"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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Majpr Van Harl, (USAF)Ret
Bio Here
Preparedness Training
My aunt died and I had to make a trip back to Iowa for her funeral. It was over 900 miles each way and I was driving by myself, so I headed to the library to acquire some books on CD to listen to. There is a book, The Long Emergency: Surviving The End Of Oil, (www.kunstler.com) by James Kunstler, that I wrote a review on over a year ago. It is a non-fiction book that spells out how the world will function as we slowly run out of oil. Mr. Kunstler has two new books out that are fiction, that deal with a small town in up-state New York after the oil is gone.
The first book is World Made By Hand, and I listened to it on my funeral road trip. The book title is the process of life in the US after we are involved in a middle-east war and nuclear weapons attack. Without oil to make electricity all the machines stop working and every thing you done in daily life has to be done by hand. There are no cars to drive or energy saving devices running on electricity to make your life easier. Manpower, with the help of very few horses, is how all work and production is accomplished. The second book The Witch of Hebron, picks up in the same small town and follows the characters in their lives of struggle, living literally hand-to-mouth. They have to grow all their food and make their own cloths. They have to protect everything they own from the “pickers” (bandits) who would rather use brute force to steal than work to produce needed items. There are no modern medicines. If they survive an injury while doing back-breaking manual labor they may not survive the infection their wound acquires, because there are no antibiotics or Viagra. If they survive the wars, the nuclear fallout and the pickers, they may die in the local dentist’s make-shift office from a procedure that was just routine in the good old-days. In this post-apocalyptic world food and firearms are the most valuable things you can own.
Our family recently moved since the Colonel retired from the Air Force and the daughter is graduated high school. We truly loved Colorado, but water or the lack of water is going to severely impact the survivability of this region in the best of future times. If there is a crisis that requires you to grow your own food to stay alive you cannot do that in the arid western part of the US. It would and does even now take fossil fuel (oil) to pump water, to facilitate food production west of the Mississippi river. As I drove east on I-70 across Colorado and western Kansas on my way to Iowa the lack of water was very evident. It was not until I was about 100 miles from Kansas City that I start seeing much natural water in the form of lakes and streams.
My aunt’s funeral was held in the rain and there was mud everywhere. As I road in the van that carried the pall bearers to the cemetery, my cousins complained about the rain. I told them I live in a state that sees very little rain and I, for one, was not complaining about the wet and the mud. I pointed out the standing water in the fields and explained you would not see that in Colorado. Even when there are heavy rains and snows, the ground is so dry it just sucks the moisture right in or wastefully runs off down stream. I believe that in the near future you will have to grow your own food and protect what you have grown by hand in order to feed your family. Protecting what you grow starts with securing your valuable non-hybrid seeds and everything right after you pluck those vegetables out of the ground. There is a T-shirt out there on the market that reads, Ammo-The Currency of the New Millennium. I always say food and firearms are the most valued items in a crisis, when in fact I mean food and ammo. There are more than enough firearms in this country they don’t wear out very rapidly. However the average home in the US that has a firearm has less than 50 rounds of ammo for that gun. Besides using ammo to feed and secure your family, you will be able to barter with bullets. Bartering, a skill and a process you need to learn.
