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Ann Arbor, MI
Joined September 2011
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ArmyProperty retweeted
GTFOH. Secretary of the Navy @HungCao_VA served as an EOD diver aboard Navy salvage ships… the hardest-working, dirtiest, and most dangerous vessels in the peacetime fleet.
The man literally descended 116 feet into the Atlantic to recover the bodies of three presidential relatives from the cockpit of a small aircraft.
Think about that. Crawling through twisted aluminum, in near-zero visibility, to recover decomposing human remains from a submerged cockpit.
And if you think a pilot plunging into the ocean at night didn’t soiled himself in his final moments, you know precious little about aviation accidents, violent death, or the grim realities Navy divers confront.
He has not only touched human waste. He’s literally submerged himself in a confined space filled with it.
And how exactly do you think EOD divers remove bolts from the submerged mines they dive down to defuse?
Do you think they dive with an entire set of NAPA metric and SAE sockets all arranged in little plastic trays? Or maybe, just possibly, perhaps, they use a crescent wrench?
ArmyProperty retweeted
🇺🇸 The B-52 bomber sitting by the front gate of the Air Force Academy has a confirmed MiG-21 kill.
Christmas Eve, 1972. North Vietnam. Operation Linebacker II was underway.
Riding in the tail of a B-52D nicknamed Diamond Lil was 18 year old Airman Albert Moore. His job was tail gunner and he manned four .50-caliber machine guns.
He spotted the blip on his radar. A North Vietnamese MiG-21 fighter was closing in from behind, climbing rapidly.
Moore tracked the interceptor on his radar scope, waited until the jet was within 2,000 yards, and held down the triggers.
Seconds later, the crew of a trailing B-52 confirmed it over the radio: the MiG was engulfed in a fireball and falling from the sky. Over 800 rounds went downrange.
In the entire history of aviation, a B-52 bomber has shot down an enemy fighter jet exactly twice. Albert Moore became the last aerial tail gunner in American military history to score a kill in combat.
Today, cars drive past that exact plane at the north entrance of the Air Force Academy in Colorado, completely unaware the gate guard is a certified MiG killer.
ArmyProperty retweeted
🔫 John McPhee Reveals the Index Secret Nobody Teaches
You'll see he's right if you slow way down while shooting. Relax the hand and pull straight to you, don't squeeze, pull.
ArmyProperty retweeted
The mother of an American soldier killed in the Philippines during WWII. 🇺🇸
She flew all the way from the United States to visit her son's grave at the Manila American Cemetery in 1967. 🪦
ArmyProperty retweeted
Camping at someone’s house was a weird lifestyle
Do you know how you feel standing in a line, waiting hours at a packed amusement park, waiting to get onto a roller coaster? Feet hurt, back hurts, it takes forever, the sun is beating down on you in the heat, you’re sweating to death in the summer?
Then you get the thrill of riding a roller coaster for a minute and a half!
That’s what war is like. That’s high on the list of why so many of us kept reenlisting to go back.
ArmyProperty retweeted
An amazing view of AH-64s from the 12th CAB’s “Viper Battalion” lying in ambush, hovering just a few feet above the ground during a training exercise (Circa 2020). Attack helicopter crews train hard to hug the terrain, using trees, ridgelines and folds in the ground to mask their approach from enemy radar and SHORAD. Then, at the right moment, they pop up, unleash their missiles and disappear back into cover. It may not look like much, but Western attack helicopters are deadly ambush predators, especially when hunting armour.
Someone in HQDA G-2 right now:
“So all we had to do was send 4th ID to OEF and they would’ve won it in 60 days. Damn it.”
“But hey, Bragg / Campbell / Benning / Stewart are future-proofed. Make those bubbles green on the chart.”
ArmyProperty retweeted
How many Americans know that for eight straight years after September 11, Japanese warships stood in 120-degree heat in the Indian Ocean to pump 135 million gallons of free fuel into the U.S. Navy?
After the twin towers fell in 2001, American carrier strike groups raced to the Arabian Sea to strike terrorist strongholds in Afghanistan.
Why could American warships not simply pull into Middle Eastern ports to refuel? Because just one year earlier, suicide bombers in a small boat had blown a forty-foot hole in the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen. Entering port meant risking ambush and losing days off the front line.
Within weeks of 9/11, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force dispatched its fleet oilers, including JS Towada, JS Tokiwa, and JS Mashu, ten thousand miles from home.
Sailing side by side with U.S. destroyers and cruisers at twelve knots across heavy ocean swells, Japanese sailors shot steel cables across the water and winched thick rubber fuel hoses into American tanks without spilling a single drop.
