Pilot Missing

The pilot of an F-16CG of the 524th FS, 27thFW, Cannon AFB is missing and perhaps dead in Iraq. The pilot was supporting Coalition forces in the area 20 miles north of Baghdad when the aircraft went down. Terrorists in the area claim to have shot the F-16CG down with a Soviet Strela shoulder fired heat seeking missile. There is one report of the aircraft operating erratically before finally crashing. By the time Coalition forces had secured the area, any sign of the pilot was gone. The search continues for the missing pilot.

Al-Jazeera, that bastion of 'objective' reporting claims to have footage of the dead pilot but refused to air the pictures because they are too gruesome. I am going to call foul on this since Al-Jazeera has never before shied away from broadcasting jihadi snuff films. I have to wonder if they are trying to delay or divert while their associates in terror, the terrorists, spirit the pilot off to somewhere more secure for torture.

Lets all pray that the pilot is found alive and unhurt before those butchers work him over. Or maybe for once Al-Jazeera is reporting truth and the pilot is dead and their chums want to milk this with their help for all the PR they can. Remember how the media showed those Somali thugs dragging those Rangers' bodies through the streets? Al-Jazeera and their friends want the US to leave and will do anything to achieve that lets remember that.

Pray for the pilot and his family.

Mike and his flags

I got pointed to this story by happenstance or serindipity because a friend emailed me a question about John McCain. As I read up on this story, the connection to John McCain became less important. It is because of men like Mike and Leo that we do get to celebrate Thanksgiving and even 'suffer' to rush the barricades at 5AM on the Friday after for the Christmas deals.

Lt Col Leo Thorsness is one of those guys who has cajones the size of beachballs, to be very frank. He was a Wild Weasel pilot with the 357th out of Tahkli AB, Thailand. His mission would be to go in before the strike package and troll for SA-2 sites to fire at him, kill them if he could or at least keep them silent, and then stick around until after the strike package egressed back to Tahkli or Udorn. On April 19th, 1967 was another Wild Weasel mission into Route Pak Six for Thorsness. A four ship of Thuds took off to supress enemy air defenses with Major Thorsness leading. Thorsness' section went south while the other two Thuds went further north. Thorsness and his wingman proceeded to kill two SA-2 sites[Shrike and bombs respectively] before the wingman was hit by AAA. Both crew ejected safely from the stricken Thud and landed. Meanwhile the other section had RTB'd because one plane's afterburner would not work. So that left Major Thorsness alone covering his downed wingman amidst heavy enemy fire. Then things got exciting, a MiG-17 showed up; instead of abandoning his post Thorsness attacked and shot the MiG down. Now Thorsness' F-105 was running low on fuel and he has to hit a tanker to stay on station. As he heads out to refuel he hears the rescue force of A-1s and helicopters is being threatened by further MiGs; so Thorsness turns around - still low on fuel - and goes to chase off the bandits. He manages to damage one MiG and escape the others. So again Thorsness tries to hit a tanker when one of the rescue planes comes on the radio to announce they are low on fuel. Maj. Thorsess vectors the lost rescue plane to hit the tanker instead of him. After doing some calculations Thorsess figures he can get his F-105 home, just not back to Tahkli. Finally leaving North Viet Nam Thorsess makes it into Thailand and throttles that big thirsty J-75 back until he is gliding to Udorn which is 200 miles closer than Takhli. He recovers at Udorn with empty tanks but saves himself, his EWO, and his plane. For this mission Major Thorsess would be awarded the Medal of Honor, but the ceremony would have to wait until after 1973. On April 30th, 1967 on yet another Wild Weasel mission Thorsess was jumped by a MiG and shot down. Him and his EWO would spend the rest of the war in prison being abused by the North VietNamese. It was during this time his path would cross that of Naval aviator Lt. Michael D. Christian, BN, of VA-85 shot down on April 24, 1967.

The following is a condensed version of a speech Leo Thorsness gave:

You've probably seen the bumper sticker somewhere along the road. It depicts an American Flag, accompanied by the words "These colors don't run." I'm always glad to see this, because it reminds me of an incident from my confinement in North Vietnam at the Hao Lo POW Camp, or the "Hanoi Hilton," as it became known.

Then a Major in the U.S. Air Force, I had been captured and imprisoned from 1967-1973. Our treatment had been frequently brutal. After three years, however, the beatings and torture became less frequent. During the last year, we were allowed outside most days for a couple of minutes to bathe. We showered by drawing water from a concrete tank with a homemade bucket.

