To All
Good Thursday Morning January 4, 2024
Bubba Breakfast in the morning at the O'Çlub at NKX
Well we got a decent amount of rain from the storm and the weather guessers say that we are looking at 8 days of clear skies ahead. The leaves pretty much cover the entire yard. School starts up again tonight and classes are pretty full. It will be fun to get going again.
Thank you all for the best wishes for Toni. We are looking forward to seeing the doctor tomorrow afternoon getting on the road to recovery.
Regards,
Skip
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This day in Naval and Marine Corps History (thanks to NHHC)
Here is a link to the NHHC website: https://www.history.navy.mil/
January. 4
1863 - Blockading ship USS Quaker City captures sloop Mercury carrying dispatches emphasizing desperate plight of the South
1910—USS Michigan, the first U.S. dreadnought battleship, is commissioned.
1943—USS Shad (SS 235) sinks German minesweeper M 4242 (ex-French trawler Odet II) in the Bay of Biscay.
1944—USS Bluefish (SS 222) and USS Rasher (SS 269) attack a Japanese convoy off French Indochina; Bluefish sinks a merchant tanker while Rasher damages another tanker. Also on this date USS Cabrilla (SS 288) sinks a Japanese freighter off Cape Padran, French Indochina while USS Tautog (SS 109) sinks a Japanese freighter off southern Honshu.
1945—During attacks against the U.S. Navy force bound for the Lingayen Gulf, a kamikaze crashes into escort carrier USS Ommaney Bay (CVE 79) in the Sulu Sea and damages her beyond repair. USS Burns (DD 588) scuttles the carrier escort.
1972—Secretary of the Navy John Chaffee approved the establishment of the Legalman (LN) rating.
1989—VF-32 F-14 Tomcats from USS John F. Kennedy shoot down two hostile Libyan MiGs with AIM-7 [Sparrow] and AIM-9 [Sidewinder] missiles in the central Med north of Tobruk in international waters.
Skip note….My good friend Mac was the one who did the welding on the seeker heads on the sidewinder missiles used in the kills.
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Today in World History
January 4
1757 Robert Francois Damiens makes an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate King Louis XV of France.
1863 Union General Henry Halleck, by direction of President Abraham Lincoln, orders General Ulysses Grant to revoke his infamous General Order No. 11 that expelled Jews from his operational area.
1896 Utah becomes the 45th state of the Union.
1902 France offers to sell their Nicaraguan Canal rights to the United States.
1904 The U.S. Supreme Court decides in the Gonzales v. Williams case that Puerto Ricans are not aliens and can enter the United States freely, yet stops short of awarding citizenship.
1920 The Negro National League, the first black baseball league, is organized by Rube Foster.
1923 The Paris Conference on war reparations hits a deadlock as the French insist on the hard line and the British insist on Reconstruction.
1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt claims in his State of the Union message that the federal government will provide jobs for 3.5 million Americans on welfare.
1936 Billboard magazine publishes its first music Hit Parade.
1941 On the Greek-Albanian front, the Greeks launch an attack towards Valona from Berat to Klisura against the Italians.
1942 Japanese forces begin the evacuation of Guadalcanal.
1951 UN forces abandon Seoul, Korea, to the Chinese Communist Army.
1952 The French Army in Indochina launches Operation Nenuphar in hopes of ejecting a Viet Minh division from the Ba Tai forest.
1969 Spain returns the Ifni province to Morocco.
1970 A 7.7 earthquake kills 15,000+ people in Tonghai County, China.
1972 Rose Heilbron becomes the first female judge to sit at the Old Bailey in London, England.
1974 President Richard Nixon refuses to hand over tape recordings and documents that had been subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee.
1975 The Khmer Rouge launches its newest assault in its five-year war in Phnom Penh. The war in Cambodia would go on until the spring of 1975.
1976 The Ulster Volunteer Force kills six Irish Catholic civilians in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. The next day 10 Protestant civilians are murdered in retaliation.
1979 Ohio officials approve an out-of-court settlement awarding $675,000 to the victims and families in the 1970 shootings at Kent State University, in which four students were killed and nine wounded by National Guard troops.
1990 Over 300 people die and more than 700 are injured in Pakistan's deadliest train accident, when an overloaded passenger train collides with an empty freight train.
