Corporal Tyler Rock USMC to Senator Harry Reid courtesy of Pat Dollard.

yeah and i got a quote for that douche harry reid. these families need us here. obviously he has never been in iraq. or at least the area worth seeing. the parts where insurgency is rampant and the buildings are blown to pieces. we need to stay here and help rebuild. if iraq didnt want us here then why do we have IP’s voluntering everyday to rebuild their cities. and working directly with us too. same with the IA’s. it sucks that iraqi’s have more patriotism for a country that has turned to complete shit more than the people in america who drink starbucks everyday. we could leave this place and say we are sorry to the terrorists. and then we could wait for 3,000 more american civilians to die before we say “hey thats not nice” again. and the sad thing is after we WIN this war. people like him will say he was there for us the whole time.

A recent USMC Challenge Coin

Hat tip to Rich Duff.

A Marine Corps Drill Team performs at a basketball half-time.

6:07 video

When I was a small boy, my father (who had served in the Marine Corps in WWII) would sometimes entertain me by performing the Manual of Arms, culminating in the same Queen Anne Salute you see performed here, in which the rifle is spun several times, smoothly returned to the position of Order Arms, and then to Parade Rest.

AP reports that a mugger in Costa Rica picked the wrong group of seniors, one which obviously included a retired American with expertise in hand-to-hand combat.

A tour group of U.S. senior citizens fought off a band of muggers in eastern Costa Rica, sending two of the assailants fleeing and killing a third, police said Thursday.

One of the tourists — a retired U.S. serviceman whom officials estimated was in his 70s — allegedly put Warner Segura in a headlock and broke his clavicle after the 20-year-old and two other men armed with a knife and gun held up their tour bus Wednesday, said Luis Hernandez, the police chief of Limon, 130 kilometers (80 miles) east of San Jose.

The Americans had arrived in Limon on the Carnival Cruise Lines ship Carnival Liberty.

“It was a group of 12 senior citizens from the United States who were going to spend a few hours in the area, but their tour bus entered a dangerous sector known as Cieneguita”, Hernandez said.

The tourists drove Segura to the local Red Cross branch but he was declared dead, Hernandez said. He declined to give the names or hometowns of the tourists.

The Red Cross also treated one of the tourists for an anxiety attack, Hernandez said.

Costa Rican authorities said they did not plan to file charges against the tourists, who left on their cruise ship after the incident.

“They were in their right to defend themselves after being held up,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez said Segura had previous charges against him for assaults.

It certainly sounds like he broke the mugger’s veterbrae, not his clavicle.

An elderly man would be likely to be pessimistic about his chances in a contest of speed or strength with a significantly younger opponent. Consequently, the American retiree must have resorted to a lethal attack. If he were younger, doubtless, he would have incapacitated and not killed the mugger.

The New York Post identifies the American hero as Allan Clady, a 70 year old retired Marine.

says Virginia blogger SWAC Girl:

America is not at war.
The Marine Corps is at war;
America is at the mall.”

Hat tip to F22Strike.

The BBC reports that Hugo Chavez, the tin-horn dictator of Venezuela, has followed Adolph Hitler’s example, and gotten his rubber-stamp parliament to start passing legislation permitting him to rule by decree, and remain in power forever.

Venezuela’s National Assembly has given initial approval to a bill granting the president the power to bypass congress and rule by decree for 18 months. President Hugo Chavez says he wants “revolutionary laws” to enact sweeping political, economic and social changes.

He has said he wants to nationalise key sectors of the economy and scrap limits on the terms a president can serve.

Mr Chavez began his third term in office last week after a landslide election victory in December.

The bill allowing him to enact laws by decree is expected to win final approval easily in the assembly on its second reading on Tuesday.

Venezuela’s political opposition has no representation in the National Assembly since it boycotted elections in 2005.

Chavez has been hosting Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and is doubtless plotting ways and means to extend the reach of our enemies into this hemisphere. The Bush Administration will be guilty of criminal negligence every bit as bad as Clinton’s, if it fails to remove this revolting communist thug from power before he does further violence to the rights of his own people, and before he creates a functioning base for terrorism in the Western Hemisphere.

The leftwing journalism side of the Wall Street Journal has a sob story today about the poor Army running out of money under the strain of expenses of combat operations in Iraq.

