No, really.

Despite what it looked like, the USS WISCONSIN (BB-64) has been at the Naticus Maritime Museum in Downtown Norfolk since April 2001 as a tourist attraction, but maintained in case she’d have to return to the fight.

No more. She’s a remembrance now.

Go and grab the operations notebook in CIC and make the following correction to the current operations order:

“DATES: 10/29/2007 – 11/11/2007”

CHANGE TO READ

“DATES: 10/29/2007 – 11/12/2007”

Annotate the change page when you’re done marking up the document.

Reason for the change: You have the Monday holiday in order to make your final contributions to the ValOUR-IT 2007 Fund Drive!Blue Velvet movie full

Sometimes you just gives, sometimes you gets…

Besides just laying out some hard earned money for the great feeling of helping to put lives back together, some people have volunteered to part with their “stuff” (for a price – name yours!) for the highest bidder.

Navy/Coast Guard’s own SteelJaw Scribe has a factory model of an F/A-18C up on the block for your collection.

Get over there and grab some stuff (and chip the bid price in towards more ValOUR-IT donations)!

Nice to have. A tangible memento and reminder of your commitment to supporting the troops. Also a conversation piece to have the opening to tell stories about what Soldier’s Angels does for our troops and their families..

Enough marketing. How, you ask? Details here. If you have a spare $25 (but thing more, WAY more) to donate…a coin can be yours, too! (Psst! Donate to Navy/Coast Guard!)

There is wonderful news coming out of Iraq these days. Charts show IEDs are down, attacks on Coalition bases are down, engagements with terrorists and insurgents are down, civilian deaths are down. Down, down, down. And all while there are more soldiers walking and living among the locals.

But there’s something hidden going on here that doesn’t make the headlines: the injured. For every loss of life among American soldiers, several others are usually wounded.

It is those publicly-uncounted wounded that Valour-IT serves. While their buddy is laid to rest, they are the ones fighting for their lives in a hospital bed. As the family of the fallen is carried in the arms of their friends and fellow military families, the wounded soldiers are wondering what their lives are going to be like with broken bodies that will never be the same again. As their buddy is being laid to rest with honors, the politicians make a quick sweep through wards filled with wounded that will still be there after the camera flashes stop. The families of the living struggle to put one foot in front of the other and the wounded wonder if the prosthetic feet are as good as everybody says. The fallen’s loved ones dream of the day it will stop feeling like a knife in their chest, and the wounded hope that when the haze of the painkillers lifts, the PTSD and TBI won’t be as bad as they seem right now.

Loved ones whose hearts are aching in loss reach out to those around them, express themselves, plan memorials for their fallen hero, bellow out the rage over what has been ripped from them, mourn the futures lost.

Not so for the warfighter, whose connectedness is dependent on who visits or calls that day, and who is now discovering that the greatest indignity of severed nerves, shattered bones, and amputated limbs is that the soldier who once walked the streets in confidence and power is now cared for like a baby until he can find a way to make things work again.

Give that soldier something he can do for himself now–a way to express himself, write about his fallen brother, blow out the rage over the violence done to his body and build the courage to face the future that seems so impossible for now. A laptop will do that–give him confidence, dignity, self-expression, connectedness with those who will help him find a new equilibrium in his world-turned-on-its-head.

Giving out from 30 to 100 laptops per month since June, Valour-IT is in more demand than ever. We literally scraped the bottom of the barrel with our last delivery of laptops, and Soldiers’ Angels has said they cannot allocate any more funds for us until March 2008. We are filling vital gap that the government has missed, but we cannot do it without funding.

Don’t turn your face away from this just because it’s easier to think things are getting better, or because it’s too uncomfortable to think of their suffering while you are whole. They don’t want your pity; just your support. What better way to support them, to show you believe in their recovery and their future than to give them a laptop that they can operate regardless of the depth of their injuries. Please, help us help them.

