Nonprofit in dispute over Marine’s Medal of Honor agrees in principle to hometown display
STARS AND STRIPES
By MATTHEW M. BURKE
Published: February 20, 2019
The foundation’s board includes Medal of Honor recipient Army Col. Walter Marm Jr., who received the award for actions taken during the Vietnam War, and Doug Sheehan, the nephew of Doug Munro, the Coast Guard’s only medal recipient.
Marine Maj. Henry Courtney Jr. received the Medal of Honor posthumously for leading a daring assault on Okinawa's Sugar Loaf Hill on May 14-15, 1945. COURTESY OF COURT STORY
A Pennsylvania nonprofit dedicated to educating Americans about citizenship and community service has agreed — in principle — to send a Marine hero’s Medal of Honor back to his hometown for display following a protracted fight.
The family of Marine Maj. Henry Courtney Jr. has been seeking the return of his medal from the Valley Forge-based Freedoms Foundation since around 2015, family members previously told Stars and Stripes.
They accused the foundation of breaching the agreement over how the medal would be used and requested it be sent instead to the St. Louis County Historical Society’s Veterans Memorial Hall in Duluth, Minn., which has a substantial Courtney display.
At first, the Freedoms Foundation, which was founded in 1949 by a group that included future President Dwight Eisenhower, refused. Courtney’s family members then took their fight public.
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New York Air National Guardsman accused of impersonating CIA agent to impress woman
Syracuse Media Group
By CHRIS LIBONATI
Published: February 19, 2019
CICERO, N.Y. (Tribune News Service) — A New York man who police have accused of impersonating a CIA agent to impress a woman works for the New York Air National Guard as a drone camera operator, according to a New York Air National Guard spokesman and an Air Force website.
Staff Sgt. Ryan Houghtalen, who is currently a sensor operator on the MQ-9 Reaper with the 174th Attack Wing, was charged by New York state police with misdemeanor criminal impersonation for pretending to be a CIA agent. He was arrested Monday, Feb. 18, 2019 and spent a day in jail before being released. VIA LINKEDIN
Staff Sgt. Ryan R. Houghtalen, 25, was charged with second-degree impersonation of a public servant, a misdemeanor, according to court records.
After showing the woman a fake CIA ID, Houghtalen told the woman how he was currently targeted by terrorists.
“He was telling her his job as a CIA agent is very dangerous,” said New York State Police spokesman Jack Keller. “He was hoping to use that information to start a relationship with her.”
Houghtalen told the woman he met at church that, because he was a CIA agent, both he and her were targets of ISIS, according to court documents.
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Fate of two soldiers sheds light on veteran suicide, points out where to get help
Delaware Online
Jerry Smith
February 19, 2019
Pfc. Jacob Jonza (left), and Sgt. Daniel Grime of Company B, 2nd Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, provide security for their platoon during a patrol through a business district in Baghdad's Sha'ab neighborhood in 2008. (Photo11: Staff Sgt. Michael Pryor/Defense Visual Information Distribution Service)
Free: This abridged version of the story about veteran suicides is presented free as a public service to allow access to information to get help. To read the full story, please subscribe online.
Francis Graves III and Jacob Jonza each carried emotional scars after returning home from military deployments to the Middle East.
Ultimately, each tried to take his life. One lived, while the other died.
About 24 First State veterans kill themselves each year, part of 6,000 veterans who commit suicide nationwide, according to a 2016 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs survey.
Because the number has risen in the last decade, both the Trump administration and Wilmington Veterans Administration Medical Center have made veteran suicide a priority.
Graves, from Townsend, lost his battle years after returning from a stint in Saudi Arabia when he killed himself in 2015.
Jonza tried to kill himself in 2008, but was saved.
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As you'll see in the video, the pain never stops for those you leave behind. Stop spreading suicide and start inspiring healing!
Go to the link and look at what help is out there for you in Delaware. If you live in another area of the country, you can find help to heal there too~
#CombatPTSD and #Take BackYourLife
The Arizona Trail chrysalis for life
Payson Roundup
Micheal Nelson
February 19, 2019
Mike Buckley makes his way from the Roosevelt Marina where he met a very friendly and helpful bar owner.
