Mastah Preddi

When 27-year-old Army lieutenant Fred Hargesheimer's P-38 Lightning was shot down on June 5, 1943 over New Britain he had no idea whether he would live or die. Below him was a forbidding jungle, reputedly filled with headhunters. Instead he found a people who would risk their very lives to save his. And save him they did. Fred Hargesheimer and his late wife Dorothy spent decades paying back the people who risked so much for him back duriing the war. 

BIALLA, Papua New Guinea — The Japanese fighter caught the American pilot from behind, riddling his plane with machine-gun rounds. The left engine burst into flames. It was time to bail out.

He yanked on the release lever but the cockpit canopy only half-opened. He unbuckled his seat belt, rose to shake the canopy loose and was instantly sucked out.

Swinging beneath his opened parachute, he plunged toward a Pacific island jungle of thick, towering eucalyptus trees, of crocodile rivers and headhunters, into enemy territory, and into an unimagined future as a hero, "Suara Auru," Chief Warrior, to generations of islanders yet unborn.

'Mastah Preddi'

Fred Hargesheimer was shot down in the southwest Pacific on June 5, 1943. A lifetime later, he sits in his quiet California ranch house amid the snow and soaring sugar pines of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

The light blue eyes, at age 91, can't see as well as they once did. But when he looks back over 65 years, the smiling Minnesotan sees it all clearly — the struggle to survive, the native rescuers, the Japanese patrols and narrow escapes, the mother's milk that saved him. He remembers well his return to New Britain, the people's embrace, the fundraising and building, the children taught, the adults cured, the happy years beside the Bismarck Sea with Dorothy, his wife.

"I'm so grateful for getting shot out of the sky," he says.

Fred Hargesheimer has raised funds for and built schools, libraries and a clinic for the people who saved his life. He and Dorothy even went there to teach in the schools they built. Hargesheimer was not a rich man, he held a sales position for Sperry Rand. But he did all this, nonetheless. 

Go read the whole thing. Mastah Preddi's story is worth reading.

The Lines That Never End

A very interesting article in the Washington Post by Mark Winne, the former director of Connecticut's Hartford Food System and a 25-year veteran of food bank programs. In it he explains how he came to recognize something awful about food handout programs: they don't work. The more the volunteers collect, the more they give away, the more demand increases. The lines never end.

We did our job well, and everything grew: Over 25 years, the food bank leapfrogged five times from warehouse to ever-vaster warehouse, finally landing in a state-of-the-art facility that's the equal of most commercial food distribution centers in the country. The volunteers multiplied to 3,000 because the donations of food, much of it unfit for human consumption, required many hands for sorting and discarding. The number of food distribution sites skyrocketed from five in 1982 to 360 today.

But in spite of all the outward signs of progress, more than 275,000 Connecticut residents — slightly less than 8.6 percent of the state's residents — remain hungry or what we call "food insecure." The Department of Agriculture puts 11 percent of the U.S. population in this category. (The department also provides state-by-state breakdowns.)

The overall futility of the effort became evident to me one summer day in 2003 when I observed a food bank truck pull up to a low-income housing project in Hartford. The residents had known when and where the truck would arrive, and they were already lined up at the edge of the parking lot to receive handouts. Staff members and volunteers set up folding tables and proceeded to stack them with produce, boxed cereal and other food items. People stood quietly in line until it was their turn to receive a bag of pre-selected food.

No one made any attempt to determine whether the recipients actually needed the food, nor to encourage the recipients to seek other forms of assistance, such as food stamps. The food distribution was an unequivocal act of faith based on generally accepted knowledge that this was a known area of need. The recipients seemed reasonably grateful, but the staff members and volunteers seemed even happier, having been fortified by the belief that their act of benevolence was at least mildly appreciated.

As word spread, the lines got longer until finally the truck was empty. The following week, it returned at the same time, and once again the people were waiting. Only this time there were more of them. It may have been that a donor-recipient co-dependency had developed. Both parties were trapped in an ever-expanding web of immediate gratification that offered the recipients no long-term hope of eventually achieving independence and self-reliance. As the food bank's director told me later, "The more you provide, the more demand there is."

Winne calls it a co-dependency between the people receiving the handouts and those providing the food. The volunteers want to feel goos about themselves and so they volunteer. The food bank programs become a self-sustaining program rather than a means to an end. There is no end in sight. Because the self-sustaining nature of the programs distracts from real solutions.

Food banks are a dominant institution in this country, and they assert their power at the local and state levels by commanding the attention of people of good will who want to address hunger. Their ability to attract volunteers and to raise money approaches that of major hospitals and universities. While none of this is inherently wrong, it does distract the public and policymakers from the task of harnessing the political will needed to end hunger in the United States.

The risk is that the multibillion-dollar system of food banking has become such a pervasive force in the anti-hunger world, and so tied to its donors and its volunteers, that it cannot step back and ask if this is the best way to end hunger, food insecurity and their root cause, poverty.

Winne's solutions are misguided, I think, because he's essentially calling for an even bigger self-sustaining handout - this time run by the government. Nevertheless, he is correct that the entire thrust of programs like these fail to address the real causes of the problem. Yet handing out more only leads to demand for still more, as Winne notices. What he appears not to see is that his "solutions" would simply multiply the lines yet again. Only this time it would be the government being asked to provide more and more, not volunteers.

It's interesting that Winne noticed the essential problem with handouts without following that insight all the way to the logical conclusion. That old, shopworn adage applies here: if you give a man a fish he eats for a day, if you teach him to fish he eats for a lifetime. The way up and out of poverty is education and opportunity, not another handout. Because the lines just never end if you're giving it all away. "The more you provide, the more demand there is." That quote from the unnamed food bank director says it all.

Fancy New Name, Same Old Problem

I'm not picking on T-Steel, who posts over at The Moderate Voice. I just happen to have taken exception to a couple of his posts in the past few days when I saw them pop up on Memeorandum. Today he has a post about the "Transhumanism Movement" that bugs me a little.

From Wikipedia:

Transhumanism (sometimes symbolized by >H or H+) is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of new sciences and technologies to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, and ameliorate what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as stupidity, suffering, disease, aging and involuntary death. Transhumanist thinkers study the possibilities and consequences of developing and using human enhancement techniques and other emerging technologies for these purposes. Possible dangers, as well as benefits, of powerful new technologies that might radically change the conditions of human life are also of concern to the transhumanist movement.

Excellent description of the aspect of futuristics, or future studies, that deeply interests me. Call me a transhumanism apprentice. Transhumanism clashes with religion at many levels since many transhumanists are atheists. Personally I’m more of a secular spiritualist and agnostic. But I never beat people up about their religious beliefs. It is counterproductive to the nth degree. But I digress.

There really is nothing new about this. This is just a slightly different take on eugenics. In even shorter terms it can be labeled 'playing God'. The problem, of course, is who decides what is good and what is bad? What traits do you select for and enhance and what ones to you suppress or eliminate? And how do you eliminate the "bad" traits after you select them. Do you kill those with undesirable traits. Do you sterilize those who carry the traits? You can see why eugenics has gotten a bit of a bad name, especially since the Nazis flirted with it.

My doctor once told me that high triglycerides were associated with people from countries that had a historical "feast or famine" cycle. At one time it was a desirable trait because it enabled people to get through the lean times. Now, with more secure food sources, it is not so good to have. (I do not know for sure that's the case, BTW. I did find a couple of papers that seem to bear that out.) So, what if you selectively eliminate a trait that would be beneficial under certain conditions without realizing that it did actually have such a function. Who decides?

What if you select for certain traits, then find out down the road that some combinations are lethal in the long term? What if you inadvertently eliminate something, like the ability to make music?

Playing God isn't really all that easy, is it?

(The Wikipedia entry on Transhumanism lists a lot arguments that have been raised about it, BTW. They also note that transhumanists have renamed eugenics as "reprogenics". New name, same, old goals.)

What A Genocidal Government Looks Like

To many in the West these days, America is the villain. They scold at every turn, pretty much no matter what we do as a nation. They decry our foreign policies. They moan about our efforts at globalization. They screech at any use of American force. They carp endlessly that we do too much, or too little or the wrong things or don't get the world's permission before we do anything at all.

But they turn a blind eye to the ongoing, self-inflicted genocide that is Zimbabwe.

Suffer the little children is a phrase never far from your mind in today’s Zimbabwe. The horde of painfully thin street children milling around you at traffic lights is almost the least of it: in a population now down to 11m or less there are an estimated 1.3m orphans.