I know how much it means to the guys who are stuck lying on their backs, unable to use their hands to so much as scratch. Being fed, bathed, taken care of like an infant—not exactly a fitting role for a warrior who’s used to being the one who helps others. It sure as hell wasn’t a role that I wanted, although there were many people who came to see me who helped…At that time I had no use of either hand. I know how humbling it is, how humiliating it feels. And I know how much better I felt, how amazingly more functional I felt, after Soldiers’ Angels provided me with a laptop and a loyal reader provided me with the software. I can’t wait to do the same, to give that feeling to another soldier at Walter Reed.

—Chuck Ziegenfuss, inspiration for Valour-IT

The button is up top center to make a donation.  Little donations help, as do big ones.  Oh, and pass the word about this program.

So, last week, there we sat, we salty sea dogs, the question posed and we all awaited an answer from the “shore based” component that worked in our shore based offices.

I figured I had figuratively placed the DC plug in the gaping hole that was causing figurative water to flood our hull. Feeling quite smug, but for only a very few brief seconds, she responded: “When is the next one (Combat System Assessment)?” Not to be outdone, I said “I’ll let you know.”

She left, the atmosphere was different. We, the guys thought we were gonna chalk one up on the score board and it was, at the moment, a draw, or at the least, undecided.

Russ, my trusty LDO LT was given the task of calling the USS WAINWRIGHT’s (CG-28) XO, who had been his Weapons Officer on his prior ship to see if we could bring along “our XO.” The answer was, sure. Well, minor issue, XO, our XO is a “she.” “No problem, I’ll be off at school so she can use my stateroom.”

Boy…the train was leaving the station at full throttle and here I thought the “girl” would just be quiet and go back her office and make sure our travel arrangements were on track.

Anyhow, a Combat Systems Assessment (CSA) was a 36 some hour trial of a ship, where we usually arrived around 0700-0730 and sat down in the Wardroom to to introductions, lay out the game rules and shake hands. Yes, we were there to help, and yes, they were happy to see us. From there, my team of 12 to 20, depending on how complex the ship’s equipment, went off to review the paperwork for various programs and do some safety checks. During this period, the ship was getting underway, or in some cases, clearing the sea buoy and heading to the “OPAREA.” The ships under DESRON SIX routinely went to sea the day before we arrived to practice, and we’d ride a tug boat out at Oh-Dark Thirty to the vicinity of Ft Sumter to meet them.

In most cases, by the time lunch was wrapped up, we were meeting to listen to the ship’s company Combat Systems Training Team (CSTT) brief the two sets of exercises to be run in the late afternoon and early evening. The first drill set was before evening chow, the second after chow. By about 2200-2300, we were sitting down to listen to the CSTT critique the drills. The purpose here was not to see if the crew passed, as much as to determine if the CSTT was able see mistakes and record them, so they could plan to train to correcting them next later on. If they saw what we saw, then it was a good chance the ship could train into the future.

After we listened to the crew’s debrief, then my team would meet to discuss the day’s events. Provided there were no glitches along the way, like correcting safety issues, of making sure all the equipment was propeorly configured for training, we might get into our assigned vistor “pits” by 0100 or 0200.

At 0600, we usually were on deck, walking around Combat Information Center (CIC) to observe the preparations for the “DTE” (Detect to engage), where a contracted Learjet would fly, pretending a very slow cruise missile (since it couldn’t make .9 Mach) would fly in, while the crew exercised their detection and engagement systems. By late morning, the DTE would be wrapped up, for better of worse, and my team and I would gather to grade the performance. The ship would head towards port. In some cases, we’d manage to get the debrief in before entering port, and other times, we’d do it upon arrival pierside.

Our command’s vehicles would be waiting for us (when in the Norfolk area), and we’d depart, sometimes with good feelings all around, and fortunately not often, to snarls and cold glares. By then, it was usually the end of the work day ashore. The 36 hours was almost straight through.

