Must See PING!
http://www.4thetroops.net/ironhorsetroops.html
Thankyou. I hope you or someone posts this to the FReeper Canteen thread... I watched it all the way through and got a great big lump in my throat.
To all the Coalition's soldiers, sailors, marines, and airforce of yesterday, today and tomorrow... thankyou. I bow my head in respect to you all.
Cheers,
KaJac
GOD BLESS THE UNITED STATES MILITARY!
BTTT!!!!!!!
Thank you, Iron Horse Brigade. Thank all of you who serve or served in the military. We honor you and we love you.
Wow! Thanks for the ping Tonk! Our military guys and gals make me more proud with every passing day. God bless them and all who have given their time and, sometimes, their life to keep us safe and free! I pray for a safe return home to all our people serving.
Thanks for the ping!
This is a visual and musical tribute to our soldiers. It's beautiful and AWESOME! It features Toby's Keith's song "American Soldier", (I posted the lyrics below). There are LOTS of photos of American soldiers on duty all over the world. You can see lots of close-ups of their faces and look into their eyes and realize they are our sons and daughters, doing their jobs. They are dedicated to duty, honor, country. They are there serving and defending our nation. They are not divided by political causes. They are NOT Democrats or Republicans or Liberals or Conservatives - they are American soldiers! They are a reflection of ALL of us! They deserve our respect and support. Pass it on to everyone!
American Soldier
I'm just trying to be a father,
Raise a daughter and a son,
Be a lover to their mother,
Everything to everyone.
Up and at 'em bright and early,
I'm all in my business suit,
Yeah, I'm dressed for success from my head down to my boots,
I don't do it for money, there's still bills that I can't pay,
I don't do it for the glory, I just do it anyway,
Providing for our future's my responsibility,
Yeah I'm real good under pressure, being all that I can be,
And I can't call in sick on Mondays when the weekends been too strong,
I just work straight through the holidays, And sometimes all night long.
You can bet that I stand ready when the wolf growls at the door,
Hey, I'm solid, hey I'm steady, hey I'm true down to the core,
And I will always do my duty, no matter what the price,
I've counted up the cost, I know the sacrafice,
Oh, and I don't want to die for you,
But if dyin's asked of me,
I'll bear that cross with an honor,
'Cause freedom don't come free.
I'm an American soldier, an American,
Beside my brothers and my sisters I will proudly take a stand,
When liberty's in jeopardy I will always do what's right,
I'm out here on the front lines, sleep in peace tonight.
American soldier, I'm an American,
An American,
An American Soldier.
very nice Tonk,
I had to play it for my daughter when she dropped the kids.
I thank you for your service and for keeping us military parents together when they need it.
You all are Great.
I received word from my son,
I will post it next, I just want to read it one more time.
Semper Fi,
Marine Nanna
P ray
U ntil
S omething
H happens
GOD is Good and
Jesus Never fails
Semper Fi
Marine Nanna
MARINE CORPS TIMES
July 09, 2004
With the Marines in Iraq: A reporter’s notebook
Marine Corps Times senior writer Gordon Lubold and staff photographer Lloyd Francis Jr. are covering I Marine Expeditionary Force operations in Iraq. He landed in Iraq in late June and will be in country for about six weeks. His stories are appearing online and in the Military Times newspapers. This is his reporter’s notebook:
July 7, 2004 — The Gift of Gas
RAMADI, Iraq — On convoy from a camp called Combat Outpost to Camp Hurricane Point, Capt. Wilson Leech got a wild hair. At least to me it seemed like he had.
Leech, commander of Headquarters and Service Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, stopped his four-vehicle convoy in the middle of a hot, busy thoroughfare in downtown Ramadi to slash some roadside gas tanks. Marines often see Iraqis selling gas, illegally and at a premium, to Iraqis who don’t want to wait in line at one of the handful of gas stations in this city of 400,000.
These black-market gas stations are a sign of the open lawlessness in this town. Also, the gas tanks are placed at the side of the road and can be used as improvised explosives.
“Most important, I don’t like them out in the street where they can cause trouble,” says Leech, from Stonington, Conn.
