Ah, the wonderful world of OPDEC….

I spent an afternoon with the widow of a B-29 pilot, who flew with the 20th Air Force in the Pacific Theater. Walter was the Co-Pilot of the “Ancient Mariner” (“Z Square 53”).

She let me sort through many of her husband’s books and then she told me an interesting story.

It turns out the whole deal about eating your carrots to improve your eyesight was actually operational deception to cover for the fact that the Norden bomb sight had been placed in service. So long as the enemy believed our aircrews just had eagle eyes from eating many carrots, then they’d not realize there was a piece of equipment they needed to place on their capture and exploit plans. Just think, it was such a good plan that it has hung on all these years in the common knowledge data base of parents and those trying to get that little advantage hunting or flying.

Moral of the story: You can tell your mom you won’t see any better if you eat your carrots….nor any worse if you don’t.

Update on Vegtable Mythology – 3/7/2006: I had breakfast with my friend, Jim, Sr and told him this story. He said they were sort of force fed carrots as pilots, and also said he didn’t have much need for a Norden Bomb Sight, so he was never in on the plan to confuse the enemies of Democracy.

From Part I, the “Bottom Line”: The F-14 Tomcat was a superior piece of technology that would counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union and her client states. All things have their purpose.

In this part, I will present some things from my life that I saw of the influence of the F-14. Way back in 1971, I went to take a physical and when asked to “read line 6 on the chart on the back of the door.,” I squinted and said little for about 10 seconds> Next I heard: “Do you wear glasses?” Next I thought: “I CAN”T FLY!”

Yep, it was true. No 20/20 for me. In retrospect, I then also realized why it was sometimes a challenge to read things the teachers wrote on the chalkboard, but I had never connected it with bad eye sight, just to liking to sit in the back of the classroom. I also should have known that if both parents wear glasses, it most likely the offspring will also be so afflicted. Anyhow, as you might have grasped, I had planned on being a go fast kind of guy for many years before that fateful day in 11th grade.

Fast forward to fall of 1975. It was the early part of Senior year and time to tell the people in the NROTC office which career path I wanted to go for. I still wanted to fly, but knew the only opportunity was to be a Naval Flight Officer (NFO) (also referred to as the “Guy in Back” (GIB)). I sat down with the officer teaching us and asked his opinion of that choice. His advice was to look for something else I would enjoy, for, at that time, he said, you could be the best GIB in the world, and even a great leader, but…..it was rare to make it past Lt Commander. It seems the pilots had a lock on the upper level ranks, and also things like command of anything avaition. It certainly didn’t sound like a career path for the option of longevity. Message to midshipman closing in on commissioning date was: You better love being the guy in the shadows due to your bad choices in genetic stock.

Ok, other options: Explosives Ordnance Disposal (EOD)? Wow! Get paid to play with things that go “BOOM!” and skydive/parachute and SCUBA dive all day (when not doing PT)? Sign me UP! Not so fast, due to the rule change that very year which required you to serve a tour in “Unrestricted Line” prior to applying to be accepted in the EOD. Ted Strong, discussed here had told me how much fun it was few months earlier when we met at the NAS Cubi Point O Club. So, scratch option #2. So, I told them I wanted to dress like this:

to go to work in the Navy. That one worked. I would become a Salvor! Well, to make a long story shorter, a discovered when a whole bunch of diving school instructors were all over you at the bottom of the pool, I was getting a little too stressed, so I chose to take a different path, hence my adventures for the next 19 years in Surface Warfare. I did learn you can swim, tap dance on the slit at the bottom of the Ancostia River, and do so much more while wearing 198 lbs of “stuff,” and that “Shorty,” an Army Sgt assigned to the school had little short, stubby legs, and he could beat us in any calestenics, but we’d just leave him behind on the morning 4 mile run.

The F-14 is now reaching significant number in the Fleet at the time. THe special thing is the NFO, specifically called a “Radar Intercept Officer” (RIO) in the back seat became a significant player in the full use of the F-14 system. As a matter of fact, the pilots became relegated to being bus drivers, so the GIB could get to wear he could open up a 55 gal drum of brush on whoop ass for any Soviet bombers coming inbound to the CVBG. The old “lineage” of pilots being supreme beings, in the footsteps of Eddie Rickenbacker, Richard Bong, Manfred von Richtofen and Werner Voss were fading. The crack in the armor began to split. The pilots still got a workout in the Naval Fighter Weapons School (TOPGUN), in case they had to cozy up to the bad guys, yet they had no capability to target and launch the AIM-54 Phoenix missile. The RIO did the job.

