Hasta La Vista Kim Baby!

Kim Jung Il’s life: a soliloquy in lunacy and madness.

Often the sages admonish
Oh Death, be not so proud
A tender soul’s last wish
The welfare of others be allowed

Death unkind, strikes indiscriminate
History records with only a wretched few
Death comes not soon enough to elate
The drop of his miserable carcass in its tomb

This could well be a scripted scene from a remake of Orwell’s 1984:

This is a more realistic response.

The world awaits the apparent madness of the heir apparent and the ubiquitous and fawning attention by our State Department to insure adequate supplies for the country and an effortless transition of power from one totalitarian despot to another, like when we aided Kim and his transition of ultimate Nepotism.

From the pen of Hitchens, 2005:

One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell’s 1984was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. (“Hmmm … good book. Let’s see if we can make it work.”)

Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell’s dystopia. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven’t already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no “free-world” propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.

Kim, Rest In Hell, you evil bastard!

Brittney Murray and Hero sit by Justin's grave. Murray took the lead in trying to bring Hero to the United States. Bill O'Leary / WASHINGTON POST

..and Tissue-alert story of the day:

This was as close as Hero the dog had been to her old buddy Justin since they were photographed together in 2007. In that picture, they were snout-to-chest, a 23-year-old soldier cuddling a weeks-old stray puppy in Samarra, Iraq. But Wednesday, Hero could get no nearer than six feet, a grown dog snuffling above a grave at Arlington National Cemetery.

~~~

Dog and soldier took very different paths to Arlington. On March 5, 2007, one day after he befriended the puppy, Army Spec. Rollins was killed by a massive roadside bomb. Two weeks later, he was here in Section 60.

Hero’s trip was longer and stranger. It started when an Iraqi soldier waved over Rollins and his unit to see something interesting outside a police station. It was a litter of dusty blond puppies, sleeping in an old upturned outhouse.

A group of the men jumped at the chance to fraternize with some local critters. Rollins in particular was a self-professed animal nut, with a beloved pit bull sleeping on his bed in New Hampshire and a history of rescuing strays. When his unit was sent to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, he got dozens of abandoned dogs into shelters.

The guys passed around the Iraqi pups, snapped a bunch of pictures. Later that night, Rollins called his girlfriend back home and told her to expect some very cute photos from him the next day. That e-mail never arrived.

“We never heard from Justin again,” Rhonda says.

When they did see the pictures, sent by one of his buddies, they were entranced: Justin nose to nose with a brown-eared pup; Justin cradling the one with a patch over its eye. His joy was palpable.

“It was so wonderful to see how happy he was,” Rhonda says. “Those were his last happy moments.”

When his flag-draped transfer case arrived at an airfield in New Hampshire, an Army general asked the family members if there was anything he could do for them.

As a matter of fact, there was.

“I want one of those puppies,” Rhonda answered immediately.

The officer nodded and said they would be glad to get her any kind of dog she liked. No, Rhonda said, she wanted one of those dogs. From the pictures. Justin’s dogs. She already had a box full of his personal effects, but she knew his dog could provide something his dog tags couldn’t — an armful of her son’s loving warmth.

Read the article.

After her request for the dog was turned down several times by the Army, Murray contacted local newspapers and then congressional offices. Bill O'Leary / WASHINGTON POST

“The world has lost a great champion. I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration. My sympathy goes out to his family and loved ones.”-Muhammad Ali

March 8, 1971 Frazier is directed to the ropes by referee Arthur Marcante after knocking down Muhammad Ali during the 15th round of the title bout at Madison Square Garden in New York. AP

One of the finest boxing legends of the modern era has passed away:

Joe Frazier, 67, the former heavyweight boxing champion who was known for his fighting spirit, powerful punch and intense rivalry with Muhammad Ali, died Monday night in a hospice in Philadelphia. He had been suffering from liver cancer.

As a heavyweight in all senses of the word, Mr. Frazier was one of the best known champions of the latter decades of the 20th century.

While at the top of the heavyweight ranks, the elite of boxing, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mr. Frazier, who went by the sobriquet of Smokin’ Joe, was known for his knockout punch.

In more than two dozen fights, Mr. Frazier’s ferocious, brawling, slugging style sent his foes to the canvas for the full count.