From December 2001 to January 2010, Japanese crews completed 939 underway refueling operations. They delivered 510,000 kiloliters, roughly 135 million gallons of fuel, plus 11,000 tons of fresh water, entirely paid for by the Japanese taxpayer.
On the final day of the mission in January 2010, American sailors lined the rails of their warship in the blazing sun, took off their caps, and saluted the Japanese crew as the hoses were uncoupled for the last time.
True loyalty does not ask for a camera. It holds the line for eight years in the sun.
🤖 Made with AI
ArmyProperty retweeted
If someone asks you how much a single family's life is worth to the United States Navy, tell them the exact price: ten million dollars of steel.
On April 29, 1975, as Saigon fell, a tiny two-seat wooden-and-fabric Cessna plane with almost no fuel left circled desperately above the American aircraft carrier USS Midway.
Inside that tiny cockpit, a father named Major Buang-Ly had crammed his wife and five small children, including a baby. He scribbled a note on a map, wrapped it around his pistol so it would not blow into the ocean, and dropped it onto the carrier deck.
A young American sailor picked up the crumpled paper and ran it up to Captain Lawrence Chambers.
The note read: "Can you move these helicopter to the other side, I can land on your runway, I can fly 1 hour more. Please rescue me. Major Buang, Wife and 5 child."
The flight deck of the USS Midway was completely jammed from bow to stern with military helicopters. A Cessna has no tailhook to catch carrier wires, and its pilot had never landed on a ship in his life.
By every military regulation, Captain Chambers had been in command for only five weeks. Throwing millions of dollars of U.S. government aircraft into the sea without permission from Washington could end his career in a court-martial.
Chambers looked up at the tiny plane circling in the wind with five children inside. He did not call an accountant in Washington.
"Clear the deck," the captain ordered.
Hundreds of young American sailors in yellow and green jerseys ran to the edge of the ship, put their shoulders against massive Huey helicopters, and shoved ten million dollars worth of machinery straight off the cliff into the South China Sea.
Captain Chambers turned the giant carrier into the wind at twenty-five knots. The tiny Cessna came down, bounced once on the steel runway, and rolled to a safe stop with feet to spare.
When the cockpit door opened and five small children stepped out onto the deck, three thousand American sailors roared so loud it drowned out the engines, and immediately passed around a hat to collect cash for the family's new life in America.
When the math says a child's life is too expensive, an American throws the math into the ocean.
🤖 Made with AI
ArmyProperty retweeted
Australian Sergeant Leonard G. Siffleet of M Special Unit about to be beheaded by Japanese officer Yasuno Chikao, Aitape, New Guinea, 24 October 1943
ArmyProperty retweeted
Most people have seen this famous WW2 photograph. A blindfolded prisoner kneels in the sand, head bowed, while a man stands over him with a sword raised to strike. It is one of the most haunting images of the entire war. But far fewer people know the name of the man about to die, or the story of how he got to that beach. His name was Leonard Siffleet, and he deserves to be remembered as more than an anonymous victim.
Len Siffleet was an Australian, born in Newcastle in 1916. He was in his twenties when the war came, an ordinary young man who had tried to join the police before the fighting pulled him in. He ended up in one of the most dangerous outfits of the Pacific war, M Special Unit, part of the secretive Australian reconnaissance organization that inserted small teams deep behind Japanese lines to watch, to report, and to radio back intelligence. These were the coastwatchers and commandos who lived or died by stealth in the jungle, cut off, surrounded, with no hope of quick rescue if things went wrong.
In 1943 Siffleet was a sergeant and a radio operator on a mission into the wild coast of New Guinea, Operation Whiting, sent to set up an observation post to watch Japanese movements. He was not alone. With him were two Ambonese soldiers of the Netherlands East Indies forces, Privates Pattiwahl and Reharin, allies fighting the Japanese alongside the Australians. The three men moved through some of the most hostile country on earth, trying to do their job in territory swarming with the enemy.
It fell apart. The team was discovered, and the three men were set upon and captured by local villagers working with the Japanese, overwhelmed and handed over. They were taken prisoner, and then, over roughly two weeks, they were interrogated and tortured by their captors, held and brutalized while the Japanese decided what to do with them.
What they decided was murder. The execution of all three men was ordered by a senior Japanese naval officer, Vice-Admiral Kamada, the commander in the area. On the 24th of October 1943, the prisoners were taken down to the beach at Aitape, made to kneel, blindfolded, their hands bound, in front of a crowd of Japanese troops gathered to watch. And there they were beheaded with a sword. The man wielding it in the photograph was a Japanese soldier named Yasuno Chikao.
