D-Day | Wisconsin soldiers fought through blood, chaos

Kenneth Schumacher of Madison landed at Normandy 70 years ago.

Pfc. Schumacher, right, with his anti-aircraft gun crew in Europe.

From the Wisconsin State Journal:

Seventy years ago, 21-year-old Kenneth Schumacher of Madison was floating in a landing ship off Omaha Beach.

As far as he could see to either side, boats were idling or maneuvering as German shells exploded in the water and on the beach, taking a terrible, bloody toll.

Trucks for gun crews like Schumacher’s were being blown up as they drove off the ships, through shallow water toward the beach.

“A direct hit and you’d see the doors fly open and you knew everyone was killed,” Schumacher said Thursday as sunlight bathed his face in a quiet library space in his nursing home on Madison’s East Side.

Read the full story here.

DOD outflanked | Middleton man to bring "missing" WWII soldier's remains home

Journalist and filmaker
Jed Henry of Middleton,
Wisconsin, worked for
two years to force the
military to accept its errors.

Pfc. Lawrence S. Gordon, KIA 8/13/44

Pfc. Gordon's charred wallet
 was returned to his family,
 but the military said
 it didn't know where
his remains were buried.

From the Wisconsin State Journal:

A Middleton man has finally outflanked the U.S. military in his determined two-year campaign to bring home the remains of a World War II veteran who had served with his grandfather.

Along the way, Jed Henry enlisted the help of the Madison Police Department, UW-Madison’s DNA Sequencing Facility, members of the state’s congressional delegation and two Madison-based forensic scientists.

“The people of Wisconsin really got this done for the Gordon family,” said Henry, a freelance journalist and filmmaker.

Henry was researching his grandfather’s Army reconnaissance company for a documentary when he stumbled across the strange case of Pfc. Lawrence S. Gordon — the only member of the unit who was killed in action but never got a proper burial.

After butting heads with the Department of Defense Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command and the Defense POW-MIA Office since 2012, Henry said, he wasn’t surprised by the announcement in March that the agencies would be reorganized because of complaints about their performance in the recovery and identification of war dead.

Temporary cemetery near Gorron, France, where
Pfc. Gordon's remains were buried first, on Aug. 15, 1944,
 as an unknown American soldier, then months later
reburied as an unknown German soldier.

“It highlights the other 83,000 who are missing and won’t get help and won’t have the luxury of the French government helping them out,” Henry said. “We all feel that if you go and you fight and you die, you ought to be able to go home.”

Cemetery for German soldiers where Pfc. Gordon's
remains were buried in 1961.

Working with Gordon family members and several military historians, Henry’s detective work led him to conclude that Gordon’s remains had been misplaced in a cemetery for German soldiers in France. The U.S. military repeatedly refused to perform DNA tests. And when the French government did the tests and identified the remains as Gordon’s, the military refused to accept the results.

In March, after Henry arranged for further testing at UW-Madison and

Pfc. Gordon's nephew in the funeral vault in France where his
uncles remains were exhumed on Sept. 13, 2013.

another laboratory, the Pentagon signaled that it would relent. He said the key was news coverage in the Stars and Stripes newspaper, along with pressure from Congress.

Last week, hundreds of veterans mounted motorcycles and headed for Washington, D.C., dedicating their 26th annual Run for the Wall rally to Gordon.

Henry and members of Gordon’s family plan to travel to France next month to take custody of the remains. They refused the military’s offer of military transport to the usual reception point for war dead, Dover Air Base in Delaware.

Read the full story here.

Soldier song and dance at Fort McCoy

From Fort McCoy Public Affairs Office: The stage will be set for 22 soldiers from across the country to entertain the public at Fort McCoy with a 75-minute song and dance production themed "Ready and Resilient."

The free performance is July 11 at 6 p.m. at the Rumpel Fitness Center. Doors open an hour before the show, and seating is on a first-come basis. Please be prepared to show a photo ID when at the main gate.

"Ready and Resilient" is a high-energy live musical production that showcases the talents of active-duty Soldiers selected by audition from throughout the Army. Soldiers first, they are artists who have a passion for music, dance and performing, with specialties ranging from information technology to combat medicine. The show is assembled and rehearsed five weeks for a four-month tour of military installations across the nation.

"Every American, military-affiliated or not, will be able to see themselves in the show," said Army Soldier Show Artistic Director Victor Hurtado. "The fact that the show is entertaining someone is already taking them away (from their mindset), but the messaging is going to inspire. We know they are coming to be entertained, but further, the content in the show is designed to hopefully be a time-released pool of inspiration."

For more information about the show, please call 877-864-4969 or visit www.mccoymwr.com.

PHOTO CAPTION: A performance scene from the 2013 U.S. Army Soldier Show (U.S. Army photograph)

Wisconsin general honored by NAACP

One of the NAACP’s top honors this year will go to a Beloit native with strong Dane County ties who last year made history by becoming the Army’s first African-American woman promoted to two-star general.
Maj. Gen. Marcia Anderson is to receive the Benjamin L. Hooks Distinguished Service Award next week during the annual National Association for the Advancement of Colored People convention in Houston.
The award was first given in 1990 in recognition of the Hooks’ service in the 92nd Infantry Division during WWII. He was the NAACP’s sixth executive director.
Anderson was born in Beloit. Her family moved to East St. Louis, Ill., when she was in the second grade.
She moved back to Wisconsin in 1998 to take the job of clerk of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Madison.
She was a member of the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs board from 2008 to 2010, including a stint as chairwoman.
Anderson’s 31-year military career started when she signed up for Army ROTC as a student at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb.
She stayed with the military, fulfilling an eight-year commitment before re-enlisting in the reserves.
When she wasn’t on active duty, Anderson lived in Verona with her husband, Amos Anderson.
In 2010 she was promoted to brigadier general — which made her the Army’s highest ranking African-American woman — and assigned to the full-time post of deputy commanding general of the Human Resources Command at Fort Knox in Kentucky.
With her promotion last year, she moved to the office of the chief of the U.S. Army Reserve in Washington, D.C.
She has said that when she retires from the military, she plans to move back to Verona.
www.madison.com/wsj
(AP Photo/The News Enterprise, Jill Pickett) 

Wisconsin teen follows slain cousin's path to dangerous eastern Afghanistan

When Army Sgt. Joshua Brennan of McFarland was killed in Afghanistan in 2007, it only stiffened the resolve of his 17-year-old cousin, Joseph, to join the fight.

“After Josh died, I told Joseph, ‘You can’t be getting out there for vengeance to find Josh’s killer,’ ” said Joseph’s father, Terry Brennan of Mequon. “But that wasn’t it. He was proud of what Josh did and wanted to follow in Josh’s footprints.”

Joseph, now 19, followed more closely than anyone in his big Wisconsin family expected.

Above: family photo shows Pvt. Joseph Brennan of Mequon and his fiance, Emily Barikmo, a UW-Milwaukee student.

Read the full story in the Wisconsin State Journal.

Ups and downs of liberty in Beaver Dam

From Nick Druecke in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, roughly 6,339 miles from his post at Camp Taji, Iraq. Nick is in the regular Army. He just happens to be home on leave just as 3,200 state Guard soldiers have returned to their homes at the end of a yearlong deployment. He offers a little advice.

What is it like being on leave? Well honestly there is a certain amount of duality to it; because everything is different now, but nothing has really changed. It's been over a year since I was last home, and Beaver Dam has changed very little in that time. Yet my friends and family are all scattered to the four winds. I will give you a little run down of my life on leave.

My father picked me up from the Milwaukee airport and we started driving home, when it occurred to me that I didn't have any civilian clothes at home, so we stopped at a WalMart so I could pick up some cheap jeans and t shirts. After taking a few steps into the stop I was honestly a little disoriented, the enormity of the store combined with all the sales and advertisements seriously left me a little daunted. I told my dad to stop for a second so I could get my bearings. That might seem a little cheesy, but I swear it happened. Next time you walk into a WalMart just take a moment to look at the shear size of them, you might be a little amazed.

So after that I go home, shower, and begin to relax. Over the course of the next few days I hang out with the few friends who are still in town, have a few drinks, and share mutual boredom with them. Of course you have to see your family, and it's a little funny how that works. Everybody knows that your time home is limited in the service, yet they are always unable to come and see you, you have to go see them. It's a little frustrating at times. As you might imagine most people have the same questions, so you begin to develop a sales pitch of what Iraq is like. While I do understand that people are curious, it can be a bit annoying to answer the same questions every time you meet someone. Not much you can do about it though, just take it in stride with a grain of salt.

So while my friends are all off doing different things with their lives, in different parts of the world (mostly Wisconsin) I am at home. I no longer have a car, and I have been away from everything so long that I no longer know what peoples work schedules are.

"Is school in?", "Do you work today?", "Do you have any free time on Tuesday?", "Where can I meet up with you?" All these questions have frequently left my mouth, and are usually left unanswered.

I think I am painting this picture a little black, which I didn't intend to do. Leave has been awesome, I was just expressing some of the complications I run into. The only really huge difference between life over there and here, is the time schedule. Even when we have days off over there we still have things to do, you work every day of the week, weekends don't exist in a combat zone. I go from working literally 24/7, to having nothing to do. Stress levels at 99% go down to zero. You get so used to being busy in Iraq that you feel like you should be doing something on leave. I go to the gym mostly everyday, yet I still feel uneasy about just sitting around. In the 8 or 9 days I have been home I have slept in my own bed twice, I can't help but run around until I find something to do with someone. Usually that runs long into the night, and I end up crashing there.

I don't want anyone to get the wrong message here, leave has been a blast for me, and I don't want it to end. It's just very difficult to readjust to a lifestyle that is so calm. So if anybody out there has a soldier back from "over there" please be patient with them, it just takes some time.

Live from Wisconsin,
Nick

(Large photo: From left, Nick Druecke, Raj Renfro, Tyler Schreiner, Matthew Odum)

Wisconsin native claimed by IED in Afghanistan

Kevin Graham, an Army specialist who grew up in Wisconsin and still has family here, was killed Saturday by an IED in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Read his story in the Racine Journal-Times by clicking here.
According to coverage in The News Tribune of Tacoma, Washington, near Fort Lewis:

His death is the 16th for the Strykers of the 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. And 10 of those deaths have fallen on a single battalion, the 1-17.

Since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, only five other Fort Lewis Stryker battalions have lost 10 or more soldiers, and those were sustained over a full 12- or 15-month deployment. The 1-17 and its parent brigade have been deployed less than three months.

Kevin Graham, 1982-2009