Garden will help veterans in need (NewBernSJ.com) A program being launched this spring in the Duffyfield area intends to help veterans find employment and provide the community with fresh vegetables.
Transition
Enlisting Companies To Invest In Veterans (The Wall Street Journal) With the drawdown of America’s major post-9/11 overseas engagements, nearly a million of the country’s finest men and women will be leaving the armed forces and joining the economy. With that in mind, we want to focus on the long-term futures of our veterans.
Job drive created for soon-to-be veterans (The Tennessean) The Rutherford County Chamber of Commerce has launched a new program to connect job seekers exiting the military and employers trying to fill many of the high-skilled jobs available across the county.
Are we all crazy? Does PTSD ever go away? I’m sure that most members of the US military have a much better understanding of PTSD than the general public.
There are currently about 1.4 million active troops serving in the U.S. military and 21.5 million military veterans. But the U.S. population has more than 317 million people. That means 0.44% are serving in the active military and 6.7% are veterans leaving 93.15% of the population mostly clueless.
So, where does the general population acquire its perception of PTSD?
To answer that, we must ask how many Hollywood movies have painted a positive picture of combat veterans compared to movies that show veterans as angry, violent, dangerous drug users and/or alcoholics (mostly brought on by PTSD).
Three Vietnam Veterans have run for President of the United States—all three lost. One was a Republican and two were Democrats.
Al Gore served in Vietnam as a reporter/journalist for five months. He was stationed with the 20th Engineer Brigade in Bien Hoa and was a journalist with The Castle Courier. He received an honorable discharge from the Army in May 1971.
Gore said, “I don’t pretend that my own military experience matches in any way what others here have been through … I didn’t do the most, or run the gravest danger. But I was proud to wear my country’s uniform. And my own experiences gave me strong beliefs about America’s obligation to keep our national defenses strong.”
John Kerry reported for duty at Coastal Squadron 1 in Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam on November 17, 1968. In his role as an officer in charge of swift boats, Kerry led five-man crews on a number of patrols into enemy-controlled areas.
John McCain requested a combat assignment, and was assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal flying A-4 Skyhawks. His combat duty began when he was thirty, in mid-1967.
John McCain became a prisoner of war on October 26, 1967. He was flying his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam when his aircraft was shot down by a missile over Hanoi.
What is your opinion about the public image of combat veterans? Do you think these three men lost the White House because of that image?
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
Walking the mile-and-a-half home, both films stirred emotions and made for conversation. I admit that I didn’t think The Wolf of Wall Street was about a real man. It was so outrageous, so amoral, and so greedy—you name it—that I thought it was the product of a very active imagination.
When I Googled the film, I discovered it was based on a real story and was surprised that anyone could be this rotten other than a serial killer who loves murdering innocent people—the real Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, was as depraved and greedy as they come. The film is worth seeing. DiCaprio does a great job playing Belfort, a man who is often unfaithful to his wives, and in the end has no loyalty to anyone when it comes to his own survival.
Belfort and his employees lead a lifestyle of total debauchery with lavish parties, sex and drugs both in the workplace and in their personal lives.
Belfort was indicted in 1998 for securities fraud and money laundering, but he only served 22 months in a federal prison designed for white collar criminals. This prison, as depicted in the film, was more of a country club with tennis courts—but still a prison you can’t leave until you’ve served your time. It seems that today, Belfort is worth millions again (although nowhere close to the amount—about $200 million—he took from his victims); hasn’t paid back what the court ordered; lives in Manhattan Beach, California and is engaged again.
Lone Survivor is about a team of SEALS in Afghanistan and is also based on a true story. The film starts out with SEAL boot camp and in short order shows how tough it is to earn the right to be a SEAL. These are tough guys who value loyalty, patriotism and honor above all else and they are more than willing to die for what they believe.
Mark Wahlberg plays the lone survivor, Marcus Luttrell. Three of the four SEALS in his team are killed in combat with a vicious enemy, the Taliban, who once ruled most of Afghanistan while supporting Al Qaeda.
While I was disgusted at Belfort’s debauchery and greed, I was angry at what happened to the SEALS in Lone Survivor. Not long after they were dropped off in the Afghan mountains to carry out their mission, they discover that the intel was bad. Instead of a few Taliban, they were up against hundreds and they lost radio contact. When the help arrives, it’s without the proper support because there are not enough Apache gunships to support all of the ground operations in Afghanistan. The result, one of the troop carrying choppers is shot down with everyone aboard killed aborting the rescue attempt.
Why was I angry? Because when I served in Vietnam—several times while in the field—I lost radio contact—once on a deep recon where four of us were dozens of miles in front of our own lines. We even drove our World War II vintage jeeps—with no armor I might add—through an abandoned village where the cooking fires were still smoldering and there was a Vietcong flag flying from a radio antenna sticking out of the top of a tree. Several decades later, and Congress should have done something about fixing it so no ground troops would ever be out of radio contact, and I blame the lack of enough air support on Congress and President G. W. Bush for not making sure the troops had all the support they needed to succeed and come home.
Then there are the rules of combat that limit our troop’s ability to fight a war. We had them in Vietnam and they sucked. Noncombatants should not be allowed to make rules for combat. Most Americans—who live in a real fantasy world—do not understand war.
The challenge is how do we measure who Americans might admire most?
For The Wolf of Wall Street, the film—with a $100 million budget—opened in December in 2,537 theaters and has earned $90.8 million as of January 10, 2014.
Lone Survivor opened wide in 2,875 theaters on January 10; had a production budget of $40 million and has earned $14.782 million (the film started in 2 theaters on December 25, 2013 and went wide on January 10) compared to The Wolf of Wall Street that made $18.5 million its first weekend.
Who do you admire most and why: Belfort’s and his mob or Marcus Luttrell and the SEALS?
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
Sometime in 1966, for a few days, some Marines from my battalion, including me, were sent to a hill on the perimeter at Chu Lai to watch over an infantry company’s equipment while they were in the hills chasing North Vietnamese ghosts—intelligence said a regiment of NVA had slipped into South Vietnam.
There weren’t many of us—just enough for two Marines to man each of the small bunkers near the base of the hill that was surrounded by coiled barbed wire and then rice paddies.
As daylight faded, the hum of a billion mosquitoes greeted our ears warning us of what was to come as we waged war with the bloodsuckers and lost.
Looking for a way to escape, several Marines scrambled into the largest bunker at the top of the hill—it stood two stories tall with a thick slab of cast iron for a roof offering protection from Vietcong mortar rounds.
Those Marines thought they would be able to escape the bloodsuckers by moving inside the bunker. But as fast as they went in, they came out—screaming like schoolgirls. The bunker was full of rats and when the first Marine’s boots landed on the dirt floor, the rats climbed his legs in a frenzy.
I watched the few who had gone in come shooting out like rockets—eyes wide with shock; faces pale. These were all men who had fought in combat without showing fear when confronted by an enemy who wanted to kill them. Before the cast iron hatch at the top was slammed shut, one Marine tossed a fragmentation grenade in the bunker and it went off with a muffled blast.
Hours later, during my watch between midnight and four, I heard a rustling noise near the wire. There would be long stretches of silence (if you didn’t count the sound of distant firefights and the glare of flares along the division perimeter), then another rustling as if someone were crawling up the hill. I couldn’t see anything and thought it might be a small animal.
When my watch ended, I visited the only latrine that was close to the top of the hill. It was a screened, plywood box with a four-hole plywood bench. Inside, it was black as ink and smelled of urine. Under the bench were four half-empty, fifty-five gallon metal drums with several inches of diesel fuel in each one. In the mornings, the drums would be dragged out from under the plywood bench and set on fire. When it wasn’t raining, hundreds of columns of black smoke could be seen drifting into the morning sky over Chu Lai as the shit was burned.
I had stomach cramps—probably from the twenty-one-year-old canned rations I’d had for my evening meal. Or maybe from the water we drank that had a strong taste of chlorine to it.
I leaned my weapon just out of reach against the three-foot high plywood wall in front of me and sat. Above the plywood was a screened in open space that allowed air to flow through while keeping the mosquitoes out.
There was a tin roof and the shitter was probably the only place to escape the mosquitoes. If it hadn’t been for the stink, I’d have slept there. On both sides of the shitter was a line of tents where the grunts (infantry) kept their gear and slept when they weren’t in the field.
That’s when the grenades started to go off. I glanced to the left and saw a shadowy figure running fast along the line of tents tossing a grenade through each opening. I reached for my weapon but a wave of cramps doubled me over as the diarrhea gushed out.
For an instant, I thought I was going to be dead when a grenade was tossed in the shitter. But from the outside, it must have looked empty and I was spared that fate.
No one died or was wounded on that hill that night. The tents were empty because the grunts were in the hills hunting an elusive enemy, and most of us were in the smaller bunkers near the concertina wire. I was closer than anyone to the lone killer who had slipped inside the wire.
That was just one night out of hundreds during my combat tour in Vietnam.
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
I’m currently watching The Walking Dead, season three on DVD, and the main character’s son—Carl—who isn’t even a teenager, has become an efficient killing machine of both humans and zombies.
But that isn’t what this post is about because The Walking Dead is fiction.
In this post, I am writing nonfiction for someone who has no voice. We now know that many who grow up to be racists, criminals and killers were victims of parental neglect, but this post isn’t about that either. [Turning Children into Killers]
This post is about George Sandefur—a smoker who died from an aggressive form of lung cancer—and I have not forgotten one story he told me at lunch one day when we were alone in the staff lounge.
At the time, he taught math and I taught English at Giano Intermediate School in La Puente, California and it was the early 1980s. He had the classroom next to mine. George told me this story a few years before the lung cancer took him.
You see, George served in the U.S. Army in the Korean War [1950 – 1953]. He told me about one patrol on a cold day. The narrow trail they followed clung to the side of a steep mountain he didn’t know the name of.
George brought up the rear and from his vantage point saw several young Korean children coming their way. None of these kids could have been over ten. The rest of American patrol had gone around a fold in the mountain and couldn’t see the children.
George stopped. He sensed something was wrong, and when he saw the machine gun strapped to the back of a little girl, he knew that the other troops in his patrol were walking into a trap and certain death.
He was the only one who had a clear shot, so he pulled the trigger.
It turned out those kids were heavily armed with explosives and the machine gun. All that little girl had to do was lean over so the seven or eight-year-old boy standing behind her could pull the trigger to kill the US troops.
George took lives that day but also saved lives, and he was left with a mental scar that followed him the rest of his life.
That one defining moment changed who George was and how he saw the world.
His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
At first, you’re probably going to wonder why this post is on this blog. Be patient, because you will see why after you watch the videos.
First, watch Van Damme as he does the splits between two moving Volvo eighteen wheelers; then scroll down and watch Chuck Norris—with the help of some special effects that includes the U.S. Air Force—beat Van Damme’s at his own game while spoofing him at the same time.
And, no laughing allowed!
Now for a bit of info: The United States is the only country on the planet with the ability to airlift an army anywhere in the world and go right into battle. As you will see in the next video, the C-17 Globemaster III may land and take off from dirt airfields. The U.S. Air Force has 223 of these monsters. There are also C-130E and C-130H cargo aircraft in addition to a few others.
“American power can be projected quickly to anywhere on the face of the earth as a result of the Air Force’s capability for rapid mobility. The Air Force’s 122,000 air mobility Airmen provide swift deployment and the ability to sustain operations by delivering essential equipment and personnel for missions ranging from major combat to humanitarian relief operations around the world. Mobility forces also provide in-flight refueling, which is a unique Air Force capability and the linchpin to joint power projection at intercontinental distances.” (U.S. Air Force)
Now for the conclusion: In December 2013 U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III aircraft flew French Troops [Van Damme is French but Chuck Norris is an America] in addition to troops from other African nations to restore security in the Central African Republic.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thrillerRunning with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW
In the early 1980s, I was working toward an MFA and one of my courses was a self-directed project monitored by a faculty adviser. The project was my memoir of fighting in the Vietnam War. A few years after completing the memoir, I took it to UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program where the professor convinced me to convert it into fiction—a suspense thriller. The professor was a woman, who later helped find a literary agent to represent my novel.
I spent several years in the program with her as my advisor, and the final product after endless revisions and feedback from the professor and other authors in the program was “Running with the Enemy”. It was fiction but true to my experience of war and its horror.
Fast forward to publication and then June 11, 2013 when a reviewer by the name of “S” posted a 2-star review on Amazon—a review I’m actually proud of.
S concluded her review with: “I was sucked in by the nitty gritty feng shui of the book, then repelled by the over use of sexual violence and testosterone dousing. Even though the ending was predictable, I still liked that the good guys won and the bad guys lost. However, the limited roles by the female characters left me feeling that half the story still lies buried and voiceless.”
