les pensées insouciantes

Oh, you had to stand on a hot subway platform for 2 minutes today?

You poor thing!

When the medal ceremony is over, and you’re done with your consolatory iced frappe from Starbucks, how about tuning in to The 5th Annual Troopathon?

Presented by Move America Forward, one of the nation’s largest grassroots pro-troops organizations, the goal of Troopathon is simple:

Send care packages to our troops, as many as we can, in a single 8-hour show.

This year, we raise funds to send care packages to those serving in Afghanistan. Our troops are growing weary. They have been at this for 10 years; many have done multiple deployments, and some are starting to question if America has forgotten that they are still in battle. There are 90,000 American troops in Afghanistan.

90,000.

Just for reference, it’s going to be in the 90’s all this week in Afghanistan.

You can make a tax-deductible donation and sponsor a care package here.

About GPICT

A Care Package Saves a Life | Operation Gratitude

From the inbox:

A few days ago we received a heart-wrenching email that we feel is important to share with you:

“I am a soldier who is currently deployed. Recently I have been pretty depressed. I see just about everyone here getting care packages from loved ones.

But I don’t have any loved ones back home.

Well, except my dog…But someone poisoned her on Thanksgiving when I showed up here.

Every day I would go to sleep and wish I didn’t wake up. On my way back to work I would hope to catch a mortar round in my chest. I spoke with the Chaplain about some of these issues but nothing seemed to help. Every day I would go through the same steps: work, lunch, work, bed.

Same thing, every day.

Then a soldier came to tell me I had a package to pick up. They told me it had been sitting in the mail office for some time now. For the whole walk over there I wondered, ‘Who could it be from?’ I heard talk about care packages being sent from private organizations back home, but those were from a list you had to put your name on. I never did that because with my job I was always too busy and time was never permitting.

When I saw the box, I saw ‘Operation Gratitude’ on the side. When I opened the package and started looking through the contents a lump grew in my throat, my lip started to quiver and the tears started to flow.

I had an overwhelming feeling that someone really does care.

I am feeling much better about myself now. I don’t know how I can ever thank you for what you have made me feel. Thank you so very much for what you and your team have done!

Sincerely, J.C.”

There is no way to quantify the invaluable morale-boosting impact our care packages have on the men and women who receive them. But letters and emails like this one from J.C. confirm that what we are doing is important. With your help we will continue this work, positively affecting Military letter-writers like J.C. and the tens of thousands more whom he represents.

Go.

Donate.

Now.

Your donation pays for the assembly and shipping expenses of $15 per care package. Tax deductible.

Do it.

# Operation Gratitude

For every picture of our young servicemembers doing something wrong…

There are a hundred pictures of them doing something right. (I know; I made them!)

See:

“Little Girl,” Mosul, Iraq, 2005.

Photo by Michael Yon, independent combat journalist.

Major Mark Bieger found this little girl after the car bomb that attacked our guys while kids were crowding around. The soldiers here have been angry and sad for two days. They are angry because the terrorists could just as easily have waited a block or two and attacked the patrol away from the kids. Instead, the suicide bomber drove his car and hit the Stryker when about twenty children were jumping up and down and waving at the soldiers. Major Bieger, I had seen him help rescue some of our guys a week earlier during another big attack, took some of our soldiers and rushed this little girl to our hospital. He wanted her to have American surgeons and not to go to the Iraqi hospital. She didn’t make it. I snapped this picture when Major Bieger ran to take her away. He kept stopping to talk with her and hug her.

Read the rest here.

Visit Michael’s site and support his incredible work here.

@Michael_Yon on Twitter

Michael Yon Fan Page on Facebook

Subscribe to his e-mail list here.

RSS Feed here.

Linking Policy & Media Inquiries here.

My original post on Michael Yon here.

About GPICT

↵ Reblogged from mbrosen

Who has done more for peace: The U.S. Marine Corps or the Peace Corps? The U.S. Army or the U.N. Peacekeepers?

Rhetorical questions from the ever-pragmatic Dennis Prager

THIS. IS. AWESOME: The Horse Soldiers of 9/11

It was the news the world breathlessly waited for immediately after the 9/11 terror attacks: a report of the first American troops on the ground in Afghanistan.

All at once the world’s attention focused on an iconic photo of those Special Operations Forces doing something no American military had done in nearly a century: They rode horses into combat.

Their secret mission: secure northern Afghanistan by advising the warring tribal factions that formed the Northern Alliance.

During the 2011 Veterans Day Parade on November 11, a new monument to these men — and to all Americans in uniform — will make its way down New York City’s famed Fifth Avenue on the way to its final home, a stone’s throw from Ground Zero.

Note: The Green Beret Foundation is helping subsidize the creation and transportation of this remarkable monument to America’s uniformed heroes. To make a tax-deductible contribution, click here.

Amazing:

• Their medic, Sgt. 1st Class Joe Jung, continued the mission with a broken back after his horse fell and slid on top of him:

“Two shots of morphine to relieve the pain. I would not allow myself to be the weakest link. That’s not in my nature. That’s not in any Green Beret’s nature.”

Riding a horse. With a broken back.

• Lt. Col. Max Bowers carried a piece of the World Trade Center with him during the mission. The team later buried it, in a body bag, wrapped in an American flag, somewhere in Afghanistan.

• A female navigator called in air strikes. It blew the Afghani warlords’ minds when they heard her voice over the team’s radios. She was nicknamed “The Angel of Death.” The warlord General made it a point to let the Taliban/al Qaeda enemy commanders know that there was a “female up in those planes wreaking havoc on you.”

• Another psychological tactic: they captured a high-ranking mullah. The medic treated him as he would anyone else…and then they released him. They figured that he would bring the message back to the other enemy fighters that he was treated humanely, and that this would encourage mass surrenders. It worked.

Watch the whole thing.

And, yes: