United Of Omaha Quotes

Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it’s much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that choreographs their actions best usually wins. They might take casualties, but they win. That choreography—you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up—is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is choreography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gatigal. The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what’s best for him, but on what’s best for the group. If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.

I share it not for myself, but to tell you what we all went through - and to show that whatever difficulties you, too, encounter, they can be overcome. While we were working on this book, I found an old newspaper with a story about my medic unit from before the war. The page was brittle, the ink faded, but if you were patient and careful, the words came clear enough. It seems to me that is a metaphor not only for memory, but my aim: to pass down what I remember before it fades, so you, too, can know and remember. Age tugs at me, dimming what I can see when I look back. but I found that working on this book sharpened what I knew, making my memory clearer. That, too, is a metaphor. The harder we work to remember, the better we get at it. The more we remember, the better we become at mastering the present.

went to the White House and got the President out of bed. Carey and President Harrison were said to be old Senate friends, and no one was present at this session to speak for Johnson County. Quickly convinced of the necessity for immediate action, Harrison ordered a telegram send to General John R. Brooke in Omaha shortly after 11:00 P.M.4 At 11:05 P.M. the president wired Governor Barber that “in compliance with your call for the aid of the United States forces to protect the state of Wyoming against domestic violence,” he had ordered the secretary of war to send troops.5 The president did not have his facts right — the state of Wyoming needed no saving from domestic violence — but Governor Barber made no effort to set the record straight. At 11:37 P.M. General Brooke telegrammed Governor Barber, informing him that the commanding officer at Fort McKinney had been ordered “to prevent violence and preserve peace.”6 This message was received in Buffalo at 12:05 P.M., and within two hours, troops rode out of Fort McKinney under orders from the post’s commanding officer, Colonel J. J. Van Horn.7

I’m here to tell you, that I do have a birth certificate saying I was born here in Chicago. I graduated high school in Omaha, where I lived with my grandparents, after my mother died while we lived in Australia. Besides, that requirement in the Constitution only requires that the people running for President of the United States must be natural born citizens. Last time I checked, I wasn’t running for that office.” responded Gary.

A Last Night with My Wife I, of course, had nothing to do with those sorts of decisions; as a T-4 and then a T-3—“Technician 4” and “Technician 3,” ranks roughly equivalent to and usually called sergeant—I worried about my job and my unit, and little else. At the same time, there were plenty of rumors about which way we were heading. Mostly, they predicted that we’d ship out to Great Britain. We kept training. I wangled my way into special rifle training, qualifying as a marksman and earning a badge. Ordinarily, medics didn’t carry weapons, not even pistols; our job in combat was to help the wounded, and according to the Geneva Conventions we were not supposed to fight or be fired upon. In combat, our helmets would have large red crosses; we would have armbands with the same very visible insignia. I took the course anyway. It’s possible I was the only medic who did that, at least in the 16th. Since I’d hunted from the time I was a boy, the course wasn’t all that difficult; I imagine a lot of guys who’d grown up in farm country found it a breeze, especially when it came to firing the M1

may not even have been about money, but details were scant. Rumors and emotions weren’t. An artillery unit ran out of ammunition on the battlefront; rumors followed that their shortage had been caused by a strike back in the States. It wasn’t true, but there were enough dark feelings around that it was easy to believe. Why wasn’t everyone back home pitching in like we were? We didn’t want our parents and families and others back home to experience the horrors we were experiencing, but we did want to feel that they were doing as much as they possibly could to help us end those horrors. There were times we didn’t get that feeling.

Yet only one highly trained black combat force landed on Omaha and Utah Beaches. They would struggle to stay alive and get their balloons aloft, under withering German fire. The 320th medics would see glory, credited with saving scores of men wounded in the early hours of the invasion. One of them, a college student twice hit by shrapnel named Waverly Woodson, was recommended for the Medal of Honor, the United States’ highest decoration for valor. It was an award he would never receive, and I wanted to know why.

