Patriots Shooting Team: More Than it Seems

“On the battlefield, the military pledges to leave no soldier behind. As a nation, let it be our pledge that when they return home, we leave no veteran behind.”

-Dan Lipinski

The wind whistled around her blonde hair as she sighted in on her target. Tuning out the laughing chatter from the next stage, her focus was on the black dot far in the distance and the steady, calm instruction coming from a voice to her left. Calculating for the wind, the distance, and the weapon that she has been learning for months, she takes the shot. “IMPACT!” someone calls, a split second before the distant plink is audible to onlookers. 

13-year-old Justice Snell shifted to the next target and followed suit, clearing the stage. Snell lay in the frozen mud next to her father, US Marine Corps veteran Toby Snell, one of the American Freedom Fund Patriots Shooting Team members, who came to the match outside of Cheney, WA, on a frozen Saturday in January with his daughter and other teammates, giving no thought to the below-freezing temperatures and knee deep mud criss-crossing the range. This is what they do. They stamp their feet to stay warm between stages and watch as each shooter navigates their way through the course, picking up tips and angles from the experience of the shooters before them. 

Snell and his daughter  were joined at the match by Inar Frostad, a Navy vet who had met Snell briefly when they both served as Range Officers (RO) for a different match. Both local to the area, Snell and Frostad connected over their shared military experience and love for shooting. They came together again at the AFF Catch 22 Shoot outside of Kettle Falls in the spring of 2017, where they met more veteran shooters from the tri-county area, including Patrick Flanagan, who also joined them at the Miller Ranch shoot for this cold morning shooting match. 

There were no high stakes here at the Miller Ranch Small Game Shoot. No major awards or fancy prize tables, just a lot of mud, laughs, and before the last stage of the event, a cloud bank that would roll in and enshroud the whole range with pea-soup fog, completely obliterating the targets from sight. The Patriots Team members shrugged off the early end with a laugh, happy to be in a heated vehicle together headed toward warm food and storytelling. 

The takeaway from this match and others like it are the growing friendships. The knowledge that just up the road there’s another guy who’s been there, deployed to some foreign place witnessing things that their friends back home can’t relate to. Here they have somebody else who gets it. They’ve got kids and families who support and love them, but this is where all those memories and questions from their years of service find a place to surface, even if they aren’t answered, or spoken, they are shared. These guys know. They share the restless itch that civilian life and jobs don’t quite scratch. Their mutual discontent, right under the surface, remembers what it was like to be part of a team, fighting for something that mattered - maybe even for their lives. 

This is what the AFF Shooting Team is all about, joining the vets with the brothers-in-arms that are sprinkled throughout our communities but might otherwise not ever connect. Bringing generations together, Vietnam veterans and Gulf War vets and the veterans of more recent conflicts, together with their families, and kids like Justice, parents and spouses, building that safety net of understanding and support.

Snell’s 13-year-old daughter outshot most of the vets from the team that day at her first formal shooting competition, except maybe her dad, upping the challenge for the next shoot, which will hopefully be a little warmer. Every event that the shooting team shows up for happens because these guys and gals have a community that supports them. Donations from AFF supporters help to cover the registration and ammunition costs of these multi-generational matches that bring vets and their families together. It makes it just a little easier and a little more possible for vets who have bills to pay and families to provide for. The Big Voice, AFF and all of our veteran and active duty shooters thank you for your support and for making this community the amazing place that it is. For more information, visit www.AmericanFreedomFund.org or fund The American Freedom Fund and The Big Voice on Facebook. 

From WAVES to Washington: Jean Thompson

Marianna “Jean” Mix didn’t much care for school. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the smarts for it - she just felt like she had better things to do. The daughter of a horseback minister, Jean had two brothers and a sister growing up in the depression era northeastern United States. After she graduated high school in Stamford Connecticut in 1942 she tried college for a year before she moved on to a job with Machlett Laboratories where she tested medical equipment for military hospitals. As World War II drew Jean’s peers into service across the globe, her mother encouraged her to sign up to serve in one of the newly formed women's divisions in the military. In the fall of 1944, Jean tested for WAVES, Women Accepted for Emergency Volunteer Services, a branch of the United States Navy. Distinct from other women’s corps, WAVES was a specialized Naval group of enlisted service members, rather than auxiliary.

