Cpl Jason L. Dunham, a United States Marine, has been posthumously awarded the Metal of Honor by President George W. Bush.

On April 14, 2004, in Iraq near the Syrian border, the corporal used his helmet and his body to smother an exploding Mills Bomb let loose by a raging insurgent whom Dunham and two other Marines tried to subdue.

The explosion dazed and wounded Lance Cpl. William Hampton and Pfc. Kelly Miller. The insurgent stood up after the blast and was immediately killed by Marine small-arms fire.

“By giving his own life, Cpl. Dunham saved the lives of two of his men and showed the world what it means to be a Marine,” said Bush.

I used to stand inside the battalion headquarters of my unit when I was a Marine and read about WWII, Korean and Vietnam war Metal of Honor recipients, and it seemed so distant to me. Their names were on plaques on the wall, with the official record of how they earned their metal. A different time. That was during the Clinton years, and we as a country were not doing much in the way of combat and war. To read about this now, it’s a little stirring. However anyone may feel about the war, this man gave his life to save his friends. There’s no denying the heroism and valor of Cpl. Jason L. Dunham, a Marine and a Hero.

I’m currently creating a pathfinder for reference sources on the Atomic Bombing of Japan for a course I’m taking. While searching for information and compiling a list of reference sources I came across Paul Tibbets’ website. Paul Tibbets was the pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima.

I don’t generally make it a point to use this blog as platform to engage in polemics, but I can’t ignore this terrible site. I know it’s easy to point at others to find faults in them than it is to have walked in their shoes, but I’m sure that if I had the incredibly unlikely moral lapse of Tibbet’s magnitute and had been the pilot dropping that weapon of mass destruction that lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of people including children and elderly, I doubt I would have created a website that sells ‘collectible items,’ baubles and various frippery celebrating the event.

Here’s a quote from a source I’m using:

A woman about a mile from the blast center remembers seeing people stark naked, their clothes in rags. “Their hair was stiff, ruffled out and burnt short,” she said. “Their hands were so severly burned that they could not move them. They were forced to flee with their hands held out before them.”…John Hersey describes a group of about twenty men: “…they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks.”

Here, have some of the ‘explosive’ themed hot sauce Paul Tibbets sells from his site.

Quote from World War II: America at War 1941-1945 by Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen

Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body, is an online museum (with a real world presence) administered by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. The online museum is a beautifully designed collection of exhibitions, galleries, and educational tools and resources related to forensic science and history. The entire site is illustrated with fascinating drawings and photographs. The site’s theme touches on how human anatomy is used to solve crimes. There are historical accounts of forensic science in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the gallery has a presentation of artifacts from this history.

The site is geared at the K-12 student group, but anyone might learn something.

forensic, information, museum, history

has collaborated with the National Records Archive to digitize their video. Google Video has for viewing. The account of Orson Wells reading of H.G. Well’s was fascinating. The Apollo 11 moon landing mission is a good watch as well.

, government, video, archives, history

The Drawn! blog has found a gold nugget. A collection of drawings by Leonardi Da Vinci. There’s quite a few, and they’re all very beautiful. On the bottom of the page are a few links to more information about the famous artist and inventor.

art, history, information,

The Memory Hole is another very interesting information resource. Their explicit purpose is:

to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known.

They have a vast collection of government and non-government information, obtained using the Freedom of Information Act, through submissions, and other means.

There’s a lot more than what I’m going to mention here, but I’ll list what I found and liked while quickly browsing.

Some things about 9/11:

A five minute video of George Bush after he had been told that a second plane had hit the WTC. You can see him being told right at the beginning, and then sitting throughout a reading performed by young children.

An audio file of an air traffic controller tower monitoring Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. There’s discussion about yelling heard, a heavily accented voice saying a bomb is aboard twice, then flight 93 changes flight abruptly, then silence, and then it disappears from radar and visual.

Also the NYC Figherfighter radio transmissions before the WTC collapse (excerpts, the full audio, and police transcripts).

Other:

Films From the National Reconnaissance Office
Three short films in which the nation’s spy-satellite agency talks about itself.

FBI Research Reports on the Ku Klux Klan
Kind of interesting I thought.

LSD Reports From the US Military
Three Army reports on experiments involving LSD. (The documents date from the 1960s and 1970s.

The Memory Hole collects many other information resources, saving them from ‘the memory hole’ where information disappears forever, including:

• Government files
• Corporate memos
• Court documents (incl. lawsuits and transcripts)
• Police reports and eyewitness statements
• Congressional testimony
• Reports (governmental and non-governmental)
• Maps, patents, Web pages
• Photographs, video, and sound recordings
• News articles
• Books (and portions of books)

It’s worth giving it a once over.

american, history, government, information, library, george bush, 911, video, audio