176 articles · 67.1K karma · 202 friends · active 1 week, 2 days ago
I'm a retired Lieutenant Fire Fighter / EMT. Prior to working as a Firefighter, I also served in Law Enforcement for several years.
In following with our long line of family military service, dating all the way back to 1776, I'm a US Army veteran (tanker). I served mostly in the M-60A1 and eventually the M1-A1 series tanks. I was a crew member in the Abrams only for a short while.
My Dad was kind of like "Lt. Dan" from the movie Forrest Gump. Fortunately dear old Dad broke our "family curse" of having members killed in every major conflict that the United States has ever had. My Dad was wounded in the Korean War, and thankfully he was not killed. Otherwise I wouldn't be here if he was. I accidentally happened some years later...
My other hobbies include restoring old "Mopar" muscle cars from the late 1960's and early '70s. I also enjoy building aircraft in 1/48 & 1/32 scale, along with 1/35 Armor. I especially like the WW2 stuff. Lately I have been gravitating towards the First World War 1/32 scale aviation kits though...
I built my first model (Revell 1/32 P-40 "Flying Tigers" version) when I was 8 years old. I currently have about 700 kits ( of which about 1/4 are built).
”Year of the Cat”
Traditionally, the Chinese have a calendar year that is named after some sort of animal. This year is the “Year of the Rooster”. So what do you think about this?
The year of the “Cat”... Anything would go [...]
Today and tomorrow marks the 73rd Anniversary of the Mariana's "Turkey Shoot", which happened on June 19th and 20th, 1944. It is sometimes called the battle of the Philippine Sea, where the Japanese lost an estimated 550 - 645 [...]
Greetings everyone !
It has been a little over a week since our reveals were completed from our Midway Group Build.
The turn out was more than spectacular and exceeded my expectations by a long shot. I never dreamed that it would have [...]
I really liked this colorized photo that shows F4F-4 Wildcats on the deck of the USS Enterprise, sometime during March of 1942. This picture was originally posted by Rob Pollock as a part of his usual "Friday Briefing" . [...]
75 years ago today "Dick" Best changed history with a single 1,000 pound bomb. At that exact instant, he also changed the course of the War in favor of the United States in the Pacific Theater. It has been written that this [...]
This is the picture that inspired the markings for my build, which was part of the recent Midway Group build. This plane has interior green paint inside the cockpit. More on that in a few...
There were a series of color photographs [...]
Here's another historically significant plane from the Midway Group build.
This plane represents the sole surviving Grumman TBF Avenger from Torpedo 8. This plane managed to limp back home after being mauled by Japanese Zero fighters on [...]
Today another very significant event occurred exactly 75 years ago. I built a model of this historical plane as part of the Midway Group Build. A link to the build log is listed below.
This Japanese Zero, (serial number 4593) was [...]
Almost exactly to the minute. Around 9AM, Midway time, which happens to be 4PM here on the Eastern coast of the US.
75 years ago today... this plane spotted the Japanese invasion forces, consisting of mainly transports. These forces [...]
This is something that I have been wanting to do for a long time now...each year passes and I would miss it, so here goes.
Since today is Memorial Day here in the US, and in honor of our fallen veterans, I felt that this would be [...]