The team’s normal work schedule? Monday/Tuesday – CSA (as above), Wednesday – Fly somewhere in a Naval Air Logistics Organization (NALO) C-9, Thursday/Friday – Do it again, Friday afternoon, fly to back to NORVA. Next week? Rinse and repeat. If we were doing ship’s in other ports, the NALO pilots and aircrews were happy to haul our butts there, beginning at about 1330 Sunday afternoon.

Oh, yeah…we were on “shore duty.”

Next week: LCDR Hobbs rides the USS WAINWRIGHT (CG-28).

Skippy San will add dollars to ValOUR-IT – Navy/Coast Guard Team if you guess something..

Check it out!

Come on, there are wounded troops counting on us!

Technology, in and of itself, like money, is morally neutral. It’s all in how we use it. For instance, ValOUR-IT, using the computer technology brought to us by the space race, has been lightened and miniaturized to the point that our wounded troops can use it to communicate. The fund drive is still on…donate (button at the top of the page to help you out).

Anyhow, a few years back, I posted about data ports being put into vehicles. Those ports have become much more used than just for the shop to run diagnostics on your car….sit back, do a little reading and see what I mean.

Anyhow, technology, like legislation, also has it’s “unintended consequences” in our daily lives.

Update: Just found this info on EZ-Pass and privacy.

BTW, Fred Fry International is a great site for current maritime (meaning other than naval) news!

In September 2005, Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo said that he would not be happy so long as the Flight 93 Memorial still included the giant crescent. He has kept his promise. The crescent is still there, and Tom Tancredo is NOT HAPPY.Alec Rawls has just received from Representative Tancredo a letter of complaint that Mr. Tancredo sent to Park Service Director Mary Bomar this afternoon. It notes the continued presence of the crescent:

Unfortunately, it appears that little if any substantive changes to the most troubling aspect of the design – the crescent shape – have been made.

And it calls for scrapping the crescent design entire and starting anew:

And while I regret having to contact the Park Service again about this issue, I sincerely hope that you will direct the committee to scrap the crescent design entirely in favor of a new design that will not make the memorial a flashpoint for this kind of controversy and criticism.

Thank you Tom Tancredo! The full text of Mr. Tancredo’s letter is pasted below.

G Gordon Liddy is on it

Alec Rawls will be on G Gordon Liddy’s radio show tomorrow morning (Tuesday) from 11-12, talking about the many Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the planned memorial. The show should be a blockbuster.

Tom Burnett Sr. is going to call in. Tancredo or his press secretary TQ Houlton may call in.   And YOU can call in:

1 800 GGLiddy

Streaming audio and broadcast stations here. Podcasts here. For the full expose, see Alec’s Crescent of Betrayal book, available for free download until the print edition of the book comes out in February.

A crescent and star flag on the crash site

For those who are not familiar with the memorial debacle, the original Crescent of Embrace design would have planted a bare naked Islamic crescent and star flag on the crash site:

Architect Paul Murdoch’s job is to work with symbols. He did not plant an Islamic flag on the crash site by accident. But even if this were somehow coincidence, it would still be wrong to build the memorial in a shape that the hijackers claimed as their own.

Representative Tancredo was the only Congressman to state the obvious, that “the crescent’s prominent use as a symbol in Islam–and the fact that the hijackers were radical Islamists,” raises the possibility that “the design, if constructed, will in fact make the memorial a tribute to the hijackers.” (Tancredo Press release, 9/12/2005. See Crescent of Betrayal, download 1, page xiii.)

Two days later, Tancredo’s press secretary laid out Tom’s conditions:

… that the congressman would be happy with the changes only if the crescent shape is removed.

Nothing was changed

All the Memorial Project did was add some surrounding trees. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the Bowl of Embrace redesign. The crescent shape was NOT removed. It was only very slightly disguised:

The graphics were recolored, and a few trees were added outside of the mouth of the crescent (lower left). Every particle of the original crescent and star structure remains. (Click here for site plan view.)

Representative Tancredo was right to demand removal of the crescent. It turns out that a person facing directly into the half mile wide crescent will be facing Mecca. That makes it a mihrab, the central feature around which every mosque is built. You can plant as many trees around a mosque as you want and it will still be a mosque. This is the world’s largest mosque, by a factor of a hundred.

If you want to thank Tom Tancredo for keeping his Flight 93 promise and standing up again for the honor of our murdered heroes, his phone numbers and online email form are here.

Full text of Representative Tancredo’s letter to Park Service Director Mary Bomar

November 5, 2007

The Honorable Mary A. Bomar
Director
National Park Service
U.S. Department of Interior
1849 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20240

Dear Director Bomar,

I am regrettably writing you in reference to the proposed memorial to commemorate the victims of Flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. As you may know, I contacted Director Mainella in late 2005 about my concerns with the design.

The appropriateness of the original design, dubbed the “Crescent of Embrace,” was questioned because of the crescent’s prominent use as a symbol in Islam – and the fact that the hijackers were radical Islamists. As I pointed out in my September 2005 letter, the use of the crescent has raised questions in some circles about whether the design would make the memorial a tribute to the hijackers rather than the victims whose mission the flights passengers helped to thwart.

When I received Director Mainella’s response to my letter on October 6, 2005, I was pleased to read her assurance that the advisory committee and the architect were amenable to “refinements in the design which will include negating any perceptions to the iconography.” I was also pleased to learn that the name of the memorial was to be changed.

Unfortunately, it appears that little if any substantive changes to the most troubling aspect of the design – the crescent shape – have been made. This deeply concerns me. As I told Director Mainella in 2005: Regardless of whether or not the invocation of a Muslim symbol by the memorial designer was intentional, I continue to believe that the use of this symbol is unsuitable for paying appropriate tribute to the heroes of Flight 93 or the ensuing American struggle against radical Islam that their historic last act has come to symbolize.

I remain committed to ensuring that this memorial is a powerful symbol for the whole nation and a testament to the courage and will of the passengers of the flight – as I am sure you are. And while I regret having to contact the Park Service again about this issue, I sincerely hope that you will direct the committee to scrap the crescent design entirely in favor of a new design that will not make the memorial a flashpoint for this kind of controversy and criticism.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Sincerely,

Tom Tancredo, M.C.

The phony redesign

To see clearly how the redesign leaves the original Mecca-oriented cescent fully intact, note that the orientation of the crescent is determined by connecting the most obtruding points of the crescent structure, then forming the perpendicular bisector to this line (red arrow):

The green circle shows the direction to Mecca (the “qibla” direction) from Somerset PA. It was generated using the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com. Just place this qibla graphic over the original Crescent of Embrace site plan and the Mecca-direction line almost exactly bisects the crescent.

Looking closely at the above graphic (click for larger image), you can see that the most obtruding tip at the bottom of the original crescent structure is the last red maple at the bottom. On top, the most obtruding tip of the crescent structure is the the end of the thousand foot long, fifty foot tall, Entry Portal Wall. Here is an artist’s rendering of the end of the Entry Portal Wall as seen in the Bowl of Embrace redesign. It shows how overtly this upper crescent tip remains intact in the redesign:

The redesign only added the extra row of trees on the left, behind the visitors in this graphic. Notice that these trees are not even visible to a person who is facing into the crescent. They do not even affect a visitor’s experience of the crescent, never mind affect the presence or integrity of the crescent itself.

The concept sprang forth last year, when a lady working for Flag Gazer decided to forgo the money owed her for a day of labor.

That’s pretty magnanimous. How about take a moment to click here and read the story yourself.

Lemme see….50 weeks/yr, 5 days/week…250 “working days” for the average American work year (math made easy for bean counters before computers and it persists). Take annual earnings and divide by 250. What’s the number? Can you see your way clear to place that sum so others can have a far better quality of life?