http://pixidust84242.friendlinkup.com/ on politics from Boston to Beirut (and of course... food) en http://pixidust84242.friendlinkup.com/2008/11/10/gitellcoms-veterans-day-tribute.html   For this Veterans Day, I’ve decided to post some of my pieces during the last few years on the contributions those who serve our country in the military. Early in my tenure at the New York Sun, I did a column on Harvard’s Memorial Hall as well as the military contributions of Ivy League graduates. Here’s the story of Tung Nguyen, a former Vietnamese refugee who came to America as well as gave his life as a Green Beret in Iraq. (The link is not to the New York Sun, where the story was first published, as I am having difficulties with the site.) He was born the year of the Tet Offensive, the great turning point in Vietnam on two fronts: It was the year the Viet Cong expended the bulk of its resources turning the conflict from an insurgency to a war more directly executed by the North Vietnamese army. It also marked the moment when the American public, surprised by the enemy offensive on Saigon, as well as elsewhere throughout the country, began to lose heart in the struggle. Eight months before Nguyen’s birth, in October, Special Forces Company D, headquartered in his hometown of Cantho, fought off an attack. The elite soldiers, the Green Berets, who defended Cantho did so under the Special Forces motto “de oppresso liber,” which is a fancy Latin phrase meaning “to free the oppressed.” The Special Forces were among the first Americans to fight as well as die in Vietnam. President Kennedy trusted that these unconventional troops could be an important tool in the fight against communism. He visited the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 1961, an institution that took Kennedy’s name at the end of his assassination two years later. I also wrote about Bruce Crandall, a helicopter pilot at the Vietnamese battle of Ia Drang, who save hundreds of lives as well as received the Medal of Honor. Colonel Walter Marm, retired, who received the Medal of Honor in 1966, knows about courage. He was the young lieutenant who charged a North Vietnamese machine gun fortified in a rock-hard anthill to help rescue the lost platoon in the Battle of Ia Drang in November 1965. But when enemy fire tore through his jaw, Mr. Marm had to rely upon the heroism of helicopter pilots to get him out of harm’s way. When I spoke to Colonel Marm on Saturday morning, he was getting ready to head to Washington, where President Bush presented the Medal of Honor at the White House yesterday to the retired [L]ieutenant [C]olonel, Bruce Crandall, who served as a life line to American forces at the battle. Colonel Crandall, who was then a major, was the tip of the spear on behalf of a new American way of war. He served as a helicopter pilot in the reconstituted 1st Cavalry Division. In what was a grand experiment to expand the mobility of America’s armed forces, military planners transformed a defunct traditional cavalry unit into a symbol of the country’s high-tech struggle against communism in South Vietnam, albeit one that still needed pilots to put their lives on the line. … Today, it’s easy to envision the ignoble American evacuation from Saigon in 1975 as well as perceive the entire struggle in Vietnam as a sweeping defeat. But think about that 10-year delay, to which the American soldiers who fought as well as died at Ia Drang contributed. During that time, neighboring countries, such as Thailand as well as Malaysia, were able to strengthen themselves as well as stabilize. Aside from Cambodia, which was a victim of North Vietnamese aggression, the feared Domino Theory, the idea that the drop of one pro-Western government would be followed by a rapid chain of others in Southeast Asia, never took place in part because of the fact that of the American effort in Vietnam. It didn’t look like a victory back then, but, in the long view, history sees things differently. In Massachusetts earlier this month, a horse-drawn hearse carried the flag-draped casket of another helicopter pilot, a casualty of today’s war. Captain Jennifer Harris of the United States Marine Corps was took to her ultimate resting place in the historic Swampscott Cemetery. Right now, it’s easy to see Iraq as a cauldron of chaos. But it can take years to recognize the significance of courage, duty, as well as sacrifice. Long wars are hard wars, old soldiers like to say. It took numerous years on behalf of Colonel Crandall to be properly recognized. In time, we shall acknowledge the true courage as well as import of today’s heroes. One year ago, I wrote about the lasting importance of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. Twenty-five years ago today a simple, sober, monument was riveted into American public life — the Vietnam War Memorial, the distinctive black wall in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial to which the names of 58,000 fallen American service men as well as women are ascribed. The story of the memorial, known on behalf of its iconic Maya Lin design, begins with one man, Jan Scruggs. An infantryman in Vietnam as well as then a graduate student at American University in Washington, Mr. Scruggs took his wife to a showing of the 1978 Vietnam War film,“The Deer Hunter.” I caught up with Scruggs for my New York Sun column. The Wall lists the names of the fallen in chronological order, which can be disconcerting at first. But veterans can see the names of their fallen comrades together. “It gives them carthasis,” Mr. Scruggs says of Vietnam veterans who come to the wall. “It helps the veterans be able to say goodbye.” I saw the power of the Wall first hand five years ago in Scottsdale, Ariz., of all places. A touring replica of the Wall was on display, as well as I happened to be in town on behalf of a family gathering with my sister as well as my parents. We