Back in the day.

In the early 60's a decision had to be made, ICBMs or long range high speed bombers, which would end civilization as we know it. The Convair B-58 Hustler tried to answer one half of that question. The pod under her chin carries an unknown, to me, amount of warheads. Her complexity killed her. But she still flies at her Mach 2 plus velocity in our hearts.

Another cute hippy chick.

Look I tried, I really tried, to understand this protest. It's not like the ships are full of Napalm headed to Vietnam, or rubber duckies to add to that mad flow in the central pacific. It's just dumb, like a bell, a big noise but a hollow structure. 

In the previous post I referred to two Russian ATGM systems. This is an FAQ on one of them from ABC news. The original take away was from Big Peace.

Russian Kornet Anti-Tank Missile FAQ March 27

go.com

When the U.S. Army recently lost a pair of its ultimate ground battle vehicles, the M1 Abrams tank, to Iraqi ground forces fighting in southern Iraq, the knock-out punch came from a weapon Iraq was not expected to have — a Russian missile called the Kornet-E.

What is it?

The Kornet-E is an "export" version of an anti-tank missile developed specifically by the former Soviet army to counter the threat of modern battle tanks such as the Abrams, America's previously-uncontested "queen of the battlefield."

Weighing about 63 pounds, the Kornet and its guidance system can be easily carried and operated by one or two soldiers.

How Does It Work?

The Kornet operates similar to other so-called anti-tank guided missiles, or ATGMs, used by the United States and other armies.

Once the missile is set up on its tripod, a soldier looks through the weapon's optical sight for a target such as a tank. He then shines a laser beam on the target and launches the missile.

A rocket boosts the Kornet out of its sealed tube and follows the laser beam to the target.

The missile contains high explosives specially arranged within the warhead. Just before the missile impacts a tank's armor, the "shaped charge" explodes and produces a jet of heat that burns through the tank's metal skin.

When the jet burns through the armor and reaches the interior of the tank, the molten armor becomes super-hot fragments that kill the crew and detonate the tank's ammunition.

What’s So Different About Kornet, Then?

Modern tanks, such as the Abrams, counter the threat of most ATGMs with an exterior layer of so-called reactive or explosive armor — essentially, boxes of shaped charge explosives.

When an ATGM detonates against such armor, the tank "reacts" by automatically exploding its own charges. The force of the explosion is intended to push the intense heat from ATGM's lethal blast away from the tank's metal skin, protecting the crew inside.

But the Kornet defeats explosive armor by using dual warheads of shaped charges. The first destroys the tank's protective layer of explosives, allowing the second warhead to burn through the metal beneath, with catastrophic results.

According to military experts, the anti-tank version of the Kornet can penetrate up to 3.9 feet of armor and can be launched from as far away as 5,500 yards. Well-trained soldiers are able to launch up to two missiles per minute by merely discarding the used launch tube and attaching the system's laser-aiming device onto a new missile.

What Makes the Kornet an Additional Concern?

Unlike other anti-tank weapons believed to be in the Iraqi arsenal, the Kornet-E can be used against coalition tanks in any kind of weather, day or night. Its laser-guided system makes it extremely difficult to counteract, say military analysts.

Also, the launch of a Kornet is difficult to spot. Coupled with a hard-to-detect guidance system, analysts say the missile could be used against low-flying helicopters vulnerable to its high-explosive warhead.

What's more, the Kornet can carry another type of warhead called thermobaric or incendiary explosives. These munitions release a fine spray of fuel before denotation. The resulting explosion creates a rapidly expanding fireball that literally consumes all oxygen within an area.

Such missiles would be used against "soft" targets such as buildings, exposed infantry, or light- or non-armored vehicles such as trucks.

Additional information provided by Jane's Infantry Weapons.

Tom and Naomi, dancing in fantasy land.

[From Common Dreams; for the Greater Good; for the "greater good", well maybe. Here we have one of the stalwart warriors of the Old / New Left taking on one of the Warrior Princesses of the New /Newer Left.Let’s listen in, shall we.]

For more info on these folks you can go to Discover the Networks at www.FrontPageMag.com.

JimG33

Published on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 by The Nation

Why Naomi Wolf's Occupy Conspiracy Theory Can't Explain Occupy LA [Or much else.]

by Tom Hayden

Compared with the brutal [!?!] police crackdowns against the Occupy movement in New York City, Oakland and even the pacific Davis campus of the University of California, the attempted eviction of Occupy Los Angeles has been almost entirely peaceful. The question is why and whether it can last.

