Top Tweets for #RosehipsInJune

I just learned that Iran is an extremely mountainous country. If anyone in Tel Aviv or Washington thinks they can beat Iran, they are mentally unwell. It's textbook impossible to defeat a mountainous country because ground troop movements will exhaust the invader. You'll be attacked by guerrillas coming down the hills, killing you all. This is going to be the US Army's Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. You are going to lose this. Mountains are why countries such as mountainous Switzerland also cannot be invaded. To know anything about military strategy, read Von Clausewitz's On War. The German military genius extensively discussed mountains as a 'retarding principle'—mountains slow down military movement. Mountains favor guerilla warfare and make decisive action impossible. Mountains favor the defenders. The invading armies are fighting literal uphill battles. Everyone at the Pentagon has lost their minds. I'm truly stupefied at the lack of functional brains among Western military strategists. What on Earth are you doing? I'm stupefied that anyone thinks the West can defeat Iran. No, you won't. Iran is protected by mountains. It cannot be defeated.

The Chernobyl Suicide Squad of 1986: Three men who walked into a radioactive basement to save half of Europe. In the early hours of April 26, 1986, after the Chernobyl reactor exploded, a new and even greater danger formed underground. A massive blob of white-hot radioactive corium was slowly melting through the concrete floor directly above millions of gallons of water. If the corium reached that water, the resulting steam explosion could have destroyed the remaining reactors and spread radiation across much of Europe. The only way to stop it was to manually open the floodgates in the flooded, pitch-black basement beneath the reactor. Three engineers volunteered for what everyone believed was a suicide mission: Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bespalov, and Boris Baranov. Wearing only thin wetsuits and carrying flashlights, they waded into knee-deep radioactive water. Their Geiger counters screamed the entire time. They found the valves in the darkness, turned them by hand, and drained the pool before the corium could reach the water. Their courage prevented a second, potentially far worse catastrophe. Contrary to many dramatic retellings, all three men survived the immediate mission. Alexei Ananenko and Valeri Bespalov are still alive today. The difference between a localised tragedy and a continent-wide disaster was the quiet bravery of three men with a wrench and a flashlight.

The legendary Billy Waugh was born on this day in 1929. U.S. Army, Korea, Vietnam, Special Forces, MACV-SOG, CIA, Libya, Sudan to surveil Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s, and then back to Sudan to track Ilich Ramirez Sanchez…better known to the world as Carlos the Jackal.  Less than three months after September 11, 2001, he celebrated his seventy-second birthday…in Afghanistan.  The above might not even be the highlights as much of what Billy did for the nation remains classified.  Billy’s journey into special operations started a week after he turned twelve when the local sheriff in Bastrop, Texas walked into the movie theater where Billy was working behind the counter serving popcorn. He asked Billy to run upstairs and tell the projectionist to stop the movie; the sheriff had news to break. The date was December 7, 1941. The United States was at war. Billy enlisted in the U.S. Army in the late 1940s, attended jump school in 1951, deployed to Korea, was selected for Special Forces in 1954, and first deployed to Vietnam in 1961. In 1977, Billy was recruited into the CIA.  His military awards include the Silver Star, four Bronze Stars for Valor, fourteen Air Medals for Valor, two Combat Infantryman Badges, and eight Purple Hearts. I encourage you to read his book, HUNTING THE JACKAL. Share it with your children in the middle school, high school and college years – kids today need heroes. Billy was one of mine. Billy Waugh from HUNTING THE JACKAL: “I was a hunter, a full-time hunter, at a time when the hunting was good.” William D. “Billy” Waugh passed away on April 4, 2023.