Frank Zappa has been the subject of government force for more than one occasion. In the 60’s, he was prosecuted by the San Fernando Valley police for producing a “pornographic” audio recording. In the 80’s he was brought to a Senate hearing by the unelected “Washington Wives,” namely Tipper Gore. They wanted to tax offensive music, force businesses to hide offensive music under the counter (similar to modern cigarette legislation), among other Soviet-style draconian free speech/commerce violations. You can find those hearings on YouTube, and a very creative track made out of the hearings by Frank Zappa himself, called “Porn Wars”, off of his album Meets the Mothers of Prevention, where he turns the politicians’ voices into pigs (rightly so).

Anyways, here’s a top 10 list of my favorite Zappa albums for all you DB readers to check out:

1. Just Another Band From L.A.

2. Studio Tan

3. Apostrophe (‘)

4. Weasels Ripped My Flesh

5. Hot Rats

6. Waka/Jawaka

7. The Man From Utopia

8. Sheik Yerbouti

9. Zappa in New York

10. Freak Out!

He has two movies, 200 Motels and Baby Snakes, which are the weirdest things I’ve ever seen. 200 Motels is has a very drug-induced feel to it. Baby Snakes has some very weird claymation, so I would refrain from viewing whilst under the influence.

Did I mention that Frank Zappa never did drugs?

Today marks 9 years since Chuck Schuldiner, the driving force behind his bands Death and Control Denied, passed away from a brain stem tumor. Death started out in 1983 as Mantas, arguably the first death metal band. They later evolved from a bare-bones simplicity into incorporating deep melodies, progressive complexity, and powerful lyrics. No Death album is truly the same, as the lineup has changed from album to album. Many Death veterans include Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert, guitarist/vocalist and drummer of Cynic (respectively), guitar virtuoso James Murphy, and Howard Stern Show host and drummer Richard Christy. Chuck had the kind of integrity that you Dueling Barstools readers find familiar in someone like Gary Johnson; very real, down-to-earth, and an affinity for integrity, despite the cutthroat nature of the music industry.

After completing the first Control Denied album in 1999 (after putting Death on hold in 1998), Chuck began to feel a sharp pain in his neck. It turned out to be a rare form of brain stem cancer. He underwent surgery and radiation therapy, and eventually regained health and began writing and recording for the second Control Denied album. He recorded all of his guitar parts, as well as Richard Christy’s drum parts, before he began to get sick again. This time he did not beat the cancer.

A legal battle ensued between the Schuldiner family and the record label. This lasted up until about a year ago, when it was announced that Relapse Records was to pick up the completion of the second Control Denied album, as well as reissue classic Death and Control Denied material and merchandise. So far, Control Denied’s The Fragile Art of Existence has been reissued in deluxe 2CD/3CD editions, and the entire Death catalog is available on iTunes for the first time.

Please take the time to check out Death and Control Denied. If you’re into more brutal metal, I suggest you check out Death’s Scream Bloody Gore, Leprosy, and Spiritual Healing. If you are into more melodic/complex metal, check out Death’s Human, Individual Thought Patterns, Symbolic, The Sound of Perseverance, and Control Denied’s The Fragile Art of Existence.

Check out Death on:

Facebook
iTunes

Check out Control Denied on:

Facebook
iTunes
Fragile Art… on Relapse Records

Also check out the Death/Control Denied/Chuck Schuldiner official website.

R.I.P. Chuck

*contrary to popular belief, death metal musicians do not hate animals

Yesterday on the radio show we were talking about how the government’s new power to shut down WikiLeaks without due process could expand to them being able to do the same to New York Times, Fox News, and yes, even Dueling Barstools. Otherwise known as mission creep- when something goes beyond its original intentions.

Well guardian.co.uk reports that Senator Lieberman is thinking about punishing New York Times for publishing cables shared by WikiLeaks:

Joe Lieberman, the chair of the Senate homeland security committee, told Fox News: “To me the New York Times has committed at least an act of, at best, bad citizenship, but whether they have committed a crime is a matter of discussion for the justice department.”

