Posts Tagged ‘USMC’
Great Sacrifice Can Produce Great Results
This weekend as Americans enjoy cookouts, beach reading, shopping sprees, blockbuster movie openings, and good times with family and friends, many of us will also take time to remember America’s military men and women who died in defense of our freedom. It is, after all, Memorial Day Weekend. But there’s another group of Americans, far from home…
Read MoreThe Army’s Been Good to Me
In 1948, Travis Brann, an immature and disillusioned high school kid, dropped out of school. He wanted to make money, he told his parents, not sit in a classroom. A year later, tired of working part-time jobs and going nowhere, he decided to join the military. A month before his seventeenth birthday, Travis forged his…
Read MoreHe Promised Me He Wouldn’t Do Anything Heroic
On April 9, 1949, 2nd Lieutenant Robert “Bob” Reem and Donna Zimmerli, both 24, were married at the US Naval Academy Chapel in Annapolis, Maryland. Bob, a prior enlisted Marine and graduate of the Naval Academy, and Donna, the daughter of a US Navy Captain and an alumna of the University of North Carolina, had…
Read MoreFrom a PT Boat to the Streets of Seoul, William H. Shaw’s Life of Character and Conscience
Should I Stay Or Should I Go? For Bill Shaw, a 28-year-old husband, father of two, and first-year doctoral student at Harvard, the answer was clear. He told his wife, two young sons, parents, and professors he’d be back soon. His studies could wait, he explained. Three months later, on September 22, 1950, US Navy…
Read MoreEaster on Okinawa, 1945
On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, Richard (Dick) Whitaker, a Private in the US Marine Corps, landed on Okinawa’s Red Beach-2. For the next 82 days, Whitaker, along with 180,000 American and Allied soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, would fight in a battle so horrific that the world would forever recognize it as the largest…
Read MoreFollow Me! The Life and Legacy of a Medal of Honor Recipient
In one of the most iconic images of the Korean War, a Marine lieutenant climbs out of a landing craft, his right foot on a rocky seawall, his right hand gripping a rifle. Smoke fills the sky. Ladders, with ominous-looking hooks, jut upwards. His body, lunging forward, gives the impression of a man with confidence…
Read MoreShe Eats, Sleeps, and Fights Like the Rest of Us
In a few weeks the 67th publication anniversary of a little-known Korean War book will quietly come and go. The non-fiction work won’t make headlines, and its author won’t be remembered in editorials or magazines. But things were different in 1951. The book, War in Korea, and its author, the award-winning Marguerite Higgins, were hugely…
Read MoreThe Forgotten Fighting Irish of the Korean War
I always look forward to St. Patrick’s Day. My maternal grandfather, Patrick J. Sullivan, did too. His father had come to America from County Kerry, Ireland, at the turn of the 20th century and had settled in Holyoke, Massachusetts, home at that time to one of the largest Irish-American communities outside of Boston. He worked…
Read MoreWorld War II and a Grand Matriarch
On December 7, 1941, Pauline Peyton Forney, like all Americans who heard the fateful news of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, knew everything was about to change. The United States was at war, and for her and millions of others, nothing would ever be the same. With over 2,300 American dead, more than a thousand…
Read MoreSmall Town, Big Heroes: South Charleston, West Virginia
I’ve never visited South Charleston, West Virginia, but after spending the past two days reading about the small city, located four miles west of the state capital and on the south bank (hence its name) of the Kanawha River, I feel like I’ve been there. I know it has six elementary schools and a middle and…
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