I’m proud of that 2-star review because the book I wrote was about the war I fought in—not the story S wanted me to write that would have been a lie. In the 1960s, the only American women who served in Vietnam that I knew of were nurses and they did not serve in combat units. There were no women in my battalion. Not one.
What I think S wanted was to see women kicking the shit out of men and beating the men at war. But that wasn’t my Vietnam. Tuyen, the only major woman character in the novel—the others were minor characters—was a half breed, a Eurasian, who had been sexually and physically abused by her half-brother since she had been a young girl.
If you have ever seen the film or the stage play of “Miss Saigon”, you might understand how women are still treated today in Southeast Asia and when that woman was a Eurasian like Tuyen, the treatment was worse, and the term for her was Bụi đời, the “dust of life”.
In fact, “Life was frequently difficult for such Amerasians [and Eurasians]; they existed as pariahs in Vietnamese society. Often, they would be persecuted by the communist government and sometimes even sold into prostitution as children.” [Benge, Michael (22 November 2005). “The Living Hell of Amerasians”. Front Page Magazine]
I think what “S” wanted from me as an author was to write a story that would fit a world she wanted—one that didn’t exist in my world. She wanted a kick-ass female character.
The latest example of this popular political correctness demanding that history and literature be rewritten may be found in the film “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”. Tauriel is a female elf who is a kick ass super warrior. The problem is that in the original Hobbit written by J. R. R. Tolkien, there are no major women characters and another fire-breathing modern day feminist—another S—also wanted the plot of this novel rewritten when made into film.
This revisionist was Nicole Lyn Pesce writing for the New York Daily News who said, “The women’s rights movement has made it to Middle-earth. The first ‘Hobbit’ film was criticized by some—like me—for its testosterone-heavy cast, so director Peter Jackson has brought in a kick-ass chick for the sequel.”
Does this mean we should rewrite history due to a modern, popular, political-correct movement? I don’t think so.
My novel was a man’s story just like “The Hobbit” was written by a man. In fact, you may want to read an essay about how J.R.R. Tolkien’s service in the British Army during World War I may have influenced his fiction. [JRR Tolkien and World War I by Nancy Marie Ott]
If Tolkien were alive today, would modern feminists be criticizing him for not including kick-ass women warriors in his novels, who didn’t exist in his day as they didn’t exist in mine?
I have news for “S”. If she had read my novel to the end, she would have discovered Tuyen kicking some serious male ass in the Golden Triangle near the conclusion of the novel. In that scene, Tuyen is so violent she even shocks the kick-ass recon Marine who loves her. Maybe Tuyen just didn’t kick enough male asses to satisfy S or someone like Nicole Lyn Pesce.
Here’s a bit of advice for today’s modern day feminists. Don’t wish for something you know little to nothing about. Take it from someone who has seen war up close and personal, you really don’t want to go there. If men are willing to go to war and die to protect women from that horror, let them.
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
I didn’t read the posts, because I was more interested in rating America’s performance as the self-proclaimed world’s police force? To do that, I compiled a death count from all the wars, civil wars, revolutions, and genocides since the end of World War II, and I’m sure it is an incomplete list.
It was difficult to come up with a precise number so there are two numbers and the actual number of deaths could be anywhere between the low and high estimates.
1945 – 1950: The expulsion of Germans after World War II was called a population transfer but in reality it turned out to be an ethnic cleansing. The death count was 500 thousand – 3 million
1950 – 1953: Korean War. The death count 400 thousand – 4.5 million
1955 – 1975: Vietnam War. The death count was 800 thousand – 3 million
1965 – 66: Indonesian massacre of anyone connected to the Indonesian Communist Party. The Death count was 100 thousand to 2 million.
1967 – 1970: Nigerian Civil War and genocide. The death count was 1 – 3 million
1971: Bangladesh genocide. The death count was 26,000 – 3 million
1975 – 1979: Cambodian Genocide. The death count was 1 – 3 million; another 800 to 950 thousand died of starvation. The only reason this tragedy ended was because Communist Vietnam invaded and stopped the insanity. Where was the United States? Why did it take one communist country to stop another one from slaughtering its own people?