The “mustang” captain (he did a stint as an enlisted man first) saw one such operation and decided to stop. He radioed his unit to tell them what he was going to do, halted the convoy, and a squad or so of Marines in full battle gear jumped out of their Humvees, M-16 rifles at the ready, scanning rooftops and controlling onlookers.
This can be incredibly dangerous in Ramadi, considered a strategically critical city because it is the government seat in one of the biggest cities in the Sunni Triangle. If Marines here stop in the middle of town, they don’t stay long. “In and out,” Leech said later.
While one lance corporal slashed a five-gallon gas tank with his Ka-Bar fighting knife, Leech told the Iraqis selling the gas to leave. Instead of cutting up all the gas tanks, which could have been a fire hazard, Leech handed a couple of tanks to a tow-truck driver pulled over to the side of the road.
“Zin?” he asked, which means “good?”
“Zin,” said the Iraqi, and smiled as he took the gift of gas.
July 6, 2004 — No monkeying around
COMBAT OUTPOST, Iraq — Lloyd and I decided to sleep at this small base camp at the eastern edge of Ramadi, a place one Marine calls “the devil’s playground” because it has received so many mortar, rocket-propelled grenade attacks and small-arms fire over the last few months. We decided we could stay there and still be safe, but we asked a corporal, an administration Marine from Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, where we could bed down. Seemed easy enough.
After a few rounds, we finally found a room in the building that had an open space. A staff sergeant who was living there was going out on a mission that night and told me I was more than welcome to sleep on his bed if I liked.
“But sir,” he said, “just don’t take the monkey out of the bag.”
Whoa. What?
Confused and even a bit embarrassed, I assured him I would not.
Then he explained. Turns out, his wife had sent him a toy monkey that was in a bag on his bed. He didn’t want me playing with it.
July 1, 2004 — Begging the question
CAMP RAMADI, Iraq — I’m in the back of an “up-armored” Humvee on the way to Camp Hurricane Point, which many here considered to be the front line of the counter-insurgency fight in Iraq. The members of 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, have paid a high price in the mission, with more than 200 casualties, including 31 dead.
Still, my mind slips to more mundane things, including the accommodations at the camp Lloyd and I will be staying at for the next week or so.
So I ask the corporal sitting in front of me: ”Are you in tents?”
But the corporal, who’s more occupied by the mission at hand — the battles that have taken the lives and limbs of his Marine brothers — begins to answer the question he thought I’d asked.
He begins to feel his way through an answer about staying focused even though he knows that anything could happen at any time.
I stop him to clarify. “No, I mean, are you living in tents?”
Again, he tries to answer the question he thinks I’ve asked.
It suddenly occurs to me that as a reporter whose job it is to ask questions, I’m asking all the wrong ones. But quickly enough, I realize what the comm problem is. The question he heard: “Are you intense?”
They’re not in tents, by the way; they’re living in cement block houses.
JUNE 29, 2004 — One big crib
CAMP BLUE DIAMOND, Iraq — We’re living with Marines at one of Saddam Hussein’s old palaces near Ramadi, west of Baghdad. It’s a beautiful place, really, since it’s the first spot in the Middle East I’ve seen that has trees and grass and destination-quality elegance. Here, you begin to see how Saddam liked living large.
The palace grounds hug the banks of the Euphrates River (“cholera canal,” as some here call it) and palm trees and bamboo shoots dance in the breeze under a blazing sun. Whiffs of jasmine sometimes make it through the ever-present smell of burning tires.
The palace is known locally as “JDAM Palace,” since the main building was hit in March of last year with enough bombs — including Joint Direct Attack Munitions — to cave in the roof and make it a little less grand.
Of course, Marines will live anywhere — and do — so it comes as no surprise that a few units have made a home in the remnants of the bombed-out building.
The expansive grounds include a dozen or so outbuildings that sit on either side of a long, palm-tree-lined street spanned by three enormous arches. I’m staying in one of the smaller buildings, a tan cement-block structure with big pillars out front. It may have been a guest house, but Lloyd thinks it might have been a torture chamber. When it comes to Saddam, you never know Marines covered all the large windows with sandbags since this place has been mortared so many times. Lloyd and I sleep in one of the two rooms with about a dozen other Marines.