1999 Jesse "The Body" Ventura, a former professional wrestler, is sworn in as populist governor of Minnesota.
1999 The euro, the new money of 11 European nations, goes into effect on the continent of Europe.
2004 NASA Mars rover Spirit successfully lands on Mars.
2004 Mikheil Saakashvili is elected President of Georgia following the Rose Revolution of November 2003.
2007 Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California) becomes the first female speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
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OPERATION COMMANDO HUNT Thanks to the Bear
MERRY CHRISTMAS
Skip… For The List for Monday, 25 December 2023 through Sunday, 7 January 2024… Bear🇺🇸⚓️🐻
OPERATION COMMANDO HUNT I (1968-1972)… Weeks 7 & 8…
From the archives of rollingthunderremembered.com post for December 1968…
Christmas Season 1968: historic events, painful losses and heroic sacrifice…
Thanks to Micro
To remind folks that these are from the Vietnam Air Losses site that Micro put together. You click on the url below and get what happened each day to the crew of the aircraft. ……Skip
From Vietnam Air Losses site for "Thursday 4 January
4: https://www.vietnamairlosses.com/loss.php?id=946
This following work accounts for every fixed wing loss of the Vietnam War and you can use it to read more about the losses in The Bear's Daily account. Even better it allows you to add your updated information to the work to update for history…skip Vietnam Air Losses Access Chris Hobson and Dave Lovelady's work at: https://www.VietnamAirLosses.com.
Vietnam Air Losses
Access Chris Hobson and Dave Lovelady's work at: https://www.VietnamAirLosses.com.
This is a list of all Helicopter Pilots Who Died in the Vietnam War . Listed by last name and has other info https://www.vhpa.org/KIA/KIAINDEX.HTM
MOAA - Wall of Faces Now Includes Photos of All Servicemembers Killed in the Vietnam War
(This site was sent by a friend . The site works, find anyone you knew in "search" feature. https://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/ )
Wall of Faces Now Includes Photos of All Service members Killed in the Vietnam War
By: Kipp Hanley
AUGUST 15, 2022
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From the archives
Thanks to Dr. Rich
This is exceptional
The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks ... YouTube video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgB1IqGp8BE
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More from Barrett and the A-6 Bubbas What these guys did every night deserves inputs. I f you have any mission descriptions I will be glad to put them in the List. Maybe if we get enough someone can get a book out that would preserve these for the future. I have heard many stories but not seen many written down……skip
Ed, right you are of course (even allowing for quoting me!)
My recent book describes world events in August 1945 (When the Shooting Stopped). Still remarkable that it hadn't been done. I'd guess that about 80 percent of the people I quote were deceased before publication, including my parents. (Jim H knows about The World Famous Pendleton Round-Up. It was 2 weeks after VJ and everybody had a real good time.)
Incidentally, a Umatilla County Howdy, Jim. Fond memories of our VA-128 sortie back in the day.
Anyway:
I quoted from interviews and correspondence from the 1970s. Some of that material had lingered 40+ years without being cited, so YES! Do It Now is important, whether anyone intends to publish or not.
Another often overlooked source: audio tapes. Two contributors to Dragon's Jaw (Thanh Hoa Bridge) had old-timey spool to spool recordings. The ultimate was from a USAF F-4 pilot who recorded ICS commentary with his WSO on The Day The AF Dropped A Span. WX was poor, prompting a memorable line, "C'mon, bridge, where are ya?"
Most CCs know that ADM Snuffy Smith departed the pattern recently. He was an invaluable source, as he led the VA-82 mission that captured the SE Asia Bombing Derby trophy.
To repeat the point: almost no WW II or Korean War books could be written today as they were through the 90s. (I was secretary of the aces assn in the 80s and 90s when we had 400 members. Today there are 12 or so remaining, just lost one of my Enterprise CV-6 guys). The time to do it is Now, especially as Boris notes the 80-ish vintage of Vietnam Era vets.
As ever
Barrett
________________________________________
From: beakleyje@roadrunner.com <beakleyje@roadrunner.com>
Subject: RE: A-6 ops in Linebacker II'JOHN STUBBS' <john.stubbs@me.com>
Follow up
Barrett, you have often commented on "getting the history" before those who made it were all gone. The A-6 guys of LB II are all pushing the 80 mark. To be sure some of that history is out there but you have to find multiple books and then find the chapter. If I were asked to recommend a single book on LB II it would be Marshall Michel's The Eleven Days of Christmas. Well researched, written, reasonably complete if you're an AF guy, B-52 bubba. The Navy and the A-6 barely get a head nod.
