Navy Lt. j.g. Chey Min-jung (C), the second daughter of SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, salutes during a ceremony at a naval base in the port city of Busan on Dec. 23, 2015, to welcome home the 19th contingent of the 300-strong Cheonghae unit. The unit arrived at the port of Busan after completing a six-month stint in the Gulf of Aden aboard the destroyer, Chungmugong Yi Sun-shin, to combat pirates operating in waters off Somalia. (Yonhap)
In my opinion Adam Driver’s character is probably one of the biggest disappointments of an otherwise mostly good Star Wars movie. Really did anyone expect a young Marilyn Manson when Kylo Ren took his helmet off? To be fair though he is a much better actor than Hayden Christensen was in the prequels. Of interest though is that before joining the Dark Side, Adam Driver was once a US Marine:
For a while, Adam Driver felt like he was doomed to a life of missed opportunities.
Of course, for an Emmy-nominated actor named one of GQ’s “Men of the Year,” that’s not true anymore — but ask him about his role in the new “Star Wars” film and it quickly becomes apparent that he does not want to screw this one up.
A misfit growing up in small town Mishawaka, Indiana, Driver was drawn to performing from an early age, landing regular roles in high school plays and singing in the choir at the church where his stepfather was pastor.
But mediocre grades kept him from getting accepted into acting school after graduating in 2001. With big talk to match his big dreams, he set off for Los Angeles to try to break into acting the old-fashioned way. Instead, his car broke down halfway there and, out of money, he was forced to retreat back home.
“It’s hard to come back after telling everyone ‘I’m outta here,’ ” he says.
A new hope
After stints selling vacuums door-to-door and other odd jobs, Driver was among the first to go see a Marine Corps recruiter after the Sept. 11 attacks, signing up for the infantry. [Military Times]
Many people have a favorite Christmas memory which for this Korean War veteran was Christmas in 1950 in Gyeongju of all places:
At Taegu, South Korea, Norman Deptula, left, stands with two soldiers from the 581st Signal Radio Relay Company after they had been evacuated out of North Korea. COURTESY OF NORMAN DEPTULA
Amid the horrors and devastation of war, a midnight Mass 65 years ago in a dilapidated church in Kyong-ju, South Korea, would prove to be a miracle of sorts for Army Pfc. Norman Deptula.
It was December 1950, six months into the Korean War. Deptula, then 21, was among the approximately 100,000 United Nations troops who had just been evacuated out of North Korea. He had been among the “Chosin Few” who had escaped intense battles against overwhelming Chinese forces in the Chosin Reservoir campaign.
In a telephone interview Wednesday from his home in Webster, Mass., Deptula, now 86, recalled how frightened he was after an estimated 300,000 Chinese crossed over the Yalu River into North Korea, intent on annihilating the U.N. forces.
“We were outnumbered. The odds were stacked against us,” Deptula said, adding that he didn’t expect to make it out alive.
When the Chinese invasion started that October, Deptula was in Koto-ri, a small village in the Chosin Reservoir area, assigned to the Army Signal Corps’ 581st Signal Radio Relay Company. “I wasn’t in the infantry, but I saw a hell of a lot of tragedies,” he said.
It was a brutally cold winter, making the war that much worse for the combatants, many of whom suffered frostbite and lost limbs.
Images of the war dead, their limbs frozen solid and stacked in trucks and jeep-drawn trailers, still haunt Deptula today. Many were buried in trenches quickly dug by bulldozers as the U.N. forces made a hasty retreat.
To get to the evacuation point at Hungnam, Deptula said, the U.N. forces had to “fight like hell,” to break through the encircling Chinese forces. It took 26 hours just to go 40 miles, he recalled. [Stars & Stripes]
The North Koreans continue to tinker with their road mobile ICBM which is their primary strategic deterrent against the United States:
Design changes to a North Korean missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland should increase its reliability but are likely to delay deployment for at least five years, according to a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
The KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missile, which was publicly displayed during an October military parade, has been shortened and simplified, according to 38 North, a website run by Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies that monitors North Korean activities. A blunt warhead that is more likely to survive re-entry replaces a narrow, pointed design, and the missile’s three stages have been reduced to two.
“The underlying technology is mostly the same — a blend of North Korean engineering and Cold War leftovers from the Soviet Union — but the structural design has been substantially improved,” the report said Tuesday. “There is reason to suspect that the new structural technology was illicitly obtained from Ukrainian sources.”
The new KN-08 would have a range similar to its predecessor — about 5,600 miles, enough to reach the U.S. West Coast — with an estimated success rate of 50 percent to 60 percent, the report said. The previous model’s rate was estimated at 30 percent to 40 percent.
“The new design is simpler and more reliable, and thus a more credible threat,” 38 North said. [Stars & Stripes]
I recently listened to the first two Serial Season 2 podcasts about Bowe Bergdahl. Just like Season 1, I have found the Season 2 podcasts to be very well narrated and easy to get into. After listening to the first two podcasts my opinion of Bergdahl has not really shifted. I always thought he was probably a little mentally off and possibly should not have been in the Army much less the infantry. With that said I don’t think he was crazy and he understood the repercussions of his actions. The podcast just reaffirms this for me because he is trying to spin a tale to defend himself about how he was going to walk over 20 miles from his combat outpost (COP) to FOB Sharana to inform his higher level leadership about the bad leadership in his unit. He says that by leaving his outpost it would cause a mass panic that would force higher level leadership in Afghanistan to take seriously his complaints when he showed up at FOB Sharana.
For those of us in the military that have been through Inspector General investigations, the IG is the best way to get the attention of higher leadership if the complaints are valid. Bergdahl supposedly did not know anything about the IG system. I find that hard to believe. Also he claims that after leaving his COP he decided he needed to gather intelligence on the Taliban to hand over to the battalion leadership at FOB Sharana to lessen his punishment. So he decided to divert his route and in the middle of the night look for Taliban setting up IEDs and follow them to their houses. Once back at FOB Sharana he could turn over the locations of these houses to the unit’s leadership. Once again this may all sound plausible to civilians, but for those of us with combat tours in Afghanistan this claim is ridiculous. How is this guy wandering around in the dark going to spot anyone much less follow them back to their house? He had no night vision and ultimately claims he got lost that night anyway. He claims after getting lost he found himself the next morning walking across open desert near a road where Taliban on motorcycles spotted him and detained him.
What was great about the podcast so far is how they were able to get the Taliban’s version of events of how he was detained. They claimed that some nomads contacted villagers to say that a foreigner wearing Afghan clothes was at their tent asking about police and a bus to Kabul. Word eventually got to the Taliban who went and checked it out and detained him. Here is what I think happened. Supposedly Bergdahl spent a lot of time talking with the Afghan policemen at his COP. Bergdahl supposedly had a lot of interest in foreign cultures and tried to teach himself some Pashtun. He was also one of these personalities that thought he was smarter than everyone else. With him hating life in his unit I could see him possibly working out a desertion plan with one of the Afghan policemen at the COP. He supposedly spent most of his time with them, so much time in fact that others in his unit were convinced he was either nuts or a secret CIA agent. So what were they talking about? If he did hatch a desertion plan with them that would explain the Taliban’s claims of him asking something about police and a bus to Kabul. Maybe the policeman was supposed to meet him to help him get to Kabul where he could then contact the international media with his bad leadership claims before turning himself in?
It seems Bergdahl suffers from delusions of grandeur; in the podcast he even says he wanted to be thought of like Jason Bourne by completing the hike to FOB Sharana. If he really wanted to make a huge story about himself, deserting and then appearing at the CNN affiliate in Kabul to air his claims would have been a way to do it. Even this theory is pretty nuts, but I think it makes more sense then wandering around in the dark looking for Taliban planting IEDs to follow them home and then walk over 20 miles in the desert with one Camelbak of water to turn in the intelligence.
Charles Robert Jenkins at his court martial.
No matter the truth of what happened I still hold Bergdahl in the same category of Charles Jenkins. He to was a little mentally off and deserted his post in South Korea to defect to North Korea misjudging the repercussions of that decisions. He spent 39 years in North Korea before being released. The Army still punished him with a month in jail before dishonorably discharging him. I think Bergdahl should get the same punishment. However, unlike Jenkins I don’t think Bergdahl is going to change much. Jenkins’ honest reflections on the stupid thing he did all these years later actually makes him kind of likable. Bergdahl seems like the personality type that will continue to believe he is smarter than everyone else and make excuses for what he did.
There is still a whole season of Serial podcasts to go that will delve deeper into this case so maybe my opinion will change. Has anyone else listened to the podcasts and have an opinion they want to share about Bergdahl?
I hope everyone is having a great Christmas holiday!
Korean KP decorates Christmas tree set up in front of serving counter of HQs & HQs Co, 19th Inf Regt, 24th US Inf Div, as Christmas Day dinner is readied for men of the Co. Korea. 25 December 1951. [Army.mil]