Among boxing fans, and connoisseurs of popular culture, his bouts with Ali have become enshrined in memory. He was the first to defeat Ali in the ring. It happened in New York’s Madison Square Garden, long the world’s capital of prizefighting.

The contest went the full 15 rounds, neither able to dispatch the other, in what was described in the hyperbole of the sports world as the Fight of the Century.

In all they had four fights, and in one of them, the “Thrilla in Manila,” they outdid their previous efforts for the title.

In that 1975 slugfest, Ali emerged the victor when Mr. Frazier could not answer the bell for the final round.

In addition to his legendary battles with Ali, Mr. Frazier was also known for two fights with George Foreman. In the first, Foreman took his title from him.

But the rivalry with Ali was what he was better known for, a kind of face-off in the ring and outside it, that emphasized the contrasting styles and personalities of both men.

With a less flamboyant and engaging image than Ali’s Mr. Frazier seemed far less expressive, possessed of a stolid ruggedness of a hard-working man who let his fists and his dedication speak for him.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More from the AP:

he also was the only American fighter to win a gold medal in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. He was the heavyweight champ from February 1970 to January 1973, an era when that crown truly meant something. He was beloved as an adopted son of Philadelphia, embodying the city’s blue-collar grit.

And when the last round of his final fight ended Monday night, reaction to Frazier’s death poured in from every corner of the sports world.

“Good night Joe Frazier. I love you dear friend,” former heavyweight champion George Foreman, who stopped Frazier to win the title, posted to his Twitter account.

WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao said boxing lost “a great champion” and “a great ambassador.”

And it wasn’t only other boxers who were touched by Frazier. Tennis star Serena Williams called him an icon and a pioneer.

“Inspiring and loved. Your presence will be missed,” she tweeted.

Don King, who promoted the steamy fight in the Philippines that became known as the Thrilla in Manila, was described by a spokesman as too upset to talk about Frazier’s death.

WBC light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins, a fellow Philadelphia fighter, said Frazier was so big in the city that he should have his own statue, like the fictional Rocky character.

“There’s no way in the world you should come to Philadelphia and not recognize who Joe Frazier is. It’s the perfect time to build the biggest statue in appreciation for all the heart and love he gave to Philadelphia,” Hopkins said. “It’s just to say how we regret when it’s not there to touch and see. We didn’t realize we had a super special person amongst us that we all in a way took for granted. I said this when he was living, I say this now. That’s the only thing.”

Bob Arum, who once promoted Ali, said the famous bout in the Philippines was “the greatest fight in the history of boxing.”

“Joe Frazier should be remembered as one of the greatest fighters of all time and a real man. He’s a guy that stood up for himself. He didn’t compromise and always gave 100 percent in the ring. There was never a fight in the ring where Joe didn’t give 100 percent,” Arum said.

Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko, who hold all the major heavyweight belts, paid respect to Frazier on Tuesday.

“My brother and I are very sad about the death of Joe Frazier,” said Vitali Klitschko, the elder of the two brothers and the WBC champion. “He was one of the really great heavyweights. He was a great champion and Joe did a lot for the sport of boxing through his social engagements.”

Wladimir Klitschko is the WBA, IBF and WBO heavyweight champion.

Former German heavyweight Axel Schulz also praised Frazier.

“He marked the gigantic era of heavyweight in the 1970s. The news made me incredibly sad,” Schulz told the German news agency dapd. “I was shocked by how fast it all went.”

The heavyweight champion’s life and career: Joe Frazier, the former heavyweight champion who handed Muhammad Ali his first defeat, died Nov. 7 after a fight with liver cancer. He was 67.

Very sad news to report from California today. Apple has confirmed that Steve Jobs has died after an extended illness.

For all the happiness.

For all the smiles.

For all the wide-eyed wonder that you brought into our lives.

Thank you, Mr. Jobs.

Our thoughts, and our prayers go out to his family, his friends, and his employees.

A stellar example of the American dream.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Baltimore Sun photo by Chien-Chi Chang

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Medal of Honor didn’t exist because there were no wars and we could all live in peace?’’-Paul J. Wiedorfer, WWII Medal of Honor Recipient

Born July 17, 1921 in Baltimore, he was the last surviving WWII Medal of Honor recipient in Maryland and died at the age of 89 this past Wednesday from heart failure at Loch Raven Community Living and Rehabilitation Center.

