What's it going to take to stop this immigration garbage AND remove the enemies within our borders?

One of the things that bothers me about information that comes across the net has to do with who sends it and how reliable it is. It's so bad, we now have so many places to go where we can check out the validity of posts or claims, it seems that an entire industry has been built to chase all the lies and deceit.

A few days prior to September 11th, I became very focused on "Attention to Detail". Chief Warrant Officer Bernard T. Diable still lives inside my head even though it's been 45 years since he began teaching that course at Ft. Wolters, Texas. I can't seem to help that and after all this time, I don't think it needs help, it needs sharing.

Until the moment we experienced the attack on the World Trade Center, I never paid much attention to the Caliphate crew. After that day, I spent more time hating than I did debating the history of their beliefs.

As it relates to thoughts about that and our future, it took some time but I eventually returned to Diable's Attention to Detail course for combat. I hope that none of you are in denial about the combat side of that statement but if you are, all you have to do is spend a little bit of energy and effort searching the net about their conduct and what they've been up to since day 1. It's their thing, it's what they do and it will always be what they do. Accept it.

As Leland would say, you don't have to agree with it, like it, aid and abet it, condone it or support it. One thing you better do is "accept it". It's real and despite all the lies and propaganda that comes with it, all you have to do is focus on the common denominator and you will see that killin' YOUR ass is the main goal.

Now that we've started to see beheadings here, I have come up with the Timmy Solution Part I. Deport the entire bunch. Every single, solitary one of them has to leave and never come back. It's actually pretty simple. If you are a rag head, your ass is history here.

For those of you who still hold on to that insane notion that not all rag heads are bad, please feel free to either point out the good ones OR accept the following:

Osama Bin Laden was a baby at one time. How much better off would the entire world be if someone had killed him before day 2 of his life? Answer that one. Now, if you still don't agree, try this on for size.

If there wasn't a single, solitary rag head in the Country and every one of them had been deported, how much rag head trouble would come from the work place or any other place in the Country. The answer is "none" because there wouldn't be any of them here. Pretty simple, don't you think. For you left wing idiots that think there are some good ones out there, read their plan book.

The Timmy Solution Part II has to do with voting. If you are not from men and women who lived in this Country after the Civil War or World War I, you don't get to vote. Dad was born in 1906 and mom was born the year the Titanic sunk. Do the math, do the study. Don't you think that's fair? If you disagree, adjust the voting eligibility situation to one that can only come with 150 years of being an American Family. Seems to me that those 150 year Americans should have a stronger say so than those that have been here 150 days.

If we have another beheading, MAYBE THEN you will get the idea that this multiculturalism stuff ain't gonna work and neither will a border that is INTENTIONALLY left open. I'll close with a quote during the days when the west was being settled and cattle rustling was going unpunished. The guy I was listening to said: "Unenforced laws guarantee Lawlessness and Anarchy. I liked that part.

Carry a gun and start carrying a knife. You never know when the opportunity for a vengeance beheading might present itself. The people in Texas already know about this rule. For the rest of you that don't, y'all have a nice day.

If it ain't one thing, it's another. Memorial stolen.

I received an email from Doug, a friend of mine that I went to flight school with. He told me that they had a memorial for Jane Fonda, set up at Ft. Meade, but it appears to be missing. It was a row of white porcelain with flush handles on it and he was wondering where it ended up.

I'm not sure if there is a connection here but it just so happens that I have one of those at my house. As a coincidence, I've seen the same thing at Blame it on Bob's house as well as Wayne and Danita's. I'm positive that neither of those families were ever stationed at Ft. Meade but I had to ask myself "How in the world did all of us end up with a Jane Fonda Memorial at our houses?"

Mine does not have the little picture of her in the bottom of it, the kind of picture that makes a good target for the men folk that use it. I'm positive that Blame it on Bob's doesn't have a picture in it either but I'm not sure about Wayne and Danita. Rumor has it that there's is a Barack Memorial at Wayne's place but I'm not sure. Y'all know how Wayne is so I'm not going to ask him about it and I'm scared to ask Bob.

In any event, if any of y'all see one of these memorials, please let me know so I can tell Doug as he's real curious if any of us has them. I'm not trying to Blame it on Bob but somehow, some way, I think he might have had something to do with it. Y'all have a nice day.

Delayed by preparations for 9/11

I had to take a break from posting because I was behind schedule for the 9/11 preparations. I don't like to view myself as a bit slower than I used to be and would prefer to describe that condition as paying more attention to detail. Everybody knows that takes time. You have to ask yourself a few questions when pondering these things.

"How much time did I spend preparing the gonad extraction and penile inverting device"?

