ATTENTION: PLEASE SHARE THIS WITH VETERANS FROM THE IRAQ WAR OR ANYONE WHO HAD THE DEPLOYMENT DATES BELOW. THIS IS GOOD NEWS. A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION, THANK YOU.
#gulfwarillness
WASHINGTON — The Department of Veterans Affairs has opened a burn-pit registry to anyone who believes he or she may have been exposed to fumes from trash burned in open pits in Iraq and Afghanistan or to toxins, such as metal or bacteria, inhaled with dust. Read more
14 March 2014
The Queen Mary 2 is the largest ocean liner in the world and on Sunday her captain got a fresh view of her size and majesty.
Captain Kevin Oprey stood on the ship’s bulbous bow, which protrudes from the front of the 151,200 tonne liner, to pose for a portrait with his ship. Read more
Christine Granville was one of the bravest, toughest and strangest secret agents of World War II. Her feats of derring-do included acting as a courier in Nazi-occupied Europe, parachuting into France in support of the Allied invasion and rescuing three of her comrades from certain execution. She was said to be Winston Churchill’s favorite spy — a considerable accolade given how much Britain’s wartime prime minister liked spies. She may have been the model for Vesper Lynd, the female agent in Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, “Casino Royale.” She won medals for bravery from both Britain and France. Men found her irresistible, and she did very little to resist them.
Yet this woman, so ripe for Hollywood hagiography, is almost unknown today. Her obscurity is the consequence of her gender (spy history is notoriously sexist), her nationality (she was Polish, and Communist Poland did not encourage praise of British spies) and above all her character. She was a complex and mysterious individual. She survived the war only to be murdered by an obsessed former lover in the lobby of a London hotel. As Clare Mulley reveals in her admirable and overdue biography, “The Spy Who Loved,” Granville was not a straightforward personality, and all the more fascinating for that.
Born Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, the daughter of a feckless Polish aristocrat and a wealthy Jewish heiress, she enjoyed a comfortable, uneventful and spoiled upbringing. Indeed, her main achievement before the war was to be a runner-up in the 1930 Miss Poland beauty contest. War changed her utterly.
She was in South Africa, the wife of a Polish diplomat, when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. She immediately headed for London, presented herself to the British secret service and offered to ski over the Carpathian Mountains into Poland in order to take British propaganda into Nazi-occupied Warsaw. “She is absolutely fearless,” a secret service report noted, a “flaming Polish patriot, . . . expert skier and great adventuress.”
She was duly recruited into Section D, which would evolve into the fabled Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.), the sabotage, subversion and espionage unit established by Churchill to operate behind enemy lines and “set Europe ablaze.” She adopted the name Christine Granville, received a British passport and shaved several years off her real age on official forms — self-reinvention was part of her makeup, as it is of many spies. The British gave her the code name “Willing,” an apt reflection of her attitude toward sex as well as her readiness to embrace extreme peril.
Deployed to Hungary, Granville spent the first part of her war ferrying messages and people in and out of Poland. She crossed the mountains between Hungary and Poland no fewer than six times, bringing out Polish resisters and soldiers who would go on to fight for the Allied cause. She was usually accompanied by Andrzej Kowerski, a one-legged Polish patriot who would become her most enduring (and long-suffering) lover.
The stories of her exceptional sang-froid come thick and fast: skiing past the corpses of refugees frozen to death in the mountains, bribing guards, dodging bullets from a Luftwaffe plane on an open hillside and escaping from the Gestapo by biting her own tongue, spitting blood, and thus convincing her captors that she was ill with tuberculosis.
According to one account, she could even charm her way around animals: when a “vicious Alsatian dog, trained to bite and break necks,” found her hiding under a bush with some partisans, she placed her arm around it, and “it lay down beside her, ignoring its handler’s whistles.” Such tales, as Mulley observes, are “the stuff of legend,” and she is too good a historian to take them entirely at face value. Granville was an expert at her own mythologizing, telling her stories of pacifying enemy dogs “right and left, to whoever was willing to listen.” (Page 2 below).
Lol 2:02 Enjoy! 🙂
BAGRAM AIRFIELD — Following the release of five high-ranking Taliban operatives in exchange for American prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl two weeks ago, Air Force drone pilots have since been collectively champing at the bit, and according to several sources, are only “two Monsters and a Doritos binge” shy of working themselves into a “click-and-kill” frenzy. Read more
Well, America’s 238th birthday is right around the corner and to honor our Nations Day of Independence, I’ve collected some desktop wallpaper, posters, and clip art to help us celebrate. I’ve posted the wallpapers in gallery form; click on any image to view and download them in full resolution. If you like the clip art or posters I’ve thrown in, click to view in full res., right-click and save!
I hope everyone enjoys their #4thofJuly. Remember: Be SAFE, be happy! ~Anna
🙂 I love getting emails from [my] veterans! These were in my inbox over the weekend. Enjoy!
Here are the last entries of SGT Chainey blog, dated January 30, 2011.
I hope all is well with him.
Chapter three has some length to it, so there’s plenty to read.
I’m still working on chapter 4, there has also been changes in the first 3 chapters and they will be posted soon. (30 January 2011).
December 9, 2010
From the first they told us we will be deploying, time seemed to just fly. We started a lot of training at the Hood, and did a month at Fort Irwin, Ca. That trained us in all areas of combat, war games helps in many ways to prepare you. But knowing if you are killed in the game, you just get recycled and start over. Being my first deployment saying goodbye was pretty hard, and very trying. And having young children also makes it difficult, because the really don’t understand where mom or dad is going. When we say goodbye it has a different meaning, which can really mean goodbye, for good. Read more
via: hiddenwounds.org
I debated whether I would share this information here, so much so I had to ask myself what it was that was stopping me, and here’s what I concluded: I thought that if I didn’t share this, I would be ‘protecting’ our veterans. (I’m a little [over] protective when it comes to them). 😉
Let me explain.
Many in America wondered if the nation would survive.
Although the United States had little history of massive social upheaval or coup attempts against the government, hunger has an ominous way of stirring those passions among any population. As bread riots and shantytowns grew in number, many began to seek alternatives to the status quo.
*SEE BELOW
By Thomas Brennan
It was a sensation that Marine Staff Sgt. Javier Jimenez could physically feel: the weight of life was literally crushing him.
“You start running out of air, the room starts getting smaller around you and your heart starts pounding,” Jimenez said, describing the “horrible” feeling that overwhelmed him. “You’re more hopeless than you have ever been before. You start worrying about the next day, wondering if you are going to make it there because all you want to do is die.” Read more
Maiden on the Midway 
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