The editorial page of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Department of Michigan website. This page is a platform that can used to help us improve the way we all do business in the VFW. As a forum it will allow our readers, our members, our Posts, our Districts and our Department to gain an insight on how others view us as veterans.

Email your thoughts, opinions, problems and even compliments, to vfwmi@att.net, please use "Sound Off" on the subject line, and we will publish your comments. The VFW Department of Michigan reserves the right to edit or return, unpublished any postings submitted. Please include your name, phone number & email address in your message; we will only publish your email address. Speak out on anything you think that we need to address, improve or change that could help other veterans, members, Posts, Districts or the Department of Michigan.

Blogs & Newsletters...

VFW National Magazine
VFW News
VFW in Washington DC
VFW Blog
VFW Blog Guide

VFW Lady "Showcasing Programs that Support America's Troops, Veterans, and their Families"

Letters & Comments...

Email
"Can you help?

Hello I am sister of US Army PFC William Davis 1980-2007. The reason I'm emailing you is to find a teddy bear identical to the one my niece was given at my brothers funeral. It was given to her by a Grand Rapids, MI veteran. All i can remember is that it was a brown bear wearing camo and a dog tag. When you press the bears hand it has a saying to it, its not a song more like a poem. just remember it being so touching and that one day id like to give my child or my brother's son the same bear. I know this is a long shot but I have looked everywhere online and cannot find it. If this sounds familiar to anyone please let me know. I appreciate your time on reading this and helping me out.

Thank you so much."
Stacy
stacy_lynn_5@sbcglobal.net

Opinion Editorial - DoD Breaking Sacred Promise with POW/MIA Families

"WASHINGTON (July 13, 2011) — President Obama is a strong supporter of our nation’s veterans, military and their families, as well as the families of almost 88,000 missing servicemen and civilians, yet some within his Administration do not share that same level of commitment."

VFW Joins in Houston National Cemetery Censorship Lawsuit

KANSAS CITY, Mo., July 1, 2011 - "The national commander of America's largest and oldest major combat veterans' organization is appalled over allegations of religious censorship at one of the nation’s national cemeteries, calling it a case of “bureaucracy running amok.”

“This is a point in case of bureaucracy…or rather, a classic example of a bureaucrat running amok. In spite of VA policy, the cemetery director is making up her own rules and has imposed hurtful, unilateral restrictions of her own choosing,” said Richard L. Eubank, the national commander of the 2.1 million-member Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. and its Auxiliaries."

John F. Kelly, Lt. General, US Marine Corps addressing the Semper Fi Society

St Louis, 13 November 2010 - "When future generations ask why America is still free and the heyday of al Qaida and their terrorist allies was counted in days rather than centuries as Osama bin Laden himself foolishly predicted, those who serve the nation…your hometown heroes—soldiers, sailors, airmen, Coast Guardsman, and Marines—can say “because of me, and people like me, who risked all to protect millions who will never know my name.” "

Email
"Show your thanks to WWII Veterans by watching this 2 minute video"

Bradford Angers
brad.jan@verizon.net

Email

March 22, 2011 (email)--- "The emphasis in the quote below my signature and the article by Dr. Conner are my own. Our occasional rememberances of the price paid by our forebearers and by our fellow citizens of the present day are hardly sufficient homage. John Quincy Adams once said, “Posterity, you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your liberty. I hope that you will make good use of it.” I have often thought that we should chisel those words over every school house door, indeed, every public building to rouse the awareness of each generation that the liberty that we enjoy daily was purchased at the price of blood as well as treasure. That dear price was paid on behalf of the yet generations yet unborn and constitutes a debt that cannot be paid back but only paid forward."

Greg Stachura
GSA International, Ltd.
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." -- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) British political philosopher, member House of Parliament"

Some Thoughts on the Passing of Frank Buckles

By Thomas Conner, Ph.D.
William P. Harris Professor of Military History
Hillsdale College

The United States lost its last surviving veteran of the First World War on February 28, 2011. Frank Buckles, of Charles Town, West Virginia, passed away just a few weeks after his 110th birthday. Born in 1901, he had enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 at age sixteen after finally being able to fool a recruiter into thinking he was two years older and thus eligible to serve. He was not in combat, but served out the War in Europe and did not return home until January 1920. He found out that he was the last of our living veterans of the Great War in 2008, and when asked how that distinction felt, he said simply: “I realized that somebody had to be, and it was me.”

