Special Operations

Veteran Cleans Thousands of Headstones For Memorial Day

Every Memorial Day, we see or read stories of ordinary Americans who do extraordinary things that make us all proud of their exploits, which is the reason we have the day, to begin with. One veteran in Seattle donated his time and effort into cleaning up the veteran’s headstones in a cemetery.

Jordan Houghton and several other members of American Legion Post 206 in Seattle are giving their time and efforts to clean up the veterans graves in Evergreen Washelli Cemetery in Washington.

“A lot of people think it’s a long weekend. In reality, it’s about the sacrifices that families have made and those people from the families,” said Houghton, also a veteran.
Houghton, who’s worked hours trying to scrub the decades’ worth of dirt and grime from the headstones, said every person buried in the cemetery “has a story” and he’s picked up little pieces of each veteran’s life.
“Well, there’s a lot of stuff that’s lost in history. Some of these graves tell amazing stories,” he told ABC News affiliate KOMO-TV recently.
He said he’d found an Irish doctor who’d served as a commander as well as a World War I nurse corps lieutenant, who, he said, was likely one of the first females ever to serve in the Army.
During his visits, he’s also gotten a chance to meet with military families. He said that while he and others have cleaned about a couple thousand headstones, a few thousand still remain.
The American Legion Post 206 plans to keep at the cleaning effort until every last one is no longer defiled.
“You do get a little bit of an intimate history of this person, where they were born, how they lived, what they earned while they were in the military. It’s really interesting,” Houghton said.

Watching the reaction that Houghton got when interacting with the family of one veteran says it all. His and those of his post are greatly appreciated.

To read the entire article from ABC News, click here:

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Green Beret Robert Anspach is Still MIA in Vietnam

There are still men missing in action from the war in Vietnam and for the family of Green Beret MSG Robert Anspach, there is no closure, no grave to visit on Memorial Day, only questions as to when will their husband and father ever come home.

Army Sgt. Robert Anspach will forever be 33.
Fifty-one years after he was killed in action on a reconnaissance mission near the height of the Vietnam War, Anspach’s status remains classified as killed in action and body not recovered.
“They’ve never brought him home,” said Cindy Anspach Baucom, his youngest daughter. “People say you need to let this go. We say, ‘No,’ there’s no direction to push but to bring him home.
“It was hard. Everybody else had a dad,” she said. “It was very hard.”
Anspach, a Green Beret who served with Fort Bragg’s 4th Mobile Strike Force Command, 5th Special Forces Group, is honored on the Vietnam Memorial Wall. His name is etched into the polished black granite in Washington, D.C.
Baucom was 8 years old when she last saw her father alive, while peering through a chain-link gate of the Fayetteville airport. Glenda Anspach, his wife, had just turned 30.
Robert Allen Anspach had been home on reenlistment leave, and he was boarding a commercial flight for a return to Vietnam. As he was getting on, Glenda Anspach said, Sgt. Barry Sadler of “The Ballad of the Green Berets” fame was disembarking.
Robert Anspach’s five family members — Glenda and their young children, Greg, Sandy, Cindy and Michael — waved goodbye.
Anspach and his son a year before his death at Ft. Bragg.
Mrs. Anspach later learned that her husband had told a friend that he felt if he went back to Vietnam again, he would never come back.
Anspach is one of 1,598 Americans still missing and unaccounted for in Southeast Asia from the Vietnam War era, according to the National League of POW/MIA Families.
Mrs. Anspach and the family have never gotten closure from his death. The family is not satisfied with the amount of information the Army has provided them over the years.
Oddly, Anspach had been missing in action once before.
This was during the Korean conflict, about a year into his military career.
Glenda Anspach, whose mind remains sharp on dates and details, told how he and a buddy were caught behind enemy lines. It would take them six days before they could work their way back. She said the commanding officer was typing up a missing-in-action letter to send to Robert Anspach’s mother when they showed up in camp.
During one of his three tours of duty in Korea, he was wounded on Heartbreak Ridge. That was the disastrous 1951 battle for the United States and its United Nations allies, in terms of casualties.
On Sept. 11, 1967, Anspach — who had started on this first tour of duty in Vietnam the previous January — was aboard the lead boat in a six-airboat operation that departed camp at 8:30 a.m. The mission was to sweep north to within a mile of the Cambodian border, the POW Network said, then west to the Mekong River.
As the first four airboats left the stream and entered the Vietnamese portion of the river about 5 miles northwest of the camp, Viet Cong bunkers on both sides of the channel caught them in a lethal crossfire, the network account said.
“Concentrated machine gunfire riddled all six airboats in the first burst,” the POW Network states, “killing SFC Anspach immediately.”

