"THE HANDCART BOYS"
He's lying in the tree line, blood running down his arm.
Listening for the sound of the Handcart boys, to remove him from this harm.
He flew in on a modern jet that got shot down in this affray.
But he is no different than the wounded at Shiloh, trying to survive, till they safely take him away.
In the dark of the night she waits with so much pain to bear.
Injured in the crash of her aircraft and now this seemly endless nightmare.
Where is the chopper that will lift her from the smoke, the fire and the pain?
Where are the Handcart boys, hurry, her life is beginning to drain? He was wounded when a round slammed onto the "cruiser's" deck.
Shards of metal are protruding from the right side his neck.
The corpsman has stopped the bleeding; he's been prepared, to be extracted in the night.
The Handcart boys are racing his way, and will be there by first light.
Get in, get them out, and hurry back, to the safety of our lines.
It has been this way since ancient wars, to the battles of modern times.
The two-wheel Handcart is the way the wounded were removed from battles in past wars.
Our modern Handcart has a rotor-blade and sliding doors.
Look at history, look at art work, or at movies if you will.
When it came to removing the wounded off of some war torn desolate hill.
It was a Handcart carrying the broken and the dying with their screams of pain.
It was a Handcart transporting at Normandy in the cold June rain.
Every branch of the service has its modern version of the Handcart boys who respond to the call.
They go out for the wounded and dead, bring them back, get them all.
Some times the Handcart boys are brought back in a Handcart not of their own.
Some times they become the wounded & the dying, and for their efforts, they never come home.
There are also women who work these, latter-day Handcarts and their lives too, are on the line.
It is a dangerous mission, but just as their predecessors they to make that recovery in time.
They move out over the desert, into the night as the sand blows and swirls.
These Handcart operators are our Handcart girls.
I have a two-wheeled wooden handcart with an old worn flag sitting out on my front lawn.
It is not a protest, it's a reminder of our injured, who returned by Handcart, lying there upon.
In order to defend this Nation, we will continue to send the brave & young, our freedom they earn.
And we will always have a need for the Handcarts, for our wounded and dead, they must return.
Major Van E. Harl, USAF Ret. 15 March 2003
Vanharl@aol.com
Special Operations Wing – SOW
Pigs are important in special-ops.
One is always on guard duty at Rescue Rock.
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Internment, 1942, and the Future
In Cody, Wyoming there are the remains of a WWII Japanese-American internment camp. Heart Mountain Relocation Center (HMRC) was the name of the camp. Sounds pleasant enough, sort of like a summer camp in the mountains that big city folks drive to for a season of family fun.
It is only sixty miles from Yellowstone National Park; perhaps the Kuwahara family could stop and see Old Faithful before driving over to HMRC. No, it was a concentration camp, just like the British built for the South Africans in the Boar War and the Nazis built for the Jews in WWII. These two former stringers-of-barbed wire viewed their internees as enemies of the state. At HMRC the internees were in most cases American citizens. While these folks may have been Americans, they did not look like “normal” Americans, you know blond haired, fair skinned, rugged Anglo-Saxon (read German) northern European types. “Real” Americans did not look like the people standing behind the wire at HMRC.
We were attacked by surprise on 7 December 1941, but by the military forces of the nation of Japan, not the Inouye family of Southern, California. In fact, Grandpa Inouye had fought as an American soldier in WWI and was hauled off to HMRC in his old “dough-boy” infantry uniform, with his combat ribbons and medals, now, not so proudly displayed on his uniform blouse.
Of course, you have to realize that I was born in 1955 and did not live the hysteria in the US just after Pearl Harbor. This nation was still in open segregation against blacks and the numerous anti-Asian laws on the books did not help the plight of the Japanese-Americans. I believe the 7 December attack allowed the prejudice against, in many cases very successful Japanese-Americans, to boil over and now there was a legal (although not right) excuse to persecute Americans of a different race.
Approximately 110,000 Japanese-Americans were removed from their homes and sent to one of ten camps in the interior of America, to keep our coastal shorelines safe from “those people” who might want to help the Emperor of Japan invade California. In pictures of HMRC it looks like many of the WWII Army camps that were built in haste at the beginning of the war. Being retired military, as I walked the site of HMRC if you did not know what really happened there you could get the feeling it was the very camp grandfather trained at before he shipped out to the Pacific to avenge Pearl Harbor. Granted very few, if any, prisoners / internees were every mowed down in a hail of machine gun bullets as they tried to rush the wire to escape HMRC, but some did actually go to real prison for draft evasion. As a young American male you were, by law, required to register for the draft and expected to serve our country if called to fight. And yes, men interned at HMRC were required to register and then go fight if called to war to defend the very nation that locked them and their family behind barbed wire. Oh, and just before you shipped out your grandmother died in camp because her body just could not take the sub-zero weather of north-west Wyoming living in a tar paper shack.
There is now a Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation (heartmountain.org) that was established to preserve what is left of that camp and the memories, both bad and good, that were created there. Three replica buildings have been constructed to be used as a museum and educational center, with a grand opening this August 19-21 2011.
I came across the phrase “Balance our concern for national security with a commitment to respect the basic civil rights of all our fellow citizens” in reference to remembering these camps that imprisoned citizens whose only crime was being an American who looked different.
I believe this nation will be attacked again on US soil. It will be horrific and we will seek out and destroy those who perpetrated the act. I fear it will be people who will not loo,k and in this case, even think the way “we” do. Barbed wire is cheap and easy to string and alleged bad people who hurt good Americans standing behind that wire make for great photo-ops.
If you are not an American citizen living in the US and you don’t like us--go home. But if you are an American and you look different (whatever that means) HMRC can not happen again. This is also why we have a Second Amendment that allows citizens to arm themselves against an unjust government; protection, not insurrection.
To learn more about life during internment visit:
