Homeless veteran lived in the shadow of downtown
Gazette Extra
By Neil Johnson
Aug 19, 2018
“He was a Vietnam vet and one of the guys whose mind never came home from the war,” John Eccles said. “Two minutes in a firefight can change your life.”
Dan Eccles
A troubled man
Eccles, 68, was a Vietnam War veteran. While still a teenager, he served in the 27th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army, a group of fighters nicknamed the “Wolfhounds,” his family said. He fought in Cù Chi in South Vietnam in 1968, fending off surprise attacks from a vast network of enemy, underground tunnels dug by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong armies.
Dan Eccles’ body was pulled from the Rock River near the Centerway Dam, just downstream from a spot on the river bank where he was known to crawl into the weeds to sleep at night.
Eccles’ world, such as it was, spanned a quarter-mile, unpaved trail along the west side of the Rock River near downtown Janesville. The heavily wooded section of the Ice Age Trail runs north of Centerway, along the tangled railroad hillside just east of Mercyhealth Hospital and Trauma Center.
In that area across the river from Traxler Park where the Rock Aqua Jays perform, observers say they had seen Eccles and still see other homeless men in the woods and along the trails. Some are drunk and dirty. Others sleep on old couch cushions and mattresses in plain view. Some take to the bushes and stay under blue tarps or in tents.
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Trump and Omarosa Had a ‘F*cking Weird’ Fight With Vietnam Vets
The Daily Beast
Asawin Suebsaeng
08.17.18
As if having Omarosa heading up veterans’ issues wasn’t strange enough, President Trump started arguing with Vietnam vets about napalm and Agent Orange.
Source present at the time tell The Daily Beast that multiple people—including Vietnam War veterans—chimed in to inform the president that the Apocalypse Now set piece he was talking about showcased the U.S. military using napalm, not Agent Orange.
Trump refused to accept that he was mistaken and proceeded to say things like, “no, I think it’s that stuff from that movie.”
Early on in the Donald Trump administration, the president vested many of his nearest and dearest with tasks they were woefully unprepared for—and Apprentice superstar Omarosa Manigault-Newman was no exception.
Long before she was his chief antagonist, Manigault-Newman was tapped by President Trump to handle veterans’ issues for the White House—causing immediate backlash from vets organizations who read this as a slap in the face and a betrayal of his campaign rhetoric about “taking care of our veterans.”
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Vietnam veterans reunite with ailing 'brother'
Tribune-Star
By Alex Modesitt
9 hrs ago
“When I got back from Vietnam I was tired of sleeping on the ground. So I joined the Air Force,” Dierdorf joked. Dierdorf served out the rest of his 27-year armed services career with the U.S. Air Force.
Ken Dierdorf wanted so badly to sit alongside his Army brothers and feel the rush of air blow through an open-sided UH-1 Iroquois “Huey” one last time at Saturday’s Terre Haute Air Show.
But fate, weather and his advanced Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis — ALS — wouldn’t allow it.
Meant as one last hurrah for a group of Vietnam veterans who call themselves the “Dirty Half Dozen,” the Visiting Nursing Association and Hospice of the Wabash Valley arranged for Dierdorf and his U.S. Army brethren from around the country to take one last ride in a Huey.
But the flight, scheduled to take off around 9 a.m., was grounded due to fog blanketing the airfield. True to form, as the soldiers’ wives tell it, the group didn’t pay the weather much attention as they waited, instead they took the opportunity to catch up on each others’ goings on and tell stories.
And boy were the stories from veterans that served together in second platoon of the 1st Cavalry Division’s 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, Bravo Company worth hearing.
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Bush VA chief: It’s ‘astounding’ that outside advisers are influencing VA from Mar-a-Lago
The Hill
BY MORGAN GSTALTER
08/18/18
A former head of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is expressing concerns over a report that a trio of allies to President Trump who do not hold government positions are affecting hiring at the agency.
Anthony Principi, who served as VA secretary under former President George W. Bush, told Stars and Stripes this week that he found the report of alleged influence by members of Trump's private Mar-a-Lago club "astounding."
“If these [Mar-a-Lago] assertions are true, I don’t think that’s good governance. It’s not the way the nomination and appointment process should work," Principi said.
ProbPublica reported earlier this month that three high-profile men — Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter, West Palm Beach doctor Bruce Moskowitz and Washington lawyer Marc Sherman — were interacting with VA officials almost daily and meeting with them at Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., resort.
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When your ride is a helicopter
PTSD Patrol
Kathie Costos
August 19, 2018
LZ Landing Zone
In military terminology a landing zone (LZ) is an area where aircraft can land. In the United States military, a landing zone is the actual point where aircraft, especially helicopters, land (equivalent to the commonwealth landing point.)
In commonwealth militaries, a landing zone is the cartographic (numeric) zone in which the landing is going to take place (e.g., a valley). The landing area is the area in which the landing is going to take place (e.g., the field where the aircraft are to land). The landing point is the point on which aircraft are going to land (e.g., a point of the field). Each aircraft has a different landing point.
From John C Wolf video
Usually I know days ahead of doing these videos what the topic will be. This time, all I could think about is a Vietnam veteran named John Wolf and how his ride was a helicopter.
I posted the following on August 17, 2018 and could not get it out of my head.
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