Barrel shaped black and gold semi precious gemstone Apache Gold designer cabochon 51 mm long by 18 mm wide and 4 mm thick.
Oval shaped brown semi precious gemstone Bruneau Jasper designer cabochon 53 mm long by 31 mm wide and 4.5 mm thick.
Beautiful pictures of wonderful dyed fabrics used in a variety of designs accompany detailed advice on the materials required, preparing the fabric and the dyeing methods. Using Shibori techniques - folding, pleating, clamping, stitching and pole wrapping, the author illustrates all the different stages, using clear step-by-step photographs and easy-to-follow text. A stunning sequence of inspirational projects have been specially chosen to develop skills and build confidence, with instructions on how to make a tea cosy, a jacket, a silk scarf and more.
"Everything is very well explained and illustrateda good introduction to indigo." International Journal of the Guild of Silk Painters
More than 300 colorful photos and behind-the-scenes details reveal the fascinating story of Japan’s cotton and indigo, and their enormous contribution to fiber arts worldwide. Learn how Japan and its top fabric designers, quilters, scientists, and artists combinetradition and high ...
Michaela Marie Chadwick (nicknamed Mica) has inherited Sea Crest, her great-great-aunt's home on the island, ...
Michaela Marie Chadwick (nicknamed Mica) has inherited Sea Crest, her great-great-aunt's home on the island, Indigo Bay. Built in the early 1800's, the old home has been converted to a bed and breakfast. Mica sees her inheritance as an opportunity ...
What do time travel, invisibility, ruthless assassins, mind-control, insanity, witches, artificial intelligence, drones, a plague, and a blue dog have in common? Indigo-this seventh juggernaut in the Pseudoverse Series is one-third science fiction, one-third horror, one-third fantasy, and one-hundred percent ...
This book is a must for the parents of unusually bright and active children. Indigo children are those who display a new and unusual set of psychological attributes and show a pattern of behaviour generally undocumented before. In this groundbreaking ...
A disgraced DEA agent pursues justice-and the mother of his unborn child-in rural Tennessee.AFTER THE ...
A disgraced DEA agent pursues justice-and the mother of his unborn child-in rural Tennessee.AFTER THE FALLWidow Timberlynn Barstow is pregnant-not by her beloved husband, but by the man she holds responsible for his death. Big, blond, infuriating Sawyer Ellison has ...
It's been almost ten years since the first volume in Ronn McFarlane's survey of Scottish lute music, and this one picks off where the last one left off -- with selections from lute books of the 16th and 17th centuries ...
Nothing in the packaging of this release explains the title razor blades, little pills, and big pianos, but it was accompanied by a burst of publicity outlining prior substance abuse on the part of British pianist James Rhodes. He seems ...
Col. James McDonough, USA (Ret.), graduated from West Point and served in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader in the legendary 173d Airborne Brigade. A military theorist who has helped shape the post-Cold War army’s thinking, he is also the author of The Defense of Hill 781 and The Limits of Glory. Now retired from active duty, McDonough lives with his family in Tallahassee, Florida.
Slowly the jeep pulls away, and I watch my driver, Phil Nail, trying hard to demonstrate his mastery over the alien vehicle. He has been driving only a few days, and his eyes dart nervously. His new job is a result of my final act of concern for the men of my former rifle platoon. Although Nail is uncomfortable, I am glad I had him transferred. As a rifleman, he was wounded three times. He's been lucky so far, but I know the odds are against his pulling through a fourth wounding. The longer he allows himself to stay in the relative safety of LZ English, the base camp for the 173d Airborne Brigade, the more likely that he will survive to the end of his stay in Vietnam. Having him transferred is the one small gesture I can make before going home, an act I hope will lessen, if only minutely, my feelings of guilt for going home on my feet. How well I know that there are many Phil Nails still out there in the bush. For them I can do nothing.
