Marine laid to rest before holding newborn son

Detroit marine, new father will have his final salute today
By Gina Damron
Detroit Free Press Staff Writer
July 2, 2012

U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Steven Stevens II, left, with his wife Monique. Family photo

Nearly every day, U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Steven Stevens II would open his email and find pictures of his newborn son.

His wife sent photos and videos when baby Kairo started cooing, laughing and focusing on objects.

Kairo listened to Stevens’ voice across a phone line, and Stevens watched his son over Skype. The last time, when Stevens said his son’s name, Kairo reached toward the computer camera.

“That was like, the best feeling of his life,” Monique Stevens said of her husband, who told her: “Oh, he knows me. He understands me. He knows my voice.”

But Stevens, a 23-year-old stationed in Afghanistan, was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade last month and never got the chance to hold his now 3-month-old child, born eight days after he deployed.
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Vietnam War at 50: A lesson for Afghanistan?

These are reporters that did the research and they added in what happened after most reporters leave off. The Mayaquez Incident

• Vietnam War: Judge and McMahon are generally considered the last to die. Lt. Col. William Nolde, a military professor at Central Michigan University who'd volunteered for Vietnam, was killed by artillery fire on Jan. 27, 1973, 11 hours before the United States signed the Paris Peace Accords. He's considered the last U.S. fatality in the war's combat phase.

But the killing didn't end even after the fall of Saigon. Two weeks later, Cambodian communist forces seized the U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez. The United States launched a military rescue operation on an island where the crew was thought to have been held. When the force withdrew, two Marines — Gary Hall and Danny Marshall — were accidentally left behind, and later killed.

Vietnam War at 50: A lesson for Afghanistan?
By Rick Hampson and Carmen Gentile
USA TODAY
7:32 AM, July 3, 2012

At center, brothers Jeff Walling, right, and Mike Walling, left, sit as their father Air Force Lt. Col. Charles M. Walling of Phoenix, is buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., just outside Washington, Friday, June 15, 2012. Walling's F-4 Phantom jet crashed during a mission in Vietnam in 1966 but his remains were not recovered until 2010. / AP Photo

By April 29, 1975, America's war in Vietnam had been over for two years. But as he stood post at the gate of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, a city encircled by 16 communist divisions, Sgt. Bill Newell got the news: Two fellow Marine security guards had been killed at the airport.

Charlie McMahon and Darwin Judge were new in country; McMahon had arrived 11 days earlier. They'd never fired their weapons in combat. They'd been assigned to the airport in part because it was safer and would be evacuated sooner.

Instead, because of an enemy rocket, they'd be the last Americans to die in the Vietnam War.

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Flashbacks and fireworks

Flashbacks and fireworks
by Chaplain Kathie
Wounded Times Blog
July 3, 2012

We hear the haunting sound of taps played and we get sad. They remember the friends and others "for which they gave the last full measure of devotion" as President Lincoln said. We jump even after seeing the honor guard raise their rifles into the air, then fire the shots. They remember the weapons fired at them.

We get angry sitting in traffic and afraid we're going to get hit when a car is coming too close too fast. They remember the suicide car bombers and bombs planted in the road.

On the 4th of July, we pack up the car, head out to see the fireworks and are willing to sit for hours until it gets dark enough for bursts to light up the sky. For combat veterans, it is waiting for the darkness surrounded by a bunch of strangers they don't feel safe around, waiting for the dark to make their anxiety stronger. When the sky turns black, they hear the sound and smell the burnt gunpowder, and they remember when the night came while they were at war.

Homeless Gulf War Veteran saves life of shooting victim

Homeless veteran credited for saving life of shooting victim
by KING 5 News
Posted on July 2, 2012

A homeless veteran is credited for saving the life of a shooting victim in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood early Monday.

Seattle police said around 3 a.m. near 2nd Avenue and Bell Street, an argument between two men escalated into a fight, which ended with one man pulling out a gun and shooting the other man. According to officers, the victim ran a block before collapsing on the street.

A couple of blocks away, a homeless man known on the streets as Staff Sgt. Royal, a 10-year Army man and a veteran of the first Gulf War, heard the shots and came to the man’s rescue.
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Staff Sgt. Travis Mills fights to recover after losing limbs

Mich. soldier fights to recover after losing limbs
MIKE HOUSEHOLDER
Associated Press
Tuesday, July 3, 2012

VASSAR, Mich. (AP) — Army Staff Sgt. Travis Mills served two deployments to Afghanistan without suffering anything close to a major injury. Then, in a second, everything changed.

On patrol during his third tour in April, Mills put his bag down on an improvised explosive device, which tore through the decorated high school athlete's muscular 6-foot-3 frame. Within 20 seconds of the IED explosion, a fast-working medic affixed tourniquets to all four of Mills' limbs to ensure he wouldn't bleed to death.

"I was yelling at him to get away from me," Mills remembers. "I told him to leave me alone and go help my guys.

"And he told me: 'With all due respect, Sgt. Mills, shut up. Let me do my job.'"

The medic was able to save Mills' life but not his limbs. Today, the 25-year-old Mills is a quadruple amputee, one of only five servicemen from any military branch to have survived such an injury during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Maria Tolleson, a spokeswoman at U.S. Army Medical Command. And instead of serving alongside his unit, he has been spending his days based at Walter Reed Medical Center, working on rehabilitation after the accident that dramatically altered the trajectory of his life.

Mills doesn't dwell on that. Sitting in his hospital bed, he describes his situation plainly: "I just had a bad day at work."

His family — especially his wife, Kelsey — admires him for that.

"I think he's Superman. I really do," she said. "It's amazing to see just how lucky he is. I mean, he's the luckiest unlucky guy."
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