What a great country!

This morning I went to sign up my dogs for welfare. At first the lady said,

“Dogs are not eligible to draw welfare.”

So I explained to her that my dogs are mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who their Daddy’s are. They expect me to feed them, provide them with housing and medical care.

So she looked in her policy book to see what it takes to qualify. My dogs get their first checks Friday.

Damn, this is a great country!

On thy grave the rain shall fall from the eyes of a mighty nation!

Title written by Thomas William Parsons

Burial at Sea

by LtCol George Goodson, USMC (Ret)

In my 76th year, the events of my life appear to me, from time to time, as a series of vignettes. Some were significant; most were trivial…

War is the seminal event in the life of everyone that has endured it. Though I fought in Korea and the Dominican Republic and was wounded there, Vietnam was my war.

Now 42 years have passed and, thankfully, I rarely think of those days in Cambodia, Laos, and the panhandle of North Vietnam where small teams of Americans and Montangards fought much larger elements of the North Vietnamese Army. Instead I see vignettes: some exotic, some mundane: Continue reading

The Passing of Frank Buckles

by Thomas Conner, Ph.D., William P. Harris Professor of Military History, Hillsdale College

The United States lost its last surviving veteran of the First World War on February 28, 2011. Frank Buckles, of Charles Town, West Virginia, passed away just a few weeks after his 110th birthday.  Born in 1901, he had enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 at age sixteen after finally being able to fool a recruiter into thinking he was two years older and thus eligible to serve.

He was not in combat, but served out the War in Europe and did not return home until January 1920.  He found out that he was the last of our living veterans of the Great War in 2008, and when asked how that distinction felt, he said simply:  “I realized that somebody had to be, and it was me.” Continue reading

The Real Charlie Brown

Look carefully at the B-17 and note how shot up it is – one engine dead, tail, horizontal stabilizer and nose shot up.. It was ready to fall out of the sky. (This is a painting done by an artist from the description of both pilots many years later.) Then realize that there is a German ME-109 fighter flying next to it. Now read the story below. I think you’ll be surprised …

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5th Grade Teacher and Teddy

As she stood in front of her 5th grade class on the very first day of school, she told the children an untruth. Like most teachers, she looked at her students and said that she loved them all the same. However, that was impossible, because there in the front row, slumped in his seat, was a little boy named Teddy Stoddard. Continue reading