Old War Dogs: Bobbie Craig

Now that Christmas and New Year's celebrations are behind us, most of us are ready for a vacation, or at least a long hibernation. There is much to do to include resting up for the remainder of the year. Some of us will be pouring through seed catalogs, planning summer recreation, preparing for renovations around the homestead, generally waiting for better weather to break so we can take care of all those chores we cannot do during winter.

We are not the only ones waiting and pondering things to do later in the year. If this winter and last fall are any indication, we can expect that the anti-war idiots have been plotting and planning for a couple of years and will be out in force this year. They have been energized by the elections.

They are frustrated with so many of us who vocally oppose them. But, they also feel that their message has been resonating with the public. And they are correct.

The tactics that they developed during the 60's and 70's are working again. Not as well as they would like, and not without a great deal of effort on their part. They also do not have the full force of draft-eligible young men helping them.

So, while they have had many successes, they are feeling the strain of not having a clear road ahead of them for their hate and rhetoric. They also seem to understand that there are many of us who will simply not allow them to demonize our warriors in the same ways that they have done in the past.
This just might be a very good time for those of us who sit behind our computers safely lambasting the idiots who do not support our military in any regard to recommit to some more direct action to neutralize those who would prefer that we lose a war than admit that a strong military is in the best interest of the United States.

Most, if not all, who read these musings have either served in the military or supported those of us who have. Entirely too many in this pack of Old War Dogs have been on the receiving end of those ranting, raving lunatics who spit, threw feces, blood and other projectiles and felt the sting of disrespect, disregard, or outright hatred from the cowards who call themselves supporting the troops. At the time this was happening in the 60's and 70's, the country seemed to react as one would to spoiled children: ignore them.

Don't dignify their behavior by responding to it. Let it go. Forgive and forget.

It didn't work. The fools and cowards were only emboldened. They now sit in Congress and on the bench.

They deliver your mail and own the liquor store down the street. Yes, some of them are in jail, and some now reside in cemeteries after that last OD. But entirely too many of them now feel that hatefulness and disrespect of our history and our veterans somehow serves our country well.

Worse yet, many are in classrooms at all levels of education and are teaching our children and grandchildren skewed lessons, filling their heads with hate and disregard for not only history but common sense and decency.
Your system of ethics may require of you that you forgive those who transgress against you. That is fine, and even dandy.

To forget is quite another thing. It is foolhardy to forget an injury one has caused any of us, particularly when they have shown no signs of having changed their ways. Those who have seen the error of their ways and asked us to forgive them are quite rare.

Most of them still hate us and are still willing to hurt us, given the opportunity.
Those of us who have sworn to never allow them to do to another generation what they did to ours must do more than talk the talk. Yes, it is very important that we continue to spread the word using our computers.

Yes, it is very important that we continue to write our members of Congress and other career politicians to let them know what we think and that we are not alone. It is certainly very important that we vote and encourage others to work for candidates (when we can find them) who really support our country and our military.
Consider this my personal challenge to every Veteran-American to do everything you can to counter the hate with displays of love of country, support of our troops, and gratitude for our veterans at every opportunity.

Call your newspapers and other media outlets. Write to them. Make enough noise that we cannot be ignored completely.

Make signs and get together with some buddies to stand on a busy street corner in your community. Wear hats that show you are a veteran and carry signs that say something like We support our Troops. This idea may sound really silly, or demeaning to you.

Having done it many times, I can tell you that a group of veterans standing quietly and proudly at a busy intersection on a Sunday afternoon can generate more excitement than you can imagine. Especially if one of you has a sign which reads Honk if You Support Our Troops!
More of us need to find ways to infiltrate the anti-war crowd, or at least find ways to get intelligence information about their activities in our communities.

There is no reason why we Veteran-Americans cannot produce a counter-rally for each demonstration they mount any where in this country.
The anti-America crowd has organizational alliances. Why don't we have any?

Shouldn't we have coalitions with other like-minded groups? Are we sharing information, and nobody notified me? While I don't really expect the VFW or American Legion to proclaim a formal commitment to support the more radical of our efforts, there are many individual members who would join with us in supportive causes.

Have we asked them?
Of course, not everyone is physically or emotionally capable of taking to the streets. All members of this pack are very involved in one way or another in efforts that vary from seeing that revisionist history is corrected to finding ways for treasonous members of Congress to be held accountable for their actions, among other things.

There are many ways to participate.
While we are hibernating for the rest of this winter, we can surely each discover at least one way to counter the negative voices we hear aimed at our country and our military members. Can we each develop an action plan?

Put another way, are we prepared to Report for Duty one last time? Is the alternative something we can even contemplate?
This is my first Veterans Day without the veteran who had the most influence on my life, my father.

