United States Air Force Quotes

Desperate men are dangerous. And I do know that the United States is not ready to go to war against Japan. Our navy isn’t ready and our air force isn’t ready.

Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation Delivered on December 8, 1941 Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate, and of the House of Representatives: Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack. It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace. The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu. Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation. As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us. Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.

When this war goes into the history books, the United States Air Force will rank as the most efficient gang of murderers in the history of man.

Three years before the terrible events of September 11, 2001, a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Robert Bowman, who had flown 101 combat missions in Vietnam, and then had become a Catholic bishop, commented on the terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In an article in the National Catholic Reporter he wrote about the roots of terrorism: We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism. . . . Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs so we can have the oil under their sand, we should send them to rebuild their infrastructure, supply clean water, and feed starving children. . . . In short, we should do good instead of evil. Who would try to stop us? Who would hate us? Who would want to bomb us? That is the truth the American people need to hear.

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan...As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense...With confidence in our armed forces - with the unbounded determination of our people - we will gain the inevitable triumph - so help us God." -President F.D. Roosevelt - 8th December 1941

Knowing why you can't will tell you why you can.

The answer is always "No" until you ask. - Ref James 4:2

One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did—this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants—they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts and trousers that mysteriously ended several inches short of the instep. Why was that? It obviously wasn't poverty. A colleague of my father's had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had offered to pay the whole cost of the nuptial feast. I forget the name of this paladin, but he had a crew-cut and amputated trouser-bottoms and a cigar stub and he came from a place called Yonkers, which seemed to me a ridiculous name to give to a suburb. (I, who had survived Crapstone… ) Anyway, once again one received a Henry Jamesian impression of brash generosity without overmuch refinement. There was a boy at my boarding school called Warren Powers Laird Myers, the son of an officer stationed at one of the many U.S. Air Force bases in Cambridgeshire. Trousers at The Leys School were uniform and regulation, but he still managed to show a bit of shin and to buzz-cut his hair. 'I am not a Yankee,' he informed me (he was from Norfolk, Virginia). 'I am a CON-federate.' From what I was then gleaning of the news from Dixie, this was unpromising. In our ranks we also had Jamie Auchincloss, a sprig of the Kennedy-Bouvier family that was then occupying the White House. His trousers managed to avoid covering his ankles also, though the fact that he shared a parent with Jackie Kennedy meant that anything he did was accepted as fashionable by definition. The pants of a man I'll call Mr. 'Miller,' a visiting American master who skillfully introduced me to J.D. Salinger, were also falling short of their mark. Mr. Miller's great teacher-feature was that he saw sexual imagery absolutely everywhere and was slightly too fond of pointing it out [...]. Meanwhile, and as I mentioned much earlier, the dominant images projected from the United States were of the attack-dog-and-firehose kind, with swag-bellied cops lying about themselves and the political succession changed as much by bullets as by ballots.

The casting of the brash United States Army Air Force officer Colonel Robert E. Hogan and the pompous German Luftwaffe officer Colonel Wilhelm Klink was inspired. For this series—a comedy with the serious backdrop of war—to succeed, the lead players had to be the perfect fit. The dynamic portrayal of this military odd couple had to be articulate, accurate, and precise. For the show to work, for the concept to be accepted, for one of the most outlandish premises in television history to be believed, the actors signed to play the two leading characters not only had to bring these extreme individuals to life with broad, fictional strokes, they had to make them real in the details.

We stole the eagle from the Air Force, the anchor from the Navy, and the rope from the Army. On the seventh day when God rested, we overran the perimeter and stole the globe—we’ve been running the show ever since. We live like soldiers, talk like sailors, and slap the hell out of both of them at the same time. Fighter by day, lover by night, drunkard by choice, and a United States Marine by an act of God.

NASA documents from 1966 confirm the United States weather modification programme with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars and in the 1990s the US military was publishing papers expounding the war possibilities of weather manipulation, or 'geoengineering' as it is also known. American scientist J. Marvin Herndon described in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2015 how weather modification has been happening for decades and includes the 'make mud, not war' programme named Project Popeye to create monsoon-scale rain during the Vietnam War. US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report published in 1996 explained how artificially-generated floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes 'offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary'.

Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over “inferior” races? The United States’ armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old.

Members of this body, with the full authority of my government, I hereby declare the withdrawal of the United States of America from this organization. My nation will no longer be a member of the United Nations. Furthermore, please consider this official notice that all non-American citizens have 10 days to leave our country. This very building will be occupied by the New York City Police Department after that time, and anyone remaining will be arrested and deported. My nation has had enough of the parasitic governments represented by this body. In addition, I would like to take this opportunity to announce our withdrawal from NATO. All American military units will be recalled immediately. Our naval carrier battle groups and all associated support operations are being ordered home as well. All air wings of the United States Air Force are being recalled from foreign lands. God help all of you – you are on your own.

The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, can escape that terrible knowledge. Our freedom is not entirely our own; in some sense it is mortgaged from those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance. My own life of security, freedom, opportunity, and relative affluence certainly has been made possible because a grandfather fought and was gassed in the Argonne; an uncle in the Marines died trying to stop Japanese imperialism on Okinawa; a cousin in the Army lost his life at twenty-two trying to stop Hitler in France; and my father in the Army Air Force flew forty times over Japan hoping to end the idea of the expansive Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. I have spent some time these past decades trying to learn where, how, and why they and their generations fought as they did—and what our own obligations are to acknowledge their sacrifices.

Things changed after that between me and Mark. I stopped being mortified that people might mistake me for one of his acolytes. I was his Boswell, don’t you know. I interviewed him about his childhood—his father was a psychiarist in Beverly Hills. I cataloged the contents of his van. I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology—in finding a cure—but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. “The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,” Mark told me. “I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and suvivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit—in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.” Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.

In 1996 Dorothy Mackey wrote an Op-ed piece, “Violence from comrades a fact of life for military women.” ABC News 20/ 20 did a segment on rape in the military. By November four women came forward at Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, about a pattern of rape by drill sergeants. In 1997 the military finds three black drill sergeants to scapegoat. They were sent to prison and this left the commanding generals and colonels untouched to retire quietly. The Army appointed a panel to investigate sexual harassment. One of the panelists was the sergeant Major of the Army, Eugene McKinney. On hearing his nomination, former associates and one officer came forward with charges of sexual coercion and misconduct. In 1998 he was acquitted of all charges after women spoke (of how they were being stigmatized, their careers stopped, and their characters questioned. A Congressional panel studied military investigative practices. In 1998, the Court of Appeals ruled against Dorothy Mackay. She had been outspoken on media and highly visible. There is an old Arabic saying “When the hen crows cut off her head.”“This court finds that Col. Milam and Lt. Col. Elmore were acting in the scope of their duties” in 1991-1992 when Capt. Mackey alleged they harassed, intimidated and assaulted her. A legislative remedy was asked for and she appealed to the Supreme Court. Of course the Supreme Court refused to hear the case in 1999, as it always has under the feres doctrine. Her case was cited to block the suit of one of the Aberdeen survivors as well!

Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan” is how Roosevelt’s speech began. Note that in this formulation Japan is an “empire,” but the United States is not. Note also the emphasis on the date. It was only at Hawai‘i and Midway, of all Japan’s targets, that the vagaries of the international date line put the event on December 7. Everywhere else, it occurred on December 8, the date the Japanese use to refer to the attack.

The phrase “white privilege” is not the only verbal sleight of hand used to make achievement differences vanish. Even racial or ethnic groups that arrived in the United States destitute during the nineteenth century, and were forced to live in a desperate poverty and squalor almost inconceivable today, have had their later rise from such dire conditions verbally erased by calling their eventual achievement of prosperity a “privilege.”19 The histories of Irish, Jewish, Chinese and Japanese immigrants in America are classic examples of this process—and of their achievements being verbally air-brushed out of history by simply calling them “privilege.” Even middle-class blacks today have likewise been characterized by some as “privileged,”20 even though their ancestors arrived as slaves.

The reality is that Facebook has been so successful, it’s actually running out of humans on the planet. Ponder the numbers: there are about three billion people on the Internet, where the latter is broadly defined as any sort of networked data, texts, browser, social media, whatever. Of these people, six hundred million are Chinese, and therefore effectively unreachable by Facebook. In Russia, thanks to Vkontakte and other copycat social networks, Facebook’s share of the country’s ninety million Internet users is also small, though it may yet win that fight. That leaves about 2.35 billion people ripe for the Facebook plucking. While Facebook seems ubiquitous to the plugged-in, chattering classes, its usage is not universal among even entrenched Internet users. In the United States, for example, by far the company’s most established and sticky market, only three-quarters of Internet users are actively on FB. That ratio of FB to Internet user is worse in other countries, so even full FB saturation in a given market doesn’t imply total Facebook adoption. Let’s (very) optimistically assume full US-level penetration for any market. Without China and Russia, and taking a 25 percent haircut of people who’ll never join or stay (as is the case in the United States), that leaves around 1.8 billion potential Facebook users globally. That’s it. In the first quarter of 2015, Facebook announced it had 1.44 billion users. Based on its public 2014 numbers, FB is growing at around 13 percent a year, and that pace is slowing. Even assuming it maintains that growth into 2016, that means it’s got one year of user growth left in it, and then that’s it: Facebook has run out of humans on the Internet. The company can solve this by either making more humans (hard even for Facebook), or connecting what humans there are left on the planet. This is why Internet.org exists, a vaguely public-spirited, and somewhat controversial, campaign by Facebook to wire all of India with free Internet, with regions like Brazil and Africa soon to follow. In early 2014 Facebook acquired a British aerospace firm, Ascenta, which specialized in solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles. Facebook plans on flying a Wi-Fi-enabled air force of such craft over the developing world, giving them Internet. Just picture ultralight carbon-fiber aircraft buzzing over African savannas constantly, while locals check their Facebook feeds as they watch over their herds.