Would you just look at these examples?

It may seem hard to believe that a country which allocated $168 billion to the Army this year — more than twice the 2000 budget — can’t cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the two pillars of the Army, personnel and equipment — both built to wage high-tech, firepower-intensive wars — are under enormous stress:

The cost of basic equipment that soldiers carry into battle — helmets, rifles, body armor — has more than tripled to $25,000 from $7,000 in 1999.

The cost of a Humvee, with all the added armor, guns, electronic jammers and satellite-navigational systems, has grown seven-fold to about $225,000 a vehicle from $32,000 in 2001.

Those M4 carbines cost $1382 a piece! And before adding another $8800 worth of sights! Let’s drop those ugly suckers, and buy some nice new Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifles in the stainless steel synthetic stock configuration. We can get them retail for $600 a pop, and I bet if we buy a few hundred thousand we can probably get some kind of discount. These rifles shoot the same identical cartridge, and even come with useable sights.

True, they won’t each and every one have nearly nine thousand dollars worth of high-tech infrared shoot-them-in-the-dark sighting equipment, but we could probably get by well enough just purchasing that level of technology for a small number of snipers. Nobody had any of that kind of equipment in WWII and we still won.

If Ruger is not able to supply every Ranch Rifle we need tomorrow, we can just temporarily rough it with the same AK-47s we must have captured by the box car load from the Iraq Army, and which you can pick up cheap in any souk or bazaar in the Middle East. AK-47s are notoriously rugged and reliable.

$225,000 Humvees? It seems impossible to suppose that a large portion of the US Army could get by for basic vehicular transportation on lesser SUVs. How about some nice Ford Expeditions @$27,042 – $38,702. We can pull out all the stops, but the Eddie Bauer model with Convenience Package and power lift gate, add a terrific stereo and soup up the air conditioning, and still come out way ahead.

Looking at that picture of the contemporary soldier, tricked out with every high tech gee gaw anybody can think of. The thought inevitably comes to mind that we are not fighting technically advanced adversaries from Outer Space, or the German Army. We don’t have to achieve the absolute state of the art to be technically far ahead of our Islamic enemies. This conflict features us against people from the Middle Ages with guns. Kalashnikovs, RPGs, IEDs hooked up to washing machine timers are as high-tech as they get.

When you think about what the US Army is spending, we could probably just take out Mafia contracts on all our jihadi and insurgent adversaries on an individual basis, and still come out ahead.

And there is another obvious, and more realistic, alternative: just take all counter-insurgency operations away the Army (with its bloated and over-luxurious TO&E), and turn them over to the Marine Corps.

Member of the Fleet Marine Force, c. 1940

United States Marine Corps founded at Tun Tavern, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on November 10, 1775.

Jeff Babbin wrote a nice tribute:

Those of us who grew up in the 1950s knew them as a group apart. All my friends’ fathers had served in World War 2, and they all had the same odd reaction to my father. He never shouted or growled (well, not that often) but when the veteran of Guadalcanal, Tarawa and Iwo Jima spoke, his peers maintained a respectful silence. He was a Marine, and nothing trumped that credential.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Pfc Ira H. Hayes, Pfc Franklin R. Sousley (killed in action), Sgt Michael Strank (barely visible on Sousley’s left – killed in action), Phm2c John Bradley, Pfc Rene Gagnon, Cpl Harlon H. Block (killed in action)
(Joe Rosenthal photograph

2. BACKGROUND: THE SECOND FLAG

The significance of the Iwo Jima operation, the first US ground assault on Japanese soil, was widely recognized in advance. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had travelled to the Pacific from Washington to watch the unfolding of the largest operation in United States Naval history.

On the morning of February 23rd, Forrestal was accompanying V Amphibious Corps Commander Lieutenant General Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith to the beachead. Their landing craft had just touched shore, when the first flag went up atop the volcano. As the Marines around them cheered, Forrestal turned to General Smith, and observed: “Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”

Recognizing the historical significance of the colors waving in the distance, Forrestal also asked General Smith to see to it that the flag then flying atop Mount Suribachi be replaced, and the original brought back to him for preservation in the nation’s capital.

The Navy Secretary’s orders were duly transmitted down the chain of command to Col. Chandler Johnson at 2/28 headquarters. Johnson ordered Lieutenant Ted Tuttle, his Operations Assistant Officer, to find a replacement flag. “And make it a bigger one,” Colonel Johnson added.

At the same time, 2/28 HQ was beginning to be having difficulty communicating with the patrol on the mountain’s summit. Lt. Schrier’s field telephone’s battery was giving out. Johnson decided the time had come to run a wired connection up the mountain. A fire team detail from Easy Company’s 2nd platoon, made up of Sgt Michael Strank, Cpl Harlon H. Block, Pfc Ira H. Hayes, and Pfc Franklin R. Sousley was given the assignment. They wound up being accompanied by Pfc Rene Gagnon, Easy Company’s runner, who was deliverying a fresh supply of batteries from the Easy Company command post to Lt. Schrier.

Before the five Marines headed up the mountain, Lt. Tuttle arrived with a 96″ x 56″ (2.44 x 1.42 meter) flag. The new flag came from a salvage yard at Pearl Harbor. It had been rescued from one of the American ships sunk on December 7, 1941. Tuttle gave the new flag to Gagnon, and instructed him to retrieve the original. And the fire team set off on its mission.

The Marines were followed up the mountain by the press. AP wire service photographer Joe Rosenthal had heard of a flag raising, and set off up the mountain to photograph it, accompanied by Marine still photographer Bob Campbell and Marine film photographer Bill Genaust. (Rosenthal had persuaded the armed Marine journalists into coming with him.)

When Sgt Mike Strank arrived at the top, he reported to Lt. Shrier, showed him the replacement flag carried by Gagnon, and explained: “Colonel Johnson wants this big flag raised up high, so that every son of a bitch on this whole cruddy island can see it!”

Rosenthal arrived in the nick of time, a little after noon. The Marines affixed the new flag to a formidable length of Japanese drainage pipe, and Lt. Shrier coordinated the two groups of Marines, so that the new flag would be raised simultaneously with the old flag being lowered.

The photographers had a little time to pick their positions. Rosenthal (who was very short) made himself a pile of stones to stand on. The whole procedure took only a few seconds, but the second pole was very heavy (weighing more than 100 lbs. – 45.36 kg.), and it took the combined efforts of the second group of five Marines, assisted by Phm2c John Bradley, to raise it to the vertical and secure it. So quickly was one flag raised, and the other lowered, that Rosenthal never had a chance to look in his viewfinder, he could only point his camera and trip the shutter.

But in the midst of the Marines’ effort to erect that second flag, destiny intervened. The breeze suddenly caught the flag, whipping it forward, and Rosenthal’s shutter clicked at the perfect moment freezing the six men in a pose of breathtaking monumentality. It was this photograph, this single image, which best conveyed the entire American idea of WWII, the idea of American Marines, of American fighting men, working together welded into a purposeful single entity, to assert the ideals of America, to plant the flag, despite anything the enemy could throw against them.

Astonishingly, the entire scene was actually also captured on color movie film by Marine photographer Sgt Bill Genaust, who was standing literally shoulder-to-shoulder with Rosenthal. Some of the Genaust footage can be seen here. It was also incorporated in the 1949 Alan Dwan film Sands of Iwo Jima, starring John Wayne.

The original Iwo Jima flag was brought back to Colonel Johnson, who placed in in the battalion safe. The new flag lasted for only three weeks. It was quickly torn to pieces by the wind.

5th USMC Division

PART ONE

Lt. Harold Shrier (sitting behind Jacobs), Pfc Raymond Jacobs, Sgt. Henry Hansen (cloth cap), Unknown (lower hand on pole), Sgt Ernest Thomas (back to camera), Phm2c John Bradley (helmet above Thomas), Pfc James Michels (with carbine), Cpl Charles Lindberg (above Michels).
(Louis Lowery photograph)

1. BACKGROUND: THE FIRST FLAG

On the morning of February 23, 1945, D-Day + 4 of the Battle of Iwo Jima, on Mount Suribachi, after three days heavy bombing, naval artillery bombardment, and infantry attack, Japanese resistance seemed to have waned.

