Celebrating Our Heroes on Memorial Day

Memorial Day is a time to gather with friends and family, welcome summer, fire up the grill and relax, and after many days of rain, we can celebrate on a beautiful sunny day today.  But most of all, Memorial Day is a time to remember and honor the heroic men and women who gave their lives in serving and protecting our country and freedoms. 

Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II by  Mitchell Zuckoff.

On November 5, 1942, a US cargo plane slammed into the Greenland Ice Cap. Four days later, the B-17 assigned to the search-and-rescue mission became lost in a blinding storm and also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on board survived, and the US military launched a daring rescue operation. But after picking up one man, the Grumman Duck amphibious plane flew into a severe storm and vanished.

Frozen in Time tells the story of these crashes and the fate of the survivors, bringing vividly to life their battle to endure 148 days of the brutal Arctic winter, until an expedition headed by famed Arctic explorer Bernt Balchen brought them to safety. Mitchell Zuckoff takes the reader deep into the most hostile environment on earth, through hurricane-force winds, vicious blizzards, and subzero temperatures.

Moving forward to today, he recounts the efforts of the Coast Guard and North South Polar Inc. – led by indefatigable dreamer Lou Sapienza – who worked for years to solve the mystery of the Duck’s last flight and recover the remains of its crew.


The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokow

"In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the massive and daring Allied invasion of Europe that marked the beginning of the end of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. There, I underwent a life-changing experience. As I walked the beaches with the American veterans who had returned for this anniversary, men in their sixties and seventies, and listened to their stories, I was deeply moved and profoundly grateful for all they had done. Ten years later, I returned to Normandy for the fiftieth anniversary of the invasion, and by then I had come to understand what this generation of Americans meant to history. It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced." ~ Tom Brokow.  This book pays tribute to the generation of Americans who fought in World War II, telling the stories of individual men and women who, united by common purpose and values, served their country overseas and returned to create modern America.

Hero found [sound recording] : The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War by Bruce Henderson

 In February 1966, U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler was shot down over "neutral Laos." He crashed deep in territory controlled by North Vietnamese army regulars and the communist Pathet Lao, who would eventually capture him and hold him prisoner in a fortified jungle prisoner-of-war camp. But German-born Dengler was no ordinary prisoner. Already a legend in the Navy for his escape and evasion skills---amply demonstrated during training in the California desert---he would initiate, plan, and lead an organized escape from the POW camp, becoming the longest-held American to escape captivity during the Vietnam War. Caught in a most desperate situation, imprisoned not only by the enemy but by the jungle itself, Dengler's heroic impulse was to not only get himself out but to free all the other POWs---Americans, Thai, and Chinese---some of whom had been held for years.