The plight of Jews in German-occupied Europe, which many people thought was at the heart of the war against the Axis, was not a chief concern of Roosevelt. Henry Feingold's research (The Politics of Rescue) shows that, while the Jews were being put in camps and the process of annihilation was beginning that would end in the horrifying extermination of 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews, Roosevelt failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives. He did not see it as a high priority; he left it to the State Department, and in the State Department anti-Semitism and a cold bureaucracy became obstacles to action. Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over "inferior" races? The United States' armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old. The Red Cross, with government approval, separated the blood donations of black and white. It was, ironically, a black physician named Charles Drew who developed the blood bank system. He was put in charge of the wartime donations, and then fired when he tried to end blood segregation. Despite the urgent need for wartime labor, blacks were still being discriminated against for jobs. A spokesman for a West Coast aviation plant said: "The Negro will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities.... Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them." Roosevelt never did anything to enforce the orders of the Fair Employment Practices Commission he had set up.

The Department of Health, Education and Welfare, established in 1953 to consolidate the scattered welfare programs, began with a budget of $2 billion, less than 5 percent of expenditures on national defense. Twenty-five years later, in 1978, its budget was $160 billion, one and a half times as much as total spending on the army, the navy, and the air force. It had the third largest budget in the world, exceeded only by the entire budget of the U.S. government and of the Soviet Union. The department supervised a huge empire, penetrating every corner of the nation. More than one out of every 100 persons employed in this country worked in the HEW empire, either directly for the department or in programs for which HEW had responsibility but which were administered by state or local government units. All of us were affected by its activities. (In late 1979, HEW was subdivided by the creation of a separate Department of Education.)

Hitler was invading every European country surrounding Germany, and it was obvious that eventually we would also be at war. At the time, some Americans joined the German American Bund that backed what Hitler was doing. Others advocated that we stay out of the war.... Charles Lindbergh was of that persuasion and supported the isolationist “America First Movement,” advocating that the United States remain neutral. You could not blame people for their hostile feelings towards the German-Americans, when Nazi Bund meetings were being held at many locations around New York City, as well as in the neighboring Schuetzenpark, the German word for the riflemen’s or shooters’ park, in North Bergen. In April of 1941, after President Roosevelt accused Lindbergh of being a fascist sympathizer, Lindbergh resigned his commission as a colonel in the United States Army Air Forces. Later in the war, Lindbergh flew 50 combat missions in the Pacific Theater as a civilian consultant, but Roosevelt refused to reinstate his commission. The majority of Americans just wanted to stay out of what they considered a European matter.

FORGET FERES DOCTRINE And the military has immunity! Yes! The feres doctrine! It states “the Government is not liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act for injuries to servicemen where injuries arise out of or are in the course of activity incident to service” (U.S. Supreme Court 1950). Federal law and our Supreme Court shield acts of rape and sexual brutality in the military as proven by its subsequent ruling on a 2001 case that denied a plaintiffs right to file a civil suit against her accusers. Yet when women report the crime, it is handled internally Commanders are given the discretion to resolve complaints. The report may not go beyond his office. Many times he's part of the problem or a sympathizer with the offender. This certainly was my case! Our Supreme Court ruled as recently as 2001 that rape is an injury incident to the course of activity in the service! THE HEINOUS CRIME OF RAPE IS ACCEPTABLE AND CONDONED BY OUR SUPREME COURT! WOMEN ARE FAIR GAME FOR RAPE AND HARRASSMENT, ACCORDING TO OUR SUPREME COURT! CONGRESS IS NO BETTER! NO LAWS ARE PASSED TO PROTECT US IN THE MILITARY AGAINST THE STATUTE OF LIMITATION FOR THE FELONY OF RAPE!

Religion is therefore well suited to be the handmaiden of groupishness, tribalism, and nationalism. To take one example, religion does not seem to be the cause of suicide bombing. According to Robert Pape, who has created a database of every suicide terrorist attack in the last hundred years, suicide bombing is a nationalist response to military occupation by a culturally alien democratic power.62 It’s a response to boots and tanks on the ground—never to bombs dropped from the air. It’s a response to contamination of the sacred homeland. (Imagine a fist punched into a beehive, and left in for a long time.) Most military occupations don’t lead to suicide bombings. There has to be an ideology in place that can rally young men to martyr themselves for a greater cause. The ideology can be secular (as was the case with the Marxist-Leninist Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka) or it can be religious (as was the case with the Shiite Muslims who first demonstrated that suicide bombing works, driving the United States out of Lebanon in 1983). Anything that binds people together into a moral matrix that glorifies the in-group while at the same time demonizing another group can lead to moralistic killing, and many religions are well suited for that task. Religion is therefore often an accessory to atrocity, rather than the driving force of the atrocity.

President Obama warned that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would pose a “red line” that would trigger an American military response. In August 2013, word filtered out that Assad’s forces had used poison gas against a rebel suburb of Damascus, killing as many as fourteen hundred people. This was a key moment. The United States was just a few hours away from launching airstrikes. “Our finger was on the trigger,” General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later said.13 Obama decided otherwise. He concluded that airpower would be insufficient and ineffective, and he wanted congressional authorization but could not get it. He had come into office to end America’s two wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan—and he was loath to slip into a third, with no clear path to success. Air power in Libya had helped remove Gadhafi, but it had left chaos behind. Obama was also demonstrating that, as he later said, he had broken with the military response “playbook” of the “foreign policy establishment.” Moreover, he feared that an air strike would not eliminate all the chemical weapons, and Assad could then claim that “he had successfully defied the United States.”14 Still, an American president had said using chemical weapons was a red line, but had not acted on that. Coming on top of Mubarak, it made leaders in other countries question the credibility of the United States and its reliability as an ally.

Hybrid warfare particularly appeals to China and Russia, since they are much more able to control the information their populaces receive than are their Western adversaries. A 1999 book, Unrestricted Warfare, written by two People’s Liberation Army colonels suggests that militarily, technologically and economically weaker states can use unorthodox forms of warfare to defeat a materially superior enemy – and clearly they had the United States and NATO in mind. Rather than focusing on direct military confrontation, the weaker state might succeed against the dominant opponent by shifting the arena of conflict into economic, terrorist and even legal avenues as leverage to be used to undercut more traditional means of warfare. The subtitle of their book, Two Air Force Senior Colonels on Scenarios for War and the Operational Art in an Era of Globalization, notes a core truth of the early twenty-first century: an increasingly globalized world deepens reliance upon, and the interdependence of, nations, which in turn can be used as leverage to exploit, undermine and sabotage a dominant power. The two colonels might not be happy with the lesson their book teaches Westerners, which is that no superpower can afford to be isolationist. One way to keep America great, therefore, is to stay firmly plugged into – and leading – the international system, as it has generally done impressively in leading the Western world’s response to the invasion of Ukraine. The siren voices of American isolationism inevitably lead to a weaker United States.

[T]hat afternoon, Sergei Lavrov called me for the second time during the crisis. [...] “We have three demands,” he said. “What are they?” I asked. “The first two are that the Georgians sign the no-use-of-force pledge and that their troops return to barracks,” he told me. “Done,” I answered. [...] But then Sergei said, “The other demand is just between us. Misha Saakashvili has to go.” I couldn’t believe my ears and I reacted out of instinct, not analysis. “Sergei, the secretary of state of the United States does not have a conversation with the Russian foreign minister about overthrowing a democratically elected president,” I said. “The third condition has just become public because I’m going to call everyone I can and tell them that Russia is demanding the overthrow of the Georgian president.” “I said it was between us,” he repeated. “No, it’s not between us. Everyone is going to know.” The conversation ended. I called Steve Hadley to tell him about the Russian demand. Then I called the British, the French, and several others. That afternoon the UN Security Council was meeting. I asked our representative to inform the Council as well. Lavrov was furious, saying that he’d never had a colleague divulge the contents of a diplomatic conversation. I felt I had no choice. If the Georgians wanted to punish Saakashvili for the war, they would have a chance to do it through their own constitutional processes. But the Russians had no right to insist on his removal. The whole thing had an air of the Soviet period, when Moscow had controlled the fate of leaders throughout Eastern Europe. I was certainly not going to be party to a return to those days [688].

On the night of September 13, Bill O’Reilly had an exchange with Sam Husseini, a former spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, that characterized Fox’s position as it was developing. “Here’s what we’re going to do, and I’ll let you react to it,” O’Reilly said. “We’re going to take out this Osama bin Laden. Now, whether we go in with air power or whether we go in with a Delta force, he’s a dead man walking. He’s through. He should have been through long before this. He’s been wanted for eight years. Now, they’re going to go in and they’re going to get him. If the Taliban government of Afghanistan does not cooperate, then we will damage that government with air power, probably. All right? We will blast them, because …” Husseini told O’Reilly that innocent Afghans would be killed by a protracted air strike. “Doesn’t make any difference,” O’Reilly huffed. “Bill—” “They—it was an act of war.” “No, no. It does make a difference,” Husseini said. “I don’t want more civilians dead. We’ve had civilians dead in New York and now you’re saying maybe it’s okay to have civilians dead in Afghanistan.” “Mr. Husseini, this is war.” “Yeah, exactly. And in war you don’t kill civilians. You don’t kill women and children. Those are your words, Bill.” “Oh, stop it,” O’Reilly said. “You just made the most absurd statement in the world. That means we wouldn’t have bombed the Nazis or the Japanese. We wouldn’t have done any of that, because you don’t want somebody who has declared war on us to be punished. Come on.” “Who declared war on us?” “The terrorist states have declared war, Mr. Husseini!” “Get them. Get the terrorists,” Husseini said. “Cut his mic,” O’Reilly responded, waving his finger across the screen, the lower third of which was covered with Stars and Stripes graphics and a caption that read: “AMERICA UNITES.