But the family says the reports that they’ve read all differ greatly and after all of these years now, they just want Anspach’s body returned. Anspach’s widow never remarried and stayed in the Fayetteville area to remain close by the POW/MIA effort to recover missing Americans.

To read the entire article from Fayetteville Observer News, click here:

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

USS Arizona Memorial Closed Indefinitely Due to Structural Concerns

The USS Arizona Memorial is one of the most visited places for visitors going to Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, especially with the Memorial Day weekend in full swing, those visitors won’t be able to visit the battleship memorial for quite some time.

Access to the USS Arizona memorial will remain closed for an unknown period of time after the damage was deemed “more significant than originally anticipated,” Hawaii News Now reported.
Boat transportation to the site was suspended May 6 after one of the vessel operators noticed a crack in the supporting structure for the visitor loading ramp, and the Pearl Harbor official visitors website is noting the historic site’s change of plans until further notice.
The memorial marks the final resting place of 1,102 of the 1,177 sailors and Marines killed on the USS Arizona battleship during the surprise attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The attack was the opening salvo in the United States’ involvement in World War II.
Visitors with tickets to the area will be able to view a documentary, and participate in a narrated harbor tour surrounding the memorial, but will not be allowed to disembark.
Tourists were initially allowed to disembark at the memorial after crews completed interim repairs. But the cracks reappeared hours later, indicating a more serious issue.
“There is a brow or an edge where the visitor ramp meets the memorial, and at that point, there’s been some fissures located on the exterior,” said Jay Blount, a spokesman for the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument. “After further investigation on the interior, it was determined that the structure is not supporting the loading ramp the way that we need.”
Engineers are working to figure out possible long-term solutions.
“The amount of time needed to implement the repairs is unknown, but the (National Park Service) will continue to provide information to the public as our team of specialists works together to restore access as soon as possible,” memorial staff said Friday in a news release.

Access to other museums in Pearl Harbor, such as the Battleship Missouri Memorial, the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum & Park, and the Pacific Aviation Museum will not be affected by the closure.

To read the entire article from Fox News, click here:

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Putin, Russia Appears Pleased Where the Syrian Conflict Is

The Syrian Civil War is moving towards a stalemate with the government of President Assad regaining control of 60 percent of his territory. The U.S.-led coalition will continue to hold ground in the east and the Turks have made it clear they will not return Syrian territory around Idlib.

And Russian President Vladimir Putin is fine with all of that. He’s already managing similar conflicts like this in Georgia and Ukraine.

Other significant players in Syria, including Israel, the United States, Turkey, and the remaining Sunni Arab rebels, may likewise discover they’d be satisfied with this new reality. The clearest losers, by contrast, would be the Assad regime and Iran.
What are the indications Syria is moving in the direction of frozen conflict? Consider the recent visit by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to Russia to meet with Putin. At the press conference following the meeting, Putin told reporters that, “Following the Syrian Army’s notable successes in fighting terrorism, and with the activation of the political process, the foreign forces based in Syria will start to withdraw from the country.” This seemed to hint that the Russian president wasn’t interested in assisting the Assad regime’s reconquest of the entirety of Syria. And absent the Russian air support that the Syrian military has relied on in major combat operations (including the siege of Aleppo and the destruction of rebel-controlled Eastern Ghouta), such reconquest would be impossible.
Some have speculated that Putin was referring only to the withdrawal of foreign forces opposed to the regime. In the past, Moscow has sought to differentiate between its own presence in Syria (at the invitation of the “legitimate” Syrian authorities) and the uninvited presence of other foreign elements. On this occasion, however, Russia’s Syria envoy, Alexander Lavrentiev, clarified that the president was referring to “all foreign military forces stationed in Syria, including American, Turkish, Hezbollah, and Iranian [forces].”
The Russian statement was followed by an angry response from Tehran. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi told reporters in Tehran that, “No one can force Iran to do anything. … As long as terrorism exists and the Syrian government wants, Iran will have presence [in Syria].” The dueling statements are just one indication among many of differences between Moscow and some of its allies about the future of Syria.
Iran has been pushing for the regime to attempt an assault on remaining rebel enclaves in southwest Syria. The arrival of Iran-supported units to the border, however, brings with it the possibility of a large-scale Israeli response. Russia has no interest in such an outcome, which could plunge Syria into a new war and threaten the gains the Assad regime has already made.