That is the crucial way that the F-14 Tomcat community, from my outside view. By the middle of my career(mid 80s), some NFOs began to be selected for squardon commands. As time went on, that “ticket punch” than opened doors for the NFOs to command wings and eventually aircraft carriers.

Another phenomena of the times was the economics of the late 70s – early 80s made it better for pilots, particulalry multi-engine rated, to get out after their obligated service was copleted. The airlines were recruiting heavily, and many pilots went. I remember the day I saw the ALNAV message that announced that NFOs could apply for pilot training, if they had served two years in their community. If selected, you would move forward (sideways) in the same airframe only, so P-3 ATACCOs could become P-3 pilots, and F-14 RIOs would go to the front part of the Tomcat cockpit. The vision requirments for the move were 20/200 (correctable). At the time, I was 20/50.

Had I been able to know this in 1975, I’d have gutted out two years in the backseat, knowing I could fly, and eventually have a fair shot at command. Water under the bridge, and I still did exciting things as a “shoe.”

As a note on the diving career that never happened, they made a Special Operations designator (not to be confused with Special Warfare (the SEALS)), which was comprised of Salvage Divers, EOD and Ordnance Management experts. Had I been a diver, I could have entered that program. I didn’t and what happened was there were only 6 CAPT (O-6) billets in the entire community, and the 4 stripers wouldn’t retire, so some great guys never made it very far in rank, only because of personnal issues, and nothing to do with their performance. Most likely, I’d have made LCDR and been “continued” until 20 years, then told to retire. One classmate from the Naval War College, Ed Kittel, happened to have this happen to him. He didn’t get to the NWC because he was just someone filling a billet, he was there because he was very good at what he did. Ed Kittel became a special agent in the FAA, and worked on many crash cases after his retirement in 1992.

The “Bottom Line” here: The Tomcat manning conditions helped elevate the NFO to a greater professional plateau in the eyes of the “system.” Not only did it affect the RIOs in the F-14s, but it helped all the NFOs in all airframes become more of value to the Navy.

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

Thanks to Cao’s Blog for the OTB!

Last Trap of the Tomcat – Part II

I began this post on 2/22/2006. I filed it as a draft. Today, whislt driving about for work, I began to ponder the effect of the F-14 Tomcat on my “generation.” Part I will cover some history, and in that, a discussion of how/why the Military gets such toys, and also why it quits using them, too.

Military.com reports the last F-14 combat mission ever has occurred.

The “Anytime, Baby!” guys got their airframe about the time I was commissioned. A few years later, as counter-battery in the recruiting wars, the Navy gleefully helped Hollywood make “Top Gun.”

I stopped there, but had captured the article. Here we go….

The Tomcat went into service the same year I did, 1972. It, as with all other equipment the US Military buys, was bought with a purpose in mind, with the operational requirements laid out by a bunch of people trying to project into the future, many years before then. Being a major procurement program to replace the McDonald F-4 Phantom II, the entire process received an equivalent amount of scrutiny by all levels of government.

The story within this story is instructive for those who often wonder “What were they thinking?” when they see some piece of expensive military equipment being a perceived “misfit” in it’s role of the moment. The beginning of a development is a “threat assessment.” What does the bad guy have now (since you just got surprised) or what do you think he is building, based on available intelligence? The answer to the threat assessment then makes the “OR” (operational requirement) pretty clear. You have to be able to counter the threat. The ORs come from the “Fleet” (in the case of the Navy), making sure the people currently assigned to the duties of war fighting make the major input to the capabilities the new system will have to meet. Shore duty “pukes” and contractors have to sit on the side lines and bite their tongues, or lobby at the bar after the big meeting, hoping to get their 2 cents into the equation. The purpose is keep the people who are not going to have their body parts on the line from “gold plating” projects, at the expense of the tax payers’ good graces. For all the grumbling about these decisions, know it’s a pretty good system to keep costs down, but, yes, sometimes a really expensive hammer does show up in a project plan.