Matt Espenshade confirmed that in spite of the deaths of so many of the kidnappers, many more are still at large, including their leaders. Those men might hope to be forgotten; they are not. The FBI has continued its investigative interest in those involved with the kidnapping. The leaders, especially, are of prime interest to the Bureau. And now the considerable unseen assets in that region are steadily feeding back information on these targeted individuals to learn their operational methods and their locations and hunt them down. The surviving kidnappers and their colleagues are welcome to sneer at the danger. It may help them pass the time, just as it did for Bin Laden’s henchmen to chuckle at the idea of payback. If the men nobody sees coming are dispatched to capture or kill them, the surviving kidnappers will find themselves dealing with a force of air, sea, and land fighters s obsessed with the work they do that they have trained themselves into the physical and mental toughness of world-class athletes. They will carry the latest in weapons, armor, visual systems, and communication devises. Whether they are Navy SEAL fighters, DEVGRU warriors, Army Delta Force soldiers, Green Berets, or any of the elite soldiers under United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), they will share the elite warriors’ determination to achieve success in their mission assignment. The news that they are coming for you is the worst you could receive. But nobody gets advance warning from these men. They consider themselves born for this. They have fought like panthers to be part of their team. For most of them, there is a strong sense of pride in succeeding at missions nobody else can get done; in lethal challenges. They actually prefer levels of difficulty so high it seems only a sucker would seek them, the sorts of situations seen more and more often these days. Impossible odds.

Germany’s rearmament was first met with a “supine”134 response from its future adversaries, who showed “little immediate recognition of danger.”135 Despite Winston Churchill’s dire and repeated warnings that Germany “fears no one” and was “arming in a manner which has never been seen in German history,” Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain saw Hitler as merely trying to right the wrongs of Versailles, and acquiesced to the German annexation of the Sudetenland at Munich in September 1938.136 Yet Chamberlain’s anxiety grew as Hitler’s decision to occupy the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 indicated his broader aims. Chamberlain asked rhetorically: “Is this the end of an old adventure, or is it the beginning of a new? Is this the last attack upon a small State, or is it to be followed by others? Is this, in fact, a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?”137 France, meanwhile, as Henry Kissinger explains, “had become so dispirited that it could not bring itself to act.”138 Stalin decided his interests were best served by a non-aggression pact signed with Germany, which included a secret protocol for the division of Eastern Europe.139 One week after agreeing to the pact with Stalin, Hitler invaded Poland, triggering the British and French to declare war on September 3, 1939. The Second World War had begun. Within a year, Hitler occupied France, along with much of Western Europe and Scandinavia. Britain was defeated on the Continent, although it fought off German air assaults. In June 1941, Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. By the time Germany was defeated four years later, much of the European continent had been destroyed, and its eastern half would be under Soviet domination for the next forty years. Western Europe could not have been liberated without the United States, on whose military power it would continue to rely. The war Hitler unleashed was the bloodiest the world had ever seen.

In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members." A number of these scientists were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experiments included subjecting Dachau concentration camp inmates to torture and death. The Edgewood Arsenal of the Army's Chemical Corps as well as other military research sites recruited these scientists with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology, and opthamology. Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland ended up conducting experiments on more than seven thousand American soldiers. Using Auschwitz experiments as a guide, they conducted the same type of poison gas experiments that had been done in the secret I.G. Farben laboratories.

Uncle Alfred was very respectful of Owen’s desire to go to Vietnam, but Aunt Martha—over our elegant dinner—questioned the war’s “morality.” “YES, I QUESTION THAT, TOO,” said Owen Meany. “BUT I FEEL ONE HAS TO SEE SOMETHING FIRSTHAND TO BE SURE. I’M CERTAINLY INCLINED TO AGREE WITH KENNEDY’S ASSESSMENT OF THE VIETNAMESE PROBLEM—WAY BACK IN NINETEEN SIXTY-THREE. YOU MAY RECALL THAT THE PRESIDENT SAID: ‘WE CAN HELP THEM, WE CAN GIVE THEM EQUIPMENT, WE CAN SEND OUR MEN OUT THERE AS ADVISERS, BUT THEY HAVE TO WIN IT, THE PEOPLE OF VIETNAM.’ I THINK THAT POINT IS STILL VALID—AND IT’S CLEAR TO ALL OF US THAT THE ‘PEOPLE OF VIETNAM’ ARE NOT WINNING THE WAR. WE APPEAR TO BE TRYING TO WIN IT FOR THEM. “BUT LET’S SUPPOSE, FOR A MOMENT, THAT WE BELIEVE IN THE STATED OBJECTIVES OF THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION’S VIETNAM POLICY—AND THAT WE SUPPORT THIS POLICY. WE AGREE TO RESIST COMMUNIST AGGRESSION IN SOUTH VIETNAM—WHETHER IT COMES FROM THE NORTH VIETNAMESE OR THE VIET CONG. WE SUPPORT THE IDEA OF SELF-DETERMINATION FOR SOUTH VIETNAM—AND WE WANT PEACE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. IF THESE ARE OUR OBJECTIVES—IF WE AGREE THAT THIS IS WHAT WE WANT—WHY ARE WE ESCALATING THE WAR? “THERE DOESN’T APPEAR TO BE A GOVERNMENT IN SAIGON THAT CAN DO VERY WELL WITHOUT US. DO THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE PEOPLE EVEN LIKE THE MILITARY JUNTA OF MARSHAL KY? NATURALLY, HANOI AND THE VIET CONG WILL NOT NEGOTIATE FOR A PEACEFUL SETTLEMENT IF THEY THINK THEY CAN WIN THE WAR! THERE’S EVERY REASON FOR THE UNITED STATES TO KEEP ENOUGH OF OUR GROUND FORCES IN SOUTH VIETNAM TO PERSUADE HANOI AND THE VIET CONG THAT THEY COULD NEVER ACHIEVE A MILITARY VICTORY. BUT WHAT DOES IT ACCOMPLISH FOR US TO BOMB THE NORTH? “SUPPOSING THAT WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY—THAT WE WANT SOUTH VIETNAM TO BE FREE TO GOVERN ITSELF—WE SHOULD BE PROTECTING SOUTH VIETNAM FROM ATTACK. BUT IT APPEARS THAT WE ARE ATTACKING THE WHOLE COUNTRY—FROM THE AIR! IF WE BOMB THE WHOLE COUNTRY TO BITS—TO PROTECT IT FROM COMMUNISM—WHAT KIND OF PROTECTION IS THAT? “I THINK THAT’S THE PROBLEM,” said Owen Meany, “BUT I’D LIKE TO SEE THE SITUATION FOR MYSELF.

Another episode startled Trump’s advisers on the Asia trip. As the president and his entourage embarked on the journey, they stopped in Hawaii on November 3 to break up the long flight and allow Air Force One to refuel. White House aides arranged for the president and first lady to make a somber pilgrimage so many of their predecessors had made: to visit Pearl Harbor and honor the twenty-three hundred American sailors, soldiers, and marines who lost their lives there. The first couple was set to take a private tour of the USS Arizona Memorial, which sits just off the coast of Honolulu and straddles the hull of the battleship that sank into the Pacific during the Japanese surprise bombing attack in 1941. As a passenger boat ferried the Trumps to the stark white memorial, the president pulled Kelly aside for a quiet consult. “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Trump asked his chief of staff. Kelly was momentarily stunned. Trump had heard the phrase “Pearl Harbor” and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else. Kelly explained to him that the stealth Japanese attack here had devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet and prompted the country’s entrance into World War II, eventually leading the United States to drop atom bombs on Japan. If Trump had learned about “a date which will live in infamy” in school, it hadn’t really pierced his consciousness or stuck with him. “He was at times dangerously uninformed,” said one senior former adviser. Trump’s lack of basic historical knowledge surprised some foreign leaders as well. When he met with President Emmanuel Macron of France at the United Nations back in September 2017, Trump complimented him on the spectacular Bastille Day military parade they had attended together that summer in Paris. Trump said he did not realize until seeing the parade that France had had such a rich history of military conquest. He told Macron something along the lines of “You know, I really didn’t know, but the French have won a lot of battles. I didn’t know.” A senior European official observed, “He’s totally ignorant of everything. But he doesn’t care. He’s not interested.” Tillerson developed a polite and self-effacing way to manage the gaps in Trump’s knowledge. If he saw the president was completely lost in the conversation with a foreign leader, other advisers noticed, the secretary of state would step in to ask a question. As Tillerson lodged his question, he would reframe the topic by explaining some of the basics at issue, giving Trump a little time to think. Over time, the president developed a tell that he would use to get out of a sticky conversation in which a world leader mentioned a topic that was totally foreign or unrecognizable to him. He would turn to McMaster, Tillerson

After Natalie [Wood] and I got back from our honeymoon, I began The Hunters, with Robert Mitchum, directed by Dick Powell. I adored both of them. Powell was one of the great guys of all time, and Mitchum and I became fast friends. He insisted that I call him "Mother Mitchum." One day we cooked up a juvenile practical joke—we hired a girl to sit on a bench at lunchtime without any underpants on. We were in Arizona, at an Air Force base, and from the reaction you'd have thought the men of the United States Air Force had never seen a woman's private parts before. As word spread, we gradually brought the entire base to a halt. The fact that it was juvenile didn't make it any less funny; actually, it made it funnier.

