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| Home Front: Politix |
| US veteran, 108, fights for WWI memorial |
| 2009-12-04 |
| The last surviving US veteran of World War I has urged members of Congress to rededicate a Washington monument to the memory of his fellow combatants. Frank Buckles, 108, said the US capital needed a symbol to honour all those who fought in the Great War. A bill, named after Mr Buckles, proposes to rededicate an existing memorial on the National Mall in honour of all Americans who fought in WWI. More than 100,000 Americans lost their lives during the campaign. Mr Buckles, who travelled to Capitol Hill from his home in West Virginia, told a panel of senators it was "an excellent idea". The official title of the bill is the Frank Buckles World War I Memorial Act. It aims to rededicate the District of Columbia War Memorial which currently only commemorates the citizens of the District of Columbia who served in WWI. However, the bill has its opponents. Some Washington politicians object to a national takeover of a local monument. And in Missouri, campaigners want to designate a memorial in Kansas City as the National World War I Memorial. The 217ft (66m) monument was dedicated in 1921 by Gen John Pershing and four Allied military leaders. Mr Buckles joined the US Army at the age of 16 - two years younger than the legal limit - and drove ambulances on the Western Front. In World War II, he worked for a US shipping company in the Philippines and was captured by the Japanese, spending three years in a prison camp. His daughter, Susannah Buckles Flanagan, said that although her father uses a wheelchair and has difficulty hearing, he still enjoys reading and daily exercise. |
| Posted by:Pappy |
| #2 In another story: WWII Vet Fights Homeowners Group Over Va. Flagpole Medal of Honor recipient Col. Van T. Barfoot, 90, and his daughter Margaret Nicholls lower the flag outside Barfoot's home in the Sussex Square subdivision in western Henrico County, Va., on Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2009. According to the subdivision's homeowner association's board, Col. Barfoot is in violation because he flies the flag from a flagpole instead of a pole attached to his porch or doorway. Col. Barfoot has been ordered to remove the pole by 5pm on Friday or face legal actio One of the nation's oldest Medal of Honor winners was back in the fight Thursday, this time against a neighborhood association that wants him to take down a front-yard flagpole. Supporters, including a U.S. senator, have been falling in behind 90-year-old retired Army Col. Van T. Barfoot, a World War II veteran awarded the lofty Congressional honor for actions including standing up to three German tanks with a bazooka and stopping their advance. |
| Posted by: Willy 2009-12-04 10:53 |
| #1 I have long been of a mind that it is essential to teach children about World War I, emphasizing both the futility of massed infantry wars, and the horrifying character of chemical warfare. It is right and proper that the 20th Century be remembered as the century of weapons of mass destruction, and more importantly, the willingness to use them. Chemical weapons in World War I as well as the use of herbicides in Vietnam, nuclear weapons in World War II and the Cold War. And not to forget the horrors visited on mankind by nature's biological weapons, such as the Spanish flu which may have ended World War I, the epidemics that ravaged US training camps in World War II, and the hantavirus epidemic that decimated the Chinese ranks in the Korean War, and might have changed the outcome in our favor. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2009-12-04 09:02 |