I posted the same thing as the e-mail on 4 FB pages focused on Naval Aviation, the Intruder or LB I, II. Got some great replies, mostly book recommendations (all but one of which I have read and currently reside on my shelves.) Obviously I didn't make my point very well. There is no comparable book to Michele's book for A-6 ops in LB II. For me it seems a shame that the stories of some of the most G-D scary assed flying ever done are in essence scattered/buried.
Frankly surprised that no one from the community has put together an Elven Intruder Days… I know it would be pretty hard to pull the appropriate chapters out, find a few more, add a little background and publish, but there are some major eye watering stories out there that deserve seeing the light of day (or starlight really) in the proper context. I stood alert 5 SAR in my A-7B and was damn glad I wasn't going into Haiphong at 200 feet. Sweet Jesus!!!
Fly Navy, the BEST Always Have
Ed 'Boris' Beakley
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Thanks to Interesting Facts
Lord Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer.
SCIENCE & INDUSTRY
L ong before laptops and smartphones, a 19th-century Englishwoman named Ada Lovelace created what many consider to be the world's first computer program. Lovelace was born in 1815 to famed poet Lord Byron and philanthropist Annabella Milbanke Byron, though she never had a relationship with her father and was raised alone by her mother. Annabella became fearful that Ada would inherit her artistic father's perceived "insanity," and so she encouraged Ada to study grounded disciplines such as logic and math. Lovelace grew fond of those pursuits, and developed a keen interest in the inventions of English mathematician Charles Babbage, whom she met in 1833. Babbage told Lovelace of his plan to create a complex calculating machine known as the Analytical Engine — the precursor to the modern computer — and Lovelace was eager to contribute to the project.
In 1843, Lovelace was asked to translate a French account of one of Babbage's lectures overseas, and Babbage encouraged her to expand the paper with her own thoughts. In August of that year, Lovelace published the 66-page translation, which included 41 pages of appendices containing additional theories and formulas. The most famous of these notations is "Note G," which has been deemed the world's first computer program. In this table, Lovelace determined how the machine could theoretically calculate a sequence of rational numbers known as Bernoulli numbers. Though the machine was never built, and thus was never able to successfully execute Lovelace's calculations, the theory laid the groundwork for the future of computer programming.
By the Numbers
Year the first Apple desktop computer was released
1976
Weight (in tons) of the first general purpose computer (ENIAC)
30
Total cantos (chapters) in Byron's epic poem "Don Juan"
16
Storage capacity (in megabytes) of the first commercial hard drive
3.75
DID YOU KNOW?
The oldest known analog computer was discovered in an ancient Greek shipwreck.
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient device built between 205 and 60 BCE that sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean aboard a shipwreck in the first century BCE. The corroded remains were recovered in 1901, though the mechanism broke into three pieces upon its removal from the water. Given the advanced wear, it wasn't until 1905 that the relic was first theorized to be some sort of ancient analog computer. Teams examined the series of complex dials and gears, which were operated by turning a small crank. As research progressed, it was determined that the Antikythera was used to calculate astronomical positions of the sun, moon, and planets; users could enter a past or future date and turn the crank to make astronomical predictions. This discovery sent shock waves through the scientific community, which previously believed this technology hadn't been invented until the 14th century.
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From the archives from last year….We did not do anything on this list and things got worse.
Thanks to Mike
Everyone needs to read this article, put aside their political bias, (be it right or left) think about the America we grew up in and how we are setting up our children, grand children and great grand children to become a second rate third world country!
Cheers
Mike
😊
10 Steps to Save America
Yes, there is a way.
But is there the will?
By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
December 18, 2022
Most Americans know something has gone terribly wrong—and very abruptly—with the United States. They are certain that our wounds are almost all self-inflicted. The current pathologies are not a result of a natural disaster, exhaustion of natural resources, plagues, or an existential war.
Crushing national debt and annual deficits, spiraling food and fuel costs amid "normal" seven-percent-plus annual inflation, bread-and-circuses entitlements, a nonexistent border, a resurgence of racial tribalism, pandemic violent criminality, and humiliation abroad—all these pathologies are easily cited as symptoms of a sick patient. Our crises are not as the Left maintains—a nine-person Supreme Court, the Electoral College, or the filibuster—all distractions from existential problems the Left largely created.
