Powerful video of Tom Burnett Senior and Alec Rawls at the August 2nd Memorial project meeting. The clip below is Part 1 of Alec’s new video exposé, starting with Mr. Burnett ’s appeal to the American people to please help him stop the Park Service from planting a giant Islamic shaped crescent atop his son’s grave.

embedded by Embedded Video


Part one: it points to Mecca. Clip covers the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, the phony redesign, and the crescent-topped minaret. Lots of unaired news video and animated graphics, bookended with the coolest spaghetti western music ever.A terror war battle that we can still win, despite a president-elect who does not want to fightRational people still want to defeat the Islamofascist enemy, but half of the electorate will now get its way in pretending that there is no enemy. Exposing and stopping the terrorist Memorial to flight 93 is a chance for the rest of us to still achieve victory, and on multiple fronts at once. Not only can we foil an enemy plot, but we can at the same time expose the willful blindness of those peace-at-any-cost countrymen who are engaged in blatant cover-up of the most damning facts about the crescent design.

These are the two battles we need to win. We have to expose and stop the deceptive agents of Islamic conquest, and we have to expose and stop the peacenik cover-up of every enemy threat.

We also need to stop the re-hijacking of Flight 93 for its own sake. Just listen to Mr. Burnett’s insistence on a proper memorial for his son Tom and the other heroes. Yes, the battle over the memorial is only symbolic, but as our Democrat-controlled media just proved by delivering Obama to the presidency, it is the information war that ultimately determines everything.

To those conservatives who have been staying away from the memorial controversy, please reconsider. All of our claims about the Memorial are easy to verify. This is a real attack on our country, and in the age of Obama, it is a rare battle that we are still in a position to win. The father of one of America’s greatest heroes is pleading for your help, but he is also offering tremendous help, if you will only hear him out.

(To join our blogbursts, just send your blog’s url.)

A Veterans Day Week appeal from Flopping Aces

One of our blogburst participants, Curt at Flopping Aces, e-mails a reminder about the great work done by the VALOUR-IT program at Soldiers’ Angels, delivering computer-based help to wounded soldiers.

It’s time again, readers to take on the challenge of “change” our wounded service members can be transformed by. We’ll never to be able to make them “good as new,” but we sure can help fund technology to make live more livable and, when they hit the civilian workforce, successful. Yes, we can!  And..it’s time once again to BEAT ARMY!Dates: It’s on. 11/11/200 - 11/27/2008.Goal: $250K. Team Navy’s bogey: Ever penny you can scrape up….or $50K, which ever is biggest.

Good News: The US Coast Guard, after two years of begging have their own team!

Bad news (for the Coasties): Be careful what you wish for, when you ask to be “equal.”

Don’t know about VALOur-IT? A program of the most excellent Soldier’s Angels. Details of the specific program to provide technology, in the form of laptops with voice activated software to those with disabilities in the areas of sight or mobility are here.

New and improved, it is! Now, in addition to laptops, items to help provide physical therapy (Nnitendo Wiis do great), aiding in over coming Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) effects and memory loss (GPS systems for those working to be on their own) are being purchased and put in the hands of those who have come back from combat.

You can go an donate here

If you’re a blogger/website owner and want to join up, at the bottom of the donation page, you can add your name to a service team and get the word out, links are at the bottom of the donation page.

Team Navy is being led by Gahlran of the awesome blog Information Dissemination. If you’ve not found this excellent professional naval/maritime blog, you’re missing out. Bookmark him for your reading pleasure. He also has some good basic info about the program in his opening post on the drive.

Oh, the picture above is MEGEN. We want her back!

To me, this day is once of great significance. Early in my blogging, I responded to the voice saying “Find out what day Paul Carr died.” If you have been a long time reader here, you’ll see his name is displayed many times across the last 4 years and a month. The journey to discover the story of that man led me down a path to the day, independent of the year, and I have found several amazing military historical events tied to this day across several centuries.

