Previously Held MOS 1729-Combat Engineer Reconnaissance Sergeant
1542-Infantry Unit Commander
1745-Infantry First Sergeant
1745-Light Weapons Platoon Sergeant
1745-Rifle Platoon or Squad Leader
1514-Radar Chief Of Section
What started with a TWS invitation from Sergeant Don Shook has now turned in to a very time consuming project. At the present time I have 504 photos with many hours of narratives.
I've tried to keep the facts and stories about each picture as factual as possible. To keep continuity in the narratives, I've added pictures that are not mine from yearbooks that I own and from long Google sessions. To verify things that I do remember happening, I also have added quoted sentences and paragraphs that are not mine. In all cases I've added copyright credits to pictures and text that I've used.
All of the photos without � credits are my own. All the Photoshop titles and composite slides are my own.
Since many of the things I write about go back as far as sixty years, some quotes that I attribute to persons may, of course, not be verbatim. I've tried to make them at least, "words to that effect".
I am not doing this for self aggrandizement, it is in response to "What did you do in the War, Daddy?" I've found TWS to be a good medium for creating memoir type slide presentations.
In some cases, my recollections may be a little fuzzy. If anyone who looks through my profile and finds wrong timelines or gross inaccuracies, please email and so that I can make corrections. TWS has made editing very easy.
There will also be spelling, grammar and punctation errors. After hours of typing, I get lazy and quote marks, commas, grammar and spelling errors get dropped into the narratives. Sorry. Thanks TWS for building in a spelling checker and bless Google for their endless source of knowledge.
After many hours of work on my 1968 tour in Vietnam, I've just finished the Jump School assignment and am working my way down each subsequent assignment. Many of which have titles that don't mean anything, pictures out of order and bits and gibberish pieces of narrative in them. Bear with me, I'm working on them.
Note: In many cases, I refer to soldiers only as "men". I don't mean to denigrate the women who serve. It is just that men served in the combat arms units in the Army and women served in the Women's Army Corps (WAC). "It was the women's branch of the US Army. It was created as an auxiliary unit, the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942, and converted to full status as the WAC in 1943. It was disbanded in 1978" Quote � Wikipedia
I retired in 1973 and never had the pleasure of serving with women soldiers.
Description The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the Caribbean Crisis or the Missile Scare, was a 13-day (October 16–28, 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning American ballistic missile deployment in Italy and Turkey with consequent Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba. The confrontation, elements of which were televised, was the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.
In response to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961, and the presence of American Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided to agree to Cuba's request to place nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter future harassment of Cuba. An agreement was reached during a secret meeting between Khrushchev and Fidel Castro in July 1962 and construction of a number of missile launch facilities started later that summer.
The 1962 midterm elections were under way in the United States and the White House had denied charges that it was ignoring dangerous Soviet missiles 90 miles from Florida. These missile preparations were confirmed when an Air Force U-2 spy plane produced clear photographic evidence of medium-range (SS-4) and intermediate-range (R-14) ballistic missile facilities. The United States established a military blockade to prevent further missiles from entering Cuba. It announced that they would not permit offensive weapons to be delivered to Cuba and demanded that the weapons already in Cuba be dismantled and returned to the USSR.
After a long period of tense negotiations, an agreement was reached between President John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a U.S. public declaration and agreement never to invade Cuba again without direct provocation. Secretly, the United States also agreed that it would dismantle all U.S.-built Jupiter MRBMs, which were deployed in Turkey and Italy against the Soviet Union but were not known to the public.
When all offensive missiles and Ilyushin Il-28 light bombers had been withdrawn from Cuba, the blockade was formally ended on November 20, 1962. The negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union pointed out the necessity of a quick, clear, and direct communication line between Washington and Moscow. As a result, the Moscow–Washington hotline was established. A series of agreements sharply reduced U.S.–Soviet tensions during the following years.
