H. Melville

From the Front Lines "Operation Enduring Freedom" - Three U.S. Servicemen have lost their lives in the War Against Terrorism. To the families of Air Force Master Sgt. Evander Andrews, 36 of Solon Maine, Army Rangers SPC. Jonn J. Edmunds, 20 of Cheyenne Wy. and PFC Kristofor T. Stonesifer, 28 of Missoula, MT, we at the National Alliance of Families offer our deepest condolence.

Taliban Threatens Allied POWs - In statements carried on various news channels, the Taliban threatened a repeat of atrocities committed on American servicemen in Somalia, should any Americans fall into Taliban hands.

Al-Qaeda Offers Reward - October 12, 2001 - Islamabad (dpa) - "Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group has announced a reward of 50,000 dollars for the capture of any American soldier landed in Afghanistan, the

local daily Ausaf reported Friday."

"The newspaper quoted an unidentified al-Qaeda spokesman as saying the group, which is the target of the United States war on terrorism, would also give 3,000 dollars for producing a U.S. military uniform and 1,500 dollars for a captured American gun."

From ABC's "This Week" Oct. 21, 2001 George Stephanopoulos interview with General Richard B. Myers, "... Stephanopoulos: You know, we saw the first U.S. casualties on Friday night and there's also the possibility of prisoners of war, and some people have said that what could happen, knowing the Taliban, is that they would take the prisoners of war and force them to broadcast statements, anti-American statements. And I want to show you something from George Wilson. He's a respected military analyst and he says the Pentagon should liberalize the Code of Conduct so that service people who are broken don't feel guilty for the rest of their lives for giving the enemy more than their name, rank, serial number and date of birth. Do you agree?

Myers: I think we've taken a hard look at the Code of Conduct in the past, and I think we've given instruction to our armed forces that would not put him in that situation. But you bring up a very good point. This is a dangerous war. Those two individuals who gave their lives the other evening -- it was obviously very tragic. But the armed forces of the United States and the armed forces of our friends and allies, I think, are prepared to do that for this very important battle. We have no options here. This is a war we must win if we want to maintain our freedom."

Support Our Troops - Show your support for our men and women on the front lines. Since the Dept. of Defense is discouraging normal or snail mail due to the danger of anthrax (never thought I'd every have to type that sentence) Stars and Stripes has set up an email address for messages that are then posted in European and Pacific editions.

Email your message to supportmessages@estripes.com The messages are printed on Mondays and Wednesdays Messages are limited to 30 words.

If you don't have email Stars and Stripes will accept letters addressed to The Stars and Stripes, ATTN: Advertising-Messages, 529 14th St., Suite 350, Washington, DC 20045-1301.

Messages are also posted on the Stars and Stripes Web site, so those at sea can read them. Visit the site at

http://www.stripes.osd.mil/

Report from Ground Zero - New York Daily News - Oct. 23, 2001 - by Michele McPhee - "The men of Ladder Co. 3 said yesterday that Firefighter Michael Moran was speaking for all of them when he told Osama Bin Laden to "kiss my royal Irish ---" on national television."

"Moran, who works at the Manhattan ladder company, set off a frenzy at Saturday night's benefit "Concert for New York City" at Madison Square Garden when he blasted Bin Laden from the stage. The 13-year-veteran firefighter, whose brother, Battalion Chief John Moran, was one of 12 members of Ladder 3 lost in the World Trade Center disaster, spoke out after being introduced by actor Michael J. Fox."

"My brother John was a chief in SOC [Special Operations Command]," Moran, 37, said. "On behalf of my brother John and 12 members of Ladder 3 that we lost, Osama Bin Laden, you can kiss my royal Irish ---! "And I live in Rockaway Beach. This is my face," Moran said, removing his dress blue FDNY hat."

As Moran left the stage, the audience began cheering and chanting, "U.S.A.! U.S.A!" "Everybody thought what Mike had to say was great," said Ladder 3 Firefighter Tom Kempf, who was in the audience when Moran addressed the crowd. "People kept stopping by the firehouse all day."

Firefighter Chris Tighe, who called Moran "a big teddy bear," said he was not surprised that his burly colleague spewed such venom at terrorist leader Bin Laden, who is believed to have masterminded and financed the Trade Center attacks.

"He said what was on his mind," Tighe said. "He was fantastic. It was the first time we had a good night out. It was the first time we laughed since Sept.10."

Moran's boss, Lt. Reid Jantz, chimed in, saying: "You can let Osama Bin Laden know he can kiss my royal German --- too. And I live in Staten Island."

War Details Remain Secret for Years - From the Associated Press, By Sally Buzbee - Washington "A decade later, Americans still don't know how far special operations forces went inside Iraq during the Gulf War.

