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VassilyJung
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Name: Wes
Country: United States
State: Oklahoma
Metro: Tulsa
Birthday: 5/21/1982
Gender: Male
Interests: I am a soldier and scholar. I love to read, watch football, and above all spend time with my friends who I hold quite dear. I'm also partial to a hot cup of Earl Grey Tea.
Expertise: I am fluent in obscure literature, and video games.
Occupation: Military
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  VassilyJung
Member Since:
12/31/2004
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| I struggle constantly with people's apathetic attitude about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It might as well be a cultural law that we forget. With concerning rapidity we have completely put the pain of only a few years ago out of our collective national consciousness. Guys, we aren't getting farther away from 9/11, we are getting closer to another one. Please read this report, simple nuts and bolts listing of all the unclassified jihadi activity in America in JUST THIS YEAR. Last year there were at least 5 successful terrorist attacks in America. Not one made headlines larger than local... I often gush on the photo-journalist Michael Yon. I still do today. The man is incredible for his wisdom and passion. He is getting extremely good at his craft of both writing and photography. He tells a story. One you would be well advised to hear. This first article is short and to the point, and I say that it speaks for me better than I. The basic point is lets do this thing in Afghanistan right, or stop lying to ourselves and go home because if we don't commit we've acknowledged that we're whipped. All that remains is a bunch of libelous headlines and bitter caskets. I look at Afghanistan, a country with a median age of 17.6 years of age, and I see desolate childhood. Do any of you look at a child who is suffering and not want to help? I am unwilling to do nothing. I am not OK with casually walking on by while travesty and tragedy go unchecked in our world. General McCrystal is, like General Petraeus, someone I have some experience with. He's simply put a dedicated professional with a stellar record and the will to win. Committed to the whole mission. There is a good write up on him, personally and professionally in context of his actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and although it is a little long, it'll help you get the measure of this tremendous man. Please take an hour over the next week and read these three links. Enrich your understanding of what our country is doing and why. Give yourself the depth of knowledge to make your own determinations with out some bloated frothing suit on the television telling you what to think. Empower yourself with the knowledge to temper your fears and misgivings. Empower the link between your mind and heart, and voice. Until next time
Wes | | |
| I had an experience last week I wish to recount. Please offer your thoughts. I was in a cafe with some friends. While looking out the window I saw an accident about to happen. It proceeded to happen in fact. It wasn't bad, just a parking lot bump with a parked car, but I took note in case the driver drove off. The driver got out of his vehicle and walked inside. He did not so much as look at the car he hit or his own. Not even a flicker of a glance. I got up, resolved to go check the damage myself, and note the plates of the car in question. While walking out the door, I bumped into the driver, and stalled. It was a friend of mine, a man I respect. Someone who I want to like me as well. After the normal salutations, I returned to my seat to mull over the situation. Do I talk to him about hitting the other car? Perhaps I should go inspect the car as I intended to do. Should I try to find the other driver and let him deal with the situation? Another question was not so hard, "what is my responsibility in the situation?" Easy, I have an obligation, as a man of integrity to stop a wrong when I can, to protect a person from being harmed or dealt with unfairly. In the end, chewing this situation for another hour or so, I did nothing. At the time I justified it by saying, "just wait, we'll figure this out." That morphed into, "it wasn't a big bump, probably no damage, I don't know who the other driver is, person X is my friend and a good man (a very good one in fact)." I did nothing. Obviously a week later I'm still perturbed by it. I'm not wracked with guilt, but I can't help but feel that I failed a small moral test. A chance to be right, at small cost, but personal, and I passed on it. I believe I compromised a bit of my personal values when I had the chance and every reason to do otherwise. What would you think, do, and why? ~Wes | | |
| 12 September 2009
Speech by Major General Robert Scales USA (Ret) at Truman Library
Mr. Skelton, Mr Cleaver, distinguished guests and, most importantly, fellow veterans. What a great thrill it is see my comrades in arms assembled here so many years after we shared our experiences in war.