One day as we all stood by the tank, stripped of our clothes, a young Naval pilot named Mike Christian found the remnants of a handkerchief in a gutter that ran under the prison wall. Mike managed to sneak the grimy rag into our cell and began fashioning it into a flag. Over time we all loaned him a little soap, and he spent days cleaning the material. We helped by scrounging and stealing bits and pieces of anything he could use. At night, under his mosquito net, Mike worked on the flag. He made red and blue from ground-up roof tiles and tiny amounts of ink and painted the colors onto the cloth with watery rice glue. Using thread from his own blanket and a homemade bamboo needle, he sewed on stars.

Early in the morning a few days later, when the guards were not alert, he whispered loudly from the back of our cell, "Hey gang, look here." He proudly held up this tattered piece of cloth, waving it as if in a breeze. If you used your imagination, you could tell it was supposed to be an American flag. When he raised that smudgy fabric, we automatically stood straight and saluted, our chests puffing out, and more than a few eyes had tears. About once a week the guards would strip us, run us outside and go through our clothing. During one of those shakedowns, they found Mike's flag.
We all knew what would happen. That night they came for him. Night interrogations were always the worst. They opened the cell door and pulled Mike out. We could hear the beginning of the torture before they even had him in the torture cell. They beat him most of the night. About daylight they pushed what was left of him back
through the cell door. He was badly broken; even his voice was gone.

Within two weeks, despite the danger, Mike scrounged another piece of cloth and
began another flag. The Stars and Stripes, our national symbol, was worth the sacrifice to him. Now, whenever I see the flag, I think of Mike and the morning he first waved that tattered emblem of a nation. It was then, thousands of miles from home in a lonely prison cell, that he showed us what it is to be truly free.

Some background information on Mike Christian. He was raised in Huntsville, Alabama. Joined the Navy as enlisted in 1958. He then got commisioned and became a Naval aviator. He was serving aboard USS Kitty Hawk with VA-85 when he was shot down. After his release in 1973 Lt. Cmdr. Christian stayed in the Navy until he resigned his commision on February 1, 1978. He resigned to protest President Carter granting amnesty to all the Viet Nam draft dodgers. He died in 1983 in a house fire. During his Navy career Mike Christian earned 2 Silver Stars, 3 Bronze Stars, 4 Air Medals, the Legion of Merit, and the Navy Commendation Medal.

As for Leo Thorsness, he was released along with Mike Christian, John McCain, Bud Day, and 500+ other POWs in 1973. During the ejection from his stricken F-105, Thorness badly injured his back. Since his captors never gave him medical treatment for these injuries, after release he never flew an Air Force fighter again. He was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Nixon.

These are the true brave men who have stood guard upon the battlements protecting America from those who want to do greivous harm to this country. In the worst of times they have kept faith and endured, these are not dilletante soldiers who at the first frost head back to the warm comfort of bed and pub. They have earned our respect and their sacrifice makes the American flag something more than just bits of material, they make it a potent symbol of what America is about - ordinary people doing extraordinary things because they can freely do those things.

Now Who's Smarter?

Happy Thanksgiving

There will be, this time, a planned hiatus in writing. I am going to visit family and enjoy too much food while being thankful that I live in a great country that is blessed with an abundance of courageous and generous people.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

From Hell's Heart I Stab at Thee, Incompetently.

Well here is a story to warm the hearts of anyone who burns with hatred in their foul black hearts.

One truly deranged and homicidal woman decided to assume the role of Azrael, the Angel of Death, to mete out her own brand of justice. This happy homemaker decided to put some extra special ingredients into the cookies she baked and sent off to all nine justices of the Supreme Court along with Army, Navy, and Air Force Chiefs of Staff and to be thorough in her kindness the head of the FBI.

What was the special ingredient? Why rat poison. She wanted to kill every last one of them. Luckily security arrangements prevented anyone from eating the tainted treats. And the woman was arrested. Barbabra Joan March, of Bridgeport, Conn., plead guilty to 14 counts of mailing 'injurous articles.' My only beef with this conviction, she only got 15 years for the crimes. Barely more than one year per attempt. That was far too lenient for such an incompetent weilder of the coward's weapon - poison.

A New Glimpse Into Hell

When one talks of the Holocaust or the Shoah, the black&white film Schindler's List now starts to play in one's mind. Or if you have been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, it is that railway car and what spills out of it that spears your mind's eye. For those who have physically visited such places as Buchenwald, the air still oppresses with a miasma after sixty years.

Facts come rolling off the tongue like six million Jews murdered. Another five to six million others were also murdered; homosexuals, Gypsies, ministers, activists, and even American servicemen are counted in that number. At the Holocaust Museum one is introduced to the mind-numbing realization of how much an industry death in Nazi Germany was with over 600 camps of various sizes scattered throughout the Third Reich.