Putin it seems is content with the consolidation of his main ally in the Assad regime and continuing to work with both Turkey and Israel as well as the continuing undermining of the West’s influence in the area.

To read the entire article from Foreign Policy, click here:

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

North Korea Still Willing to Meet With President Trump

Kim Jong Un has stated that North Korea is still willing to meet with President Donald Trump “at any time” despite the recent cancellation of the summit meeting between the two leaders.

The two leaders were slated to meet in Singapore on June 12^th. The language of their message was not as bombastic as usual for the North’s Foreign Ministry.

Kim Kye Gwan, a top official at North Korea’s Foreign Ministry, said Trump’s decision to cancel the talks runs counter to the global community’s wishes for peace on the Korean Peninsula.
“We would like to make known to the US side once again that we have the intent to sit with the US side to solve problem(s) regardless of ways at any time,” said Kim in comments published by the country’s state-run news agency KCNA Friday.
Kim said Trump’s decision is “not consistent with the desire of humankind for peace and stability in the world, to say nothing of those in the Korean Peninsula.”
President Trump canceled the summit Thursday in a letter addressed to Kim Jong Un, citing recent hostile comments from top North Korean officials and concern over Pyongyang’s commitment to giving up its nuclear weapons. Trump said it would be “inappropriate” to have the summit given his worries.
The final straw, US officials said, was a statement Thursday from North Korea’s Foreign Ministry calling US Vice President Mike Pence a “political dummy” and hinting that Pyongyang was ready for a “nuclear showdown” should diplomacy fail.
Trump’s administration claimed there had been hiccups behind the scenes. In a background briefing a senior White House official said the North Koreans had failed to turn up to a meeting with a White House official in Singapore to talk planning and logistics. “The North Koreans didn’t tell us anything. They simply stood us up,” the official said.
But despite President Trump’s abrupt cancellation, he appeared to leave the door open for talks to resume at some point, telling reporters Thursday that “if and when Kim Jong Un chooses to engage in constructive dialogue and actions, I am waiting.”

The two sides can still meet and South Korea, who was acting almost as a middleman in the earlier negotiations will be key if future talks are planned. The North Koreans did destroy their nuclear test site in a show for western media.

To read the entire article from CNN News, click here:

Photo courtesy CNN Video Screenshot

US Disinvites China from Pacific Military Exercise

The continuing escalation of tension between the United States and China has been ratcheted up even more with the U.S. disinviting the Chinese from participating in an upcoming international naval exercise to be held off Hawaii.

Among other things, the U.S. is upset of China’s militarization of small islands in the South China Sea. China’s foreign minister criticized the U.S. decision calling it “very unconstructive” and “unhelpful.”

The move is in response to China’s continued placement of military hardware on seven artificial islands in the Spratly Island chain that it claims as its territory.
“China’s continued militarization of disputed features in the South China Sea only serves to raise tensions and destabilize the region,” said Lt. Colonel Christopher Logan, a Pentagon spokesman.
“As an initial response to China’s continued militarization of the South China Sea, we have disinvited the PLA Navy from the 2018 Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) Exercise,” he added. “China’s behavior is inconsistent with the principles and purposes of the RIMPAC exercise.”
Held every two years, this year’s version of the RIMPAC exercise was to begin in late June and end in early August. The exercise is largest international Navy exercise, with 27 nations slated to participate in this year’s version.
China’s navy participated in a limited role in the 2014 and 2016 versions of the exercise.
The move to rescind the invitation to participate in this year’s exercise is directly pegged to China’s buildup of large-scale air and sea facilities on the seven artificial islands it has built up in the Spratly Islands.
In 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping made assurances to President Barack Obama that China was not seeking to militarize the islands, but satellite photos indicate China has consistently placed military equipment on the islands, and built up runways and port facilities that could be used by China’s military.
“We believe these recent deployments and the continued militarization of these features is a violation of the promise that President Xi made to the United States and the World not to militarize the Spratly Islands,” said Logan.
“We have strong evidence that China has deployed anti-ship missiles, surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems, and electronic jammers to contested features in the Spratly Islands region of the South China Sea,” said Logan. “China’s landing of bomber aircraft at Woody Island has also raised tensions.”
State Councilor Wang Yi labeled the rescinding of the invitation “very unconstructive” and “unhelpful to mutual understanding.”

