Guess I'll start here.

[razors edge]

Nobody here at DU really knows me, but I would like to change that. I feel it only fair since I have witnessed your heart and soul for the last five years as a lurker who found a place. A place where people who actually thought about what was going on in our world with a lot of brain cells working. I have only started posting here recently. I am a self taught typist who can blaze away a good twenty words a minute.

I left a school system that left me behind and joined the marines at seventeen. In four days it will be twenty five years since I left my hometown for paris island and I have never looked back for shelter from the world I found. I have visited, but I could never go home again.

I was lucky and didn't even know it. I was given the best training the marines had going at the time. Aircraft hydraulics and pneumatics technician serving in Hawaii and the far east. I have been to peace park and seen the handiwork of an atom bomb. I have been to the Philippines and seen the greatness of our military economy for the locals (commonly refereed to as shit street).

I was finally placed in a position with my squadron's maintenance control where we supervised all maintenance on the planes, that we all paid for. I was disgusted with the fraud, waste and abuse from the one service that prided itself on giving money back to congress every year, while still meeting the call to duty. If we had that much shit going on under budget, what where the rest of them up to I always wondered as I scraped pots in the scullery one month a year.

The same armed forces network that now airs limpballs, asked us peons to report such things, so we did, and then the marines promptly dealt with it. I got 30 days correctional custody and an other than honorable discharge 4 days before my enlistment was up, I was lucky. I was threatened by my CO, XO and several pilots and one of our witnesses got a knife in the chest, almost killing him.

That whole scenario has made me a little apprehensive to share in a world where every click on my home phone reinforces the lengths they will go to to control all of us.

I typed in the name diktatrw because I had to take that leap from lurk, to in their face. but I would like to change it if possible.

And if you still wonder why I consider myself lucky, first of all, no plane I ever launched fired on an enemy target with the resultant collateral damage, looking back over all these years, that in itself is enough for me, but I have many other reasons. And I hold no grudge with the military, they were doing what they were told, I guess I wasn't.

[niyad]

1. jThank you so much for sharing a very important part of yourself

with us. and thank you for having the courage NOT to be bound by the fear that the powers-that-be are trying to create in all of us. Wave to agent mikey, and know that you are amoung friends.

[razors edge]

4. thanks alot

will check you guys in the am, gotta work at 8.

[mike_c]

2. good on ya' brother....

Welcome to DU.

[razors edge]

9. thanks mike _c

I kinda like it here.

[knowbody0]

3. now KNOWBODY knows you!

Thanks for sharing your story, sounds like a nightmare for you.

Are you ok now?

[razors edge]

10. Been out for a long time now

so I was just kina shareing where I came from in case you wonder why I may seem a little synical at times. I'm fine but the leadership of this country ain't.

[Erika]

5. Welcome to DU n/t

[babylonsister]

6. Great start, diktatrW. I love aviation and people who have

committed their lives to keeping us, the public, safe. I welcome your views as I know many retired people from the military who will read your post with interest. Thanks.

[vickitulsa]

7. Glad to make your acquaintance -- and I won't call you "Sir"!

I'm a Vietnam-era female citizen who has about 200 close Nam vet pals I've met over the last nine years online and of course IRL all over the place all my life.

Lost my daughter (not to death and not due to combat) to that war, and it changed me forever. Long story, which I've told elsewhere on DU a time or two when it was relevant.

My dad was a WWII vet, Army, Artillery, who fought in North Africa and Italy for two years, two months and twenty-two days and was wounded four days before the war ended in Italy when a German Eighty-Eight shell hit the turret where he was the "sighter." Killed the other two guys in the turret, one of them his best pal who'd had a premonition only a couple of nights before that he wouldn't survive the war even though it was almost over there in Italy. Their group was "just picking up a little rear action," as my dad told it, when they found themselves in a serious situation.

Dad was laced with shrapnel and his hair and clothes were on fire, the ammo in the turret was cooking off, and he followed his training and rolled out of the hatch, down the side of the tank, and then all the way down the berm they were on and into an irrigation ditch alongside it. That put the fire out, but he always asked people when he told this story: "Didja ever try to RUN in two feet of water?"

He managed to get out of the water and headed toward his own guys, under fire from a German machine gun in the second story of an Italian farmhouse (the Eighty-Eight had been concealed in a large haystack nearby) ... and then his own troops drew a bead on him and nearly shot him because they couldn't recognize him as American.

I was, as a result of that family background, raised to be a flag-waving, proud and patriotic American by both my dad and a Rosie-Riveter mom who worked for a time on P-38's before she married my dad. A war marriage, typical of the times, in early 1942.

Now I've had to hugely reduce the number and size of flags I display on my house and car (none on car now, only tiny ones in flowerbed in yard). I'm afraid people will think I support that moran squatting in the White House if I proudly display flags like I'd done all my life before him.

Makes me so mad I want to shove a flagpole somewhere the light don't shine, if you get my drift.

Anyway, that's a part of my story that I felt like telling tonight, after reading your eloquent introduction. I haven't hung out in the Veterans forum yet because I've been in a lot of Nam vets and supporters groups online for years, but I caught your post on the Latest page and just had to reply.

:hi: :patriot: Welcome! So glad you are here and adding your voice to the conversation. IMO folks like yourself speak from a place of a certain authority just by virtue of your life experience in the military. Thanks for serving your country and all of us citizens in it for so long and so well. I hope you didn't lose all your veterans benefits due to that "less than honorable" discharge they hit you with just before you were due to retire!

And I've wondered about what you mentioned -- the possibility of changing one's screen name here in DU. Don't know if it's possible, though I'm not unhappy with my usual handle I use most places.

Be sure to let us know if you get yours changed so we'll know who ya are. Glad yer here and speaking out!

[ms liberty]

8. Thank you for sharing your story...

and Thank You for your service. Welcome to DU!

[razors edge]

11. thanks to all you guys.

I have spent many a hour watching you guys laugh and cry over the shit thats happened since around december of 01. I can remember all the site jam ups during the elections, the anticipation of AAR coming, and all the rest.

We could use a break for a change, maybe diebold will screw up and give us one.