And then you read that what you knew is not even the full story. Tucked into a quiet town in Germany are the records of Hell on Earth. Six buildings, under the auspices of the International Red Cross in Bad Arolsen, have quietly held the most detailed look into the death machine that was Nazi Germany's concentration camps. No there were not 'only 600' such camps, think over 20,000 of various sizes and varying cruelty. There is probably graphic depictions of the Dora underground facility tucked away there, detailing how many people had to die to build one V-2 rocket. That over 17 million people were put into these camps; of that number some 12 million were worked to death or simply gassed if they were lucky, some poor souls became medical experiments.

One description from a Russian imprisoned in one of those camps reads like a scene from Alexander Nevsky. Of Jews being thrown alive into the flames. Little children being murdered. Of gutters flowing red with Jewish blood, blood the same color as their murderers. To poleaxe the reader there in one document is the name Frank, Annelise; Anne Frank was just a statistic in the Nazi bureaucracy of death.

Only now are these documents perhaps coming to public light after being sheltered for decades by bureacracies and their rules. One has to wonder if the likes of John Demjanjuk would have made it into the United States to hide for decades from his crimes if these files had been more widely known earlier? Maybe just maybe a full accounting of this gross atrocity can be realized when each country that has equal control over these records decide to release them to the public.

Stuck on Stupid

Not content with controlling both the House and Senate, the Democrats continue to display how utterly poor sports they are. We now have Murtha saying things as 'this President has no power' and stating that there are points of interest that Pelosi has agreed to.

Phrases that spring to mind:
"I wish the Democrats had stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night."

"Egon, what does your meter read?"
"Well Ray. If this Twinkie was the Democrats before November 7th. They are now the size of the Eifel Tower when it comes to stupid."

It's Started

It has not taken twenty-four hours for the bubbling giddy gleeful hand-rubbing vengenance of the newly empowered Democrats to rear its head. Heaven save the Union from folly.

Update 20061109.
Unless the new crop of Democrats and Sen. Joe Leiberman stop them, the next two years will be nothing but investigations. Murtha and his ilk are coming not to bury Ceaser but to dismember Ceaser in all ways possible. Hang the consequences to the nation as a whole.

A timetable to withdraw from Iraq. Either the violence will literally explode as the impatient celebrate the impending withdrawl or they will lay low until the last American soldier pulls out before trying to conquer Iraq. If the central government of Iraq is not strong enough, will Syria and Iran make a play to run the country by invasion? South VietNam fell when the Democrats cut off funding and North VietNam invaded with a regular army and tanks. Which leads to the next bit of derision.

They talk of increasing the number of special forces; that is to laugh. It will take more than two years to train up those needed extra forces. That is assuming the US military will get the needed volunteers to join a military that just lost in Iraq. The military will descend into another nadir of unpreparedness even as the threat grows.

And do these people even think of what this arbitrary pull-out will do with the US image worldwide? Sure the UN popped champagne when it learned the Democrats took control. Thats a good thing how? Oh right, to the Democrats the UN peacekeeping forces pass the global test on such things as looking the other way as genocides happen while they run their own brothels. It will be Saigon, Beirut, Mogadishu, and southern Iraq all over again and no one will trust the promises of the US to stick by them.

Democratic Victory

What a tumulteous night this has been. Or perhaps the beginning of a long, strange, trying journey.

It looks like the Democratic Party will control the House of Representatives come this January while falling just shy of taking control of the Senate. To say I am dissapointed is a bit of an understatement but now is the time to move forward. To pray that the Democrats will have the wisdom to do the smart things and not the attention grabbing show-boating they have been doing these past six years. Voters have told them: you have two years to prove your ideas are better than the Republicans so now put up a plan or sit down.

I do not want to see deer in headlights look now they have control. I do not want to see in real life Democrats floundering while wailing to the media they have no clues as to what to do except try to impeach President Bush and use arbitrary redeployment phase lines to pull out of Iraq. They say they can do better, then they better live up to that promise.

The Democrats have the chance to prove themselves these two years. But if they go all out for the extreme solutions then in two years time they will be out of power again. Assuming the mainland is left alone during these two years. If that happens, all bets are off. America can no longer hide behind the ocean barriers, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 proved that and so does the global commerce that keeps the United States running.

The Democrats are up at bat and its in all Americans' interest they don't hit a foul ball. Even in the world's interest.

Sore Losers

We are in the home stretch for what are normally boring mid-term elections. Just hours to go before the polls officially open while the absentee ballots flow in.