Wang has stated that China is only building civilian and some necessary defense facilities on their own islands,” he said.

He added that the Chinese retain their right to self-defense and compared the construction to what the U.S. does on their bases in Guam and Hawaii.

To read the entire article from ABC News, click here:

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Amnesty International: Nigeria’s Military Raped, Killed Civilians

Amnesty International, the human rights organization says the Nigerian military has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the continuing war against Islamic insurgent groups.

The charges leveled against the Nigerian military include rape, torture, and the killing of civilians. The military is fighting not only Boko Haram but the Islamic State West Africa. The military denies all charges.

The crimes were perpetrated for years and have continued despite a presidential inquiry established last August whose findings have not been made public, said the watchdog.
In a statement, the Nigerian military described Amnesty’s findings as “a false report on fictitious rape incidents in IDP (internally displaced person) camps in the North East region of Nigeria.”
A presidency statement said Amnesty’s report lacks credibility.
The 89-page report is based on hundreds of interviews and is replete with accounts of sexual violence, torched villages and other abuses.
“The soldiers, they betrayed us, they said that we should come out of from our villages,” said a woman whose name was given as Yakura in the report. “They said it would be safer and that they would give us a secure place to stay. But when we came, they betrayed us. They detained our husbands and then they raped us women,” said Yakura, who fled Andara village, Borno state, in December 2016.
Nigeria has waged a nine-year war against Boko Haram and its now more powerful offshoot, Islamic State West Africa. The country has fought alongside Cameroon, Chad and Niger and been supported by the United States, Great Britain and France.
The conflict has killed more than 30,000 people and spawned one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
For years, rights groups, aid organizations and journalists have documented military abuses, with little resulting action from the armed forces.
According to Amnesty’s report, interviewees “said that when the military conducted operations in their villages, they burnt down homes and opened fire at remaining residents indiscriminately.”
Often the military would forcibly take people to camps for people displaced by the conflict, the report said. People the military detained without food and water would die, the watchdog said.
Many of the women were held for six months to two years without charge, some were tortured and beaten, and some, along with 32 children, died, the report said.

Amnesty International claims in their report that hunger, sickness and sexual violence remain an issue at all of the displacement camps and occurs on a large scale.

To read the entire article from Voice of America, click here:

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Startup That Made Safer NFL Helmets Now Turning to the Military

Vicis, a Seattle startup company that sought to make a safer football helmet now has their version in the hands of over 100 NFL players and thousands of high school and college players.

The company is now turning their attention to the military community and making a helmet to better protect our troops.

Last year, the startup signed a contract with the U.S. Army to redesign part of its helmets, co-founder and CEO Dave Marver revealed. The company has been working in stealth to incorporate some of its football helmet technology into the standard issue helmets worn by Army and Marine Corps troops.

U.S. military helmets are optimized for ballistic protection, meaning defense against bullets and shrapnel. Yet roughly 80 percent of head injuries in the military occur in nondeployed settings where those things generally aren’t an issue. Instead, these injuries tend to be of the blunt force variety, incurred from incidents like jumping out of aircraft or striking one’s head during drills or combat training.

In 2016, medical staff from Joint Base Lewis-McChord outside Seattle approached Vicis about trying to improve the blunt impact performance of both the Army and Marine combat helmets, which are similar to one another.

That team operated behind the scenes throughout the past two years. Initially, Vicis funded the work itself, but last year the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center offered the startup a development contract. The company is also starting to raise an approximately $15 million Series B round, which will bring its total funding near $80 million.

For now, Vicis’s work focuses on the pads on the interior of the helmet. The Zero1 football helmet has a layer that consists of hundreds of columns that bend on impact. “The technology inside the pads leverages those same engineering principles,” Marver says.

