Photo images of the day

Pictured is Kassidy Johnson, 9, leaning on her dad, Jerry Johnson, near the rifle memorrial to her big brother Cpl. Jeffrey W. Johnson, who was killed May 11 in Afghanistan.




There was a memorial on Friday at Camp Pendleton for the 14 Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment who did not make it back from the 3/1's seventh month deployment to Afghanistan.

One of those Marines was a young man from Speedway, Indiana:

Sgt. John K. Rankel, a two-time Iraq combat veteran, had charged through machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades to reach his men pinned down at a haystack. When he got there, he flopped next to them and said, “Hey, I heard you need some help out here.”

That was classic John — always calm, recalled Matthew Howard, a former Marine who served with him: “Even under duress, he was always confident and easygoing.”

Rankel waited until his Marines ran to cover. He was shot on the way out and died in their arms.

When Lima Company later moved into the Safar area, they built a huge combat outpost and named it after Rankel. A few weeks later in late August, after another long day in the field, their company commander explained why.

His words were tinged with fury: “I made it five times the size it needs to be because Rankel was a big man,” said Capt. John Kenneley, now a major. “We pushed it right up against the Taliban because John Rankel feared no one. He was a damn good squad leader and he gave his life looking out for his Marines.”

Kevin Rankel flew in from Indiana to attend his son’s memorial with a large group of relatives. He had tried to talk John out of joining the Marine Corps straight out of high school. The boy had good grades and was a decent athlete, said his father, a finance executive.

No one in their family had served in the military, but it was soon clear that John Rankel found his calling as a Marine infantryman. “He was doing exactly what he wanted to do in life,” Kevin Rankel said.

About 30 Marines joined the Rankels for dinner the night before the memorial.

“It meant so much what we learned last night, talking with the kids,” the father said. “I shouldn’t say kids; they are men at the same time. They have gone through so much ...”

Again, props to Gretel Kovach who has been embedded with the Marines in Afghanistan and who filed this story for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Link of the day

Yesterday, we blogged about 1st Lt. Will Donnelly (Kings Point '08) who was killed in action on Thanksgiving Day.

Regular reader and frequent commenter, Steve (a former Navy Corpsman who served alongside Marines) suggested that to honor the life and sacrifice of Will, a donation be made to the Marine Corps Scholarship Fund.

The site is here where you can find out more about this worthy program.

Though they did not have children, we feel that would be an excellent way to honor William J. Donnelly IV and support his wife, Linsey.

Uncommon valor?

Actually, for these guys, quite common.

Maj. Gen. Richard P. Mills, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in southwestern Afghanistan, said Wednesday that Camp Pendleton’s 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment drew one of the toughest assignments in Marine Corps history when it was sent in October to Sangin, a strategic crossroads town in Helmand province.

As security improves in other districts, insurgents are putting up a fierce fight with the Marines for control of Sangin, their last major population center in the province, Mills said via videoconference from Afghanistan.

“The bravery and the courage of the Marines from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines stands with any unit in Marine Corps history, any unit,” Mills said.

“I don’t have to tell you that 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines have had a tough month. They have inherited a very difficult mission up there, and they have done it very, very well,” Mills said. “I know that body counts are not a measure we want to use these days, but I can tell you that with the heavy casualties that they have suffered, they have inflicted 10 times that amount on the enemy.”

Despite the intense fighting near Sangin, other areas of the province have become calmer, Mills said. In Marjah, the scene of a major Marine offensive in February, hundreds of children now are able to go to school.

At a recent school opening there, Mills said he was surprised to see several teenage boys standing in the back of a third-grade class. It turned out the teenagers had not been able to attend school under the Taliban, but they wanted to read and write so much that they were willing to attend class with 7- and 8-year-olds, Mills said.

“That is probably the thing I am proudest of. I know there is a book back home that says each school in Afghanistan cost three cups of tea. Well, those schools didn’t cost three cups of tea; those schools cost dead and wounded,” Mills said.

“But we got them built. They’re up and running, they are servicing the people and they are going to change the future of Afghanistan,” he said. “Once you have an educated population, the game changes.”

I've been blogging with a bit of a heavy heart for the past day or so. Upon returning to work from the holiday, I was informed that the husband of one of my co-workers, one of these very 3/5 Marines out of Camp Pendleton, was KIA in Afghanistan on Thanksgiving Day.

Linsey and her husband both met at my alma mater, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy or Kings Point, a period of my life which I often refer to affectionately here at BwD as my "time at Seminary". Both graduated in 2008 and had been married only since this September.

Memorial services will be held at the U.S. Naval Academy (don't know why they are not being held at Kings Point). My old boss (KP '79) will be attending the services and Will is to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

As a Kings Point brother, I am extremely proud of all my fellow Kings Pointers who have decided to serve their country in the Navy and the Marines. I am especially awed and humbled by those who even after fulfilling their commitment to the Naval Reserve and having worked in the civilian sector for a few years, sign up to serve in the Navy or the Corps, such is the strength of the call they feel to serve their country.

Please keep Will's family and Linsey in your prayers.


P.S. I hesitated in blogging about this because of the personal nature of the subject matter but with the accompanying linked article which ran originally back on Nov. 10th, the 235th birthday of the Marine Corps, I wanted to do something to honor Will and highlight what has been incredible bravery and courage displayed by these Marines.

Veterans Day 2010

This picture is a few years old but remains one of the most moving we've seen. Pearl Harbor survivor Houston James of Dallas, Texas embraces Marine Staff Sgt. Mark Graunke Jr. during a Veterans Day commemoration in Dallas. Graunke lost a hand, a leg and and eye when he was injured by a bomb in Iraq.