The most significant connection in my process of discovery was the manner in which Paul Henry Carr ended his life. Selfless, on mission, and disregarding the cost, as there was a larger picture to serve than just himself, in the agony he must have been suffering from physically.He lost his life in MT 52 of the USS SAMUEL B ROBERTS (DE-413) at the last major naval battle in history this day in 1944.Dick Rohde, a radioman was there too. He allowed me to sit for an afternoon and ask about the battle.CAPT Amos T. Hathaway, USN (Ret) was at that battle. He became my professor at The Citadel for Computer Science, and I never took the time to sit and ask why he woare a ribbon for a Navy Cross when I had the opportunity across at least an entire semester. Lesson learned - Talk to them when you can, for one day thay will be ghosts and the story of their lives is now other people’s memories, at best.

In researching another incredible story of heroism, I found out that Cpl Desmond T. Doss, US Army was on the beach at Leyte Gulf, and may have been stranded from support and defeated in detail, had Taffy 3 not charged into battle, against incredible odds, with essentially no hope of survival. LCDR Evans was one such man, and his legacy was, as with Paul Carr and Desmond Doss, dedication to the mission above self. My connection to Desmond Doss? While a third grader, son of a civil servant, we took a family walk through the nearby sugar cane field to be told the story of a brave man, while standing over the small granite monument to his courage on the Meada Escarpment on Okinawa. I also missed meeting Desmond Doss. He passed away March 23rd, 2006.

When did this conscious trip into history begin? October, 1988. Not exactly then, as I was completing turn over as XO from Tom Brown, but over the next 18 months, as I found information in the USS CARR’s (FFG-52) files and took the time to read the battle reports of a time 44 years earlier, I became engaged in the story.

I became more engaged in the larger picture 10 years ago today, as Dr Powers, at First Baptist Church in Norfolk, VA, talked of a man named Jonah, who paid to run from his destiny, both in cold hard cash and with his person for three days. I got it. My life has not been my own since that sermon.

October 25th is a significant day in history.

From this point, I don’t think I could link post-Hugo events to specific days, but I’ll follow up in the next several days of those things I recall of the days after the storm and the clean up.

To get one part out of the way, the story of the RX-7. I didn’t get out to James Island to my mother-in-law’s house until the first weekend after returning to port, if I recall correctly. Not knowing much more than I had no specific need to have a car in those days, and that it was damaged by a tree, topped with all those duties I had to perform taking priority.

I did finally arrive and I’ll paint a word picture as best as I can. Picture three cars in the drive way. Mine furthest in, the mother-in-law’s next and then my sister-in-law’s. The pine tree, with a diameter of about 30 inches had managed to fall, from it’s location on the side of the house, down the axis of the driveway. The good news? My car held the tree off the other two cars, causing only some minor cracks in the next car’s windshield. The bad, but not that bad under the circumstances news? The frame was in fine shape and mostly it was body damage. All the glass was shattered, the sunroof looked like a “U”, the roof, yes, had a large indentation, the hood was dimpled badly, but intact. Salvageable, in other words. The bad news? Deployment was but 4 weeks away and the family was in another state.

I contacted USAA and asked when they might send an adjuster. Response: “We don’t know, we have lots of customers to handle.” Yes, I know, but I am on the only ship deploying out of this port in 4 weeks and I will need some time to take care of this before this.

That conversation went back and forth a bit util it sunk in. No resolution when I got off the phone, but I was insistent that letting the car sit in the weather for the next 6 months in this condition would cost them more. The next day, I had a call from an adjuster, and the next day I met him as he looked the car over, and handed me a 00 check to get to work.

A few weeks later, with a hand from a shipmate, Chief Hatherly, to be specific, as he was PCSing to Norfolk, he picked up a trailer and drove me and the car to Virginia Beach, where my wife then took over the duty of getting an extreme makeover.

Next part? A yard with 27 very tall pine trees, and 4 oak trees ended up with something less, and I helped clean up on my free time.

I don’t recall the time, but we finally arrived at the pier at the Charleston Naval Base. We moored starboard side to, bow out at one of the southernmost piers.

The trip up the channel revealed a flattened landscape, the vegetation stripped away along the shores, leaving an eerie feeling for us. The temporary range markers looked like toy replicas of the permanent ones we had been so used to “riding” in and out of port, but they were all there and usable.

The arrival pierside wasn’t greeted with the families and friends. It was the DESRON staff personnel to get us ready for the work effort to help restore Charleston at several levels.

Obviously, we had to make some decision. The work force had a lot of their minds, after being gone since the Monday and now their personal lives were first and foremost in their minds. Our base was decimated, and then the overall civilian community needed help. Beyond our ability to control the assignments, we were tasked with providing working parties men for the Naval Station, the Naval Weapons Station, and the local Red Cross. So, the priorities came…and came, and came. Oh, and the other non-negotiable was factored in: Deployment to the Middle East for convoy escort duty….and did I mention a minor event know as “Change of Command?”

One of those “details” of life at sea now came to the forefront: Water. The base couldn’t provide it. Sounds like not too much of a big deal, as you know we make our own water, but, there are these sticky things called “sanitation regulations.” For health reasons, we do not make water within 3 NM of land. It’s a basic rule to ensure we don’t have the run off from the land, carrying the entrained refuse of humanity, to get into our source of drinking water. Now we were well within that limit, and up a major river. The decision: Fire up the evaporators and “super-chlorinate” the water. That was also a part of the regulations, in the event you ended up in a situation like this, or in some body of water that indicated it may be more polluted than it should be.

Power? Not a problem. Ship’s run their generators alongside the piers all the time.

The takeaway here? The crew, while “in port, homeport,” had a wide variety of extra duties to conduct, well above and beyond any normal set of circumstances. Besides all the working parties, and the routine work that had to necessarily continue, we also were “steaming,” and not “Cold Iron,” which required a more extensively manned inport watchbill. Add to this the family issues, and the uncertainy as to when any of this might return to the “normal” level of Naval chaos we had become accustomed to and comfortable with.

The crew, rolled up their sleeves and got to work, day and night. During the day, they dutifully cleaned debris on our base and the other other government facilities, and those in the community as assigned. When they were done for the day, and not assigned to the duty section, they were out lending a hand to their shipmates families, and their neighbors. The “unattached” crew members were especially helpful, as they had the time, but they willingly helped as they could.

So were were home, in our wrecked homeport, and we had our work cut out for us.

My car? I wouldn’t have the opportunity to get out to James Island to see it. I had a crew to keep running, and a car was not necessary for this, and besides, it wasn’t able to be driven from the description.

We awoke this morning and got to business. That of still working on what pre-deployment preparations we could do. Some of the energy went towards figuring out the alternate methods we would have to use to accomplish this underway commitment, regardless of where we were moored stateside.

Some of the crew had arranged to rent cars and head for Charleston. We assisted in that process also, particularly for the ones who had destroyed homes to handle up north.

By afternoon, the entire playing field changed. We received orders to get underway and return to Charleston. It turns out that between the Charleston Pilots Association, the Navy (using the minesweepers in Charleston) and I believe the Coast and Geodesic Service, had conducted several surveys of the navigational channel, and the Coast Guard had installed temporary buoys and range markers, all in a 5 day time frame. The channel had not been affected and remained as before.

Preps to get underway, again, but now getting us closer to, and not further from home. The mood improved.

This morning, back then, we set for and executed our 4th in a row unplanned sea and anchor details, arriving in Mayport. I don’t recall the order, but we were part of a group of about 4-5 other vessels sent south.