The improvements have been measurable. Vicis tested its pads in a lab setting using Department of Defense test protocols earlier this year, and the startup says its version performed between 30 and 55 percent better than each model the U.S. military currently uses

While the results are very encouraging, the design is probably still a year or two away. The Army is doing its own testing and Vicis designed the pads so that they could fit into the ballistic helmets without need a total redesign. Existing helmets can be retrofitted with the pads if adopted.

To read the entire article from Inc., click here:

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Israeli Strikes Hamas Tunnel, Outpost and Boats in Gaza

After Hamas orchestrated the “peaceful protest” that the world bought into, the Israeli military wasn’t waiting around for the next one. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), struck at a tunnel as well as two boats that the Palestinians were using to block the blockade.

Palestinian media reported that a training compound belonging to Hamas’ military wing and two boats in the Gaza seaport were targeted in the strike. According to Palestinian reports, the targeted boats were due to depart from the port in an attempt to break the naval blockade on the Strip.
Local residents reported hearing three explosions at the port. A fire broke out at the scene, which rescue forces were working to extinguish.
There were no casualties in the incident, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The strikes were in response to Tuesday’s events when a group of about ten Palestinian approached the border fence near Rafah, according to the Israeli army. Despite the army’s high alert, the group managed to cut through the fence and reach an outpost set up for Israeli snipers due to recent border protests.
The outpost was empty at the time and the Palestinian managed to set it on fire. Afterward they returned to Gaza. The army claims they were aware of the event as it was happening, however, it is unclear why the army would permit them to cross and damage the outpost.
An Israeli army tank fired Tuesday on a Hamas outpost in response to the incident.
This is not the first time Palestinians manage to infiltrate into Israel. In one incident at the end of March, three Palestinians armed with grenades and knives entered Israel and were arrested more than 12 miles inside Israeli territory, near the Tze’elim army base in the south. Days earlier, four Palestinians had illegally crossed the border trying to set fire to military vehicles.

On Tuesday night Israeli security forces arrested four Palestinians suspected of terrorist activities and violent rioting against citizens and security personnel in the West Bank town of Rantis.

They also confiscated funds used to support terrorist operations and seized several weapons.

To read the entire article from Haaretz, click here:

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

Israeli Launches First Airstrike Using F-35 Against Iranian Troops in Syria

Israeli pilots have carried out the first operational airstrikes using the new U.S.-built F-35 stealth fighter according to Israeli Air Force General Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin.

The Israelis pounded Iranian bases and positions in Syria after the Iranian troops launched a slew of missiles at Israel from Syrian territory.

“The F-35 squadron has become an operational squadron. We are flying the F-35 all over the Middle East,” he said.
Norkin presented images of the F-35 over Beirut, Lebanon, and said that the stealth fighter did not participate in the most recent strike in Syria but did in two previous ones. He was speaking at a three-day conference organized by the IAF in Herzliya, to which senior officers from armies all over the world were invited.
The IAF commander also said that Iran fired 32 rockets at Israel during the flare-up across the Syrian border earlier this month. According to him, four rockets were intercepted by Israel and the rest landed outside of Israeli territory, and more than 100 surface-to-air missiles were fired at Israeli jets over Syria.
“After that [the Iranian attack] we attacked over 20 Iranian targets in Syria. Unfortunately, Syrian air defense systems fired over 100 antiaircraft missiles at our planes and in response we destroyed their antiaircraft batteries,” Norkin said.
IAF chief Norkin outlined the reasons behind Israel’s growing anxiety over Iranian activities in Syria. “The Quds Force established itself at T-4 base, 250 kilometers from Israel. From this base they tried to attack using a drone that entered into Israel, a few months ago. After this incident we realized that they were continuing to store weapons on this base, including air defense capabilities, which we attacked last month,” he explained at the conference.
“Over the past few weeks we learned that Iran had sent long-range missiles and rockets to Syria, including the Uragan launchers that we attacked north of Damascus,” added Norkin.
After months of tensions, Israel and Iran locked horns directly in Syria on May 11. At the time, Israel reported that Iranian forces had fired 20 rockets at IDF positions in the Golan Heights. Four of the rockets aimed at Israel were intercepted by the Iron Dome air defense system while the remaining rockets exploded on Syrian territory, the military said.

The Israelis are also looking to upgrade their refueling and helicopter fleets but as far as the F-35, the early usage looks to the outside as being a successful investment.

To read the entire article from Haaretz, click here:

Photo courtesy Screen shot of video