Trippster
14 years ago
There you go Vikes, screwing it all up. Here I have this awful idea of you and your horrid passion for all things purple and then you have to go and blow it by telling me about your past activities and show that not only are you normal and a hero, but you were a good looking kid too. (although I am sure your looks have diminished after years of rooting for the Vikings, kinda like sever drug addiction) :thumbleft:

I am proud to be associated with you.

Thanks for your bravery so some 10 yr old could grow up in Wi and MI and become a Packer fan.

Putting yourself in danger for an ideal is brave. Putting yourself in danger so other's can be idealistic is heroic.

Dead or Alive, every damn one of you are my hero.


Thank You
"Let Your Light Shine!"
Pack93z
14 years ago
There isn't many a time that I find myself lost for words or a way to properly express the emotions that dwell inside me.

VR, Foster, Nonstop, Steve, WPR and family.. it has been an honor to get to know you all via this medium of communication. You and your comrades in arms sacrifices have not been forgotten and certainly should never be.

My father spent several years in the Green Beret, but rarely speaks of anything but his stateside time. I have heard the very little I know via my grandfather and uncles, but even they know very little of his time outside of the states. There are reasons I can't pretend to understand why he doesn't speak upon it; I only asked one time and haven't broached the subject again.

Yet I know at times he remembers or reflects on something and the emotions are still raw yet today. A simple stare into the open tells his story without a single word.

VR.. thank you for sharing a small piece of your story and those that served with you.

Last fall we placed a Legacy Stone in the High Grounds  park for my Grandfather. Much like some of the other memorials around the country it is a truly moving experience to take a walk and honor those that have served this great country.

Thank You.

And since you shared a little about Jim Wall in this thread, I thought it might be fitting to post a little more about Jim from past conversations we have had about the man. In his honor...

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"The oranges are dry; the apples are mealy; and the papayas... I don't know what's going on with the papayas!"
Cheesey
14 years ago
Helps to keep priorities in order.
THANK YOU Vikes, and all the brave men that have fought for us!
I NEVER take our freedoms for granted.

Back in the 1990's they had the traveling Vietnam Vet wall on display in Port Washington. I went to see it.
Even though my cousins that fought there came back, i wanted to see, to touch the wall. I cried when i did so.
It makes it "real" when you actually see it. The Vets that were there to see it, well, to see them and what it meant to them.........you'd have to be pretty cold hearted not to be touched.
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Rockmolder
14 years ago
Vikesrule might've resigned from PackersHome, but he had the most amazing veteran's day 'story' I've seen so far.

So, to Vikesrule.
Cheesey
14 years ago
Amen.
I sure miss ol Vikey Poo.
UserPostedImage
a year ago
John Kass magnificently wrote:

MEMORIAL DAY, LEST WE FORGET

By John Kass May 30, 2022

https://johnkassnews.com/memorial-day-2022-lest-we-forget/ 

We had some fine traditions in America, though many have been pushed aside because they get in the way of modern politics.

And when it comes to patriotism on the days when we mourn our war dead, you can feel the media groaning. Patriots and patriarchs aren’t much appreciated these days. They’re now considered just too toxic, too masculine and they’re such a bother.

America once prized merit and competition. Now, though, we prize politics and our cultural institutions strive to make Beta males. There are unintended costs to all of this, including all those young men lost, boys adrift without fathers to guide them, lonely confused boys who rage in the anonymous shadows of social media. Add unfettered access to violent violent video games, unfettered access to internet porn, raised by mothers who resent the fathers who walked away, shaped by anger and the social isolation that comes from closing schools for the past few years.

Throw in the absence of a spiritual life and the absence of a common morality. Add guns. This stew of rage boils over into murder sprees, in rural areas, in urban centers.

We ignore what we feel in our bones to be wrong. We’d rather play our politics instead.