Lloyd snores.
There’s a PX here that closes when the power goes out, decent chow (if you don’t mind unidentifiable fried food) a post office, and the little gym has treadmills. A regular Mayberry.
When I first got here, we were told it was built for Saddam’s brother-in-law, whoever he might be. Other Marines think it was built for Saddam’s son, Uday. I suspect they say “Uday” just because they like saying “Uday” and may have forgotten the other one’s name was “Qusay.”
Marines seem unimpressed by the grandeur of it all It’s just another nasty place to call home.
Lloyd, however, is awed by Saddam’s bigger-is-better approach to life.
“It’s amazing how big this guy liked his cribs,” he said.
JUNE 28, 2004 — Blue Force trasher
CAMP BLUE DIAMOND, Iraq — Call it what not to do when you ride in the command vehicle in a convoy.
Two days after arriving in Iraq, I was asked if I wanted a lift to Camp Blue Diamond, the 1st Marine Division’s headquarters camp near Ramadi.
So we joined a 28-truck convoy at Camp Taqaddum to the east. It’s only a 14-mile ride, but attacks by Iraqi insurgents have made it dangerous. Improvised explosives —— IEDs in local lingo – are common on the roads and can blow up Humvees and topple 7-ton trucks.
Sometimes insurgents leave dead dogs on the side of the road that have been wired with such devices.
I was asked to ride in the command Humvee by the convoy commander, 1st Lt. Jeff Stoner, a fresh-faced logistics officer from Colorado who looks as if he’d rather be surfing in California. Stoner invited me to sit in the front seat I could watch the computer screen that flashes a live digital image of the area we were traveling in.
The system, called Blue Force Tracker, saves lives. It shows anyone using it where all the other “friendlies” are, so no one shoots a fellow Marine. I hopped into the dusty Humvee and tried not to be a bother. Convoys are tense affairs.
As we bumped down back roads and navigated around suspicious-looking road debris, I tracked our progress on the computer screen. After five years of traveling with the Marine Corps, I finally felt like I really was in the loop.
During the trip I interviewed Stoner, who took a seat behind me in the back of the Humvee, the keyboard to the computer screen on his lap and the radio phone handset in his ear.
When Lloyd and I finally arrived at Blue Diamond, another Marine met us at the gate. He told us to grab our bags and he’d show us our new, temporary home there.
I went back to the Humvee, and felt around for my dusty computer bag, which was sitting under a snarl of wires, the computer keyboard and the phone handset. Everything in a Humvee is “ruggedized,” which is to say it’s designed to get dirty and get bounced around a lot. I shoved the wires and the other stuff out of the way, carefully, but with little thought.
That was when the Blue Force Tracker computer screen affixed to the dash flashed a red screen with a horrific message: “This System Will Destroy in 15 seconds … 14 seconds … 13 seconds.”
After a long, tense drive, I was for the first time, officially stressed out.
I found Stoner. I explained. He said, “don’t worry about it, it’s probably nothing.”
I knew it was probably something. I explained some more.
Then he said, “Oh [expletive deleted],” and ran off to investigate.
He came back, shrugging. Nice guy that he seems to be, Stoner tried to make light of it.
“I never liked that thing anyway,” he said.
JUNE 28, 2004 — Name that band
CAMP BLUE DIAMOND, Iraq — During the same convoy to Camp Blue Diamond, I chatted up Lance Cpl. Justin Costiloe, a 21-year-old motor transport Marine from Norman, Okla. Costiloe, eyes hidden behind wraparound sunglasses, said little, but finally piped up to ask me what my “dream concert” would be.
“Name any band or performer you want, alive or dead, and list who would open, who would be the main event and who would close,” he said. I had to think.
“You know he’s going to judge anything you say,” Stoner called from the back.
I’m a music lover, but some groups I like aren’t as cool as others, and I knew it would be tough to win over a young lance corporal if I said “Nick Drake” or “Bonnie Raitt.”
So I went safe. “The Stones,” I said. Then I offered the Grateful Dead and Lyle Lovett to close the “dream show.”
Costiloe kept driving, saying nothing. It wasn’t immediately clear if my lineup passed muster. Then he said, “that’s cool.”
So I turned it on him. His dream show?
“Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, followed by Motley Crue.”
JUNE 28, 2004 — Cut the bottle
CAMP TAQADDUM, Iraq — For years I’ve been told to save the ducks. Which is to say that whenever I finish off a six-pack of beer or Diet Coke, I should always cut up the plastic rings that hold the cans together.
The thinking is that the plastic rings, if thrown away intact, will somehow ensnare a duck or a dolphin or, well, fill in the blank here, and kill it. Some environmental group planted this idea in our heads years ago. It’s environmental correctness gone wrong, but I can’t stop myself from cutting the rings into 27 pieces or so before tossing them out.
Marines have a combat-zone version of the same thing, except they’re saving themselves, not dolphins. Iraqi insurgents have been known to throw Molotov cocktails at passing convoys — in this case, plastic bottles filled with gasoline and sugar that can cause a nice little explosion when heaved in your direction.
So some Marines have gotten it into their heads that it’s wrong to throw away a water bottle without cutting it up first. The first time I saw this, a Marine finished off a bottle, then whipped out a knife and slashed the bottle with a vengeance. He later explainedthat he feels safer knowing that no bottle he drinks from could be used against Marines.
Was he the only one? We had to find out, so Lloyd and I have glanced inside trash cans throughout our travels since, and found that many other Marines apparently are doing this, too. Now, we can’t help but break out our Leatherman tools and rip our bottles up.
There are skeptics, though. “That’s ridiculous,” said one officer, who hadn’t heard of this phenomenon and refuses to see it as an operational security move.
JUNE 25, 2004 — There’s a rat in my tent
CAMP VICTORY, Kuwait — Rat, mouse, whatever. It’s hard to care about the difference when you realize he’s in your tent in the middle of a combat zone.
So there we were, Lloyd and I, settling in to our first night in the field, somewhere in the Kuwaiti desert. It’s hot, it’s dusty and we’re on the verge of feeling miserable But after only a few hours, we’ve befriended a few rambunctious Marines who also just arrived.
By nightfall, with little else to do, we sit down to watch Mel Gibson’s “We Were Soldiers” on a portable DVD player, occasionally ducking outside the air-conditioned tent to grab a smoke and shoot the breeze.
One of the Marines, Lance Cpl. Matthew Edmonds, a 21-year-old ammo-pusher from Combat Service Support Brigade 7, loves the Marine Corps, hates the bad guys in Iraq, and wishes like anything that he could “get some.” In Marine lingo that means combat action, of course, not sex.
Full of youthful exuberance, optimism and 12-pack of Mountain Dew, he is the very definition of “lance corporal.” He’s with his buddy, Staff Sgt. James Cole, another ammo-pusher, with Combat Service Support Brigade 1.
Edmonds and Cole have been friends for years but were assigned to separate units in Iraq. But they’ve both been sent to Camp Victory, where they will collect unused ammo from Marines rotating out of Iraq starting in a few weeks. We finish talking and go back in the tent.
I remember a cookie I bought earlier that day, and grab it out of my open computer bag and sit down to watch the rest of the movie. I start chewing the now-stale cookie and wonder to myself why there is a little hole in the cookie bag.
Not two minutes go by when Lloyd jumps up and bellows: “WHAT WAS THAT?” I freeze.
“Dude, it was a rat,” Edmonds says, surprised at our over-reaction and leaving off the rest of what he could say, which is: “you idiot.”
Lloyd is wound up, yelling and flailing, and I’m kind of stunned, knowing I could be bedding down with a rat in an hour or so.
At this point, Edmonds and Cole are laughing so hard they’ve all but dropped off the green cot they’re sitting on, laughing with no control. “Watch the sissy civilians freak about a little rat!” Well, neither of them said it, but you could tell they were thinking it.
That’s when I realize that the little hole in my cookie bag was a rat hole — not unlike the one Saddam Hussein was hiding in, only this one had little bites on the sides and rat-drool moistening the corners.
Edmonds stops laughing long enough to suggest that it really wasn’t a rat, just a desert mouse, and he’s seen a bunch of them in these parts.
But it doesn’t matter because I already feel like a tool.
Bump!