Part of his story...

Like so many of his countrymen, Mr. Wiedorfer didn’t seem the heroic type. He was working at a responsible job for Baltimore Gas & Electric in the early years of World War II, and, because it was a war industry, he didn’t go into the Army until 1943. He ended up in Europe, in the long, bloody slog to Germany that followed D-Day.

Assigned to Company G, 318th Infantry, 80th Division, his unit was part of General George S. Patton Jr.’s Third Army. They were sent in to rescue American troops who were trapped in Bastogne, Belgium; and on Christmas Day, 23 year-old Wiedorfer saw combat for the first time…

On Christmas Day 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, Mr. Wiedorfer’s platoon was ambushed in Belgium by two concealed German machine gun emplacements. Pinned down, helpless, the unit seemed in danger of suffering heavy casualties, when Mr. Wiedorfer took the initiative. “I was probably a little nuts when I did it,” he told the Baltimore Sun in an interview a half-century later. “But someone was going to die if something didn’t get done.” He ran as best he could across a 120-foot stretch of open, snow-covered ground toward the guns. “Miraculously escaping injury,” as his medal citation put it, he got to within 10 yards of the first machine gun nest, threw in a hand grenade, and shot and killed the three German soldiers manning the gun. He then attacked the other gun, killing one of its crew. Six more quickly surrendered to him.

Wiedorfer was given a battlefield promotion to sergeant that afternoon. Minutes later, he had to assume command when his platoon’s leader and sergeant were wounded.

Less than two months later, in Germany, Mr. Wiedorfer was badly wounded by mortar fire. The soldier next to him, Pfc. Milton C. Smithers of Huntingdon, N.J., took the brunt of the explosion and was killed.

According to the Baltimore Sun:

Three days before V-E Day on May 8, 1945, Mr. Wiedorfer, who was 24, was recuperating at the 137th U.S. Army General Hospital in England from severe wounds he suffered in a mortar attack while crossing the Saar River earlier that year.

In the attack, a fellow infantryman near Mr. Wiedorfer, who was a staff sergeant, was killed instantly by an exploding mortar shell. Shrapnel ripped into Mr. Wiedorfer’s stomach, broke his left leg and riddled his right. Two fingers on his right hand were seriously injured.

“That was Feb. 10, 1945. The sergeant’s back was blown wide open, and he was dead when he hit the ground. I was just lucky, I guess,” he said in the 2008 interview. “I spent more than three years in hospitals recovering from those wounds.”

Another patient was reading Stars and Stripes when an item caught his eye, and he asked Mr. Wiedorfer, “How do you spell your name?”

“It really was funny,” he said in the 2008 interview. “I said, ‘W-i-e-d-o-r-f-e-r,’ and he said, ‘You just got a medal.’ I said was it the Bronze Star, and he said no, ‘Congressional Medal of Honor.’

“To be perfectly honest with you, I wasn’t really sure what the hell it was, because all I was was some dogface guy in the infantry,” he told the newspaper.

“All the officers and nurses were wearing their Class A uniforms and there was a band. Gen. E.F. Koening came into the ward and presented the medal,” he recalled. “I really was embarrassed by all the fuss.”

He was made to give a “little speech” and said he was so nervous because he had never given a speech before in his life (and apologized to the mayor for getting his name wrong).

Here is the full text of his Medal of Honor citation. In addition, Wiedorfer was also awarded 2 Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star.

A little more:

He separated from the military in 1947 as a master sergeant and was a power station operator with Baltimore Gas and Electric when he retired in 1981.

In the early 1990s, a man came to Mr. Wiedorfer’s home and offered to polish his Medal of Honor. The man took the authentic medal from its ceremonial shadow box and replaced it with an imitation. Mr. Wiedorfer’s stolen medal was returned to him in 1995. Stephen Pyne, who was charged with the theft, was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Mr. Wiedorfer’s wife, the former Alice Stauffer, died in 2008. A daughter, Nancy Mazer, died in 2010.

Survivors include three children, Randee Wiedorfer of Parkville, Md., Paul J. Wiedorfer Jr. of Baltimore and Gary Wiedorfer of Cocoa, Fla.; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

As he aged, Mr. Wiedorfer said he prayed for the day there would be no living recipients of the Medal of Honor.

“Because,” he once said, “it will mean that we have learned to live in peace.”

Today, 84 recipients remain.

Mark Daily relaxes on the rooftop of an Army combat operations base in Mosul in January. (Daily family photo)

I blogged about Mark Daily before after hearing his story on the Hugh Hewitt Show and reading his “Why I joined” statement. (Also here). I also included several images of him in my 2007 tribute video.