Go to one of the overflowing cemeteries in Bulawayo or Beit Bridge and you are struck by the long lines of tiny graves for babies and toddlers.

A game ranger friend tells me that hyena attacks on humans, previously unheard of, have become increasingly common. “So many babies, not all of them dead, are being dumped in the bush that hyenas have developed a taste for human flesh,” he explains.

Under the weight of the general economic meltdown — the economy has shrunk by 40% since 2000 and is still contracting — the health system has collapsed and a populace now weakened by five consecutive years of near-starvation dies of things which would never have been fatal before. A staggering 42,000 women died in childbirth last year, for example, compared with fewer than 1,000 a decade ago.

A vast human cull is under way in Zimbabwe and the great majority of deaths are a direct result of deliberate government policies. Ignored by the United Nations, it is a genocide perhaps 10 times greater than Darfur’s and more than twice as large as Rwanda’s.

Genocide is not a word one should use hastily but the situation is exactly as described in the UN Convention on Genocide, which defines it as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.

Our homegrown internal critics throw charges of "ethnic cleansing" against our own government. Because it is easier to posture against an internal political opponent and paint him as evil than to actually see the real evils in the world and actually do anything about them. It is easier to carp and moan and poke sticks at countries you know, deep down, will never try to hurt you in return, than it is to address real evil. It is easier to pretend that a thoroughly corrupt United Nations, increasingly dominated by thuggish regimes is effective than to admit they don't actually do much good at keeping monsters down.

Zimbabwe is dying and the West damns America. And when it is dead, they will also blame America.

Modest Hero

This guy deserves a medal.

It was every subway rider’s nightmare, times two.

Who has ridden along New York’s 656 miles of subway lines and not wondered: “What if I fell to the tracks as a train came in? What would I do?”

And who has not thought: “What if someone else fell? Would I jump to the rescue?”

Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old construction worker and Navy veteran, faced both those questions in a flashing instant yesterday, and got his answers almost as quickly.

Mr. Autrey was waiting for the downtown local at 137th Street and Broadway in Manhattan around 12:45 p.m. He was taking his two daughters, Syshe, 4, and Shuqui, 6, home before work.

Nearby, a man collapsed, his body convulsing. Mr. Autrey and two women rushed to help, he said. The man, Cameron Hollopeter, 20, managed to get up, but then stumbled to the platform edge and fell to the tracks, between the two rails.

The headlights of the No. 1 train appeared. “I had to make a split decision,” Mr. Autrey said.

So he made one, and leapt.

Read the whole thing. He doesn't feel he did anything special at all. I think the rest of us do.

UPDATE: A new story from the AP just came up. This guy is amazing.

NEW YORK - In hindsight, jumping in front of an oncoming subway train may not have been the smartest move Wesley Autrey has ever made.

"It's all hitting me now," Autrey said Wednesday, a day after he saved the life of a young man who had fallen down onto the tracks by pushing him into a gap between the rails. "I'm looking, and these trains are coming in now. … Wow, you did something pretty stupid."

No, sir, Mr. Autrey. You did something to save a man's life. That does not make you stupid. It makes you a hero. Even if you don't think it is anything particularly special, a lot of us do. So does the family of Cameron Hollopeter. Thank you.

The Hardest Service

A beautifully written article in today's Washington Post by Neely Tucker reminds us of the last, hardest, public service that is rendered by a former First Lady. That of burying her husband in the full glare of publicity. Betty Ford has performed that service with dignity and grace.

Betty Ford, observed in these days of national mourning:

Frail. Determined. Quiet. Tired.

She was 88 and clearly exhausted.

She was resting on the arm of the president of the United States when she emerged from the darkness of Washington National Cathedral into the weak January sunlight yesterday, following her husband's coffin. She did not speak during the service, except to turn to her daughter, Susan, and mouth the word "beautiful" after a moving rendition of "O God, Our Help in Ages Past." She was surrounded by family, including her three sons.

She will bury her husband today on a hillside back home in Michigan.

Then, three decades after leaving the White House, she will finally be relieved of the duties of being first lady, a job that comes with no description but endless expectations. The final duty is burying one's husband under the glare of public attention. This has become a de facto job requirement in the past century, when first ladies began to routinely outlive their husbands.