Buckles’ death severed the last living connection between us and the generation that put 4.7 million men under arms to go off and lick “Kaiser Bill,” the playful name Americans of that day gave to Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, our principal enemy in the conflict. That generation of our fighting men did defeat its enemy, but the world they were promised by the President (Woodrow Wilson) who had asked them to wage war did not materialize. Indeed, within a year or two of the formal end of the fighting, with many parts of Europe still simmering cauldrons of violence and revolution, there seemed little to show for America’s effort to “make the world safe for democracy.”

If not recognized, then, as the “Greatest Generation” of Americans, Buckles and his fellow “doughboys” served their country selflessly and honorably, and they deserve to be remembered more than they are. The commander of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, John J. Pershing, is one of only two of our countrymen (the other is George Washington) ever to be given the exceptional rank of General of the Armies. In the ranks of Pershing’s army were some of the most famous national figures from the next global struggle—George C. Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, and Harry Truman, to name a few. Roughly 100,000 of Pershing’s men were killed in action or died from the various infectious diseases that constantly stalked them. About one-quarter of those deaths, and sixty or seventy thousand more injuries, occurred in the War’s last battle in the Meuse-Argonne region of France, the bloodiest battle in the whole history of the United States. The cemetery maintained by our government to this day on that hallowed field is final “home” to 14,246 dead from that battle and some of the most heroic soldiers in American history. But, how many of us have ever heard the name of that place? And, not even one sitting President has paid homage to these all but forgotten warriors in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery.

Sadly, too, while Buckles lived long enough to be rightly honored as the last American veteran of World War I, he also perceived in his final years the degree to which he and his generation had been forgotten. To his immense credit, he tried to do something about it. In 2009, Buckles appeared before a committee of the U.S. Senate to endorse the idea of building a national World War I memorial in Washington, something at least reminiscent of the majestic World War II memorial erected on the National Mall and dedicated in 2004. In the course of that Capitol Hill appearance, Buckles was escorted by Dylan Kessler, Hillsdale College Class of 2010, who was then interning in the office of John Thune of South Dakota, a supporter of the monument idea.

With Frank Buckles gone, and no living embodiment of his fellow soldiers of the Great War to take up this cause, there seems little reason to expect that such a structure will ever be built. It is worth recalling, after all, that it took herculean efforts by countless veterans of the Second World War to lobby for the idea, and then to raise the money privately over the better part of a decade to make the monument to the “Greatest Generation” a reality. In the face of ballooning debts and increasingly tight-fisted public spending, moreover, it is almost unimaginable that the federal government would fund a World War I monument. But if the memory of Frank Buckles’ generation may not find expanded expression in marble and fountains, today’s Americans should never allow themselves to ignore or forget what they did a century ago as brave young men on a mission thousands of miles from home to rid their world of threats to our precious freedom.

Dr. Thomas Conner is William P. Harris Professor of Military History at Hillsdale College. Along with courses in Western Heritage and American Heritage as part of Hillsdale's rigorous core curriculum, Dr. Conner also teaches upper-level courses on European history and the Two World Wars. He is one of the College's longest-serving faculty members, and has several times been named Professor of the Year by the student body.

Copyright 2010 Hillsdale College. All Rights Reserved.

Hillsdale College
33 East College St. | Hillsdale, MI 49242

The Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship
227 Massachusetts Avenue, NE | Washington, D.C. 20002

Email

February 22, 2011 (email)--- "I’ve attached a photo and press release concerning vascular surgeon, Dr. Kevin Nolan of Southfield, MI, who volunteered for two weeks to care for wounded Iraq and Afghanistan soldiers at the US Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. I’m contacting you in the hopes that you can include this information in your VFW publication to Michigan veterans and/or on your Michigan VFW website."

Thank you for your consideration."
Sue Crosson-Knutson
Communications Manager
Society for Vascular Surgery
633 North Saint Clair Street, 22nd Floor
Chicago, Illinois 60611
Telephone: 312-334-2311
Fax: 312-334-2320
scknutson@vascularsociety.org
VascularWeb.org

Email

January 28, 2011 (email)--- "Sergeant Hurley of Hartford, Michigan lost his small Michigan house in direct violation of a law intended to protect active military personnel from predatory creditors. Deutsche Bank agents forced Sergeant Hurley’s wife, Brandie, and her two young children to get out and find shelter elsewhere. This all happened while he was fighting in Iraq as a member of the Michigan National Guard - for you.