 WAVES actively recruited women with college degrees, training and experience in science and technological fields. They were tested and screened rigorously, requiring background checks and solid references.   Jean was one of the few selected to enter the training program. Growing up, Jean had considered entering the field of nursing as a profession but was concerned that because she had flat feet that she wouldn’t be able to endure the long hours. But taking care of people was still something that drew her, so she opted to go into training for the hospital corps with WAVES. 

  The Hospital Corps were established by the Naval Department in 1898 to answer the demand for medical attendants in the Navy. Hospital corpsman were trained in medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, record keeping, administering medication and shots, assessing vital signs such as temperature and pulse, wound dressing, “therapeutic back rubs”, and Artificial Respiration and Resuscitation, the predecessor to modern CPR for drowning victims which was at the time performed with the patient lying on his stomach. 

  Passing in the top 10% of her class, Jean was given her pick of assignments. As female service members in the Navy were not allowed to serve overseas or on ships, Jean opted for the Great Lakes Naval Training Station outside of Chicago. She laughs about her learning experience, “Maybe it wasn’t so much that I was smart, maybe everybody else made me look good!” The twinkle in Jean’s eye lends a clue to the energetic curiosity that is as alive and well a few days after her 93rd birthday as it was 73 years ago when she graduated WAVES and went to work at the hospital.   Jean was promoted to Hospital Apprentice 1st Class and began her work at the hospital. She says that more than anything she remembers giving shots to the injured sailors. “One poor guy got so many shots that his backside looked like a pincushion!” She chuckled. Vaccination and antibiotic shots were administered routinely to patients in the gluteal muscles, and was one of the primary duties of the hospital corps members. In good fun, recovering patients at the Great Lakes Naval Station were given certificates of membership in the “Order of the Perforated Rectum.” 

Jean’s first assignment at the Naval Station was in the eye surgery ward, where she remembers vividly being allowed to assist in the eye removal surgery for an injured pilot named Ray, who also became her first “boyfriend.” While her normal duties included administering eye drops and changing dressings, assisting in surgery was usually reserved for the nurses on staff. Injured eyes were replaced with steels balls, and Jean remembers groups of recovering soldiers being sent to Chicago to be fitted for false eyes that slid in over the steel balls. 

When she left the eye ward she was reassigned to the rheumatic fever ward where she worked to keep restless patients comfortable during the painful illness. In this ward, Jean recalls that the patients were stacked in bunks, and remembers standing on a chair one night to give a suffering sailor a dose of APC (aspirin, phenacetin and caffeine) and rubbing his back until he fell asleep. 

In June of 1945, Jean was reassigned to the chest surgery ward, where wounded Marines were recovering from massive chest injuries and subsequent surgeries. “Practically everyone on the ward had a big hole is his back either with drainage and irrigations tubes or great gobs of packing in it.” Jean recalled in an interview with her granddaughter in 2002. It was here that she met Minard “Tommy” Thompson, a marine who had been in Peleliu in the New Guinea Islands when he was injured by two grenades in the fall of 1944. Tommy was in the last stages of a 13 month rehabilitation that involved major skin grafts and serious complications from his wounds, but by the time he met Jean he was recovering and was assigned to the cleaning detail in the chest surgery ward. Jean and Tommy went on daily walks around the hospital, and eventually Jean took him off hospital grounds and rented a tandem bicycle that they took out for rides. 

  In August of 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan triggering the surrender of the empire that had dug their heels stoutly into the struggle in the Pacific. In a letter to her parents, Jean mentions the bomb that was called “Little Boy” by the allies when the Enola Gay dropped it over Japan. “...Just think what could happen when it gets into the wrong hands, which it is bound to. It could just wipe all life off the earth.” She writes. 

  Jean says that taking care of the injured soldiers and sailors and helping alleviate their suffering was the best part of her experience in WAVES. “I am glad I did it, and I am glad I didn’t have to stay any longer than I did.” In her short year with WAVES, Jean experienced the best and the worst that the Nave had to offer during World War II. In the fall of 1945, Tommy proposed to Jean and she accepted. She was given only five days leave for their wedding, but shortly after, she was released from duty as she was married to a disabled veteran. 

  Jean and Tommy settled in Iowa near Tommy’s hometown, and they had two children. Tommy went back to contracting, his job before he joined the marines, and Jean stayed at home to raise the children for a few years. “Don’t call me a housewife,” she smiles, “housewife sounds horrible. Mother is just fine.” She got a job with the postal service in Jesup, Iowa, where her son jokes that she started the Women’s Liberation movement. Jean saved up her money and invested in an apartment complex, and then another, becoming and entrepreneur after her own fashion as the years went on. 

  Jean Thompson was an avid swimmer, teaching swimming lessons, participating in synchronized swimming teams and long distance swims and scuba diving, as well as being an accomplished horseback rider. “I liked to dabble in a lot of things,”she says about her various hobbies, but her first priority were her kids. She and Tommy divorced after 25 years but Jean says that no matter what, “I had to have my kids and I had to be with them,” making choices that enabled her to be with her son and daughter throughout their growing up years. 

  In 2011, Jean moved to Lewiston Idaho to be closer to family. Her grandson Shannon drove with her from Iowa on a road trip that she considers one of the highlights of her life, stopping in Missoula to enjoy the local beer. “For the education of my grandchildren, I will try anything!” She laughs. In 2011 as an 88 year old she tested for and earned her driver's license in Idaho, and even a year later she was still swimming a mile at a time. In 2015 she relocated again to the Colville area where her son and daughter in law lived. She moved into Parkview Assisted Living where she keeps her friends and family entertained with her spirit of adventure and keen sense of humor. Jean is a sparkling representation of the spirit of her generation and the wit and tenacity that made them so great. 

10th Mountain Scout: Stephen Louis Paparich

Louie Paparich graduated high school in Northport, Washington in 1942, a few months after the United States had joined the war effort in response to the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Immediately following graduation, Louie took a job on the southern end of Lake Pend Oreille for a contractor building submarines at Farragut Naval Training Station, the recently established and second largest submarine training center in the United States at the time. It was during his time in Idaho that Louie heard about well-paying jobs constructing the Alaska-Canada highway from Alaska territory to the lower 48 states. Setting out from Seattle on a barge, 18 year old Paparich made his way to Skagway Alaska and then to Teslin in the Yukon Territory.

In late 1942, construction of the Alcan Highway was considered part of the war effort, and young Louie met a military service member serving on an army road engineering crew who asked Louie if he had registered with the selective service. Born and raised in Northport, Stephen Louis Paparich had never heard of the selective service or the consequences of not registering. Realizing that he would have more flexibility if he enlisted rather than wait for the draft, Louie hopped on a sternwheeler ship from Whitehorse to Dawson City where he bought an 18 foot boat for $5 so he could travel quickly to Fairbanks to register for the draft. Somewhere along the way, Paparich adopted a dog that crossed his path, and made his way 255 miles down the Yukon river, stopping at villages along the way to get directions and supplies. 

During a stop at the confluence of the Nation River with the Yukon, Louie ran across an old miner named Tom Phillips who had lived in the area since 1889 and was gravely ill. His companion begged the teenage Louie to take the sick man to Fairbanks for medical help in his $5 boat, but Louie instead left some of his provisions with the men and went ahead to send a floatplane back for the sick prospector, always wondering if the old man had survived. The float plane eventually got to Tom Phillips but they were unsuccessful in getting him to Fairbanks that way. He was moved by riverboat but died shortly afterward. 

Paparich found an army recruiter in Fairbanks where he quickly signed up for the draft. Fully expecting to be immediately deployed, Louie looked forward to the warm beaches of the South Pacific, away from the cold Pacific Northwest and Alaska. The recruiter, however, saw Louie as a candidate for a different mission. After a few questions, Louie had disclosed his experience as a skier and horseman, building skis in the rural Northport area and learning to ski on the nearby hills and working as a ranch hand in the summer. The recruiter filed away all of Louie’s information but told him that his work on the highway was needed for the war effort and directed him back to Teslin to continue his work with the civilian construction crew. Louie spent a month’s worth of wages to book a flight on a Ford Tri-motor plane back to Teslin and his old job driving trucks. Louie loved Alaska and wrote to family at home that he hated the thought of ever leaving the North. 

Paparich worked on the Alcan highway until the spring of 1943, when the army finally sent him to first basic training at Camp Roberts in California and then Fort Hale in Colorado, where the newly formed 10th Mountain Division was training the Light Infantry and one of the last mounted cavalry units for mountain warfare in the frigid and harsh climate of the European war theater. The mountaineering troops drilled on skis, snowshoes and horseback, honing survival and combat skills up against the backdrop of the rugged Colorado mountains. After several months at high elevation, the unit was moved complete with 180 head of horses to Fort Swift in Texas where they were trained and acclimatized for low elevation and high temperatures for several months. Exposed to the extremes of weather and terrain conditions, the 10th Mountain was ready for anything. 

During his training in Texas, Louie Paparich was joined briefly by his high school sweetheart, Kay Lael, a young girl with a sweet southern drawl from North Carolina who had moved to Northport with her family a few years earlier and fallen head over heels for the farm boy down the road. They were married in the chapel at Fort Swift and then Kay went back to North Carolina to live with family and wait out the war while Louie prepared to ship off. 

Louie, like many in his unit, had never been to sea before the troop crossing that winter, and to avoid the crowded bunks of seasick soldiers he found a place to sleep in the beams of the ship high above the head, where the air was fresh and the bunks weren’t stacked like sardines in a can. He never got caught in his unauthorized berth, and so Louie didn’t mind the trip as much as some others. 

It was January of 1945 when the 10th Mountain Division entered combat in the North Apennine Mountains in Italy. They were tasked with taking the five mile ridge of Mount Belvedere from the controlling German troops, and the first obstacle they faced was a 1,500 foot vertical ascent up the western stronghold, known to the Americans as Riva Ridge. The German’s were confident that the sheer face couldn’t be scaled and had minimal patrols in place, but the 10th Mountain rigged rope ladders in the night and surprised German forces, breaking through the line and taking Mount Belvedere after three days of intense fighting. 

Serving in the 10th Mountain Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop, Louie raised his hand when they asked for scouting volunteers. Although he didn’t know what he was signing up for, Louie made an excellent scout as he spoke Italian and his years hunting in the woods of Northeastern Washington made him adept in the Italian forests, although Louie would never have touted his valuable skill set, being above all things a humble man. Rose Paparich-Kalamarides says that her dad told her that the life expectancy of scouts were measured in minutes, rather than years, as they crept in front of their own troops to gather intelligence and report back. On one scouting mission, Louie’s partner set his rifle against a tree and left it when they crept to their next position. Knowing that a misplaced firearm was grounds for dishonorable discharge, when the scouts got back into camp Louie squirreled a rifle out of the unit commander’s tent to replace his partner’s and avoid reprimand. Neither soldier ever heard a word about the missing rifle from the officer. Louie liked to retell this story because it reminded him that outside of the reality of combat, boys will still be boys, applying mischievous ingenuity to get out of a tight spot. 

Paparich and his division continued to route the Germans out of Northern Italy, culminating in the final battle for the 10th Mountain at the Po River, where German Troops faced off against the Americans who crossed the river at Lake Garda and cut off the last escape route for Hitler’s army. Louie says that some of the bravest soldiers he saw in battle were the engineers who were laying temporary bridges across the water under heavy mortar fire while the rest of the unit sheltered in foxholes on the opposite side of the river. Louie lay flat on the ground near a foxhole, imploring the guys in it to make room for him only moments before a mortar landed square in the trench and killed all of the men crowded there. Louie’s daughter Rose says that her father said a Rosary for the men in that foxhole every day for the rest of his life. 

It wasn’t until Louie was dying of cancer that he began to open up about his experiences in the war to his children. At the urging of his daughter Rose, he related many anecdotes before his passing in March of 2000 at the age of 75. In addition to the stories he related, he left behind letters that he scrawled to his family at home, in the barely legible handwriting of a right-hand compelled southpaw. As time went on, Louie was able to talk about the horrors that he had seen as well as the humanity that he witnessed during his time with the army. After the battle of Mt. Belvedere, the plethera of German prisoners of war dictated the need for the digging of more latrines. As Louie supervised the POW soldiers digging, he witnessed the terror of some Germans and he realized that they thought they were digging their own graves. Once, when searching a German POW for weapons he found a beautiful pocket watch that had belonged to the man’s grandfather. Louie graciously returned it to the German soldier, telling his daughter later that the prisoners that he saw were guys that looked just like him. 

The bloody but successful campaign at the Po River transpired two days before fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was executed in a small Italian village and then hung by his feet in a public square in Milan in a retaliatory move by local communist forces. As Louie Paparich and the 10th Mountain Division marched back to their ship through Milan, he endured the gruesome sight of the deposed dictator and his mistress, swinging from the beams of a service station. Louie, like many of the soldiers he served with, bore witness to atrocities committed by enemy and even some friendly troops as the dehumanizing effect of the war ate away at moral standards. Later in life Louie would admonish his children and grandchildren about the horrors of war and would be strongly opposed to the military action in Vietnam and later engagements, like so many of his comrades in arms. 

The troops left Italy in the summer of 1945, destined for the planned invasion of Japan which was circumvented by Japan’s surrender in August of that year. The ship changed course and returned home, where Louie collected his young wife Kay and settled back in Northport where their first three children were born before they used the money he saved from his highway construction work to buy a large farm just outside of town. They had three more children while living on the farm and Louie and Kay went on to become pillars in the small community. Louie was the head of American Legion Post #158 in Northport for 50 years. Stephen Louis Paparich received two bronze stars on his discharge in November of 1945 after just over two years of service. 

The Rest of the Story: When Even Death Doesn't End the Struggle

Casey Owens was a decorated Marine who served the United States through two deployments. In September of 2004, barely a month into his second deployment in the Al Anbar Province of Iraq, the vehicle in which Owens was riding in en route to aid an injured Marine struck two anti-tank mines. The injuries to Owens’ legs were catastrophic. He was stabilized at a field hospital and then flown to Germany, where his left leg was amputated below the knee and his right amputated just above the knee. But this was only the beginning of Owen’s very long journey.

Upon his return to the United States, Owens received care for complications from his surgeries at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. His amputations failed to heal properly and resulted in the loss of more of Owen’s right leg. He underwent numerous procedures and therapies, and when his resources through the VA were tapped out, Owens found himself footing the bill with the help of charitable organizations for hyperbaric oxygen therapy in Louisiana as his body continued to resist healing.

In addition to the loss of Owens’ legs, he suffered a traumatic brain injury in the explosion that compounded his mental recovery. Owens battled PTSD and depression in the way that many “recovering” vets do, when all other therapies fail: with a bottle. Interviewed first in 2004, then again in 2009, and finally, in 2012, Owens shared openly his struggle to find help through the available channels at the time, and his return each time to self-medicating. More than a decade later, studies on the correlation between traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and PTSD or other psychological symptoms are just beginning to pick up steam and gain public attention. More data is emerging that ties a direct line between head injuries and depression and suicide demographics.

After Owen’s fourth amputation surgery and self-funded hyperbaric therapy, the Marine was finally mobilized on prosthetic limbs. When he left the clinic in Louisiana in 2009, he shouted jubilantly to the CBS news crew “Free at last!” as he lumbered off on new legs. But his newfound liberty was short lived.

From a wheelchair in Denver in 2012, Owens told CBS that he would never totally released from the experiences that changed his life.