One party, while besieged by scandals real and manufactured and fighting a war, hopes to hold on to slim majorities in both the House and Senate. Santorum in PA is looking to be a squeaker. Burns, in spite of selling his vote, is also in a squeaker. While in Connecticut, the GOP candidate is merely a spectator akin to Banquo's ghost as Lieberman pummels the erstwhile Democratic candidate Lamont. One House race where the Democrats were sure to pick up a seat, Foley's in Florida, has turned tight as the GOP replacement runs a good campaign.

The other party has been positively giddy the past few weeks, eagerly rubbing their hands together in gleeful anticipation of assuming control of at least the House. With old media shills pushing everything in America as a failure, Pelosi has started to refer to herself as Speaker Pelosi while other cohorts are measuring drapes. While an impeached scoundrel named Hastings stands ready to be placed in charge of the House Intelligence Committee if the Democrats do take control of the House. In Texas, due to lawyering, it looks like the Democrats might pick up DeLay's seat.

What matters now is how the last minute surprises will affect the undecided. Looking at the Pew data in their latest poll, the Democrats will need to pull out some serious surprises since John Kerry insulted the intelligence of everyone who has served or is serving in the military. The New York Times just ran a scare piece about how the Bush Administration has helped rogues to build nuclear weapons by placing Iraqi and UN documents of the Iraqi WMD program online. Now Vanity Fair has launched their own drive by mugging and in the process shows how truly unethical they are; in fact it shows how they lack any journalistic integrity as they butcher a piece written by Rose by cutting&pasting his writings and quotes to support their view of things, not Rose's or the likes of David Frum, Richard Perle, or Rubin who was boots on the ground in Iraq.

And if these surprises do not sway people back into being Bloc voting Democrats, well there other arrows in the Democratic quiver. In the Buckeye state some 'progressives' are trying to infiltrate the GOP vote drive to sabotage it. In Missouri a group called ACORN is under investigation for submitting thousands of false voter registrations. Other 'progressives' plan to only document local voting stations with video cameras. There are twelve activation cards used on electronic voting machines that are missing. Plus the likes of Pelosi already saying there is voter fraud happening, even before the polls open as a sort of pre-emptive strike so they can deploy lawyers to contest everything once the ballots are counted and seats they thought they had sewn up go Independent or Republican. Then there are the age old tricks like what happened in 2004 when members of a local Democratic Party slashed the tires of vans rented by the local GOP to assist voters into getting to the polls.

All this shows is a naked contempt for the average American by these 'progressives.' They assume any who do not share their thoughts must be browbeaten to their point of view or kept from voting or heaven forbid those tactics fail to use the legal system to thwart the obvious will of the voters. For deity's sake, do not vote such spiteful mean-spirited people into office because their actions prove how unworthy they are of any public trust. They are sore losers who need to grow up.

Thanks Answers.com

I stumbled across this entry about the 2004 Democratic National Convention and the pictures they have just beg to be re-captioned.

Al Gore thinking: Let see I place my hand over my heart, if I only had a heart.

Jimmy Carter: "I swear that the rabbit was this big and was coming right at me!"

Howard Dean: "Steer by the second star to the right to find Neverland and we can finish off Peter Pan! Yyyaarrggghhh!!!!"

Al Sharpton: "I am coming for you Elizabeth!"

And finally John Kerry thinking: Is that another boat coming towards me, the glare is so bright have to shade my eyes.

My new car

One 2007 Mustang GT California Special, parked in the front yard.

All mine, well if I ignore the monthly payments. :)

NYT is for Vendetta

Mere days from Tuesday's election and we find another brilliant piece from the New York Times attempting to influence things.

Oh my gosh! Its the end of the world as once again the inept administration of George Bush puts out on the Internet all the nit-picky pieces on how to build a nuclear weapon. Sound the alarm! Get the pitchforks and torches! To arms!

Oh wait these captured documents are from Iraq that document the former regime of Saddam Hussein and his minions games with various inspection teams as they pursued the creation of weapons of mass destruction.

So to battle once again rode the New York Times and all of its vast army of experts. So the Bush Administration listened to the calls of alarm and took down the web-site that contained the thousands of documents, both translated and untranslated. And now the New York Times trumpets their victory against the inept Bush Administration in broadsides printed in their newspaper.