In addition to all the usual reflection and gratefulness I feel each year for every veteran who served throughout our history, those who served with me, and those who are serving now, there is a very special part of my heart that accepts that Veterans Day will always be different for me now. Dad enlisted in 1931, in the cavalry, in El Paso, Texas. He was a bandsman who could sit a horse.

He'd never been an athletic sort but saw the Army as a terrific career possibility. They needed musicians as well as infantrymen. He really took to Army life, serving at both Cheyenne and El Paso in the band.

At the time, there was a band leader, a first sergeant, and no one else above the rank of corporal in a band. He told me many times that since he chose to remain in the band that he was the ranking corporal in the US Army for many years. In early 1941 my father was selected to go to the Army War College, to become a Warrant Officer and lead his own band.

While there he met my mother. During WWII they were in Arizona and California, mostly with a brief stint at the Greenbrier. Dad formed his own band at the Presido, complete with bag pipes.

He also perfected his flying skills since he was able to check out aircraft and fly himself around to recruit musicians, acquire music and calendar events for the band. He told me of enlisting many Hollywood musicians for his first band in Arizona because during the War many of them werre looking for work and a way to serve the armed forces. They spent a lot of time in Los Angeles playing for movie premiers and in San Francisco for departing and arriving troop ships.

Dad was sent to Germany in 1945 to assist with demobilizing troops. I was never quite sure how that fit into the job description of a band leader, but he would never tell me just what he did for the first few months there. He was tasked with forming a band school there as well.

That also sounded a bit strange, but I have seen papers that indicate that he did indeed do that. He in fact set up several band schools in Germany in 1946 and 1947. That experience was quite an adventure.

He flew L-5's and such around and took some enemy fire. He also got stuck in the bomb bay of a B-25 once. His best tale was of having an integrated band before it was fashionable to have one.

He had no clue about who was being assigned to him and just made room assignments without regard for who might be who. Of course, there were some "mistakes" made, which he dutifully promised to correct when he "got around to it." When he found time a few days later to address the "problem," the bandsmen no longer cared.

They had discovered on their own that they got along just fine and no one cared about anyone else's skin color. And so, the US Army was unofficially integrated. Along the way, especially in Korea, Dad saw real fire fights.

Funny, but he never told me about those until after I returned from Desert Storm. Until then, all I knew was that his band played a lot of concerts and marched in a lot of parades. When he arrived on post in Korea, he was the ranking officer for several weeks.

He had no band there yet and apparently functioned quite well as the CO. He preferred telling the story of hosting Marilyn Monroe for a visit. The legacy from my father is not dissimilar from many that others relate.

From our fathers we learned the lessons that carried us through our military careers. Dad taught me all about honor and duty. He lived it every day of his life.

He expects nothing less from me. Daddy succumbed to Alzheimer's. It is a terribly painful disease, for everyone.

We had a very poignant moment early in the 2004 Presidential campaign. sKerry was in town and Dad was determined to put in an appearance with a few of us who were rallying against the fool. I knew it would be difficult for him, but he had his wits about him when it was time to leave.

So, off we went. To save him walking, and since he was having a good day, I dropped him off at the venue, parked the car, and returned to find him in deep conversation with some union troublemakers. He couldn't read their signs and mistakenly thought they were on our side!

These same idiots later came to attempt to intimidate us and said a couple of unflattering things to me. My dad stepped up and began thumping one of the union thugs on the chest, backed him down the steps, and left me rather speechless. Bless him!

There weren't a lot of good days after that, but I remember that one on this Veterans Day. My father, defending his little girl, even under those circumstances. And I didn't think there were many more lessons to learn about honor.

Enjoy this day all you veterans. I know that I will. Among all the parades and other ceremonies will be the memory of my father, reminding me to always act with honor, to report for duty whenever and wherever called upon to do so.

Sometime during the day I will probably also be reminded that we may still some day be called upon to put our lives on the line for our country. Just as generations before us have done, we will be there. Down to the wire, the October Surprise was unleashed upon the Democrats yesterday.

Surprisingly it wasn’t launched by the Republicans, but instead the liberal’s very own “useful idiot” John Kerry.
You know, education - if you make the most of it - you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq,
This site was to be announced next week, but in light of Kerry’s comment and the importance of next week’s elections we hope you will visit what promises to be an exciting place for discourse on the issues of the day.

Participation does require registration, so don’t be shy.
Zero gave us a real poser, one which is not easily answered. After much head scratching, I will submit this one idea: Something that has set Americans apart from the rest of the world is our heightened sense of survival.

Oh sure, every society, every civilization throughout time has survived in some form and surely has a sense of how to do it, but this country was populated by peoples who were escaping something, looking for greater opportunities than their home country offered, were sent here as prisoners (or worse), or otherwise were seeking adventure.
That quest for adventure, whether it was those original settlers or the many waves of immigration that followed, led also to the expansion across this land. But what allowed it to successfully happen were the universal skills, both innate and learned, at survival in a strange land or adapting to survive as strangers pushed across what had been your land that make us unique.

We took the many cultures and skills which met here, melded them into new and better ways of addressing a myriad of problems, and became the most productive and innovative culture in the history of the world.
The U.S.

Constitution allows us the freedom to become so spoiled by our success that we can actually destroy ourselves by loosing that sense of survival.
You really cannot blame the DNC for doing everything they can to garner the votes of veterans. After all, when you add up all those who have served in some capacity with the military and their family members, friends and associates, it is a significant voting block.

Plus, there remains in this country a sizable group of voters who simply have more respect for the armed forces and those who have served than any other group in the country.
Unfortunately, the movers and shakers within the DNC have so removed themselves from average Americans that they seem to have no means for making the simplest decisions concerning appealing to veterans. Their judgment is so clouded with disdain for the military that they forget the high esteem that most Americans still have for military service and how quickly ordinary Americans will come to the defense of military members who are dishonored.

So we see the DNC doing things like posting a photograph of a Canadian soldier on it's website beside an article claiming that discontent among active military members serving in harm's way is running high. We hear them claim that only they can support the troops properly. We see them dumping millions of dollars into the Congressional race of an ex-Marine who has dishonored the Corps.

Either the DNC doesn't really want the vote of veterans or they can't bring themselves to talk with real veterans to find out what we expect from a political party. All they have to do is ask us. We will tell them that while we honor the Canadian Forces as an ally, they do not substitute for American soldiers when you want to show support of the U.

S. military forces, the ones who actually vote in U.S.

elections. We will tell them that claiming to support the U.S.

military while having a track record of cutting the military budget is hollow praise. We will tell them that calling U.S.

Marines cold-blooded murderers is no way to gather support from veterans.
Thanks, but no thanks, DNC. We know who really supports the military.

Bobbie's been leaving comments signed OWB for a while and come to find out she's someone a couple of the Dogs have known and trusted since the '04 Kerry Wars. Since I don't know a lot about her yet myself I'll let and the two posts just below this one handle the introductions for me. I mean what do I need to know?

With two dogs I didn't even know knew each other (if they do) vouching for her, added to the proof I've seen of her writing ability, who am I to ask questions? Just as long as she doesn't start wanting to paint or rearrange the furniture or something we'll be fine. (No, that wasn't a sexist remark.

Master Sergeants just make me a little nervous.)
Just one question, Sarge. Just where the hell have you been?

We've been here over three months and you're just now showing up? Glad you could make it.
Oh, the OWB thing?

I wouldn't touch that line with a 10-foot Shiite.
Anyone else notice that the anti-war protesters of today look and sound a lot like the ones from the 60's? With a few more grey hairs and wrinkles, of course.

I had the dubious pleasure of being among a group of students being recruited for service with the SDS back in the 60's. They seemed to think that I fit their target audience of teenagers of upper middle to upper income, well-educated families. They were wrong, of course, which may explain why their tactics didn't take.

Being curious and as hard-headed then as now, I took advantage of the opportunity to take a good look inside their organization anyway. It was disturbing, to say the least.
The speeches, the printed materials, and the organizers themselves were straight out of Communist China and the USSR.

My uncle, the printer, checked the hand outs and assured me that almost everything I brought home was printed in China. You didn't have to look far behind the curtain to see actual foreign agents at work. It was scary to a kid, and my family soon forbid me to participate in any more field trips.

Fast forward to the past couple of years. Many of the same individuals are still involved in the anti-war movement. They are still hawking their communist agenda, with a success rate which far exceeds my comfort zone.

They are training their children to carry on. They still disrespect anything which uplifts our military, our country or our culture.
Many of these clowns have traded in their smelly clothes for three-piece suits, but their message remains the same: Destroy the United States through rhetoric, dirty tricks, and legislation.

Perhaps the most disturbing innovation of the current crop of anti-war activists is that they now use their children to do their dirty work. At protests, it is quite common for them to send their children to curse and ridicule the veterans who are at the next corner or across the street counter-protesting.
Do we know anyone else who uses children as human shields or instruments of destruction?

Back about 15 years ago or so, some of us were engaged in a little something called Desert Storm. During that time, I was assigned to a C-130 Airlift Wing which combined with a bunch of other C-130 units to form what was lovingly called the 1st DAWg, since we were the first Desert Airlift Wing set up and operating in theater. The powers that be eventually came up with an official designation, but who cares.

We were and remained 1st DAWg for the duration.
My position at the time was as a Logistics Plans technician, so I got to be involved with the packing of the aircraft, the ordering of supplies and parts to keep the aircraft and support staff functioning, and figuring out how much water to palletize and store in case we had to bug out in a hurry. It also came to be that I had to do a bunch of load plans for the aircraft for everything from hauling those blasted tanks up country to finally packing us to go home.

We generally had a pretty good time where we were, in spite of the heat, the dust, the isolation, and the station brass which mostly didn't have a clue. We had beer! Which everyone drew, whether they liked the stuff or not.

After the war was over, it seemed to many of us in theater that the job was just beginning. But, instead of finishing it, we were packing up to leave. I remember standing out in a dust storm asking why we were being sent home.

It felt rather foolish at the time, because I, too, wanted to sleep in my own bed for a change, but many of us agreed that we would rather stay for as long as it took than have to come back in 10 years or less.
Yes, 10 years seemed to be the consensus among those of us opining as to the maximum amount of time it would be before we, or someone, would have to return to the neighborhood. As crazy as it sounds, there were many of us muttering about leaving without finishing the job.

Sometimes it does not feel at all good to be proven right.
It all started with an email from Russ Vaughn, which I posted . That set off a flurry of emails which led to the creation of this site.

I'll let Russ explain more:
Through the magic of the blogosphere it is becoming increasingly evident that there are a lot of old dogs out there mastering the new tricks of this 21st Century phenomenon. While some are technically skilled enough to create their own sites, like your host Bill Faith, far more fall into my category: those who tenaciously hunt and peck out their opinions on war, society and life in general, and have only the basic computer skills requisite to sending those opinions into the ether of this wonderful thing called the Internet.
Old War Dogs is a site designed for these old dogs to practice their new tricks without having to compete with the fluid skills of younger, more technically savvy bloggers.

While we may be too old to carry a gun in the ranks, we can still pound these keys. Mao’s dictum that political power flows from the barrel of a gun, while true, predates the blogosphere; and this old dog bets the Chairman would be truly stunned at the power that flows from the keyboard.
The youngest of 4 sons, John Werntz turned 18 —choice draft-meat —11 weeks after Pearl Harbor.

His eldest brother, Ted, a telephone technician in civilian life, was already in the Army, fated to find himself installing commo systems in Morocco in late 1942. Lest we forget, North Africa in’42 led to Palermo, then Messina, Salerno, Cassino, Anzio, Rome, Southern France, on up into Germany and all the way to Munich. But this is about John, not about Ted.

The middle brothers, Eugene and Howard, were already noncoms headed for action in the Pacific with the Fleet Marine Force. John’s dilemma: How to beat the draft without incurring the wrath and scorn of his dog-tagged and chevron-sleeved brethren. Just in time, the Army Air Corps lowered its standards to permit mere high-school grads to train as aircrew officers.

After months of hard schooling relieved by PT and a modicum of Hup!Toop!Threep!

Fawr, this gawky teenager found himself taking the President’s commission and with it a solemn vow of service to the nation. A soldier? Hardly.

But a citizen in full.
That was early August of ‘43. Two months later John’s outfit, which was the first Troop Carrier Group to arrive in England, began to train for the assault on occupied Western Europe.

Please note that John’s official MOS was Aerial Observer (Navigator). Prior to D-day he racked up well over 1000 hours of air time. Much of that was spent observing two sweating pilots wrestling with the controls, trying to stay on an even keel and keep proper distance in close formation while wallowing in rotten turbulent air exasperated by propwash and wingwash.

A neat trick, formation flying in an aircraft that was designed to look serene while soaring over the Grand Tetons in lonely splendor.
The rest is history, and John had ample opportunity to observe some of it. The chaos that ensues when you release gliders, dozens of them in the air all at once, competing for a safe place to set down.

The silent menace of that huge invasion fleet lurking in the pre-dawn mist off the coast of Normandy. The foreboding when the invasion seemed bogged down in the hedgerows six weeks after D-day. The euphoria after the breakout.

Loud cheers in the Quonset hut when Patton’s tanks overrun the LZs and DZs of planned airborne ops. Why ramble on? We all know what happened.

For John Werntz, it all comes down to a tale of 3 first weeks of August.
1943: Newly hatched shavetail, wet behind the ears.
1944: Breakout at St.

Lô. Paris soon liberated. Rehearse French.

1945: Enola Gay does its thing. Tear up orders for Okinawa. Get smashed.

We wish him well. *** Update: John has returned from retirement and resumed normal blogging. *** Update: John has resigned from Old War Dogs effective 2007.

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