“Nah, no. I don’t think I will ever be free. I don’t think the burden of war is ever gone...I could be in a room with a hundred people, but I’d still be alone,” he confessed. But it wasn’t the people around him who couldn’t see his battle. “I think I didn’t realize what I’d been through, or really what was going on with me.”

When an attempt at college failed due to his TBI, he threw himself into paralympic sports, moving to Aspen, Colorado, where he found an escape from his new reality, one day at a time. But even there, proving himself as an aggressive paralympian, Owens circled back to the thing he confessed helped the most: drinking. After an arrest for drunk driving, Owens went through rehab, and then was able to participate in a recovery program for vets.

Along the way, Owens crossed paths with Patrick Flanagan, a local Air Force Veteran who had served through four deployments, two to Iraq, one to Afghanistan and one to Kyrgyzstan, as a firefighter for the Air Force. In the time he spent with Owens, Flanagan witnessed the agony of a decade long recovery first hand.

“He used to scream at night because his feet hurt and they weren't there. The Docs couldn't help him because it hadn't been long enough for his meds. It was nuts.” Flanagan’s front line experience resonated with Owens and the two became friends, keeping in contact across the miles and over the years when it was difficult to find veterans with shared experiences nearby. Flanagan explains the daily struggle for vets in finding therapy that helps.

“It's a catch 22. If you get drunk, you have to live with the consequences. If you don't, you have to live in your own PTSD head. There's no coming back home and there's no going back to fight,” says Flanagan. And survivor's guilt might be one of the hardest parts of the battle. “That's the worst thing. Leaving or not being able to go back. I want to be first in and last out. It sucks leaving when boots are still on the ground.”

Owens other friends and family tried to stay connected as he battled through his medical and psychological challenges. But it was not enough. Owens took his own life on October 16 of 2014 at his home in Aspen, ten years after the course of his life was altered in Iraq. He was 32 years old. The news cameras didn’t capture the end of Owens’ story, or the ugly aftermath some years later when another Marine who had served in an adjacent unit to Owens’ borrowed pieces of the late Marine’s experiences to claim charitable benefits for himself.

Former Marine Brandon Blackstone began piggybacking on the story of the anti-tank double mine explosion before Owens’ death, and continued for many years adding layer upon layer of narrative borrowed from the double amputee as he cashed in on a mortgage-free home from a charitable organization and many other perks for his stolen valor. Blackstone was eventually exposed by members of Owens’ unit who recognized the story, and revealed that Blackstone’s brief deployment to Iraq in 2004 was actually cut short by appendicitis. He was there long enough to hear about the terrible explosion that sent Owens back to the states.

Casey Owens sacrificed his life for a nation. When his legs were gone and his body failed him, he laid his soul bare for audiences across the country to hear the heart cry of soldiers and Marines like him who fought the same battles that he did when they got home. When his struggle became more profound than he could bear, the audiences abandoned him, just like hope and health had. Other than his closest circle of friends, some of whom learned of his death only after he had been buried, there was no hero’s fanfare for the fallen warrior. There was only the quiet grieving of an unsurprised family, while a vulture preyed on the bones of Owens’ suffering even after his death, capitalizing on a story that he couldn’t possibly grasp the depth of. Owens’ end was a far cry from the young Marine, saluting in his dress blues from a wheelchair at George W. Bush’s second inauguration.

As a nation we struggle to understand how to recognize the suicides of our veterans as the true battlefield deaths that they are. We cannot see the invisible scars that don’t heal over years, a deadly gangrene that began in combat. Owens demise seems too tragic to herald as a hero’s death, and yet it was. He gave all, even after his return from war, and more than ever we owe it to him to understand that - for the ones that he left behind who are still giving.

Giving War a Face: Catherine Leroy

She stood five feet tall, but only with her boots on. She was one of only two female journalists covering the war in Vietnam (the other, Dickie Chappelle, was killed by a grenade in 1965) , and the diminutive French girl was the last thing you’d expect to see parachuting in with American troops, but the 90 pound photographer became the only known accredited photojournalist to accomplish this mission, and with it, capture some of the most haunting images of the Vietnam War that the world would ever see.

Catherine Leroy was raised in a convent in Paris, France, where a boyfriend taught her how to skydive as a teenager. She was enthralled with photojournalism, and at the age of 21 (her age was never confirmed), she bought a one way ticket to Saigon and landed in the war zone with only a few dollars and her small Leica M2 camera in hand. Her goal was to “give war a human face”. On the flight from Paris, she met someone who introduced her to Life magazine photojournalist Charles Bonnay, who helped her get the press credentials she lacked and within days she was on her way to the front lines.

Catherine Leroy, 1967

A licensed parachutist, Leroy jumped with the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade into combat during Operation Junction City in February of 1967. It was in this action, the battle for Hill 881, that Leroy photographed U.S. Navy Corpsman Vernon Wike as he rushed to the aid of a fallen comrade. “Corpsman in anguish” is the third frame of a series that Leroy shot, capturing the unimaginable grief of war. Later, in an interview for the documentary “The Hill Fights”, Wike recounted the moment that Leroy photographed.

“I know there was chaos going on around me, but there was no sound,” he says. “...I knew he didn’t have a chance, but I still got p-----d off when he died.” Leroy describes the aftermath as the corpsman “lost in this nightmare landscape” grabbed the fallen marine’s M16 and charged a Viet bunker alone in a hail of obscenities. The fallen marine was a man called “Rock”, a New Yorker from Puerto Rico. Earlier that day he had told Wike that he only had 60 days left “in country” - his deployment in Vietnam.  

Two weeks later, Leroy was wounded near the demilitarized zone where she was embedded with a Marine unit. The next year, the photojournalist was captured by the North Vietnamese Army during the TET Offensive, along with another French journalist. Somehow, the blonde girl talked them into releasing them and before they left their captors she interviewed them and took photographs for a story in Life magazine which she wrote. Leroy kept in contact with Wike over the years. The Navy veteran came home and struggled through readjusting to civilian life as an icon of an unpopular war and the death it brought.  

Along with the American Soldiers lost in countless battles across the globe, the warriors who come home to continue fighting the demons they have encountered are still here among us. Veterans like Wike who have lost more in a small window of time than many of us lose over a lifetime are very much alive and still at war against less obvious enemies. Rarely have civilian audiences been given the intimate glimpse of war that Leroy provided. What the photographer captured in the face of Wilke on the hill in Vietnam is as close to the horror of war as any of us will ever come, and in this, Leroy accomplished her mission. She gave war a face, and it was the face of an American Soldier.

On Fridays, We Wear RED. Why You Should Too:

In 2005, one of those email chain letters went around. You know, the kind that you get annoyed at all of your friends for sending? Well this one was a little different and something about it stuck with the ones who read it. The original email read thusly:

“The Americans who support our troops, are the silent majority. We are not ‘organized’ to reflect who we are, or to reflect what our opinions are. Many Americans, like yourself, would like to start a grassroots movement using the membership of the Special Operations Association, and Special Forces Associations, and all their friends, simply to recognize that Americans support our troops. We need to inform the local VFWs and American Legion, our local press, local TV, and continue carrying the message to the national levels as we start to get this going. Our idea of showing our solidarity and support for our troops is starting Friday, and continuing on each and every Friday, until this is over, that every RED - blooded American who supports our young men and women, WEAR SOMETHING RED.

Word of mouth, press, TV — let's see if we can make the United States, on any given Friday, a sea of RED much like a home football game at a university.

If every one of our memberships share this with other acquaintances, fellow workers, friends, and neighbors, I guarantee that it will not be long before the USA will be covered in RED - and make our troops know there are many people thinking of their well-being. You will feel better all day Friday when you wear RED!

Let's get the word out and lead by example; wear RED on Fridays.

Please forward this to everyone you know!!

Wear RED on Fridays . SUPPORT OUR TROOPS! WE LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE, BECAUSE OF THE BRAVE. FOR US, THEIR BLOOD RUNS RED!! GOD BLESS AMERICA.”

Apparently somebody forwarded it, because fast forward to 2018 and #REDFriday has officially become a thing. While many family members of deployed troops have been sporting red on Fridays since that fateful day in September of 2001, the public trend took a few years to gain traction. More and more people are donning crimson on Fridays in support of the deployed service members around the world and at home.

In addition to Instagram and Twitter trends steered by hashtags like #RememberEveryoneDeployed, most veteran owned companies now offer R.E.D. Friday t shirts, hoodies and other paraphernalia. In 2016, the Big Voice made our first run of R.E.D. t shirts which you can see your friends and neighbors rocking around the area. We’ve updated our design a few times, but you can get your R.E.D Shirt HERE and join the party!

"...Struggle On the Highest Level..."

Politically speaking, we are poised in an historic moment. As we look toward the inauguration of one of the most controversial Presidential candidates in recent memory, issues of civil rights, individual liberty, military power and social programs are paramount in a way that perhaps they haven’t been since the 1960s, when another controversial president came into power. John F. Kennedy was a democratic candidate who opposed Jim Crow (segregation) laws that were still in effect in many states, and won the presidency by one of the narrowest margins in U.S. History. Today, January 16th, 2017, is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday observed in remembrance of one of Kennedy’s political backers and the father of the civil rights movement. Dr. King endorsed Kennedy only after the then Senator worked for the release of King from a hard labor sentence springing from a minor traffic violation. King and Kennedy, while allied in their pursuit of civil rights, were not always in agreement about other key issues.

 A Navy veteran from World War II, It was his military service that predisposed Kennedy to make the stalwart cold war decisions that helped to avoid nuclear war and a “peace through strength” policy. Kennedy’s civil rights ally, Martin Luther King Jr., did not share the president’s views on war or the military. In fact, King has been largely considered a pacifist by many as his endorsement of conscientious objectors during the Vietnam conflict was widely publicized. But King wasn’t strictly anti-war. He was realistically aware that his religiously driven philosophy of change effected through love was a hard sell in the hate-fueled civil rights battle, much less the international political theater.

 In a recorded interview from 1960, Dr. King says, “I would ... say that it is a method which seeks to secure a moral end through moral means, and it grows out of the whole concept of love, because if one is truly nonviolent that person has a loving spirit, he refuses to inflict injury upon the opponent because he loves the opponent." Later, in 1967, King voiced his opposition to the war in Vietnam, but not in all conflict: “I see this war (Vietnam) as an unjust, evil and futile war. But if I had confronted the call to military service in a war against Hitler, I believe that I would have temporarily sacrificed my pacifism because Hitler was such an evil force in history...I would willingly have fought against the Nazi menace of the 1940s."

 President Elect Donald Trump swears in to office in the midst of violent race-driven riots that mirror the civil rights struggles of Dr. King’s day. Martin Luther King Jr was, above all, an advocate for peaceful protest and respectful civil disobedience. While enduring gross injustice in a segregated culture, he worked toward peaceful change: “I am convinced that when the history books are written in future years, historians will have to record this movement as one of the greatest epics of our heritage," he said. "It represents struggle on the highest level of dignity and discipline."

 Currently, protests against election results, ambushes on law enforcement and other civil unrest that seeks validation under the banner of human rights is a far cry from the war that Dr. King waged on the flagrant racism of the 1960s. Even his recommendation of conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War was rooted in the fight for equal treatment of black men in a military system that had only recently parted from the practice of troop segregation.

 As we observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and look ahead to the presidential inauguration, it is only the careful weight of worldviews that guarantees our success as a nation. Balancing our national “strength with power” philosophy and the unwavering support of our military forces and domestic law enforcement with the belief that our fighting energy should be saved for the real evil that pervades this world is imperative to our survival as a people united. The civil unrest and current political climate would be well served by a reappearance of Martin Luther King Jr and the spirit of his message.

 In the immortal words spoken by Dr. King on a sweltering August day in 1963, “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.” These words were delivered only months before the violent and untimely end of President Kennedy by a radical hand. The real enemy shows his face in the form of the terrorist on our own soil and the violent tyranny of factions overseas who threaten not only civil rights but life and civilization on every level.