Some parts of the fighting in Kosovo and Vietnam -- even Korea -- remain sketchy. Even in conventional wars, the secrets are many. In the war against terrorism, where special operations forces play a crucial, almost unprecedented role, the public may never learn more than a sliver of what happens inside Afghanistan."

"If they catch someone on the most-wanted terrorist list, they might eventually acknowledge that," said John Pike, a military and intelligence analyst in Washington. "But not quickly. Anybody they'll catch, they're going to want to interrogate first" in secret, to help catch others."

"And when American special ops soldiers die? "They'll tell us that," Pike said. "But they may not say where -- or how." Saturday's overnight raids by 100 airborne Army Rangers and other special forces into southern Afghanistan were the first publicly acknowledged covert missions of the war -- and a bit of an anomaly."

"Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday that no prisoners were taken. But he said officials would never again provide such detail. U.S. officials would not say what the raid's objectives were, beyond gathering "useful intelligence" on the movements of Taliban leaders, specifically leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. They wouldn't say what they found, beyond a cache of weapons and documents. They said two soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash in neighboring Pakistan, but provided almost no details."

"Two U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said troops were still conducting secret operations inside Afghanistan -- including some operations that will be kept secret even when they're over.

"Some of the invisible operations we will provide information on," said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "There will be other invisible operations where we will not say a thing."

The reasons for secrecy are clear: To protect soldiers' safety, and to protect tactics that might be used elsewhere. Special ops have to be secret, Pentagon officials say, and they are necessary to hunt Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network. Airplanes and bombs "can't crawl around on the ground and find people," Rumsfeld said.

But maintaining the public's support is more tricky. Americans were so outraged by the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that they will give the military much leeway to wage war, and will not demand constant accounting, said Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution.

But over time, "If people don't get a sense of movement, that this is the direction things are headed, they are going to get extraordinarily antsy," said Dan Goure, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute.

The military will announce its successes, most believe, perhaps omitting details of how they happened. But secrecy also allows officials to hide bad news, at least temporarily. They might wait to announce troop deaths, for example, until they also can announce positive results.

"We will do our best to give you as much information as we can safely provide," Rumsfeld said Monday. He criticized leaks before Saturday's campaign, saying they endangered soldiers' lives, and said "the goal is to confuse" the terrorists. Asked, for example, if helicopters had been used to extract the Rangers from southern Afghanistan, Myers said, "If I were to divulge that, then the next time we conduct an operation somewhere in this world on this globe, people would have an understanding of how we operate."

Goure noted that many military operations, both special ops and conventional, become public only when former soldiers tell war stories -- sometimes decades later.

Details of the killing of refugees at No Gun Ri by Army troops in 1950 took a half-century to surface, Goure said. Information about Sen. Bob Kerrey's actions as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam came out more than 30 years later. Stories of special ops teams hunting Scud missile sites in the Gulf War have appeared, but there has been no hard information about how far the teams went into Iraq.

It's still unclear where all the Apache helicopters were based during the Kosovo air campaign, Pike said.

All of that secrecy will be magnified in Afghanistan - and beyond. "Here, almost everything we do will be behind the line of secrecy," Daalder said. "That's very different."

When Does The Need For Secrecy End - we all agree secrets are necessary to insure the success of ongoing military operations and the safety of the men and women conduction those operations. However, there is no justification in maintaining those secrets for 30 years in the case of Vietnam, 40 - 50 years in the case of the Korean and Cold Wars, and almost 57 years since World War II.

Senate Approves Vietnam Trade Pact - That says it all. One the few friends our POW/MIA have in the Senate did issue a statement regarding the new Trade Pact with Vietnam. The following statement from the Office of Senator Bob Smith, October 3, 2001 was "Spoken on the floor of the United States Senate."

"I do not want to normalize trade relations with Vietnam for a number of reasons--first and foremost, because they have never fully accounted for our POWs and MIAs, and I don't care how many people come on the floor [of the Senate] and say they did. They have not. It is an issue I have worked on for 17 years, and I can tell you right now they have not fully cooperated in accounting for POWs. If anyone wants to sit down with me and go through it on a case-by-case basis, I will be happy to do it."

"Paul Wolfowitz [Deputy Secretary of Defense] agrees. The archives have not been opened. Have they been cooperative to some extent? Yes. Have they been fully cooperative? No. There are lots of families out there who have not gotten information on their loved ones that the Vietnamese could provide. They have not done it. So I don't want to hear this stuff that they are fully cooperative. They are not fully cooperative. There is a big difference between being cooperative and being fully cooperative. They are not cooperative fully. You can ask anyone who works on this issue on the Intelligence Committee--and certainly Paul Wolfowitz knows what he is talking about. He says they are not fully cooperative."