In the hot sun I stand beside the short airstrip of LZ English, waiting for the helicopter to take me to Camranh Bay, where the DC-10 waits to take me home. It is a quiet morning. From my vantage point on the small, leveled hill that houses the airstrip, I can see across the barbed wire fence to the rice paddies and the village of Bong Son beyond. Amid the tall, green rice, Vietnamese peasants are toiling away, here and there a domesticated water buffalo performing the timeless chores of Southeast Asian farming. Smoke wafts up from countless small homes and huts in the crowded village. The smells of Asia drift across the runway, intensified by the warmth of the sun and the stillness of the day. How quiet and serene it seems. Only the sandbagged wooden hut at the edge of the airstrip reminds me that a war is in progress.
I am not quite alone. A few yards to my right stands an army major in ill-fitting fatigues. His awkwardness of dress and his soft facial expression tell me at a glance that he has never been on the other side of the barbed wire, out in the field. In the wooden hut a soldier stands beside a field radio; nothing but static hums over the speaker. The soldier's rifle is the only weapon in sight.
I ignore them both. I want to be alone with my thoughts. Somehow I must rivet the picture of Bong Son and the countryside into my mind, and I feel I can only do it at this moment. Soon I will be gone, never to see it again. Before, I was too involved, too close to it, to remember it objectively. But now it is important for me to concentrate on these last few minutes on the ground in Binh Dinh province. Perhaps I am assuring myself that I have made it to the end. Perhaps I must convince myself that this is my last day with the 173d Airborne, and I am intact. That seemed a remote possibility when I began leading my platoon back in the early stages of my tour in Vietnam.
How long ago was that? Only a year? It seems I was much younger then, so much younger. And the men. Only a few are still around. Perhaps that was why Phil Nail was so smug when he shook my hand and said good-bye. So many of the others are gone. Even their replacements are gone, gone to early graves, hospital wards, shocked and horrified families, and years of questioning what happened, why it happened, and why it happened to them.
And how did I make it? Did I ask other men to do what I would not have done? Did I not take care of them? Was I too zealous in doing what was military? Did I contribute to the evil of this war in some callous, uncomprehending way? Or did I lessen that evil by doing what was right, by doing what had to be done, by doing what I was supposed to do?
My thoughts are interrupted. The major approaches me and asks me where I am going. I try to conceal my disdain for him, the disdain of a self-acclaimed veteran for the rear area soldier. It is an unfair disdain, but it is there, and he probably sees it.
"I'm going home," I tell him. He smiles, trying to share what he expects is my joy. I sense that, and my disdain grows. Doesn't he know that it's not joy? It's confusion; it's guilt; it's a sense of loss--but not joy. There is no room for joy in Vietnam.
"I'm a doctor," he tells me. "Psychiatrist, as a matter of fact." I wonder why he tells me that. I become wary. What is a psychiatrist doing here? He makes small talk, but I am only half-listening. Somewhere in his words he asks me my branch (infantry), and where I served in Vietnam. I point to what we call the Tiger Mountains, over in the north. "There," I say, "by the village of Truong Lam, not far from Tam Quon." He looks, but cannot see. He doesn't know the places; he doesn't know what comes with the names. The words mean nothing to him. I suppress my rage at this; many have died in the places that bear those names.
"What did you do?" he wants to know. I am wary again. Why is he asking these questions? The answers mean nothing to him. I speak in the past tense of the platoon I led. It has been a while since I led it (having been a staff officer in the last few months of my tour), and the men who were in it then are no longer there. The major picks up my mood; perhaps he is a good psychiatrist after all. "Do you ever dream about it?" he asks me.
I am surprised by the question. Dream about it? What does he mean? What is there to dream about? Is he testing a pet theory? Am I a subject of a research effort? "No, I don't dream about it," I tell him, with all the warmth with which I might say, "Shit on you, Bud!" He gets the message and backs off. I stand in silence waiting for the helicopter. The major is the final irony in a year filled with irony. Whoever sets in motion the forces that determine the life we lead has a tremendous flair for the ironic.
I marvel at the audacity of the question. My platoon was a part of my life, but I will not dream about it. I am determined I will not.
I wake from my sleep with a start. The sweat is damp and chilly on my chest; the sheets cling to me. I sit up, causing my wife to stir in the cool air. Outside the bedroom window I can see a gray morning forming beyond the barren trees that ring the backyard.