What I do recall are two specific circumstances of the day. The first was seeing our HSL-44 Detachment crew standing on the pier to greet us, intermingled with so many others. There were pallets of supplies sitting there, having been collected by our on and off shipmates and their families and friends, all to be taken back to Charleston at some point in the future. While there had been many a day when surface sailors and their embarked aviation crews would like to keep separate, while stuck together, this day wasn’t one of them. As is common with the team spirit of Americans in all our disasters, the big picture merges us into one entity to take care of the problems we face. After we were moored, the supplies of water, diapers, canned food, cleaning supplies, etc, were craned aboard and staged in the empty helo hangers.

The other event of the day is one I have to report on hearsay: The Chief Staff Officer, upon us putting the brow down and declaring it secured, scampered aboard and went to see Captain Johnson. The CSO gave a little bit of a butt chewing to my CO, but then CDR Johnson had his turn to speak. The issue? It seemed that on the previous Wednesday morning there had been a meeting of the base commanders. At the meeting it was noted that USS CARR was inport already for storm evasion. Some direction about us was issued, I believe by the Base Commander, which I recall the Commodore of DESRON 8 rogered for. Shortly thereafter, they looked out the big picture window of the office towards our berth on the NE side of the basin, to see a bare slip. Jaw(s) dropped and the embarrassment factor increased all of a sudden, which then became a burr under the Commodore’s saddle. The CSO was the messenger to let my CO know he had done something wrong. Now Wade Johnson stated his defense: ON the evening of the prior Tuesday, he had contacted the CDS8 Duty Officer. He requested permission to get underway, and was granted same, with a promise from the Duty Officer, a chief petty officer, that the base authorities would be notified to provide us tugs, line handlers and a pilot to depart. The CO went on to indicate, professionally, that he had followed the normal chain of command, and also, that he was not in possession of the Commodore’s home phone number in any case, making it impossible to contact the Commander directly anyhow. He indicated to me that he followed with an obvious point: The Duty Officer failed to breif the rest of the staff on Wednesday morning, something he had no control over. That ended that.

The day went on, with some certainty in the uncertainty, as the crew now made their way to the phones on the base to try and call home.

We spent most all day at anchor, the mood still quiet. The news on the TVs still just more of the same - lots of wreckage, and then more.

Side note: About this time, they tended to show a shot taken from a news helo flying the length of Folly Island. There was house after beach house only marked by the foundation and piles of construction material rubble. Except one house. It had a fewe missing shingles, but was otherwise unaffected by any visible damage. It turns out, later on, the secret was revealed: When the house was built, the owner had every material “upsized” one increment. 1/2 in plywood was 3/4 in, 2×4s were replaced with 2×6s in the plans. Moral of the story: If the construction code was for 120MPH (I think that was the then current standard, then one size up of everything would stand over 150MPH storms.

Anyhow, during the day, the ships that had sortied from Charleston began to return, going to the anchorages as assigned by SOPA (senior Officer Present Afloat) - Most likely COMCRUDESGRU TWO. It became apparent the port was going to be closed and we couldn’t just hang around a decimated port. We were directed, in groups to head to other ports, in our case, Mayport.

Once more, the getting underway checklist was broken out and the Ship prepared with little other than professional communications required, to get underway/ We would sail through the night to get there.

I know, this story reminds you of “Castaway,” but trust me, it was a time of numbness for many, much like for Tom Hanks character let on a deserted island for years.

The day was long. Longer still because of the heavy emotional burden. Here was a ship full of people who always got the job done, sitting mere miles from a job worth doing, for self, for family, for shipmates, for just someone who needed help, and we were not allowed to go there. Additionally, were weren’t being told to go anywhere else, either. The sky, once again the brilliant blue we had seen near Miami the day before, and behind the many storms we had collective seen at sea among the lot of us. The waves were essentially non-existent, too.

The bare essentials of the routine for being anchored, and life aboard a ship continued, but mostly people stood on deck, staring at the devastated beach, or on the signal bridge, waiting for a turn to scan the beach nearby. If below decks, they were in the berthing compartments, watching the news on over the air TV.