Lt. Col. Chandler Johnson, commander 2nd Battlalion, 28th Regiment, 5th Marine Division, sent two four-man patrols to explore routes up the mountain’s northern face. They successfully reached the volcano’s summit, and returned. So Chandler hastily assembled a 40 man platoon from surviving elements of the 3rd Platoon, Easy Company, augmented by 12 men from his Mortar Platoon and some members of the 60mm mortar section. Command was given to First Lieutenant Harold Schrier, along with orders to ascend the mountain, blowing up caves, and extinguishing any surviving Japanese resistance encountered on the way, and attempt to secure the top.

As an afterthought, Johnson took an American flag from his map case, handed it to Schrier, and told him, “If you get to the top, put it up.”

Staff Sergeant Louis Lowery, a photographer for the Marine Corps’ Leatherneck Magazine, asked for, and received, permission to accompany and record the ascent.

The platoon proceeded upward for forty minutes, blasting caves they passed with hand grenades, but without being attacked. Reaching the summit around ten A.M., they salvaged a length of Japanese water pipe to use for flagpole, and as Marines below cheered and Navy vessels blew signal horns in triumph, erected the first United States flag to fly on Japanese soil.

No sooner was the flag erected, then the Marine platoon found itself engaged in a firefight with a handful of Japanese survivors. It was later discovered that hundreds of Japanese, who could easily have annihilated the platoon, had killed themselves in Suribachi’s caves, many by clutching a hand grenade to their bodies.

Raymond Jacobs account

V Marine Amphibious Corps

PART TWO

WWII veterans commemorate the recent film by releasing a video discussing the two flag raisings on Iwo Jima. For the marines battling for control of the island, it was the first flag raising, not the second flag raising which produced the monumental Joseph Rosenthal photo, which counted.

video

Maggie’s Farm has a recent letter from a Marine Intel Officer stationed in Iraq featuring good anecdotes.

Bravest Guy in al-Anbar Province – Any Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician (EOD Tech). How’d you like a job that required you to defuse bombs in a hole in the middle of the road that very likely are booby-trapped or connected by wire to a bad guy who’s just waiting for you to get close to the bomb before he clicks the detonator? Every day. Sanitation workers in New York City get paid more than these guys. Talk about courage and commitment…

Best Piece of U.S. Gear – new, bullet-proof flak jackets. O.K., they weigh 40 lbs and aren’t exactly comfortable in 120 degree heat, but they’ve saved countless lives out here.
Best Piece of Bad Guy Gear – Armor Piercing ammunition that goes right through the new flak jackets and the Marines inside them…

Biggest Mystery – How some people can gain weight out here. I’m down to 165 lbs. Who has time to eat?…

Coolest Insurgent Act – Stealing almost $7 million from the main bank in Ramadi in broad daylight, then, upon exiting, waving to the Marines in the combat outpost right next to the bank, who had no clue of what was going on. The Marines waved back. Too cool…

Highest Unit Re-enlistment Rate – Any outfit that has been in Iraq recently. All the danger, all the hardship, all the time away from home, all the horror, all the frustrations with the fight here – all are outweighed by the desire for young men to be part of a ‘Band of Brothers ‘ who will die for one another. They found what they were looking for when they enlisted out of high school. Man for man, they now have more combat experience than any Marines in the history of our Corps.
Most Surprising Thing I Don’t Miss – Beer. Perhaps being half-stunned by lack of sleep makes up for it.
Worst Smell – Porta-johns in 120 degree heat – and that’s 120 degrees outside of the porta-john.

Highest Temperature – I don’t know exactly, but it was in the porta-johns. Needed to re-hydrate after each trip to the loo.

Biggest Hassle – High-ranking visitors. More disruptive to work than a rocket attack. VIPs demand briefs and “battlefield” tours (we take them to quiet sections of Fallujah, which is plenty scary for them). Our briefs and commentary seem to have no affect on their preconceived notions of what’s going on in Iraq. Their trips allow them to say that they’ve been to Fallujah, which gives them an unfortunate degree of credibility in perpetuating their fantasies about the insurgency here.

Biggest Outrage – Practically anything said by talking heads on TV about the war in Iraq, not that I get to watch much TV. Their thoughts are consistently both grossly simplistic and politically slanted. Biggest offender – Bill O’Reilly – what a buffoon.

Read the whole thing.

Last year’s Letter from a Marine in Iraq. (Different guy.)

Hat tip to Rick Ballard.