So, what are the therapies and prognoses for America?
In the spirit of constructive rather than blanket criticism, here is a partial, 10-point plan for national recovery.
Cut the Debt
Americans' national debt is now $31 trillion. That is about 123 percent of current GDP. The liabilities are unsustainable. We run annual deficits of $1.6 trillion. These financial obligations will eventually ensure that rising interest rates to service the debt crowd out essential spending for national defense and the general welfare.
Or in extremis, in the not-too-distant future, the government will be forced to default on what it owes the "rich" bondholders and foreign debt holders. Or the government will be forced to confiscate private wealth, for example, occasional crazy suggestions to nationalize and absorb 401(k)k retirement plans into the soon-to-be-insolvent Social Security system. Or the state will simply print millions of dollars to pay off obligations, Weimar-style.
In addict style, the more we come to realize that our binging habit cannot go on, the less we can practice self-restraint. And the more it is the case that those who receive government redistributions outnumber those who pay the majority of federal income taxes, the less hope there remains to avoid insolvency.
In 2010 then-President Barack Obama appointed a bipartisan "National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform." More commonly remembered as the Simpson-Bowles commission, after chairmen Senators Alan Simpson (R-Wyo) and Erskine Bowles (D-N.C.), it included private citizens and elected officials.
The commission recommended radical tax simplifications and some cuts—along with reductions in tax deductions and credits, an increase in the gas tax, restraints on entitlement spending, and various spending caps.
Obama and Congress ultimately rejected the recommendations and the commission's blueprint died. But had it succeeded, the current debt would have long been frozen at the 2014 level of $17 trillion—with annual reductions ensuring that this coming year 2023 the debt would have plunged to $10 trillion and then disappeared in another decade.
Something like Simpson-Bowles could still stop the madness and avoid the natural corrective on the horizon of financial collapse. Note that federal tax revenue has increased almost every year since 2010. Sometimes it grows by nearly a half-trillion dollars per annum, even as we sink deeper into debt. Our crisis, then, is one of spending what we do not have rather than one of declining revenue.
Secure the Border
We no longer have a southern border. There have been 5 million illegal border crossings just since Joe Biden took office. He intentionally destroyed immigration law for cheap political advantage. Nearly 50 million current American residents were not born in the United States. Well over 20 million—and perhaps 30 million—are illegal aliens. Old melting-pot efforts at assimilation and integration eroded into the salad-bowl metaphor that has just become tribalism—even as intermarriage is at an all-time high.
The Left brags that "demography is destiny" as it cheers the electorate's changes to ensure its political dominance. And simultaneously, it smears conservatives who agree with its triumphalism as "great replacement theory" conspiracists.
Yet we finally found a solution in 2019-2020. Had we continued replacing rickety border fencing with an effective wall and then completed it along the entire border, had we stopped catch-and-release, had we continued demanding that refugee status be obtained before entry, had we forced Mexico and Central American governments to stop exporting human capital and subjected them to taxes on more than $60 billion in annual remittances (along with trade penalties) for their complicity with the situation at the border, had we continued to deport those who entered illegally, had we returned to assimilation and integration on the theory any who entered America did so because they wanted to become Americans, then a desired legal, meritocratic, and diverse immigration policy might easily have assimilated and absorbed perhaps 200,000 skilled and legal immigrants per year.
Again, we had the outlines of a solution and then simply destroyed it for liberal political agendas and cheap corporate labor.
Tap Natural Resources
Similarly, by 2020, the United States enjoyed inexpensive fuel. It was all but independent in gas and oil. It had become the world's largest combined gas and oil producer. That status radically curtailed the need for optional military engagements in the Middle East. It gave America enormous clout against hostile oil exporters like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. And such independence helped reduce vast trade deficits.
Again, the Biden Administration simply exploded the idea of fossil-fuel independence as a gradual transition to sustainable energy. So simply doing the opposite of its policies would correct the pathology almost immediately: Issue more federal gas and oil leases, approve the Keystone and Constitution pipelines, reopen the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, and build nuclear power plants. The present course of high-priced and scarce gasoline and oil is eroding the middle class, spiking inflation, widening class divisions, and reducing American autonomy abroad.