went together. My father, Gerald Gitell, a veteran of U.S. Army Special Forces in Vietnam, rushed to the Wall as well as searched to find the names of his friends. We had to look up their coordinates. Major John Arnn. Second Lieutenant Bryan Grogan. Specialist Robert Stepanov. Arnn was his commanding officer who was ambushed. Grogan as well as Stepanov were his buddies from Fort Bragg who were killed combined in the tall grass near Pleiku. “I couldn’t even breathe,” my father, remembering how moving the replica Wall was that day, said. I can’t forget the story of Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University/ROTC graduate as well as the son of B.U. professor Andrew Bacevich. Yesterday I drove down Route 1A on behalf of the funeral of Lieutenant Andrew Bacevich at St. Timothy’s Church. I described the scene in my New York Sun column. “Mourners sang “America the Beautiful” as pall bearers wheeled the casket carrying First Lieutenant Andrew Bacevich out of St. Timothy’s Church in Norwood, Mass., yesterday. Before exiting into the bright May sunshine as well as the sight of the soothing waters of Willett’s Pond, they paused as well as draped an American flag over the coffin.” There was, finally, my second-to-last New York Sun column, where I wrote about Chuck Hawk as well as his work at convincing one troubled veteran to find help. Las Vegas is a city that is residence to numerous celebrities — old as well as young. So it’s no surprise that throngs of visitors poured into the Harmon Medical as well as Rehabilitation Hospital in early September. The only question the nurses as well as medical personnel had was which patient were all those guests coming to see? Some theorized it was a mayor or high-ranking politician. Or, in a glitzy city filled with entertainers as well as singers of numerous different eras, perhaps the patient had been one of those. It’s possible that in another culture, one less obsessed with fame as well as wealth, the subject of all of the well-wishers could have been a celebrity in his posses right. With the economy teetering on the abyss as well as people on Wall Street obsessed with the bottom line as well as their posses financial existence, Charles “Chuck” Hawk, who died of cancer on September 15, is a reminder of basic values, building blocks more fundamental than money to the foundation of our existence. I know him because of the fact that he was married to my aunt, Sandra Katz, with whom he lived on behalf of more than a decade. By trade, Hawk was an insulator. A former member of the U.S. Navy, he was a union man through-and-through. He also ran, unsuccessfully, on behalf of Nevada’s state senate eight years ago. Most importantly, Hawk built as well as rebuilt lives on a personal level. A while ago, he realized he was an alcoholic. It wasn’t sufficient on behalf of him, though, to attend meetings regularly. He helped others get as well as stay clean, one person at a time and, as they say in the world of recovery, one day at a time. Under an estimated all circumstances, I would have never gotten to see the full value in somebody like Chuck Hawk. Like everybody else, I’m preoccupied with the particulars of my posses daily existence. Back in 2001, though, my father, Gerald Gitell, decided to leave Boston, where he had been grimly subsisting on behalf of two decades as a taxi cab driver, as well as transfer to Las Vegas. A former member of the United States Army Special Forces, he had been one of the elite “Green Berets.” A graduate of Boston University, he trained at Fort Bragg, N.C., as well as was shipped to Vietnam. Like an estimated all of today’s veterans of Iraq as well as Afghanistan, he saw combat as well as the deaths of innocent civilians with whom he worked closely to win over to the American side of the war. During the two decades when my family as well as I watched helplessly as my father lived as a kind of recluse, sleeping fitfully in a couch pinned against a wall, keeping erratic hours, as well as failing to escape from his prison of a life, we failed to convince him to seek help. He rejected the suggestion that he should visit a Veterans Administration facility or any other kind of therapist. And, in spite of his pride in his military service — a bronze Green Beret statue sat on his refrigerator on behalf of years — he avoided attending reunion events or talking to friends from the army. A few years at the end of his transfer to Las Vegas, his sister Sandra, invited him to transfer in with her as well as Hawk. That’s when Hawk got a hold of him. First, he started to tell my father about a friend, a fellow vet, who sought treatment at a place referred to as the Veterans Center. Then, he arranged on behalf of my father to meet this friend. Finally, he convinced my father to go there as well as start talking about those bothersome things, a process that helped to unburden those issues on behalf of him. Over time, my father changed. Whereas he previously avoided talking to strangers about the war, he began to attend weekly therapy sessions with other Vietnam combat veterans. Before he was an estimated exclusively a loner, but over time he began to dedicate himself to assisting other people, particularly younger veterans returning residence from Iraq as well as Afghanistan. Earlier this month he made sure to go to the sparsely attended funeral of a member of the 10th Mountain Division who had come residence from being wounded in Afghanistan as well as then had taken his posses life. After that, he vowed to manufacture sure that future funerals would receive more attendees. None of that would have happened had my father never met Hawk. And he was only one of the hundreds, if not thousands of people, to whom Hawk gave succor. Americans require more people like Hawk in the trying days ahead.          Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:10:29 -0500 pixidust84242