Let me give you the bottom line up front: I'm proud I served in Vietnam. Like you I didn't kill innocents, I killed the enemy; I didn't fight for big oil or for some lame conspiracy. I fought for a country I believed in and for the buddies who kept me alive. Like you I was troubled that, unlike my father, I didn't come back to a grateful nation. It took a generation and another war, Desert Storm, for the nation to come back to me.
Also like you I remember the war being 99 percent boredom and one percent pure abject terror. But not all my memories of Vietnam are terrible. There were times when I enjoyed my service in combat. Such sentiment must seem strange to a society today that has, thanks to our superb volunteer military, been completely insulated from war. If they thought about Vietnam at all our fellow citizens would imagine that fifty years would have been sufficient to erase this unpleasant war from our conscientiousness. Looking over this assembly it's obvious that the memory lingers, and those of us who fought in that war remember.
The question is why? If this war was so terrible why are we here? It's my privilege today to try to answer that question not only for you, brother veterans, but maybe for a wider audience for whom, fifty years on, Vietnam is as strangely distant as World War One was to our generation.
Vietnam is seared in our memory for the same reason that wars have lingered in the minds of soldiers for as long as wars have been fought. From Marathon to Mosul young men and now women have marched off to war to learn that the cold fear of violent death and the prospects of killing another human being heighten the senses and sear these experiences deeply and irrevocably into our souls and linger in the back recesses of our minds.
After Vietnam we may have gone on to thrilling lives or dull; we might have found love or loneliness, success or failure. But our experiences have stayed with us in brilliant Technicolor and with a clarity undiminished by time. For what ever primal reason war heightens the senses. When in combat we see sharper, hear more clearly and develop a sixth sense about everything around us.
Remember the sights? I recall sitting in the jungle one bright moonlit night marveling on the beauty of Vietnam. How lush and green it was; how attractive and gentle the people, how stoic and unmoved they were amid the chaos that surrounded them.
Do you remember the sounds? Where else could you stand outside a bunker and listen to the cacophonous mix of Jimmy Hendrix, Merle Haggard and Jefferson Airplane? Or how about the sounds of incoming? Remember it wasn't a boom like in the movies but a horrifying noise like a passing train followed by a crack and the whistle of flying fragments.
Remember the smells? The sharpness of cordite, the choking stench of rotting jungle and the tragic sweet smell of enemy dead.
I remember the touch, the wet, sticky sensation when I touched one of my wounded soldiers one last time before the medevac rushed him forever from our presence but not from my memory, and the guilt I felt realizing that his pain was caused by my inattention and my lack of experience. Even taste is a sense that brings back memories. Remember the end of the day after the log bird flew away leaving mail, C rations and warm beer? Only the first sergeant had sufficient gravitas to be allowed to turn the C ration cases over so that all of us could reach in and pull out a box on the unlabeled side hoping that it wasn't going to be ham and lima beans again.
Look, forty years on I can forgive the guy who put powder in our ammunition so foul that it caused our M-16s to jam. I'm OK with helicopters that arrived late. I'm over artillery landing too close and the occasional canceled air strike. But I will never forgive the Pentagon bureaucrat who in an incredibly lame moment thought that a soldier would open a can of that green, greasy, gelatinous goo called ham and lima beans and actually eat it.
But to paraphrase that iconic war hero of our generation, Forrest Gump, life is like a case of C Rations, you never know what you're going to get because for every box of ham and lima beans there was that rapturous moment when you would turn over the box and discover the bacchanalian joy of peaches and pound cake. It's all a metaphor for the surreal nature of that war and its small pleasures... .those who have never known war cannot believe that anyone can find joy in hot beer and cold pound cake. But we can.