Oppose Discrimination
Never has the United States seen more evidence of progress in racial relations, and never has such progress given way to more tribalism. If we do not return to a Martin Luther King, Jr. "content of our character" policy—one that views race as incidental rather than essential to who we are—then our future is a sectarian one with echoes of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Iraq.
Affirmative action was never envisioned as permanent quotas and race-based reverse discrimination. Yet after over a half-century, it has ballooned under the idea of "diversity" to invent a victim class of nearly a third of the nation, absurdly and loosely defined—in an age of commonplace intermarriage—as "non-white."
Help for the underprivileged should be race-neutral and entirely based on class and income, given numerous ethnicities exceed the so-called white medium income. The labyrinth of racial categories grows unfathomable. The identity politics mess logically results, on the one hand, with rank iconic frauds like Elizabeth Warren, Ward Churchill, and Rachel Dolezal, and, on the other hand, with well-off poseur victims in the manner of a Meghan Markle, Colin Kaepernick, or Jussie Smollett.
Substitution of racial criteria for merit, rather than aiding the poor of all races, is creating a commissar-like drag on the economy, spiking racial and ethnic tensions, and ensuring that every group will eventually, for its survival, go tribal based on the same logic that applies to nuclear proliferation. Again, the remedy? Just enforce civil rights statutes that prohibit racial discrimination and consider the Pavlovian shriek of "racism!" as the revealing projection of racists.
Disrupt and Reform Higher Education
Our universities are failing to produce competent graduates essential to a meritocratic nation engaged in fierce global competition. Increasingly, students are politicized, largely ignorant, indebted, bitter, and unable to ensure American preeminence in basic science, technology, engineering, and math.
Yet the solutions are again simple: get the government out of the student-loan business that ensures escalating tuition hikes greater than the rate of inflation. Eliminate faculty tenure and replace it with five-year contracts that require demonstrable achievement. Subject large endowments to taxation on their interest income to curb their wasted spending. Allow public schools to hire either those with school of education credentials or one-year master's degrees that focused solely on academic study. Require standardized exit tests, in the fashion of erstwhile SAT and ACT entry tests, for the certification of the bachelor's degree. Force universities to follow the Bill of Rights on campus, regarding due process and freedom of expression.
These are not radical suggestions. Yet the likely fierce faculty opposition to them proves that the Left envisions higher education as it views Silicon Valley—another private monopoly that helps maintain political power in lieu of popular support.
Revive the Armed Forces
Our military is in dire straits. It is overcommitted, under-resourced, and without any geo-political strategy other than ad hoc responses without defined objectives. It has become politically weaponized and, inevitably, unable to meet recruitment goals. The Pentagon remains obsessed with exorbitantly priced weapons that cannot be produced in sufficient numbers in an age of hostile swarms of cheap, mass-produced drones and thousands of batteries of ground-to-air and shore-to-ship missiles.
Constant profiling, racial, and gender quotas, and obsessions over proportional representation and disparate impact increasingly apply to training, education, and promotion—to everything except worries over the disproportionate profile of those killed in battle. The Pentagon has become adept in publishing racial data on every aspect of military service to emphasize disparity and bias—except concerning the combat dead.
To address the changes, retiring high-ranking officers should refrain from board memberships in contracting corporations for at least five years upon leaving the military. The uniform code of military justice must be strictly enforced, including article 88 which prohibits retired officers from attacking in personal terms high-ranking elected officials, and in particular their commander-in-chief.
Woke training is destroying morale and battlefield efficacy. The military must return to a race and gender-neutral stance that does not erode meritocratic standards to fit political agendas. We should never again witness a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff virtue signaling to Congress and the nation his intention to understand "white rage" in the ranks, without supplying any confirmatory evidence or data for his apparent allegation of systemic racism in the ranks—particularly not while the greatest U.S. defeat and humiliation in a half-century was unfolding on the horizon in Kabul. Any high-ranking military officer who informs his Chinese counterpart of his own psychiatric diagnosis that his commander-in-chief is unhinged and thus U.S. strategic intentions will first be relayed to Beijing should be summarily dismissed.
Fix Voting
Elections are a mess. The greatest political revolution in our election history has been the change—accelerated under the cover of COVID and the George Floyd riots—in many key states from a 20-30 percent "absentee ballot" vote to 70-80 percent early/mail-in balloting. In a mere four years we have all but destroyed Election Day voting and Election Night final tabulations as we had known them for decades.
All discussions of voter IDs, fraud, and charges and countercharges of election denialism are irrelevant if there is no real mechanism to validate the authenticity of mail-in ballots that have incomplete or false addresses, names, and signatures, or do not match registration rolls. Third-party ballot harvesting and ballot curing should be outlawed at the federal level, and we should return to the requirement of requesting absentee ballots rather than automatically sending them out. Otherwise, no future election will again win the confidence of a majority of Americans. And without trust in balloting, consensual government becomes nonexistent.
Drain the Swamp
Americans distrust the "swamp," administrative state, or deep state. Call what you will, the Washington nexus of bureaucracies, media, and lobbyists have created a huge, unelected permanent army of auditors, regulators, investigators, and punishers, all mostly exempt from audit and accountability and without fear of their elected overseers.
The easiest solution is to break up concentrations of power. Transfer out of Washington, in this age of zoom and telecommunications, major cabinet departments like Health and Human Services, Energy, or Agriculture into the hinterland Restore the idea that lying to Congress, feigning amnesia, or pleading ignorance under oath to Congress or federal investigators or in depositions is a prosecutable felony with jail time.
Had we restored equality under the law, then Andrew McCabe, James Clapper, and John Brennan would not have dared lie under oath. And Robert Mueller, James Comey, Anthony Fauci, or Jack Dorsey might have not so easily believed they simply could plead memory loss or mislead in a fashion that no American would dare to do with the IRS.
Being forced to tell the truth would be a powerful deterrent against bureaucratic overreach.
Finally, ossified centralized agencies like the FBI need to be broken up and their bureaus redistributed through the cabinet-level departments to avoid past pathologies resulting from a concentration of power.
Upend the Welfare State
The number of those receiving federal and state subsidies is beginning to match the number of those who subsidize them "No one wants to work anymore" is now a common public lament. Inflation and recession may come and go, but workers are now scarce whether we are in boom or bust times. Labor non-participation remains at an all-time high. Soon only 60 percent of the available labor force will be working. Trillion-dollar COVID subsidies have accelerated the idea that Americans need not work full-time to maintain a living.
We can easily return to the "workfare" championed by a triangulating Bill Clinton in the 1990s that demanded healthy and able recipients to be gainfully employed upon receipt of state and federal cash. In the context of the homeless, we need to return to pre-Reagan norms of institutionalizing the mentally ill and creating hospitals and safe spaces away from American downtowns to house those who either cannot or will not take care of themselves. Defecating, urinating, injecting, and fornicating on city streets are not victimless crimes, but assaults on civilized life as we once knew it.
Restore Norms
The fact is, few public norms are left. Rather than the current therapeutic obsessions that seek to divide Americans into binaries of oppressors and the oppressed, we are in desperate need of civic education in K-12 that acquaints all children and teens with American institutions, key events like Gettysburg or D-Day, and familiarity with the Constitution and the duties of the citizen. We will get nowhere basing our understanding of the world on psychodramas and therapeutics.
Neither journalists nor elites understand, much less appreciate, the First Amendment, and in ignorance despise the Second.
Like it or not, the nuclear family remains the bulwark of the American nation, which will not survive if current fertility rates of below 1.7 children per woman continue to diminish and age the population. The government must incentivize childbearing and childraising.
Without clear punishment for violent crimes, deterrence is lost, and the innocent become victims of the exempt criminal class. Critical race theory, critical legal theory, and critical criminology theory are euphemisms for unleashing lawbreakers upon the vulnerable. We are in a strange cycle in which we deliberately do not enforce gun laws in our cities, and then when murder reaches near-historic proportions we blame unenforced gun laws rather than the criminals who are exempt from using deadly weapons as the cause.
These are just a few of the many ways that the United States could stop the present madness—which, after all, was entirely self-created.
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January 4
This Day in U S Military History
1847 – Samuel Colt rescues the future of his faltering gun company by winning a contract to provide the U.S. government with 1,000 of his .44 caliber revolvers. Before Colt began mass-producing his popular revolvers in 1847, handguns had not played a significant role in the history of either the American West or the nation as a whole. Expensive and inaccurate, short-barreled handguns were impractical for the majority of Americans, though a handful of elite still insisted on using dueling pistols to solve disputes in highly formalized combat. When choosing a practical weapon for self-defense and close-quarter fighting, most Americans preferred knives, and western pioneers especially favored the deadly and versatile Bowie knife. That began to change when Samuel Colt patented his percussion-repeating revolver in 1836. The heart of Colt's invention was a mechanism that combined a single rifled barrel with a revolving chamber that held five or six shots. When the weapon was cocked for firing, the chamber revolved automatically to bring the next shot into line with the barrel. Though still far less accurate than a well-made hunting rifle, the Colt revolver could be aimed with reasonable precision at a short distance (30 to 40 yards in the hands of an expert), because the interior bore was "rifled"–cut with a series of grooves spiraling down its length. The spiral grooves caused the slug to spin rapidly as it left the bbarrel, giving it gyroscopic stability. The five or six-shoot capacity also made accuracy less important, since a missed shot could quickly be followed with others. Yet most cowboys, gamblers, and gunslingers could never have afforded such a revolver if not for the de facto subsidy the federal government provided to Colt by purchasing his revolvers in such great quantities. After the first batch of revolvers proved popular with soldiers, the federal government became one of Colt's biggest customers, providing him with the much-needed capital to improve his production facilities. With the help of Eli Whitney and other inventors, Colt developed a system of mass production and interchangeable parts for his pistols that greatly lowered their cost. Though never cheap, by the early 1850s, Colt revolvers were inexpensive enough to be a favorite with Americans headed westward during the California Gold Rush. Between 1850 and 1860, Colt sold 170,000 of his "pocket" revolvers and 98,000 "belt" revolvers, mostly to civilians looking for a powerful and effective means of self-defense in the Wild West.
1945 – The fighting in the Ardennes continues; a German counterattack near Bastogne is repulsed by troops of US 3rd Army. There are attacks by US 8th and 3rd Corps and by the British 30th Corps. Some of the units of the 6th SS Panzer Army (Dietrich) are withdrawn and sent to the Eastern Front. In Alsace, the German attacks in the Bitche area continue.
1945 – Americans B-24 Liberator bombers attack Clark Field in Manila, on Luzon and claim to destroy 20 Japanese aircraft. Shipping near Luzon is also attacked. It is claimed that 35 Japanese vessels have been sunk or severely damaged.
1951 – For the third time in six months, Seoul changed hands as CCF troops moved in. The last USAF aircraft left Kimpo Airfield. Eighth Army regrouped behind the Pyongtaek-Wonju-Samchok line as Seoul fell to the communists for the second time in the war. Britain's 27th Commonwealth Infantry Brigade covered the U.N. withdrawal, then blew the bridges over the Han River. Naval guns of Task Force 90 held the communists at bay while 69,000 U.N. troops withdrew by sea from the port of Inchon on Amphibious Group 3 vessels.
1980 – President Carter announces US boycott of Moscow Olympics.
1989 – Aircraft (VF-32) from USS John F. Kennedy shoot down 2 hostile Libyan Migs over the Mediterranean.
Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day
McCARTON, JOHN
Rank and organization: Ship's Printer, U.S. Navy. Born: 1847, Brooklyn, N.Y. Accredited to: New York. G.O. No.: 326, 18 October 1884. Citation: For jumping overboard from the U.S. Training Ship New Hampshire off Coasters Harbor Island, near Newport, R.l., 4 January 1882, and endeavoring to rescue Jabez Smith, second class musician, from drowning.
SNYDER, WILLIAM E.
Rank and organization: Chief Electrician, U.S. Navy. Born: 24 February 1883, South Bethlehem, Pa. Accredited to: Pennsylvania. G.O. No.: 58, 2 March 1910. Citation: Serving on board the U.S.S. Birmingham, for extraordinary heroism, rescuing G.H. Kephart seaman, from drowning at Hampton Roads, Va., 4 January 1910.
*JACHMAN, ISADORE S.
Rank and organization: Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army, Company B, 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Place and date: Flamierge, Belgium, 4 January 1945. Entered service at: Baltimore, Md. Birth: Berlin, Germany. G.O. No.: 25, 9 June 1950. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty at Flamierge, Belgium, on 4 January 1945, when his company was pinned down by enemy artillery, mortar, and small arms fire, 2 hostile tanks attacked the unit, inflicting heavy. casualties. S/Sgt. Jachman, seeing the desperate plight of his comrades, left his place of cover and with total disregard for his own safety dashed across open ground through a hail of fire and seizing a bazooka from a fallen comrade advanced on the tanks, which concentrated their fire on him. Firing the weapon alone, he damaged one and forced both to retire. S/Sgt. Jachman's heroic action, in which he suffered fatal wounds, disrupted the entire enemy attack, reflecting the highest credit upon himself and the parachute infantry.
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AMERICAN AEROSPACE EVENTS for January 4, FIRSTS, LASTS, AND SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS. THANKS TO HAROLD "PHIL" MYERS CHIEF HISTORIAN AIR FORCE INTELLIGENCE, SURVEILLANCE, AND RECONNAISSANCE AGENCY
4 January
1936: The Vought SB2U Vindicator first flew. (5)
1937: Frank Sinclair flew a Seversky Airplane 240 miles per hour from New York to New Orleans, La., in a record of 5 hours. (24)
1944: Operation CARPETBAGGER. American and Royal Air Force planes dropped arms and supplies to French, Belgian, and Italian partisans for the first time. (4)
1945: Republic received a contract to build 100 production P-84 Thunderjets. (12)
1948: The University of California completed a pilot model for the world's first low-pressure supersonic wind tunnel. (24)
1951: KOREAN WAR. As Communist Chinese forces occupied Seoul, the last USAF aircraft left Kimpo Airfield. (28) Miss Caro Bayley flew a Piper Super Cub 30,203 feet over Miami to set a Federation Aeronautique Internationale altitude record for light planes. (24)
1955: Aerojet General began a research and development effort on rocket engines and associated ground equipment for the Titan Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. (6)
1957: Exercise JUMP LIGHT/Project ROTAD. Through 28 January, a joint Army-Tactical Air Command airlift effort supported this exercise and Project ROTAD (Reorganization and Testing of Airborne Division) near Fort Bragg, N. C. (11) 1958: The Army awarded Chrysler Corporation a $51.8 million contract to build the Jupiter Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile. (6)
1965: The Strategic Air Command's first Atlas-E missiles came off alert in the 548th Strategic Missile Squadron at Forbes AFB, Kans., and the 566th Strategic Missile Squadron at Francis E. Warren AFB, Wy. Moreover, the first Titan Is came off alert in the 568th Strategic Missile Squadron at Larson AFB, Wash., the 850th Strategic Missile Squadron at Ellsworth AFB, N. Dak., and the 851st Strategic Missile Squadron at Beale AFB, Calif. (6)
1968: A 6511th Test Group (Parachute) C-130 claimed an unofficial single-delivery record by dropping a 50,160-pound pallet from 1,200 feet at El Centro, Calif. (3)
1985: Major Patricia M. Young became the first female commander of an Air Force Space Command unit, Detachment 1, 20th Missile Warning Squadron. (16) (26)
1989: Two Navy F-14 Tomcats, operating from the USS John F. Kennedy, shot down two Libyan MiG-23 Floggers that were displaying hostile intentions over international waters. (20)
1994: Operation PROVIDE PROMISE. The USAF formed a C-130 "Delta Squadron" under the 435th Airlift Wing at Rhein-Main Air Base, Germany, with Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard assets. The squadron joined the effort to deliver relief supplies to Bosnia. (16)
2000: Joint Task Force FUNDAMENTAL RESPONSE. Final tallies of the flood devastation near Caracas, Venezuela revealed 30,000 people dead and another 400,000 left homeless. Through 10 March, 11 C-17 missions and 5 C-5 missions airlifted 189 passengers and 527 short tons of cargo to Simon Bolivar International Airport near Caracas to support Task Force relief efforts. (See 20 December 1999) (22)
2001 : A C-17 Globemaster III from the 315th Airlift Wing at Charleston AFB, S. C., flew the 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft from Buckley AFB, Colo., to Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.The mission was named as a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke, evoking the name of his and Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Odyssey was launched April 7, 2001, on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and reached Mars orbit on October 24, 2001, at 02:30 UTC (October 23, 19:30 PDT, 22:30 EDT). On May 28, 2002 (sol 210), NASA reported that Odyssey's GRS instrument had detected large amounts of hydrogen, a sign that there must be ice lying within a meter of the planet's surface, and proceeded to map the distribution of water below the shallow surface. The orbiter also discovered vast deposits of bulk water ice near the surface of equatorial regions.
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