Soldiers In Korea Had to Withstand Temperatures at -40 degrees at the Chosin Reservoir

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You guys are amazing! In just the last three day 75 people have subscribed!! We now have 1,304 subscribers. Keep letting other veterans know about this site. It is reaching out and helping people

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I saw this report on Reuters. Not even thinking that this is a done deal. They have broken off from talks several times before.

KABUL (Reuters) – Afghan government and Taliban representatives said on Wednesday they had reached a preliminary deal to press on with peace talks, their first written agreement in 19 years of war and welcomed by the United Nations and Washington.

The agreement lays out the way forward for further discussion but is considered a breakthrough because it will allow negotiators to move on to more substantive issues, including talks on a ceasefire.

“The procedure including its preamble of the negotiation has been finalized and from now on, the negotiation will begin on the agenda,” Nader Nadery, a member of the Afghan government’s negotiating team, told Reuters.

The Taliban spokesman confirmed the same on Twitter.

The agreement comes after months of talks in Doha, the capital of Qatar, encouraged by the United States, while the two sides are still at war, with Taliban attacks on Afghan government forces continuing unabated.

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I can certainly relate to this. I was Deployed to Korea.

Nov. 29—Even at 88 years old, Jim Valentine finds himself waking up at night and shifting positions in an attempt not to freeze.

“I would never have believed that you could live on the ground at 40 (degrees) below zero,” said Valentine, who 70 years ago this month was among the thousands of U.S. troops encircled by Chinese soldiers on the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea. “You would sleep on one side until it froze, and then you would turn on the other side and rub it.

“I catch myself still doing it in bed today.”

It took Valentine, who signed up for the U.S. Army at 17 as a runaway hoping to escape the hard labor of picking cotton in California, several decades to talk about what happened during that attack that began Nov. 27, 1950. Recalling it now, 70 years later, still causes the longtime Cheney resident to pause, tears welling in his eyes.

“Personnel wasn’t that great. It wasn’t until ’51, ’52, ’53 did people start showing up,” said Valentine, who originally volunteered for what he understood was a “police action” in North Korea that exploded following that Chinese offensive into a full-scale war.

He cleared his throat.

“So much of that …,” he said, trailing off. “Sorry. It’s all coming back now.”

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Thought I would show you some endorsements for my new book coming called, Signs of Hope for the Military: In and Out of the Trenches of Life.

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Although Signs of Hope for the Military: In and Out of the Trenches of Lifewasn’t written for men only, it brings honesty and openness to veterans, military personnel and men in general about feeling ok to express fears and emotional challenges in a difficult world.  US Army Retired Veteran, Mr. Douglas Bolton brings his personal stories to life in a way we all can relate to and gives a big “you’re ok” for revealing our shortcoming and encourages us to open up and talk.  A must read for those seeking healing and forgiveness from ourselves and those wanting a fresh look on life. 

Steve Durgin, Founder & CEO with Victory For Veterans Foundation. 

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Signs of Hope for the Military: in and Out of the Trenches of Life, is a must read book for any military, which are hurting from PTD, TBI, anxiety, depression, etc. It has extensive valuable and doable suggestions for successful cope mechanisms. I have also enjoyed Doug Bolton sharing his own stories about his time in the military. He shows that he has been there and done that. This makes him very qualified to offer his advice, guidance and support.  

I applaud Doug for his insight and wiliness to share. I know you will too.

Colonel Dona Marie Iversen

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How is your world turning? Is it going too fast? Do you want it to stop so you can get off?

You are not alone my friend. There are over 10,200 fellow veterans here and they all have you back.

If it is getting to wild for you GET HELP!

Here is a toll free number that is available 24/7. They have highly qualified counselors there to help you.

They will not hang up until the know you are OK.

1-800-273-8255 Option # 1

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Remember:

You are never alone.

You are never forsaken.

You are never unloved.

And above all…Never, ever, give up!

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It is Hard to Lose a Buddy in the MIlitary

I have been sharing excerpts from my upcoming book, Signs of Hope for the Military: In and Out of the Trenches of Life.

