On August 10, 2012, the Cheyenne chapter of the AARP hosted a seminar
called Gray Matters - which was free and provided a free lunch -
unfortunately fish and cheesecake, blech - from 4 to 6 was a reception
for all travelers who had come in for the AARP National Spelling Bee to
be held on the 11th.
I attended that and it was a lot
of fun. The emcee introduced a few folks, we talked about words, there
was a "mock" spelling bee (which only consisted of about 20 people
getting up and being questioned on one word...._ and so on. And there
were finger foods there - Chinese food to be precise. Don't know where
they got it from or if they cooked it on site (Little America is a hotel
and resort where people come to play golf among other things) but it
was delish.
The spelling bee started at the ungodly hour
of 8:30 am (Well...8:30 is not so ungodly but I had to get up at the
ungodly hour of 6:30 to get there in time for registration, etc.) It
started with 4 rounds of 25 words each - which was a Written Test.
The
first 25 words were extremely easy. They asked words like "Greetings"
and "Navel" and "Mince." I suppose a few might have been considered
difficult... "Animus" and "Lacuna."
The second 25 words were equally easy, but I did miss MUGWUMP.
I assume they did this just to help everyone settle the nerves
and get new people used to what was going on. People had trouble hearing
some of the words (hey, they were all over 50 and most over 60) and the
Pronouncer would come down and tell them the word face to face and
have them say it back, etc. Indeed, the Pronouncer did an excellent job.
Third round was where they started asking the difficult words.
I missed:
QUESTIONARY
INERCALATE
TUATARA
SKOSH
VIRIDITY
WIMBLE
The fourth round was the real killer. I only got 12 out of 25 right. I missed:
FELICIFIC
DOVEKIE
FLYTING
NAPERY
COTYLEDONARY
WELTSCHMERRZ
OPPUGNER
AECIOSPORE
SYNCYTIAL
KNUR
IRIDIUM
TUYERE
HYOSCYAMINE
I then stayed for the Oral rounds and was joined by one of
my friends from my Scrabble Club. (I think an audience could have
assembled for the Written rounds, too. There were chairs there and
family were in them...but I think most people only wanted to come see
the Oral rounds where you actually saw the speller's faces as opposed to
their backs, etc.)
Two of the people I met last night
at the reception made it to the Orals. One of them it was his first trip
to the Bee and he was successful his first time out. Made it through
about 10 rounds. (In the Orals, you miss two words and you're out.)
Another one was an elderly woman from Minnesota who also got through
about 10 rounds before being knocked out.
There were
three sisters and a brother who had come as a sort of family reunion.
The eldest sister made it to the Oral rounds but was bounced after only
two rounds. This was too bad and it was because she was a bit unlucky -
she got two 6-syllable words in a row while some of the others were
getting much easier ones (but still, not ones I could have
spelled). But she was disqualified along with several other people in
the same round, so hopefully she didn't feel too bad.
The
words in the Oral Rounds were extremely difficult. Several times more
difficult than the toughest words in the final round of the Written.
But, had I studied for a year, I think I could have handled them.
And it is my intention to study for a year and get into the Orals next year.
So, why is the title of this blog entry 60 is thenew 40?
Because it is.
People are living longer. You don't want to outlive your money
and more importantly you don't want to outlive your sense of enjoyment
of life. And learning new things every day is enjoyment and keeps the
mind active.
The AARP Spelling Bee is held every year, and it gives you an
excellent reason to travel to Cheyenne and see The Cowboy State. You'll
meet lots of interesting people.
You do have to study.
I studied very desultorily for about a month...combine all the
time I studied and it was about 10 hours. Not nearly enough, but then,
I'm a good speller so the Written Rounds were relatively easy - except
for that killer last round.
Why learn words that you'll never, ever say in real life?Well, because they're interesting. And the concepts of what you'll learn, you can apply in other areas. So it's a win win.
So start planning to live a long, healthy, active, intellectual life, and do it now, however old you might be!
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Posts resume Monday
I'm participating in the AARP Cheyenne Spelling Bee today, Saturday, and need to recover Sunday....
So Monday, posts resumes.
So Monday, posts resumes.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
The Long History of (Wrongly) Predicting North Korea's Collapse
From the Atlantic: The Long History of (Wrongly) Predicting North Korea's Collapse
Since the early 1990s, Pyongyang-watchers have insisted the country's demise was just around the corner. That they've been so consistently wrong might say as much about the outside world as it does about North Korea.
It turns out that Kim Jong Un, the doughy ex-playboy and Disney enthusiast-turned hereditary neo-Stalinist overlord, is hardly as feckless or as cartoonish as he may appear, according to a new report from the International Crisis Group. "When it comes to institutions usable for social control, the [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] is a hyperdeveloped state," announcesNorth Korean Succession and the Risks of Regime Stability. "Kim is young and inexperienced, but the instruments of control have been established by his grandfather [Kim il Sung] and father [Kim Jong Il], and he has pledged to adhere to their policy line. This means reform prospects are dim. He could well be around for decades -- and with a growing nuclear arsenal."
There's no immediate way of knowing whether the report will turn out to be right or wrong, but it breaks with a decades-old tradition of predicting or at least assuming North Korea's impending demise. Since the early '90s, around the time of both the fall of the pro-North Korean Soviet bloc and Kim Jong Il's 1994 takeover, scholars and commentators have braced themselves for the coming collapse of the DRPK's political and economic system, if not the collapse of the country itself.
The fact that the Kim regime is still alive and thriving doesn't mean that these commentators were wrong, exactly -- much of their logic appeared sound at the time, and their work responded to the seemingly imminent crisis of North Korea's dissolution. But the fact that so many close observers could misread the country's future so widely speaks to both North Korea's unknowability and its uniqueness. It seems that the experiences of post-communist or reform-minded countries Romania or China don't actually tell us as much as we might think about the trajectory of North Korea, a place that plays by its own bizarre and totalitarian rules. The world has treated North Korea's coming collapse as an inevitability for years. "In North Korea, the possibilities run the gamut from an implosion and collapse along the lines of Romania to an explosion," wrote Robert A. Manning, now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in the Fall 1993 issue of World Policy Journal. Twenty years later, respected North Korea scholar Andrei Lankov argued that an "inexperienced" Kim Jong Un might be unable to stave off his government's eventual downfall. To be fair, Lavrov hasn't been proven wrong yet, and his predictions about the first months of Kim Jong Un's rule have been remarkably accurate. Still, the Kims have proven the naysayers wrong many times before.
In the early 1990s, North Korea faced a series of existential crises -- or what looked like existential crises from the outside, anyway. Global communism had fallen, along with the Soviet-led anti-capitalist, and anti-democratic political bloc. China and Russia opened up diplomatic relations with South Korea in the early 1990s, around the same time they halted subsidies for North Korea's once-formidable export economy. Kim Il Sung, the nation's founder and "eternal leader," died in 1994. Famine, economic crisis, and international sanctions in response to North Korea's nuclear weapons program wracked the country for most of the decade. The world foresaw doom.
"While North Koran military action can never be ruled out, a more likely scenario these days is a North Korean economic and political collapse," Leif Rosenberger, who is currently the chief economist at U.S. Central Command, wrote in the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies' journal in 1994, shortly after Kim Il Sung's death. In a 1997 article for Foreign Policy entitled "Promoting a Soft Landing in Korea," Selig Harrison, now a project director at the Center for International Policy, was somewhat less definitive in predicting the country's fall. "While the North Korean system is unlikely to implode or explode in the foreseeable future," Harrison wrote, "it could well erode over a period of five to ten years if the United States and its allies remain wedded to policies that exacerbate the economic problems facing the Kim Jong Il regime." That was in 1997, 15 years ago. That same year, the CIA determined that North Korea was likely to collapse within the next five years.
While some experts took North Korea's failure as a foregone conclusion, others argued that the country would be unable to survive as long as it remained an oppressive and self-contained pariah state. They argued that a reformist wing of the governing clique was acutely aware of this, and could attempt to transform the country. The consensus of the early '90s seems to have been that the North Korean system was destined for major, imminent changes, whether it wanted them or not.
A 1993article in the Asian Survey by John Merill examined North Korea's coming liberalization, predicting a "more flexible" and "cosmopolitan" leadership, which either never gained much power or never existed at all:
North Korea has not imploded, and it has not reformed. There has been no "soft landing," no quick collapse, no confederation with the South. There has been no successful food-for-peace program with the U.S., as Seligson implied there could be, and no rapid, Iraq-like disintegration of the Korean peninsula, a possibility that The Atlantic's own Robert Kaplan discussed in a 2006 print article. To be fair, it's entirely possible that any number of these things could still happen, and these predictions have had plenty of evidence to support them: the 1994 nuclear agreement, the North-South peace process, and the somewhat-recent collapse of global communism, among many others. Everything from domestic Pyongyang politics to the political and historical arc of the 20th century informed against North Korea's survival.
So how, apparently against all the odds and so many theories and understandings of how the world is supposed to work, has North Korea continued to hang on? According to Jay Ulfelder, a Washington, DC-based political scientist and blogger who studies regime stability, North Korean-style one-party dictatorships are adept at insulating and perpetuating themselves. "These really closed authoritarian regimes that don't have a history of recent coup activity stick around for a long time," Ulfelder told me.
For such a unique system like North Korea's, the recent history of apparently similar countries (remember Manning's reference to Romania?) has little predictive power. Take, for instance, the belief that North Korean reformists were capable of changing the character of the regime. "The whole body of theorizing about democratic transitions from the late '80s and early '90s made the claim that those transitions always began because of splits between hardliners and soft-liners," says Ulfelder. "People took that as a predictor when in fact it really was just descriptive." Even the most authoritarian governments have reformists somewhere in their ranks. But, for Ulfelder, "the question is what are the conditions under which that reform-minded group becomes powerful enough to win the eternal fights and enact reform-minded changes?"
The consequences of North Korea's collapse would be incredibly messy, possibly even catastrophic. As Kaplan explained, it would mean integrating 25 million very poor North Koreans into much richer South Korea, winding down decades of propaganda that told North Koreans to hate and fear the world, dismantling one of the largest political prison systems in the world, and liquidating an enormous, nuclear-armed military. Perhaps, Ulfelder suggests, analysts might be unintentionally inflating the chances of North Korea's collapse precisely because its consequences would be so severe -- a feedback loop that psychologists refer to as an "affect heuristic."
"With North Korea, we're so scared of the country falling apart that this 'affect heuristic' drives people away from a more data-based forecast," Ulfelder says. "They make the mistake of treating their level of uncertainty as the level of probability of the event happening ... we have a tendency to substitute how scared we are of that happening with an estimate for how likely it is of that happening."
If this is in fact what's happening, then couldn't that actually be a good thing? Had the worst-case happened and North Korea actually fallen in the mid-'90s, the world would have been that much more prepared, thanks to the scholarly literature and expertise fueled by the the world's fears. The "effect heuristic" might partially explain the many false (or maybe just premature) predictions of North Korea's doom, but it also means we'll all be a lot readier if and when it actually happens.
But this is North Korea, and there isn't really such thing as a best-case scenario. For now, those 25 million North Koreans are still living in an impoverished totalitarian state, and the millions more in South Korea and Japan have still got a twitchy, nuclear-argued rogue state next door. As the Crisis Group report makes clear, North Korea is a regional and domestic catastrophe whether it changes or not.
Since the early 1990s, Pyongyang-watchers have insisted the country's demise was just around the corner. That they've been so consistently wrong might say as much about the outside world as it does about North Korea.
It turns out that Kim Jong Un, the doughy ex-playboy and Disney enthusiast-turned hereditary neo-Stalinist overlord, is hardly as feckless or as cartoonish as he may appear, according to a new report from the International Crisis Group. "When it comes to institutions usable for social control, the [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] is a hyperdeveloped state," announcesNorth Korean Succession and the Risks of Regime Stability. "Kim is young and inexperienced, but the instruments of control have been established by his grandfather [Kim il Sung] and father [Kim Jong Il], and he has pledged to adhere to their policy line. This means reform prospects are dim. He could well be around for decades -- and with a growing nuclear arsenal."
There's no immediate way of knowing whether the report will turn out to be right or wrong, but it breaks with a decades-old tradition of predicting or at least assuming North Korea's impending demise. Since the early '90s, around the time of both the fall of the pro-North Korean Soviet bloc and Kim Jong Il's 1994 takeover, scholars and commentators have braced themselves for the coming collapse of the DRPK's political and economic system, if not the collapse of the country itself.
The fact that the Kim regime is still alive and thriving doesn't mean that these commentators were wrong, exactly -- much of their logic appeared sound at the time, and their work responded to the seemingly imminent crisis of North Korea's dissolution. But the fact that so many close observers could misread the country's future so widely speaks to both North Korea's unknowability and its uniqueness. It seems that the experiences of post-communist or reform-minded countries Romania or China don't actually tell us as much as we might think about the trajectory of North Korea, a place that plays by its own bizarre and totalitarian rules. The world has treated North Korea's coming collapse as an inevitability for years. "In North Korea, the possibilities run the gamut from an implosion and collapse along the lines of Romania to an explosion," wrote Robert A. Manning, now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in the Fall 1993 issue of World Policy Journal. Twenty years later, respected North Korea scholar Andrei Lankov argued that an "inexperienced" Kim Jong Un might be unable to stave off his government's eventual downfall. To be fair, Lavrov hasn't been proven wrong yet, and his predictions about the first months of Kim Jong Un's rule have been remarkably accurate. Still, the Kims have proven the naysayers wrong many times before.
In the early 1990s, North Korea faced a series of existential crises -- or what looked like existential crises from the outside, anyway. Global communism had fallen, along with the Soviet-led anti-capitalist, and anti-democratic political bloc. China and Russia opened up diplomatic relations with South Korea in the early 1990s, around the same time they halted subsidies for North Korea's once-formidable export economy. Kim Il Sung, the nation's founder and "eternal leader," died in 1994. Famine, economic crisis, and international sanctions in response to North Korea's nuclear weapons program wracked the country for most of the decade. The world foresaw doom.
"While North Koran military action can never be ruled out, a more likely scenario these days is a North Korean economic and political collapse," Leif Rosenberger, who is currently the chief economist at U.S. Central Command, wrote in the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies' journal in 1994, shortly after Kim Il Sung's death. In a 1997 article for Foreign Policy entitled "Promoting a Soft Landing in Korea," Selig Harrison, now a project director at the Center for International Policy, was somewhat less definitive in predicting the country's fall. "While the North Korean system is unlikely to implode or explode in the foreseeable future," Harrison wrote, "it could well erode over a period of five to ten years if the United States and its allies remain wedded to policies that exacerbate the economic problems facing the Kim Jong Il regime." That was in 1997, 15 years ago. That same year, the CIA determined that North Korea was likely to collapse within the next five years.
While some experts took North Korea's failure as a foregone conclusion, others argued that the country would be unable to survive as long as it remained an oppressive and self-contained pariah state. They argued that a reformist wing of the governing clique was acutely aware of this, and could attempt to transform the country. The consensus of the early '90s seems to have been that the North Korean system was destined for major, imminent changes, whether it wanted them or not.
A 1993article in the Asian Survey by John Merill examined North Korea's coming liberalization, predicting a "more flexible" and "cosmopolitan" leadership, which either never gained much power or never existed at all:
As the younger Kim has come into his own, he has put his stamp on North Korea's (DPRK) policies. Pyongyang's recent moves are not just random responses to outside pressure but a more carefully thought-out strategy for regime survival. The new style is that of a second-generation revolutionary leadership that is more technocratic, better educated, more cosmopolitan, and tactically more flexible than its predecessor.China-style liberalization was seen as such an inevitability that Rosenberger's 1994 journal article even cited the need for "bankruptcy laws and anti-trust legislation" -- as if North Korea were already on its way to a quasi-capitalist economy. The Asian Survey's 1993 article even detected a new sensitivity towards human rights by Kim Jong Il's regime. "There were hints that Pyongyang itself realized a need to improve its human rights situation," Merill wrote, foreseeing a decreased emphasis on songbun (the hereditary North Korean caste system based on perceived loyalty to the regime) and a new openness towards citizens with family in South Korea or Japan. Needless to say, if Kim Jong Il was ever headed in that direction, he didn't get there. His rule was just as cruel as his father's or perhaps even crueler. Today, the North Korean gulag system has over 150,000 inmates.
North Korea has not imploded, and it has not reformed. There has been no "soft landing," no quick collapse, no confederation with the South. There has been no successful food-for-peace program with the U.S., as Seligson implied there could be, and no rapid, Iraq-like disintegration of the Korean peninsula, a possibility that The Atlantic's own Robert Kaplan discussed in a 2006 print article. To be fair, it's entirely possible that any number of these things could still happen, and these predictions have had plenty of evidence to support them: the 1994 nuclear agreement, the North-South peace process, and the somewhat-recent collapse of global communism, among many others. Everything from domestic Pyongyang politics to the political and historical arc of the 20th century informed against North Korea's survival.
So how, apparently against all the odds and so many theories and understandings of how the world is supposed to work, has North Korea continued to hang on? According to Jay Ulfelder, a Washington, DC-based political scientist and blogger who studies regime stability, North Korean-style one-party dictatorships are adept at insulating and perpetuating themselves. "These really closed authoritarian regimes that don't have a history of recent coup activity stick around for a long time," Ulfelder told me.
For such a unique system like North Korea's, the recent history of apparently similar countries (remember Manning's reference to Romania?) has little predictive power. Take, for instance, the belief that North Korean reformists were capable of changing the character of the regime. "The whole body of theorizing about democratic transitions from the late '80s and early '90s made the claim that those transitions always began because of splits between hardliners and soft-liners," says Ulfelder. "People took that as a predictor when in fact it really was just descriptive." Even the most authoritarian governments have reformists somewhere in their ranks. But, for Ulfelder, "the question is what are the conditions under which that reform-minded group becomes powerful enough to win the eternal fights and enact reform-minded changes?"
The consequences of North Korea's collapse would be incredibly messy, possibly even catastrophic. As Kaplan explained, it would mean integrating 25 million very poor North Koreans into much richer South Korea, winding down decades of propaganda that told North Koreans to hate and fear the world, dismantling one of the largest political prison systems in the world, and liquidating an enormous, nuclear-armed military. Perhaps, Ulfelder suggests, analysts might be unintentionally inflating the chances of North Korea's collapse precisely because its consequences would be so severe -- a feedback loop that psychologists refer to as an "affect heuristic."
"With North Korea, we're so scared of the country falling apart that this 'affect heuristic' drives people away from a more data-based forecast," Ulfelder says. "They make the mistake of treating their level of uncertainty as the level of probability of the event happening ... we have a tendency to substitute how scared we are of that happening with an estimate for how likely it is of that happening."
If this is in fact what's happening, then couldn't that actually be a good thing? Had the worst-case happened and North Korea actually fallen in the mid-'90s, the world would have been that much more prepared, thanks to the scholarly literature and expertise fueled by the the world's fears. The "effect heuristic" might partially explain the many false (or maybe just premature) predictions of North Korea's doom, but it also means we'll all be a lot readier if and when it actually happens.
But this is North Korea, and there isn't really such thing as a best-case scenario. For now, those 25 million North Koreans are still living in an impoverished totalitarian state, and the millions more in South Korea and Japan have still got a twitchy, nuclear-argued rogue state next door. As the Crisis Group report makes clear, North Korea is a regional and domestic catastrophe whether it changes or not.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Columbus County ties mined to identify Korean War soldier's remains
From FayObserver: Columbus County ties mined to identify Korean War soldier's remains
TABOR CITY - Pfc. Clarence Erskin Lane went missing more than 60 years ago in the Korean War.
Finding a living relative of the Columbus County native may be key to identifying his remains, said Harold Davis, an American Legion representative from Wilmington.
Davis is looking for a blood relative of Lane to compare DNA with remains of unidentified Americans recovered from Korea. About 8,000 Americans remain unaccounted for from the war.
Born Aug. 29, 1929, Lane would be 83 this month. Lane was assigned to the Army's 7th Infantry Division, 32nd Infantry Regiment, C Company when he was lost early in the Korean War. He is believed to have been killed Nov. 30, 1950, Davis said.
Working on the eastern side of North Korea in brutally cold weather, Lane's regiment was overrun "by a superior number of Chinese soldiers" during the battle of Chosin Reservoir, David said.
More than 30 operations have been carried out in Korea to recover the remains of servicemen. The remains are sent to Hawaii for DNA collection. Efforts are under way to compare the samples with living relatives.
"Once remains are identified, they are returned to the family for proper burial," according to the website for the American Legion in North Carolina.
With so much time passed, the military has lost contact with many of the family members of missing servicemen from Korea, which has prompted the American Legion's effort.
That's what brings Davis into the search. A combat veteran of the Korean War who lives in Wilmington, he's made it his mission to help bring closure to families who don't know what happened to their loved ones on the battlefield.
"I know how the conditions were when these men were lost," Davis said in an email. "My God for some reason brought me home to live a life and have a family. I am truly grateful. I cannot bring back one POW/MIA but I can locate family members to provide DNA to identify remains. That is what I have done for the past nine years."
Davis has limited information about Lane's family history. He believes Lane was a son of Nora Erskin Todd Lane, who was born Oct. 15, 1889, in South Carolina and whose parents were Ellis Todd and Mary Jane Todd. The mother was married to John G. Lane.
Lane apparently had a half sister who married Elmer Lee Wright, who died in 1972 and is buried at Mt. Sinai Cemetery near Sidney. Children of Wright included Bobby Dale Wright; Martha Ann Wright, who married Robert Lawrence Blackmon; and Lillian Mable Wright, who married David Alan Jackson.
Lane also had a half brother, James C. Brown.
Anyone with information about Lane's family can contact Davis at 910-791-2333 or hgdavis@bellsouth.net.
TABOR CITY - Pfc. Clarence Erskin Lane went missing more than 60 years ago in the Korean War.
Finding a living relative of the Columbus County native may be key to identifying his remains, said Harold Davis, an American Legion representative from Wilmington.
Davis is looking for a blood relative of Lane to compare DNA with remains of unidentified Americans recovered from Korea. About 8,000 Americans remain unaccounted for from the war.
Born Aug. 29, 1929, Lane would be 83 this month. Lane was assigned to the Army's 7th Infantry Division, 32nd Infantry Regiment, C Company when he was lost early in the Korean War. He is believed to have been killed Nov. 30, 1950, Davis said.
Working on the eastern side of North Korea in brutally cold weather, Lane's regiment was overrun "by a superior number of Chinese soldiers" during the battle of Chosin Reservoir, David said.
More than 30 operations have been carried out in Korea to recover the remains of servicemen. The remains are sent to Hawaii for DNA collection. Efforts are under way to compare the samples with living relatives.
"Once remains are identified, they are returned to the family for proper burial," according to the website for the American Legion in North Carolina.
With so much time passed, the military has lost contact with many of the family members of missing servicemen from Korea, which has prompted the American Legion's effort.
That's what brings Davis into the search. A combat veteran of the Korean War who lives in Wilmington, he's made it his mission to help bring closure to families who don't know what happened to their loved ones on the battlefield.
"I know how the conditions were when these men were lost," Davis said in an email. "My God for some reason brought me home to live a life and have a family. I am truly grateful. I cannot bring back one POW/MIA but I can locate family members to provide DNA to identify remains. That is what I have done for the past nine years."
Davis has limited information about Lane's family history. He believes Lane was a son of Nora Erskin Todd Lane, who was born Oct. 15, 1889, in South Carolina and whose parents were Ellis Todd and Mary Jane Todd. The mother was married to John G. Lane.
Lane apparently had a half sister who married Elmer Lee Wright, who died in 1972 and is buried at Mt. Sinai Cemetery near Sidney. Children of Wright included Bobby Dale Wright; Martha Ann Wright, who married Robert Lawrence Blackmon; and Lillian Mable Wright, who married David Alan Jackson.
Lane also had a half brother, James C. Brown.
Anyone with information about Lane's family can contact Davis at 910-791-2333 or hgdavis@bellsouth.net.
Missing Korean War Soldier Comes Home
From GBP News: Missing Korean War Soldier Comes Home
MACON, Ga. — Sgt. Barksdale's first cousin Louise Butts speaks at memorial services in Macon (Adam Ragusea/GPB News)
Memorial services were held in Macon Friday for Sgt. Thomas Jefferson Barksdale, a Georgia soldier who died in Korea almost 62 years ago, but whose remains were only recently identified.
Motorcycle engines roared as more than 50 Patriot Guard Riders of Georgia stood at attention outside a mortuary in Fort Hill, the historically black neighborhood in east Macon where Sgt. Barksdale was born in 1929.
The young man was known by his friends and family as "Sugar Boy." During services inside, Barksdale’s first cousin and self-proclaimed keeper of the family secrets Louise Butts said the nickname came from the boy’s father.
“And since I know how their dad didn’t mind bragging about all of his kids, I have sort of thought that perhaps it was because he thought they were all pretty, sweet, and that Sugar Boy had a bigger dose of it than anybody,” Butts said, drawing chuckles from family members, veterans, and dignitaries in attendance.
At age 18, Barksdale volunteered for the Army. He served in Korea with the 503rd Field Artillery Battalion, along with future New York Congressman Charlie Rangel. At the ill-fated Battle of the Ch'ongch'on River near the Chinese border, Barksdale became one of nearly 700 American fatalities, in combat that Congressman Rangel would later describe as “a waking nightmare.” It was December 1st, 1950, and Sugar Boy was just 21.
“He sacrificed his life before Brown vs. Board of Education," Macon City Councilor the Rev. Dr. Henry C. Ficklin said, delivering Barksdale’s much-belated eulogy.
"[Barksdale died] before the streets were paved in Fort Hill, before the bus ran on the east side, before the lights were installed, before the first black was elected to anything," said Ficklin.
Barksdale’s body lingered on the battlefield for half a century, until a rare US expedition to North Korean in the summer of 2000 turned up the remains of many soldiers, including one unusually intact skeleton. But it wasn’t identified as Barksdale’s until recently, thanks to advances in DNA testing.
“When the bones of Sgt. Barksdale were unearthed, God had already put in them a computerized program that would tell who he was and bring out his story,” Ficklin said in his eulogy.
About 8,ooo American soldiers are still missing in action from the Korean War. Another mission to recover remains in North Korea was scrapped in March as diplomatic tensions flared with the regime in Pyongyang. But for her part, Louise Butts is thankful for her cousin’s homecoming.
“You cannot imagine how I feel, being probably one who knows more of the intimate stories of the family than anyone else, that finally we know what happened to Sugar Boy,” Butts said.
Following services, Sgt. Barksdale’s remains were interred at Georgia Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery in Milledgeville
MACON, Ga. — Sgt. Barksdale's first cousin Louise Butts speaks at memorial services in Macon (Adam Ragusea/GPB News)
Memorial services were held in Macon Friday for Sgt. Thomas Jefferson Barksdale, a Georgia soldier who died in Korea almost 62 years ago, but whose remains were only recently identified.
Motorcycle engines roared as more than 50 Patriot Guard Riders of Georgia stood at attention outside a mortuary in Fort Hill, the historically black neighborhood in east Macon where Sgt. Barksdale was born in 1929.
The young man was known by his friends and family as "Sugar Boy." During services inside, Barksdale’s first cousin and self-proclaimed keeper of the family secrets Louise Butts said the nickname came from the boy’s father.
“And since I know how their dad didn’t mind bragging about all of his kids, I have sort of thought that perhaps it was because he thought they were all pretty, sweet, and that Sugar Boy had a bigger dose of it than anybody,” Butts said, drawing chuckles from family members, veterans, and dignitaries in attendance.
At age 18, Barksdale volunteered for the Army. He served in Korea with the 503rd Field Artillery Battalion, along with future New York Congressman Charlie Rangel. At the ill-fated Battle of the Ch'ongch'on River near the Chinese border, Barksdale became one of nearly 700 American fatalities, in combat that Congressman Rangel would later describe as “a waking nightmare.” It was December 1st, 1950, and Sugar Boy was just 21.
“He sacrificed his life before Brown vs. Board of Education," Macon City Councilor the Rev. Dr. Henry C. Ficklin said, delivering Barksdale’s much-belated eulogy.
"[Barksdale died] before the streets were paved in Fort Hill, before the bus ran on the east side, before the lights were installed, before the first black was elected to anything," said Ficklin.
Barksdale’s body lingered on the battlefield for half a century, until a rare US expedition to North Korean in the summer of 2000 turned up the remains of many soldiers, including one unusually intact skeleton. But it wasn’t identified as Barksdale’s until recently, thanks to advances in DNA testing.
“When the bones of Sgt. Barksdale were unearthed, God had already put in them a computerized program that would tell who he was and bring out his story,” Ficklin said in his eulogy.
About 8,ooo American soldiers are still missing in action from the Korean War. Another mission to recover remains in North Korea was scrapped in March as diplomatic tensions flared with the regime in Pyongyang. But for her part, Louise Butts is thankful for her cousin’s homecoming.
“You cannot imagine how I feel, being probably one who knows more of the intimate stories of the family than anyone else, that finally we know what happened to Sugar Boy,” Butts said.
Following services, Sgt. Barksdale’s remains were interred at Georgia Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery in Milledgeville
Friday, August 3, 2012
Korean War vet’s remains are returned to Ga.
From Army Times: Korean War vet’s remains are returned to Ga.
MACON, Ga. — Sugar Boy came home Tuesday morning.
His flag-draped casket made the eight-hour flight from Honolulu. It arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport shortly after dawn. The black hearse was escorted down Interstate 75 by the Georgia State Patrol, Bibb County Sheriff's deputies, the Macon Police Department and 87 Georgia Patriot Guard Riders on motorcycles.
Sgt. Thomas Jefferson "Sugar Boy" Barksdale returned home in the arms of a half-mile long motorcade on an interstate that wasn't built when he died in a foxhole in Korea in 1950.
Low, gray clouds sunk across the morning sky. It was primary election day. At the city limits, cars, buses, trucks pulled over to pay their respects. The hearse climbed the hill on Gray Highway, then passed Boone Street in Fort Hill, where Sugar Boy grew up one of Ben and Vilena Barksdale's 11 children. The house is no longer there, only a vacant lot.
As the motorcade traveled down Shurling Drive, a man stopped his van in the far lane, got out and saluted.
By the time Sugar Boy reached the front door at Jones Brothers Mortuary on Millerfield Road, tears were falling like raindrops in the parking lot.
Seven members of the Georgia Army National Guard carried the casket inside, where his remains will be until Friday's memorial service at noon at the Jones Brothers Memorial Chapel.
He will be buried with full military honors at 2:30 p.m. at the Georgia Veterans Cemetery in Milledgeville.
Sixty-two American flags lined the driveway and street to represent the number of years since Barksdale left his last boot print in Macon.
"It was a beautiful welcome home," said Alfred McNair, who was Barksdale's cousin. He was 3 years old when Barksdale was sent to Korea. He was left with only a fleeting childhood memory — standing in the yard with his uncle on Boone Street.
McNair took his daughter, Chiquita Glover, and granddaughter, Ashlie Mack, to meet the plane in Atlanta. A great-great-niece, A'nia Wilson, also traveled from Macon. So did his niece Sonja Person, whose DNA sample helped officers positively identify Barksdale's skeletal remains.
"I never thought it would be anything like this," she said. "I thought there would be about six motorcycles. But this many? It was amazing."
She was 1 year old when her 21-year-old uncle was killed in combat while fighting with the Second Infantry in North Korea. He was listed as missing in action, but his remains were not among those returned by Communist forces after the war. He was left behind on a hill halfway around the world.
His family back in Macon held on to what hope they could, never pushing back from faith that the 21-year-old they called "Sugar Boy" would one day come walking through the door at 345 Boone St. Perhaps he had been captured and was planning his escape as a prisoner of war.
During the first week of August 2000, excavation teams from the U.S. and North Korea explored several old fighting positions about 50 miles above the capital of Pyongyang. Along a hilltop, they discovered an isolated human skeleton of a 5-foot-10, African-American male.
The skeletal remains were returned to the U.S. and assigned a case number. Four bone samples were sent to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory for testing.
It would take nine years before the remains could be positively identified.
At the airport Tuesday, Person and other family members spent a few quiet moments next to the coffin before it was carried to the waiting hearse at Cargo Gate 60. More than two dozen orange-shirted Delta Air Lines employees stood reverently nearby, many holding their hands over their hearts.
Person ran her fingers across the top of the casket. She knew it would be emotional. Her daughter, Kimberly McIntyre, died six years ago.
"She was only 36," Person said. "I can't imagine my grandparents losing a son who was 21 years old. I can't imagine not being able to bury him or visit his grave on his birthday or a holiday."
As the Georgia Patriot Guard Riders lined the cargo ramp holding American flags, Wynne Inya-Agha stood next to a banner made by her 15-year-old son, Jared, and 10-year-old daughter, Joy, on Monday night. The banner read: "WELCOME HOME SGT. BARKSDALE."
She drove her children from Fayetteville early Tuesday after she read the July 22 column on Barksdale on The Telegraph's website.
"Today is my 48th birthday, and this is how I choose to spend it," she said. "This is my gift to myself. I've never done anything like this in my life. I am grateful for people like Sgt. Barksdale who fought and died for our freedom. I have always been patriotic, but this one brought me to tears."
The homecoming was special for Freddie Jones, of Jones Brothers Mortuary. He has spent much of the past month planning and preparing to bring Barksdale back to Macon. His father, Norman Jones, was wounded in the Korean War and received a Purple Heart.
It was also deeply personal for David Blanton, of Gray, who coordinated the participation by the more than seven dozen Georgia Patriot Guard Riders. It included 40 from the Macon area who left at 4 a.m. Tuesday to meet the plane at the airport.
His father, the late Ernie Blanton of Valdosta, was assigned to the same 503rd Field Artillery Battalion.
"When I saw the information on Sgt. Barksdale, it sent a chill up my spine," Blanton said. "My father used to talk about how cold it was, and there were so many of (the Chinese), and (the U.S.) didn't have enough ammunition."
Blanton made the journey Tuesday and will return Friday for the memorial service to escort the funeral procession to the cemetery in Milledgeville at 2:30 p.m.
"We can't change what happened, but we can be there for the family to show our support," he said. "We got him home. We never want a fallen warrior to be left behind."
MACON, Ga. — Sugar Boy came home Tuesday morning.
His flag-draped casket made the eight-hour flight from Honolulu. It arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport shortly after dawn. The black hearse was escorted down Interstate 75 by the Georgia State Patrol, Bibb County Sheriff's deputies, the Macon Police Department and 87 Georgia Patriot Guard Riders on motorcycles.
Sgt. Thomas Jefferson "Sugar Boy" Barksdale returned home in the arms of a half-mile long motorcade on an interstate that wasn't built when he died in a foxhole in Korea in 1950.
Low, gray clouds sunk across the morning sky. It was primary election day. At the city limits, cars, buses, trucks pulled over to pay their respects. The hearse climbed the hill on Gray Highway, then passed Boone Street in Fort Hill, where Sugar Boy grew up one of Ben and Vilena Barksdale's 11 children. The house is no longer there, only a vacant lot.
As the motorcade traveled down Shurling Drive, a man stopped his van in the far lane, got out and saluted.
By the time Sugar Boy reached the front door at Jones Brothers Mortuary on Millerfield Road, tears were falling like raindrops in the parking lot.
Seven members of the Georgia Army National Guard carried the casket inside, where his remains will be until Friday's memorial service at noon at the Jones Brothers Memorial Chapel.
He will be buried with full military honors at 2:30 p.m. at the Georgia Veterans Cemetery in Milledgeville.
Sixty-two American flags lined the driveway and street to represent the number of years since Barksdale left his last boot print in Macon.
"It was a beautiful welcome home," said Alfred McNair, who was Barksdale's cousin. He was 3 years old when Barksdale was sent to Korea. He was left with only a fleeting childhood memory — standing in the yard with his uncle on Boone Street.
McNair took his daughter, Chiquita Glover, and granddaughter, Ashlie Mack, to meet the plane in Atlanta. A great-great-niece, A'nia Wilson, also traveled from Macon. So did his niece Sonja Person, whose DNA sample helped officers positively identify Barksdale's skeletal remains.
"I never thought it would be anything like this," she said. "I thought there would be about six motorcycles. But this many? It was amazing."
She was 1 year old when her 21-year-old uncle was killed in combat while fighting with the Second Infantry in North Korea. He was listed as missing in action, but his remains were not among those returned by Communist forces after the war. He was left behind on a hill halfway around the world.
His family back in Macon held on to what hope they could, never pushing back from faith that the 21-year-old they called "Sugar Boy" would one day come walking through the door at 345 Boone St. Perhaps he had been captured and was planning his escape as a prisoner of war.
During the first week of August 2000, excavation teams from the U.S. and North Korea explored several old fighting positions about 50 miles above the capital of Pyongyang. Along a hilltop, they discovered an isolated human skeleton of a 5-foot-10, African-American male.
The skeletal remains were returned to the U.S. and assigned a case number. Four bone samples were sent to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory for testing.
It would take nine years before the remains could be positively identified.
At the airport Tuesday, Person and other family members spent a few quiet moments next to the coffin before it was carried to the waiting hearse at Cargo Gate 60. More than two dozen orange-shirted Delta Air Lines employees stood reverently nearby, many holding their hands over their hearts.
Person ran her fingers across the top of the casket. She knew it would be emotional. Her daughter, Kimberly McIntyre, died six years ago.
"She was only 36," Person said. "I can't imagine my grandparents losing a son who was 21 years old. I can't imagine not being able to bury him or visit his grave on his birthday or a holiday."
As the Georgia Patriot Guard Riders lined the cargo ramp holding American flags, Wynne Inya-Agha stood next to a banner made by her 15-year-old son, Jared, and 10-year-old daughter, Joy, on Monday night. The banner read: "WELCOME HOME SGT. BARKSDALE."
She drove her children from Fayetteville early Tuesday after she read the July 22 column on Barksdale on The Telegraph's website.
"Today is my 48th birthday, and this is how I choose to spend it," she said. "This is my gift to myself. I've never done anything like this in my life. I am grateful for people like Sgt. Barksdale who fought and died for our freedom. I have always been patriotic, but this one brought me to tears."
The homecoming was special for Freddie Jones, of Jones Brothers Mortuary. He has spent much of the past month planning and preparing to bring Barksdale back to Macon. His father, Norman Jones, was wounded in the Korean War and received a Purple Heart.
It was also deeply personal for David Blanton, of Gray, who coordinated the participation by the more than seven dozen Georgia Patriot Guard Riders. It included 40 from the Macon area who left at 4 a.m. Tuesday to meet the plane at the airport.
His father, the late Ernie Blanton of Valdosta, was assigned to the same 503rd Field Artillery Battalion.
"When I saw the information on Sgt. Barksdale, it sent a chill up my spine," Blanton said. "My father used to talk about how cold it was, and there were so many of (the Chinese), and (the U.S.) didn't have enough ammunition."
Blanton made the journey Tuesday and will return Friday for the memorial service to escort the funeral procession to the cemetery in Milledgeville at 2:30 p.m.
"We can't change what happened, but we can be there for the family to show our support," he said. "We got him home. We never want a fallen warrior to be left behind."
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Korean War Anniversary
An OPINION piece From the Missourian: Korean War Anniversary
It passed unnoticed for the
most part. The Associated Press did do a story on the 59th anniversary
of the ending of the shooting in the Korean War, but that was about it
as far as we are aware.
The anniversary date is 10 p.m. July 27, 1953. That was last Friday when most attention was being paid to the opening ceremonies of the beginning of the Olympic games in London.
To our troops who were on the front lines, or on the
seas around Korea, or at air bases where air strikes originated, July
27, 1953, is a significant date. To relatives of loved ones who were
killed, wounded or reported as missing in action, the date has special
meaning, along with June 25, 1950, when the war began.
North Korea, aided by China and Russia, fought South Korean forces, aided by the United States and other members of the United Nations. We offer that because so many Americans don’t know when the war occurred and who the participants were. The U.S. carried the load for United Nations forces. The war began when communist North Korea invaded South Korea. The country had been divided after World War II as part of the treaty settlements by the victors.
North Korea apparently had a major observance of the anniversary of the armistice. Its observance was meant to kindle patriotism and loyalty in North Koreans, according to the AP story. U.S. and South Korean officials marked the anniversary at the village of Panmunjom, where peace talks were held during the war. Since no peace treaty has ever been signed, the Korean Peninsula remains technically in a state of war. The U.S. still is at war with North Korea, and we still have thousands of troops stationed in the south.
Our country has said repeatedly that normal ties will not come until after North Korea abandons its pursuit of nuclear weapons and takes other steps.
North Korea, naturally, says it won the war and called its celebration one of “victory in the Fatherland Liberation War.” Others call it a stalemate. We call it a victory for South Korea and the United Nations because the invading North Koreans were kicked back to their communist grounds, and South Korea was saved from communism.
If you want one of the best comparisons of life under a communistic government and under a democratic government where freedom reigns, take a look at Korea North and Korea South. Life is so different in the two nations that the difference is like night and day. It’s dark most of the time in North Korea while in South Korea the freedom rays have turned it into a powerful economic machine and the people have a high standard of living. The U.S. and the United Nations are the parents of South Korea freedoms.
The anniversary date is 10 p.m. July 27, 1953. That was last Friday when most attention was being paid to the opening ceremonies of the beginning of the Olympic games in London.
North Korea, aided by China and Russia, fought South Korean forces, aided by the United States and other members of the United Nations. We offer that because so many Americans don’t know when the war occurred and who the participants were. The U.S. carried the load for United Nations forces. The war began when communist North Korea invaded South Korea. The country had been divided after World War II as part of the treaty settlements by the victors.
North Korea apparently had a major observance of the anniversary of the armistice. Its observance was meant to kindle patriotism and loyalty in North Koreans, according to the AP story. U.S. and South Korean officials marked the anniversary at the village of Panmunjom, where peace talks were held during the war. Since no peace treaty has ever been signed, the Korean Peninsula remains technically in a state of war. The U.S. still is at war with North Korea, and we still have thousands of troops stationed in the south.
Our country has said repeatedly that normal ties will not come until after North Korea abandons its pursuit of nuclear weapons and takes other steps.
North Korea, naturally, says it won the war and called its celebration one of “victory in the Fatherland Liberation War.” Others call it a stalemate. We call it a victory for South Korea and the United Nations because the invading North Koreans were kicked back to their communist grounds, and South Korea was saved from communism.
If you want one of the best comparisons of life under a communistic government and under a democratic government where freedom reigns, take a look at Korea North and Korea South. Life is so different in the two nations that the difference is like night and day. It’s dark most of the time in North Korea while in South Korea the freedom rays have turned it into a powerful economic machine and the people have a high standard of living. The U.S. and the United Nations are the parents of South Korea freedoms.
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