His friend, Matt Gallagher, writing in the NYTimes, reflects back upon that MySpace essay of Mark’s, this Memorial Day:

Before he deployed with the First Cavalry Division, Mark posted a brief statement on his MySpace page, titled “Why I Joined.” The entire piece resonates even today, in a post-surge America and post-Awakening Iraq, because it puts on display the type of individual that made these movements work in the first place. “Consider that there are 19-year-old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest,” Mark wrote, “who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics.” Mark channeled idealism into action in a manner that seemed natural to him, but remains all too rare in our modern world.

Why’d we sometimes disagree? He saw the best in people; I feared the worst. He was inspired by Hitchens; I called Hitchens a chicken hawk. Although he was sympathetic to antiwar statements and arguments regarding Iraq, he instead focused on the opportunity we had to instill democracy in the heart of the Middle East. I, uh, didn’t. Mark also became the first person to tell me to stop concerning myself with how we ended up in Iraq — it didn’t matter anymore — and to instead focus on what could be done since we were already there. And he was right. We were second lieutenants destined for the war regardless of our personal opinions, and the decisions made in 2003 were now as irrelevant to our lives as they were to the Iraqi people living in the midst of it all.

With the passage of time, and through my own deployment to Iraq, I’ve been able to focus on the good times with Mark: laughing about being covered head to toe in mud while fixing a tank track; ganging up on political fascists and berating them into intellectual submission; drinking beers at Irish pubs in Louisville, reminiscing about field exercises, talking about them like they were actual war stories. He was a driven mind, less of an oddball than me, and I genuinely liked and admired him — things that aren’t always the case with battle buddies.

In retrospect, I think that I was even a little jealous of Mark’s rugged optimism; young men like him weren’t supposed to exist anymore, except maybe in the minds of our Greatest Generation grandparents. But he did, and all of us who were there with him at Knox are better off because of it. Even then, we knew Mark to be the lieutenant we wanted our platoons to think we actually were. He set a high standard and gave us something to aspire to as leaders — something I suspect lingers in all of us, whether we’re still in the Army or not. I know that it remains the case for me.

See you at Fiddler’s Green, Mark.

I encourage readers to check out his “Why I Joined” essay. A bit more background on it from Teresa Watanabe writing for the LA Times, linked in my 2nd post, in 2007 (I believe this was around the time of the “Surrender” Resolution being debated in Congress, post 2006 midterms):

that essay, in recent weeks, has ricocheted throughout the Internet, taking on a life of its own. It was read on the U.S. Senate floor and posted on the websites of columnists and talk show hosts. It has prompted hundreds of letters from strangers. Daily’s words, his astonished parents say, seemed to resonate with all kinds of folks, stirring a common altruistic impulse.

He wrote it in just 20 minutes, his parents say, as he chatted with his family in his packed-up El Paso apartment near Ft. Bliss, Texas, where he was assigned to the 2nd Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division.

John and Linda Daily pore over the hundreds of sympathy cards and letters they received after the death of their son Mark in Iraq. The response has filled them with a strange mix of grief, pain, gratitude and awe. (Wally Skalij / LAT)

I won’t politicize if you won’t, Mr. President.

President Obama does deserve credit as it happened on his watch. He’s made good on his campaign promise (really, it was only a matter of time before justice would catch up to al Qaeda’s #1 figurehead, a culmination of the last 9 years, not just the last 9 months). But it’s irksome that his narcissism can’t help but inject himself into this:

“Last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground,” President Obama told the nation in a speech Sunday night.

“Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body,” he said.

Or maybe as a partisan, I’m far too sensitive and am reading more into it than is warranted. Of course President Obama had to green light the operation; but I seem to always feel like this president has a way of always making it all about him; of taking undue credit for things he had little to do with (yes, he gave the order; but what sitting president wouldn’t have? Actually, Clinton had opportunities and did not take them, so nix that). Even when he says, “it’s never been about me”, he inadvertently seems to make it otherwise.

President Obama deserves credit, whether he wants to claim it (and he does) or not. And I am glad he called his two predecessors to give them the news. The hunt did not begin on his watch but President Obama has seen it to through to its conclusion.

