three-quarters of a century later lexicographers and historians would still hotly debate the origins of the name jeep before it had become a brand name or trade name. Nobody needs to debate the etymology of the name jeep as it was applied to World War II American military 1/4-ton 4×4 trucks, as the genesis of that name is crystal clear. Continue reading →

Arc Light marked beginning of B-52 involvement in Vietnam

By 1972, the war in Vietnam had persisted for more than eight years, characterized by a gradual, but massive buildup of U.S. forces.

That massive buildup began in April 1965, with the highly-publicized event of U.S. Marines wading out of the sea and onto the beaches of Da Nang, South Vietnam. Concurrent to this, and to support those ground forces, the Air Force deployed a portion of its tactical fighter-bombers to air bases located in South Vietnam and later Thailand. However, prior to this and in a less publicized move, Strategic Air Command deployed its first contingent of B-52 Stratofortresses to the tiny island of Guam in support of what became known as Operation Arc Light. Continue reading →

Distinguished Warfare Medal

The Distinguished Warfare Medal is a United States military decoration announced by U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on February 13, 2013. It is the first American combat-related award to be created since the Bronze Star Medal in 1944. The new blue, red and white-ribboned medal will be awarded to individuals for “extraordinary achievement” related to a military operation occurring after September 11, 2001. It is intended to recognize military achievement in cyberwarfare or combat drone operations for actions that do not include valor in combat. Continue reading →

The Ho Chi Minh Trail is arguably one of the greatest feats of military engineering in history, a Goliath of ingenuity and bloody determination. At its peak this 20,000km transport network spread like a spider’s web through Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, an indestructible labyrinth through which the North Vietnamese fed the war in the South.

Without the trail, there could have been no war, a fact the Americans knew only too well. In a sustained eight-year campaign to destroy it they flew 580,000 bombing missions, dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on neutral Laos, denuded the jungle with chemicals, and seeded clouds to induce rain and floods. At one point Nixon even mooted the notion of deploying nuclear weapons. Continue reading →