My heart is beating fast; my nerves feel frayed. The dream was vivid; I feel it lingering even now in the faint morning light. How many were there? Four? Five? No, there were more, and I knew them all. Who were they? Think, think! I knew them. I knew their names. Yes, that's it. They are West Point classmates of mine, all six of them graduates of the Military Academy, class of '69. Momentarily, their names escape me.
In the dream they moved so slowly, they talked so solemnly. And their eyes: big, wide, but nothing in them. Glass eyes, looking at me with no expression. They were in full battle dress, each of them, bandoliers strapped across their chests, faces and hands camouflaged, their M-16s taped tightly to avoid metallic clangs. In single file--ranger file, as we called it--they came to me. We knelt in a muddy, barren hole in the ground, an enlarged foxhole or a fresh bomb crater. I'm not sure which. We talked, they and I, but I couldn't remember the words. We were discussing a mission; a map was spread on the ground in front of us, a map marred by mud and rain, barely legible in the dark jungle. When our discussion was over, they stood up to leave. How stiff they looked, how blank their stares.
Then I remembered some of the dialogue. "How are you doing?" I had asked them. I wanted to know. I felt as if I had to know. But no one answered. Slowly, again in ranger file, they walked off into the foliage, soundlessly fading into the background of my vision and my dream. By now I knew each of them. Their names, first and last, had come to me. Each one had come with me to Vietnam. Each one had died there.
The United States slid into Vietnam so gently, so slowly, it was all but imperceptible to the average observer. The early 1960s had bigger issues to contend with: a missile gap, a space race, a Cuban invasion, confrontation in Berlin, a nuclear face-off with the Soviet Union, an assassinated president, remote wars in faraway places of little importance to the United States, but seeming more important than the nonwars in Indochina.
In 1963 a boy coming of age in Brooklyn could identify more easily with the immediate issues of his own life than he could with Buddhist monks immolating themselves in grisly street scenes in Saigon. "Where is Saigon anyway?" he might ask while quickly thumbing through the newspaper to reach the box scores on the latest Yankee thriller against the Red Sox. Sports were important then. Politics were not. Girls were important, too, even if they were more incomprehensible than politics. World affairs are not the stuff of adolescence.
School was alleged to be important. All the adults said so. But in Brooklyn, school very often ended with graduation from high school, and that event was looming ever closer as 1963 passed into 1964. A time for decision was fast approaching. If not college, then what kind of work? And if college, then how to pay for it? And where to go?
The roads that lead young men to war are not political roads, or national and international roads, but individual roads. What propels young men (and, perhaps in the future, young women) to combat is not the draft. Those who are not destined for armed combat usually will not be drafted for armed combat. The pool of human resources is vast, and the number of riflemen is small. The person who wants to avoid the draft will avoid it. And in Vietnam, as the war went on, the numbers who successfully avoided the draft increased. So who fights? The fools, the uneducated, the knaves? I was none of these--or so I maintain. But I fought. What led me to it?
Certainly not the draft. Things were looking up in the winter of 1963-64 as I moved successfully through my senior year in high school. A New York State Regents Scholarship and a part-time evening job were answering the question of how to afford college. Although the thought of enlisting in what appears to be a peacetime army was appealing to an eighteen-year-old yearning to break free of the nest, I was cautioned against running pell-mell into the ranks by my wise father, a veteran of World War II and twenty-two years of enlisted service. The advice made sense, and doubly so since there was a chance for an appointment to West Point. True, it was a remote chance in the highly politicized congressional districts of New York, but some exposure as a promising amateur boxer representing the American Legion gave me hope for a political appointment. At any rate, the army could wait; life was too exciting.
By the fall of 1964 Vietnam had become a bigger news item in the local papers. Still, it was too far away, and the United States too little involved, for it to be more than an item of passing interest to a young man planning his future in a world he already knew, a world alien in every way to Southeast Asia. Undergraduate study in civil engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic allowed me to live at home and commute to college. It also allowed me to continue developing as a boxer in the nearby Brooklyn YMCA. I was expanding my intellectual horizons and feeding my hunger for adventure--right in my own backyard.
The summer of 1965 brought talk of sending American units to Vietnam. A year earlier the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution had laid the groundwork for the deployments, but the buildup was still not addressed as a war. It was not of much interest to a college student completing his first undergraduate year and embarking on an interesting summer surveying job in upstate New York.
A quirk of fate, however, brought the appointment to West Point. Nobody had qualified from the lower East Side of Manhattan. With a deft push of a pencil I was made an imaginary citizen of Manhattan. The phone call reached me at the surveying camp: "If you can get to West Point in three days, you can enter with the class of 1969. Want it?"
A moment of decision. Although young people are never properly prepared for these decisions, they must make them anyway: "I guess so." After all, I had told everybody I was seeking a nomination, and I had literally fought for it. I had taken the tests for it, and I had even been circumcised for it. Having given that much, it didn't seem right to turn it down.
I drove down to Staten Island that night. (My family had made the break from Brooklyn.) There was a big family party, a dinner out on the town, a proud ex-NCO father pounding his son the cadet-to-be on the back. I remember his face that night--the map of Ireland looking at me with sparkling blue eyes, pleased as punch that his boy was going to become one of "those goddamned officers."
Two days later I drove with my mother to her sister's home thirty miles from West Point. How different my mother's emotions were from my father's. As I left her to continue the last leg of the journey on my own, she became stricken with grief. She was saying good-bye to her boy, her sad dark eyes pouring out tears as she clutched at me with her small hands, her Italian features showing all the hurt a mother feels when she fears for what is about to happen to her son in his quest for his own life. It made me cry, and I was ashamed of it. How could I go to West Point, the school of military leaders, with tears in my eyes? That was a place for men, not mama's boys. Thank God, I had thirty miles for my eyes to unredden.
This at one time was on the must read list for Infantry School at Fort Benning GA every new Platoon leader shouldread this book Prehaps the best book onInfantry operations in Vietnam written by A Rifle Platoon leader in Vietnam.
The truth is a liberating thing. This was written from the perspective of one who was there, and dealing with the emotion of it all. I recommend it.
This book was about a platoon leader fresh out of West Point in the US ARMY during the Vietnam war. It deals with the fear, leadership, and courage of soldiers who were both enlisted and drafted. The main theme was coming of age. I thought this book had a lot of good qualities and a one bad quality. I loved how vivid it was in describing the thoughts of the author. Everything was in detail and you could tell he was brutally honest throughout. He failed to leave out any detail and walked you through the experience as close to real life as possible. It was also easy to read and did not get boring. My one complaint is that it was a lot like other Vietnam stories and it felt like there wasn't much difference between this book and the movie Platoon, or Full metal Jacket. It was sort of clich&eacute; for a war story. Still though, the writing style was simple and easy to follow. You did not need to analyze this book very deeply to understand it. Everything is how it is written. I gave this book a 4 because it wasn't perfect, but it was still a really good book. I think if you don't read books very often this is a good book and is easy to read. However, If you prefer deep symbolic pieces I would probably read something else. I think this book would make a great movie, but again it would be very similar to other war movies. Overall I would recommend this book.
This book was about a platoon leader fresh out of West Point in the US ARMY during the Vietnam war. It deals with the fear, leadership, and courage of soldiers who were both enlisted and drafted. The main theme was coming of age. I thought this book had a lot of good qualities and a one bad quality. I loved how vivid it was in describing the thoughts of the author. Everything was in detail and you could tell he was brutally honest throughout. He failed to leave out any detail and walked you through the experience as close to real life as possible. It was also easy to read and did not get boring. My one complaint is that it was a lot like other Vietnam stories and it felt like there wasn't much difference between this book and the movie Platoon, or Full metal Jacket. It was sort of clich&eacute; for a war story. However, it was still really good.
“You're hooked, you feel every cut, grope up every cliff, swallow water with every spill of the canoe, sweat with every draw of the bowstring. Wholly absorbing [and] dramatic.”—Harper's Magazine The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the states most ...
In 1981, rock star Jodie Trinket was dumped by his flight attendant boyfriend Geoff Browne, who sacrificed his shot at happiness for a shot at conversion therapy. Almost twenty years later, Jodie is a hotelier and Geoff is a new divorcee in need of a vacation…
Eileen Gonzalez lives, writes, and geeks out over comic books in Connecticut, where she takes online classes at Johns Hopkins University. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys researching future writing projects, watching movies with her family, and spending time with very ill-behaved Maltese, AJ. Her short stories have appeared in Potomac Review, Toasted Cheese and Helix Magazine.
This story is a flowing conversation told in first person, revealing the thoughts of one conversant. The characters are likeable and real. This quick read is complete as it is, but leaves me wanting more. Not that I can define what more. And the story is well-edited, unlike too many other free or very inexpensive e-books. I look forward to reading more by this author.
"... which can be reached from Newport, easily driven to from Sandown or Shanklin, or by train to WroxalI, and a delightful walk through Appuldurcombe Park. There is a good deal to be seen at Godshills, which lies 5 ½ miles from Newport, four from Shanklin, and five north west of Ventnor.
The Parish Church (All Saints’) is said to be one of six or seven churches given by Fitz-Osborne to the Normandy Abbey of Lire. It is of Early English style, cruciform, with chancel and nave, north and south transepts, and south porch. It stands on a hillock by itself. Tradition states that when the builders started the erection of this church they began at the foot of the hill, but that during the night some mysterious personages - angels, it was thought - carried the materials to the top. This having occurred night after night, it was decided to abandon the lower site, and hence the place took the name of Godshill. The church contains some interesting memorial tablets and the tombs of men of renown among the ancients of the Isle of Wight. A few years ago the London and local newspapers had a great deal to say about a large picture in this church representing Daniel among the lions. It was presented to the church by the former Earl of Yarborough, who resided at Appuldurcombe, a mile from the church. It was stated that it was the bona fide work of the great Rubens; and when the churchwardens thought they had something valuable it was reported that their price for it was £40,000, as it had been mooted that it should be purchased by the nation. The matter was investigated by art critics and connoisseurs of old masters, and at length they came to the conclusion that it was a replica. It is now thought that the portrait of Daniel was painted by Rubens, and the lions were copied by his assistants. A new peal of bells were put into the tower a few years ago.
Letters received for delivery at 5.55 a.m. and 7.25 p.m., and dispatched 5.55 and 7.25 p.m. Sundays, received 5.55 a.m. and dispatched 5.55 p.m.
"Four miles northward {of Shalfleet}. This is a pleasant and safe haven, with a broad estuary. Newtown, though small now, was formerly a town of importance, and known by the name of Frenchville. History records that it was burned down by the Danes in the year 1001, and again during the reign of Richard II. by the French. After this the new town took the new name. In Elizabeth’s reign it was vested with power to return two members to Parliament, but this privilege departed when the Reform Bill became law. The Church (the Chapel of the Holy Ghost) is built of stone in the Norman style. It was formerly part of the Calbourne parish, but is now attached to Shalfleet for ecclesiastical purposes.
Along the coast line we pass Thorness Bay and Gurnard Bay, rounding Egypt Point to West and East Cowes. We would suggest the use of the train, however, or a ride along the road, which is almost parallel with the railway, in the direction of the Capital. We thus first reach historic Carisbrooke. "
We are the official Islamic Society at Barts and the London SMD. ISoc holds regular activities for both muslims and non-muslims at the Whitechapel campus.
It is a large and diverse society with students from around the globe designed to cater for the spiritual, social and academic needs of students across campus. With a plethora of activities, events and charity initiatives taking place around the year including Paintballing, Sisters Circles, the famous Mock OSCE and “How to Smash your Exams”, Charity Week (raising tens of thousands of pounds for orphans and needy children), both the Charity Week Dinner and The ISoc Annual Dinner – each host to over 200 students respectively, (and the list continues on) you are guaranteed to feel a part of the fantastic ISoc family.