Mike Buckley stared at the gun on his desk.
“It was the night I started to crack,” he said in front of more than 200 members of the Arizona Trail Association at its annual meeting recently.
The 30-year Army veteran commanded a bomb squad in Afghanistan, but after months of sending his boys home in pieces, he’d reached his breaking point.
Sitting with the gun and his despair, he had no way to know the Arizona Trail would save him.
Little did he know a bartender on a golf cart, an Australian woman with body odor and a Pine winemaker with a bathrobe encountered along the trail would restore his faith in humanity — and heal the wound in his soul.
He ultimately found himself again in a charred burn scar, near the end of the 800-mile-long trail.
“At Telephone Hill, passage 41 runs through a burn scar,” said Buckley. “It incinerated ponderosa pines. Even to go out through the devastation is profound because you see life. I became overwhelmed. It was like a chrysalis of new life and I realized it was who I was.”
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11 years in jail for ex-Veterans Affairs official in disabled vet fraud scheme
WTOP News
Valerie Bonk
February 18, 2019
WASHINGTON — A former U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs official has been sentenced 11 years in prison for a $2 million bribery scheme involving a program for disabled military veterans.
James King, 63, of Baltimore, previously pleaded guilty to one count of honest services and money wire fraud, one count of bribery of a public official and one count of falsifying records to obstruct an investigation, authorities said in a news release.
King was sentenced Friday to serve 132 months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release and to pay $155,000 in restitution to Veterans Affairs.
Three school owners and employees, who admitted to bribing King, were sentenced last week.
Albert Poawui, the owner of Atius Technology Institute, was sentenced to serve 70 months in prison and ordered to pay $1.5 million in restitution.
Sombo Kanneh, Poawui’s employee, was sentenced to serve 20 months in prison and ordered to pay $113,000 in restitution.
Michelle Stevens, the owner of Eelon Training Academy, was sentenced to serve 30 months in prison and ordered to pay $83,000 in restitution.
“James King and his associates exploited an important VA program that provides valuable services to our disabled military veterans,” said Justice Department Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski in a release. “This prosecution once again demonstrates the Justice Department’s commitment to hold accountable those who seek to defraud government programs for their own personal enrichment.”
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'Blue water' Vietnam veterans may finally be able to seek help with Agent Orange side effects
WCPO 9 News
Craig McKee
February 19, 2019
A Jan. 29 federal appeals court ruling could expand the pool of Vietnam veterans able to claim disability benefits connected to Agent Orange, a chemical weapon known to cause serious health problems in those exposed.
“It’s about time,” veteran John Ranson said Monday.
That category — those exposed — for years did not technically include Navy veterans like him.
Agent Orange was a defoliant herbicide American soldiers deployed to thin out the Vietnamese jungle, depriving guerilla insurgents of both cover and food. When its deadly long-term health impacts became clear, Congress passed the Agent Orange Act of 1991 to provide some financial relief for all those who served.
However, the Department of Veterans Affairs repeatedly denied the claims of so-called “Blue Water Veterans,” claiming only soldiers present on the Vietnamese mainland could reasonably claim to have interacted with the substance.
That’s not what Rex Settlemore, who served from 1967 to 1998 and spent two tours in Vietnam, thinks. He watched from the U.S.S. Durham and U.S.S. Richard S. Edwards as airplanes releases chemical weapons overhead, and he remembers how close to the shore both ships sailed.
Agent Orange particles must have made it into the ocean water he and the rest of the crew used, he said, if not the air they breathed. He believes some of the early deaths among his comrades from that time are connected to that exposure.
“Ships who ingested the sea water, even if the sea water was distilled for fresh water on board, would still contain the Agent Orange contaminants,” he said.
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Will the US do the right thing finally after Australia did it for their Vietnam veterans?