Please read the whole thing. And spare a thought or a prayer for Betty Ford and the Ford Family who served this country in their unelected yet required duties so well these past days.

Never Again

I make it a point to try to mention things like this when they happen. We need more of this. American Muslims gathered for a ceremony to commemorate Jews murdered in Nazi death camps at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. The remembrance was organized by the leader of a local mosque. The event was organized specifically in response to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's just completed Holocaust denial hate fest.

 Local Muslim leaders lit candles yesterday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to commemorate Jewish suffering under the Nazis, in a ceremony held just days after Iran had a conference denying the genocide.

American Muslims "believe we have to learn the lessons of history and commit ourselves: Never again," said Imam Mohamed Magid of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, standing before the eternal flame flickering from a black marble base that holds dirt from Nazi concentration camps.

Around the hexagonal room, candles glimmered under the engraved names of the death camps: Chelmno. Auschwitz-Birkenau. Majdanek.

"We stand here with three survivors of the Holocaust and my great Muslim friends to condemn this outrage in Iran," said Sara J. Bloomfield, the museum's director, addressing a bank of TV cameras in the room, known as the Hall of Remembrance.

The museum, she noted, holds "millions of pieces of evidence of this crime."

Kudos to Imam Mohamed Magid for doing this. The Imam actually delayed a pilgrimage to Mecca by a day to attend the ceremony.

UPDATE: Rather a lot of positive reaction to this story. Check out what a few others are saying: Wake up America, The Moderate Voice, The Debate Link, Liberty Street, Secular Blasphemy, Bring it On,

Sixteen Miles Of Tears

Imagine a trail of paper that documents terror and death. Imagine the voices of people caught up in those events. Their voices long silent now, but the paper remains. A voiceless echo of the pain and suffering. The screams and the death and the blood and the agony long since gone. All that is left is the paper.

Sixteen miles of paper.

Sixteen-miles. That’s how far stretches the surviving individual records of what happened to millions of the Jews exterminated by the Nazi’s. Those records have been kept under lock and key by the International Red Cross since they were captured by the Allies after World War II. Soon, they will become available on digital copies.

The Nazi’s meticulous record-keeping, which fell apart late in the war, captures the fates of so many who today are only remembered in big numbers that fail to capture the individual horrors. Similarly, the scope of the death operations is now known to be even larger than previously described.

The files will support new research from other sources showing that the network of concentration camps, ghettos and labor camps was nearly three times more extensive than previously thought.

Postwar historians estimated about 5,000 to 7,000 detention sites. But after the Cold War ended, records began pouring out of the former communist nations of East Europe. More sites were disclosed in the last six years in claims by 1.6 million people for slave labor reparations from a $6.6 billion fund financed by the German government and some 3,000 industries.

"We have identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 camps and ghettos of various categories," said Geoffrey Megargee of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, who is compiling a seven-volume encyclopedia of these detention centers.

The archive [also] has some 3.4 million files of DPs _ Displaced Persons….

[Also] Some 50 million pages _ scraps of paper, transport lists, registration books, labor documents, medical and death registers _ make reference to 17.5 million individuals caught up in the machinery of persecution, displacement and death.

When I was a very young child, I recall the extended family gathering around a short note from the International Red Cross about the fate of part of my family: Taken out of their village in Belarus by local sympathizers of the Nazi’s, to dig ditches, then hammered on their heads with the shovels, some shot, and tossed into the ditch like garbage.

Read the whole thing. If you are strong enough.

The Actions Of Barbarians

Two years ago, the Iranian clerical courts had a 16-year old girl executed. Her crime? She was raped by a 51 year old former Revolutionary Guard member. The BBC actually published this story, which surprises me. They did go to some tortured convolutions of language describing the girl and her rapist as having a relationship. Yeesh.

On 15 August, 2004, Atefah Sahaaleh was hanged in a public square in the Iranian city of Neka.

Her death sentence was imposed for "crimes against chastity".

The state-run newspaper accused her of adultery and described her as 22 years old.

But she was not married - and she was just 16.

Sharia Law

In terms of the number of people executed by the state in 2004, Iran is estimated to be second only to China.

In the year of Atefah's death, at least 159 people were executed in accordance with the Islamic law of the country, based on the Sharia code.