1975 – 80: Operation Condor in South America was a campaign of political repression by right-wing dictatorships sponsored by the United States. The death count was 50 – 80 thousand.
1979 to Present: Afghan Civil War. The death count is 1.5 – 2 million
1980 – 1988: Soviet War in Afghanistan. The death count was 600 thousand – 2 million
1980 – 1988: Iran–Iraq War. The death count was 500 thousand – 2 million
1983 – 85: Famine in Ethiopia. The death count was 400 thousand – 1 million
1990 – 98: Sanctions against Iraq imposed by the United Nations Security Council that caused excess deaths of young children 175 – 576 thousand
1994: Rwandan genocide death count 500 thousand – 1 million
1998 – 2003: Second Congo War’s death count 2.5 – 5.4 million dead
1998: Sudan famine. Death count was 70,000
After I compiled the list, I thought, what exactly has the United States accomplished to bring about world peace and save lives as the world’s so-called cop? Maybe the world would have been better off if the United States had stayed home and saved a few trillion dollars.
If you want to know how much the United States spends as the world’s so-called cop, visit data360.org to discover that answer, but you may have to spend an hour or so adding it all up. I wanted to find one number but could only find annual lists.
Last year, the world’s top 15 military spenders spent $1.753 Trillion combined, but 39% of that was the United States. The People’s Republic of China was number two at only 9.5% of the total. I found this information from a List of countries by military expenditures on Wiki.
I think that if a real cop in the United States had a similar record, they would be suspended from active duty followed by an investigation and then—for sure—a trial.
Do you think the citizens of the United States should vote in the next Presidential election on America continuing its job as the world’s so-called cop? After all, every American who pays taxes is footing the bill so shouldn’t all the citizens of a democracy have a say?
And of course this brings up another question: Is the United States really a democracy?
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
You may have heard of corporate welfare and subsidies from the federal government paid to millionaire farmers not to grow food. I’m sure you’ve heard of the GOP’s drive to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits—entitlements that were earned and paid for by US workers and employers.
But how much have you heard about the welfare—fraud might be a better word—to industries that build weapons for the US Military?
“Because of its persistent inability to tally its accounts, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a law that requires annual audits of all government departments. That means that the $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited, has never been accounted for. That sum exceeds the value of China’s economic output last year.” Source: Yahoo.com
And a special report from Reuters.com says, “The Pentagon’s doctored ledgers conceal epic waste. … In its investigation, Reuters has found that the Pentagon is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn’t need and on storing others long out of date. It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known.”
Then there is this from The Wire.com: “Accounting Fraud and Waste Is Standard Procedure at the Pentagon”.
Examples of Waste in Defense Budget
And when Republicans want to cut budgets, where do they want to slash and burn? Business Insider reports on a list of “20 [so-called] Huge Spending Cuts Republicans Want to Make Right Now”.
1. Eliminate the Presidential Campaign Fund that was intended to make elections more honest
2. Eliminate funding for administrative costs of Obamacare
3. Repeal the David-Bacon Act that required federal government construction contracts include provisions for paying workers prevailing wages and benefits.
4. Eliminate funding for National and Community Service Act programs like AmeriCoprs, Senior Corps and Serve America
5. Prohibit union activities by federal employees
6. Eliminate education programs for children like Head Start, career and technical education programs, etc.
To discover the rest of the twenty budget cuts the GOP wants to make, visit Business Insider @ Business Insider.com, and if you do, see if anything on that list cuts Pentagon waste/fraud; corporate welfare or farm subsidies?
In conclusion from Truth-Out.org: “Most Americans don’t know that ‘long-term reforms’ to ‘entitlement spending’ specifically means cuts to Social Security and Medicare.” And that Reuters, Truth-out.org says [a foreign news service based in London] is the only outlet carrying this news.
Complicity is a doctrine that operates to hold persons criminally responsible for the acts of others.
“An individual is complicit in a crime if he/she is aware of its occurrence and has the ability to report the crime, but fails to do so. As such, the individual effectively allows criminals to carry out a crime despite possibly being able to stop them, either directly or by contacting the authorities, thus making the individual a de facto accessory to the crime rather than an innocent bystander.”
But what happens when an individual who is complicit in a crime is a member of Congress? Are elected representatives in Congress exempt from the law?
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning suspense-thriller Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was fighting for the other side.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
The Soulful Veteran's Blog 