The real winners, of course, are the American people.

Finally setting aside partisan politics at the end of this partisan post, I’d like to say, thank you President Obama and congratulations for a job well done!

Josh Rogins offers a timeline (beginning with Obama’s decision-making for what led directly to this operation).

I think I now understand how he transitioned from “serious drama” into comedy:

Most people are already familiar with his work on Naked Gun, Airplane, and the like. But this one was so obscure to me and ridiculous, I had to go with it.

RIP:

Shirley, he will be missed. Leslie Nielsen, who made audiences laugh with his ridiculous seriousness and deadpan deliveries in the absurd scenes of comedy films like Airplane! and The Naked Gun, has died. He was 84.

His agent, John. S. Kelly, confirmed that the actor died Sunday near his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., surrounded by his “lovely wife and friends” at 5:34 p.m. ET, due to complications of pneumonia.

7 of America’s best and brightest who fought and died in Iraq and Afghanistan came out of Buchanan High School in the Central Valley community of Clovis, California. The 7th soldier to be killed, Brian Piercy, age 27, was buried on Friday.

There’s no sure answer as to how such a thing could happen. But many people in this Central Valley city have a theory. They say Clovis is an extraordinarily patriotic community and its children are raised on God and country, duty and honor. They’re willing to serve and willing to die, the same as Clovis’ generations who went before them.

Buchanan’s school colors are red, white and blue. The stadium is named Veteran’s Memorial. Former classmates and older siblings come back in uniform for campus visits. Friday night football games include a moment of silence for Buchanan’s fallen soldiers.

“The cheerleaders wear six stars on their uniforms. I guess it will be seven now,” said 15-year-old Julie Thaxter. “We’re not proud they died, but we’re proud they fought. It makes others from here even more ready to go and honor them. My brother wants to join. He’s 14 and he’s been set on it since he was 8.”

Julie works at a peach stand across from the 2,600-student high school. On one side of the street are shaggy-leafed peach trees. On the other, the big, suburban campus serving upper-middle-class neighborhoods that rooted where there were fields and orchards some 25 years ago.

She fiddles with the pink cellphone in her hand, then shyly shows her screen saver: Tony Butterfield, a blue-eyed Marine in dress uniform.

“Two days from now, it will be four years since the day he died,” she said. “I was 11. He’s the son of my mom’s best friend. I knew him all my life.”

****

The first funeral in 2004 was for Jeremiah Baro, 21, and Jared Hubbard, 22. Best friends since junior high, they joined the Marine Corps together, went to basic training together and died together, killed by a roadside bomb in Fallouja, Iraq, west of Baghdad.

Butterfield looked up to Baro and Hubbard and went to their funeral. He joined the Marines as soon as he graduated. Before going to Iraq, he asked that if something happened, that he be buried next to them. His body lies within 10 feet of their graves at Clovis Cemetery. Butterfield died in 2006 at the age of 19, trying to stop a suicide bomber driving a gasoline tanker filled with explosives in Iraq’s Anbar province, west of Baghdad.

“You all mean the world to me. I hope I’ve made you all proud,” he wrote in his final letter to his family.

In February 2007, Rowan Dale Walter, 25, was killed in an apparent ambush after leaving a tank to help injured soldiers in Ramadi, Iraq, west of Baghdad. At the funeral, his young widow draped her body over the casket. Walter’s father gave a eulogy few have forgotten — a testament from a working-class dad to a free-spirited dreamer of a son.

“I’m looking at …bricks. Rowan, he’s looking at clouds,” Bryan Walter said.

Then in August 2007, the unthinkable: another Hubbard brother killed in combat. Nathan and Jason Hubbard joined the Army after Jared’s death. The brothers had always been close. Each had a tattoo of three interlocking ravens on their left biceps. Nathan said he was joining “to walk in Jared’s boots.” Their mother was pretty sure that older brother Jason — married with a son — was joining to keep an eye on Nathan.

The two were in separate Black Hawk helicopters over Multaka, Iraq, north of Baghdad, when Nathan’s chopper went down because of mechanical failure. Jason’s unit recovered the bodies. He was a pallbearer at his 21-year-old brother’s funeral.

Nick Eischen, 24, died in his sleep Christmas Eve 2007 while serving at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Force Base, north of Kabul. A member of Buchanan’s class of 2001, he’d played on the same champion football team as Jared Hubbard. When the family couldn’t find the championship ring he loved, Buchanan football coach Mike Vogt gave them his. Eischen was buried with it.

Now, on Friday, a seventh funeral.