Lieberman also said that the department of justice should indict Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, under the 1917 Espionage Act and try to extradite him from the UK. Asked why this had not happened, Lieberman admitted there was probably an argument going on over how to charge Assange.

Not only is the power expanding, unlike certain people said wouldn’t happen because ‘WikiLeaks isn’t a news organization,’ but they are using the 1917 Espionage Act, a highly unconstitutional act put into place under the Woodrow Wilson administration. If you know anything about Wilson, he was a progressive and hated the Constitution. The Espionage Act locked up many Americans simply for speaking out against World War I.

Julian Assange is being treated like a terrorist, and it does not look like he will get proper due process, and Senator Lieberman can’t even think of how to charge him.

Say goodbye to the first amendment.

Many presidents in our history have talked about balancing our budget and cutting spending, including even FDR in his first race against President Hoover.

But the walk never matched the talk. Continuously budgets rose, administration after administration. A few like Coolidge cut back a lot, but the trend is there. The talk remained the same, but once in office everyone flipped flopped to some degree, including Reagan. No modern president has ever cut spending in a serious way.

Will anyone ever mean what they say in this area? I say yes. And his name is Gary Johnson.
Will we get the ideal? Maybe, maybe not. There’s a lot to scale back, and government growth will drop. But when that will sum up to a balanced budget depends on the annual rate of decrease in spending. It depends how much Congress is willing to co-operate on scaling back. They’d have to scale back by at least 43% of the budget and sustain and expand upon those cuts annually.

The fundamental problem with most discriminatory laws is that their foundations are in group rights, otherwise known as ‘collectivism.’

Laws based on collectivism have no baseline rule of law; rights are given arbitrarily based on what group you belong to (i.e. groups based on race, color, religion, sexual preference, income, political views, etc.). This also implies that rights come from men, which is clearly not the case. Rights come from our existence as humans, and are not delegated by the will of any man. Collectivism implies that an authority exists to designate which rights you have (most of which have nothing to do with freedom). Without a baseline rule of law, the tyranny of the majority generally decides what rights certain groups of people can have. Examples include Soviet Russia (groups based on income and political views) or the Jim Crow South (groups based on race/color).

Individual rights have a baseline rule of law, such as the freedom of speech or the right to contract, which applies to all humans equally, regardless of what group you belong to. It also gives authority the purpose of protecting these rights, not designating them. It cannot take them away, because the rights exist whether there is a charter for them or not. You have rights, because you exist as a human. You can’t have more or less rights based on some group you belong to. Examples include United States (which was perfected when slavery was abolished and the 14th Amendment insured equal protection).

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is a law based on group rights. It tells individual humans they have different rights because they are homosexual, and anyone with a brain knows that homosexuality is not a choice. It does not meticulously judge each individual person by their merit and ability to perform various tasks necessary to their employment condition. You could have a gay Rambo and he’d be denied.

If the military were a 100% private entity, this would not be the case, because anyone can go to another firm looking for a job (would you want to work for a homophobe anyways?). But since this is the case of government, and government has a legal monopoly on force, they aren’t supposed to discriminate based on some group you may or may not belong to.

DADT restricts speech for only certain people who belong to an arbitrary group. I could openly say I’m a libertarian, and that could irk someone who doesn’t like libertarians. But free speech protects offensive speech, as long as it is not accompanied by violence. If anything, homophobes (or libertyphobes) should recieve penalties based on merit, because they’d be straying from the task at hand which is a term of their employment. Now if they were penalized for being homophobes, that’d be wrong; freedom is a two-way street, as long as there is no violence. Now if a gay member of the military was to sexually harass someone, that should be penalized in the same way if a straight guy were to harass a female member of the military (and vice-versa). Individual rights and equal protection also implies that punishment shouldn’t differ based on groups either (such as politicians getting away with tax evasion).

