A safe place to run to. Now we need to preserve the safe place we have created with the help of every armed forces member that ever existed. We are the last stance. Time to clean it up.
๐จ IRAN CAUGHT LYING AGAIN: Fake Claim They Killed 3 American Troops in Kuwait, CENTCOM SHUTS IT DOWN!
Pure propaganda.
CENTCOM just dropped the truth: ZERO U.S. service members killed or injured. All personnel accounted for. Thank God our heroes are safe.
Iranโs regime is desperate, lying to save face while getting hammered in the Strait and losing leverage by the day.
Lies are the sign of a dying regime. America isnโt falling for it.
Our military is strong, accounted for, and ready.
On this day in 1944, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. died in his sleep in a stone farmhouse in Normandy. He was 56 years old, and he had spent almost his entire adult life trying to be worthy of a famous last name.
He was the eldest son of President Theodore Roosevelt. In the First World War he went to France and was gassed and badly wounded at Soissons leading his men. That same summer his younger brother Quentin, a pilot, was shot down and killed over France. Ted came home with lungs and a leg that never fully recovered, and before he even left Europe he helped found the American Legion so that ordinary soldiers would have someone looking out for them.
Between the wars he did almost everything. Governor of Puerto Rico. Governor General of the Philippines. Businessman, explorer, writer. He could have spent the Second World War safe behind a desk. Instead, at 54, arthritic and walking with a cane, he talked his way back into uniform and into combat.
By 1943 he was fighting in North Africa and Sicily under Terry Allen, and their loose, unpolished, soldier-first style rubbed General Patton the wrong way. Patton had them both relieved of command. Roosevelt didn't sulk. He asked for another job, any job, as long as it kept him near the fighting. They made him assistant commander of the 4th Infantry Division.
Then came D-Day. He hid a heart condition from the Army doctors. He wrote to his commander three separate times, in writing, begging to go in with the very first wave rather than watch from a ship. He was the only general to land in the first wave on any beach that morning, the oldest man in the invasion, walking through machine gun fire with a cane in one hand and a pistol in the other.
The boats came in a mile off course. Officers froze. Roosevelt limped up and down the beach under fire, studied the ground, and said, "We'll start the war from right here." Then he spent the morning waving men forward and sorting out the chaos so calmly that terrified 20 year olds looked at this old man with a cane and decided that if he wasn't scared, they wouldn't be either.
His son Quentin, named for the uncle killed in the last war, landed at Omaha Beach the same morning. They were the only father and son to come ashore together on D-Day.
He died a month later. A heart attack in his sleep. And here is the part that gets me. On the very day he died, the orders had just come through promoting him to major general and giving him his own division. He never saw the paperwork. He never knew he'd earned the Medal of Honor either.
At his funeral his pallbearers were seven of the most famous generals of the war, Bradley, Hodges, Collins, Barton, Huebner, and George Patton. The same Patton who had fired him. Patton wrote in his diary that Roosevelt was one of the bravest men he had ever known.
Years later Omar Bradley was asked to name the single most heroic thing he witnessed in all of World War II. He didn't pause. He said, "Ted Roosevelt on Utah Beach."
Honoring Marine Master Sgt. Jerome D. Hatfield he died July 11, 2009 serving during Operation Enduring Freedom while supporting combat operations in Khan Neshin, Afghanistan.
Hatfield, a former drill instructor, joined the Corps in June 1991. He is survived by his wife and three children.
Someone accused me of โstolen valorโ awhile back. They didnโt believe I was an actual NYPD law enforcement officer.
Yeahโฆ total โstolen valor.โ
Iโm the real deal, Oogums.
P.S.: For the uniform sticklers, I had my longevity bar in the RMP and forgot to attach it.