35 years since the end of the First Gulf War

 

It has been 35 years since the end of Gulf War 1, The event that changed my life forever, it is an event that I have called "before the Storm" and "After the Storm".  My life and those like mine are forever impacted by that war.  That being said, I would do it all over again in a new york minute.  I remembered a photo that came across the wire and you know if you see a photo and it sears it into your soul..well this one was one of the ones for me.

This photo relates to the 24th Infantry Division, where a few Bradley's were hit by  Friendly tank fire, this photo shows the price of war and it was a personal meaning for me.  I lost a friend of mine we called him "woody", that was his nickname, I had met him back in 1986 at "Planet Gerp" as we called our kaserne in Germany.  The place is gone, after the Germans took the Kaserne back after we pulled out of Germany in 1992.  We both went to different assignments during the normal Army PCS moves.  Well to make a long story short, I found out after the war ended that "Woody" died there, his "Track" was hit by a hellfire missile fired by an Apache Helicopter, then I saw this picture and it epitomized the pain for me. 
     I will give a bit of background on this, After the war ended, a large percentage of the casualties we suffered were called "Blue on Blue", the lethality of the missiles and guns we used exceeded our ability to ID targets.  This was the first time the Army used Armor and Infantry in a large scale since WWII.  Our weapons have gotten more lethal but we still relied on the Mark I "eyeball" for Target Identification.  The technology for ID hasn't paced the range and accuracy of the stuff we used on the First Gulf war.  The U.S Army used the "Airland Battle or FM 100-5" concept that we had developed to counter the Soviet Echelon formation and their doctrine and it worked very well, we crushed the 4th largest Army using this doctrine.  We called it "Shock and Awe" and it was warfare like nobody else had ever seen before.  I am of 2 minds of that war, We won the War, and lost the Peace, I remember being pissed when they stopped us after 100 hours of ground combat,  President Bush caved under pressure of the Democrats because they saw the "Highway Of Death" and whined to Bush about it.  I personally had no pity, those soldiers were fleeing Kuwait city after raping and pillaging the city and were running with all their loot.  War is a bitch.  a lot of Iraqi soldiers survived that Saddam was able to reconstitute a big chunk of his army and use them to repress the Kurds after the war.  I wish we had gone to Baghdad the first time, it probably would have saved us a lot of drama and aggravation through the 90's and probably Gulf War II and possibly 9-11.  It would have calmed down the Ayatollah's in Tehran anyway....Maybe.  I do know that the middle east would have been a lot different.
    I will include some more pics and a link to the story and background.  Anybody that has walked the ramparts in defense of this country will have stories like this, it is a common thread of our experience and it is part of the bonds of the brotherhood, the shared sacrifice and loss that we have suffered. 


Here is the Link and the Story plus other pics of them meeting, follow the links

UNIONTOWN, Pa. – Twenty-four slow, burning years have passed since Sgt. Ken Kozakiewicz got wrecked to his soul.
Raw from a battle that ended moments before, dazed from the two missiles that smoked his Bradley Fighting Vehicle and weary from traversing an ungodly expanse of Iraq desert, Kozakiewicz did what any man would.
He read the name on the dead soldier’s identification card, looked away from the bloody body bag and wailed.
Kozakiewicz’s helpless, primal howl became the signature image of Operation Desert Storm. The picture, taken by David Turnley, showed war’s wicked truth and is considered one of military history’s most provocative photos.

Kozakiewicz, his broken left hand in a sling, had been guided into a medical evacuation helicopter after the Jalibah Airfield rout Feb. 27, 1991. The battle was among the final objectives of a dominant campaign to expel Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein’s army from neighboring Kuwait.

Kozakiewicz and Cpl. Mike Tsangarakis were about to be whisked away. Then a body bag was loaded onto the helicopter floor. Kozakiewicz demanded the dead soldier’s name.
A medic reluctantly handed Kozakiewicz the ID for 20-year-old Pvt. Andy Alaniz. In the center of the photo, Tsangarakis lifted his head bandages to glimpse the sack at his feet.
“I was just dumbfounded,” Kozakiewicz recalled Friday. “I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. He just got married. There’s no way.’
“Then it hit me like a ton of bricks.”

The vulnerable moment was seen around the world, running on the cover of Parade magazine. For 24 years, the photo has embarrassed Kozakiewicz but buoyed Alaniz’s high school sweetheart, who became a 19-year-old, pregnant widow.

“I don’t see my husband in a body bag,” Catherine Alaniz-Simonds said Friday. “I see a man crying. I see my husband surrounded by people that loved him. This picture shows the true meaning of war. Not everybody came home.”

Operation Desert Storm was a television show to most Americans.
For the first time, we watched a war as it happened. CNN showed airstrikes live and aired the latest news around the clock. We could see missiles fired from a safe distance, and a sensational fireworks display.
The United States dominated the Iraqi forces. Setbacks were rare. Even so, the Pentagon censored news reports that depicted death or military suffering.
Back home, few realized the cost of war until the haunting photo of Kozakiewicz, Tsangarakis and Alaniz’s body bag appeared on Parade magazine’s cover June 9, 1991.
“Some of us were taken, and some of us weren’t, but everybody rolled the dice where they were going to come out,” said Staff Sgt. Kary Varnell, part of the 24th Infantry Division that swept the Jalibah Airfield. “Were they going to come out alive or mangled?

"How Rome Destroyed Its Citizens"

 I honestly believe that being an "American Citizen" is a precious thing and the politicians try to cheapen it by giving it to people that don't appreciate it.  I know that Rome fell when they cheapen the value of being a citizen of Rome and gave it to anybody and eventually nobody saw the value of it and the empire collapsed of internal rot and when the Goths attacked(who were auxiliaries of Rome and led by "Alaric" who was trained by Rome then used his training against them.   I see parallels to today  Oh Snap, I shouldn't have said that.    Well anyway.I have seen the Meme's involving "The Roman Empire" that have been floating around farcebook and other social media sites,    I do think of the Roman Empire and I do believe that there are a lot of parallels between them and us.  

   One of the books I have in my library I have in my Bonus room.   I see the strength and the decadence, and I wonder if we will survive or will the barbarians from the East will win with the internal rot I am seeing in our society.   

I got this from "Templar Minds"

Emperor Caracalla issued the Constitutio Antoniniana in the year 212 AD. To the modern mind, marinated in egalitarian sentiment, this decree must read like a triumph of social justice.

By the stroke of an imperial stylus, every free man within the borders of the Roman Empire received full citizenship. The ultimate inclusion initiative.

It was also a scam.

Caracalla was no philanthropist. He was a fratricide who had murdered his brother Geta in their mother's arms and then slaughtered twenty thousand of Geta's supporters in the streets of Rome.

He drained the treasury to gorge his legions and finance his Persian fantasies. Rome levied lucrative taxes exclusively on its citizens. The emperor didn't expand the franchise to elevate the masses. He expanded it to bleed them.

The revenue came. So did the rot.

---

For centuries, Roman citizenship had been a covenant forged in civic duty, blood, and military service. It demanded assimilation and commanded awe. The Apostle Paul wielded his citizenship like a blade, halting the centurion's whips by asking, "Is it lawful for you to flog a man who is a Roman citizen and uncondemned?"

When Caracalla bestowed this status on every breathing subject of the empire, he annihilated the value of being a citizen. By making everyone a Roman, he ensured no one was. The title shed its prestige, its cultural gravity, and its power to bind.

It devolved from covenant to clerical entry. The empire staggered on for generations, but its civic core had been hollowed out. What remained was territory without a people, an administrative zone waiting for the barbarians to finish what the emperor had started.

---

We're living through our own Edict of Caracalla.

The campaigns for open borders and mass amnesty don't argue that the illegal entrant has earned the rights of the citizen. They argue that the distinction itself is immoral. Non-citizen voting proposals don't strengthen the franchise; they dissolve the meaning of it by detaching it from allegiance.

The logic is Caracalla's logic, updated for a therapeutic age: expand the category until it contains everything...and therefore means nothing.

And like Caracalla, the architects of this dissolution are not humanitarians. They are accountants of power. The progressive state desires a pliable electorate unmoored from constitutional memory. The corporate oligarch desires a labor pool vast enough to suppress the wages of the American worker. Both cloaked in the language of compassion.

They want the border erased, not because borders are unjust, but because a defined citizenry is harder to govern and harder to exploit than an undifferentiated mass of consumers and taxpayers.

When citizenship is reduced from a bond of constitutional loyalty and shared historical memory to an administrative status stamped at a processing center, the nation does not become more inclusive.

It ceases to be a nation.

It becomes an economic zone. The passport cheapens. The glue dissolves. And we are instructed to call this progress.

---

Yet as the temporal order decays, we must keep our bearings. We're not the first generation to watch an empire devour its own foundations.

When the Western Empire buckled under the weight of its accumulated rot and the Goths poured through gates that no longer meant anything, St. Augustine of Hippo delivered the Church's verdict.

History, he wrote, is the tale of two cities formed by two loves.

The Earthly City is built on the love of self, the libido dominandi, the lust for domination.

It's the city of the technocrat and the open-borders oligarch. Because it is built on the sand of human pride, it will inevitably dilute its own foundations and collapse into ruin.

The Heavenly City is built on the love of God, usque ad contemptum sui, to the contempt of self. It's eternal, and it's ruled by the King of Kings.

We are placed in this moment by divine providence. We are called to stand against the tide, to demand justice, to defend borders, and to resist those who would dissolve the moral order for profit and votes.

We stand, armed with the knowledge that Washington, like Rome, is not eternal.

Act accordingly.

- Marcus Sterling

"Feelings...Nothing More Then Feelings"

 I have commented quite a few times especially during the 2024 election cycle, all the democrats had was "HATE Trump" or "ORANGEMANBAD" or variations along that line.  I and people that believe like me have been called "Nazi" by people that know not that that word actually is.

But their University professors told them one thing and by Gaia, they are right.   After a while we get to a stage where we flat out don't care, don't want to be nice or want to get along and deal with those screeching moonbats.  I am not a spring chicken, I am a very summer chicken, approaching fall and I no longer have patience anymore, and I have a gut feeling a huge portion of the population, their cup runneth over and their patience is gone also.

    I shamelessly clipped this from Farcebook and Michael Smith.

I’ve been thinking about the intractability of American politics and whether the rift can ever truly be healed. I began to wonder if I wasn’t seeing something because I was looking at it from the wrong perspective. For years, I assumed the division was primarily ideological—policy disputes about taxes, regulation, foreign policy, culture. That would at least be manageable, but the more I’ve watched the past decade unfold, the more I’ve come to suspect that what divides us is not policy at all—it is all about “feeling.”

More specifically, it is feeling about Donald Trump.

Strip away the daily outrage cycles and the social-media hysteria, and you see something striking: opposition to Trump has rarely been framed in terms of executive and legislative substance. It is not primarily about tariffs versus free trade, border enforcement levels, NATO funding formulas, or regulatory rollbacks. It is about loathing. It is aesthetic revulsion elevated to moral emergency. The man must be opposed, not because of policy detail, but because he exists and the hollow, performative screams of authoritarianism, dictator, Nazi, and racist, absent of actual proof, prove once politics becomes emotional absolutism, reconciliation becomes unlikely and nearly impossible.

Democrats are so invested in opposition—so invested in hate—that curiosity has disappeared. When an assassination attempt occurs, it is not treated as a national trauma demanding sober reflection. It becomes a footnote, an inconvenience to a preferred narrative and the media, which long ago ceased pretending to be neutral referees, oscillates between hair-on-fire apocalypse—“He is starting World War III!”—and studied indifference when events don’t serve the script. Context is dead. Everything is either the end of civilization or a “meh” moment. There is no middle register.

This isn’t journalism. It’s dramaturgy.

The Never Trump contingent—Democrats who for years masqueraded as Republicans—have fared no better. They appear like actors who missed their cue in a play that has already closed. Picking at the bones of a long-dead grift, they surface periodically to assure us that they still matter, that if only a Jeb Bush, a John Kasich, a Paul Ryan were in charge, normalcy would return. What they really want is a restoration of the polite managerial class—a GOPe technocracy that governs by consensus dinners and donor conference calls. Lovable losers.

If such a figure were president, one assumes many of today’s fiercest critics would rediscover their appreciation for “norms.” Their outrage would subside into professional disagreement, and the temperature would drop not because policy changed, but because the “vibes” did.

Which brings me to a different question: What if the paradigm has already shifted?

What if America—quietly, imperfectly—has accepted that MAGA is not a passing tantrum but a realignment? What if a substantial portion of the country has decided that “America First” is not isolationism but self-respect? What if the country has already begun a turn toward something more assertive, more self-conscious about sovereignty, more comfortable with strength—yes, even more consciously masculine in tone?

There are signs.

Social media is not the real world, but it is often a bellwether. The ridicule aimed at progressive hyperbole feels sharper than it did five years ago. The reflexive hysteria that once commanded instant compliance now meets mockery. BlueSky—intended as a sanitized antidote to the free speech chaos of X—has devolved into what can only be described as a digital terrarium of grievance. Dems took the admonition to go F themselves at face value, so now it is where outrage goes to self-fertilize. It increasingly resembles an endless, unironic episode of Libs of TikTok.

The reactions to America winning gold medals at the recently completed MilanCortina Olympics, especially the patriotism of the hockey team winning the gold on the 46th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice, outed the America haters and illustrated that when your echo chamber becomes indistinguishable from parody, something has shifted.

The economy, too, tells a story. Despite relentless messaging that any recovery is insufficient, fragile, or falsely attributed, the underlying indicators have stabilized. The narrative insists that nothing counts unless perfection is instantaneous. “Why hasn’t he fixed everything yet?” becomes the refrain even though five years of market and supply chain disruption takes time to heal. The same with illegal immigration. Emotional imagery dominates headlines and enforcement is framed as cruelty—but deportations continue. Border crossings decline. Policy, imperfect and incremental, proceeds beneath the noise.

This suggests something uncomfortable for the opposition: governance is happening—and if governance continues while hysteria escalates, the hysteria begins to look performative. Voters may disagree with tone, style, or rhetoric—but they can see results. Over time, results dull outrage.

That may be the key to understanding the present moment. The rift cannot be healed so long as one side defines its identity entirely in opposition to a man rather than engagement with reality. But if reality keeps intruding—if jobs return, if borders stabilize, if wars don’t materialize on schedule—then emotional absolutism loses oxygen and healing, if it comes, will not arrive through kumbaya gestures or bipartisan photo-ops. It will come when politics returns to policy, disagreement centers on marginal tax rates rather than existential evil, journalism rediscovers proportion, and parties compete on measurable outcomes instead of apocalyptic forecasts.

Maybe it is like a bad case of the flu. Perhaps the more accurate question is not whether America can get over it, but when the emotional fever will break. When it does, the underlying America—pragmatic, aspirational, resilient—remains.

If America has already decided it prefers self-respect to self-loathing, then the paradigm has shifted more than many in Washington are willing to admit.

"AOG Fraugster Gets Prison Sentence"

 

A couple of years ago I "Published a couple of stories" about a huge fraud that impacted the spare parts market for mostly commercial aircraft.   Well the scammer got a few years of prison for doing so.  Here is the news report from "Aviation News"   This for those Aviation nuts among us.

Credit: Sean Broderick/Aviation Week

The person behind AOG Technics, the broker that sold thousands of parts with falsified records that rendered them unairworthy, was sentenced to 56 months in prison, the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said Feb. 23.

Jose Alejandro Zamora Yrala, operating from a home office, sold some 60,000 engine parts—many of them in bulk—to airlines and MRO shops from January 2019 to July 2023, investigators found.

Shipments were backed by fake authorized released certificates (ARCs) created on a home computer claiming the parts were new or overhauled, when they were not.

Zamora bolstered his scheme with emails from fake employees to some customers, the SFO found.

The ruse unraveled in mid-2023 when a TAP Air Portugal technician questioned the validity of a supposedly new CFM International CFM56 part. TAP contacted Safran, which supposedly provided the part’s accompanying ARC, and GE Aerospace, which co-own CFM.

The manufacturers confirmed the document was fake and alerted authorities.

Airlines were forced to ground aircraft with AOG parts installed. While no in-service incidents were linked to the suspect parts, the disruption cost operators an estimated $53 million, SFO said.
The SFO’s probe led Zamora to plead guilty in December 2025 to fraudulent trading.

The issue also led to the creation of Aviation Supply Chain Integrity Coalition, an independent group of industry stakeholders focused on identifying ways to reduce parts-related fraud. The group’s initial report and recommendations have helped drive interest and investment in digital records, including ARCs, and broader parts integrity validation efforts.

"Freedom of or Freedom From"

 

Yeah, I shamelessly clipped this from "Farcebook", again.  I ran across it taking a "Microbreak" if y'all know what I am talking about and "saved it".  A gentleman named "Don Stratton" wrote the addendum to the original Michael Smith article.  I give credit where credit is due.

Yes, our founding documents preclude socialism; it is not in any way consistent with life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or freedom, for that matter. "Fairness" and "democracy" as meant by today's libtards are nothing more than code for communism as are "equity" and "compassion". Michael Smith lays it out more eloquently; taxation enslaves both the payer and destroys the parasite for whom the taxes are confiscated. Every penny destroys our republic and propels us towards the hellish third world, European model that always ends with an unarmed citizenry helpless against authoritarian, atheist ideologues like Lenin, Mao and countless others-Starmer Macron, Mussolini, etc.

Michael Smith

1d ·

Since the American left insists on denying the morality of traditional America while using government to impose their own, I thought it time to further explore this quote from John Adams, written in his October 11, 1798 message to the officers of the Massachusetts militia:

“…we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Why is this 200-plus-year-old observation still relevant?

Because it strikes at the heart of the modern conflict between Statists and Anti-Statists.

The Statist impulse in contemporary politics often chases what I see as a dream—others might call it a nightmare—of enforced secularity. It is true that the First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” But that clause does not require society to be stripped of religion, nor does it demand that moral reasoning be banished from public life. It prevents the establishment of a national church; it does not establish a national vacuum.

It is true that progressives do not hate freedom; they just define it very differently. Modern conservatism emphasizes “freedom of”: freedom of opportunity, of speech, of religion, of self-determination. Progressivism often emphasizes “freedom from”: freedom from economic risk, from unequal outcomes, from social instability, from religious influence. The conservative approach requires limited regulation and trusts citizens to navigate life’s challenges. The progressive approach seeks expanded regulation to shield citizens from those challenges.

This divide surfaces most clearly in debates over the welfare state, health care, and taxation. Conservatives are routinely accused of selfishness for opposing expansive redistribution or resisting higher tax rates on “the rich.” The argument is familiar: if someone can afford to pay more, fairness requires it. Opposition, therefore, must be selfishness—but selfishness and fairness are not legal categories. They are moral ones.

There is no constitutional clause outlawing selfishness. There is no statute mandating fairness in every human exchange. In nature, fairness is not a governing principle; the cougar survives because it is stronger than the rabbit. Human beings, however, are not governed solely by instinct. We construct moral systems—often rooted in religious belief—to restrain raw power and appetite. Civilization depends on those internal restraints.

Adams understood that the Constitution is a legal framework, not a moral engine. It presumes citizens capable of self-government. The Founders intentionally limited federal power because they recognized that morality cannot be successfully legislated. When law attempts to do the work of conscience, it multiplies itself endlessly. Each new regulation creates unintended consequences, which then require further regulations. Legalism becomes both symptom and accelerant of moral decline.

The Constitution speaks to equal protection and due process. It does not promise equal outcomes. “All men are created equal” refers to equality in rights, not in results. Fairness in governance means impartial application of law, not perpetual redistribution to correct every disparity.

The nexus of legality and morality is perhaps most visible in the welfare state. Conservatives often oppose expansive redistribution not because they despise the poor, but because they believe dependency erodes dignity and self-governance. Progressives often see redistribution as a moral imperative, interpreting resistance as refusal to share. The deeper question is whether government itself can act morally when it operates through coercion. Market transactions are voluntary; government actions are backed by force. Taxes are not charitable donations. They are compulsory. When government transfers wealth from one citizen to another, it does so under threat of penalty.

From a biblical perspective, the 8th and 10th Commandments—“Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not covet”—frame this tension sharply. If a majority votes to take from a minority for its own benefit, does democratic process alone render the act moral? Alexis de Tocqueville warned of the “tyranny of the majority,” where numerical superiority becomes justification for encroachment.

Tax data often cited in these debates illustrate the imbalance: a relatively small percentage of earners pay a disproportionately large share of federal income taxes, while a significant portion pay little or none. In a system where one person equals one vote, but not one person equals one share of the tax burden, the temptation for majorities to vote benefits to themselves is ever-present. The moral hazard is obvious.

Economists speak of substitution theory—how behavior changes in response to incentives. Applied socially, as government expands its role in caring for the poor or regulating outcomes, individuals may gradually substitute state action for personal responsibility and private charity. Government becomes not merely administrator but moral arbiter. In extreme historical cases, the state becomes quasi-deity, demanding allegiance once reserved for religion.

This is why Adams’ warning matters. The Constitution cannot restrain passions if citizens themselves are not restrained by an internal moral code. A free republic depends on self-governing people. If morality is outsourced to legislation, freedom shrinks to accommodate enforcement.

The bottom line is this: caring for our fellow man does not require surrendering liberty as payment. Society can be compassionate without being coercive and freedom, prosperity, security, and justice are not mutually exclusive—but they do require a citizenry capable of moral self-restraint. Adams’ insight was structural, not sectarian, and a constitution designed for free people assumes those people possess the character to remain free.

Without that character, no parchment barrier can stand against the inevitable assaults.