Since the revolution, Sharia law has been Iran's highest legal authority.

Alongside murder and drug smuggling, sex outside marriage is also a capital crime.

As a signatory of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, Iran has promised not to execute anyone under the age of 18.

But the clerical courts do not answer to parliament. They abide by their religious supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, making it virtually impossible for human rights campaigners to call them to account.

Read the whole thing. It's quite sickening. The most sickening thing? The execution was carried out in public. The authorities put a noose around her neck and hoisted her to the top of a crane. For those of you who do not understand this, this is slow strangulation and exceedingly cruel. These are the actions of barbarians.

UN “Reforms”

The UN made a huge show of reforming it's Human Rights Council. It's first order of business was to re-institute the habit of the old council to bash Israel first at every meeting.

 The new UN Human Rights Council voted Friday to make a review of alleged human rights abuses by Israel a permanent feature of every council session.

The resolution, which was sponsored by Islamic countries, was passed by a vote of 29-12, with five abstentions. It effectively revives a practice of the UN's dissolved Human Rights Commission, which also reviewed alleged Israeli abuses every time it met.

Israel protested Friday's vote, calling it a perpetuation of "the old infamous habits" of the widely discredited commission.

The resolution requires UN investigators to report at each council session "on the Israeli human rights violations in occupied Palestine."

The resolution also said the council "decides to undertake substantive consideration of the human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories at its next session and to incorporate that issue in its following sessions."

One of the United States' main criticisms of the 53-nation Human Rights Commission that was replaced this year by the council was that it spent one week of its annual six-week session criticizing Israel and made other frequent attacks on the Jewish state.

"Voting in favor of this draft resolution will lead you directly to the old infamous habits of the commission," Israeli Ambassador Itzhak Levanon told the council. "Voting yes essentially means that no lessons have been drawn. It means that there is no fresh beginning."

Well, it seems they are off to a thrilling start. It would, of course, mean a bit more if the first thing they reviewed at every meeting was the member nations record.

As if.

UPDATE: Others: Liberty and Justice, Meryl Yourish, JoshuaPundit,

Well, it seems they are off to a thrilling start. It would, of course, mean a bit more if the first thing they reviewed at every meeting was the member nations record.

As if.

UPDATE: Others: Liberty and Justice, Meryl Yourish, JoshuaPundit,

Star For A Day

A six year old girl from Boise Idaho became a superhero named Star for a day:

When she donned her blue and metallic superhero costume, Star took on the super-powers of X-ray vision, superhuman strength, speed and blowing power — and a mission: To capture the villain who had stolen a golden star from the Idaho Historical Museum.

After Star was alerted by authorities, she hopped on a Life Flight helicopter to reach the crime scene, where she found a clue linking the crime to a known evildoer.

The chase was on, with plenty of opportunities for Star to use her superpowers along the way.

Before catching the bad guy, she rescued people from a "smoke"-filled building, saved a citizen from drowning in ParkCenter Pond, and vindicated ferrets at Zoo Boise who had been framed for stealing the golden star.

It was a busy day for Aubrey, a little girl with an incredible imagination whose biggest foe is the inoperable optic glioma tumor growing in the center of her brain. The tumor was diagnosed when Aubrey was 6 months old.

The Idaho Make-A-Wish foundation made the day happen for the little girl. Read it all, but have the tissues handy.

This Is Just A Nice Story

Frank and Anita Milford of England have just celebrated their 78th wedding anniversary.

The pair met as teenagers at a dance in Plymouth, southern England, in 1926 and married two years later.

Asked for the secret of their enduring union, Frank Milford, 98, a retired dock worker, was quoted in The Daily Telegraph as saying: "We don't always see eye to eye and we do have a small argument every day.

"But that comes and goes. We are always here for each other."

His 97-year-old wife added: "The key is give and take and lots of laughter."

With their relationship as strong as ever, the couple hope to beat the record for Britain's longest-ever marriage of 80 years, set by Percy and Florence Arrowsmith. Percy Arrowsmith died last year.

"There's every chance we could break that record," Anita Milford said.

"These days marriages don't last long. A lot of people get married with the idea that if it doesn't work out there's no worry, but we can't understand that."

They are very devoted to one another says the staff at the nursing home they moved into last year.

Perfection At The Cost Of Humanity?