"So let's not stand on the floor of the Senate and say let's normalize trade with Vietnam because they have been fully cooperative when every one of us knows differently. End of story; they are not."

World War II Airman's Remains Returned to Family - from the Associated Press October 18^th - "The remains of a World War II airman killed in a 1944 crash in New Guinea are finally coming home. Sgt. Gilbert F. Smith will be buried Monday in the I.O.O.F. Cemetery. He died at age 23 on March 5, 1944, and had been listed as missing in action for 55 years."

"Nancy Blackard, his youngest and only surviving sister, said family members received an initial call in 1999 that a plane and human remains had been found in New Guinea. Smith, a sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Forces, died with nine other crewman aboard a B-24D Liberator on its way to bomb a target in Hansa Bay, New Guinea...."

Remains of 17 Korean War MIAs Repatriated - from Agence France-Presse - "Washington, Oct 1 (AFP) - North Korea on Tuesday will hand over remains of 17 US soldiers missing since the Korean War, the Pentagon

said Monday."

"The 17 were uncovered by joint US-North Korean teams working near the Chosin Reservoir, site of fierce battles between US and Chinese troops in November and December 1950, and along the Chong Chon river, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of Pyongyang."

" The remains will be placed on a US aircraft and flown to Yokuta Air Base in Japan, before being taken to a US army laboratory for identification, the Pentagon said in a statement. Since 1996, when the joint operation began, the remains of 144 missing US servicemen from the 1950-53 war have been found in North Korea. Eight have been returned to their families for burial, and 12 others are in the final stages of the identification process, the Pentagon said. More than 8,100 US soldiers are still listed as missing in action from the Korean conflict. More than 35,000 were killed."

Vietnam Airman's Remains Repatriated Along With 4 Others - from the Associated Press October 6^th by Janis L. Magin - " Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii - "A military official turned up at Danny Evert's home in Arizona last fall with a request: Would the family mind if then-President Clinton visited the site where his father, Capt. Lawrence Evert, crashed in Vietnam?"

"Until that day, the family had no idea where Evert's plane went down. They had held no funeral, no memorial service for Evert, listed as missing in action and declared dead in 1978. On Friday, a joint military honor guard carried a flag-wrapped casket containing what is believed to be Evert's remains off a C-141 cargo plane. A

ceremony was then held."

"From the very beginning I had this feeling it was going to be a long time. We just waited," said his wife Wanda Allen, who waited 15 years before she remarried. The remains of Evert and five others believed to be American servicemen recovered from Vietnam and Laos were returned to U.S. soil for the ceremony..."

"After the visit from the Defense Department, Danny Evert, 42, and his brother, David, traveled to Vietnam last November with Clinton and viewed the recovery site in the Me Linh district in Vinh Phu province, a 40-minute drive north of Hanoi."

"He said people like my brother and I should be able to bring our fathers home," Danny Evert said, quoting Clinton. Danny Evert was 8 on Nov. 8, 1967, when his father's plane disappeared. He returned to the site in February, this time with their sisters. "It was so important for me to go," said Elizabeth Dempsey, 33, born five

days after her 29-year-old father was lost. "That was the closest I was going to come to my father."

"Officials showed the siblings what they believed to be their father's remains, pieces from his flight suit and a large sole from a boot - their 6-foot-5 father wore a size 13 shoe. Several days later they were told that their father's wallet and dogtags were found, along with a tag indicating he was a member of the Mormon church."

"Evert's remains should be identified within three months but the others may take longer. Three sets of remains returned to the United States from Vietnamese villages are not part of any known mission...."

Hanoi Takes Down For Rent Sign - Moscow, Oct 23, 2001 (Itar-Tass via Comtex) By Dmitry Vinitsky - "Hanoi does not plan to give the Cam Ranh base for rent to any third country, the Vietnamese ambassador to Russia said at a Tuesday press conference in Moscow."

"The base's potential and infrastructure will be used for the social and economic development of Vietnam, he said. The decision of Moscow to close the base two years in advance did not come as a surprise for Vietnam and met its intentions, the ambassador said. The sides are preparing to discuss technical aspects of the base's closure. No date for the negotiations has been set yet."

"The move will not exacerbate relations between Vietnam and Russia. On the contrary, the bilateral cooperation will be fostered after January 1, 2002, (the official date of the base's closure), the diplomat said. "

"Hanoi and Moscow are actively developing a political dialog, trade, economic relations and investments, he said. The two countries are successfully cooperating in the extraction of oil and gas, the energy industry, high technologies and the personnel training.

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