Sounds all grand and praiseworthy doesn't it? Until one starts to think on things. The Internet is not like a small publishing house that can be raided and shut down in the dead of night like such progressive governments like Cuba still do. Once something is on the Internet it is cached by entities like Google or Yahoo; those are the big names. Will the New York Times now demand these companies purge their caches or are they expecting the US Government to do the fell deed to spare the New York Times from being splashed with excrement? Even if these caches are purged, there are still the individuals who have stashed on hard drives, thumb-drives, or CD-Rs these documents; some want to try and translate them to get a better understanding or to bring important facts out for public scrutiny and others probably have less honorable motives like actually building the dreaded things.

So this is a truly empty gesture carried out by people who have no understanding of what the Internet is, all because they have a strong animus towards George Bush the person.

You see dear readers that is the true problem with carrying a vendetta too far. It blinds you to anything except the ends. Like A Khan of Pakistan who ran his own nuclear eBay auction site before Pakistan shut him down. Or declassified documents in the National Archives that one enterprising college student used to design on paper a small nuclear weapon as a class project, the student passed while his project itself was classified.

P.S. Thank you New York Times for Swift Boating Joe Wilson by validating the legitimacy of all these documents that showed Iraq was perhaps a year away from a nuclear weapon when the Coalition liberated Iraq from the depredations and depravity of Saddam Hussein.

More 9/11 Victims Identified

A flight attendant from American Flight 11 that crashed in the North Tower of the World Trade Center is among the three latest identified by the New York City's medical examiner. Her name was Karen Ann Martin of Danvers, Mass.

Meanwhile since the accidental discovery of human remains found in a manhole that had been paved over by a service road to help remove rubble from the WTC site and then forgotten, more than 200 other pieces of human remains have been found in various places around Ground Zero. New York City has once again expanded it's search for remains since roughly 40% of the vicitms who died that clear September morning have still not been identified.

Lets remember those three families who now finally have closure and pray the others who are still missing but presumed dead are also found and identified.

Wither Naval Aviation?

Catching late night repeat on HIstory Channel of the last flights of the F-14 Tomcat by VF-31 and VF-213 off USS Theodore Roosevelt.

This will not be about the Tomcats since already talked about their stand down, instead will talk about another fine Grumman airframe. The A-6 Intruder. The A-6 was developed to carry out all weather attack. It first saw combat in VietNam like many other aircraft and in VietNam it earned an enviable reputation of precisely striking valuable targets in places like Haiphong, even when the crew would have to kick the 1950's technology bombing computer to get it to work in flight. The A-6 evolved as the years progressed and even branched out to cover other missions. A-6As gave way to A-6Es. The A-6B Prowler of VietNam evolved to the EA-6B Prowler to jam the enemy. And then there were the KA-6D tankers that provided fuel to the rest of the air group.

In 1996, in spite of Grumman producing the A-6F which used the F/A-18's F-404 engines and AYK-14 data computers from the F-14D as a succesor to the A-6E, the last A-6 Intruder stood down from active duty. This was not the end however of the A-6 family.

Because the F/A-18 Hornet is a short legged beast, it could not be turned into a dedicated tanker. So S-3 Hoovers got impressed to supplement the KA-6Ds. Now with the F-18 Super Hornets in service and able to buddy refuel, the KA-6Ds are finally standing down with their antique J-65 engines.

While the rest of the A-6 family has encountered extinction, the EA-6B continues to soldier on. In the 1990s the USAF retired all of its EF-111A Ravens and started to train crews to co-man the Navy's Prowlers. In fact in 2006, a full ten years after the A-6E caught its last active trap, the Prowler still occupies deck space on the US Navy's carriers as the only dedicated electronic warfare platform. All is not sweetness&light in the ECM community. Northrup-Grumman is still producing EA-6Bs and upgrading existing ones, but the GAO is still worried about an ECM shortfall because the USAF still has call on any Prowlers along with the Navy. While the latest spawn of the F-18 Mafia which is designed to replace the EA-6B, the EF-18 Growler, is encountering its own problems like Boeing putting delicate ECM antenna fairings in places where deck crews would be pushing the airframe.

I just hope the F-18 Super Hornet can really live up to its billing to cover all these various missions. To call it an F-18 is to mislead though. The F-18 Mafia and McDonnel-Douglas call it an F-18 as a bit of sleight of hand aimed at Congress to prove all that Congress is buying is a 'slightly' improved F/A-18C Hornet. You can believe this if you ignore the bigger engines, the longer fuselage, the bigger wing, heavier weight, and beefier landing gear. The Super Hornet is as much a totally new airframe as the original F/A-18 was when compared against the YF-17 that birthed it.

If the F-18, in any of its current versions, does an A-12 when push comes to shove, after killing off the infant A-6F/A-6G programs and more F-14Ds in the 1990s to provide money for the F-18 program, Naval aviation will be in a jam until the F-35 JSF shows up.