The Daily Mail has a disturbing - no, that's wrong - appalling story that a fairly large number of late term abortions have been performed because the fetus had what are considered very minor, fully treatable birth defects.

The ethical storm over abortions has been renewed as it emerged that terminations are being carried out for minor, treatable birth defects.

Late terminations have been performed in recent years because the babies had club feet, official figures show. Other babies were destroyed because they had webbed fingers or extra digits.

Such defects can often be corrected with a simple operation or physiotherapy.

The revelation sparked fears that abortion is increasingly being used to satisfy couples' desire for the 'perfect' baby.

A leading doctor said people were right to be 'totally shocked' that abortions were being carried out for such conditions.

Campaigners warned we are turning into a society that can no longer tolerate imperfection. Doctors were recently told they can now screen IVF embryos to try to weed out inherited cancers.

Ethical groups fear parents are opting for abortions because they are not told of the support and help available if they continued with the pregnancy.

Details of the terminations emerged as new figures revealed an alarming rise in the use of an abortion pill that has been linked to 10 deaths.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that between 1996 and 2004, 20 babies were aborted after 20 weeks because they had a club foot.

It is one of the most common birth defects in Britain, affecting one in 1,000 babies each year. That means around 600 to 700 babies are born annually in the UK with the problem, which causes the feet to point downwards and in severe cases can cause a limp.

However it can be corrected without surgery using splints, plaster casts and boots. Naomi Davis, a leading paediatrician at Manchester Children's Hospital who specialists in correcting club feet, said: 'I think it is reasonable to be totally shocked that abortion is being offered for this.

'It is entirely treatable. I can only think it is lack of information.'

Figures also show that four babies were aborted since 1996 because they were found to have webbed fingers or extra digits, which can be sorted out with simply surgery.

Abortions have been reported as late as 28 weeks. Normal gestation is 38 weeks. Is having the perfect baby worth the cost of your humanity?

I have a brother with Down Syndrome. He has been a challenge at times for the whole family and for my Mother in particular while she was alive. But neither my Mom or any of the rest of us wished he had not been born. For all the problems pale in comparison to the person he is. He loves to laugh, he loves to dance, he is always charming to any lady he meets and he is a very good artist with a unique perspective.

He is not disposable.

It is such a shame that others, with fewer challenges, are disposable in some people's minds.

About Angels

The Seattle Post Intelligencer ran an essay by a soldier who recently returned from Iraq. It's one of the most moving pieces I have read.

On this particular day one of the locals had his little girl with him. She was shyly watching me from behind his legs. When I smiled and waved at her, she brazenly ran up to me with a big smile and held out her arms, expecting to be picked up. At first I was shocked at her sudden bravery, and it took me a second to reach down and pick her up. When I did, she immediately kissed me on my cheek and then nestled in as if she meant to stay a while.

I looked toward her father and he immediately began talking rapidly in Arabic and gesturing at me. Our translator quickly explained that he, the father, had been locked in a prison for most of the child's life. He had been sentenced to death for being a Shiite dissident traitor. The man went on to say that soldiers wearing the same patch on the shoulder as I was (the 101st Airborne Division) had freed him shortly after we began the liberation of Iraq. His daughter from then on believed that the famous Screaming Eagle patch of the 101st meant that we were angels sent to protect her family.

Please read the whole thing.

Missouri Soldier In Need Of Help

Gateway Pundit has a long post about Air National Guard Master Sgt. Rhys Wilson of Savannah Missouri.

Wilson recently returned from active duty in Iraq after his wife Therese was diagnosed with 4th stage neuro-endocrine cancer which will require extremely intense and expensive treatment, much of which will not be covered by health insurance.

This man served his country despite having a child with medical problems, a son who is also serving in Iraq and now a desperately ill wife to contend with. He deserves our help. Please pass the word on and help if you can.

Who: Rep. Colonel Jack Jackson, Veteran’s Commission Ombudsman Pat Rowe Kerr and members of Therese and Master Sgt. Rhys Wilson’s Family.
What: Press Conference to announce start of “Operation on Spirits Wings.”
When: Saturday March 25th, 2:30 pm.
Where: Platte Woods United Methodist Church. 7310 NW Prairie View Rd. Platte Woods Missouri, 64151.

Please help out if you can.
For more information you may contact paul@jackjackson.org