Haven’t we always been taught that we always don’t end up working with people we don’t like? DADT reverses that age old idea. What if there was a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy for people who whistle abnoxiously when not doing important work-related tasks (such as during lunch or in the parking lot), and talked about his hobby of whistling openly to some people? In any private sector job, it would be stupid to report that to your boss. You should ignore it and focus on your job is what he or she would say. But in the military, what you do in your private life and choose to express to people (in whatever context) could get you fired, simply because some other member can’t get over an arbitrary fact and focus on their job. I think people’s rational self-interest will take over and realize if they focus on such absurd things like the sexual orientation of their colleagues, that it will endanger them in the battlefield. I think they’d be more concerned with staying alive on the battlefield.

Besides, does being gay automatically make you a sexual abuser? That logic seems absurd. If someone does, they (once again) shouldn’t be punished for the gay part, they should be punished for the fact that they initiated force upon another individual, same as if a guy did it to a girl.

Your probably thinking ‘why should Alex care about DADT, because it won’t affect him.’ True, true. It won’t affect me, because I’m straight and will never ever join the military (not even for draft). But I care because 1) I’m not selfish and 2) I can better protect my own individual liberties by protecting others’. Here’s a few examples: when Woodrow Wilson instituted the income tax, the promise was that only the rich would pay taxes, and even then it wouldn’t be that high. At the end of his presidency everyone was paying taxes (and a lot of them, too). By putting people into groups and deciding who does or does not have property rights, you leave it up to man to make decisions. The Founding Fathers understood that men are flawed, so you need to limit their power, and protect the basic rights of the individual. This is known as mission creep.

It can also work in the way where one guy can legislate collectivism from a faith-based way. People of faith will think it’s OK because it doesn’t affect them. But their guy won’t be in power forever, and the next guy will have that power structure to implement anti-faith laws. Both sides would be wrong; the authority should stay out of faith one way or the other.

Same works for DADT. Woodrow Wilson segregated the military based on skin color. The power structure implied by DADT could easily make way for a re-segregation of the military if the wrong guy got a policy making position. And be weary of the ‘common good’ argument that is made, a lot of bad things are done in the name of the ‘common good,’ no matter how well-intended. Getting rid of DADT would limit the power of the government to make policy based on groups, which would prevent the chances of such an injustice like racial segregation from happening in the military again.

We should really think twice about how it might eventually affect us if we support policy that affects people in different groups. We should support protection of individual rights, not arbitrarily designating ‘rights’ based on groups.

I think Ron Paul puts it best when he says–paraphrasing–”individual rights are the biggest enemy to racism.” It is true. Racism is a form of collectivism/group judgement, which is the antithesis to liberty.

So let’s repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ and stop legislating people into groups. Rather, judge people based on the content of their character. And all this coming from a straight guy who wouldn’t even join the military in a time of draft, let alone volunteer.

“You don’t have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.”
-Barry Goldwater*

*Harvey Milk supported Barry Goldwater for president in 1964

I think the PMRC and music censorship brought the U.S. to the edge of Communism in the non-economic/social realm, and it was lead by right-wingers. Glenn Beck often points out that progressivism (a.k.a. big government-ism) is prevalent in both the left and the right; progressive/big government left and right. None can be more true of the so-called ‘right’ of the 1980’s.
As a musician and a big Zappa fan, you can see where my disgust comes from. My dad got into bad terms with the KGB when he lived in the Soviet Union for having albums of non-approved artists. Doesn’t sound too far fetched from what the PMRC was trying to accomplish, huh?

Not to mention that the board was made up of the unelected wives of Senators, including both Al and Tipper Gore.

Consider Judaism. It told a group of people they were more special than the natural order, and proved it by enslaving them in Egypt, bringing them out of Egypt, insulating them from the natural order for forty years, and then reintroduced them to the natural order of things, which is fighting to sustain their collective conception of natural order, which, like many other religions, offer interesting possibilities at what the natural order could be if it were the natural order, which it could be if it implemented its conception of natural order on everyone else.