Occupy LA was grappling with internal conflicts before the Mayor’s deadline brought the occupiers and their supporters to stand together Sunday night. The police chose wisely not to attempt mass arrests or brutal force. The police are now being accused by some in the business community of going soft. Meanwhile the occupiers have no end game at this point. [Duh] An Occupy media spokesperson, Clark Davis, indicated the group’s problems in a Sunday morning KPFK interview when he accused one faction of being “freeloaders” and warned that the movement could lose its way. [Anyone who has followed this dance through fantasyland knows that this “movement” has never had a way to lose. And how to tell the “freeloaders” from the legitimate #Occupandos, it was always impossible to me. Also if you think what had gone on with the police is brutal you have a lot to learn about crowd control, but Tom always wants the citizen’s representatives to roll over and assume the position, whether they be police or soldiers.]

One reason for the uneasy status quo was the leadership of the liberal Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who ordered the eviction but also no beatings, tear gas or police violence. Another was the leadership of the Los Angeles Police Department, eager to show a new approach after years of controversy. The City Council came out early in support. Organized labor and local clergy joined the Occupiers and insisted the mayor do the right thing. And the Occupiers themselves adhered to a code of non-violence in an effort to keep the focus on Wall Street. 

But to believe the writer Naomi Wolf, who was arrested during one of the New York protests, the Occupy movement inevitably faced a brutal crackdown because of its threat to the status quo. Wolf has written in the UK’s Guardian that the recent crackdowns on Occupy have been a coordinated conspiracy between local officials, police, the FBI and Homeland Security. As evidence, she points to conference calls between officials and police in eighteen cities that preceded the raids. She claims that a “shocking truth” behind the crackdown is the vested interest of Congress in protecting its own insider stock dealings on Wall Street. In one passage, Wolf accuses the White House of blessing the “war on peaceful citizens.” [Shocking, and not just as a doctrine! That The President and Ms. Pelosi, along with so many other Dem office holders should come forward in support of OWS while working behind the curtain to undermine and destroy the Glorious Revolution! Not to mention all the other members of the 1% who showed up in their $1000 jeans riding their Maybachs. So may labels, so much profiling!]

Wolf is not entirely off the mark. But her monolithic conspiracy model needs more investigation and cannot explain the case of Los Angeles. [But it is the source of her wealth and fame and has been for the last decade.]

There is no doubt that the conference calls were conducted, [We’re so important, look how the ruling class shakes in their boots as we raise our tiny fists.] and public records act requests may yet shed light on what was said. The mayor of Los Angeles was not on those calls, and says he didn’t want to be. [But he knows they happened, how?]

While there is no evidence thus far of FBI or White House coordination of the crackdowns, [Tommy’s so hungry for central control that he sees it even when it doesn’t exist.] what is most naïve in the Wolf analysis is her notion that coordinated crackdowns are new with the advent of Occupy Wall Street. Since the 1999 Seattle protests, the involvement of the FBI with local police has followed a repeated pattern. First, an FBI counter-terrorism task force warns local officials, media and the public that thousands of masked “anarchists” will be invading their cities to break the law, fight the police, break windows and destroy property. [As if local officials have to be warned, the Black Block sends out press releases weeks before. Any local politician who doesn’t take their threats seriously need only look at the streets of Seattle littered with broken glass, or the wire stretched between lampposts in Washington D. C. to unhorse police to know what their facing when these folks come to town. But the Left’s fetish for violence goes so deep that there is no way for them to get away from it.] They then advise that all protests be literally fenced into protest cages. To sweeten the coordination, tens of thousands of federal dollars are offered to local police forces for “security” [acquisition of the latest in gas grenades, launchers, surveillance cameras, even paper shredders in one case]. Young people and their convergence centers are targeted for prior detention, with the. assistance of informants and provocateurs. [As if provocateurs were ever necessary, these people can work themselves into a frenzy with no provocation at all. Let’s review the Minneapolis-St. Paul traffic disruptions and bomb plots at the Republican convention of 2008.]