Ultimately the day comes—and it always comes—when some other powerful nation that isn’t obsessed with creating Beta males shows up with its armies. They come to take all that you have and all that you’d ever dreamed of having. They come to take your food, your life, the lives of your children. Your spine. Your hope. Your identity. Everything.

And then you don’t have a country. The landless descend into wandering barbarism. They become as beasts of no nation, because their nation is gone.


Don’t think it can’t happen. It happens. It has happened in many other ages. It happened to Thebes. That nation had destroyed the unstoppable superpower and military might of Sparta, but soon Thebes was itself destroyed, all the way down to the scattered, nameless stones, the people dead or sold off in the slave markets. And who and what they were was forgotten. All that was left were scratches on stones bleaching like bones in the sun.

History tells us these stories again and again, if we’d listen. History warns of what happens to nations that weaken themselves and abandon their own borders, prizing sensitivity and men without chests above virtue.

A culture becoming fragile is awash with tears, but it becomes dry, like pottery. It cracks. And as the ages forget the names, history smirks.

When the people are threatened, with the people desperate and frightened, it is then that soldiers are appreciated, welcomed and needed. The armed forces, forming that thin line between civilization and chaos are honored for a time. Though eventually, if they’re successful in defense, they are inevitably forgotten, again. All soldiers throughout history have understood this dynamic, especially in free, prosperous nations like ours.

Our war dead didn’t risk or lose their lives to be praised and petted with flowery words. They knew they were led to slaughter by fine words from the double-tongues about great honor and great sacrifice. But they also knew this:

They had a job to do, protecting our liberty and our nation with their bodies and blood.

I suppose they hoped, as Americans, that we would live up to our half of the bargain and not dishonor the freedom they’d given to us, that was bought with their lives.

Traditions are an important means for a people trying to stave off cultural betrayal. This is why traditions are often targeted by agents of change. The old traditions remind us who we are, what we were, reminding us of our ideal selves, of virtue lost to time and what we call progress.


But today is Memorial Day, 2022, when we mourn the fallen of the United States Armed Forces who died for our liberty.

And because it is Memorial Day, not burger and beer day, not sports day, not play video games day, not chips and dip day, there is one tradition I hope we try our best to keep.

It involves us taking time out to think hard and long about a soldier’s poem and the poppies, row on row.

“In Flanders Fields” is that soldier’s poem, written in World War I by Col. John McCrae, a man who’d seen the devastation of war, and hopelessness. Yet with clear eyes and a clean heart he wrote of poppy blossoms as rebirth of hope, those bright orange/red papery thin blossoms, as delicate as dreams, waving in the breeze over the freshly dug graves of the dead.

The scene was Ypres, Belgium at a farm converted to a military hospital, where McCrae was an Army doctor, doctor, dealing with pain and death and disease. Flanders Fields is particularly tragic. The political leadership had led their citizens into hell, and still the citizen soldiers marched toward death and the trenches and the barbed wire, and the gas.

My mother, 92 years old and born of the United Kingdom, hasn’t forgotten. She was born in Guelph, Ontario, the town where Col. McCrae is from. She knew his family. They all knew of the McCraes, but they did not treat them as celebrities. Instead, they respected them.

My mom would put a book of his poetry on the breakfast table when my sons were little boys, so that we’d remember as we taught the boys. And that is how traditions are maintained.

And my friend Bill Gritsonis, a former soldier of the U.S. Army and member of the American Legion Hellenic Post 343 hasn’t forgotten. The entire American Legion hasn’t forgotten. The legion remembers the poem and the poppy, and members hand out poppies to help commemorate Memorial Day.

“We’d hand out the poppies around City Hall,” he said. “Some of the veterans who survived are so very old. They’re still holding on. We have to do this for them, for us, for our kids, for our country. We just can’t forget.”

On this Memorial Day, when too many of us are thinking of grilling meat and drinking beer and staring at ballgames with sports announcer talking of the loss of a game as if it is death. American Legion posts and Veterans of Foreign Wars and many other groups will attend and participate in ceremonies of somber remembrance and mourning.