Your soldier, honor and duty bound to protect you, who offered up his life for you and left his wife and children here in your protection had his American land stolen and family thrown out into a Michigan winter by a German bank who sold it to a greedy developer from Chicago, Illinois for $76,000. When Sergeant Hurley returned to the United States of America, land that I love, in December of 2005 he found himself driving past the deep, wooded property on the banks of a river near Hartford. He reportedly could see the little home he had put there but the land had been sold to some guy from Chicago.

Sergeant Hurley has been patiently moving through the court ‘system’. Federal court said it was against the law.

Deutsche Bank Trust Company and its co-defendant, a Morgan Stanley subsidiary named Saxon Mortgage Services have been disputing any payments ordered for Sergeant Hurley. Over 100 other military mortgages have been raided by Deutsche Bank over the same time.

I respect our military. Do you?

It is my opinion that Sergeant Hurley needs to have his property returned to him immediately - regardless of any red tape, lawyerly notices, bank notes, lying contracts, international agreements, free trade or anything else. It boils down to this - are you going to allow a Michigan Citizen Soldier of the United States of America to be thrown off his own land, against the law, by a foreign national bank and their buddies in New York City?"

Sincerely,
Alfred Brock
Alfred.Brock@gmail.com

Webmaster comment... See email confirmation at leatherneck.com at http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/showthread.php?p=732777

Lansing State Journal

Jones: Veterans jobs grant 'mishandled'
Jan 12, 2011, Melissa Domsic mdomsic@lsj.com ---"... contends the Michigan Department of Energy and Economic Growth "mishandled" federal funds funds by not using all the money available in fiscal year 2010 to hire veterans to staff its veterans' employment services program. He has called for a change in department leadership."

Sen. Rick Jones, state dept. at odds over money for veterans
Jan 10, 2011, Melissa Domsic mdomsic@lsj.com ---"... contends the Michigan Department of Energy and Economic Growth "mishandled" federal funds by not using all the money available in 2010 to hire veterans to staff its veterans' employment services program. He said $623,000 was unused out of a roughly $6.2 million grant."

VFW Urges Caution in Ending 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'
The VFW national commander said his greatest concern is how repeal will impact those closest to the fight.

December 20, 2010--- "The end of the Defense Department policy known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is imminent, but the national commander of the nation's largest combat veterans organization is still urging the administration to move cautiously with implementation.

"The acceptance of open homosexuality and the creation and enforcement of new policies could be far more difficult to implement than repeal advocates ever envisioned," said Richard L. Eubank, a retired Marine and Vietnam combat veteran from Eugene, Ore., who leads the 2.1 million-member Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. and its Auxiliaries." read more

"American Legion, VFW reach out to younger vets" by Micki Steele / The Detroit News December 2010 read more

Statement From VFW National Commander on the PAC Situation
Decisions made by PAC failed to represent the best interest of VFW members
October 22, 2010

October 21, 2010--"I salute our Commander-in-Chief for his dealing with PAC and I hope the next step is to declare that NO candidate can use the VFW logo." Paul Ignelzi ignelzip@frontier.com Quartermaster Post 667"

"Judge Rules Stolen Valor Act Illegal"

August 2010---"In response to this posting on military.com I find it very offensive that some one or anyone can go and claim that they have won the medal of honor or they are a Navy Seal or Special Forces for that matter, or not even being in the military but yet falsely wearing that uniform. I don’t see how a court can say that this does not effect anyone by say you won such honors. As I see it affects those who have gone and gave their life for god and country to earn such honors. I think it, better yes I know it is time for a group to be formed like those that go after persons that claim to be SEALS and such to do the same for those that claim false honors and such. This makes me sick"

US Navy Vet
Campaign Operation Iraqi Freedom
Operation Secure Tomorrow
HM2(FMF)
Vernon Goss