The list of cities where this has occurred is a long one, starting with Seattle: Los Angeles (2000 convention), Washington DC (2000, 2002), Genoa (2001), Quebec City (2001), Oakland (2003), Miami (2003), New York (2004, 2008), Minneapolis-St. Paul (2008), Denver/Boulder (2008), to list only the most dramatic and recent. None of these are remembered in Wolf’s inflated narrative, as if the Occupy movement has been unique in provoking the ruling class to order up repression. [So Tommy, are we supposed to sit around with our fingers up our asses when you crew of wreckers comes to town?]

There was one exception to this recent pattern: Mexico’s handling of the anti-WTO protests held in Cancun in 2003. Instead of following the FBI’s script, Mexico decided to de-escalate the police response, perhaps to protect Cancun’s tourist economy, perhaps to improve their security forces’ tattered reputation. It was quite remarkable to observe. In spite provocations by the so-called Black Bloc, in spite of protestors taking over the streets, in spite of a horrific ritual suicide by a South Korean farmer, the police and army remained largely disengaged or passive. When they arrested one group for sitting in an intersection, they placed them on an air-conditioned bus, which drove them back to the protest site. 

The lesson that was driven home for me in Cancun is that the police, and those who dictate their policy, have enormous discretion over whether a confrontation turns violent. It mostly depends on what image they want to project. [The projection of image is totally irrelevant to the “protesters”? Really Tommy? In a propaganda war, really Tommy?] That is, it depends on politics. [Duh!]

To return to the case Los Angeles, I am not arguing in favor of the Mayor’s eviction order. There was no particular reason for the order to be imposed. [Public health be damned!] Left alone, the Occupiers might have decided on their own time that it was the moment to move on. Even Adbusters, the Vancouver culture-jamming magazine that called for Occupy Wall Street, has editorialized on the need for a new phase. [Since the old phase was going nowhere.]  Or the LA occupiers might have descended into negative feuding and folded their tents. [Since they had no leadership, and didn’t want any.]  There was a serious risk in forcing them out of their encampment. [Bathing and disease, rape and general mayhem, of course, had no effect.]  Nor do I believe the mayor bowed to pressure from downtown property owners to clear the encampment. [Of course not, tax paying business have no effect on local pols. Just wondering, after all this time does Tommy own property, just asking.] His own explanation as an elected official makes more sense: that sooner or later, an incident would occur at the encampment (a death, a rape, a fight) for which he would be held accountable politically. [Read that again; a death, a rape, a fight, seemed to be all too common in #OWS sites across the country.]

But the way the LA eviction has been handled so far is a very important achievement for a city plagued by fifty years of police scandals, brutality, corruption, and court-ordered reforms. Only four years ago the LAPD’s fabled Metro Division went wild and trampled peaceful protestors and media at a huge immigrant rights rally. The LAPD still stops and frisks hundreds of thousands of inner city youth each year, a potential scandal that is so far invisible. [NYPD does that a lot here, and shootings are still a problem in “inner city” neighborhoods; if they were neighborhoods.]

Under the direction of the mayor and Chief Charlie Beck, however, the LAPD officers on Sunday night were as “tactful” as could be, in the phrase one Occupy sympathizer who works at City Hall. 

Once considered an “occupying army” projecting a threat against the least disturbance, for one night the LAPD allowed Occupy LA to co-opt their old brand. 

The Occupy movement also showed an evolution in thinking about street tactics. A decade ago, the phrase “diversity of tactics” allowed a range of actions from strict nonviolence to “fucking shit up”, as certain anarchist factions used to say. [Hey Tommy, ever wonder what it was like to be the owner of a storefront designated to be the shit to be fucked up?]  Experience showed that such “diversity” only allowed the most violent sensational tactics to dominate the media narrative, despite being employed by a tiny handful of activists and provocateurs in some cases. [Must have been the Hello Kitty Faction.]

So far the clearances in LA have been peaceful. On Monday morning the mayor met with a delegation of inter-faith leaders who have been joining the occupiers for several weeks. [Slaves looking for Masters.] The clergy communiqué from the meeting commended Chief Beck for “the restraint shown so far by the LAPD”, and made a “commitment to sustain the Occupy presence and message in LA going forward”, including a promise by the Mayor to use his “bully pulpit” as head of the National Conference of Mayors to push the major themes of the national Occupy movement: “the need to halt the avalanche of home foreclosures, the need to reverse corporate ‘personhood’, the need to fully enforce the Dodd-Frank law, and the need to gain needed federal and state tax revenue to support municipal services in LA and throughout the nation.” [And the need to strip the middle class of all their assets in the service of the Revo.]