George Mendonsa, Navy veteran identified as 'kissing sailor' in WWII photo, dies at 95
NBC News
By Erik Ortiz
February 18, 2019
"He was very proud of his service and the picture and what it stood for," Mendonsa's daughter said Monday.
George Mendonsa, a World War II veteran whose claim of being a sailor kissing a nurse in an iconic image was verified using facial recognition technology, died early Sunday, his daughter said. He was 95.
Mendonsa was living in an assisted living facility in Middletown, Rhode Island, and had been suffering from severe congestive heart failure, daughter Sharon Molleur told NBC News. He would have turned 96 on Tuesday, she added.
Mendonsa, a retired fisherman, had maintained for years that he was the sailor locking lips in a picture taken on Aug. 14, 1945, by Alfred Eisenstaedt and published in Life magazine as a scene from "V-J Day in Times Square." On that day, Americans crowded the streets to celebrate the Japanese surrender to the Allies and the end of the war.
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Active Duty Soldier Killed By Suspected Drunk Driver
KURV 710 News Talk
By JSALINAS
February 17, 2019
A Valley man has been charged in the suspected drunk driving death of a U.S. Army soldier. 25-year-old Edward Leo Magallan was brought before a judge Saturday, charged with intoxication manslaughter, and ordered jailed on a $150,000 bond.
Magallan is accused of plowing into a Ford Mustang and running over 19-year-old Cassandra Julianne Perez. Perez was standing next to her car which had stalled on the southbound frontage road of I-69C at around 1 a.m. Friday.
Perez was part of a squad of active duty soldiers assigned to the border.
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Fundraiser Underway to Help 96-Year-Old WWII Veteran Live Final Days at Home Care Facility
Faithwire
February 18, 2019
Friends of Gordon’s set up a GoFundMe campaign called “Herbie WW2 Veterans Dying Wish” to help cover the costs. It had raised more than $11,000 of the $35,712 goal as of the weekend.
A community is trying to give back to a hero who served this country by ensuring he gets to live his final days comfortably in the home care facility where he spent the last years with his late wife.
World War II U.S. Army veteran Herb Gordon, 96, has had multiple brushes with death, the latest being in 2017, when he broke his neck while volunteering at a medical center, he told WPBF-TV.
“They were so certain I was going to die on the operating table, but I had my family here and God listened,” Gordon said of his caretakers at the Atria Senior Living Facility in Lantana, Florida. “And here I am.”
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Florida military bases could lose up to $177 million to Trump’s border wall
Tampa Bay Times
Steve Contorno and Howard Altman
February 18, 2019
President Donald Trump will pay for his much coveted wall at the southern border in part by taking $3.6 billion from military projects across the country and the world.
LUIS SANTANA | Times A-10 Warthog jets from the 122nd Fighter Wing of the Indiana Air National Guard taxis out of Macdill Air Force Base in Tampa. Increased jet noise and activity surrounding the base are from several jets that are being hosted at Macdill Air Force Base on Dec. 6, 2018. President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency and plans to divert $3.6 billion from military construction to the southern border for a barrier. A $3 million project at MacDill is one of many that could be cut.
The decision means Florida bases could lose up to $177 million for planned construction, more than all but eight other states, according to a list of eligible projects compiled by the House Appropriations Committee and provided to the Tampa Bay Times.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the influential Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies subcommittee, said the move is an indication that Trump feels the wall “is a higher priority than these projects.”
Among the projects in jeopardy are $3.1 million to relocate KC-135 Stratotanker pilot flight simulators to MacDill Air Force Base. The KC-135 are refueling planes “critical to the joint warfighter and our allies,” Gen. Carlton D. Everhart said in a June 2018 press release, and the simulators would allow pilots to experience realistic training of these aircrafts and practice emergency protocol.
Other projects that could lose funding include: $83 million for Littoral Combat Ship support facility and $29 million for Littoral Combat Ship operational training facility at Mayport Naval Base in Jacksonville, and $35 million for a F-35A training center and $28 million for a F-35A student dormitory at Eglin Air Force Base in Okaloosa County.
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