See there! I bet some of you didn't even have yours sharpened before midnight of the 10th!  I have other duties here besides being retired, writing about my experiences dealing with illegals and maintaining my presence in various public places to stay informed, connected and intellectually engaged.

I took great risks preparing for 9/11 this week as I began to sneak up behind a rag head at the counter and mimicked the skillful maneuver illustrating the proper way to slit a throat from behind. That, in and of itself isn't such a big deal but doing that in a stealthy manner that prevents all of the patrons in the café from screaming out loud, is a whole nuther thing.

I thought I'd pulled it off until the morning of the 11th when I returned to the café to the sounds of laughter coming from the wait staff. One girl asked: "Are you really that fast"? I told her that I had an invisible knife and that I was only doing it for purposes of demonstration. It was clear to me that she'd not been through The Bernard T. Diable course of Attention to Detail.

In any event and for whatever it's worth, I've done some more study lately and discovered that September 11th has a special meaning for the rag heads. Two times in history, one near Vienna and another on Malta, September 11th marks the day of a disaster of monumental proportions for the donkey lovers. There was more ass kickin' and name takin' of the rag heads on those two occasions and they've apparently been pissed off about that ever since then. Talk about holdin' a grudge! Don't that beat all. It's been centuries since all that happened.

I just wanted to explain the last few days of vacation so you would understand that only those items of the greatest concern could take me away from the lessons here. My apologies to Karen, Troy, MFH, Dupe (who witnessed the knife cutting scene in the café), Eddie, Craig, The Woodruff' family and Blame it on Bob who anxiously awaits these epistles. I appreciate your patience. Lessons resume shortly. Thanks.

The Best Combat Mission I Ever Flew.

The last week of November 1970, was a tough one for the 11th Cav. Those areas that were close to Xuan Loc, the one where we shot up the log truck when I was with the 199th, were becoming more dangerous because of the continued immigration of the NVA. With the 199th gone, the call to respond to all the activity there was given to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and the Air Cav Troop was assigned the mission to stop it. Despite the fact that I had only been with the Air Cav for ten weeks, I was assigned the left hand seat and was to fly with John Finnerty, the most soft spoken of all the pilots from the Blues.

Even though I had already been serving as the Standardization pilot for Nighthawk missions for the 11th Cav, I never had to take a check ride for the position of Aircraft Commander. The Aircraft Commander always flew from the left seat and the copilot flew from the right seat. Despite that, I felt very comfortable about the mission because we were going to stage from Xuan Loc which was like a home coming for me and the landing zone was located in the same opening where we'd blown up the log truck.

We loaded the Huey with as many ARPs as we could and took off for Xuan Loc for a pre-insertion briefing. It actually was quite nice to be hanging out in an area that I considered to be relatively safe and to do so with a group of guys that I had become very comfortable flying with.

If you can visualize a dozen Hueys parked on the ramp next to 4 Cobras and 4 Loaches, you might imagine how large the force was. I don't know how many ARPs were there but I would have to guess that there was somewhere between 60 and 72 of them because we would carry five or six of them at a time. Those boys were carrying lots of ammo, M 60 machine guns, M 79 grenade launchers and the usual M 16s. It was hot and we were heavy.

When the Cobras and Loaches were given the order to take off, we knew it wouldn't be long before we were going in. We had already gone over the maps a hundred times and before the Cobras were out of sight, the ARPs began to gather around each Huey. We were ready and when the order to "Pull Pitch" was given, we loaded the Hueys and began our start up procedures.

It only took a few minutes to get into our formation and make our way to the landing zone where we were told to establish a holding pattern while the Cobras worked over the site where we would make our insertion of the troops. Radio checks were made to insure that each aircraft could communicate with the men on the ground and when that was done, we began our tactical approach to the landing zone.

Jim "Jelly" Gelsomin was flying lead that day and I was Chalk 2. Jelly was the top gun in the Slick Platoon and was respected by everyone. He was one of the best Huey pilots any of us had ever flown with. I can close my eyes and, just as we were about to touch down, I can still see my main rotor blades overlapping his tail rotor. It was the most precise formation maneuver I'd ever experienced at that time.

The Cobras and Loaches had cleared the way for the landing and I don't recall seeing a single tracer coming our way when we made our approach. We dropped the Arps at the exact location we needed to hit, and departed the LZ to head back to Xuan Loc where we waited and waited for the call to pick them up. It seemed like a long time but I doubt if it was much more than an hour before we received the call informing us that they were in heavy contact, that some of them had been hit and we needed to get them out of there and let the Air Force finish them off.

I received a radio call on my UHF radio, something that had never happened before. They asked if my ground radio was inop because I had failed to acknowledge a radio to call to insure that it worked. I made the call and when I reported that the radio wasn't working, they told me to hold west of the Pick Up Zone until needed.

