Ghosts of Arlington Podcast

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here Captivity at the hands of the Vietcong continues to bring hardships to Captain Rocky Versace, Lieutenant Nick Rowe, and Sergeant Dan Pitzer. Versace has been separated from the group, though two new prisoners, Army Master Sergeant Ed Johnson and Army Sergeant Len Tadios join Rowe and Pitzer. After attacking a guard and a second round of fail...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here After begin captured by the Vietcong, Captain Rocky Versace, Lieutenant Nick Rowe, and Sergeant Dan Pitzer are held in a series of Vietcong jungle prison camps in South Vietnam. The Vietcong also send cadre to try to reeducate their prisoners - to get them denounce the US involvement in Vietnam - but to no avail. After Captain Versace is lab...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here Two fo the first US Solderis taken captive by the communists in Vietnam were to advisors to the South Vietnamese Army, First Lieutenant Nick Rowe and Captain Rocky Versace. One of these men worked so hard to keep up the moral of other US prisoners that the North decided to summarily execute him. The other refused to give up and after five ye...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here As the war in Europe draws to a close, Wild Bill Donovan once again tries to convince FDR of the need for a centralized intelligence service - but when the president suddenly dies, he has to deal with a new chief executive, Truman, who he is not familiar with. All this while also helping Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson prepare for with...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here After Pearl Harbor, Coordinator of Intelligence Colonel William J. Donovan petitioned for President Roosevelt to transfer his new agency from White House control to that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. FDR thought he was committing political suicide - the military generals and admirals wanted nothing to do with him - but FDR granted Donovan&ap...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here William Donovan resigns from the Justice Department when he is not appointed Attorney General by his friend and newly elected president Herbert Hoover. He returns to law and comes out of the Great Depression a self-made millionaire. He also finds common cause with Franklin D. Roosevelt when he replaces Hoover in the White House and in time,...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here William Donovan's final battlefield action of WWI is to countermand an order he received to attack - an order that would needlessly cost more lives than the Irish Regiment has already lost. Not only does he live to defend this action, but he is eventually awarded the Medal of Honor and the commander who issued the order is relieved. Aft...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here The last two episodes we talked about the highest decorated member of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and now we look at the man who created the OSS - William J. Donovan, aka "Wild Bill" - from his humble origins in Buffalo New York, through his social rise as an up-and-coming Columbia educated lawyer, to his...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here This week we finish the story of French Foreign Legionnaire turned OSS operative Peter Ortiz, after he jumps behind enemy lines, deep into Nazi occupied France to stir up mayhem and cause as many problems for the Germans as he can. What would you do if the Germans were hunting you and you happened to end up in the same bar as several German...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here When people think about the US Marine Corps' many contributions in World War II, they usually think about the island hopping campaign in the pacific, as they should - amphibious operations are the bread and butter of the USMC. But there were a select few who served in Europe, mostly with the Office of Strategic Services - or OSS - the p...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here Thanks to a question posed to me at a high school baseball game by listener Chris A., I looked a little deeper to see if there were other professional baseball players besides Spottswood Poles buried at Arlington. It turns out that there are six so I decided to give a short vignette about each of them. Today's Ghosts of Arlington are: N...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here Record keeping was haphazard in the early days of baseball - it was even less standardized for African American players in the early days of the Negro Leagues. Even so, with the statistics we do have available, we can say for certain that Spottswood Poles was one of the best. With hitting like Ty Cobb and speed that rivaled Cool Papa Bell, i...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here While we have talked about the first military burials at Arlington as a national cemetery, we have not talked about the first overall burial on the grounds, back when it was still a plantation. The first person buried at Arlington was a women well known in Virginia and the region beyond thanks to the first cookbook published in the Americas,...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here Before his final senate term was up, John Glenn became the oldest person to fly in space (a record that would stand until 2021. After retiring from the senate, he continued to teach public policy and preach public service at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University. He also continued to see the world with his beloved...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here After becoming the first American astronaut to orbit Earth, John Glenn hoped to return to space and hoped to be the first person to set foot on the moon, but after NASA failed to put him on the flight rotation, he left the agency, retired from the Marine Corps, and joined the private work sector. He also nurtured a close friendship with Robe...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here A presidential commission followed the Challenger disaster and that commission issued recommendations to make space travel safer, but it missed a major issue that had been happening on takes off for almost as long as the shuttle had been flying. Large chunks of foam would flake off and strike the tiles protecting the shuttle and its crew fro...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here Through the Rogers Commission hearings, the truth comes out about the faulty O-rings and that if those in charge had listened to the concerns of the engineers below them, the disaster could have been avoided by waiting until the weather warmed up to launch the shuttle. Joh Denver also makes good on his promise to write a song for the Teacher...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here Despite warnings that it was likely not safe to launch in such cold weather, NASA gave  Challenger the go ahead on January 28, 1986. Seventy three seconds after liftoff, the shuttle stack suffered a catastrophic malfunction and exploded. Seven astronauts lost their lives, but not from the explosion itself. We'll look at exactly what hap...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here Christa McAuliffe's four months of training draw to and end. Before the launch, she get's to head home to spend Christmas and New Year's with her family and then it's off to Florida for the launch, a launch that was delayed several times until NASA felt pressure to get the mission underway no matter what. The Space Race s...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here The Teacher-in-Space finalists take a ride on the vomit comet and are rewarded with a trip to Space Camp, which tragically results in the death of an employee, before returning to Washington, DC for the announcement of which one of them will be joining the crew of STS-51-L. We also learn why mission specialist astronauts really don't li...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here Following the first several shuttle missions, particularly after Sally Ride's historic flight on the seventh mission, public interest in the shuttle program dropped off much as it had following Apollo 11 and the first successful moon landing. In an attempt to rekindle public interest, President Reagan announced that the 25th shuttle mis...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here To qualify the Space Shuttle, four test flights into space with two member crews, were launched to prove its spaceworthiness. After the final of these flight, which landed on July 4 - a date I'm sure what not a coincidence - President Ronald Reagan declared the Shuttle fully mission capable. Between 1983 and 1985, three more shuttles jo...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here Even before the end of the Apollo Program ended, work on the next generation space vehicle began. The result was the Space Shuttle, NASA's workhorse that would serve for 30 years, but was not able to completely live up to its pre-production hype. The Space Race series introduction music is Lift Off by kennysvoice . As always, a very spe...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here The first International Space Station was a joint US-USSR mission called the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program in 1975 when three astronauts and two cosmonauts spent nearly two days together docked in Earth orbit. It was planned during a thawing of the Cold War but by the time the mission ended, the poticial climate was chilling again and it would b...

I'd love to hear your thoughts - send me a text here After accepting they would not make it to the moon first, the Soivet Union shifted thier focus on creating space stations for scientific and miltiary observations in low Earth orbit. These stations, called Salyuts, saw several iterations in the 1970s. Not to be out done, the US launched its own Space Station - Skylab - built from left over A...