Some will be at parades in small towns. Or in quiet gatherings in cemeteries. They’ll bow their heads as ae bugler plays “Taps” in a town square, or as the notes from the horns echo on the gravestones in great national cemeteries.

American Legion Hellenic Post 343 plans on being at Elmwood Cemetery, in River Grove, Il., as they have for years, since the 2011 dedication of the Hellenic American Veterans Memoria that honors Greeks who served.

“This began way before my time, with others, the group as a whole, Hellenic Post 343 bought the land at Elmwood Cemetery, raised the funds,” Gritsonis said. “The Scouts remember. Our former commander, Anastasios “Steve” Betzelos, he’s 98 and a half. He’s going to try to make it.”

Gritsonis isn’t looking for a mention. He’s not like that. Once a top soldier, he doesn’t seek glory in the words of others. He’d rather that I write around his name. But he and other former U.S. Armed Service Personnel and those on active duty will remember.

Why? Once you learn about Flanders Fields, once you read the poem, it sears. It is difficult to forget.

And perhaps because we all come from someplace else. We’re Americans. And whatever our ethnicity or creed, we’re bound together by the ideas that maintain our liberty. They’re written in the Constitution of the United States and The Bill of Rights added to the Constitution by wise and great men, that form a nation that is still the last, best hope of mankind on earth.

Some old soldiers will be asked about Col. McCrae’s poem and the poppies on the graves. I hope they’re asked about it. You might want to print this poem out, take it with you to the cemetery, or a parade, or a lonely grave.

You might leave a copy of the poem on a picnic table, as others stuff their faces and guzzle beers without a thought of the Americans who gave everything for them. I don’t mean to shake it at them as if it’s some kind of dare. We’ve had too much of that on all sides.

Politicians and their angry mouthpieces are waging wars of words right now over what to do in the aftermath of mass shootings, like the one in Texas. The way they talk, they’re all about winning some kind of advantage, hoping to crush their political opponents. It’s as if their words were political tomahawks fashioned from the bones of the dead children from that school in Uvalde. The dead children become the pointed tips of their rhetorical spears.

And others wage wars of words over escalating the war in Ukraine, the same voices that frightened the nation about those weapons of mass destruction that couldn’t be found in Iraq, the same voices that argued for that war. The same voices that assured us that Western-style democracy could be imposed on people with no idea or appreciation for our democratic traditions. These are same voices that told us not to worry about the rise of the American Surveillance State.

And all these barking dogs on all sides sound as if they have a deep faith, not in God, but in themselves, and their own special talents. The anonymous life on social media has left them unbound. They rage and become their own gods, and for as long as they keep barking, I suppose they feel they’ll never be held accountable. So the barking continues.

When “In Flanders Fields” was first published anonymously, in the English magazine “Punch” on Dec. 15, 1915, it seemed as there was a common purpose to our history. And then as now, the young wanted so desperately to live.

It became an anthem. Here is John McCrea’s poem:

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved, and were loved,

And now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch, be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.”


There have been other poems. But this, to me, to many of us, on this Memorial Day 2022, when we mourn our war dead, is one of a kind.

‘Lest we forget.

-30-


I hope we all take these words to heart.
Go Packers!!!!
Cheesey
a year ago
Whenever I see someone that is wearing a veteran's hat, I make sure to thank them for their service.
And you wouldn't believe some of the responses from the Vietnam vets. I have had some tear up, saying no one had ever thanked them. I have had their wives sneak aside and thank me for doing so. Many times I ended up talking to them for 10 or 15 minutes.
No matter how you feel about the Vietnam war, the soldiers were doing what they were told to do by their country. They were serving honorably.
And the few WW2 VETS that remain are the greatest generation.

