Give thanks that we live in a country with people like these:

SangerM, whose comment on Americans a couple of posts down was too good not to give wider exposure...

That we are so rich in every imaginable way, and that we can travel around the world in fantastic machines of our own making and deliver food and other aid to people on mountains and in valleys, and everywhere, and that we can do it again, and again, and again... That we don't care if those people can read or write or speak our language; nor what their religion is, or their color, or even if they like us all that much. We just do it because it is the right thing to do. . .

. . . Because it is the right thing to do.

...and another.

Slow Hand salute for a brave young man, unafraid to answer his nation's call, willing to give the last full measure of devotion in defense of our freedom and way of life. Please pray for him and his family in their time of grief.

1st Lt. Dennis W. Zilinski, 1st Battalion, 187th Infantry, 3rd BCT, 101st Airborne Division. Killed in action 19 November, 2005, in one of two separate IED attacks on US combat operational patrols in the vicinity of Bayji, Iraq.

I am deeply saddened at this young man's death. It has brought back all the repressed memories of comrades lost in another war, another time.

How fortunate we are that we have men such as this. How very painful it is when we lose them. God Bless and keep you, Dennis. Farewell.

Jim Ewart
162 AHC
Vulture 29
Can Tho 69-70

Two-Niner and I have sounded our own Taps earlier, in private--but in keeping with Castle tradition, now is the time when we dance In Memoriam.

Friends await him on his journey...