Last month, my vacation coincided with the 23rd birthday of our
eldest son, 2cd Lt. Nick Allen. I flew down to Del Rio, TX to bake
him one last cake at Laughlin Air Force Base.
Last month, my vacation coincided with the 23rd birthday of our eldest son, 2cd Lt. Nick Allen. I flew down to Del Rio, TX to bake him one last cake at Laughlin Air Force Base. Nick and his roommate Mike are about to begin pilot training, and Trevor was about to go to England to do logistics, and H – that is her name, H; it is a family tradition – was about to leave for Portugal to do purchasing and contracts and such.
Nick and I walked around the base. He showed me the T-6s he will begin his pilot training in, and the T-38s and T-1s he may train in next, depending on whether he is picked for fighter, bomber or cargo track. We drove across town to see the Cessna he had just soloed in.
Nick and his friends and I went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant – in Mexico. The food was terrific. We drank Coronas, not water. The LTs reminisced about field training, which is like boot camp for the Air Force officer corps.
They look like ordinary American youth. When they aren’t in uniform, they wear jeans and sweatshirts. Look closer: the young men have short hair; H’s hair is neat. Listen: they talk about TV and video games and music and defending their country.
Other young people from Gilroy are defending their country. One of Oliver’s best friends, Nick Van Winkle, is an airman in Iraq. Roger Burnett came back from Iraq last year; he married a pretty girl in the south.
Other Gilroyans are serving our country. I wish their friends and families would take a moment to write a brief letter to the editor stating where they are and what they are doing, partly because Gilroy wants to know what its finest young people are doing, and partly to find out what it is really like, out there where the international news is happening.
It was interesting, in the midst of the major media hysteria about horrific conditions at Walter Reed Medical Center, to read the interview in The Dispatch on March 9, 2007 with the wounded Morgan Hill soldier actually recovering there.
“The care here is top-notch,” said U.S. Army medic David Shebib, 23, who was injured in a roadside bomb blast last December. “A couple of people complained, and it got blown out of proportion.”
I agree with David’s father, Vietnam veteran George Shebib, who thinks the Walter Reed hysteria is part of a politically partisan attack on Bush’s troop surge.
Nick subscribed me to the RSS/SAF AIM Points. Today’s AIM reports succinctly: “Iraq, USAF F-16s dropped GBU-12s and GBU-38s on enemy buildings near Baghdad. Large secondary explosions were noted after the initial strike, indicating the destruction of explosive material within the structure.”
Let us see if ABC and NBC pick that one up.
Even when a story with facts that would support the war is carried in a major newspaper, it rarely makes the front page. The New York Post carried an Op-Ed piece on March 3, written by a retired U.S. Army officer, George Cucullu. The story says the troop surge is working.
The tactic, according to new commander General David Petraeus, is: “We got down at the people level and are staying. Once the people know that we are going to be around, then all kinds of things start to happen.”
The Iraqi people are providing more intelligence. As a result, fewer than half of the Al Qaeda leaders who were in Bagdad at the beginning of the campaign remain. They have fled or been captured or killed.
The tribal leaders in Sunni al Anbar Province have had enough of the killing and disruption of business by Al Qaeda. “All the sheiks up there are businessmen. The presence of the foreign fighters is hitting them hard in the pocketbook, and they are tired of it.” Instead, the sheiks are encouraging their young men to join the Iraqi police force and army.
Concrete barricades have been placed around markets to limit access by vehicles, and car bombings have dropped precipitously as a result.
Don’t count on seeing any of that on the evening news.