Along the way in all of this, the ORs become reality when the actual contractor is chosen to build the item. In most all cases, this comes many years later, and the warfighters who suffered through the many hours of meetings, at the expense of their professional development, have moved on the retirement or shore duty, and now the people behind them have to keep the flame burning and answering questions of the contractors, the Pentagon at large, and taxpayers. This can be a daunting task, for even if the note taking in the early days was exceptionally well done, there never seems to be the time, nor were many of the side conversations that supported some of the decisions captured to aid in the present discussions. In this, the oversight of the Operational Test Force comes into play, and the project officers “ride herd” on the Fleet guys and the contractors to make sure the equipment does what was laid out in the system requirements, which came from the ORs.

That’s the short way into the F-14 story. In the 60s, the Soviet Union was building up its fleet for defense of the Motherland. While the oceans provided a great buffer, our ability to conduct long range air strikes with several varieties of conventional and nuclear capable platforms, such as the A-3D Sky Warrior, the A-4 Skyhawk, and the A-6 Intruder, the Soviets wanted to take out our carriers before they could get within launch range of the homeland. The counter force to ours was not Soviet aircraft carriers, but massive amounts of SNAF (Soviet Naval Air Force) bombers, equipped with supersonic cruise missiles. Additionally, they put guided missile submarines (SSG/SSGN) to sea, and also put the missile capability aboard surface ships, mostly of the cruiser size, when it was a missile designed to sink air craft carriers quickly.

Soviet TU-16 “Badgers,” TU-95 “Bears,” and later TU-22 “Blinders” and TU-160 “Backfires” would come in massive formations, guided towards CVBGs (Carrier Battle Groups) by forward observer platforms, usually of the TU-95 “Bear D” variant, using it’s underslung “Big Bulge” search radar and video data link to pass the information of the location to the armed aircraft, submarines and surface ships, waiting over our long range radar horizons. The bombers would be armed with cruise missiles that were essentially the size of a small fighter aircraft, packed with explosives. The AS-2 “Kipper,” AS-4 “Kitchen,” -5 “Kelt,” and -6s “Kingfish” were all in this category, capable of being launched from 100 to 200 miles from the carriers. The AS-4 and -6 were particularly nasty, as the climbed high, then approached at several times the speed of sound, and then pitched over towards the target at a very steep angle, making it exceptionally difficult for our gun systems to track and engage the missile in its terminal phase (think ORs for those gun systems that did not envision that threat capability when they were developed, rather than people consciously building a “bad” system).

Welcome to the party the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. Admiral “Hammerin’ Hank” Mustin, while the Second Fleet Commander, often stated his doctrine of “shoot the archer, not the arrow” to say the easier shot is the one at the sub, or not too supersonic, large profile bomber, than to deal with multiple, small, high speed inbound cruise missile, and the F-14 did this in spades. Capt Lex may yuck it up that the F-14 is gone, but even he knows it was the right platform for its time. In a match up between the two aircraft for some DACT (dissimilar aircraft training), and “BVR” (beyond visual range) weaponry being used as it was intended, the “Anytime, Baby!” aviators would be the first ones back with notches in the belts, drinking a few at the O Club and saying things like “Yeah, we had them on radar in plenty of time to smoke them like cheap cigars at about 100NM. You should have heard them whining all the way to impact about how it was so unfair for us to have Phoenix onboard!”
>/p>

The AIM-54 Phoenix missile, targeted by the AN/AWG-9 radar was more than a match for the Soviet bombers. Being able to be punched off the deck with 6 AIM-54s, it could “buster” (in afterburners) out to Combat Air Patrol (CAP) station on a threat vector quickly (combat radius of 500 miles +), being capable of doing more than twice the speed of sound (think 1500+ mph as a round figure, and BTW, that’s Mach 2+!). The AWG-9 radar could scan a sector, and simultaneously track a target for each missile. The AIM-54 range was demonstrated to be in excess of 100 NM. Add a CAP station about 200 miles down the threat axis and a few sections of F-14s, and the bad guys were going to have tough sledding to reach their launch points. More than likely, they would be swimming with the fish before they could get their cruise missiles off their rails, which, from my perspective, was a very, very good thing. Oh, I forgot to mention, not only could these cruise missiles of the Soviets go really fast, and carry a lot of explosives (enough to do serious damage to an armored aircraft carrier), they could carry nuclear warheads, as well, which meant those of us in the “screen” in small boys, or aboard the supporting oilers and ammunition ships in the vicinity would be in serious danger as well. I really liked the idea of the F-14 being the main fighter in service.

Compare and contrast this with the oh, so sexy “lawn dart” known as the F/A-18 Hornet. Is this an aircraft the pilots dearly love? Does it have a really cool radar that does serious magic, can be used in air-to-air or air-to-ground modes? Yes, it does. Can it be equally at home yanking and banking in ACM (air combat maneuvers), as well as “mud moving?” Yep, that too. Can the Hornet dogfight successfully without having the jettison stores meant for a ground target? Check. Does the Hornet have the “legs” to get way out on station and still put a major hurting on a bomber with a 200 NM reach? Not so sure (with out lots of tankers, which then decrements the number of fighters being fighters)? Nope. Interestingly enough, the initial OR for the F/A-18 had a combat radius that wasn’t attainable during operational testing. It seems the then SECNAV, John Lehman directed the combat radius for the F/A-18 in the test documents be lessened, so that we could get the production rolling, hence the knick name of “lawn darts” being applied. Toss them up, and they come back down. The F/A-18E/F “Super Hornets” that came along later provided more fuel tank space in the wings, addressing this issue.

Enough for now….if ou’ve hung on this long, stay tuned for Part II, where I will discuss how the Tomcat was a revolutionary aircraft in the annals of the Navy from a personnel perspective…

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for the Open Thread!

In reference to the current debate over the NSA “wiretapping” issue, we have been here before.

The situation is in many ways similar, but, it was a different time. It was a time when an attack on American soil awakened a sleeping giant, that then, with a crippled, and barely adequate military, travelled across two large oceans and set their youth into harm’s way, with the will of the people firmly behind them.

The first engagement in the Pacific was Pearl Harbor. The enemy took the initiative and caught us unprepared for the challenge, despite General Billy Mitchell having shown us we were not able to protect our national security in the late 30’s.

The next engagement in that theater was the Battle of the Coral Sea, where a non aviation admiral, Admiral Raymond Spruance, took a new type of battle force against a powerful enemy and he held the line of the Japanese advance into the southern Pacific. As a side note, much has been written critisizing Adm Spruance for his perceived lack of agressiveness with his fleet, but the bottom line is we had suffered major blows and his conservative approach acheived a turning point, where they progressed no more.

Next came a tiff in the vicinity of a very small island, big enough for little more than an airstrip and populated by gooney birds named Midway. It was an incredible naval victory for the US, where we caught the Japanese carriers by surprise. Heroism was a common virtue in that battle, with famous names of ships such as USS THATCH and USS McCLUSKEY being named after valiant aviators who carried the day in that moment.

What allowed us to sink four Japanese carriers to the loss of our one (YORKTOWN)? It began with what we might call “wiretapping” today: Interception and reading of the Japanese Naval Code.

The story is incredible, how a group of Navy code breakers struggled to break the code, then had a dummy “in the clear” message sent from Midway, saying the island was running out of fresh water. In subsequent intercepts, the Japanese coded messages reported this “condition,” and therefore our experts were then confident they had the right methods to ensure other coded messages “breaks” could be given the highest degree of confidence.

Read this excerpt from a site discussing the history of the Midway Atoll:

During World War II, the U.S. utilized a great military intelligence advantage over the Japanese, in both their radar capabilities and code breaking. The radar on Midway gave position, bearing, and altitude. Intelligence experts discovered that the Japanese planned to attack an unknown site referred to as “AF.” To test the theory that Midway was the target, a disinformation message regarding Midway’s freshwater supply was sent out over open communication channels. The Japanese intercepted the message and redistributed it in their JN 25 code, saying that “AF” needed freshwater. This strengthened intelligence allowed Admiral Nimitz to reinforce Midway’s defenses and station additional bombers, fighters, and torpedo aircraft on Eastern Island in preparation for the suspected attack.

Clearly, our govenrment officials, with the sanction of the President, had listened in on the tactical and strategic messages of the enemy, who intended to harm us, in this case, once more, as a follow up to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Across time, this method has been hailed as the runing point of the War in the Pacific, and how in less than a year, a underdeveloped Navy had come back from a major blow, devised entirely new strategies, and had taken the fight to the enemy. Pretty impressive.

Should we now impunge the character of President Roosevelt (who had the Bill of Rights as a restriction on his actions) and demand a reversal? No, that would be ludicrous.

Look at the common threads:

1) Japan wanted resources. We blocked them with embargos. They decided to destroy us in order to be able to go to the areas of the world where oil, metal and rubber resources were, and take them via a military presense. We reacted with economic sanctions on them, thus causing shortages of the strategic materials of the day.