In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members." A number of these scientist were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experiments included subjecting Dachau concentration camp inmates to torture and death. The Edgewood Arsenal of the Army's Chemical Corps as well as other military research sites recruited these scientists with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology, and opthamology. Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland ended up conducting experiments on more than seven thousand American soldiers. Using Auschwitz experiments as a guide, they conducted the same type of poison gas experiments that had been done in the secret I.G. Farben laboratories.

I am very sorry to deny the existence of a political Santa Claus, or a non-aggression Easter Bunny, but the Allies only won World War II because they finally created superior military forces with which to stop the Germans and Japanese. The United States and NATO, after decades of weakening, are acting toward Russia today as the Indians acted in Tibet. They are pushing on Russia, subverting Russia’s position in Ukraine, without giving sufficient weight to the fact that Russia has the most modern nuclear forces on the planet and Europe is dependent on Russian natural gas. That is to say, we are threatening Russia with an unloaded gun; and that is dangerous, because Russia’s gun is loaded. As the example of India in 1962 shows, those who play at war without serious preparations are headed for defeat. In practical terms, we should have bombers in the air as Russia does. We should be matching them division for division. But we cannot do this because we believed in the “peace dividend” which we have spent. And we had conservative politicians like Newt Gingrich, who famously said, “I am a hawk. But I am a cheap hawk.” J.R.Nyquist

We professors are often forced to hand out grades, and if I were teaching Risk Management 101 and had to give us humans a midterm grade based on our existential risk management so far, you could argue that I should give a B-on the grounds that we're muddling by and still haven't dropped the course. From my cosmological perspective, however, I find our performance pathetic, and can't give more than a D: the long-term potential for life is literally astronomical, yet we humans have no convincing plans for dealing with even the most-urgent existential risks, and we devote a minuscule fraction of our attention and resources to developing such plans. Compared with the roughly twenty million U.S. dollars spent last year on the Union of Concerned Scientists, one of the largest organizations focused on at least some existential risks, the United States alone spent about five hundred times more on cosmetic surgery, about a thousand times more on air-conditioning for troops, about five thousand times more on cigarettes, and about thirty-five thousand times more on its military, not counting military health care, military retirement costs or interest on military debt.

I’m just a cop. Cops sign up for the action, not the legal aftermath, and it blindsides us every time. This was no Air Force DUI bust, this was an impeachable offense against the president of the United States for perjury, bribery, sexual harassment, paying a mistress, and risking national security intelligence. Then there was trying him in the court of public opinion for being a coward, a scoundrel, a womanizer, sexist, and playing political poker at the entire world’s expense for his personal pleasure.

Our 182-passenger Boeing Classic this morning is under the able command of Captain Hiram Slatt, discharged from service in the United States Air Force mission in Afghanistan after six heroic deployments and now returned, following a restorative sabbatical at the VA Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Wheeling, West Virginia, to his “first love”—civilian piloting for North American Airways. Captain Slatt has informed us that, once we are cleared for takeoff, our flying time will be between approximately seventeen and twenty-two hours depending upon ever-shifting Pacific Ocean air currents and the ability of our seasoned Classic 878 to withstand gale-force winds of 90 knots roaring “like a vast army of demons” (in Captain Slatt’s colorful terminology) over the Arctic Circle. As you have perhaps noticed Flight 443 is a full—i.e., “overbooked”—flight. Actually most North American Airways flights are overbooked—it is Airways protocol to persist in assuming that a certain percentage of passengers will simply fail to show up at the gate having somehow expired, or disappeared, en route. For those of you who boarded with tickets for seats already taken—North American Airways apologizes for this unforeseeable development. We have dealt with the emergency situation by assigning seats in four lavatories as well as in the hold and in designated areas of the overhead bin. Therefore our request to passengers in Economy Plus, Economy, and Economy Minus is that you force your carry-ons beneath the seat in front of you; and what cannot be crammed into that space, or in the overhead bin, if no one is occupying the overhead bin, you must grip securely on your lap for the duration of the flight. Passengers in First Class may give their drink orders now. SECURITY:

During the “Bay of Pigs Invasion” One Douglas “B-26” airplane with counterfeit Cuban markings was fired on and crashed into the sea about 30 miles north of the island. Another of these aircraft, which was also damaged but still air worthy, continued north and landed at Boca Chica Key Naval Air Station near Key West, Florida. The following day the crew was quickly flown to exile in Nicaragua. The United States government announced that the downed aircraft belonged to the Cuban air force and was manned by Cuban dissidents. In reply to this, Castro appeared on Cuban State television and denounced these claims. He put his military on high alert and directed defensive operations from the Cuban Military Headquarters, which had just been bombed by two of the masquerading airplanes. Fidel issued orders to detain anyone who was suspected of conspiracy or treason. Lists of these people had previously been prepared and were used to round up suspected dissenters. Within days, his overzealous police force and army incarcerated about 20,000 Cuban citizens, using whatever means were available, including a sports stadium. In a speech to the people, Fidel finally admitted to the public that his Movement was Socialistic. The Cuban Foreign Minister Raúl Roa García, successfully presented evidence at the United Nations, proving that the attacks were foreign in origin. Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, replied that the United States had not participated in any action against Cuba. Ambassador Stevenson, knowing better, insisted that the aircraft that had landed in Miami had Cuban markings and therefore must have been of Cuban origin. Stevenson’s comments sounded contrived since the aircraft had Plexiglas noses, normally used as the bombardier’s station, whereas the actual Cuban B-26’s had solid noses with armament. It was obvious to the General Assembly that the United States Ambassador had been perpetrating an outright lie or, in diplomatic double talk, an untruth! It was an embarrassing moment that left the United States’ veracity open to ridicule

. Unable to find a master list of what military assets they could use, NORAD personnel opened phone lists and began to call Air Force and Air National Guard bases across the United States one by one, asking if they had any planes they could get airborne. “There were Guard units I’d never heard of calling asking how they could help. And we said, ‘Yes, take off,’ ” recalls one NEADS technician. By the day’s end, nearly 400 fighters, tankers, and airborne command posts would be keeping watch from the sky, flying out of sixty-nine different sites around the country. Not even the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis had seen such a huge, rapid military buildup. VII. Even inside the agency, communication

the defense establishment of the United States of America is so complicated, not to say baroque, that many different agencies can accomplish any given task. Want to invade a small Caribbean island? Who you gonna call: the Army or the Navy’s Army, which is to say, the Marine Corps? Want to call in an air strike? You could ask the Air Force … but the US Navy has lots and lots of fighter jets and tends to get annoyed if they’re left out. And the Army of the Navy has its own Air Force, the USMC Air Corps, and they’ve got aircraft carriers. It

Nevertheless, I was convinced that I could be selected as an astronaut. Ed White had been accepted, and we had flown together in the Air Force during the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States. I knew Ed was a good fighter pilot, and I was, too. “I can shoot gunnery as well as if not better than Ed can,” I said. “I’m going to apply to be an astronaut.

For almost three decades, September 11 marked a day of infamy for Chileans, Latin Americans, and the world community—a day when Chilean air force jets attacked La Moneda palace in Santiago as the prelude to the vicious coup that brought Pinochet to power. In the aftermath of “9/11,” 2001, it is more likely to be remembered for the shocking terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With that horror, the United States and Chile now share “that dreadful date,” as writer Ariel Dorfman has eloquently described it, “again a Tuesday, once again an 11th of September filled with death.

The world is turning upside down. Shanghai is a living hell. The Japanese soldiers are patrolling everywhere. People are hiding behind doors, and the foreigners in Shanghai are collected for slaughter.” “I don’t believe you.” “Your lover is probably dead by now. Or sent to a camp.” “What camp?” He was chewing an apple; I could hear the crunch. He went on to say that Japanese carriers, Mitsubishi Zero fighters, bombers, and destroyers had descended on Pearl Harbor and attacked the United States of America on the same day they attacked the Settlement. The Americans finally declared war against Japan. But the Japanese had launched a full assault. They invaded Hong Kong, their naval and air force killing thousands on the island. They flew over South Asia and sunk two British battleships, one named the Prince of Wales and the other Repulse. They captured Malaya, bombed Manila, and attacked the Dutch East Indies. The British had surrendered Hong Kong and retreated to Singapore, and the Americans had given up Manila and fled to the Bataan Peninsula. “They are helpless. They can barely cover their own asses.

LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE sits just southeast of the U.S. Route 90 and Interstate 410 interchange, in the dead center of San Antonio, a city better known for its River Walk and Mexican food. It is bisected by Route 13 and its Gateway Hills Golf Course occupies a significant portion of the property. It is home to one of the largest Air Force training facilities in the United States and hosts the Wilford Hall Ambulatory Surgical Center, one of the country’s four major referral centers for advanced medical care. In more recent years, Lackland had become part of Joint Base San Antonio, home to the 16th Air Force.

At the time, he and two of his classmates had been three of only eight black officers in the United States Army Air Forces. To get to that point they had had to be better than their white colleagues at every stage of the training programme.

Krulak wrote back that the United States did not need the Marine Corps; the Army and Air Force could do anything the Marines could. The Marine Corps flourished, he said, because of what “the grassroots of our country believes we are and believes we can do.” He said that America had three beliefs about the Marine Corps. First, when troubles come, the Marines will take care of them and do so at once. Second, Americans had an “almost mystical” belief that when the Marines go to war, their performance will be “dramatically and decisively successful—not most of the time, but always.” And third, Americans saw the Marines as masters of an “unfailing alchemy” that converts “unoriented youths into proud, self-reliant, stable citizens into whose hands the nation’s affairs may safely be entrusted.” He ended by saying that although America did not need the Marines, it wanted them. But, he warned, if Marines ever lost the ability to meet the high, almost spiritual standards of the American people, “the Marine Corps will then quickly disappear.

Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett had tried to block the entrance to the University of Mississippi of James Meredith, an African American veteran of the United States Air Force. Georgia Senator Richard Russell, after whom one of the three United States Senate office buildings is named, lauded the “great and courageous governor of Mississippi” and lamented: “It is regretful that we have no one on the Supreme Court that recognizes the fundamentals of democracy.

Perhaps because they were so convinced that traitors rather than the arrival of American troops had cost them victory in 1918, few Nazi leaders ever understood that the real problem for their long-term plans was the United States, not Britain. Nothing else can explain why, just days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the Americans rather than hoping that the war in the Pacific would distract them from Europe. “What does the USA amount to anyway?” asked Hermann Göring, the head of the German air force. Churchill, however, saw exactly what it amounted to. “Now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death,” he said of hearing the news about Pearl Harbor. “So we had won after all!

The phrase “white privilege” is not the only verbal sleight of hand used to make achievement differences vanish. Even racial or ethnic groups that arrived in the United States destitute during the nineteenth century, and were forced to live in a desperate poverty and squalor almost inconceivable today, have had their later rise from such dire conditions verbally erased by calling their eventual achievement of prosperity a “privilege.” The histories of Irish, Jewish, Chinese and Japanese immigrants in America are classic examples of this process—and of their achievements being verbally air-brushed out of history by simply calling them “privilege.” Even middle-class blacks today have likewise been characterized by some as “privileged,” even though their ancestors arrived as slaves.

Poet Ayoade, the first African immigrant to serve as a nuclear missile operator in the United States Air Force, debuts with an inspirational memoir chronicling his childhood in Nigeria and journey to become a doctor and American citizen. Ayoade, who at the age of seven promised his mother “One day, I will take you far away from here,” details his upbringing with an abusive father and the many family tragedies he endured—along with his dedication to creating a different life: “Underground is my unusual journey from childhood poverty to where I am today. How the impossible became a reality.” Readers will be swept into Ayoade’s vivid recollections of his early years, including his strict education, brushes with death, and a strained relationship with his father. He recounts the family’s passion for American movies that made “America seem like the perfect place,” sparking his desire for a better future, and details his decision to become a veterinarian and eventually pursue a career in the U.S. military to ensure the best life for his family (and future generations). Ayoade’s story is moving, particularly his reconciliation with his father and hard-earned American citizenship, and his message that it’s never too late to chase your dreams resonates. That message will evoke strong emotions for readers as Ayoade highlights the importance of hard work and the benefit of a committed support system, alongside his constant “wishing, praying, and fighting to be free from all the sadness and injustice around me”—a theme that echoes through much of the book, including in his acknowledgement that the fear he experienced as a nuclear missile operator was a “cost of this freedom.” Ayoade’s poetry and personal photographs are sprinkled throughout, illuminating his deep love for family and his ultimate belief in liberty as “The reason for it all./ A foundation for a new generation,/ The best gift to any child.” Takeaway: This stirring memoir documents an immigrant’s fight for the American dream. Great for fans of: Ashley C. Ford’s Somebody's Daughter, Maria Hinojosa’s Once I Was You. Production grades Cover: A- Design and typography: A Illustrations: A Editing: A Marketing copy: A

My father was buried a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, and my uncle Chuck let me know that when they folded the flag, they usually give it to the oldest living female of the family. He asked if I wanted to receive it. I refused it. I didn’t want a flag, and I didn’t want a ceremony, and I didn’t want guns going off, and I didn’t want a reception. I wanted my parents back.

The PLAAF had fewer than 100 fighters in 1950, increasing to 3,000 fighters and bombers by 1953, and totaling 5,000 planes by 1955.44 In five years, this made China’s air force the third largest in the world, after the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union also re-armed sixty PLA infantry divisions between 1951 and 1954, and thereafter Chinese weaponry was standardized.

For a long time, the United States of America focused much of its security concerns on the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean. The recognition of the Pacific Ocean as a vitally important front for war was not high on America’s list of priorities. Only after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor did the strategic significance of Hawaiʻi become a top priority, so much so that the current headquarters for the commander in chief of the US Pacific Command is located in Hawaiʻi, and it is the central base for US Navy, Air Force, and Army operations for the region.

While the nation would be told by President Roosevelt’s radio address that the “United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan,” it was the USS Ward (DD-139) that suddenly and deliberately attacked and sank a vessel of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

BECAUSE OF THE WISDOM and encouragement of good parents, I decided to attend the United States Air Force Academy following high school. I got in because I was good at basketball, not because I had ever been a serious student. Life at the Academy was difficult but rewarding. The first two years were particularly taxing, especially for those like me who had just left home for the first time in their lives. When my incoming class of freshmen and I first arrived, we had everything stripped from us—civilian clothes, cars, cell phones, other personal belongings, and even our hair. Thus began my initiation into a respectable tradition, one for which I have been profoundly grateful. That tradition taught us not to lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does. It was a tradition of patriotism. The Academy was a place where I learned that no honor was granted short of hard work and merit. There, I learned

Lately, the Army has found new worlds to conquer under the cloak of the Green Berets who operate with the CIA. Even the Air Force welcomes the utilization of the once proud B-52 strategic bomber in a function that is totally degrading—the blind bombardment of Indochina’s forests and wastelands on the assumption that there are worthwhile targets on the Ho Chi Minh trail. The only reason State and Defense can give for what they have permitted themselves to become engaged in is that “the intelligence reports” say the “enemy” is there. No one asks, What is the national objective in Indochina? No one has a national plan for Indochina. We have become counterpunchers without a game plan, and we have become that because we take our cues from raw intelligence data.

Some examples from the American experience in Iraq help illustrate the contradiction between the physical and moral levels: The U. S. Army conducted many raids on civilian homes in areas it occupied. In these raids, the troops physically dominated the civilians. Mentally, they terrified them. But at the moral level, breaking into private homes in the middle of the night, terrifying women and children, and sometimes treating detainees in ways that publicly humiliated them (like stepping on their heads) worked powerfully against the Americans. An enraged population responded by providing the Iraqi resistance with more support at each level of war, physical, mental, and moral. At Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, MPs and interrogators dominated prisoners physically and mentally – as too many photographs attest. But when that domination was publicly exposed, the United States suffered an enormous defeat at the moral level. Some American commanders recognized this when they referred to the soldiers responsible for the abuse as, “the jerks who lost us the war.” In Iraq and elsewhere, American troops (other than Special Forces) quickly establish base camps that mirror American conditions: air conditioning, good medical care, plenty of food and pure water. The local people are not allowed into the bases except in service roles. Physically, the American superiority over the lives the locals lead is overwhelming. Mentally, it projects the power and success of American society. But morally, the constant message of “we are better than you” works against the Americans. Traditional cultures tend to put high values on pride and honor, and when foreigners seem to sneer at local ways, the locals may respond by defending their honor in a traditional manner – by fighting. After many, if not most, American military interventions, Fourth Generation war has tended to intensify and spread rather than contract.

In Libya in 2011, fourteen NATO members and four partner countries prevented Muammar Qaddafi from carrying out a promise to slaughter tens of thousands of his own people—and then they removed him from power. France, Britain, Italy, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and others struck 90 percent of all NATO targets. Spain, the Netherlands, Turkey, Greece, and Romania enforced an arms embargo at sea. Sweden, not a NATO member, contributed naval and air force personnel and equipment. The United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan, and Morocco also contributed.18 There was not a single U.S. casualty.19 The point is not that Washington should persuade others to do all the heavy lifting. NATO jets were able to hit their targets only because U.S. cruise missiles had already wiped out Libya’s air defenses. When Europeans ran short on precision-guided missiles, Washington sent them more.20 Without the United States, there would have been no mission. Critics carp that while NATO rid the world of a dangerous monster, it hasn’t created a stable Libya. That charge misses the point. From a Moneyball perspective, the goal was not to bomb Libya into democracy, start a war, or launch another improvisational bout of nation-building. It was to give Libyans a chance to escape the fate Qaddafi intended for them, and to enable them to begin the long-term process of building their own future.