Even the unmarried sailors and officers had a load on their minds, foremost for most was the status of their vehicles parked at the piers, not far from the water’s edge in most cases. Not having someone to drop you off at the pier on the day you sail is the condition that got them to that state of mind.

So as we swing at the anchor, in limbo, the mood was quiet, pensive and tense.

Late in the afternoon, the Bridge-to-Bridge VHF radio spoke a familiar voice, that of Chief Petty Officer Steve Hatherly. Just this morning, he had climbed aboard a zodiac and headed into the Coast Guard Station, which was at the tip of the Charleston Peninsula, and now he was calling us from the Naval Station, several miles away, across a city without power or public transportation at the moment. Steve was always the resourceful one, and to this day, I never have found out how he did it, but at that moment, we didn’t care. I recall a large number of people crowding the bridge near the Captain’s Chair, listening intently as Chief Hatherly read off the list of who he had contacted, providing status of each family. He had managed to reach at least 3/4 of the people listed on the Alpha roster, all within a work day’s period, in the middle of the devastation.

I recall three homes of families of the crew were uninhabitable, but all of them were safe with neighbors or other families of the crew. Smiles and sighs of relief began to break out. He finally was about to wrap up his report, and he said to let the Doc (HMC Mentzer) that the windows of his van had blown out due to the storm’s over-pressure, but it was otherwise fine. Then he said “I have bad news for the XO.” It was quiet on the Bridge. He then said “A tree fell on his RX-7.” It had been parked at the Mother-in-Law’s house for that trip to sea, as my family had moved in anticipation of orders following the upcoming deployment. Deployment you say? Yes, in just 40 days, we were scheduled to sail for the Persian Gulf, and our homeport was pretty much destroyed.

We ate chow that evening, knowing a little more of the conditions ashore, but still without plans. The Charleston ships that had sortied, still were no where near getting back, having run far to the north east for safety. We turned in, not knowing what the next day would bring.

Having steamed all day and night in the wake of Hugo, we arrived and sun up off the coast of Charleston. We selected an anchorage and headed there, being the first Navy ship back. We had been preceded by a Coast Guard Cutter, a converted Navy salvage ship, skippered by a classmate of mine from the Naval War College.

We did not have permission to enter port. The shortest distance the buoys had shifted was about 1/2 a nautical mile. Most all of the range markers had been destroyed. The larger concern is that the channel had shifted with the push of the storm going through the area, rendering it unsafe for transit to the Naval Base up the Cooper River. The sea floor in the vicinity of Charleston Harbor is mostly fine silt, so that fear was real.

What did we know? For one, the crew, about 1/2 of the of the 189, had families ashore. What we didn’t know is how they were. We knew it had been a devastating storm, as we could plainly see the Ben Sawyer turntable bridge from Mt Pleasant sitting at a god awful angle into the sky from our vantage point jsut off the shore. With the “Big Eyes,” the large binoculars on the Signal Bridge, you got a better idea of the almost complete devastation of the houses on the beach along the Isle of Palms.

With our external TV antenna, we began picking up news reports from the local stations, as they came back on the air. I recall just staring at one reporter, looking like he was stnding in Francis Marion Forest, saying “I’m standing on (can’t recall the main road, but it was one of the main roads in Charleston)….” I was mesmerized by the thick background of pine branches behind him.

It was quiet walking the decks. Not much work was being done, as our minds were obviously focused on the unknown.

The Captain called me to the Bridge. The Coast Guard cutter was sending a zodiac boat into the Coast Guard Station, and asked if we wanted to put some ashore. He told me to get Chief Hatherly, and an “alpha” roster (a recall list, with the home names and addresses of the crew, as well as spouse and children’s names). Order the CO gave to STGC Hatherly: “Take the roster and do the right thing. Grab a toothbrush and get to the Quarterdeck.” Off Steve went. About 10 minutes later, he was climbing down the Jacob’s ladder to the zodiac alongside.

It was to be a long day of not knowing much.