Email

July 19, 2010 --- "I need some help on this issue. I am an honorably discharged Vietnam Veteran. I have been out of work for a year and a half. My friend is disabled and has been working with Michigan Rehabilitation Services. He has been out of work for a year and a half. Since we had not been able to find employment he was advised by Michigan Rehabilitation Services to apply for a grant to start a business. We decided to form an LLC. My friend owns 51% and I own 49%. A marketing specialist was assigned to help us by the State and we wrote our business plan and financial projections and submitted them. Our business is a gunshop and training center and Michigan Rehabilitation Services has known this from the start. After at least a month of filling out endless paperwork we have been told that they aren't going to be able to help us because our business is selling firearms. This is no different than any other legitimate business! We have met all conditions we were told we had to. Can anyone help us and could anyone tell us what our options are?"

www.house.gov/smbiz

THURSDAY, July 15, 2010, 10:00 AM
Subcommittee on Contracting and Technology
“Improving Contracting Opportunities and Preventing Fraud for Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Businesses”
"The hearing examined U.S. government agencies’ veteran contracting programs and what steps can be taken to ensure veteran-owned small businesses are awarded their fair share of federal projects. Witness List | Video Highlights on YouTube | Chairwoman Nye's Opening Statement"

"Above is a link to the U.S. House subcommittee on small business and a hearing it conducted 15 July on fraud in sdvob contracting with the federal government. There are videos of two witness panels plus q & a sessions. One of those testifying is Linda Oliver, small business director of DOD who spoke at our conference last October and Joe Sharpe, of the American Legion. I think this is must viewing for anyone even considering doing business with the federal government.
Regards
Ed R."
edronders@comcast.net

Email

6/2010 -- Video comments on the November 5, 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, TX 'that killed 13 people and wounded 30 others' [Wikipedia] posted on cbn.com was sent in by:

Thank You For Supporting Albert Snyder
March 2, 2011 "Despite the impassioned efforts of patriots around the country, the United States Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church’s right to protest at military funerals, deciding its demonstrations are protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

In response, VFW National Commander Richard L. Eubank had this to say: "The Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. thanks the Supreme Court for considering the case, but is greatly disappointed with the result. The Westboro Baptist Church may think they have won, but the VFW will continue to support community efforts to ensure no one hears their voice, because the right to free speech does not trump a family's right to mourn in private."

The VFW would like to thank you for your help spreading the word about the landmark case and your caring support of Mr. Snyder at such a difficult time.

Opposing view on free speech: Vulgarity is not a message
"The media are wrong to confuse freedom of expression in the Snyder case"

October 06, 2010---USA TODAY By Richard L. Eubank... "While in uniform, VFW members have fought in every war and conflict to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. They, better than most, know that most Americans have inherited the luxury of freedom while not having accomplished anything to earn it." read more

USA TODAY's VIEW: Does First Amendment protect protests at military funerals?

VFW Outraged by Media Support of Westboro Protestors

July 20, 2010 "Kansas City, MO, --- "Last week's U.S. Supreme Court filing of a friend-of-the-court brief by 22 news media organizations in support of the First Amendment rights of the Westboro Baptist Church has outraged the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S.

"As despicable as their message of hatred is, at least the church has a vested interest in this fight," said VFW National Commander Thomas J. Tradewell Sr., a combat-wounded Vietnam veteran from Sussex, Wis. "The media only filed their brief to protect themselves against potential libel suits."

The case is Albert Snyder v. Fred W. Phelps Sr. (et al), who leads the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., a nonaffiliated church that for years has taunted grieving mourners at military funerals nationwide..." read more

Media Groups Side With Westboro Protestors in Court Case
Published in Stars & Stripes by Jeff Schogol July 16, 2010

ARLINGTON, VA. — "Twenty-two media organizations have sided with a radical church against the father of a fallen Marine who is trying to sue it for picketing his son’s funeral.

The media organizations filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Wednesday with the Supreme Court in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church, which protests near servicemembers’ funerals because it believes that troops’ deaths and other national tragedies are divine revenge for America’s tolerance of gays and lesbians.

The father of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who died in Iraq in 2006, sued the church for picketing near his son’s funeral with signs that said “God hates you,” “You’re in hell” and “Semper Fi fags.” They also distributed a flier with Snyder’s picture on it that read “Burial of an Ass."” read more

Statement From VFW National Commander on the PAC Situation Decisions made by PAC failed to represent the best interest of VFW members October 22, 2010

Statement From VFW National Commander on the PAC Situation
Decisions made by PAC failed to represent the best interest of VFW members
October 22, 2010