Frank Fiorini, better known as Frank Sturgis, had an interesting career that started when he quit high school during his senior year to join the United States Marine Corps as an enlisted man. During World War II he served in the Pacific Theater of Operations with Edson’s Raiders, of the First Marine Raiders Battalion under Colonel “Red Mike.” In 1945 at the end of World War II, he received an honorable discharge and the following year joined the Norfolk, Virginia Police Department. Getting involved in an altercation with his sergeant, he resigned and found employment as the manager of the local Havana-Madrid Tavern, known to have had a clientele consisting primarily of Cuban seamen. In 1947 while still working at the tavern, he joined the U.S. Navy’s Flight Program. A year later, he received an honorable discharge and joined the U.S. Army as an Intelligence Officer. Again, in 1949, he received an honorable discharge, this time from the U.S. Army. Then in 1957, he moved to Miami where he met former Cuban President Carlos Prío, following which he joined a Cuban group opposing the Cuban dictator Batista. After this, Frank Sturgis went to Cuba and set up a training camp in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, teaching guerrilla warfare to Castro’s forces. He was appointed a Captain in Castro’s M 26 7 Brigade, and as such, he made use of some CIA connections that he apparently had cultivated, to supply Castro with weapons and ammunition. After they entered Havana as victors of the revolution, Sturgis was appointed to a high security, intelligence position within the reorganized Cuban air force. Strangely, Frank Sturgis returned to the United States after the Cuban Revolution, and mysteriously turned up as one of the Watergate burglars who were caught installing listening devices in the National Democratic Campaign offices. In 1973 Frank A. Sturgis, E. Howard Hunt, Eugenio R. Martínez, G. Gordon Liddy, Virgilio R. “Villo” González, Bernard L. Barker and James W. McCord, Jr. were convicted of conspiracy. While in prison, Sturgis feared for his life if anything he had done, regarding his associations and contacts, became public knowledge. In 1975, Sturgis admitted to being a spy, stating that he was involved in assassinations and plots to overthrow undisclosed foreign governments. However, at the Rockefeller Commission hearings in 1975, their concluding report stated that he was never a part of the CIA…. Go figure! In 1979, Sturgis surfaced in Angola where he trained and helped the rebels fight the Cuban-supported communists. Following this, he went to Honduras to train the Contras in their fight against the communist-supported Sandinista government. He also met with Yasser Arafat in Tunis, following which he was debriefed by the CIA. Furthermore, it is documented that he met and talked to the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or Carlos the Jackal, who is now serving a life sentence for murdering two French counter intelligence agents. On December 4, 1993, Sturgis suddenly died of lung cancer at the Veterans Hospital in Miami, Florida. He was buried in an unmarked grave south of Miami…. Or was he? In this murky underworld, anything is possible.

Joe Pike watched his friend Elvis Cole leave the Burger King parking lot, then entered the longitude and latitude into his GPS. Pike was not using a civilian GPS. He used a military handheld known as a Defense Advanced GPS Receiver, which was also known as a dagger. The DAGR was missile-guidance precise, could not be jammed, and contained the cryptography to use the Army and Air Force GPS satellite system. The DAGR was illegal for civilians to own, but Pike had used it in remote locations throughout Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Central and South America. These were military contract jobs for multinational corporations, mostly, but also the United States government. The government gave the DAGR to him even though it was a crime for him to own it. Governments do that. Thirty-two

Dad never wore the gun home. David didn’t even know he had a boot knife. And he always wore an immaculately clean uniform, and shiny boots. Dad said it was just part of his job as a United States Air Force officer. But now he could line up with the homeless men on the sidewalk at the downtown Mission for a free meal, no questions asked. Dad

On the ninth anniversary celebration of the Moncada Barracks Attack, Castro gave a speech in Santiago stating that the only thing Cuba had to fear was a direct attack by the United States. At the same time, the Russians were off-loading men and equipment from ships at the small, hardly-noticed port of Mariel. They transported their equipment, mostly at night, into a thickly wooded area in the mountains near San Cristóbal, which was 26 miles away from the port and approximately 50 miles from Havana. The CIA received a report that a twenty-six foot missile had been seen being transported on Cuban Highway A 1. This was twice the size of a SAM missile and the CIA deemed it highly unlikely that the Soviet Union would send offensive weapons of this size to Cuba. However, with the cold war in high gear, Khrushchev thought that he could change the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union by placing missiles on Cuban soil. This operation was conducted in strict secrecy, with Castro reluctantly agreeing to it. Castro still felt that Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet’s was risky and that this was a negative compromise undermining Cuban autonomy. Their secret however became confirmed by an Air Force U 2 surveillance aircraft, sent on a reconnaissance mission, dispatched over the western part of the island. The United States and the Soviet Union agreed on a deal. In return for pulling the Russian missiles out of Cuba the U.S. agreed to pull its missiles out of Turkey.

In early 1941, the United States was a fifth-rate military power, its armed forces ranking seventeenth in size compared to other world forces. Long starved of financial support by Congress and the White House, the Army had little more than 300,000 men (most of them just drafted), compared to Germany’s 4 million and Britain’s 1.6 million. Not a single armored division existed, and draftees were training with broomsticks for rifles and sawhorses for antitank guns. The Army was in such bad shape, according to one military historian, that it would not have been able to “repel raids across the Rio Grande by Mexican bandits.” Although the Navy was in better condition, nearly half its vessels dated back to World War I. The Army Air Corps, meanwhile, could boast only about two thousand combat aircraft. After

Lindbergh told Carl Jung that the United States Air Force investigated hundreds upon hundreds of UFO sightings without finding any evidence of supernatural phenomenon link to the UFOs, because they were real machines. Lindbergh was fully convinced that some of those UFOs were of a German origin, and the first to have worked on these enigmatic flying machines was Maria Orsic. Lindbergh admitted that he had discussed the subject of the German UFOs with General Spaatz, then Chief of the United States Air Force, and told him about Orsic’s super flying machine. Some have accused Lindbergh of having an affair with Maria Orsic, and because he was anti-Semite, Maria Orsic did not hesitate to tell him almost everything about the Aryan UFO she was working on.

Sometimes, just to see what was happening, my father would drive to the airport…. Before my birth, during the “Roaring 20’s” Newark Airport was the first major airport to serve the greater New York area. It was opened for traffic on October 1, 1928, on 68 acres of reclaimed marshland adjacent to the Passaic River. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey later took it over from the Army Air Corps and in 1948 started a major expansion and improvement program. Driving by and seeing activity from the road, we drove to where Eastern Airlines had a shiny new DC-3 on display, and as luck would have it, it was open to the public. It was an exciting moment when I boarded this aircraft and discovered that it was first constructed in 1934, the same year I was born. An example of modern technology, it was the first modern airliner and the forerunner of commercial aviation. The DC-3 was used during World War II, when the military version was identified as the C-47. After the war it continued as the primary carrier keeping Berlin open during the Berlin Airlift. On June 24, 1948 the Soviets prevented access to Berlin to the Western Allies’. Two days after the Soviet (Russians) announcement of the blockade, the United States Air Force airlifted the first cargo into Berlin. The American nicknamed the effort, "Operation Vittles," while British pilots dubbed the operation "Plain Fare." In July 1948, the operation was renamed the Combined Airlift Taskforce. Normal daily food requirements for Berlin were 2,000 tons with coal, for heating homes, being the number one commodity and two -thirds of all the tonnage flown in. The airlift ended on May 12, 1949 when the Soviets realized that the blockade wasn’t effective against the “Allied Resolve” and reopened the roads into Berlin.

The British air force desperately needed planes for their military, and the US had lots of planes but couldn’t sell them to the British, because that would count as selling weapons to a country at war. So, the States enlisted the help of their neighbors, Britain’s colony Canada. American pilots flew their planes to the border between Canada and the United States, which was mostly farmland, and landed them in the fields, and left them there. Then overnight Canadian pilots would cross down into the States and tow the planes north into Canadian lands.

On September 11, 2001, there were no more than a few hundred al Qaeda members hiding out in Afghanistan. Three months later, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitaries, U.S. Army Delta Force and U.S. Air Force finished bombing them, and Osama bin Laden had escaped to Pakistan, there were not enough of the terrorists left alive to fill a 757. Now, 20 years after that brief, one-sided victory, there are tens of thousands of bin Ladenite jihadists thriving in lands from Nigeria to the Philippines. Recently, and for almost three years, some even claimed their own divinely ordained caliphate, or Islamic State, temporarily erasing the border between Iraq and Syria. Local chapters of their group keep popping up all over the region. The State Department consistently reports a vast increase in the number of global terrorism incidents compared to the pre-September 11th era. Al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and their “lone wolf” copycats have carried out multiple, deadly attacks in more than a dozen major Western cities in the past decade, including Brussels, Paris, Berlin, London, San Bernardino, Orlando, New York City, Pensacola and Corpus Christi. Something must be wrong. The problem is that our government is ignoring and misrepresenting the real causes of the terrorists’ war against the United States.

We all live in the past. Your parents have given you a certain conditioning. The society has given you a certain conditioning, and to live in that conditioning is to live your life in a prison. The religions have forced you to be a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan or a Buddhist, which are all conditionings.  Meditation is a freedom from all these conditionings that parents, the society and the religions have forced on you. Unless you are free you will never be able to hear your own authentic inner voice.  Your parents will tell you "do this and don't do this." The priests will goon creating guilt and shame in you. They will not allow you to be yourself.  Nobody in the world is really interested in anybody else being given the freedom to be himself or herself. Everybody is trying to impose their ideas and ideologies on others.  That is why humanity is in such misery and chaos.  We have created an ugly world, where we have not allowed children to be themselves.  We have created a prison made of ideas, theologies and ideologies. You can think that you are free, but you are not free. We have to get rid of this prison. We have to uncondition ourselves, sothat we become free. It is first when the whole sky is ours that the whole existence is ours. When one realizes this, one just wants freedom, joy, silence,  awareness, truth and love. In that inner silence and freedom,the whole heritage of humanity becomes ours. Then we know that truth is within ourselves.  My first book in English, The Silent Whisperings of the Heart, is dedicated to my parents, Essy and Sven, with the dedication: "My parents, who taught me what love and freedom are.” My whole childhood was an atmosphere and climate of love and freedom. An American astrologer said in an astrology  session in the United States that my mother seemed to be a very special  woman. She was so rebellious that the boys in elementary school held herdown and shot her in the foot with an air rifle.  Once when I was in high school, I wanted to  have a little parental conflict, and said to my mother that I would never go back to school again. My mother replied: I would never do that either. This atmosphere and climate of love and freedom made me always feel that I could be who I am. It also taught me early to listen to my inner true voice, which early began to guide me in life.

Some people said they saw United States Air Force jets following them.  The air force said this wasn’t true.