The following is excerpted from a post from a couple years back:

"Where do we keep finding these people..?"

California…. Garden Grove to be exact.

Coronado-based Navy SEAL, Michael Anthony Monsoor was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor today. He is the first Navy recipient of the award in the Iraq war. Story from U-T, here.

Monsoor fell on a grenade and saved the lives of 3 American snipers and several Iraqi soldiers in Ramadi on Sept. 29, 2006. He died within a half-hour.

Monsoor’s remains lay at the Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery out on Pt. Loma here in San Diego. His headstone will be replaced with one that will reflect his award.

Were not psychologists and we don’t have any supporting data in front of us but the description of Monsoor’s personality by family, friends and colleagues appears to fit a pattern we observed in this nation’s bravest: quiet, unassuming guys who were never the BMOC or the best athlete on the high school football or wrestling team but were always the hardest workers who led more by deed than word. They’re all business at work but good-naturedly rambunctious away from it and never turn down an opportunity to play a practical joke on a mate. And perhaps ironically, they never seem to wear their patriotism on their sleeve but all of them, of course, are held in the highest esteem by everyone with which they come into contact.

The 2nd ship of the Zumwalt-class Destroyers (DDG-1001) is named the USS MICHAEL MONSOOR.

B-Daddy has Monsoor's Summary of Action as well as some other related thoughts, here.

A special shout-out to our two older brothers who served honorably and with distinction in the submarine force of the U.S. Navy and the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army.

Photo image of the day

File this one under "Where do we keep finding these people?"

San Diego, to be exact.

His brother, Sgt. Rafael Peralta, is one of the Marine Corps heroes of Iraq -- a leader who smothered a grenade to save his fellow Marines during the 2004 battle for Fallouja.

Now Ricardo Peralta, 19, is following in his brother's path as a Marine private first class bound for the 3rd Battalion, 4th Regiment at Twentynine Palms to begin training for deployment to Afghanistan.

It's the fulfillment of a promise that Ricardo made at his brother's funeral.

That promise would've been made when Ricardo was merely 13 yrs. old. How many of us would have the courage, honor and sense of self-sacrifice to follow through on something like that, especially at such a young age?


Side note: Rafael was born in Mexico. The linked article did not mention whether or not he was a U.S. citizen. The armed forces has a naturalization program for legal immigrants of which we are strongly in favor.

Just a couple weeks back, here in San Diego, the flight deck of the retired aircraft carrier, USS MIDWAY, was the site of a citizenship ceremony for 300 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. We'll see if we can dig up the story with some background on the program.

Marine meets IED...

Marine wins.

The unbreakable Cpl. Matt Garst, here.


H/T: The Corner

Courage: your definition may vary

"Mark our words: There's not going to be any more taxes from this body"

So says California Assembly GOP leader Mike Villnes after the state Senate pulled an all-nighter to pass the budget and which was sent to the Assembly this morning for rapid passage and which contained horse-trading provisions as an open-ballot primary referendum and dropping a 12 cent/gallon hike of the gasoline tax.

And if you believe what Villnes says, we’ve got some beach front property in Yuma we’d like you to take a look at.

This “budget” includes $12.5 billion in tax increases which includes raising personal income taxes, already the highest in the nation and a 1 cent on the dollar raising of the state sales tax also the highest in the nation. Vehicle registration fees will also double under this budget and the irony of these same outrageous fees paid under former Governor Gray Davis that was used as one of the rallying points to recall him and which paved the way for the current governor was not lost on us.

And we’re supposed to be mollified by $14.8 billion in spending cuts much of which aren’t real cuts just cuts to the automatic budget increases for that particular budget line item.

Well, it was a game effort by the G.O.P., but as we like to say about our fair city here in the extreme southwest corner of the nation… San Diego: the city that almost gets it right.

Republican legislators had a golden opportunity to end business as usual in Sacramento and they failed. With a chance to upset the apple cart, cheese-off a bunch of people and stand athwart the back-asswards nature of how this state is managed, they caved.

And for his part, Governor Scharzenegger called the legislator’s work “courageous”, proving that Sacramento and those inhabiting it are foreign to the planet the rest of us live on as we attempt to reconcile how it is that sticking the tax payers with an additional $12.5 billion in taxes and $14.8 billion in smoke’n’mirrors budget cuts is some how “courageous”.

Because its not like sitting around in a prison for 5-1/2 years is like actual combat

What a difference 4 years makes…

Only a clownish Democrat like Senator Tom Harkin (IA) can make us rush to defend John McCain as we have on a couple-three occasions the past couple of months.

Remember the campaign meme’ 4 years ago...? That John Kerry’s military experience in Vietnam gave him the national security and “honor” edge over the “chicken hawk” George Bush who never saw any action in Vietnam… or Cambodia for that matter.

Well, it appears that worm has turned.

From a conference call with reporters on Friday, Senator Harkin, opined on the significance of McCain’s military service (Article here):

Republican presidential candidate John McCain's family background as the son and grandson of admirals has given him a worldview shaped by the military, "and he has a hard time thinking beyond that."

"I think he's trapped in that". "Everything is looked at from his life experiences, from always having been in the military, and I think that can be pretty dangerous."

“…it's one thing to have been drafted and served, but another thing when you come from generations of military people and that's just how you're steeped, how you've learned, how you've grown up."

And as if to demonstrate that what he had said was not as blatantly moronic as it really was and as an attempt to bolster his credibility Harkin continued: "I just want to be very clear there's nothing wrong with a career in the military" and that he has friends who are generals and admirals who have served the country well.

Tom Harkin would also like you to know he has a lot of black friends…. and gay friends too!