To read them go below and read the last two posts.

+If you like what you see, please subscribe at the top of this page where it says, “subscribe.” When you do all future posts will come directly to your inbox. Also, if you know some else who could benefit for the site, please let them know about it. You may be saving a life. Your comments will not be seen by other people, just me, and I will connect with you to see if you are OK to share it.

I think back to my time in the Military and think about what was good and what wasn’t good.

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Some of the not good things were:

  1. Good friend in Korea suffocated in a human waste ditch, called a “Honey bucket.”
  2. Three of us enlisted into the military Buddy System and only two came back alive.
  3. A drunken soldier was goaded into placing his wet tongue on a frozen flagpole pipe. (Wasn’t pretty.)
  4. A “slicky boy,” snuck in my compound in Korea. I was the only one there.
  5. One soldier in Korea had sex so many times in the Village that he came down with an awful disease, and had to have part of his penis amputated.

All of these stories will be in the book in much more detail.

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Some good and fun things were:

  1. I was nominated for soldier of the month in Basic Training.
  2. We had fun with a Warrant Officer who was marching us back to the barracks in Basic. He marched us into the bay.
  3. My buddy made the mistake of washing all of his military clothes at once, and there was a sudden call to assemble.
  4. I went to Tokyo, Japan for R&R (Rest and recuperation.) I remember most of it.
  5. I got to go up to the DMZ zone in Korea and saw a North Korean looking at me through his binoculars.

These stories will also be in length in the book.

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News

They have pulled the Federal Agents out of Portland, Oregon. They replaced them with State Police. The Governor thought they had left, but the leader of the Agents said they weren’t leaving until they can see that the State Police can get control of the rioting.

President Trump is being attacked on all sides. Much of it from Fake media. He is staying strong, and facing the storm.

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How are you doing these day my friend? The country is not a friendly place to be right now. There is the rioting, the Pandemic, shootings, and violence. Almost like the war zone we faced.

I am holding on as strong as I can, but I am on lock down. I have underlying problems that the virus would love to attack.

Is the stress getting to you? Is it too overwhelming right now?

There is a toll free number you can call 24/7 to get help. The people there are very qualified.

1-800-273-8255

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+If you like what you see, please subscribe at the top of this page where it says, “subscribe.” When you do all future posts will come directly to your inbox. Also, if you know some else who could benefit for the site, please let them know about it. You may be saving a life. Your comments will not be seen by other people, just me, and I will connect with you to see if you are OK to share it.

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Remember:


You are never alone.

You are never forsaken.

You are never unloved.

And above all…never ever, give up.

What to Fear in a War with North Korea

Thanks to all of you who have been joining me here. We help bring change to lives. The response has been wonderful.  We just past 4,000 new subscribers. That was a huge increase in 2016. We only had 1,000 two years ago.The year 2017 helped us to make it to 4,000.

We have reached our goal.  We will now be giving a prize to the person who is our 4,500th person to subscribe. We just passed 4,065.

Help us make it to 4,500 by subscribing today if you haven’t already. This shows you care for veterans. Just click on the icon right after the title of this post and click on FEEDBLITZ , and the posts will come straight to your inbox.                            ____________________________________________________________

Doug Bolton, the founder of the blog, Signs of Hope, which is at www.dailysignsofhope.com, has written a new book, “Signs of Hope for the Military: In and Out of the Trenches of Life.” It reaches out the many military and veterans who may be battling anxiety, fear, depression, addictions, rejections, and the many other usual suspects. There are 22 military connected suicides every day. That is almost one every hour. Doug wants to help stop those statistics.  

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This is a new social network just for veterans. I joined it and made instant friendships with veterans who want to talk about what I want to talk about. Please check it out. You will be glad you did. 

https://www.rallypoint.com/join/spc-douglas-bolton

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We have just added a fantastic product for people who are suffering from PTSD. I have looked at the video myself. It is a little long, but it is very valuable. Go to   https://sites.google.com/site/v4vweaponspackage/  to see for yourself. It will change your life if you suffer from PTSD. 

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I am sharing the latest news pertaining to veterans today. Some will be good. Some not so good.

1. Government Shutdown Looming: Except for military and emergency services, the federal government will shut down unless Congress passes a continuing resolution by midnight tonight. Whether Congress will be able to put political differences aside is uncertain. Also uncertain is whether a new shutdown would replicate the 16-day shutdown in 2013. The VFW, along with other organizations, have worked tirelessly to shield VA from future shutdowns. That means health care facilities will remain open, new appointments will still be made, disability and compensation payments will be paid, and veterans will still be buried. More information will be known as the day and weekend unfolds.

  • The government shut occurred last night. What this means is the the military will continue to protect us, but without pay! This certainly is not acceptable! It mainly has shut down because each party has their “needs,” that they think should come first. They will not budge to compromise, and get this country going again. Updates on this coming.
  • This Is One Of US Military Planners’ Greatest Fears In A War With North Korea

    on  

    With tensions between the U.S. government and North Korea at a historic high, the Department of Defense spent 2017 deterring an armed confrontation with Kim Jong Un’s regime on the Korean peninsula. The Pentagon deployed three carrier strike groups to the Western Pacific for the first time in a decade; stood up THAAD missile defense batteries in South Korea; and deployed squadrons of F-22 and F-35 fighter jets to patrol  the skies near Pyongyang. All the stakeholders know that, even with overwhelming U.S. might and decades of wargaming, an invasion involving the 28,500 U.S. troops currently stationed in South Korea could bring massive casualties for military personnel and civilians, including an estimated 20,000 South Korean deaths a day from North Korean artillery.

    But according to a series of war games conducted last year at the Air War College on Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, the DoD also faces a limited ability to evacuate wounded service members from a battlefield in Korea — an obstacle that could send the U.S. military death toll soaring in an open conflict.

     South Korea Medevac Exercise
    U.S. Army and South Korean military personnel conduct MEDEVAC exercises as Suwon Air Base

    The upshot: United States forces in a conventional ground war with North Korea could suffer an outsize wound-to-kill ratio due to those airlift difficulties, political science professor and war scholar Tanisha M. Fazal argues in today’s Washington Post. While the United States has endured Nearly 7,000 combat casualties  in the course of the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, those numbers have remained relatively low and stable over time due to the DoD’s overwhelming air superiority in the region (an advantage best captured by the massive rise in bombing sorties against militants in the first year of the Trump administration). Under those conditions, evacuation of casualties by air — the fastest method, and hence the key to making injuries more survivable — is a no-brainer.

    Unlike al Qaeda or ISIS jihadists, however, North Korea is ready for an air war: A November 2017 assessment by the Congressional Research Service of the country’s military capabilities conclude that while Pyongyang’s air defenses are relatively outmoded, the North Korean Air Force possesses “a dense, overlapping air defense system of SA-2, SA-3, and SA-5” surface-to-air missile sites and other mobile and man-portable anti-air munitions — and that’s not even counting the Kim regime’s fleet of 1,300 Soviet-era aircraft intent on knocking U.S. assets out of the sky.

    north korea air defenses medevac

    Add it all together, and those air defenses spell trouble for an opposing force’s traditional medevac efforts. “Modern combat medicine has made great advances in stemming blood loss, for example, but those procedures are typically temporary measures, carried out to keep a patient alive until airlifted to a higher-level, trauma-care facility,” Fazal writes. “That was possible in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States had undisputed control of the skies. But it would not be true on the Korean Peninsula, at least at first.”Indeed, a 2012 assessment in Military Medicine found that late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s Air defense command unit was effective enough during the initial months of the 2003 invasion that the U.S. military scrambled to develop forward-deployed medical and surgical teams to stabilize casualties near an injury point.

    It’s difficult to assess the DoD’s overall air evacuation capabilities in the event of war with North Korea, given the different system and structure of each branch’s various medical commands. (Air University and the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Task & Purpose). But as part of the the Air War College simulation, the prospect of an aerial medevac for American troops was reduced to near zero through a conventional strike against a U.S. air base in South Korea; that, Fazal observed, forced a radical shift in how medics treat patients.