2) Japan, acting as the agressor, attacked our soverign territory.

3) Japan planned another attack on our territiory.

4) Government officials, acting on official orders, listened in on the conversations of the enemy (Japan) in order to find out how to defend our nation.

5) Japan lost the war, yet is now a major democratic and economic powerhouse, and is not occupied by the United States, in fact, they are one of our closest allies.

See the connection? The difference is the modern day agressors in this story do not have the covering of a soverign nation status, and defined borders, but otherwise, they still desire to attack and destroy us, for we interfere with their expansionist plans, and desire for major power status on the world’s stage. The Islamic terrorists do not want the strategic materials, they just want sharia law spread worldwide and have proven they will kill those who are 1) weak and 2) those who resist.

Polish mathematicians broken the German Enigma Codes, and turned that information over to the British, who exploited it throughouot the way, and shared the intelligence with us to re-route naval convoys of troops and material around U-Boats in the Atlantic.

We also were reading the Berlin-Tokyo diplomatic message, as a result of breaking that Japanese set of codes.

In each of these three cases, this effort produced free people and not more oppression. Why can’t anyone see that in the current situation?

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for the Open Thread!

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

From Military.com, an M-60 A4 firing 850 rounds “at one sitting.” It seems the old standby crew served weapon has been given improved qualities…They said it goes 15K rounds before a barrel change.

See it here.

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

They have finally done it in Taiwan using genetic engineering to “install” jellyfish bioluminescense genes in pigs.

This could spawn a whole series of applications. Kids could have a GITD pig as a pet, so when parents venture in the tried and true admonistion of “this place looks like a pigsty!” would be far more applicatble. In the meantime, the GITD pig would provide a night light function for the child.

Sailors of all types might enjoy a GITD pig, so as to remind them (in the case of Capt Lex) the glow in the carrier’s wake as they make night traps, or (in the case of Chapomatic) the glow of the boiluming plankton in the periscope while underwater, or (in the case of CDR Salamander) the green shine of the UNREP ship’s bow wave following the outline of the ship as you get gas and ammo at night….

And, there are many other applications. Maybe GITD hampsters would be a better idea if you are trying to get into the novelty market…

HT to Little Green Footballs.

Scary story, but gives new meaning to the old axiom of never take the same path twice.

It seems the bad guys have come up with a creative solution to get at our helo assets, to include special attention being paid to MedEvac helos.

From the Telegraph, here’s an article on Aerial IEDs.

The new home-made weapons, known to the Americans as “aerial improvised explosive devices” have been used on numerous occasions.

“The enemy is adaptive. They makes changes in the way they fight, they respond to new flying tactics,” Brig Edward Sinclair, a US army aviation commander, told Defense News, which first revealed the new threat.

HT to Van Impe in a Open Thread comment over on Little Green Footballs.

Thanks to The Military Outpost for the link!

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

A while back I blogged on some history of training development I worked on in the Navy with the Battle Force Tactical Trainer (BFTT) project, begun by Capt. Herb Kahler in the early 90s….

Does the new XBox 360 owe a tip of the hat to a bunch of war fighters and federal tax doallars for it’s development? hmmm…consider how your tax dollars keep giving and giving….

I checked Chapomatic’s blog this morning and enjoyed his article and the links to the issue of pulling out of Iraq.

I began what I thought would be a short comment, but it grew.

Here are my thoughts (first read his post, “I just Don’t Get It” to get the flow of my discussion:

I just had a scary thought….

Common thread: The strategic tool that gets us to the tipping point for those events listed is the Media.. I have long thought, since my college days after Vietnam, that war was going to be waged in very different spheres, the press being one. Subsequently, we saw our peace partner, Japan, wage an economic war agaisnt pretty much the rest of the world. We, to some extent, did a similar thing to the USSR under Reagan, but, I have never felt the NCA, and alkl of us who have or are working for same, really “get it.” It’s not just on the physical field of battle where we must excel.

As I wrote that line, we have become the Redcoats, in our rectangular formations, while the farmers and indians send small, “untrained” (meaning tactailally thinking unconstrained) bands to pick at our flanks, until we can no longer see how to win.

Yes, there is Information Warfare, but we seem to continue to confine it to a mostly military discipline.