The dire scenario painted by Wolf does not tell the story of Los Angeles, where for the moment a crack of hope has been opened for nonviolent conflict resolution and a transition to a new stage.

© 2011 The Nation

Tom Hayden is a former state senator and leader of 1960's peace, justice and environmental movements. [And a supporter of Communist dictatorship through out the world.] He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. [Since no one will vote for him to hold office in southern California anymore.] His books include The Port Huron Statement [new edition], Street Wars and The Zapatista Reader. [Just what you want when curled up before the flicker of raging bonfires.] [Just one more question, how does the shutting down of West Coast ports and causing dock workers to miss work feed this "ideology"? This bunch continues to make no sense, unless that's the point, like an old Talking Heads song. Is the Left so bankrupt that all that's left is temper tantrums? Hmm....]

Jonah and VDH give two cheers to The President

November 30, 2011 4:00 A.M. Victor Davis Hanson @ NRO Obama 101 Few presidents have dashed so many illusions as Obama. In the last three years, the president has taught us a great deal about America, the world, and himself. Before Obama, many Americans still believed in massive deficit spending, whether as an article of fairness, a means to economic growth, or just a lazy fallback position to justify an out-of-control federal government. But after the failure of a nearly $800 billion “stimulus” program — intended to keep unemployment under 8 percent — no one believes any more that an already indebted government will foster economic growth by taking on another $4 trillion in debt. In other words, “stimulus” is mostly a dead concept. The president — much as he advised a barnstorming President Bush in 2005 to cease pushing Social Security reform on a reluctant population — should give it up and junk the new $500 billion program euphemistically designated as a “jobs bill.” The U.S. government is already borrowing every three days what all of America spent on Black Friday. Obama has also taught us that prominent government intervention into the private sector often makes things worse, and invites crony-capitalist corruption. Nearly three years into this administration, it is striking how seldom Barack Obama brags about Cash for Clunkers, the Chrysler and GM bailouts, or Solyndra. He either is quiet about them or sort of shrugs, as if to say, “Stuff happens.” Even creative bookkeeping cannot mask the fact that the auto-company bailouts (begun, to be sure, by the Bush administration, but made worse under Obama) will prove a huge drain on the Treasury. No one even attempts any more to convince us that we will like Obamacare once we read the legislation, or that it will save us costs in the long run, or that it will cheer up businesses so that they will invest and hire. All that was dreamland, 2009, and this is reality, 2011, when we hear only “It could have been worse.” Obama has also taught us that a president’s name, his father’s religion, his ethnic background, loud denunciations of his predecessor, discomforting efforts to apologize, bow, and contextualize past American actions — none of that does anything to lead to greater peace in the world or security for the United States. And by the same token, George Bush’s drawl, Texas identification, and Christianity did not magically turn allies into neutrals and neutrals into enemies. Israel, Britain, and Eastern Europe are not closer allies now than they were in 2008. Iran is still Iran — and may be even a more dangerous adversary after the failed Obama outreach. Putin’s Russia, despite “reset” (a word we no longer much hear), is still Putin’s Russia. China still despises the U.S., and feels in 2011 that it is in a far better position to act on its contempt than it was in 2009. North Korea never got the “hope and change” message. Europe is collapsing, reminding the world where the United States is headed if it does not change course. Outreach didn’t seem to do much for the Castro brothers, Hugo Chávez, or Daniel Ortega. We are helping Mexico to sue our own states, but that does not seem to persuade its leaders to keep their citizens home. Muslim Pakistan went from a duplicitous ally to a veritable enemy. The more we bragged about Turkey, the more we could feel it holds us in contempt. We hope that the Libyan rebels and the Cairo protesters are headed toward democracy, but we privately admit that they seem to have no more interest in establishing it than we have in promoting it. In other words, Professor Obama reminds future presidents that the world will transcend their rhetoric, their pretensions, and their heritage. Other nations always calibrate their relations with the United States either by their own perceived self-interest, or by centuries-old American values and power, or both. Barack Obama has taught us a great deal about dealing with radical Islam, an ideology not predicated on what presidents do or say. There will be no shutting down of Guantanamo as promised, and no end to either renditions or preventive detentions and tribunals. Khalid Sheik Mohammed will never be tried, as promised, in a New York courtroom not far from the scene of his mass murdering. The so-called Ground Zero mosque — once so dear to sanctimonious members of the Obama administration — will never be built; either liberal New Yorkers will quietly prevent it, or the architects of the scheme will be exposed as financial as well as cultural con artists. Obama will never again give an interview to Al-Arabiya expanding on how his own heritage will ameliorate relations with Arabs. The Cairo speech will go down in history not as a landmark creative effort to win over Muslims, but, to the extent it is remembered, as one of the most ahistorical constructs in presidential history. The Obama legacy in the War on Terror is as Predator-in-Chief — boldly increasing targeted assassinations tenfold from the Bush era, on the theory that we more or less kill the right suspected terrorists; few civil libertarians care much, apparently because one of their own is doing it. We have learned from Obama that the messianic presidency is a myth. Obama’s attempt to recreate Camelot has only reminded us that JFK’s presidency — tax cuts, Cold War saber-rattling, Vietnam intervention — was never Camelot. We shall see no more Latinate presidential sloganeering (“Vero Possumus”), no more rainbow posters. Gone are the faux-Greek columns, the speeches about seas receding and the planet cooling — now sources of embarrassment rather than nostalgia. Chancellor Merkel won’t want another Victory Column address from someone who ducked out on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama himself will not lecture crowds any longer about the dangers of their fainting when he speaks; Michelle will cease all the nonsense about “deign[ing] to enter the messy thing called politics” and finally acquiring pride in the U.S. when it nominated her husband. Even Chris Matthews’s leg has stopped tingling. There will be no more Newsweek comparisons of Obama to a god. Even the Nobel Prize committee will soon grasp that it tarnished its brand by equating fleeting celebrity with lasting achievement. “Green” will never be quite the same after Obama. When Solyndra and its affiliated scandals are at last fully brought into the light of day, we will see the logical reification of Climategate I & II, Al Gore’s hucksterism, and Van Jones’s lunacy. How ironic that the more Obama tried to stop drilling in the West, offshore, and in Alaska, as well as stopping the Canadian pipeline, the more the American private sector kept finding oil and gas despite rather than because of the U.S. government. How further ironic that the one area that Obama felt was unnecessary for, or indeed antithetical to, America’s economic recovery — vast new gas and oil finds — will soon turn out to be America’s greatest boon in the last 20 years. While Obama and Energy Secretary Chu still insist on subsidizing money-losing wind and solar concerns, we are in the midst of a revolution that, within 20 years, will reduce or even end the trade deficit, help pay off the national debt, create millions of new jobs, and turn the Western Hemisphere into the new Persian Gulf. The American petroleum revolution can be delayed by Obama, but it cannot be stopped. One lesson, however, has not fully sunk in and awaits final elucidation in the 2012 election: that of the Chicago style of Barack Obama’s politicking. In 2008 few of the true believers accepted that, in his first political race, in 1996, Barack Obama sued successfully to remove his opponents from the ballot. Or that in his race for the U.S. Senate eight years later, sealed divorce records for both his primary- and general-election opponents were mysteriously leaked by unnamed Chicagoans, leading to the implosions of both candidates’ campaigns. Or that Obama was the first presidential candidate in the history of public campaign financing to reject it, or that he was also the largest recipient of cash from Wall Street in general, and from BP and Goldman Sachs in particular. Or that Obama was the first presidential candidate in recent memory not to disclose either undergraduate records or even partial medical. Or that remarks like “typical white person,” the clinger’s speech, and the spread-the-wealth quip would soon prove to be characteristic rather than anomalous. Few American presidents have dashed so many popular, deeply embedded illusions as has Barack Obama. And for that, we owe him a strange sort of thanks. — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of the just-released The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