Rather, religions together accurately depict natural order because the global concert of each religion’s actors all acting simultaneously and at once is precisely nature’s order. This is true even of Atheists who collectively function as a single religion. As do Voluntaryists, however non-coercively. And wouldn’t natural order be interesting if people, whom for so long have done nothing but coerce each other, just stopped it already? Then people could get on with figuring out whom they are, and being that person. What I’m saying is the great Greek aphorism – know thyself – is potentially unfulfilled.

Perhaps it requires a moment to understand that natural order is as natural order does. Whatever natural order may be, it always abides by the laws of physics, markets, and providence. So what all religions – and cultures, which like any collective group of people trying to achieve their conception of the natural order play a substantial role in shaping the natural order – have in common is a good indicator of what’s true about the human experience. For instance, no religion I’m aware of promises that the rain will fall only on the righteous, because clearly that’s not true. All religions that promise the return of its particular prophet or deity disclaim that the precise date or time is unknown. The exceptions to this all prove the rule, such as the Seventh Day Adventists who were so sure Jesus was returning in 1844 they didn’t bother to bring in the crops that year.

That’s why it’s important to consider how accurately a particular religion depicts the immutable laws by which all actors in the concert of natural order must obey, such as gravity and probability. Consequently, I’m particularly tolerant of religions that articulate and are consistent with the natural rights (see Locke, John; Hobbes, Thomas) that shape my conception of the natural order, which is freedom. I suppose that explains a lot about why some people think man made God in man’s image.

For instance, if God was made in my image he’d love freedom, hate coercion, but be a bit of a fatalist, being a big believer in providence and that the best we can do is to do the best we can. Of course, you can say the same of gazelles on African savannah.

Nature, then, provides the natural order with which the human experience is ultimately consistent. The obvious implication is that humans evolved directly from nature, which is scientifically true. Yet common to almost every human is belief in God or religion, befuddling Atheists. Perhaps gazelles marvel at the stars, thanking providence for sparing them from the day’s lions. That doesn’t account beyond nature’s order, however, for the gazelles the lions ate.

The fact is that natural life is short and brutal. Since humans are uniquely capable of attempting to recreate natural order in their conception of what natural order should be it should be no surprise that humans endeavor precisely that. Perhaps left to our own devices in a world devoid of government or religion – like in The Book of Eli, where the natural order of humankind was truly short and brutal – religion would be a most logical conclusion, as a preferable alternative to nature’s brute order. The logical end of that, though, is the same concert of religions, cultures, and individuals, as exist now, all fighting, one way or another, to assert their conception of natural order upon others. The common human experience, then, may be cyclical and never learns from its mistakes, something to which most religions stipulate. As does Cosmology (universe expanding, contracting, and over again).

If in a world devoid of government or religion life is short and brutal, rather than libertopia, one wonders how voluntaryism might take hold if not by force. Consider Ghengis Khan, the original neocon, who sincerely believed the only way to live at peace was to conquer potentially (and often actually) quarrelsome neighbors, and enforce a culture of peace with the hardest of iron fists – which he did. His only mandate to all within his ever-expanding territory was be peaceful. But it took many millions of lives to achieve that peace, and it lasted only as long as he could enforce it. George Bush might say that Khan violated his peaceful principles to implement his peaceful principles. Successfully, too, for a time.

Then again, hundreds of millions of lives have been wasted throughout history for reasons much less noble than creating a culture of relative peace. As a result I’m often convinced that neoconism is the lesser of the evils. The obvious counterargument to neoconism is that Alfred Nobel thought dynamite – his invention and at that time the world’s greatest weapon – would end large-scale warfare. And look how well that turned out. But as a friend pointed out the other day, Nobel may have actually been correct in principle, and his flaw one of scale. Perhaps hydrogen bombs are weapons great enough in global scale to end large-scale warfare, making irritating regional conflicts the norm rather than greater global upheaval.

