Posts Tagged ‘sacrifice’
Wednesday’s Hero
Wednesday Hero has never been issued a warning before but I felt it necessary for this one. This post contains graphic descriptions of torture and brutality that some may find it difficult to read.
This weeks Wednesday Hero is dedicated to thousands of men who lost their lives in April of 1942 in what has become known as the Bataan Death March.
On April 9, 1942 Major General Edward P. King, Jr. surrendered 75,000+ men (Filipinos, Chinese Filipinos, and Americans) who had been fighting the Japanese since January of that year when they launched a full scale invasion of The Philippines. They were starving and wracked with disease. Upon their surrender the men were robbed of their possessions and forced into a 61 mile, 5-12 day, march to Camp O’Donnell. Along the way men were brutally beaten, staved of food and water, some had their throats cut, some were beheaded, some died to disease or exposure or untreated wounds and others were simply executed. In all the death tally is unknown but it’s estimated that between 6,000 to as many as 20,000 men didn’t survive the march.
Maj. Richard Gordon: “I didn’t come down with a surrender group. They caught me actually two days after the surrender took place. First thing I did was receive a good beating. And everything I had in my wallet, in my pockets was taken from me. And as I was marched down that road, where they captured me, I passed my battalion commander, Major James Ivy, and he had been tied to a tree and he was stripped to the waist and he was just covered with bayonet holes. He was dead obviously. And he had bled profusely. He had been bayonetted by many, many bayonets. And that’s when I knew we had some troubles on our hands. We were in for deep trouble. And they brought us down into a staging area and put me in with the rest of the thousands that were assembled on the side of the road, and that’s where I spent my first night.”
Here’s a great link with more information and interviews with survivors.
The sacrifice and Hell that these men went through will not be forgotten. I don’t know about anyone else, but I never learned about this while in school. If you’re children aren’t being taught this piece of history make sure that you do it for them. These men must be remembered and honored.
These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero.
We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived
This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.
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Wednesday’s Hero
This Weeks Hero Was Suggested By Mary Ann
Wednesday Hero was started to put a face to the men and women of the American Armed Forces and what they do for us. Vary rarely has there been a member of a foreign military profiled. In fact, in the two years Wednesday Hero’s been going on it’s only been done once before. Here’s the second.
24 years old from Birmingham, England
40 Commando Royal Marines
L/Cpl Matt Croucher is not only one of the bravest men alive, he’s also one of the luckiest men alive. On the morning of February 9, 2008 L/Cpl. and his unit were searching a compound near Sangin in Afghanistan that was suspected of being used to make bombs to be used in attacks on British and Afghan troops. Walking in the darkness among a group of four men, Croucher stepped into a tripwire that pulled the pin from a boobytrap grenade. His patrol commander, Corporal Adam Lesley, remembered Croucher shouting “Grenade!”
As others dived for cover, Croucher did something nobody expected. He lay down on the grenade to smother the blast. Lesley got on the ground, another man got behind a wall, but the last member of the patrol was still standing in the open when the grenade went off.
“My reaction was, ‘My God this can’t be real’,” said Lesley. “Croucher had simply lain back and used his day sack to blunt the force of the explosion. You would expect nine out of 10 people to die in that situation.” L/Cpl. Croucher was that 1/10. Not only did he survive, amazingly he only suffered shock from the blast and a bloody nose. He was saved by the special plating inside his Osprey body armor. The backpack he was wearing was thrown more than 30ft by the blast.
“I felt one of the lads giving me a top to toe check. My head was ringing. Blood was streaming from my nose. It took 30 seconds before I realized I was definitely not dead,” said L/Cpl. Croucher.
For his actions that day, L/Cpl. Croucher was in line for the Victoria Cross, the highest award for a British Serviceman, but it has yet to be awarded.
These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero.
We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived
This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here
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Wednesday’s Hero
This Weeks Hero Was Suggested By Mary Ann
Company C, 1st Battalion, 77th Armor
“How can I say to my sons, stand up for something, fight for what you think is right, if I don’t do anything myself?”The Jeffrey Jamaleldine that you speak to today is a complete 180 from the Jeffrey Jamaleldine that you would have spoke to in the past. In 1991, Jamaleldin was living in Germany when joined in anti-American protests on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm boulevard during Operation Desert Storm. “That was the way it was back then,” he says. He was 15 and “America was simply the enemy.” And today, Jeffery Jamaleldine is a wounded veteran of the U.S. Army. On June 6, 2005, after the terror bombing in Madrid, Spain, in the middle of the Iraq war, he showed up at the U.S. Army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas, to enlist. His father, Bashir, told him at the time: “Son, this won’t be a picnic.”
On June 30, Jamaleldine was on patrol in Ramadi, Iraq. The patrol ahead of him had been ambushed by at least 70 combatants and were now under fire. During the fight, Spc. Jeffrey Jamaleldine was hit in the face by a bullet. In the end, the battle lasted into the next morning and the soldiers were able to stop the enemy from returning to Ramadi.
The article on Spc. Jeffrey Jamaleldine is five pages long, and I simply can not condense it down to only a few paragraphs. You can read the entire story here.
These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero.
We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived
This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.
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