Finnerty and I entered a holding pattern just west of the PZ and watched the extraction as all of the Hueys, except us, picked up a load of Arps and exited the PZ. That's when TSHTF. As the last Huey was just about to leave the PZ and we began to make the course correction to join their formation, my UHF received an incoming call informing me that 4 of the Arps were left in the PZ and we would have to go in and pick them up.

If there ever was an "Oh shit" moment, that was it. The Arps had already killed a bunch of them and I knew that they were chasing our guys as they made their way to the PZ. I knew they were hoping to kill some of our guys and take out the Hueys as they landed to extract the Arps.They told us that the 4 men were hiding behind a fallen log that was laying aside the main road we used to land on. I knew it was one of the logs that came from the explosion of the log truck we'd blown up a few months earlier.

We dropped down to tree top level so the NVA couldn't get a shot at us, screamed toward the road, and the moment we cleared the trees, we began looking for the log where the 4 men were reported to be hiding. We were a bit too hot coming into the PZ so we executed a "quick stop" maneuver where the nose is very high, the tail is very low and zero pitch is in the blades. We landed right next to the log and within an instant, the 4 Arps were on board and we were pulling pitch to get out of there before the NVA could shoot us down.

We hit the top of a defoliated tree with the chin bubble but managed to escape without too much difficulty or damage except for one of the Arps whose pants were caught by some limbs as we were clearing the trees. It nearly tore them off his body and almost allowed him to establish himself as the first guy in the 11th Cav, to get out of a fight.....naked. I'll try to cut and paste that story in Ed's own words but I'll have to do that later. Now, back to the fight.

At that point, we returned to Dian and made our landing in the revetment. As I was letting the turbine do it's 2 minute cool down, I looked out of the cockpit window and saw all 4 of the Arps waiting for us to shut down and exit the Huey. One was Sgt. Kerry Earl, the others were Ed Usrey, Sgt. Dee and one other Arp who's name I can not remember.

When I got out, Sgt. Kerry Earl came over to me, hugged my neck, patted me on the back and kissed me on the cheek. I was shocked. He told me that we had saved their lives and that the place was crawling with NVA. He told me: "If anybody ever screws with you, let me know and I will take care of it". He had the wide eyes of a man who had been in a tough fight and I knew what he meant. I didn't know that I wouldn't have to ask for any help but that it would eventually be needed and he would eventually come to my rescue. That's another story that you will hear but let me close this one with a report from Ed Usrey that came many years later.

Thanks to computers, Ed contacted me to let me know that every Thanksgiving Day he began his blessing with "Thank You for sending Mr. Butler to take us out of that horrible fight. Without him, I would not have my wife, my children or my Grand Children. Thank You for giving me my family".

The moment I had that conversation with Ed, I knew that it had been the best mission I had ever flown.  I made sure to let him know that John Finnerty was just as important to that mission as I was and eventually, through a mutual friend, Curt Lambert, Ed met face to face with John Finnerty during a reunion in California and had an opportunity to thank him. Thanks for letting me unload this story.  




 

Ed Wolfe's notes from his Nighthawk mission with Wolman on May 21, 1970, six days into my tour.

 

The story below is from my first room mate in Vietnam, CW4 retired Ed Wolfe, with the permission of Craig Wolman. Thanks to both of you.

 

*********************************************************************************

On the evening of 21 May 1970, Craig and I were given a mission to check out a grid area that was SSE of FSB Mace and about 10km north of Ham Tan.  We flew out to that area after dark and started a VR with the Star Light Scope operator checking out the area. 

 

Shortly after we started, the Star Light Scope operator found a target which eventually was found to be 4 trucks and about 18 individuals on top of a small hill top in the process of transferring weapons and materials.  The Star Light Operator transferred the target location to the Xenon searchlight operator and then Craig gave the order to open fire with the mini-gun.  Eventually the 50-cal gunner on the left side of the Huey got into the action to open fire.  I had been about one week in country and this was the first nighttime and Night Hawk mission for me.  The instrument panel of the Huey did a blurry dance as the mini-gun and the 50 shot up the area.  A radio report back to Mace brought a AC-119 Spooky gunship and a flight of TAC Air fighters to the station we were working.  Both Spooky and the F-4’s lit up the area. 

 

After we had concluded that no fire was being returned, we headed back to Mace to attempt to get some rest.  After refueling, we headed to the aviation shelter and laid down.  About 0100, the battalion commander from that area challenged our report of the contact and ordered us to return to the area of the contact for a confirmation.  Ground troops found 4 burnt up trucks and 18 dead individuals.  I believe that we got credit for a truck or two and 4 of the dead, whereas the USAF got credit for the balance.