Of course, regional conflicts involving nuclear weapons may quickly progress to global upheaval, which makes the neoconservative point about the importance of stopping unstable regimes such as Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. By contrast, neoconservatives tolerate Israel’s nuclear arsenal because they don’t think it’d be used for anything but self-preservation. Self-preservation is a natural right, and one superior to the right of coercion asserted by every invader – even those who claim the right of invasion to create a peaceful order. Human’s collective appreciation for the right of self-preservation may be precisely why implementing an aggressive neoconservative strategy effectively frightens the majority of us into inaction on the matter, leading then to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in unstable regions (e.g. Pakistan), the presence of which makes more likely the prospect of global warfare, which is ultimately much worse than irritating regional conflicts.

Worse, not only are we collectively unwilling to preclude the possibility of global warfare by forcibly stopping unstable regimes from obtaining nuclear weapons, we are unwilling even to destabilize those regimes by tearing down the restrictions on nuclear energy in the United States – ironically, the form of energy powering the Navy, our greatest projection of power – and instantly bankrupt unstable and unwanted regimes the world over. The mass proliferation of nuclear energy in America would reduce regional conflicts into simply national conflicts. Or at least nations in a given region couldn’t project their regional conflicts onto us, which would be outstanding.

So do we agree, then, on supporting nuclear energy? And did I mention Gov. Gary Johnson supports bustin’ down the door to nuclear energy in America? I’m on board.

Ultimately, there are three ways to think about whether a law is constitutional: Does it conflict with what the Constitution says? Does it conflict with what the Supreme Court has said? Will five justices accept a particular argument? Although the first three of the potential constitutional challenges to health-care reform have a sound basis in the text of the Constitution, and no Supreme Court precedents clearly bar their success, the smart money says there won’t be five votes to thwart the popular will to enact comprehensive health insurance reform.

That’s interesting, and extremely important.  But it obfuscates a more important issue.  Only 11 out of 50 states are joining the suit.  A medical prognosis is appropriate here: America’s political spine has osteoporosis.  The best thing you can say about 11/50 is that it’s a fraction George Washington would have used.  [Ed. note: I once read, although I can't find any support on the Internet tonight, that Washington used uncommon fractions, like 7/11, 23/31, etc.]   Also, like I said before, referring to Obamacare as reform is a leading candidate for misnomer of the still infant decade, “since the bill entrenches the existing health care industries’ oligopolistic relationship with the federal government.”

While there may be much perspective to be had regarding the implications of the bill, and what is the best course of action to take to repeal it, I’m struggling to find any positive perspective about the fact that only 11 states are joining the fight.  It’s an appropriate time for inspiration from greater men than ourselves:

“The utopian schemes of leveling, and a community of goods, are as visionary and impracticable as those which vest all property in the Crown. They are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional.” — Samuel Adams, via.

“If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” — Samuel Adams, via Pila.

“The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” – Variously attributed, mostly to Alexis de Tocqueville.

Here’s my new favorite, also by Tocqueville:

“I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.”

Finally, Mark Levin reminded us today that Tocqueville warned us, in the early third of the 19th century:

Tocqueville foresaw a slow death of freedom.  He feared that the power of the central government would gradually expand, meddling in every area of our lives, and he was afraid that we would welcome it, and even convince ourselves that we controlled it.

Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately.  It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will.  Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated…

The tyranny he foresaw for us does not have much in common with the vicious dictatorships of the last century, or with contemporary North Korea, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.  “The nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel, but minute and meddling.”  The vision and even the language anticipated Orwell’s 1984, or Huxley’s Brave New World. Tocqueville described the new tyranny as “an immense and tutelary power,” and its task is to regulate every aspect of our lives.

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.

Tocqueville thought we would not be bludgeoned into submission; we would be seduced.  He foresaw the collapse of American democracy as the end result of two parallel developments that would ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power: the corruption of our character, and the emergence of a vast welfare state.  His nightmare vision is brilliantly and terrifyingly prescient:

That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.  It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.  For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

UPDATE: I found some typos and lousy syntax, and fixed it accordingly.