Another reason why Vietnam remains in our consciousness is that the experience has made us better. Don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing for war as a self improvement course. And I realize that war's trauma has damaged many of our fellow veterans physically, psychologically and morally. But recent research on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder by behavioral scientists has unearthed a
phenomenon familiar to most veterans: that the trauma of war strengthens rather than weakens us (They call it Post Traumatic Growth). We know that a near death experience makes us better leaders by increasing our self reliance, resilience, self image, confidence and ability to deal with adversity. Combat veterans tend to approach the future wiser, more spiritual and content with an amplified appreciation for life. We know this is true. It's nice to see that the human scientists now agree.
I'm proud that our service left a legacy that has made today's military better. Sadly Americans too often prefer to fight wars with technology. Our experience in Vietnam taught the nation the lesson that war is inherently a human not a technological endeavor. Our experience is a distant whisper in the ear of today's technology wizards that firepower is not sufficient to win, that the enemy has a vote, that the object of war should not be to kill the enemy but to win the trust and allegiance of the people and that the ultimate weapon in this kind or war is a superbly trained, motivated, and equipped soldier who is tightly bonded to his buddies and who trusts his leaders.
I've visited our young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan several times. On each visit I've seen first hand the strong connection between our war and theirs. These are worthy warriors who operate in a manner remarkably reminiscent of the way we fought so many years ago. The similarities are surreal. Close your eyes for a moment and it all comes rushing back. In Afghanistan I watched soldiers from my old unit, the 101st Airborne Division, as they conducted daily patrols from firebases constructed and manned in a manner virtually the same as those we occupied and fought from so many years ago. Every day these sky soldiers trudge outside the wire and climb across impossible terrain with the purpose as one sergeant put it - to kill the bad guys, protect the good guys and bring home as many of my soldiers as I can.. You legacy is alive and well. You should be proud.
The timeless connection between our generation and theirs can be seen in the unity and fighting spirit of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again and again, I get asked the same old question from folks who watch soldiers in action on television: why is their morale so high? Don't they know the American people are getting fed up with these wars? Don't they know Afghanistan is going badly? Often they come to me incredulous about what they perceive as a misspent sense of patriotism and loyalty.
I tell them time and again what every one of you sitting here today, those of you who have seen the face of war, understand: it's not really about loyalty. It's not about a belief in some abstract notion concerning war aims or national strategy. It's not even about winning or losing. On those lonely firebases as we dug through C ration boxes and drank hot beer we didn't argue the righteousness of our cause or ponder the latest pronouncements from McNamara or Nixon or Ho Chi Minh for that matter. Some of us might have trusted our leaders or maybe not. We might have been well informed and passionate about the protests at home or maybe not. We might have groused about the rich and privileged who found a way to avoid service but we probably didn't. We might have volunteered for the war to stop the spread of global communism or maybe we just had a failing semester and got swept up in the draft.
In war young soldiers think about their buddies. They talk about families, wives and girlfriends and relate to each other through very personal confessions. For the most part the military we served with in Vietnam did not come from the social elite. We didn't have Harvard degrees or the pedigree of political bluebloods. We were in large measure volunteers and draftees from middle and lower class America. Just as in Iraq today we came from every corner of our country to meet in a beautiful yet harsh and forbidding place, a place that we've seen and experienced but can never explain adequately to those who were never there.
Soldiers suffer, fight and occasionally die for each other. It's as simple as that. What brought us to fight in the jungle was no different than the motive force that compels young soldiers today to kick open a door in Ramadi with the expectation that what lies on the other side is either an innocent huddling with a child in her arms or a fanatic insurgent yearning to buy his ticket to eternity by killing the infidel. No difference. Patriotism and a paycheck may get a soldier into the military but fear of letting his buddies down gets a soldier to do something that might just as well get him killed.
What makes a person successful in America today is a far cry from what would have made him a success in the minds of those assembled here today. Big bucks gained in law or real estate, or big deals closed on the stock market made some of our countrymen rich. But as they have grown older they now realize that they have no buddies. There is no one who they are willing to die for or who
is willing to die for them. William Manchester served as a Marine in the Pacific during World War II and put the sentiment precisely right when he wrote: "Any man in combat who lacks comrades who will die for him, or for whom he is willing to die is not a man at all. He is truly damned."
The Anglo Saxon heritage of buddy loyalty is long and frightfully won. Almost six hundred years ago the English king, Henry V, waited on a cold and muddy battlefield to face a French army many times his size. Shakespeare captured the ethos of that moment in his play Henry V. To be sure Shakespeare wasn't there but he was there in spirit because he understood the emotions that gripped and the bonds that brought together both king and soldier. Henry didn't talk about national strategy. He didn't try to justify faulty intelligence or ill formed command decisions that put his soldiers at such a terrible disadvantage. Instead, he talked about what made English soldiers fight and what in all probably would allow them to prevail the next day against terrible odds. Remember this is a monarch talking to his men:
This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered- We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition; And gentlemen in England now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
You all here assembled inherit the spirit of St Crispin's day. You know and understand the strength of comfort that those whom you protect, those in America now abed, will never know. You have lived a life of self awareness and personal satisfaction that those who watched you from afar in this country who hold their manhood cheap can only envy.
I don't care whether America honors or even remembers the good service we performed in Vietnam. It doesn't bother me that war is an image that America would rather ignore. It's enough for me to have the privilege to be among you. It's sufficient to talk to each of you about things we have seen and kinships we have shared in the tough and heartless crucible of war.
Some day we will all join those who are serving so gallantly now and have preceded us on battlefields from Gettysburg to Wanat. We will gather inside a firebase to open a case of C rations with every box peaches and pound cake. We will join with a band of brothers to recount the experience of serving something greater than ourselves. I believe in my very soul that the almightily reserves a corner of heaven, probably around a perpetual campfire where some day we can meet and embrace all of the band of brothers throughout the ages to tell our stories while envious standers-by watch and wonder how horrific and incendiary the crucible of violence must have
been to bring such a disparate assemblage so close to the hand of God.
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| A Johns Hopkins University student killed an apparent burglar with a samurai sword after discovering the man in his garage, police said Tuesday. Baltimore, Maryland, police received a phone call shortly before 1:30 a.m. Tuesday about a suspicious person, and an off-duty officer arrived at the scene with campus security, city police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. When authorities arrived, they heard calls for help and for police, he said. They discovered a suspected burglar with a severed left hand and severe lacerations to his upper body, Guglielmi said. The suspect died at the scene, he said. The man had entered a home where several Johns Hopkins students lived, Guglielmi said. Four students, one armed with a samurai sword, had confronted the suspect in the garage. The man "lunged" at the students, and the student with the sword defended himself, severing the man's left hand and cutting his upper body, Guglielmi said. Police did not release the name of the suspect, who Guglielmi said had a long criminal history, or that of the student. The burglary suspect had been released from prison Saturday, Guglielmi said. (CNN) My favorite part of this is that the student may face charges. For some reason he can defent himself with a gun, but not with a sword... -Wes | | |
| They say a picture is worth a thousand words.
Here is my daily dissertation 
In 1936 Adolf Hitler and Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to shake hands with the penultimate olympian, Jesse Owens. In 2009, 75 years later, German kids have Usain Bolt's name painted on their bare chests at the Track & Field World Championships in the same city, Berlin.
 December 7, 1941. A day that will live in infamy. February 24, 1945. 5 Marines and a Navy Corpman plant a US flag on Mt Suribachi, Iwo Jima. February 4, 2004. Japanese troops touch ground in Iraq. In support of their good friends, and staunch ally, the United States. I'm pretty down on the political landscape and forward social values in this country. I know many people are, and have been, for a variety of reasons for a long time. Perhaps it is inherent to being free and having access to the news. But I do know this. Things change. Keep your head down. Keep believing. A generation of hard work and good will can do a lot to change the world. 
That's just one of the coolest pictures I've seen in a long time.
Over and Out
~Wes | | |
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