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dhazer (14h) : Steelers sign Patterson because of new kickoff rule interesting
Zero2Cool (17h) : Former #Packers TE Josiah Deguara is signing a 1-year deal with the Jaguars, per source.
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dfosterf (28-Mar) : For the record, I enjoy Beast and Mucky drafts
Zero2Cool (27-Mar) : Haha
Mucky Tundra (27-Mar) : No time for talking! Back to work beast!
beast (27-Mar) : You saw only 4,201 of my mocks? 🥺 I think that means you missed more than half of them 😢
dfosterf (27-Mar) : Does anyone know what Lambeau field improvements got put on hold? My guess would be for the 2025 draft
Zero2Cool (27-Mar) : It's like listen, you made 4,201 mocks, no shit.
Zero2Cool (27-Mar) : Cuz during the draft "I had them mocked there!" as if it's amazing.
Zero2Cool (27-Mar) : They're fun to do once in awhile. It's people who think they are "content" that annoy me.
dfosterf (27-Mar) : Against tbd
dfosterf (27-Mar) : Answer to your question is yes, it's a Thursday, will be the Chiefs aga
dfosterf (27-Mar) : Luckily for all concerned, I don't post them. I did one, but that was like 25 mocks ago
Zero2Cool (27-Mar) : NFL 2024 gonna start Sept 5th isn't it???
Zero2Cool (27-Mar) : Ugh... kids these days!
dfosterf (27-Mar) : I'm gonna go do some more mock draft hell instead 🤪
Zero2Cool (27-Mar) : Did we do one of those prediction threads yet for 2024 season?
dfosterf (27-Mar) : In my city, they are playing the nimby game, in order to keep some railroad tracks vs. 2 professional sports teams and a concert venue.
dfosterf (27-Mar) : And/Or a city council, of which I haven't seen a good one in a very long time
dfosterf (27-Mar) : That sounds like a Mayor, not a city.
buckeyepackfan (26-Mar) : Packers halt scheduled 80mil upgrade of stadium until lease agreement talks are restarted
Zero2Cool (26-Mar) : City of Green Bay puts Packers' Lambeau Field lease talks on hold
buckeyepackfan (26-Mar) : Packers 1 of 3 teams to vote no on new kickoff rule.
Zero2Cool (26-Mar) : Packers sign another Kicker
dfosterf (26-Mar) : Lengthy explanation at PFF if you click the link
dfosterf (26-Mar) : Kickoff rules officially changed.ngthy explan
Zero2Cool (26-Mar) : lol
Cheesey (26-Mar) : 2009? No thanks! One open heart surgery is enough!
dfosterf (26-Mar) : Good for you!
Zero2Cool (26-Mar) : Yes. That's the one.
dfosterf (26-Mar) : Is that "Lady Dugan" per chance?
dfosterf (26-Mar) : Crystal?
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Zero2Cool (26-Mar) : Alan posts. Crystal back in my life. It's 2009 all over again! Lol
Mucky Tundra (26-Mar) : BAH GAWD! THAT'S CHEESEYS MUSIC!
Zero2Cool (25-Mar) : Gutekunst said early stages of Jordan Love contract being discussed.
Zero2Cool (25-Mar) : Shouldn't be penalized cuz official screwed up
Zero2Cool (25-Mar) : Yeah, challenge until you are incorrect twice.
Zero2Cool (25-Mar) : Fining them is the goal, per the people who made the rule anyway.
dfosterf (25-Mar) : Still waiting on the kickoff rule changes. Did hear yesterday that the touchback proposal will now be the 30 yard line, not the 35
dfosterf (25-Mar) : Probably speed of game issues with your proposal
dfosterf (25-Mar) : Hopefully the refs don't get in the habit of throwing flags on this
beast (25-Mar) : I think when it comes to Challenges should get two strikes, so unlimited challenges as long as they keep winning them, but 2 wrong then done
dfosterf (25-Mar) : Still subject to the fines etc
dfosterf (25-Mar) : Yes, I should have been more specific. Also, they are now saying it would be a 15 yard penalty. That makes more sense .
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