@Stephis_world Good morning Steph and crew. Being American/ I'm routing USA. I'm about 40 minutes from Foxboro where on June 23, Team, England will be playing group match vs Ghana. I'm also just a few trolly stops away from city hall plaza in Boston where matches will be on big screens
She was 23, a widow with a baby, when she parachuted into Nazi-occupied France—and changed history forever.
Violette Szabo's life should have been ordinary. Born in 1921 to a French mother and British father, she grew up between two worlds, fluent in both languages, dreaming of nothing more than love and family.
She found both. Married young to Étienne, a dashing French Foreign Legionnaire. Had a daughter, Tania. Built the beginning of a life.
Then the telegram came. Étienne—killed in action at El Alamein. Gone before he ever met his daughter.
Most 21-year-old widows would have collapsed into grief. Violette transformed hers into fire.
She walked into the offices of Britain's Special Operations Executive—the shadowy organization training agents for espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines. The same organization that barely believed women belonged in such dangerous work.
She didn't ask permission. She demanded training.
And they gave it to her. Weaponry. Parachuting. Demolition. Hand-to-hand combat. She mastered it all with a ferocity that stunned her instructors. This wasn't just duty—this was personal.
Violette parachuted into occupied France twice. Not as a nurse. Not as a secretary. As an operative. She gathered intelligence. Coordinated resistance networks. Armed the French underground. Moved through Nazi checkpoints with a calmness that belied the danger humming beneath every moment.
On her second mission in June 1944, everything went sideways. Ambushed by German troops, she could have run. She could have hidden.
Instead, she fought.
With her Sten gun blazing, Violette held her ground, providing covering fire so her comrade could escape. She exchanged shots with trained soldiers until her ammunition ran dry. Only then did they take her.
What followed was worse than any battlefield. Interrogation. Torture. The Gestapo tried everything to break her—to extract names, safe houses, codes that would destroy the resistance network she'd helped build.
She gave them nothing.
They sent her to Ravensbrück, the concentration camp designed to extinguish hope, especially in women. But even there, fellow prisoners remembered Violette's strength. Her defiance. Her humanity in a place built to erase it.
On February 5, 1945—just weeks before the war's end—she was executed. She was 23 years old. Her daughter was barely three.
Violette Szabo never wore a general's uniform. She never commanded armies. She fought in occupied villages and darkened safe houses, with false papers and a gun she knew how to use.
History didn't make room for women like her—so she made room for herself.
She reminds us that courage doesn't wait for permission. That grief can become power. That the most dangerous weapon in any war is someone with nothing left to lose and everything to fight for.
Her daughter Tania grew up without her. But she grew up free.
That's what Violette died for. That's what she'll always be remembered for.
Not as a victim. Not as a footnote.
As a warrior.
@mon777evelyn As much as I would love to shoot a game with you, I think you are trying to hustle me. Aiming at the 1 ball instead of the cue ball. On the other hand I'd be so fascinated in your gorgeous attributes I would be totally at your mercy.
Medal of Honor by President Richard Nixon on March 2, 1971, becoming one of the youngest living recipients at the time in history.
He runs straight into gunfire no one is surviving.
July 11, 1969. A Shau Valley, Vietnam. The jungle is thick, loud, and already filled with wounded men. Delta Company is surrounded. Eighty soldiers trapped. Seventy-eight already dead or injured. Collapse is minutes away.
Specialist Fourth Class Gordon Roberts is dropped in by helicopter with his platoon. Fifty feet down by rope, boots hit dirt, and the world explodes. Automatic fire rips through the trees. Grenades tear the ridge apart. Four men go down immediately.
There is no time to think.
Roberts moves.
He breaks from cover and charges the first bunker alone. Two enemy soldiers inside. He eliminates them and climbs on top, signaling his men forward—then another bunker opens up and smashes his rifle apart in his hands.
Now he’s exposed. Weapon gone.
He doesn’t stop.
Roberts grabs an enemy rifle he’s never used before. No idea how much ammunition it holds. No guarantee it even works. So, he switches to what he trusts—grenades. Seven, maybe eight.
He starts clearing bunkers one by one.
Explosions. Dirt. Smoke. Silence—then more fire.
He’s cut off now. Completely alone. No support. No backup. Just a 20-year-old soldier moving through a storm of bullets, choosing to go forward every single time he could have stopped.
Four bunkers fall.
And then he reaches them.
The wounded. The barely breathing. The men who thought no one was coming.
Roberts doesn’t rest. He turns around and walks back into the same fire - again and again - carrying them out. One trip. Then another. Then another.
Not once. Multiple times.
He finishes his tour. Comes home. April 1970.
One year later, they hand him the Medal of Honor.
He’s 20 years old.
The youngest living recipient at the time.
But when he speaks, he doesn’t talk about what he did.
He talks about the men beside him.
Because for Gordon Roberts, the medal was never his.
It belonged to the ones he carried out… and the ones he couldn’t.
Thank you to all who fought and sacrificed in freedoms defense all those years ago. Incredible footage here. Blessed that both my uncles survived and will never forget the over 400,000 who did not come home.