Tonio and his dog sat in the kennel training yard as he explained that the day had come. An airplane would take him through several stops back to the United States, probably never to return. Tonio knew his dog would never go home again. There would be no C-130, nor even a raft. One way or another he would be killed and placed in a shallow, sandy grave in the K-9 cemetery in front of the K-9 Unit. And Tonio would dream the rest of his life of ways to return, exhume the dog’s remains, and bring them for burial in Germany. Dreams usually fade. True love never dies.” Untold Stories of Tonio

Tonio and his dog sat in the kennel training yard as he explained that the day had come. An airplane would take him through several stops back to the United States, probably never to return. Tonio knew his dog would never go home again. There would be no C-130, nor even a raft. One way or another he would be killed and placed in a shallow, sandy grave in the K-9 cemetery in front of the K-9 Unit. And Tonio would dream the rest of his life of ways to return, exhume the dog’s remains, and bring them for burial in Germany. Dreams usually fade. True love never dies.

Tonio and his dog sat in the kennel training yard as he explained that the day had come. An airplane would take him through several stops back to the United States, probably never to return. Tonio knew his dog would never go home again. There would be no C-130, nor even a raft. One way or another he would be killed and placed in a shallow, sandy grave in the K-9 cemetery in front of the K-9 Unit. And Tonio would dream the rest of his life of ways to return, exhume the dog’s remains, and bring them for burial in Germany. Dreams usually fade. True love never dies (Untold Stories of Tonio)

At the time of Nautilus’s launching back in January, the Caribbean Sea Frontier, an area command with bases in San Juan, Trinidad, Guantánamo, and Aruba-Curaçao, had begun running air-sea patrols in the Gulf of Honduras after the leftist government of Guatemala requested arms from the Soviet bloc in reaction to a U.S. decision to give covert support to an antigovernment “liberation” movement. To protect Honduras from invasion and to monitor and regulate arms shipments into the region in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, which had since 1823 warned European powers against meddling in the Western Hemisphere, the United States airlifted arms to Honduras. On May 20, the first Soviet arms shipment arrived in Guatemala. A few days later, the commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet ordered a contingency evacuation force into the area comprised of an antisubmarine carrier and five amphibious ships with a Marine battalion embarked. On June 18, the United States announced an arms embargo against Guatemala. The crisis ended eleven days later with a U.S.-backed coup that installed a new government under the dictator Carlos Castillo Armas.

General Lori Robinson, who, when she retired from the Air Force in 2018, was the highest-ranking female officer in the history of the United States military, explains that the responsibility of the most senior person in an organization is to look beyond the organization.

Had the US Navy somehow not existed, this British Navy with its enhanced Fleet Air Arm would have been the most powerful naval force the world had ever seen. Yet that hypothetical condition did not exist in 1945, and America’s giant power was evident to all. The Royal Navy was far, far larger than any other naval service in the world apart from that of the United States; the badly battered French Navy was way behind in third place, and perhaps Australia or Canada was in fourth.

The first was to secure uninterrupted control of the sea-lanes supplying the British Isles, the great future base for the Allied invasion forces, but that had meant the defeat of the U-boat menace, which came only in the summer of 1943. The second was to attain command of the air, not just over France but also over the Reich, and that was properly secured, interestingly enough, only by early 1944.23 The third and absolutely critical prerequisite had been of course the entry of the United States into the war and the commitment by the American government to a Germany First strategy, for only its vast productive power could guarantee that the Allies would be strong enough to push their way into France. Yet there was also a fourth great factor at work, though it was far to the east, namely, the vast Nazi-Soviet struggle that sapped so much of the Third Reich’s resources and was still pinning down the majority of the German Army’s divisions in 1944.

He has three master’s degrees and recently retired as a major after twenty-eight years in the United States Air Force.

Thus FDR, being a shrewd, smart sonofabitch now in his third term as President, knew that despite the cries of the isolationists who wanted Amer ica to have nothing to do with another world war it was only a matter of time before the country would be forced to shed its neutral status. And the best way to be prepared for that moment was to have the finest intelligence he could. And the best way to get that information, to get the facts that he trusted because he trusted the messenger, was to put another shrewd, smart sonofabitch in charge-his pal Wild Bill Donovan. The problem was not that intelligence wasn't being collected. The United States of America had vast organizations actively engaged in it-the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Military Intelligence Division chief among them. The problem was that the intelligence these organizations collected was, in the word of the old-school British spymasters, "coloured." That was to say, the intel tended first to serve to promote the respective branches. If, for example, ONI overstated the number of, say, German submarines, then the Navy brass could use that intelligence to justify its demands for more funds for sailors and ships to hunt down those U-boats. (Which, of course, played to everyone's natural fears as the U-boats were damn effec tive killing machines.) Likewise, if MID stated that it had found significantly more Axis troop amassing toward an Allied border than was previously thought, Army brass could argue that ground and/or air forces needed the money more than did the swabbies. Then there was the turf-fighting FBI. J. Edgar Hoover and Company didn't want any Allied spies snooping around in their backyard. It followed then that if the agencies had their own agendas, they were not prone to share with others the information that they collected. The argument, as might be expected, was that intelligence shared was intelli gence compromised. There was also the interagency fear, unspoken but there, as sure as God made little green apples, that some shared intel would be found to be want ing. If that should happen, it would make the particular agency that had de veloped it look bad. And that, fear of all fears, would result in the reduction of funds, of men, of weapons, et cetera, et cetera. In short, the loss of im portance of the agency in the eyes of the grand political scheme. Thus among the various agencies there continued the endless turf bat tles, the duplications of effort-even the instances, say, of undercover FB agents arresting undercover ONI agents snooping around Washington D.C., and New York City.

Thousands of left-wing volunteers from all over Europe, along with many Americans and Canadians, answered the Spanish Republic’s call for help and were supported by arms shipments, military advisers, and air force pilots from the Soviet Union. The governments of England, France, and the United States maintained a hypocritical neutrality, embargoing arms shipments and volunteers to both sides.

On 15 August 1944, the same day that Allied troops landed on the nearby Mediterranean coast, and Catherine was deported from Paris to Ravensbrück, Ramonda took part in an operation to hold back a German convoy until the United States Army Air Forces could intervene. He

As for the Earthshot ceremony, viewers were less than captivated, to say the least. In the United Kingdom, newspapers claimed the public “switched off” in droves within minutes of the BBC airing it, while the audience watching live in the United States via PBS’s streaming platform fell to the hundreds at times. Despite certain celebrity guests flying in to the “green” event at great expense and using thousands of gallons of jet fuel (Beckham flew on a private jet from Qatar), the environmental award winners themselves were strangely forced to stay at home and appear via Zoom.

In the end, the annexation goal was spurred on by falling sugar prices and the rising belief that the United States must control Hawaiʻi against other foreign interests and to protect the West Coast of the contiguous United States of America. There was also a perceived air of economic instability and the potential for an economic depression to beset the islands. This spurred Americans like Lorrin Thurston and Minister John L. Stevens to zealously promote and push the idea of annexation abroad, leading to many US politicians to buy into the idea. Stevens asked the US State Department to send additional naval forces to protect American interests and asked Washington to station a warship in Honolulu indefinitely to secure the islands. This was the beginning of a rapid increase in American military might in Hawaiʻi.

RONALD REAGAN WAS ELECTED THE 40th president of the United States in a landslide victory on November 4, 1980. He received the highest number of votes ever won by a non-incumbent presidential candidate. William Holden was thrilled for Reagan, whose victory represented the pinnacle of his longtime devotion to public service. They first became pals while serving in the US Army Air Force, where Reagan was promoted to the rank of Captain.

The Syrian civil war was raging at this time. When we faced the press in the prime minister’s residence, Obama was asked point-blank about reports that the Syrian government had possibly used chemical weapons against opponents of Assad’s regime a day earlier. “Is this a red line for you?” a journalist asked. “I have made clear that the use of chemical weapons is a game changer,”1 he said, a reaffirmed threat heard round the world. He had first drawn a red line on this issue a few months earlier in a White House statement. Would he make good on it if it were proven that chemical weapons were actually used in Syria? Time would tell. And it did. Five months later, Assad’s forces carried out a horrific chemical attack that killed 1,500 civilians. Obama called it “the worst chemical weapons attack of the twenty-first century.”2 The entire world was shocked by the footage of little children suffocating to death. All eyes were on Obama. He was scheduled to make a dramatic announcement. Minutes before going on-air, he called me. “Bibi,” he said, “I’ve decided to take action but I need to go to Congress first.” I was astonished. American law did not require such an appeal. Syria was not about to go to war with the United States but Congress was unlikely to approve military action anyway. I hid my disappointment and rebounded with an idea that Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz had raised earlier with Ron Dermer and me in the event that Obama wouldn’t attack. The Russian military was in Syria to shore up the Assad regime and protect Russian assets in Syria, such as the strategic Russian naval base in Latakia. That was a fact we could do little to change. But Putin shared with us and the United States a desire to prevent chemical weapons from falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists who posed a threat to Russia, too. “Why don’t you get the Russians with your approval to take out the chemical stockpiles from Syria?” I suggested to the president. “We would back that decision.” This is in fact what transpired in the coming months, though some materials for chemical weapons were still left in Syria. Yet, despite these positive results, the lingering effect of Obama’s last-minute turn to Congress was the impression that red lines can be crossed with impunity and that Obama would not employ America’s massive airpower even when the situation warranted it. I should have expected this. The second important and telling exchange between Obama and me during his visit to Israel happened in private, and gave me a heads-up on how he viewed the use of American power. The day after the intimate dinner at the prime minister’s residence we met at a King David Hotel suite overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem.