    “Certain casualties could be saved if air evacuation was possible — but would have little to no hope without evacuation, and thus would receive only palliative care,” Fazal wrote of the simulation. “A base commander would probably require medics to prioritize care for personnel essential to the mission, even if they had less severe injuries than others. Assuming that medicine and medical personnel would not be resupplied, medics would not be able to provide the standard of care to which the U.S. military has become accustomed.”

    Even without a direct strike on a U.S. staging area, air evacuations would remain a challenge. “Lift in the Pacific is always a problem and has been for years, simply because it’s just so big,” Lindsay Ford, a Asia Society fellow and former advisor to the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, told Task & Purpose. “To have the amount of lift you need to cover the tremendous amount of space, there is always a challenge, whether you’re talking about everyday operations or a unique medevac. Just think about that in the context of how many forces we currently have in the region.”

    Ford pointed to the 2006 evacuation of U.S. citizens from Lebanon, in which the Pentagon aided the Department of State in extracting 15,000 people over the span of two months in the largest overseas evacuation in U.S. history. While U.S. Central Command was responsible for extracting 90% of the U.S. evacuees to nearby Turkey and Cyprus, a 2007 Government Accountability Office review of the effort found that Israeli strikes on the Beirut airport and subsequent blockades of coastal ports seriously complicated air and sea evacuation efforts. The evacuations were primarily excuted by U.S. and British naval flotillas, supplemented by contracted commercial or civilian ships; Marine CH-53 Super Stallion helicopters were used only for the most serious medical cases, primarily because Israeli munitions had “crippled airports, seaports and roads in retaliation for attacks by Hezbollah militants,” the New York Times reported at the time.

    “That was just 15,000 [American civilians] evacuated,” Ford said of the Lebanon evacuation. “There are some 100,000 in Seoul, where, once war starts, there will be between 30,000 and 300,000 dead in just a few days.”

    There are two options available to the Pentagon to address this problem. The first simply involves improving medevac capabilities by adding more maneuverable aircraft. The Army is addressing this issue with the Future Vertical Lift project, designed to replace the iconic AH-64 Apache attack chopper and UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter with an aircraft that combines speed and range with versatility and maneuverability. But since 2016, the Army’s Medical Research and Materiel Command has also been exploring the potential deployment of unmanned vehicles to conduct quick and relatively safe medevacs. Last March, Dragonfly Pictures unveiled the DP-14 as a potential one-man extraction craft; despite resistance to the deployment of robots downrange, a 2014 USAMRMC report stated that unmanned systems “can potentially conduct extraction and/or retrieval of combat casualties on behalf of the first responder and deliver the wounded Soldier (within a short distance) to a safer location.”

    But even the best aircraft can get held up in the skies or be too far from an extraction site, leaving the standard operating procedure for forward surgical teams as the next best option: Stabilize the patient and wait for the cavalry. The Pentagon has a long-established ground-medevac doctrine utilizing chains of medical outposts that connect a forward operating base to a secure medical facility in the rear. The Army’s Combat Casualty Care Research Program (CCCRP) is working overtime on new tech to accelerate diagnosis and treatment downrange, but the branch admits that “prolonged field care” is the primary capability gap of concern across the entire branch, according to the January/February issue of Army AT&L Magazine.

    “Experts say future battlefields will require medical efforts to be more assertive at the point of injury as opposed to standard forward aid locations,” Army AT&L notes, “a shift that also radically changes the concept of the ‘golden hour’ standard of care, which relies on traditional medical transport to get service members treated within the first hour after injury.”

    Given the nature of defense planning, that shift in downrange medical treatment won’t come overnight, but it’s long overdue. Declassified documents from 1994 published by the Guardian last month showed that, while the Pentagon remained convinced it would eke out a victory in war with North Korea, a ground invasion would leave some 490,000 South Koreans and 52,000 U.S. troops wounded or killed in the first three months alone. After 15 years of air superiority in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, it appears the best strategy to avoid a breathtaking casualty rate in a conventional war with North Korea is the exact same as with a nuclear conflict with Pyongyang.