This IW is much, much bigger than that, and, as I said in one of my posts, they may not have tractors from John Deere to harvest rice and rubber, but they still understood a part of the spectrum far better than we did then and possibly even now.

I heard rumors some of the very first visitors to the new Sandanista government were NVA types, particularly to get them geared up in the IW arena against us. Congress also took a serious swipe at our national security there, as they were defeated in the press, the same as they had been during Vietnam. And, here we go again!

Now to the scary thought: Make PAO staff types part of the unrestricted line, based on the rising importance (or at least so we can catch up) in IW.

Doesn’t that send a shiver up your spine? I don’t think we can afford to “outsource” this to the press corps any longer….

Anyhow, to add one more pice of a puzzle, as we don’t see the Republicans, or the President using in your face verbal assualts on the opposition, neither do we see him going after the global enemy in the World press, as they are dong to us. Time to take the gloves off, in my opinion, in the War of Words, and put the Islamic agenda out for what it is, adn has been since AD 622, when Mohammed and about 200 followers went to Medina, expansion and control of the world, pure and simple.

The particulars of which specific tools we have to wage war have changed, but the underlying premise of why hasn’t.

See this trackback to Mudville Gazette for Greyhawk’s added commentary on the post from Chapomatic…

To begin with, don’t forget the Valour-IT Project is an ongoing thing. The fund raiser from 11/2-11/11/05 was but a moment to leverage off the Veteran’s Day Holiday for donations.

I was away from the net from Friday afternoon until last night. I had a hard time finind the consolidted After Action Report (AAR) on the big blogs (Mudville Gazette, Black Five, etc. I did find this wrap up on the project webiste (go figure!) and it’s incredible.

Note how a bunch of competetion by nature people got over enthused and instead of taking the $21,000 mark as the goal, each service branch team took that amount on as their goal. I was amazed myself to find out I hadn’t read the directions in my promotion, but I’ll take this type of failure any day….

Here’s the AAR from FbL, the project coordinator of Soldier’s Angels for this project, who took on this important project for our troops:

Fundraising Competition Totals

What can be said in the face of such amazing generosity, creativity and hard work? Mere words do not do justice to the impact you all will have on the wounded warriors who benefit from this. And superlatives cannot begin to describe the efforts and activities of those who have made it happen. You have gone far above and beyond the call of duty!

As for me, saying “thank you,” feels strange because I am not the one benefitting from this. But I sit here in awe and in tears as I try to comprehend the scope of what you have accomplished in these last ten days, and what it will do for beneficiaries of Valour-IT. It has exceeded expectations by such a scale that I can’t wrap my brain around it.

Our first fundraiser (in August) netted about $15,000 in three long weeks. I thought I was stepping out in faith by setting the bar for this one at $21,000 total in ten short days. Instead, you have more than quadrupled that! And there is still more to come as checks are counted and corporate matching funds come in. Current* totals (including auctions and online contributions not made through a team) are:

Donations Funds Average

Marines
209 $19,607.00 $93.81

Air Force
123 $11,114.11 $90.36

Army
258 $23,652.57 $91.68

Navy
223 $23,831.76 $106.87

Unaffiliated
154 $10,128.00 $65.77

Totals
967 $88,333.44 $91.35

*The information in the table above is not official. It is gleaned from automated totals for teams as of midnight PST on November 11, the information from team auctions, and the PayPal email notifications of donations made. It does not include checks mailed in (believed to be a minimum of $5,000), or matching funds (unknown). When those totals become available (hopefully by Tuesday), this information will be updated and a final winning team can be declared.

Watch for another post soon, detailing significant contributions of time, PR, and hard work of various people.

posted by FbL @ 9:28 AM

I’m not sure if it’s factored in above (but I imagine it is) a total of $2638 was raised by things put up for auction by various people. Not bad for a bunch of people sitting around in their pj’s at a computer, I’d say!

As noted, “we” in the teams, really screwed up and assumed we were all supposed to get $21K each. I hate it when mistakes like this happen, but the up side is it seems someone with “means” (read money and a heart) has taken note of the success of the 10 days of fund raising and is discussing significant support for the Valour-IT Project. Check out what FbL says here, and, as she orders, pray and cross your fingers for success in the negotiaions…

The winners are the current comabt vets who have stepped up to the plate and taken what came their way. Thanks to all for your support.

Again, a reminder that this isn’t a one time project fund raiser, and not only this project, but others, need your support on an onging basis.

BZ!