Just completed Run For The Wall 2012- a 10 day motorcycle Run from Los Angeles to D.C. to support veterans, current military and bring awareness to the POW/MIA situation in the USA.  Did you know that PFC. Bowe Bergdahl was captured in Afghanistan 3 years ago?  Did you know that he is still alive and there are almost no efforts going on to bring him home? Did you know that inside our strategic ally Pakistan is where he is being held by Al Qaeda?  DID YOU KNOW THAT HE ESCAPED ON HIS OWN LAST OCTOBER? Evaded his captors for 3 days inside of Pakistan, no help from them, thank you very much!  Did you know that he was re-captured, beaten, tortured and is still being held inside Pakistan? How does this match the America you expect? We're currently contemplating holding up our $1.2Billion supplement that we send to Pakistan EVERY YEAR because the Pakistan judicial system convicted the Pakistani doctor that aided us in pin-pointing Usama Bin Laden for treason....How about we don't pay them their money for hating us if they don't return Bowe???

Yeah, we've got a lot more respect in the world today don't we....?

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl's father Bob Bergdahl promises prisoner-of-war son "will come home"

at recent Rolling Thunder 2012 motorcycle demonstration in DC on Memorial Weekend

 

The current administration is proposing that we swap some Guantanamo Al Qaeda prisoners for Bowe, at least that's movement after 3 years, but makes you wonder if this is for the purpose of bringing Bowe home or implementing the elimination of Guantanamo Bay as wrestled with by the administration for years? 

Too good not to post:  I have to quote Jeffrey Reinberg from his posted comment regarding Milton Friedman's hosing of Phil Donahue 30 years ago.
These are the simple facts of human nature. If people don't have free rides to lives of sedentary consumption, they have to earn their livings. To earn a living you need to produce value to others that creates a surplus for you to supply your own means to survival. You produce with your labor and/or with your brain. To the degree that you produce more than similar others (now your Global friends and neighbors) your rewards grow at a greater rate. Some people are bigger and stronger than others, so if society values and rewards those skills above others these people have an advantage. Good or bad, it is simply a fact. Since not everyone can be bigger and stronger, the mind is the equalizer. If you educate your mind continuously you will learn other skills or invent things of value. Working smarter and harder is a good combination for you to create more than enough to sustain yourself and allows you to help and/or employ others so they can produce more than they consume. This is only possible in a democratic, free-enterprise society. History shows that socialist or communist societies are created and can only exist by taking the surplus developed through free enterprise, but since such societies under produce for what they consume, they fail. Such is the case when the Federal Government of a Free Enterprise Society takes increasingly more from it's peoples' productivity and spends it without reasonable controls. Federal Governments produce no surplus for its people, in fact it does not produce anything but expense. That is what we are living through in our own Country. Somewhere along the line, the government lost site of its role, spent more money than its people could produce, then blamed the problem on its people. 

ta-da!

So, My latest efforts that give me pause and drive my thoughts....
I am one of the founding members of the CHS (Claremont High School) Alumni Society and chairman of the Veterans Committee.  The Society was formed this year in honor of the 100th year anniversary of the High School, yep that's The Centennial of CHS. I have undertaken the efforts to gain recognition for all CHS alumni who have answered this nation's call in time of war and time of peace. I have searched at length and can tell you that there is no record of CHS classmates who either joined the Military right out of high school or later after college or after time has passed.  However, the transition to serve the country, the records just don't show. 

So I have started communicating with as many classmates and others on the alumni society to gain, through their personal interactions and their social networking of choice, access to as many CHS alumni veterans as possible.  What a project, I've written to local newspaper columnists, spoken with school officials, joined the local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), joined the local American Legion and broadcasted my search wherever I could.

To date, I have garnered information on over 220 alumni veterans; names, CHS class, Branch of service and in many cases theater of participation in times of war. Looking at the demographics and breadth of class participation in these results I believe that I have probably around half of the actual number and I have participation from the classes of the 50' and 60's much more than the other classes.  Followed by the 70's and then 80's.

I am seriously lacking any intelligence on veterans from the classes before 1950 and after 1995; observation- the more recent classes are still young enough to be constantly looking forward and can't be bothered with things like 'records' and 'annals'.  The classes before the 50's are probably very lean in number of survivors to 'tell the story'.

If you can help...please do. I hope to present this record to the school and to the local American Legion on 11/11/11, Veterans Day 2011 at a ceremony in Memorial Park-for effect.  I am in conjunction with this effort working with CHS to gain a memorial spot on campus to place a permanent marker to thank those CHS alumni who have answered the call.