So for three months, Sir Michael Howard shepherded a hundred or so of us future leaders of the world (you’re welcome) through the sorry events of 1914 to 1918. As my friend Rob and I traded jokes in the shadows—he was a fellow Record E-Boarder, and just as punch-drunk as I—the facts and conclusions flew like shrapnel. What an unholy mess it had been, starting as a comic opera (if the Archduke’s driver hadn’t taken a wrong turn, and Princip hadn’t stopped for a sandwich, the assassination would’ve never happened), and ending like a Wagnerian tragedy. Then as now, it’s difficult to keep the facts in order. Ypres, Mons, Verdun, Chateaubriand—is that one, I forget? The battles are almost impossible to keep straight because they are all the same: stupid plans carried out with incredible bravery, unimaginable slaughter ending in utter stalemate.

“By the end of 1915, the French had lost 995,000 men.” That fact alone is enough to paralyze the imagination, or should be. A million men from one country? In three months? And they were just getting started. How many Einsteins, and Picassos bled their lives away into the dirt of Flanders? How many Alexander Flemings or Louis Armstrongs suffocated in a collapsed dugout, or froze to death on the Eastern Front? How many—and now I am speaking as my 21-year-old self—Thurbers or Benchleys or Groucho Marxes perished? What wars really destroy is potential, the future, and that is something simply too big to mourn. And so Rob and I kept joking, even going so far to pop “Sir Mike” into the magazine for an issue or two. He took it all in very good humor; somewhere I have a letter from him mock-failing us both.

There is no story in World War I, only suffering. There are no great heroes who triumph, nor villains who are vanquished; there is no cause thrumming underneath worth all the sacrifice, nor any final victory redeeming it all. It is, to be blunt, some of the most depressing, unsatisfying history one can study. That is its gift to us, and why everyone should have a passing familiarity with it. Especially citizens of countries who emerged from it relatively whole, and have a tendency to forget what they do not wish to remember—yes, I’m talking to you, United States.

* * *

If our modern madness has a name, this is it. The only reason some members of the US military advocated a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union was, obviously, they felt that they and theirs would come out all right. One always believes that one will survive, this is how human beings are constructed. In people like Curtis LeMay, that instinct was infinitely more powerful than their imagination; that’s the difference between him and say, Jackson Browne. I’d argue one cannot be Curtis LeMay—or indeed any part of the modern military—without killing that precise area of one’s imagination. If a neurotic sees death and decay everywhere, the modern military mind sees everything but death and decay, and must, or be unable to function

Finally, the author linked to youtube uploads of the “The Great War”, which is a BBC series on the first world war similar to “World At War.” I’m happy to find it on youtube, and I’ll be watching all of them.

24 Feburary 2010

From: Mellinger, Jeffrey J CSM MIL USA

Classification:  UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

Today, at Arlington National Cemetery, we lay to rest COL(R) Robert L. Howard.  The link for the interview is at the end of this email.

Read a bit about Howard at one of these links: The Robert L. Howard Tribute Website, The Congressional Medal of Honor Society Website, The Washington Post- Medal of Honor recipient Col. Robert L. Howard dies at 70.

COL(R) Howard was arguably America’s most highly decorated Warrior ever, earning more awards for valor (10) than Audie Murphy, but he was surely America’s most highly living warrior until his death.  The US Army Special Forces Command (Airborne) Biographical Sketch.

I had forgotten that Audie Murphy was a highly decorated combat veteran who earned the Medal of Honor.

Color image from the Robert L. Howard Tribute website.

Wounded 14 times in 54 months of combat duty in Vietnam, Robert Howard was awarded 8 Purple Hearts and was believed to be the most decorated living American.

Colonel Howard served five tours in Vietnam and is the only soldier in our nation’s history to be nominated for the Medal of Honor three times for three separate actions within a thirteen-month period. He received a direct appointment from Master Sergeant to 1st Lieutenant in 1969, and was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Richard M. Nixon at the White House in 1971. Colonel Howard is one of America’s most decorated soldiers. His other awards for valor include the Distinguished Service Cross – our nation’s second highest award, the Silver Star – the third highest award, and eight Purple Hearts. He was the last Vietnam Special Forces Medal of Honor recipient still on active duty when he retired on Sept. 29, 1992.