Storm Tactics by Lin and Larry Pardey
This is such a great book. I’ve had it on my shelf for about two years now, and only NOW, in between stitching up lacerations, examining radiographs for hairline fractures, and studying for my board exam, have I gotten a chance to read any of it. Keeping it by my bedside to read until I fall asleep was a mistake, because I didn’t fall asleep. So it’s been moved.
| First Hand Account re: John Kerry
I would like to add my two cents about my John Kerry experience. During my career as an Air Force pilot, I spent two years flying a small twin engine prop plane around the Pacific from my base in Okinawa, Japan. On one trip we had to fly Senator Kerry, his congressional aide, and a Navy Captain (Vietnam, A-4 fighter pilot) who was also in Kerry’s party to various locations in Vietnam and Cambodia as part of the MIA/POW talks. When I met him, he was wearing a shirt with a picture of his sailboat on it. I told him I had a small 27 foot sailboat in Okinawa, he remarked “Oh I never sail on anything less than 135 feet.” When we first flew him into Phnom Penh, he went to the back of the airplane and grabbed the pizza that was put aside for the crew and passed it around to his staff. He was never offered any pizza because they were supposed to have lunch with the Cambodian government once we landed. The pizza would have been our only meal that day. When we picked him up in Cambodia, he was an hour late getting to the airport. We could not start the engines and therefore the air conditioning until he arrived. Phnom Penh at that time was over 100 degrees with 95% humidity and we were basically sitting in a greenhouse behind the cockpit windows. When he finally did arrive, we were wringing out our clothes from the perspiration. He walked out of the air conditioned car, into the airplane and asks us “Could you guys get the air conditioning running, I’m a little warm?” The other pilot had to physically restrain me from going back there and picking a fight. Then we took him into Noi Bai airfield in Hanoi. After we picked him up the next day (he stayed the night in Vietnam, we stayed in Bangkok) we taxied out, ran up the engines for takeoff, and noticed that our prop was vibrating all over the place. We taxied off to the side to look at it, but there was a good possibility that there was an engine malfunction and the engine may fail if we took off with it. Well, Mr. Senator sticks his head up in the cockpit and says “This plane WILL take off, I have a press conference in Bangkok in three hours!” (Maybe this is an indication of how he will run the FAA). We ran the engines again, and did not have the problem, so we took off and made it back. During the flight, he told everyone how he had taken a Cessna (a small General aviation plane) up with a fighter pilot, and the fighter pilot remarked that Kerry was one of the best pilots he had ever seen. I don’t know about other pilots out there, but it’s hard to imagine a little, single-engine prop plane pilot being able to show the “right stuff.” After Kerry left the plane, the Navy Captain came up to us, apologized and said basically that “he knows Kerry is a jerk” and that we should be glad we don’t have to deal with him every day. |
I know some people discredit this story that’s passed around the
Internet. To me, it brings back some really nauseating memories of
people I have happened to sail with who look with disdain on small
boat sailors. They all hold one quality in kind — they’re very rich
and they throw the most awful hissy fits, if they don’t get their way.
Nothing makes me want to gibe really fast more than a whiner in the
boat, if it can at least make them shut up because they’re unconscious.
Like, “Oops! Sorry!” These small boats, ya know. . .
they have such low booms.
Childhood Leukemia
I highly encourage people to register for potential bone marrow donation. A child can be cured of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) with a simple gift of a bit of bone marrow/blood which regenerates.
I’m Struggling
For some reason, the last few days, every time I turn on the radio, some news reporter is telling me that the unemployment rate is at its highest, and that the economy is struggling.
Well, I don’t know who exactly they ask about all this “struggling,” but it sure wasn’t me. They could have asked me about my “struggling” 9 years ago.
In fact, this year, I found the job of my dreams. And my husband just got another job, which I grant doesn’t pay much, but allows him to use some of his skills while allowing him to study for his upcoming exam. We bought a brand new house in a superb location. And I am loving it!
If this is struggling, bring it on, baby!
Thank you to the many men and women — and one of my preceptors who has been called into action this week — who spend their days and nights protecting my family’s freedom to live our lives the way we believe it should be lived. Although it may seem that there are many who publicly scorn you for your sacrifice (ex. Michael Moore and all those sad people), my family never looked at anyone in the U.S. military with scorn, even when we were in different countries.
I find it foreign that American-born citizens have been taught to believe that everyone in other countries hates the United States. If that were the case, then I wonder why my relatives haven’t gone back to their respective countries. Or why my friends from Poland, Cuba, India, Bulgaria, Japan, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, the former U.S.S.R., and even France (I could go on and on), don’t feel the need to return to their countries.
My voice may not be very loud, but I felt it had to be said.
The only people I see hating the U.S. are people who have something to gain by saying that the country is in ruin, and that they can make it better.
Politicians don’t make a country better.
Its people do.
Gen. George McClellen
“The President is nothing more than a well-meaning buffoon.” — General George McClellen of the Union Army
|
N ewspaperman Horace Greeley, seldom a defender of Lincoln, recognized that the Democrats had more in common with the Confederates than with their fellow Yankees. As setback piled up upon setback, as the death toll mounted, Greeley wrote, “Who does not see, that [Democratic candidate General McClellan’s] fortunes rise as the country sinks, and that his chances would be brightened by his country’s ruin?”And, while Rumsfeld praised his audience for liberating 25 million Iraqis from a brutal despot, he might have been thinking of how the Democrats of Lincoln’s day felt that liberating the slaves was not worth shedding American blood. One of the Democratic Party’s greatest orators argued, “We are not for propagating philanthropy at the point of the bayonet. We are not for wading through seas of blood in order to re-organize the whole social structure of the South.” The less subtle Democrats pointed out that Lincoln was advancing a course that would bring on “Negro Equality.” To be clear, this was, to the Democrats of that day, a terrible idea which would lead to “universal anarchy and ultimate ruin.” General McClellan himself believed that the Republicans only wanted to free the slaves and give them the vote to keep “permanent [Republican] control… through the votes of the ignorant slaves.” (This is one parallel which is not exact — Democratic views on whether blacks owe loyalty to a particular political party have since been modified.) – The American Thinker, May 19th, 2004 |
It is sad to me, that someone can post the Gettysburg Address on a website and leave out the words “under God” which were indeed in the original words written by Lincoln.
It’s so easy to change history. The problem with changing history is that if you change it too much, there is nothing left from which to learn. Ah, journalists.