POW/MIA's-Thousands are still unaccounted for today....

and the families deserve closure. I spoke with veterans of the Korean war at a couple of the VA Medical Centers that we visited on this trip, some have not been out of the VA ward they are in for decades, many have not had a visitor for months ;( One of them who could not verbalize his name so that I could understand it, clearly asked about the missing and captured in Korea. 'so many', he said, 'so many'..) We had 2 children of MIA's  from the Vietnam war ride with us on the backs of our bikes, carrying tens of posters that they had made, asking for accountability for the MIA's in Nam. "Children', huh, both ladies were over 35 and had sparse or no personal knowledge of their fathers, constant harassing and badgering of the many congressional committees established to pretend to care about these POW/MIA's over the decades had brought no action to mention. We honor and pension our politicians, each with hundreds of thousands of dollars per year! Our warriors and POW's are put out to pasture at best, ignored and cast aside more typical. I spoke with veterans at the Tuscaloosa VA Med center whom were dis-oriented but still trying to participate in lucid conversations and listened intently in Monroe, Louisiana as a younger man (younger than me) spoke with pride and tears about his great-grandfather, multi-medaled in WW1 and his grandfather in WW2 who never made it back, his dad who had served in Korea and was MIA in Vietnam and his uncle who was KIA in Nam and then of his own service in Gulf 1 and Gulf 2. We stood in front of the Monroe Veterans monument as he pointed at each of his relatives on the monument...and he saluted us as we left on our journey to DC to ask for an honest effort at accounting for the many POW/MIA's. I have been close in the past with a Prisoner of War from Korea, haven't spoke to him for nearly a decade now, he was held and tortured for over 3 years, liberated by the political treaty, weighing in at just under 80 pounds and then spending 32 months in a hospital recovering from the depth of his emaciation and torture. What did he receive? his 36 months back pay from the years he was prisoner at an elevated pay-rate since he had been eligible for promotion during that length of time that he was held and a disability rating that would qualify him to a couple of thousand a month for life. What did he do with this conundrum? He used the determination and resolve he had found in that hell-hole in Korea to attend Stanford and achieve 2 PhD's in Engineering disciplines and started several different businesses and last I heard was retiring to his property on a lake in Texas. He was accounted for as were thousands of others, but there are literally thousands of Americans still not accounted for from WWII, Korea and Vietnam!  Someone that our family was surely related to way-back from the Carolinas, before our personal history inter-twined with the Trail of Tears,  L/Cpl Joseph Hargrove, was last seen fighting off the Khmer Rouge as the Mayaguez rescue operation (the last combat mission of the Vietnam War) was extracted.  This Marine was unaccounted-for, for decades, in 1995 an eyewitness finally gave an account that Hargrove survived for weeks evading capture, without food, water or supplies. He was finally captured but had put up such a fight that the local Khmer Rouge Commander ordered him executed on the spot.  It was 2001 before some inconclusive remains were recovered by the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTFFA) but it took Joseph's home town Duplin (North Carolina) County Commissioner to get involved with JPAC (Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command) in 2007 to recover identifiable remains at the site of the execution. Believe it or not L/Cpl Joseph Hargrove, fought off the Khmer Rouge allowing the Mayaguez rescue operation to leave, evaded capture for weeks living off of the land, put up such a fight at his eventual capture that he was executed on the spot, this L/Cpl Joseph Hargrove was awarded a Purple Heart!  Something still doesn't seem right...
This same L/Cpl Hargrove is the stimulant for one of the original founders of RFTW (Run For The Wall) in 1988.  GySgt Gregory, Hargrove's superior in that fated Mayaguez incident got involved to support the demands by Vietnam Veterans for Full accounting of all POW/MIA's by riding his motorcycle from LA to DC with a gathering group of veterans and supporters to gain awareness of that effort. Gunny Gregory cites today that his motivation was Joseph Hargrove and the knowledge that Hargrove was alive during lift-off and seen alive at last sighting. Surely this un-assuming hero deserved more than official red tape and stone-walling.  Gunny Gregory and the RFTW has grown over the last 23 years, so that now every May hundreds (500+ in 2010) riders leave Los Angeles to ride to DC "for those who cannot" to join up with hundreds of thousands of riders at the Pentagon parking lot on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend and ride 4 abreast from the Pentagon to The Vietnam Wall to protest the lack of awareness of our missing and demand a full accounting.  If you want to see a sight, watch as the 400,000+ riders parade for nearly 5 hours (it takes 4 and a half hours to empty the Pentagon parking lot, 4 motorcycles at a time!) This demonstration is rightfully deemed to be "Rolling Thunder".  All Gave Some, Some Gave All

Run For The Wall-May 19 - 28, 2010

-22 YEARS OF HONOR-Riding in Freedom for Those Who Can't-"Honoring All American Warriors"-Remember the POW/MIA's
RFTW riders visit VA Medical Centers, Veterans’ Memorials, Veterans’ Outreach Facilities, VFW Posts, American Legion Posts, and Community Centers, as well as schools along the routes. Both the Central and Southern Routes leave from Rancho Cucamonga, CA, on May 19, separate, and join back together in Arlington, VA, on May 28. 3100 miles COME JOIN US!