These notoriously destructive White-on-Black race riots started en masse just one year after the end of the Civil War and continued until the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Some historians have claimed that there were anywhere from 250-300 race riots over this period, most of which have been conveniently forgotten about by the American academia and press. Over 25 race riots broke out between April and October 1919 alone, a six-month period poet James Weldon Johnson labeled the "Red Summer." Among the most deadly outbreaks were those in East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); Chester, Pennsylvania (1917); Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1917); Houston, Texas (1917); Washington, D.C. (1919); Chicago, Illinois (1919); Omaha, Nebraska (1919); Charleston, South Carolina (1919), Longview, Texas (1919); Knoxville, Tennessee (1919); Elaine, Arkansas (1919); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921). Ward noted,   Although urban race riots in the United States between 1866-1951 were unique episodes rooted in the particular historic situation of each place, they shared certain characteristics. To begin with, the whites always prevailed, and the overwhelming majority of those who died and were wounded in all of these incidents were blacks. They also tended to break out in clusters during times of significant socio-economic, political, and demographic upheaval when racial demographics were altered and existing racial mores and boundaries challenged. Perhaps most importantly, the riots usually provoked defensive stances by members of the black communities who defended themselves and their families under attack. Seldom did the violence spill over into white neighborhoods.

The bureaucracy of a big company like Citi often led to bad policies. Such a large firm is basically forced to make decisions for a whole organization that don’t necessarily apply well to the individual business units. Is it better, one wonders, to have uniformity of authority in decision making at the expense of flexibility? It was a demonstration of the challenges of size, the difficulty of managing a large business with hundreds of disparate units. In the mid-2000s, for example, the firm developed new rules for air travel, insisting that employees reach their destinations on the cheapest fares available, even if that meant multiple connections to get to smaller cities. Saving money was not a bad inclination in an industry notorious for profligacy, but there was no flexibility in the rule, and so my assistant, Angela Murray, was engaged in frequent battles to make sure I could arrive at out-of-town meetings on time. If I had a ten o’clock morning meeting in Omaha to discuss a deal with a potential $6 million fee, Citi still insisted on saving a few hundred bucks by booking me on a flight that arrived in the afternoon, which meant I would miss the meeting unless I traveled the day before. And because those cheaper flights often required an overnight stay, more work hours were wasted as well as any potential savings, since the firm would have to pay for a hotel and meals. I knew for a fact that the policy was revenue-negative.

Omaha native Paul Stratman spent forty-four years in the electrical trade, laying wire, managing people, and eventually doing 3D modeling. Then he retired. Dissatisfaction soon set in. “My wife had a long list of things she wanted done around the house,” Paul said, “but that took me less than a year to complete. And I certainly didn’t want to just sit around the house doing nothing for the rest of my life. I wanted to help people.” About this time, he heard about a group of retired tradesmen in the Omaha area who call themselves the Geezers. Several times each week, for a half day at a time, a group of five to ten Geezers meets in North Omaha (a poorer part of town) to rebuild a house for later use by a nonprofit. “Currently, we’re rebuilding a home that will house six former inmates,” Paul told me. “We’re providing the home, and the nonprofit will provide the mentorship when the gentlemen move in.” The goal is to help formerly incarcerated people build better lives and stay out of jail. The rate of recidivism in the United States reaches as high as 83 percent.[12] “Our goal is zero percent among the men who will occupy this home when we are finished,” Paul said. On a previous occasion, after the devastating 2019 midwestern floods, Paul was working as a volunteer in the area to restore electricity to many of the homes when he received an urgent phone call concerning a couple in their fifties whose home had been destroyed in the flood. The couple were living in a camper with their teenage daughter and three grandkids (whose mother was unable to take care of them) while they tried to get enough money to fix their house. Six people in a tiny camper! The couple were worried because they had been informed that someone from Nebraska’s Division of Children and Family Services would be coming to inspect the living conditions for the three grandkids. The couple feared their grandkids were going to be taken from them. They were almost frantic to prevent that. Would Paul help? Paul went right to work. He completed the electrical wiring and safety renovations inside the flood-damaged home, free of charge, in time for it to pass inspection by CFS. The family stayed together. Reflecting on this experience, Paul said, “When you can help people that are so desperate, and can make a little difference in their lives—people who have put their lives on hold to care for the needs of someone else—it is moving. That was one of the most emotional experiences I’ve ever had and some of the most meaningful work I’ve ever accomplished.” Paul has retired from his job, but he hasn’t stopped working for others.

SAC created the Headquarters Emergency Relocation Team (HERT), based at the Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant about 150 miles west of Omaha, a convoy of EMP-hardened command posts mounted on tractor-trailers that would have deployed out into the vast open American West during an attack. Later renamed the Enduring Battle Management Support Center and staffed by the 55th Mobile Command and Control Squadron, the unit’s patch hinted at its Doomsday task: A Grim Reaper sneaking through the night carrying a lightning bolt.