Harvard educated Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who was named Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet in August 1939, came to see naval air power as a great equalizer. At first, he was against waging a war against the United States, knowing her people well. He had the firm belief that Japan was not able to win a war in any ordinary manner. He concluded that Japan must have a new air strategy that would demoralize not only the US Navy, but also the American people. He also believed that by destroying the American fleet that the US government would agree to let Japan rule the Pacific. As part of high command, the Naval Headquarters turned down the plan due to its high danger and risks. Yamamoto argued, stating, “Japan will certainly be beaten if we wage war, force to force. There is nothing we can do but crush their fighting spirit. I will resign from this post if my plan cannot be approved.” The chief of naval operations finally relented saying, “As Yamamoto will go that far, we will have to let him do it.” Japan’s

Colorado Springs can be traced to the city’s founding, but it was in the post-WWII era that the city began to emerge as a nerve center for a politically engaged, globally expansive evangelicalism intent on winning the country, and the world, for Christ. The entrenchment of evangelicalism in Colorado Springs coincided with the growth of the military in the region. In 1954, the United States Air Force Academy was established in Colorado Springs. The city would eventually house three air force bases, an army fort, and the North American Air Defense Command. In the 1960s, the Nazarene Bible College opened its doors, and soon an array of evangelical, charismatic, and fundamentalist churches, colleges, ministries, nonprofits, and businesses took root. Lured by local tax breaks and drawn to the growing epicenter of evangelical power, nearly one hundred Christian parachurch organizations sprouted up within a five-mile vicinity of the academy, including Officers’ Christian Fellowship, the International Bible Society, Youth for Christ, the Navigators, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Christian Booksellers Association, Fellowship of Christian Cowboys, Christian Camping International, and, most significantly, Dobson’s Focus on the Family. 2

Indeed, China has shown that it is willing to flout many of the rules of the system, using its outsized military to intimidate its neighbors. Meanwhile the United States has responded by sending its own massive air force and navy to push back against the Chinese claims. In this clash of military titans, how could legal niceties matter? But stepping back, it is possible to see that the power struggle is taking place against a backdrop of law. Why were islands so worthless for hundreds of years? Because barren territory that was difficult to defend against conquest was more trouble than it was worth. Why did these islands become so valuable? Because the law changed. Not only did conquest become illegal (and thus defending islands unnecessary), but the new law of the sea gave states control over hundreds of miles of ocean and seabed resources surrounding islands. China and the other coastal nations scrambling to establish claims to the islands are doing so because they are pursuing their interests as determined by law.

One of the most startling effects was that within about two orbits, all the contrails normally crisscrossing the United States had disappeared because they had grounded all the airplanes and there was nobody else flying in U.S. airspace except for one airplane that was leaving a contrail from the central U.S. toward Washington. That was Air Force One heading back to D.C. with President Bush.

Mikhail.” Her voice was hesitant, as she chose her words carefully. “I belong to myself. I’m a person, not something you can own. In any case, I live in the United States. I’m going back there soon and intend to be on the next train to Budapest.” His smile was that of a hunter. Predatory. For a moment the firelight gleamed red, so that his eyes glowed like a wolf’s in the night. He said nothing, simply watched her unblinkingly. Her hand fluttered defensively to her throat. “It’s late, I should be going.” She could hear the pounding of her own heart. What was it she wanted from him? She didn’t know, only that this was the most perfect, frightening night of her life, and she wanted to see him again. He was utterly motionless, menacing in his complete stillness. She waited breathlessly. Fear was suffocating her, sending tremors through her slender form. Fear he would let her go; fear he would force her to stay. She drew air into her lungs. “Mikhail, I don’t know what you want.” She didn’t know what she wanted either.

Man's flight through life is sustained by the power of knowledge.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress in a measured but determined voice: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” Roosevelt’s cabinet, led by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, initially urged the president to present to Congress a comprehensive history of Japan’s international misconduct. Roosevelt decided instead on an accessible five-hundred-word speech so that his message would get through to as many people as possible: The Japanese attack was treacherous, and the United States had to defeat this cowardly enemy, no matter what it took.

Moderate Republicans like Rockefeller supported the national consensus toward advancing civil rights by promoting national legislation to protect the vote, employment, housing and other elements of the American promise denied to blacks. They sought to contain Communism, not eradicate it, and they had faith that the government could be a force for good if it were circumscribed and run efficiently. They believed in experts and belittled the Goldwater approach, which held that complex problems could be solved merely by the application of common sense. It was not a plus to the Rockefeller camp that Goldwater had publicly admitted, “You know, I haven’t got a really first-class brain.”174 Politically, moderates believed that these positions would also preserve the Republican Party in a changing America. Conservatives wanted to restrict government from meddling in private enterprise and the free exercise of liberty. They thought bipartisanship and compromise were leading to collectivism and fiscal irresponsibility. On national security, Goldwater and his allies felt Eisenhower had been barely fighting the communists, and that the Soviets were gobbling up territory across the globe. At one point, Goldwater appeared to muse about dropping a low-yield nuclear bomb on the Chinese supply lines in Vietnam, though it may have been more a press misunderstanding than his actual view.175 Conservatives believed that by promoting these ideas, they were not just saving a party, they were rescuing the American experiment. Politically, they saw in Goldwater a chance to break the stranglehold of the Eastern moneyed interests. If a candidate could raise money and build an organization without being beholden to the Eastern power brokers, then such a candidate could finally represent the interests of authentic Americans, the silent majority that made the country an exceptional one. Goldwater looked like the leader of a party that was moving west. His head seemed fashioned from sandstone. An Air Force pilot, his skin was taut, as though he’d always left the window open on his plane. He would not be mistaken for an East Coast banker. The likely nominee disagreed most violently with moderates over the issue of federal protections for the rights of black Americans. In June, a month before the convention, the Senate had voted on the Civil Rights Act. Twenty-seven of thirty-three Republicans voted for the legislation. Goldwater was one of the six who did not, arguing that the law was unconstitutional. “The structure of the federal system, with its fifty separate state units, has long permitted this nation to nourish local differences, even local cultures,” said Goldwater. Though Goldwater had voted for previous civil rights legislation and had founded the Arizona Air National Guard as a racially integrated unit, moderates rejected his reasoning. They said it was a disguise to cover his political appeal to anxious white voters whom he needed to win the primaries. He was courting not just Southern whites but whites in the North and the Midwest who were worried about the speed of change in America and competition from newly empowered blacks.

Nothing less than control of the heavens was at stake. It was Armageddon, the final and decisive battle of the forces of good and evil. Lyndon Johnson, who was the Senate majority leader, said that whoever controlled “the high ground” of space would control the world. This phrase, “the high ground,” somehow caught hold. “The Roman Empire,” said Johnson, “controlled the world because it could build roads. Later—when it moved to sea—the British Empire was dominant because it had ships. In the air age we were powerful because we had airplanes. Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space.” The New York Times, in an editorial, said the United States was now in a “race for survival.” The panic became more and more apocalyptic.

Tennessee when he was thirteen years old. He is a veteran of the United States Air Force and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from East Tennessee State University and a Doctor of Jurisprudence from the University of Tennessee College of Law. He lives in Northeast Tennessee with his wife, their dogs,

To the men and women I’ve met in the United States Air Force— You have taught me more about what it means to be human than anyone who wears a suit ever did.

Beyond the deprivations, degradations, and tortures these prisoners endured, each man often recounts how he got to the camps Weller visited. These conflicts, and all they implied, would have been instantly recognizable to the 1945 public. Many of the Dutch and the British, the Australians and Canadians, were taken in the defeats of Singapore (130,000), Java (32,000), and Hong Kong (14,000). Many of the Americans got captured on Guam or Wake; or in the Philippines (75,000), to then endure the Bataan death march, on which one in four died. Some built the Siam-Burma railroad, which claimed yet another 15,000 lives, same ratio. Nearly everywhere, in a hurry, the Japanese won and the Allies lost. The United States saw its navy smashed at Pearl Harbor and its Pacific air forces wiped out in Manila, just before MacArthur got himself safely out to Australia. This litany of early military disasters added up to astonishing numbers. In a mere six months the Japanese, at a cost of only 15,000 of their own men (deaths and casualties), took 320,000 Allied soldiers out of the war, either as deaths, casualties, or prisoners; over half these were Asiatic. White prisoners, about 140,000 total over the course of the conflict, became slave labor across the growing Japanese empire. (Asiatic prisoners were often turned loose, as good propaganda among the subjugated peoples.) Japan had not signed the 1929 Geneva Conventions regarding treatment of prisoners of war, and a Japanese soldier would sooner be killed than captured: thus every enemy soldier who surrendered was a coward, a cur, a thing. Any notion of “inhumane treatment” toward a surrendered Chinese, much less a white man, was incomprehensible. White men were the foe, so their role was to work, then die. Whether their deaths proved painful did not matter to the Japanese. Unlike the Nazi POW camps, there were few escape attempts, for it was obvious to any Allied POW in Asia that a white face was an immediate giveaway even had he succeeded, and the Japanese made it clear that they would execute ten men for every man who escaped. Statistically it was seven times healthier to be a POW under the Nazis than under the Japanese. By war’s end, one out of every three white prisoners had died as their captives—“starved to death, worked to death, beaten to death, dead of loathsome epidemic diseases that the Japanese would not treat,” as Daws puts it. Another year of war and there would have been no POWs still alive. (A Japan War Ministry directive of August 1944 iterated that “the aim is to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.”)

in South Haven, Michigan, and moved to Tennessee when he was thirteen years old. He is a veteran of the United States Air Force and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from East Tennessee State University and a Doctor of Jurisprudence from the University of Tennessee College of Law. He lives in Northeast Tennessee with his wife, their

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -- McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.