Here is the detail that makes the photo exist at all. A Japanese soldier took it, a private snapshot of the killing, the sword frozen at the top of its arc above Siffleet's bowed head. It was never meant for the world to see. But the next year, in 1944, advancing American troops recovered the photograph, found, by the accounts, on the body of a dead Japanese soldier. It was published in the press, including in Life magazine, as evidence of Japanese atrocities, and it became one of the defining images of the war in the Pacific, reproduced ever since.
For a long time no one even knew for certain who the kneeling man was. The prisoner in the photo was misidentified more than once, confused with other Allied servicemen, and it was not until after the war that he was positively identified as Sergeant Leonard Siffleet. The anonymous victim had a name at last.
The accounts of his last moments say he met them with extraordinary composure, calm and unbroken before the crowd and the sword. His body was never recovered. He has no grave, and he is commemorated among the missing on a memorial in New Guinea, one of so many who vanished into that campaign. His two Ambonese companions, Pattiwahl and Reharin, murdered beside him, deserve to be remembered too, allies who died the same way on the same beach and whose names are almost always left out.
The fate of the man with the sword is murkier, and the records disagree. Some say Yasuno Chikao did not survive the war, killed before it ended. Others say he was captured, tried for the killing, sentenced to hang, and had the sentence commuted to a prison term. History has not fully settled it.
So the next time that photograph goes past, remember it is not a symbol or an anonymous horror. It is a specific young Australian named Len Siffleet, a radio operator from Newcastle, captured on a reconnaissance mission, tortured for two weeks, and murdered on a beach with two forgotten allies beside him, facing the end with a courage that outlasted the men who killed him. That is who he was.
ArmyProperty retweeted
Footage shows an unspecified third-world artillery crew unwittingly firing a powerful howitzer directly into the berm in front of them with what should have been an easily predictable and deadly outcome.
See more at FUNKER530.com
ArmyProperty retweeted
People who have never lived through a catastrophe love to ask why America spends billions of dollars building giant nuclear aircraft carriers.
Tell them to ask the mothers of Banda Aceh, Indonesia what they saw on the ocean horizon in January 2005.
When the Indian Ocean tsunami killed more than two hundred thousand people, the entire coast of Sumatra was erased. Every bridge, road, and water pipe was gone. Tens of thousands of children were dying of thirst in the mud, and no truck on earth could reach them.
Two thousand miles away in Hong Kong, the U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was on holiday port call.
Within hours of the news, young American sailors walked out of restaurants and hotels, left their vacation behind, ran back up the gangway, and pushed the ship's two nuclear reactors to flank speed.
When the Abraham Lincoln dropped anchor off the shattered coast of Aceh, it did not launch a single fighter jet.
Instead, the American sailors turned their nuclear warship into the largest floating water factory on earth.
Using the ship's four massive steam distillation plants, the crew purified nearly 100,000 gallons of fresh drinking water from the sea every single day. For weeks without sleep, young sailors stood on the hangar deck filling five-gallon plastic jugs by hand, while seventeen Seahawk helicopters flew nonstop from sunrise to sunset.
They flew more than 1,500 missions into jungle clearings, delivering over 400,000 gallons of pure water and nearly six million pounds of food and medicine to people of a different faith who had been taught for years to fear the United States.
America did not ask for one barrel of oil or one dollar in return. When the local hospitals were running again, the giant gray ship quietly raised its anchor and sailed away.
A small mind looks at an American aircraft carrier and sees only a weapon. A survivor looks at that flat gray deck and sees five thousand young Americans bringing water from the sea.
🤖 Made with AI
ArmyProperty retweeted
Exhausted Navy personnel returned home on a chartered flight after nearly two weeks of captivity on a Chinese island in April 2001 during the Hainan Island Incident.
The 24 crew members were on board an EP-3E Aries II SIGINT aircraft on a routine mission over international waters when they were intercepted by a pair of Shenyang J-8 fighters from the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force. One of the J-8 fighters flew so close to the EP-3E that its far-left propeller blades struck the tail of the J-8. Both aircraft were severely damaged in the collision, and the J-8 struck the nose of the EP-3E as it fell to the ocean, destroying it.
Pilot Lieutenant Shane Osborn managed to maintain control of his aircraft and land at the nearest airstrip on Hainan Island after a harrowing 34-minute flight. The crew used the short flight time to destroy as much of their sensitive equipment, computers, and documents as possible. Once on the ground the destruction process continued even as Chinese military personnel surrounded the aircraft.
Eventually the crew opened the doors and were taken prisoner. For the next eleven days they were held captive while diplomatic negotiations continued over the incident, led by Brigadier General Neal Sealock, the defense attaché at the US embassy in Beijing. Lieutenant Osborn was subjected to sleep deprivation and continuous interrogations, but overall, the crew maintained high morale and were able to push back on their captors’ demands and attempts at propagandizing the incident.
The US government secured their release after delivering a letter “expressing sorrow” (but not apologizing) over the occurrence. The EP-3E itself was disassembled and returned to the US later that year, and after extensive repairs, reentered service with the Navy a few years later.
For episode 236 of the Spycraft 101 podcast I spoke with pilot Shane Osborn about the collision, the emergency landing, and his twelve days in captivity on Hainan Island, which he wrote about in his book Born to Fly: The Untold Story of the Downed American Reconnaissance Plane. The episode is available now.
#china #navy #aviation #sigint #pilot
open.spotify.com/episode/6oi…
ArmyProperty retweeted
What Our Boys Went Through for Us
February 5 1945
American POW's Lee Rogers (L) and John C Todd sit outside Santo Tomas internment camp in the Philippines after it's liberation. Both endured four years of captivity under the Japanese Army.
Roger's weight dropped from 145 to 90 pounds, while Todd fell from 178 to 102.
The Japs were cruel and ruthless bastards that reaped the whirlwind in the end.
ArmyProperty retweeted
Oct 23, 1983: At 6:22 on a Sunday morning, a truck bomb destroyed the Marine barracks at the Beirut airport. 241 American service members were killed. It was the deadliest single day for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima.
Lebanon had been torn apart by civil war since 1975. In June 1982, Israel invaded to drive out the Palestine Liberation Organization. That August, US Marines went in alongside French and Italian troops as part of a multinational force to oversee the PLO's evacuation. They finished the job and left.
Days later, Lebanon's newly elected president was assassinated. Then Christian militiamen entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and massacred hundreds of Palestinian civilians. The peacekeepers were rushed back in. This time their mission was vague. They were there to provide what officials called a presence.
The Marines set up at Beirut International Airport. Over the next year, the situation got worse. In April 1983, a suicide bomber blew up the US Embassy in Beirut and killed 63 people, including 17 Americans. Through the summer, the Marines at the airport took sniper fire and shelling from militias in the hills. In September, American warships began shelling militia positions to support the Lebanese army. To many in Lebanon, the Americans were no longer peacekeepers. They had taken a side.
The headquarters of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines was a four-story concrete building at the airport. On the morning of Oct 23, around 350 men were inside, most of them asleep. It was a Sunday, their one day to sleep in.
A yellow Mercedes truck turned into the parking lot, circled once, then picked up speed. It plowed through a coil of barbed wire, passed between two guard posts, and crashed through the gate. The sentries had been ordered to keep their weapons without a round in the chamber. One of them later said the driver was smiling. Before they could stop him, the truck smashed into the lobby and the driver set off his bomb.
The explosion was so powerful that the FBI later called it the largest non-nuclear blast it had ever investigated. It lifted the building off its foundation, and it collapsed on itself.
Survivors and Marines from nearby positions began digging through the concrete with their bare hands, listening for voices. Snipers fired at them while they worked. Some men were pulled out alive hours later. Others were found days later. 220 Marines, 18 Navy sailors, and 3 Army soldiers were killed. More than 100 were wounded. Many of the dead were 19 and 20 years old.
Minutes after the first blast, a second truck bomb hit the French barracks a few miles away and killed 58 French paratroopers.
A few days later, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. P.X. Kelley, visited the wounded at a hospital in Germany. One of them, Cpl. Jeffrey Nashton, was covered in bandages and tubes and couldn't speak. When he realized who was standing over him, he motioned for a pad and wrote two words: Semper Fi. President Reagan told that story to the country in a televised address.
A group calling itself Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. Investigators and later US courts tied the attack to Hezbollah, backed by Iran. In February 1984 the Marines were pulled out of Lebanon.
Today there's a memorial wall outside Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, home of the units that went to Beirut. The names of the men killed are carved into it. Above them are four words: They came in peace.
At Arlington National Cemetery, a cedar of Lebanon was planted among the graves of some of the men killed that morning.
Forty-three years ago today, 241 Americans went to sleep in Beirut on a mission of peace and never came home. 220 Marines. 18 sailors. 3 soldiers. They were sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers, most of them barely out of high school. Take a moment today to say their names and remember them. Semper Fi.