Jonah Goldberg on NRO November 30, 2011 12:00 A.M. Courting Joe the Puppeteer Democrats have abandoned all pretense of winning the white working class. Earlier this month, the left-wing magazine The Nation highlighted Joe Therrien as a symbol of the Occupy Wall Street movement. A New York City public-school drama teacher, Therrien was frustrated with the shortcomings of the school system. So he quit his job and “set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion — puppetry.” Three years and $35,000 in student-loan debt later, Therrien returned home, only to find he couldn’t land a full-time job. Apparently, a master’s in puppetry doesn’t provide the competitive edge in the marketplace he’d hoped for. Therrien joined Occupy Wall Street, constructing giant puppets and “figuring out how to make theater that’s going to help open people up to this new cultural consciousness. It’s what I’m driven to do right now.” I think I speak for everyone when I say: Good luck with that. One other thing: He may not realize it, but Joe the Puppeteer may be for Democrats what Joe the Plumber was for the GOP. (Joe “the plumber” Wurzelbacher was the Ohio man who confronted candidate Barack Obama about raising taxes on small business.) Thomas Edsall writes in the New York Times that the Democrats have made a fateful decision: “All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up . . . of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers, and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African American and Hispanic.” After decades of trying, the white working class is now “an unattainable cohort,” according to Edsall and a slew of Democratic strategists. The most common explanation for this failure is a self-serving and mossy tale about a racial backlash. The most recent version holds that the “tea parties,” which are about as white as the Occupy Wall Street movement, amount to a bigoted reaction to a black president. Never mind that the leading Tea Party contender for the GOP nomination is Herman Cain. [Funny how all of Herman’s “women” are from Chicago? I’m just saying.] In a less-charged environment, the differences between Obama and Cain would be seen as a continuation of the great philosophical rivalry between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Du Bois, a socialist intellectual, favored promoting a “talented tenth” — a black progressive elite focused on state-run, top-down reforms — while Washington preached self-help and entrepreneurialism from the bottom up. Today’s Democratic party has an ingrained cultural aversion to the Booker T. Washington school. Liberal elites see themselves as a multiracial talented tenth, planning the economy and guiding society. In power, they lavish support on fashionable but unproductive sectors of the economy, such as green-energy boondoggles, and they buy off big constituencies invested in ever-larger government, such as public-sector unions, the “helping professions,” and even too-big-too-fail businesses. Their arguments sound economic and empirical, but ultimately they’re cultural in nature. The upscale white professionals the Democrats are courting disproportionately share a cultural affinity for government and faith that statist interventions are for your own good. They also believe government needs to help people succeed — or escape – the rat race of the private sector. (Remember Michelle Obama’s advice to working-class women? “Don’t go into corporate America . . . become teachers. Work for the community.”) In his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic convention, Obama mocked the Booker T. Washington concept of self-reliance: “In Washington, they call this the ownership society, but what it really means is, you’re on your own.” Later, Rep. Nancy Pelosi sold health-care reform as a “jobs bill” because “if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent . . . your aspirations because you will have health care,” she explained as if speaking straight to Joe the Puppeteer. “You won’t have to be job-locked.” That might be a compelling message to the white left represented at Occupy protests. The question is whether it sounds condescending or aloof to the rest of the Democratic coalition that wouldn’t mind being “job-locked” right now. — Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can reach him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2011 TribuneMedia Services, Inc.

When I was 14 I was an atheist, it was easy then.

That 1%

It's never too late for a Veteran's Day tribute and Micheal Yon says it so much better than I can.

11 November 2011

Iraq 2005

It has been an honor these seven years to cover American and British troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Philippines and elsewhere.  It is said that only about 1% of Americans serve in the armed forces.  Many of our troops are not even American citizens.  I see them in combat regularly.  Many veterans are in hospitals or have fresh scars and are recovering from recent wounds.  A message just arrived from the military in Kabul that we just lost another service member in Southern Afghanistan.

Many of our finest will be in combat as you read these words.  They will cope with their losses and continue to fight.  Mostly they are very young.  It is common to meet a young combat trooper who has fought for several years overseas.  He doesn’t make much money.  A heartfelt “thank you” goes a long way.

They have lost friends.  Many of our young veterans have been wounded more than once, and yet they are out there right now.  Some have more Purple Hearts than stripes.  Their strength and dedication is inspirational.  Their courage seems bottomless.

Tonight, many will sleep on the ground, their ears ringing from the nearby bullets and blasts that they have experienced so many times.  They have killed the enemy, and watched their buddies die in their arms.  They have seen and smelled and heard things that most of us rather would not.  They will carry these things forever as Veterans.  Tonight they will fight. We’ve already lost at least one today, yet most Americans seem to have forgotten that many of our men and women are still out there.

This is the longest war in the history of the United States.  It’s far from over.  I have not forgotten.  I never will forget.

Thank you, Veterans.