Brian Piercy, 27, was 30 days shy of completing his second tour of duty in Afghanistan when he was killed July 19 by an improvised explosive device while on foot patrol in the Arghandab River Valley in southern Kandahar province, on the Pakistani border. The former marching band drummer was the son of a Marine, and one of three brothers who joined the military in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Younger Buchanan students who’d had his mother, Carol, as a junior high school teacher flocked to the funeral of her son. Kids who are now in band, too young to have gone to school with Piercy, also attended, feeling how easily he might have been someone they knew. The minister giving the eulogy said the death wasn’t only a blow to Piercy’s family, but a blow to Buchanan, a blow to Clovis.

“Seven. It’s an unfathomable number,” said Larry Grossi, owner of a gift and cabin decor store in Clovis’ Old Town shopping district.

“We’re not a small town anymore, but we’re connected. If you don’t know one of the families, you know someone who does,” he said on the day Piercy’s body arrived for burial.

A middle-aged woman approached his cash register.

“You ready to be rung up, Delores?” he asked.

“Brian was our neighbor,” Delores Piers told him. “My kids baby-sat him. My first thought when I woke up this morning was, ‘Carol is on her way to the airport to pick up her son in a box.’ ”

“I know,” Grossi said. “It hurt this morning when I saw those motorcycles decorated with flags on their way to the airport — again. I’m proud, but it’s a heavy-hearted proud.”

Old Town is covered with American flags. Not just the half-mast ones flying for Piercy. But all-year symbols of Americana. There are baskets of glittery flags for sale. Little flags stuck in flower pots. Red, white and blue “We Believe in America” placards in business windows.

Cora and Bill Shipley’s corner gift store has flags and framed photographs of the fallen Buchanan grads in the window.

“It makes sense that they were all from here,” said Cora Shipley. “God, country and family, that’s what we believe in, in Clovis. They made us proud.”

****

Vogt, the football coach, said the best part of his job is running into former students 10 to 15 years down the road and seeing who they grew into being.

“It hurts that I won’t get to talk to Jared and Nick and the others,” Vogt said. “But ‘We won’t forget’ is a Buchanan motto. The new kids coming through Buchanan will know about their sacrifice.”

The day before Piercy’s funeral, Buchanan High Principal Ricci Ulrich, Tony Butterfield’s family, Nick Eischen’s mom and about 40 others cut red-and-white plastic tablecloths into strips and tied them to every tree on the 3-mile route between the church and cemetery.

“We wanted Carol to look out that window and know our hearts were with her,” Ulrich said.

“This is the Buchanan legacy: When any other school or community has a loss, we’ll know what they feel. Our families will be their families. They’ll know that in Clovis, our hearts are with them.”

And America’s hearts should be with the Clovis community and the families of the fallen 7.

Before Buffy and Angel made vampiring cool….before that dang Twilight series….before Corey croaked…before Keifer racked up the body count in 24 hour time constraints…there was….The Lost Boys. Cult classic stuff. The soundtrack rocked!

Corey Ian Haim (December 23, 1971 – March 10, 2010)

Even though I was really young, I remember distinctly, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, as played by Fess Parker:

I haven’t seen this since I was around 4; but the final scene of Davy Crockett fighting to the end- that image in this movie has always remained with me:

True to character, he was not a modest man, and once said in an interview that his Davy Crockett was “bigger than anything, ever, including the Beatles and Elvis.” I remember them all clearly, and I’m not sure I’d argue with that. Elvis and the Beatles certainly lasted longer, but there was never a day when either of them was beloved by the majority of the people in America, the way Fess Parker’s character was. During the anxiety of the Cold War with its duck-and-cover drills and our own soldiers having to integrate our own schools, he took us back to a time when being proud to be American was not so complicated.

~~~

He was a wise money manager and invested his money in California real estate, building hotels and starting a cattle ranch in Los Olivos, northwest of Los Angeles near Santa Barbara. His son convinced him to turn it into a vineyard instead and the Fess Parker Winery has become very successful, its label featuring a coonskin cap.

Parker was married to his wife, Marcella Belle, for fifty years; they have one son, one daughter, eleven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Fess Parker died on his wife’s 84th birthday, in their home in Santa Ynez, near the winery. But thanks to him the Davy Crockett legend, rooted in truth, will never die.

Fess Elisha Parker, Jr. (August 16, 1924 – March 18, 2010)

This was played at Peter Graves’ Memorial: