Fentanyl is a painkiller that is 50 times stronger than heroin. It has already killed thousands, including Prince. Chris McGreal reveals why so many are playing Russian roulette with this lethal drug Natasha Butler had never heard of fentanyl until a doctor told her that a single pill had pushed her eldest son to the brink of death and he wasnt coming back. The doctor said fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin. I know morphine is really, really powerful. Im trying to understand. All that in one pill? How did Jerome get that pill? she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper as the tears came. Jerome was on a respirator and he was pretty much unresponsive. The doctor told me all his organs had shut down. His brain was swelling, putting pressure on to the spine. They said if he makes it hell be a vegetable. The last picture of Jerome shows him propped immobile in a hospital bed, eyes closed, sustained only by a clutch of tubes and wires. Natasha took the near impossible decision to let him die. I had to remove him from life support. Thats the hardest thing to ever do. I had him at 15 so we grew together. He was 28 when he died, she said. I had to let him die but after that I needed some answers. What is fentanyl and how did he get it? That was a question asked across Sacramento after Jerome and 52 other people in and around Californias capital overdosed on the extremely powerful synthetic opioid, usually only used by hospitals to treat patients in the later stages of cancer, over a few days in late March and early April 2016. Twelve died. Source: http://allofbeer.com/pills-that-kill-why-are-thousands-dying-from-fentanyl-abuse/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/08/27/pills-that-kill-why-are-thousands-dying-from-fentanyl-abuse/
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The hijinks celebrated in Animal House are depicted as more sinister in Goat but in other movies theres recognition than fratboys have evolved, too The frathouse comedy is almost as much of an all-American institution as fraternities themselves. In 1978, National Lampoons Animal House became one of the most profitable movies of all time and Hollywood realised that there was gold in them there locker rooms. Animal Houses uproariously wacky tone, however, couldnt have been further removed from Goat, the dark drama starring Nick Jonas about a fraternitys brutal hazing ritual. Out in the US this Friday, its an indication of how Americas attitude has changed towards fraternities, from harmless hijinks to something much more sinister. After Animal House grossed $141m, having been made on a $3m budget, cinemagoers couldnt move for snobs and slobs battling in subgenres from sports comedies (Caddyshack, Ski School) and high school raunchfests (Porkys, Fast Times at Ridgemont High). The venues may have varied, but the central elements remained the same: a group of lovable, sex-crazed guys doing battle with cruel authority figures or talented rivals and somewhere along the way, of course, they score with some chicks. Emerging from the post-Watergate era in which suspicion of the establishment was at an all-time high, Animal House and 1984s Revenge of the Nerds had a strong whiff of anti-authoritarianism. There was one aspect that was wearyingly traditional, however: the movies depiction of women as little more than disposable objects to be fought over and won by the guys. But as the genre evolved, so did its sexual politics. Watching fraternity comedies over the past few decades we see a slow march towards gender equality and a deconstruction of the patriarchy both onscreen and off. On its release, the misogyny of Animal House seemed to pass critics by. In his four-star review, Roger Ebert praised it as an end run around Hollywoods traditional notions of comedy. He praised the fraternitys womanizing leader Otter (Tim Matheson) for achieving a kind of grace in his obsession. This is the womanizer who seduces the deans wife to get even and, in one of the funniest sequences, poses as a dead girls unwitting fiance in order to garner sympathy from the deceaseds attractive roommate.
More disturbing is the attitude displayed by Larry (Tom Hulce) towards a young, attractive cashier. He invites her to a party at the frathouse, where she promptly passes out topless in his room. A devil and angel appear on Larrys shoulders, as he grapples with the idea of raping her unconscious body. Eventually, he does the right thing, and seems proud of it. But later, he takes her out again. With both of them sober, theyre about to have sex, when she reveals that shes only 13. The scene cuts away, but it is later revealed that Larry had sex with her anyway. Whats particularly toxic about this scenario is that unlike Otter, Larry is one of the good guys. Larry is a virgin, and the fraternity which Animal House holds up as an antidote to the oppressive establishment turns him into a statutory rapist. At the time however, no one seemed notice. Even Pauline Kael celebrated the film, writing in her review: I stand with the slobs.
Revenge of the Nerds, the next frat movie to hit big at the box office, is similarly icky. Like Animal House, it focuses on a crew of students rejected from the establishment fraternities who form their own frat and eventually do battle with the jocks. In Nerds, the heroes arent dumb drunks, but their goal of abusing women to validate their own manhood remains the same. In the films climactic scene, Lewis (Robert Carradine), the chief nerd, poses as a jock to have sex with his unwitting girlfriend. The law calls this rape, but the film simply sees it as a victory for the nerds. Meanwhile, his friends are across campus selling nude photos of her that they took without her consent in an effort to win a competition with the jocks. In these films, the characters are so concerned with their status in the eyes of other men that the treatment of their female peers is totally irrelevant. As times change, however, so do attitudes. Steve Zacharias, the writer of Revenge of the Nerds, expressed contrition about his work. That was rape,
Over the years, the fraternity movie has popped up from time to time in its original form
The fraternity movie has certainly changed with the times, but this year, the transformation came all at once.
This years sequel, Bad Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, goes even further to subvert the toxic masculinity of the genre. The film opens with Pete getting engaged to another man and sharing the moment with his former brothers. Teddy (Zac Efron), the alpha-male rush leader who once represented the social conservatism of the Reagan era, approves and is happy for his friend. These films were never explicitly homophobic the villain of Animal House called his pledges faggot, but the heroes never did but an embrace of queerness within the fraternity system still stands as a bold embrace of progressive social mores. The films real social victory is in its feminist qualities. One storyline follows Shelby (Chlo Grace Moretz), a freshman who starts her own sorority when she learns that, by Greek rule, sororities are not allowed to host parties which is true. Teddy even offers his help to mentor and tutor the young women, never once treating them as sexual objects. The film subverts genre tropes, and takes the opportunity to explore the sexism that is, the film argues, inherent in the Greek system. Bad Neighbors 2 is optimistic that fraternities can change, but Goat offers nothing so rosy. The film, based on
The pledges in Goat are urinated on and made to sleep in cages. They are forced to drink far more excessively than anything weve seen before in a frathouse film and consume entire bottles of hot sauce. In the scene that gives the movie its title, a small group of pledges are instructed to drink an entire keg of beer and if they fail, they will be forced to have sex with a goat. Shocking as these images are, the film would come across as ineffective moral scolding if it were not seen through the eyes of its protagonist, who is mercilessly beaten by a pair of strangers in the films first scene, and spends the rest of the film especially Hell Week, the hazing period covered in the film trying to prove to himself and the world hes not a coward. In Goat, there is no overbearing dean or rival fraternity with whom the heroes do battle. The villains are the frat leaders themselves. Earlier films would have Brad break off and start another fraternity a kindler, gentle one but Goat keeps its sheep among the wolves, trapped in the institutionalized violence that have defined both fraternities and their cinematic representations since day one. Ultimately, fraternities have become a stand-in for the American establishment itself. In the late 2000s, as Americans were expressing their disappointment over the Bush presidency, movies like
Source: http://allofbeer.com/sex-booze-and-stupidity-fratboys-on-film-from-animal-house-to-goat/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/sex-booze-and-stupidity-fratboys-on-film-from-animal-house-to-goat/ Ale infused with juniper, sage, and dandelion. A strawberry and basil porter. A beer brewed with lactose, giving it a smooth, creamy feel on the palate. Such concoctions sound like the brainchild of a startup in Boulder, Berkeley, or Berlin? Think again. The beers are on tap at the Open Gate Brewery, a small-batch pub on the back side of the vast Guinness plant in central Dublin. Weve got license to do anything we want, says Peter Simpson, the master brewer in charge of the project. And by that, he really means anything. When an American brewer named Heather came for a visit, they honored her with a beer flavored with heather. A member of the Guinness team loves plums; a damson plum brew followed. And for a brewers wedding? Ferment to Be, a beer made something like champagne, with a secondary fermentation in the bottle. Simpsons team cooks up test brews almost daily and offers pub-goers a new beer every two weeks or so.
Source: Courtesy Diageo
Open Gate highlights Big Beers efforts to cope with the growing popularity of the offerings of small startups. Craft brewers now account for 20 percent of the $106 billion U.S. beer marketand almost all the growth the industry has seen in the past decade. Jean-Franois van Boxmeer, Heinekens chief executive officer, has said the threat from craft beer is one of his companys greatest challenges. Analysts say Anheuser-Busch InBevs ongoing acquisition of rival SABMiller is aimed at countering craft. Those concerns have spurred the industrys giants to buy into smaller brewers, whose products are often sold with little mention of their corporate parentage. InBev, for instance, owns Goose Island Brewery and Four Peaks Brewery, and SABMiller makes Leinenkugels and Blue Moon. But lately, the big names have started experimenting with new brewing processes, unexpected ingredients, and historical recipes to establish craft cred while preserving the megabrands theyve spent decades nurturing. Heineken has introduced H41, brewed with yeast harvested in Patagonia, the first installment in a series of new flavors the company calls Lager Explorations. And Carlsberg offers Rebrew, based on yeast extracted from 19th-century bottles found in the cellar of the companys 140-year-old laboratory in Copenhagen. Craft is growing at double-digits as consumers look for something newnew taste, new flavors, says Flemming Besenbacher, chairman of the Carlsberg Foundation, which controls the beermaker.
Source: Courtesy Guinness
While Guinness has had an experimental brewery at the Open Gate site since the 1960s, it only recently started to produce the fanciful creations that are the hallmark of craft brewers. Were not craft, but were not mainstream lager either, Mark Sandys, the executive in charge of the beer business at Diageo, the owner of Guinness, says over a pint of ale at Open Gate. Were somewhere in between, and Open Gate lets us experiment with how far we can go in either direction. The place looks something like a high school chemistry lab. The work benches are covered with scales, beakers, and graduated cylinders. A refrigerator has 28 varieties of hops. Theres a storeroom with 50-kilo bags of cassava, sorghum, banana starch, and other ingredients for Diageo-owned breweries across Africa. The pub has lines that can produce 30-liter and 30-keg batches. The smaller lines are used to test ideas, while the bigger ones turn out beers that will be sold at Open Gate. Since December, the pub has been open to outsiders on Thursday and Friday evenings. Customers pay 6 ($6.75) for a flight of four half pints, and additional beers run 5 a pint. The sales are enough to cover the cost of running the place but usually not the beers ingredients. Simpson says he may start hosting meetings of homebrewers, where hobbyists can get together and sample each others creations alongside whatever the pros at Guinness might dream up. Customers are given forms to critique the brews, though most have little chance of ever being commercialized. If we were to make this commercially, wed use every strawberry in Ireland, Nick Doyle, a Guinness brand ambassador and bartender at Open Gate, says of the strawberry porter the pub sold this summer. A handful, though, will be rolled out to a broader market. Before the pub opened to outsiders, Simpson came up with Hop House 13, a malted lager made with hops from Australia and the U.S. I wanted to produce a lager that I would drink myself, he says. And two years ago the crew at Open Gate created West Indies porter, a Guinness sub-brand based on a recipe found in a logbook from 1801. Today, Simpson says he has high hopes for a rye pale ale, created for the companys Christmas party and sold at Open Gate since last winter. Were very fortunate that the craft brew wave happened, Simpson says. Without it, we wouldnt be able to do what were doing. The bottom line: After years of ceding share to upstarts, Big Beer is seeking to bolster its craft cred with traditional recipes and new flavors. Source: http://allofbeer.com/on-tap-at-guinness-strawberry-porter/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/on-tap-at-guinness-strawberry-porter/ The southern California city has a reputation for beaches and beer. But amid a dramatic spike in homelessness, people are coming to terms with a new reality A tableau of squalor and suffering isnt what comes to mind when people think of San Diego, a town with the motto Americas finest city and a reputation for its craft-beer culture and miles of beautiful beaches. But thats how Dan McSwain, a columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune, described the citys homelessness crisis in a piece last year, the first in a series pillorying city leaders for not doing more to address the issue. Since then the situation has, if anything, worsened. A recent count found a dramatic 104% increase in tents and hand-built structures located downtown,for a total of 418, compared to 2016. Driving through East Village, a gentrifying neighborhood on the edge of downtown, its tough to find a street that doesnt have a tarp or tent or dozens. People with neither tent nor tarp fashion makeshift shelters out of shopping carts, storage bins and blankets. Helming the city during this crisis and also the focus of criticism for what some onlookers call a failure to address it effectively is San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer. A moderate Republican in a predominantly Democratic city, he acknowledges that homelessness may be the defining issue of his term. We cannot just do what weve always been doing. Its not working, he said recently from his downtown office. Just before his interview with the Guardian, he had attended one of multiple weekly meetings focused solely on homelessness. The issue is not new in San Diego. Nearly three decades ago, then-mayor Maureen OConnor spent two days sleeping on the street, incognito, to get a better sense of the problem. But ambiguity over who is responsible for providing the bulk of homeless services, namely the city or the county in which it is located, has resulted in years of finger-pointing and stagnation. There has been a steady increase in the homeless population under Faulconers watch; about 5,600 homeless people were recently counted in the city, and the countys numbers place it among the top five US metro regions. Still, it would be tough to argue this is Faulconers fault. Other large west coast cities with high housing costs have seen similar increases; in San Diego, apartment rents average more than $1,700 a month. And since 2003, more than 5,000 residential hotel units, often considered the housing of last resort, have been demolished or converted into boutique hotels.
The situation has prompted frustration on all sides, and proposals that are a little off-the-wall: a pair of businessmen recently suggested banning camping downtown and restricting it to a site 13 miles outside the city. (They called it Camp Hope.) It may not be helping matters that the mayors point person on homelessness left her post last week without explanation.
A southern California native, Faulconer started off in 2006 as a city councilman who had an uneasy relationship with homelessness. He repeatedly opposed locating a temporary emergency shelter in his downtown district. And he voiced support for arresting or ticketing people who sleep in public overnight. But since his election as mayor in 2014, Faulconer, either by will or force, seems to have grasped the severity of the issue.
In 2016, for instance, he allocated $3.3m to homelessness programs on top of the federal funding the city receives. He has also proposed an increase in the citys hotel-room tax, a portion of which would go to homeless programs. The tax would need to be approved by voters, but Faulconer says he has the support of hoteliers and the citys tourism industry, whove complained that homelessness is impacting their bottom line. One hotel manager
But while many San Diegans might wish for a quick fix, it is proving difficult to bring people off the streets. Despite the rising homeless numbers, shelter usage is actually down, even on rainy nights when the city makes additional beds available. Most folks out there, they think the best thing they have going is their tent, said Bob McElroy, CEO of the Alpha Project, one of the citys largest homeless services providers. Alpha Project has submitted a proposal to the city for an intake center with a sleeping courtyard that would accommodate up to 150 people and a camping space with room for 25 tents. Over a three-year period, the project would expand to include 700 units of permanent housing. The idea of a safe space to pitch her tent is appealing to Lawell Brooks, a 29-year-old who sleeps under a blue tarp. On a recent morning, it was one of more than two dozen tents and tarp structures pushed up against a fenced-in empty lot in East Village. I could probably have gotten a job by now, she said, but I dont want to leave my stuff. The contours of her life are defined by her living situation. Each morning, she makes a quick trip two blocks over to a facility called Father Joes Villages,to take a shower and get dressed so she doesnt appear to be residing outside. Shes been arrested simply for sleeping under her tarp, a violation of a city law
Michael McConnell, a homeless advocate who lives downtown, regularly documents these sweeps on
Addressing homelessness means recognizing that one size doesnt fit all, he said. McConnell supports the idea of giving people a safe place to sleep and having street outreach workers, not police, keep tabs on folks. Some might only need a few months of rental assistance, or help finding a landlord wholl accept a housing voucher, he said. In other cases, it could take months before an outreach worker gains someones trust. He is realistic about the citys future.People are not going to just disappear, he said. from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/a-tableau-of-suffering-seaside-city-of-san-diego-faces-a-dark-homelessness-crisis/ One day in the summer of 1969, a young Marine lieutenant named Bob Mueller arrived in Hawaii for a rendezvous with his wife, Ann. She was flying in from the East Coast with the couple’s infant daughter, Cynthia, a child Mueller had never met. Mueller had taken a plane from Vietnam. After nine months at war, he was finally due for a few short days of R&R outside the battle zone. Mueller had seen intense combat since he last said goodbye to his wife. He’d received the Bronze Star with a distinction for valor for his actions in one battle, and he’d been airlifted out of the jungle during another firefight after being shot in the thigh. He and Ann had spoken only twice since he’d left for South Vietnam. Despite all that, Mueller confessed to her in Hawaii that he was thinking of extending his deployment for another six months, and maybe even making a career in the Marines. Ann was understandably ill at ease about the prospect. But as it turned out, she wouldn’t be a Marine wife for much longer. It was standard practice for Marines to be rotated out of combat, and later that year Mueller found himself assigned to a desk job at Marine headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. There he discovered something about himself: “I didn’t relish the US Marine Corps absent combat.” So he headed to law school with the goal of serving his country as a prosecutor. He went on to hold high positions in five presidential administrations. He led the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, overseeing the US investigation of the Lockerbie bombing and the federal prosecution of the Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. He became director of the FBI one week before September 11, 2001, and stayed on to become the bureau’s longest-serving director since J. Edgar Hoover. And yet, throughout his five-decade career, that year of combat experience with the Marines has loomed large in Mueller’s mind. “I’m most proud the Marines Corps deemed me worthy of leading other Marines,” he told me in a 2009 interview. Today, the face-off between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump stands out, amid the black comedy of Trump’s Washington, as an epic tale of diverging American elites: a story of two men—born just two years apart, raised in similar wealthy backgrounds in Northeastern cities, both deeply influenced by their fathers, both star prep school athletes, both Ivy League educated—who now find themselves playing very different roles in a riveting national drama about political corruption and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The two men have lived their lives in pursuit of almost diametrically opposed goals—Mueller a life of patrician public service, Trump a life of private profit. Those divergent paths began with Vietnam, the conflict that tore the country apart just as both men graduated from college in the 1960s. Despite having been educated at an elite private military academy, Donald Trump famously drew five draft deferments, including one for bone spurs in his feet. He would later joke, repeatedly, that his success at avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating numerous women in the 1980s was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” Mueller, for his part, not only volunteered for the Marines, he spent a year waiting for an injured knee to heal so he could serve. And he has said little about his time in Vietnam over the years. When he was leading the FBI through the catastrophe of 9/11 and its aftermath, he would brush off the crushing stress, saying, “I’m getting a lot more sleep now than I ever did in Vietnam.” One of the only other times his staff at the FBI ever heard him mention his Marine service was on a flight home from an official international trip. They were watching We Were Soldiers, a 2002 film starring Mel Gibson about some of the early battles in Vietnam. Mueller glanced at the screen and observed, “Pretty accurate.” His reticence is not unusual for the generation that served on the front lines of a war that the country never really embraced. Many of the veterans I spoke with for this story said they’d avoided talking about Vietnam until recently. Joel Burgos, who served as a corporal with Mueller, told me at the end of our hour-long conversation, “I’ve never told anyone most of this.” Yet for almost all of them—Mueller included—Vietnam marked the primary formative experience of their lives. Nearly 50 years later, many Marine veterans who served in Mueller’s unit have email addresses that reference their time in Southeast Asia: gunnysgt, 2-4marine, semperfi, PltCorpsman, Grunt. One Marine’s email handle even references Mutter’s Ridge, the area where Mueller first faced large-scale combat in December 1968. The Marines and Vietnam instilled in Mueller a sense of discipline and a relentlessness that have driven him ever since. He once told me that one of the things the Marines taught him was to make his bed every day. I’d written a book about his time at the FBI and was by then familiar with his severe, straitlaced demeanor, so I laughed at the time and said, “That’s the least surprising thing I’ve ever learned about you.” But Mueller persisted: It was an important small daily gesture exemplifying follow-through and execution. “Once you think about it—do it,” he told me. “I’ve always made my bed and I’ve always shaved, even in Vietnam in the jungle. You’ve put money in the bank in terms of discipline.” Mueller’s former Princeton classmate and FBI chief of staff W. Lee Rawls recalled how Mueller’s Marine leadership style carried through to the FBI, where he had little patience for subordinates who questioned his decisions. He expected his orders to be executed in the Hoover building just as they had been on the battlefield. In meetings with subordinates, Mueller had a habit of quoting Gene Hackman’s gruff Navy submarine captain in the 1995 Cold War thriller Crimson Tide: “We’re here to preserve democracy, not to practice it.” Related StoriesDiscipline has certainly been a defining feature of Mueller’s Russia investigation. In a political era of extreme TMI—marked by rampant White House leaks, Twitter tirades, and an administration that disgorges jilted cabinet-level officials as quickly as it can appoint new ones—the special counsel’s office has been a locked door. Mueller has remained an impassive cypher: the stoic, silent figure at the center of America’s political gyre. Not once has he spoken publicly about the Russia investigation since he took the job in May 2017, and his carefully chosen team of prosecutors and FBI agents has proved leakproof, even under the most intense of media spotlights. Mueller’s spokesperson, Peter Carr, on loan from the Justice Department, has essentially had one thing to tell a media horde ravenous for information about the Russia investigation: “No comment.” If Mueller’s discipline is reflected in the silence of his team, his relentlessness has been abundantly evident in the pace of indictments, arrests, and legal maneuvers coming out of his office. His investigation is proceeding on multiple fronts. He is digging into Russian information operations carried out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms. In February his office indicted 13 people and three entities connected to the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that allegedly masterminded the information campaigns. He’s also pursuing those responsible for cyber intrusions, including the hacking of the email system at the Democratic National Committee. At the same time, Mueller’s investigators are probing the business dealings of Trump and his associates, an effort that has yielded indictments for tax fraud and conspiracy against Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea on financial fraud and lying to investigators by Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates. The team is also looking into the numerous contacts between Trump’s people and Kremlin-connected figures. And Mueller is questioning witnesses in an effort to establish whether Trump has obstructed justice by trying to quash the investigation itself. Almost every week brings a surprise development in the investigation. But until the next indictment or arrest, it’s difficult to say what Mueller knows, or what he thinks. Before he became special counsel, Mueller freely and repeatedly told me that his habits of mind and character were most shaped by his time in Vietnam, a period that is also the least explored chapter of his biography. This first in-depth account of his year at war is based on multiple interviews with Mueller about his time in combat—conducted before he became special counsel—as well as hundreds of pages of once-classified Marine combat records, official accounts of Marine engagements, and the first-ever interviews with eight Marines who served alongside Mueller in 1968 and 1969. They provide the best new window we have into the mind of the man leading the Russia investigation. Robert Swan Mueller III, the first of five children and the only son, grew up in a stately stone house in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb. His father was a DuPont executive who had captained a Navy submarine-chaser in World War II; he expected his children to abide by a strict moral code. “A lie was the worst sin,” Mueller says. “The one thing you didn’t do was to give anything less than the truth to my mother and father.” He attended St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, New Hampshire, where the all-boys classes emphasized Episcopal ideals of virtue and manliness. He was a star on the lacrosse squad and played hockey with future US senator John Kerry on the school team. For college he chose his father’s alma mater, Princeton, and entered the class of 1966. The expanding war in Vietnam was a frequent topic of conversation among the elite students, who spoke of the war—echoing earlier generations—in terms of duty and service. “Princeton from ’62 to ’66 was a completely different world than ’67 onwards,” said Rawls, a lifelong friend of Mueller’s. “The anti-Vietnam movement was not on us yet. A year or two later, the campus was transformed.” On the lacrosse field, Mueller met David Hackett, a classmate and athlete who would profoundly affect Mueller’s life. Hackett had already enlisted in the Marines’ version of ROTC, spending his Princeton summers training for the escalating war. “I had one of the finest role models I could have asked for in an upperclassman by the name of David Hackett,” Mueller recalled in a 2013 speech as FBI director. “David was on our 1965 lacrosse team. He was not necessarily the best on the team, but he was a determined and a natural leader.” After he graduated in 1965, Hackett began training to be a Marine, earning top honors in his officer candidate class. After that he shipped out to Vietnam. In Mueller’s eyes, Hackett was a shining example. Mueller decided that when he graduated the following year, he too would enlist in the Marines. On April 30, 1967, shortly after Hackett had signed up for his second tour in Vietnam, his unit was ambushed by more than 75 camouflaged North Vietnamese troops who were firing down from bunkers with weapons that included a .50-caliber machine gun. According to a Marine history, “dozens of Marines were killed or wounded within minutes.” Hackett located the source of the incoming fire and charged 30 yards across open ground to an American machine gun team to tell them where to shoot. Minutes later, as he was moving to help direct a neighboring platoon whose commander had been wounded, he was killed by a sniper. Posthumously awarded the Silver Star, Hackett’s commendation explained that he died “while pressing the assault and encouraging his Marines.” By the time word of Hackett’s death filtered back to the US, Mueller was already making good on his pledge to follow him into military service. The news only strengthened his resolve to become an infantry officer. “One would have thought that the life of a Marine, and David’s death in Vietnam, would argue strongly against following in his footsteps,” Mueller said in that 2013 speech. “But many of us saw in him the person we wanted to be, even before his death. He was a leader and a role model on the fields of Princeton. He was a leader and a role model on the fields of battle as well. And a number of his friends and teammates joined the Marine Corps because of him, as did I.” In mid-1966, Mueller underwent his military physical at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard; this was before the draft lottery began and before Vietnam became a divisive cultural watershed. He recalls sitting in the waiting room as another candidate, a strapping 6-foot, 280-pound lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles, was ruled 4-F—medically unfit for military service. After that it was Mueller’s turn to be rejected: His years of intense athletics, including hockey and lacrosse, had left him with an injured knee. The military declared that it would need to heal before he would be allowed to deploy. In the meantime, he married Ann Cabell Standish—a graduate of Miss Porter’s School and Sarah Lawrence—over Labor Day weekend 1966, and they moved to New York, where he earned a master’s degree in international relations at New York University. Once his knee had healed, Mueller went back to the military doctors. In 1967—just before Donald Trump received his own medical deferment for heel spurs—Mueller started Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia. Like Hackett before him, Mueller was a star in his Officer Candidate School training class. “He was a cut above,” recalls Phil Kellogg, who had followed one of his fraternity brothers into the Marines after graduating from the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Kellogg, who went through training with Mueller, remembers Mueller racing another candidate on an obstacle course—and losing. It’s the only time he can remember Mueller being bested. “He was a natural athlete and natural student,” Kellogg says. “I don’t think he had a hard day at OCS, to be honest.” There was, it turned out, only one thing he was bad at—and it was a failing that would become familiar to legions of his subordinates in the decades to come: He received a D in delegation. During the time Mueller spent in training, from November 1967 through July 1968, the context of the Vietnam War changed dramatically. The bloody Tet Offensive—a series of coordinated, widespread, surprise attacks across South Vietnam by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in January 1968—stunned America, and with public opinion souring on the conflict, Lyndon Johnson declared he wouldn’t run for reelection. As Mueller’s training class graduated, Walter Cronkite declared on the CBS Evening News that the war could not be won. “For it seems now more certain than ever,” Cronkite told his millions of viewers on February 27, 1968, “that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” The country seemed to be descending into chaos; as the spring unfolded, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Cities erupted in riots. Antiwar protests raged. But the shifting tide of public opinion and civil unrest barely registered with the officer candidates in Mueller’s class. “I don’t remember anyone having qualms about where we were or what we were doing,” Kellogg says. That spring, as Donald J. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and began working for his father’s real estate company, Mueller finished up Officer Candidate School and received his next assignment: He was to attend the US Army’s Ranger School.
Mueller knew that only the best young officers went on to Ranger training, a strenuous eight-week advanced skills and leadership program for the military’s elite at Fort Benning, Georgia. He would be spending weeks practicing patrol tactics, assassination missions, attack strategies, and ambushes staged in swamps. But the implications of the assignment were also sobering to the newly minted officer: Many Marines who passed the course were designated as “recon Marines” in Vietnam, a job that often came with a life expectancy measured in weeks. Mueller credits the training he received at Ranger School for his survival in Vietnam. The instructors there had been through jungle combat themselves, and their stories from the front lines taught the candidates how to avoid numerous mistakes. Ranger trainees often had to function on just two hours of rest a night and a single daily meal. “Ranger School more than anything teaches you about how you react with no sleep and nothing to eat,” Mueller told me. “You learn who you want on point, and who you don’t want anywhere near point.” After Ranger School, he also attended Airborne School, aka jump school, where he learned to be a parachutist. By the fall of 1968, he was on his way to Asia. He boarded a flight from Travis Air Force Base in California to an embarkation point in Okinawa, Japan, where there was an almost palpable current of dread among the deploying troops. From Okinawa, Mueller headed to Dong Ha Combat Base near the so-called demilitarized zone—the dividing line between North and South Vietnam, established after the collapse of the French colonial regime in 1954. Mueller was determined and well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown,” he says. “More afraid in some ways of failure than death, more afraid of being found wanting.” That kind of fear, he says “animates your unconscious.” For American troops, 1968 was the deadliest year of the war, as they beat back the Tet Offensive and fought the battle of Hue. All told, 16,592 Americans were killed that year—roughly 30 percent of total US fatalities in the war. Over the course of the conflict, more than 58,000 Americans died, 300,000 were wounded, and some 2 million South and North Vietnamese died. Just 18 months after David Hackett was felled by a sniper, Mueller was being sent to the same region as his officer-training classmate Kellogg, who had arrived in Vietnam three months earlier. Mueller was assigned to H Company—Hotel Company in Marine parlance—part of the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, a storied infantry unit that traced its origins back to the 1930s. The regiment had been fighting almost nonstop in Vietnam since May 1965, earning the nickname the Magnificent Bastards. The grueling combat took its toll. In the fall of 1967, six weeks of battle reduced the battalion’s 952 Marines to just 300 fit for duty. During the Tet Offensive, the 2nd Battalion had seen bitter and bloody fighting that never let up. In April 1968, it fought in the battle of Dai Do, a days-long engagement that killed nearly 600 North Vietnamese soldiers. Eighty members of the 2nd Battalion died in the fight, and 256 were wounded. David Harris, who arrived in Vietnam in May, joined the depleted unit just after Dai Do. “Hotel Company and all of 2/4 was decimated,” he says. “They were a skeleton crew. They were haggard, they were beat to death. It was just pitiful.” By the time Mueller was set to arrive six months later, the unit had rebuilt its ranks as its wounded Marines recovered and filtered back into the field; they had been tested and emerged stronger. By coincidence, Mueller was to inherit leadership of a Hotel Company platoon from his friend Kellogg. “Those kids that I had and Bob had, half of them were veterans of Dai Do,” Kellogg says. “They were field-sharp.” Second Lieutenant Mueller, 24 years and 3 months old, joined the battalion in November 1968, one of 10 new officers assigned to the unit that month. He knew he was arriving at the so-called pointy end of the American spear. Some 2.7 million US troops served in Vietnam, but the vast majority of casualties were suffered by those who fought in “maneuver battalions” like Mueller’s. The war along the demilitarized zone was far different than it was elsewhere in Vietnam; the primary adversary was the North Vietnamese army, not the infamous Viet Cong guerrillas. North Vietnamese troops generally operated in larger units, were better trained, and were more likely to engage in sustained combat rather than melting away after staging an ambush. “We fought regular, hard-core army,” Joel Burgos says. “There were so many of them—and they were really good.” William Sparks, a private first class in Hotel Company, recalls that Mueller got off the helicopter in the middle of a rainstorm, wearing a raincoat—a telltale sign that he was new to the war. “You figured out pretty fast it didn’t help to wear a raincoat in Vietnam,” Sparks says. “The humidity just condensed under the raincoat—you were just as wet as you were without it.” As Mueller walked up from the landing zone, Kellogg—who had no idea Mueller would be inheriting his platoon—recognized his OCS classmate’s gait. “When he came marching up the hill, I laughed,” Kellogg says. “We started joking.” On Mueller’s first night in the field, his brand-new tent was destroyed by the wind. “That thing vanished into thin air,” Sparks says. He didn’t even get to spend one night.” Over the coming days, Kellogg passed along some of his wisdom from the field and explained the procedures for calling in artillery and air strikes. “Don’t be John Wayne,” he said. “It’s not a movie. Marines tell you something’s up, listen to them.” “The lieutenants who didn’t trust their Marines went to early deaths,” Kellogg says. And with that, Kellogg told their commander that Mueller was ready, and he hopped aboard the next helicopter out. Today, military units usually train together in the US, deploy together for a set amount of time, and return home together. But in Vietnam, rotations began—and ended—piecemeal, driven by the vagaries of injuries, illness, and individual combat tours. That meant Mueller inherited a unit that mixed combat-experienced veterans and relative newbies. A platoon consisted of roughly 40 Marines, typically led by a lieutenant and divided into three squads, each led by a sergeant, which were then divided into three four-man “fire teams” led by corporals. While the lieutenants were technically in charge, the sergeants ran the show—and could make or break a new officer. “You land, and you’re at the mercy of your staff sergeant and your radioman,” Mueller says. Marines in the field knew to be dubious of new young second lieutenants like Mueller. They were derided as Gold Brickers, after the single gold bar that denoted their rank. “They might have had a college education, but they sure as hell didn’t have common sense,” says Colin Campbell, who was on Hotel Company’s mortar squad. Mueller knew his men feared he might be incompetent or worse. “The platoon was petrified,” he recalls. “They wondered whether the new green lieutenant was going to jeopardize their lives to advance his own career.” Mueller himself was equally terrified of assuming field command. As he settled in, talk spread about the odd new platoon leader who had gone to both Princeton and Army Ranger School. “Word was out real fast—Ivy League guy from an affluent family. That set off alarms. The affluent guys didn’t go to Vietnam then—and they certainly didn’t end up in a rifle platoon,” says VJ Maranto, a corporal in H Company. “There was so much talk about ‘Why’s a guy like that out here with us?’ We weren’t Ivy Leaguers.” Indeed, none of his fellow Hotel Company Marines had written their college thesis on African territorial disputes before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had. Most were from rural America, and few had any formal education past high school. Maranto spent his youth on a small farm in Louisiana. Carl Rasmussen, a lance corporal, grew up on a farm in Oregon. Burgos was from the Mississippi Delta, where he was raised on a cotton plantation. After graduating from high school, David Harris had gone to work in a General Motors factory in his home state of Ohio, then joined the Marines when he was set to be drafted in the summer of 1967. Many of the Marines under Mueller’s command had been wounded at least once; 19-year-old corporal John C. Liverman had arrived in Vietnam just four months after a neighbor of his from Silver Spring, Maryland, had been killed at Khe Sanh—and had seen heavy combat much of the year. He’d been hit by shrapnel in March 1968 and then again in April, but after recovering in Okinawa, he had agitated to return to combat. Hotel Company quickly came to understand that its new platoon leader was no Gold Bricker. “He wanted to know as much as he could as fast as he could about the terrain, what we did, the ambushes, everything,” Maranto says. “He was all about the mission, the mission, the mission.” Second Battalion’s mission, as it turned out, was straightforward: Search and destroy. “We stayed out in the bush, out in the mountains, just below DMZ, 24 hours a day,” David Harris says. “We were like bait. It was the same encounter: They’d hit us, we’d hit them, they’d disappear.” Frequent deaths and injuries meant that turnover in the field was constant; when Maranto arrived at Hotel Company, he was issued a flak jacket that had dried blood on it. “We were always low on men,” Colin Campbell says. Mueller’s unit was constantly on patrol; the battalion’s records described it as “nomadic.” Its job was to keep the enemy off-kilter and disrupt their supply lines. “You’d march all day, then you’d dig a foxhole and spend all night alternating going on watch,” says Bill White, a Hotel Company veteran. “We were always tired, always hungry, always thirsty. There were no showers.” In those first weeks, Mueller's confidence as a leader grew as he won his men’s trust and respect. “You’d sense his nervousness, but you’d never see that in his demeanor,” Maranto says. “He was such a professional.” The members of the platoon soon got acquainted with the qualities that would be familiar to everyone who dealt with Mueller later as a prosecutor and FBI director. He demanded a great deal and had little patience for malingering, but he never asked for more than he was willing to give himself. “He was a no-bullshit kind of guy,” White recalls. Mueller’s unit began December 1968 in relative quiet, providing security for the main military base in the area, a glorified campground known as Vandegrift Combat Base, about 10 miles south of the DMZ. It was one of the only organized outposts nearby for Marines, a place for resupply, a shower, and hot food. Lance Corporal Robert W. Cromwell, who had celebrated his 20th birthday shortly before beginning his tour of duty, entertained his comrades with stories from his own period of R&R: He’d met his wife and parents in Hawaii to be introduced to his newborn daughter. “He was so happy to have a child and wanted to get home for good,” Harris says. On December 7 the battalion boarded helicopters for a new operation: to retake control of a hill in an infamous area known as Mutter’s Ridge. The strategically important piece of ground, which ran along four hills on the southern edge of the DMZ, had been the scene of fighting for more than two years and had been overrun by the North Vietnamese months before. Artillery, air strikes, and tank attacks had long since denuded the ridge of vegetation, but the surrounding hillsides and valleys were a jungle of trees and vines. When Hotel Company touched down and fanned out from its landing zones to establish a perimeter, Mueller was arriving to what would be his first full-scale battle. As the American units advanced, the North Vietnamese retreated. “They were all pulling back to this big bunker complex, as it turned out,” Sparks says. The Americans could see the signs of past battles all around them. “You’d see shrapnel holes in the trees, bullet holes,” Sparks says. After three days of patrols, isolated firefights with an elusive enemy, and multiple nights of American bombardment, another unit in 2nd Battalion, Fox Company, received the order to take some high ground on Mutter’s Ridge. Even nearly 50 years later, the date of the operation remains burned into the memories of those who fought in it: December 11, 1968.
That morning, after a night of air strikes and artillery volleys meant to weaken the enemy, the men of Fox Company moved out at first light. The attack went smoothly at first; they seized the western portions of the ridge without resistance, dodging just a handful of mortar rounds. Yet as they continued east, heavy small-arms fire started. “As they fought their way forward, they came into intensive and deadly fire from bunkers and at least three machine guns,” the regiment later reported. Because the vegetation was so dense, Fox Company didn’t realize that it had stumbled into the midst of a bunker complex. “Having fought their way in, the company found it extremely difficult to maneuver its way out, due both to the fire of the enemy and the problem of carrying their wounded.” Hotel Company was on a neighboring hill, still eating breakfast, when Fox Company was attacked. Sparks remembers that he was drinking a “Mo-Co,” C-rations coffee with cocoa powder and sugar, heated by burning a golf-ball-sized piece of C-4 plastic explosive. (“We were ahead of Starbucks on this latte crap,” he jokes.) They could hear the gunfire across the valley. “Lieutenant Mueller called, ‘Saddle up, saddle up,’” Sparks says. “He called for first squad—I was the grenade launcher and had two bags of ammo strapped across my chest. I could barely stand up.” Before they could even reach the enemy, they had to fight their way through the thick brush of the valley. “We had to go down the hill and come up Foxtrot Ridge. It took hours.” “It was the only place in the DMZ I remember seeing vegetation like that,” Harris says. “It was thick and entwining.” When the platoon finally crested the top of the ridge, they confronted the horror of the battlefield. “There were wounded people everywhere,” Sparks recalls. Mueller ordered everyone to drop their packs and prepare for a fight. “We assaulted right out across the top of the ridge,” he says. It wasn’t long before the unit came under heavy fire from small arms, machine guns, and a grenade launcher. “There were three North Vietnamese soldiers right in front of us that jumped right up and sprayed us with AK-47s,” Sparks says. They returned fire and advanced. At one point, a Navy corpsman with them threw a grenade, only to have it bounce off a tree and explode, wounding one of Hotel Company’s corporals. “It just got worse from there,” Sparks says. In the next few minutes, numerous men went down in Mueller’s unit. Maranto remembers being impressed that his relatively green lieutenant was able to stay calm while under attack. “He’d been in-country less than a month—most of us had been in-country six, eight months,” Maranto says. “He had remarkable composure, directing fire. It was sheer terror. They had RPGs, machine gun, mortars.” Mueller realized quickly how much trouble the platoon was in. “That day was the second heaviest fire I received in Vietnam,” Harris says. “Lieutenant Mueller was directing traffic, positioning people and calling in air strikes. He was standing upright, moving. He probably saved our hide.” Cromwell, the lance corporal who had just become a father, was shot in the thigh by a .50-caliber bullet. When Harris saw his wounded friend being hustled out of harm’s way, he was oddly relieved at first. “I saw him and he was alive,” Harris says. “He was on the stretcher.” Cromwell would finally be able to spend some time with his wife and new baby, Harris figured. “You lucky sucker,” he thought. “You’re going home.” But Harris had misjudged the severity of his friend’s injury. The bullet had nicked one of Cromwell’s arteries, and he bled to death before he reached the field hospital. The death devastated Harris, who had traded weapons with Cromwell the night before—Harris had taken Cromwell’s M-14 rifle and Cromwell took Harris’ M-79 grenade launcher. “The next day when we hit the crap, they called for him, and he had to go forward,” Harris says. Harris couldn’t shake the feeling that he should have been the one on the stretcher. “I’ve only told two people this story.” The battle atop and around Mutter’s Ridge raged for hours, with the North Vietnamese fire coming from the surrounding jungle. “We got hit with an ambush, plain and simple,” Harris says. “The brush was so thick, you had trouble hacking it with a machete. If you got 15 meters away, you couldn’t see where you came from.” As the fighting continued, the Marines atop the ridge began to run low on supplies. “Johnny Liverman threw me a bag of ammo. He’d been ferrying ammo from one side of the ridge to the other,” Sparks recalls. Liverman was already wounded, but he was still fighting; then, during one of his runs, he came under more fire. “He got hit right through the head, right when I was looking at him. I got that ammo, I crawled up there and got his M-16 and told him I’d be back.” Sparks and another Marine sheltered behind a dead tree stump, trying to find any protection amid the firestorm. “Neither of us had any ammo left,” Sparks recalls. He crawled back to Liverman to try to evacuate his friend. “I got him up on my shoulder, and I got shot, and I went down,” he says. As he was lying on the ground, he heard a shout from atop the ridge, “Who’s that down there—are they dead?” It was Lieutenant Mueller. Sparks hollered back, “Sparks and Liverman.” “Hold on,” Mueller said, “We’re coming down to get you.” A few minutes later, Mueller appeared with another Marine, known as Slick. Mueller and Slick slithered Sparks into a bomb crater with Liverman and put a battle dress on Sparks’ wound. They waited until a helicopter gunship passed overhead, its guns clattering, to distract the North Vietnamese, and hustled back toward the top of the hill and comparative safety. An OV-10 attack plane overhead dropped smoke grenades to help shield the Marines atop the ridge. Mueller, Sparks says, then went back to retrieve the mortally wounded Liverman. The deaths mounted. Corporal Agustin Rosario—a 22-year-old father and husband from New York City—was shot in the ankle, and then, while he tried to run back to safety, was shot again, this time fatally. Rosario, too, died waiting for a medevac helicopter. Finally, as the hours passed, the Marines forced the North Vietnamese to withdraw. By 4:30 pm, the battlefield had quieted. As his commendation for the Bronze Star later read, “Second Lieutenant Mueller’s courage, aggressive initiative and unwavering devotion to duty at great personal risk were instrumental in the defeat of the enemy force and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and of the United States Naval Service.” As night fell, Hotel and Fox held the ground, and a third company, Golf, was brought forward as additional reinforcement. It was a brutal day for both sides; 13 Americans died and 31 were wounded. “We put a pretty good hurt on them, but not without great cost,” Sparks says. “My closest friends were all killed there on Foxtrot Ridge.” As the Americans explored the field around the ridge, they counted seven enemy dead left behind, in addition to seven others killed in the course of the battle. Intelligence reports later revealed that the battle had killed the commander of the 1st Battalion, 27th North Vietnamese Army Regiment, “and had virtually decimated his staff.” For Mueller, the battle had proved both to him and his men that he could lead. “The minute the shit hit the fan, he was there,” Maranto says. “He performed remarkably. After that night, there were a lot of guys who would’ve walked through walls for him.” That first major exposure to combat—and the loss of Marines under his command—affected Mueller deeply. “You’re standing there thinking, ‘Did I do everything I could?’” he says. Afterward, back at camp, while Mueller was still in shock, a major came up and slapped the young lieutenant on the shoulder, saying, “Good job, Mueller.” “That vote of confidence helped me get through,” Mueller told me. “That gesture pushed me over. I wouldn’t go through life guilty for screwing up.” The heavy toll of the casualties at Mutter’s Ridge shook up the whole unit. Cromwell’s death hit especially hard; his humor and good nature had knitted the unit together. “He was happy-go-lucky. He looked after the new guys when they came in,” Bill White recalls. For Harris, who had often shared a foxhole with Cromwell, the death of his best friend was devastating. White also took Cromwell’s death hard; overcome with grief, he stopped shaving. Mueller confronted him, telling him to refocus on the mission ahead—but ultimately provided more comfort than discipline. “He could’ve given me punishment hours,” White says, “but he never did.” Decades later, Mueller would tell me that nothing he ever confronted in his career was as challenging as leading men in combat and watching them be cut down. “You see a lot, and every day after is a blessing,” he told me in 2008. The memory of Mutter’s Ridge put everything, even terror investigations and showdowns with the Bush White House, into perspective. “A lot is going to come your way, but it’s not going to be the same intensity.” When Mueller finally did leave the FBI in 2013, he “retired” into a busy life as a top partner at the law firm WilmerHale. He taught some classes in cybersecurity at Stanford, he investigated the NFL’s handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence case, and he served as the so-called settlement master for the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal. While in the midst of that assignment—which required the kind of delicate give-and-take ill-suited to a hard-driving, no-nonsense Marine—the 72-year-old Mueller received a final call to public service. It was May 2017, just days into the swirling storm set off by the firing of FBI director James Comey, and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein wanted to know if Mueller would serve as the special counsel in the Russia investigation. The job—overseeing one of the most difficult and sensitive investigations ever undertaken by the Justice Department—may only rank as the third-hardest of Mueller’s career, after the post-9/11 FBI and after leading those Marines in Vietnam. Having accepted the assignment as special counsel, he retreated into his prosecutor’s bunker, cut off from the rest of America. In January 1969, after 10 days of rain showers and cold weather, the unit got a three-day R&R break at Cua Viet, a nearby support base. They listened to Super Bowl III on the radio as Joe Namath and the Jets defeated the Baltimore Colts. “One touch of reality was listening to that,” Mueller says. In the field, they got little news about what was transpiring at home. In fact, later that summer, while Mueller was still deployed, Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon—an event that people around the world watched live on TV. Mueller wouldn’t find out until days afterward. “There was this whole segment of history you missed,” he says. R&R breaks were also rare opportunities to drink alcohol, though there was never much of it. Campbell says he drank just 15 beers during his 18 months in-country. “I can remember drinking warm beer—Ballantines,” he says. In camp, the men traded magazines like Playboy and mail-order automotive catalogs, imagining the cars they would soup up when they returned to the States. They passed the time playing rummy or pinochle. For the most part, Mueller skipped such activities, though he was into the era’s music (Creedence Clearwater Revival was—and is—a particular favorite). “I remember several times walking into a bunker and finding him in a corner with a book,” Maranto says. “He read a lot, every opportunity.” Throughout the rest of the month, they patrolled, finding little contact with the enemy, although plenty of signs of their presence: Hotel Company often radioed in reports of finding fallen bodies and hidden supply caches, and they frequently took incoming mortar rounds from unseen enemies. Command under such conditions wasn’t easy; drug use was a problem, and racial tensions ran high. “Many of the GIs were draftees; they didn’t want to be there,” Maranto says. “When new people rotated in, they brought what was happening in the United States with them.” Mueller recalls at times struggling to get Marines to follow orders—they already felt that the punishment of serving in the infantry in Vietnam was as bad as it could get. “Screw that,” they’d reply sharply when ordered to do something they didn’t want to do. “What are you going to do? Send me to Vietnam?” Yet the Marines were bonded through the constant danger of combat. Everyone had close calls. Everyone knew that luck in the combat zone was finite, fate pernicious. “If the good Lord turned over a card up there, that was it,” Mueller says. Nights particularly were filled with dread; the enemy preferred sneak attacks, often in the hours before dawn. Colin Campbell recalls a night in his foxhole when he turned around to find a North Vietnamese soldier, armed with an AK-47, right behind him. “He’d gotten inside our perimeter. He had our back,” Campbell says. “Why didn’t he kill me and the other guy in the foxhole?” Campbell shouted, and the infiltrator bolted. “Another Marine down the line shot him dead.” Mueller was a constant presence in the field, regularly reviewing the code signs and passwords that identified friendly units to one another. “He was quiet and reserved. The planning was meticulous and detailed. He knew at night where every position was,” Maranto recalls. “It wouldn’t be unusual for him to come out and make sure the fire teams were correctly placed—and that you were awake.” The men I talked to who served alongside Mueller, men now in their seventies, mostly had strong memories of the type of leader Mueller had been. But many didn’t know, until I told them, that the man who led their platoon was now the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election. “I had no idea,” Burgos told me. “When you’ve been in combat that long, you don’t remember names. Faces you remember,” he says. Maranto says he only put two and two together recently, although he’d wondered for years if that guy who was the FBI director had served with him in Vietnam. “The name would ring a bell—you know that’s a familiar name—but you’re so busy with everyday life,” Maranto says. April 1969 marked a grim American milestone: The Vietnam War’s combat death toll surpassed the 33,629 Americans killed while fighting in Korea. It also brought a new threat to Hotel Company’s area: a set of powerful .50-caliber machine gun nests that the North Vietnamese had set up to harass helicopters and low-flying planes. Hotel Company—and the battalion’s other units—devoted much of the middle of the month to chasing down the deadly weapons. Until they were found, resupply helicopters were limited, and flights were abandoned when they came under direct fire. One Marine was even killed in the landing zone. Finally, on April 15 and 16, Hotel Company overran the enemy guns and forced a retreat, uncovering 10 bunkers and three gun positions. The next day, at around 10 am, Mueller’s platoon was attacked while on patrol. Facing small-arms fire and grenades, they called for air support. An hour later four attack runs hit the North Vietnamese position. Five days later, on April 22, one of the 3rd Platoon’s patrols came under similar attack—and the situation quickly became desperate. Sparks, who had returned to Hotel Company that winter after recovering from his wound at Mutter’s Ridge, was in the ambushed patrol. “We lost the machine gun, jammed up with shrapnel, and the radio,” he recalls. “We had to pull back.”
With radio contact lost, Mueller’s platoon was called forward as reinforcement. American artillery and mortars pounded the North Vietnamese as the platoon advanced. At one point, Mueller was engaged in a close firefight. The incoming fire was so intense—the stress of the moment so all-consuming, the adrenaline pumping so hard—that when he was shot, Mueller didn’t immediately notice. Amid the combat, he looked down and realized an AK-47 round had passed clean through his thigh. Mueller kept fighting. “Although seriously wounded during the firefight, he resolutely maintained his position and, ably directing the fire of his platoon, was instrumental in defeating the North Vietnamese Army force,” reads the Navy Commendation that Mueller received for his action that day. “While approaching the designated area, the platoon came under a heavy volume of enemy fire from its right flank. Skillfully requesting and directing supporting Marine artillery fire on the enemy positions, First Lieutenant Mueller ensured that fire superiority was gained over the hostile unit.” Two other members of Hotel Company were also wounded in the battle. One of them had his leg blown off by a grenade; it was his first day in Vietnam. Mueller’s days in combat ended with him being lifted out by helicopter in a sling. As the aircraft peeled away, Mueller recalls thinking he might at least get a good meal out of the injury on a hospital ship, but he was delivered instead to a field hospital near Dong Ha, where he spent three weeks recovering. Maranto, who was on R&R when Mueller was wounded, remembers returning to camp and hearing word that their commander had been shot. “It could happen to any one of us,” Maranto says. “When it happened to him, there was a lot of sadness. They enjoyed his company.” Mueller recovered and returned to active duty in May. Since most Marine officers spent only six months on a combat rotation—and Mueller had been in the combat zone since November—he was sent to serve at command headquarters, where he became an aide-de-camp to Major General William K. Jones, the head of the 3rd Marine Division. By the end of 1969, Mueller was back in the US, his combat tour complete, working at the Marine barracks near the Pentagon. Soon thereafter, he sent off an application to the University of Virginia’s law school. “I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have made it out of Vietnam,” Mueller said years later in a speech. “There were many—many—who did not. And perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always felt compelled to contribute.” Over the years, a few of his former fellow Marines from Hotel Company recognized Mueller and have watched his career unfold on the national stage over the past two decades. Sparks recalls eating lunch on a July day in 2001 with the news on: “The TV was on behind me. ‘We’re going to introduce the new FBI director, Robert … Swan … Mueller.’ I slowly turned, and I looked, and I thought, ‘Golly, that’s Lieutenant Mueller.’” Sparks, who speaks with a thick Texas accent, says his first thought was the running joke he’d had with his former commander: “I’d always call him ‘Lieutenant Mew-ler,’ and he’d say, ‘That’s Mul-ler.’” More recently, his former Marine comrade Maranto says that after spending six months in combat with Mueller, he has watched the coverage of the special counsel investigation unfold and laughed at the news reports. He says he knows Mueller isn’t sweating the pressure. “I watch people on the news talking about the distractions getting to him,” he says. “I don’t think so.” Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) is a contributing editor at WIRED and author of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror. He can be reached at [email protected]. This article appears in the June issue. Subscribe now. Listen to this story, and other WIRED features, on the Audm app. More Great WIRED Stories
Source: http://allofbeer.com/the-untold-story-of-robert-muellers-time-in-combat/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/08/25/the-untold-story-of-robert-muellers-time-in-combat/ 21 Quotes About Wine That Perfectly Explain Your Need To Have A Glass At The End Of Each Day8/24/2018 1. I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food. W.C. Fields 2. Either give me more wine or leave me alone. Rumi 3. Accept what life offers you and try to drink from every cup. All wines should be tasted; some should only be sipped, but with others, drink the whole bottle. Paulo Coelho 4. One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters…But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk. Charles Baudelaire 5. his lips drink water but his heart drinks wine E.E. Cummings 6. Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing. 7. At church, during communion, they give out free wine. Whoa! Talk about a great place to drink and meet women. Jarod Kintz 8. If reassurances could dull pain, nobody would ever go to the trouble of pressing grapes. Scott Lynch 9. A raisin on the ground is full of hope that if it just keeps aging, it will turn into wine and get drunk on its wrinkly self. Jarod Kintz 10. Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages. Louis Pasteur 11. Beer is made by men, wine by God. Martin Luther 12. What wine goes with Captain Crunch? George Carlin 13. Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares Ralph Waldo Emerson 14. Wine makes all things possible. George R.R. Martin 15. A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover Clifton Fadiman 16. Wine makes every meal an occasion, every table more elegant, every day more civilized. Andre Simon 17. The first kiss and the first glass of wine are the best. Marty Rubin 18. My love is like an empty bottle of wine. If youre wondering, my ex wife drank it all. Jarod Kintz 19. …wine [is] a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy. Benjamin Franklin 20. WINE! Because these problems arent going to forget THEMSELVES! Tanya Masse 21. Wine is to women as duct tape is to men, it fixes EVERYTHING! Tanya Masse from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/08/24/21-quotes-about-wine-that-perfectly-explain-your-need-to-have-a-glass-at-the-end-of-each-day/ My Friends And I Found A Mysterious Hole On My Property And We Decided To Explore Its Depths8/23/2018 I need to have my story heard. I need to write this down. If I don’t, then I fear I’ll end up as mad as everyone thinks I already am. I’ve spent the past 11 months trying to find meaning and answers at the bottom of a bottle, but it never helps. Every night I wake in a cold sweat, shaking uncontrollably and gasping for air in the wake of the memory of the things I saw. Even now, I cannot venture past my door after dusk for fear of what lies beyond. Every bark from my dogs is a warning; every flicker of the floodlights that surround my house has me running for the generators. I have no idea what future awaits me past this moment, but I know I can’t stand the thought of another day where my experiences are not recorded in some way. I farm a sizable piece of land, some several thousand acres in size. What I farm isn’t important, just the location. Upon my land occurs a unique land formation a type of rock that bears in a pattern unique to this area. In all the world, there is always something similar, but never quite exactly the same. Imagine a type of rock used by the early peoples to make paints that they would apply to their faces colors of orange, tan, red, white, and blue and embedded within these rocks are numerous geodes. It was always my plan that, should I fall upon financial hardship, I would sell these geodes at local stores or flea markets to the more “spiritual” people that frequented the larger towns near my home. Now however, that is no longer an option. Until last year, I would allow hunters onto my land each winter to hunt deer and elk, occasionally joining them, as one elk could feed me for the better part of a year. They were my friends men I had hunted with for years and whom I had come to depend upon. I can still remember crawling through the brush of my property some year ago, only to came face to face with a mountain lion that appeared just as stunned as I at the encounter. I scarcely remember un-holstering my sidearm, a Beretta that had been gifted to me some years ago, and unloading half a clip into its still startled face as the panicked hands of my hunting buddies tore apart catclaw and mesquite branches alike to reach me before the second gunshot had rung out. I still hold fond memories of how we laughed at the encounter that evening as they applied hydrogen peroxide to their bloodied hands in-between sips of beer. None of us went back for that mountain lion carcass. I think we honestly believed it wouldn’t be there if we looked, as if it had shrugged off several 9mm rounds fired point blank and was laughing off the encounter with its own buddies in much the same way we were. Sometimes I can still think back on that evening and smile at the image of all of us, wearing our beanies and fatigues, rifles slung over our backs…. The only two things that saved me in the end were my sidearm and the men at my back. It was supposed to be a good year for hunting, the weather had been kind to us over the months and the uncharacteristic amount of rain for the area meant there was more grass to graze. Already I’d begun seeing elk lying dead on the side of the road. Unfortunate for the driver, but hopefully a sign of greater numbers that season. It was a more humid year than we were used to and it seemed like the winter would be harsh, but for us, it only meant buying more firewood. I’d been keeping the corn feeders stocked throughout the year and keeping a mental checklist of every deer and elk I saw. Even the javelina were starting to become a nuisance, although a decent source of meat provided you got a clean shot before they could musk. I knew every inch of my property like the back of my hand, or at least I thought I did. It wasnt until two weeks into the season that we encountered . We were on a night hunt, trekking through a part of the property I’d taken to calling “Paint Rock Canyon,” due to the abundance of the unique rock formations in that area. It had needed no descent, just a brief 45 minute drive to the area situated between two mountains that sat almost directly in the middle of the property. We were all outfitted with LED headlamps and Maglites and most of us had outfitted our rifles with night-vision scopes, save for Anthony. Anthony was not a large man, but he did seem to carry luck on his side. His medium length hair was usually tied back into a small ponytail and he had an almost ill-informed love of his neatly trimmed mutton chop sideburns and mustache that had earned him the nickname “Lemmy.” He couldn’t be considered lanky, nor could he be called overweight. On the whole, Anthony was quite normal, which many mistook for “average” brown hair, brown eyes, and a tanned complexion shared by the rest of us (the result of a life lived working outdoors). He had brought his AR-15, something he won in a local rodeo raffle, equipped with a thermal scope. While the others had found the rifle enviable, I was less impressed. Admittedly, I was disappointed that I didn’t win the second prize, which was a lever-action rifle with a custom saddle holster, provided by my favourite, local saddlery. I’m ashamed to admit it in retrospect, but I took a small comfort in the fact that Anthony was limited to featureless black-and-white as opposed to the rest of us. Apart from Anthony, the hunting party consisted of Markus, Forrester, and myself. Markus was a heavy set Hispanic man who I turned to whenever I needed help with any of my vehicles, which was typically one per month. Auto repair was his family’s business and hed taken over the shop from his father after his passing. Forrester on the other hand was a pious man, a devout Baptist, and the only one among us who could honestly say hed never known the taste of liquor in his life. While the rest of us would set up the satellite to watch the game and drink to the point where we felt 10 years younger, Forrester could always be found over a smoker or grill that hed welded together himself, a root beer in one hand and a cooking utensil in the other. He was the shortest of all of us, but the only other farmer apart from myself, and my main source of hay when it came to animal feed. That’s how I will always remember them before we found that damn hole under the light of the full moon. It was impossibly large and dug into the base of one of the mountains where the Paint Rock began. The hole was larger than any one of us and seemed like it was freshly dug. It certainly hadnt been there when wed last passed through the canyon scarcely two days prior. We stood in front of it in confusion for several minutes, questioning what could have caused such a thing when an elk came sprinting out, startling us all. Anthony was the quickest on the draw, bringing his rifle up and letting off several quick bursts as the gigantic animal bound towards us. The rest of us dove for cover, all but Anthony who, with his unbelievable luck, pierced the animal’s heart, bringing it crashing to the ground as he finally dove away from the falling body of an animal that weighed enough to total any vehicle unfortunate enough to collide with its form. After calling to ensure that everyone was unhurt, we quickly turned our lights on the elks corpse, which turned out to be a cow rather than a bull as wed all assumed. Bullet wounds marked its body and I could have sworn the wounds on its back looked far too large to be caused by the 5.56 rounds fired from Anthonys rifle, yet I dismissed them as exit wounds despite being able to vividly recall no upward angle to his shots. We were all thoroughly shaken by the experience and yet, for some unknowable reason, our curiosity was piqued. I recalled no one else on my land and doubted border-jumpers could have made something large enough to conceal an elk in less than two days. For reasons I will never fully know, none of us contested the idea when Markus suggested venturing inside the tunnel. We readied our night-scopes and light sources, pocketed some extra ammunition and abandoned what little light was offered by the night sky and made our way into the darkness. The first thing we noticed as we entered the tunnel was its slope, which I think we all expected, except instead of sloping down into the earth the hole slanted upwards, ascending into the mountain. Out flashlights and headlamps illuminated the earthen walls yet saw no immediate end to the tunnel, which seemed to extend almost impossibly far. Markus led the way, followed by Anthony, Forrester, and myself. I looked in awe at the almost circular hole that could almost comfortably fit a tractor within, provided you never intended to turn around. It was maybe a hundred yards into the tunnels depths that we first noticed a change and felt hesitant to continue. The air felt cool…yet . It was uncharacteristically more humid than any of us were used to. At first, we dismissed it as a result of being underground until we also began to realise we also felt lighter. Not only that, but the air somehow seemed thinner, like we were suddenly much higher in altitude, even though no mountain on my property was more than a few hundred feet tall. As our nerves began to take hold, Markus noticed what seemed to be an opening ahead, possibly into some sort of cavern. With none of us wanting to be the first to suggest turning back, we all agreed to at least see where the tunnel led before heading back. After another 50 or so yards, Markus came upon the opening and froze. When asked what it was, it seemed all he could do to manage a wordless stutter, apparently rooted in place by whatever it was that he was witnessing until Anthony made his way beside him to shine his own light into the opening. I caught a brief glimpse of green on the ground before Anthony turned his head back and slowly, disbelievingly called Forrester and myself forward. Exiting the tunnel, we stepped into…I still dont know how to describe it, a Jules Verne novel? The center of the earth? All that I know is that I now think of it as hell. What looked like greenish-black moss and algae covered the ground around us and giant, impossible plants grew amongst the moss. Various black-leaved ferns grew several yards, like those you would see in pictures of tropical climates, some growing upwards and branchless, maybe 10 feet tall with leaves like black pine needles reaching for the sky. And there was a sky. As impossible as it sounds, the four of us stood in silence, in a tunnel dug into a mountain at our backs, staring into a night sky. At first, my mind didnt want to believe it reeled at the idea. I first rationalised that they were some sort of glowing insects on the cavern roof, that there was no way they could be stars, but it wasnt long until I realised that the size and shape was wrong, even for stars. Together we stared into a night sky dotted not by distant suns, but by distant galaxies. All around us, under an alien night sky, life grew up from the ground. The trunk of some massive tree reached towards the night sky just to the right of us, nearly a 100 feet high and four feet across, yet instead of branches, it looked more like an asparagus stalk, sprouting tightly packed, pale looking pods that resembled mushroom caps. Another tree looked not dissimilar to a spanish dagger cactus, yet with the same black leaves as the alien fern and almost three times larger than it should be with bark that resembled alligator skin, dotted with large white flower towards its apex. Around us countless alien plants grew, too many to recall had I even noticed them, because that was the moment grabbed Anthony. Our first warning was a rapidly approaching series of clicks, but apart from that, the thing was impossibly quiet, swooping down from above with blinding speed and snatching Anthony up, carrying him screaming into the darkness as the rest of us were knocked to the ground by a gust of wind. By the time we were up and calling for Anthony, he was gone and Markus was running after off into that alien landscape, screaming his Anthonys name as Forrester and I gave chase. Our chase was hampered by how light our bodies felt, every step propelled us farther than we were used to, which made it difficult to balance ourselves at any speed. Regardless, Markus had enough of a head start that by the time we caught up to him, hed already started firing. He was aimed into the branches of some alien tree above him, firing shot after shot until something fell at his feet. Following his gaze, it was too dark to see high enough into the tree, but bringing the scope of my .308 to my eyes, I saw the creature. Through the green colouring of my night scope, I couldnt make out the color of its feathers, but the creature was huge. It was large enough to steal a small horse into the sky. The creature was armed with talons the length of my arm, which were wrapped around a branch, a long, needle-like beak protruding from the centre of a flat, only vaguely bird-like face. The creature seemed like some unholy union between an owl and some reptilian creature. Its face was almost entirely free of feathers and covered in a scaly skin with a pair of forward-facing eyes so large that they seemed to take up more than half of its head. It sat on the branch, letting loose a series of bizarre clicks until one of Markus bullets struck its abdomen and it took off, flying away into the night. We looked to Markus and saw him crouched down over Anthonys crumpled form he had fallen from the branches when Markus had started firing. Even before making my way to him, I knew he was dead. The fall was too high, his body looked too twisted. When the light from my flashlight illuminated his body, I immediately wished it hadnt. The creature’s talons tore his chest, stomach, and legs open. From the state of his innards as they lay splayed around him it was apparent that the creature had begun to feed before Markus started firing upon it. As we stood in stunned silence around Anthonys corpse, Markus began to moan, a low, woeful sound, as if his body and mind couldnt reconcile whether to be violently ill or if he should cry out in anguish. Forrester and I stood silently, neither of us certain of what to do. We were unable to process that our friend was dead until it slowly dawned on us that none of us knew where we were. In our haste to save Anthony, we had left behind our only means of returning home. It was at that moment I truly began to feel what others describe as despair, a feeling of such hopelessness fueled by the loss of one of my dearest friends and the crashing realization that we were alone, trapped in a place that had likely never before been seen by human eyes. I felt what seemed like tears of panic and sorrow begin to form. My breathing quickened as panic threatened to consume me. My heart hammered away I know not whether from fear of from adrenaline, yet through some means I will never fully know, I was able to keep my composure, possibly because I still refused to believe that any of what was happening was real. When we tried to tell Markus of our situation, a fury seemed to take over, adamantly refusing to leave Anthonys body where it was while we tried to explain to him through panicked whispers that it was too dangerous to try to carry him with us, especially if other creatures like the one that had carried him away were lured by the smell of blood. Markus ignored our reasoning, instead muttering with only passing moments of coherence as he calmly attempted to reinsert Anthonys innards back into the torso. Markus mumbled that it would be okay, that things were lighter here, that he would take Anthony home and patch him up, that hed be okay as long as he got him back out into Paint Rock Canyon, because where they were was so impossible that it would be impossible for him die there too. His ravings became louder and louder as Forrester and I frantically tried to calm his growing madness. From where the next creature came from, I still do not know, but like everything else on this world, it was monstrous and impossibly large. It made no noise when it grabbed Forrester between its massive pincers and Forresters attempts to scream were cut off by a gurgling wheeze when he was torn in half, as if all the air and blood were trying to escape from his lungs at once. In the dim torchlight, the creature seemed jet black, as wide as a feral pig, yet its serpentine body trailed more than 15 feet behind it. Its head seemed to be little more two giant eyes that had formed into one, yet was like that of an ant while the rest of its body was like that of a centipede, covered in a insectile, chitinous exoskeleton that seemed almost reddish-brown in color. Blood and viscera spilled onto the alien soil as Forresters legs fell away from him, the same wheezing, gurgling sounds escaped from his lips for what seemed like minutes. I am ashamed to admit it, but at that moment, panic and fear took their hold on me and I found myself stumbling back, toppling over Anthonys crumpled body. I crawled backwards in an attempt to escape the nightmare that was illuminated before me. My last memory was the sounds of Markus chastising me followed by several rounds of gunfire and a sharp pain as something struck the side of my head, followed by the darkness of unconsciousness. When I awoke, I found myself alone. As images and memories of what had happened returned to me, I sat up in a panic. I was back within the tunnel, presumably carried there by Markus, but the bodies of Anthony and Forrester were nowhere to be seen. In the distance, I heard no gunfire, no screams, no clicks from some monstrous raptor soaring through alien skies, scanning the land for prey. Out of fear, I refused to call Markus name, instead I fled down the slope of the tunnel, and refused to look back. Not even when I exited the tunnel back onto familiar earthen soil and ran to the waiting vehicle did I dare look at that tunnel, terrified that I might see that gargantuan insect-like creature pursuing me. Everything following that was a series of calls, first on short-wave radio and then to the sheriff on my landline once I found myself back home. Search parties were mobilized, questions were asked, I was treated for shock, underwent numerous evaluations, was asked whether it could have been a mountain lion whether my mind had created the scenario to deal with the trauma. They found the tunnel, but it led nowhere. No alien world lay beyond. It simply ended with an earthen wall some 10 feet in. Officially, it was dismissed an abandoned illegal camp being used as a mountain lion den, but there were rumors that there was no sign it had been used by either. People began to talk, to say I had snapped and killed my friends. But I know what happened, what continues to happen. Whenever I find the corpse of a deer or an elk, I know it was some hellish, clicking, avian creature that slaughtered it, flying forth from whatever doorway is contained within that canyon. I know I cant ever sell this place, for I am the only one who knows the signs to look for, for the tunnels to cave in. I havent found any more since that night, but I know theyre out there, leading to the bodies of my friends whove been left to rot in some unknowable hell, under the sky of a world between galaxies in the darkest region of existence. And yet I can never truly call it hell, because if it was, then why did the tunnel ascend? For potentially haunted emails, sign up for the Creepy Catalog monthly newsletter! from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/08/24/my-friends-and-i-found-a-mysterious-hole-on-my-property-and-we-decided-to-explore-its-depths/ WaPo: WH office that vets appointees inexperienced understaffed aides played drinking game in office8/23/2018 (CNN)The White House office charged with vetting political appointees is understaffed, inexperienced, has been a source of jobs for friends and family and employs aides who got their positions because of work on the Trump campaign despite their questionable backgrounds, The Washington Post reported Friday.
White House officials confirmed to the newspaper that PPO leaders held happy hours in their offices that included beer, wine and snacks for office employees and White House liaisons in federal agencies. Officials in the office also played a drinking game called “Icing” to celebrate the deputy director’s 30th birthday, the Post reported. “Icing involves hiding a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, a flavored malt liquor, and demanding that the person who discovers it, in this case the deputy director, guzzle it,” the newspaper reported.
The White House confirmed to the Post that office officials played the drinking game, but said it and the happy hours are not unique to that office and allow staff to network and let off steam.
The revelations about the office come as the administration has struggled to fill positions and has suffered from high turnover. White House officials acknowledged to the Post that “some PPO staff got their jobs in part as thanks for working on the Trump campaign,” the newspaper reported. The Post added that some of those aides had backgrounds that were unusual for their jobs.
One former Trump campaign aide gained employment there despite having her driver’s license suspended for driving while intoxicated in 2005, the Post reported, citing police records, and an arrest for intoxicated driving in 2007, for which she was found guilty of a misdemeanor.
The aide did not respond to the Post’s request for interviews. A White House official speaking anonymously told the newspaper that the aide had proven herself to be competent during the Trump campaign, adding, “We do feel confident in her ability.”
The Post also identified another office aide, Max Miller as a former Trump campaign worker. Citing police records, the Post reports that Miller was charged with assault and resisting arrest in 2007 following an altercation with another man, a case that was later dismissed.
“Growing up, everyone makes mistakes,” Miller told the Post. “Who I was in the past is not who I am now.”
The same White House official told the Post that Miller’s background serving in the Marine Corps Reserve “speaks volumes to his willingness to serve his country.”
CNN has not independently confirmed the Post’s reporting.
Deputy White House press secretary Raj Shah defended the office, telling the Post, “despite historic obstruction from Democrats in Congress, the Presidential Personnel Office is filling the administration with the best and brightest appointees who share the President’s vision for the country.”
Shah added, “Staff work tirelessly and have experience consistent with the practice of previous administrations.”
from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/08/24/wapo-wh-office-that-vets-appointees-inexperienced-understaffed-aides-played-drinking-game-in-office/ European footballs largest standing terrace felt vulnerable after terror attack until one of clubs famed fan choreographies The yellow wall, the 25,000 capacity southern terrace of Borussia Dortmunds home stadium, is also a face that charts the clubs emotional wellbeing. European footballs largest standing terrace wails in frustration when strikers fresh air the ball inside the box, screams with red hot anger when the referee overlooks a stone-cold penalty, and goes soppier than the most loved-up teenager when the team scores, breaking out into the clubs dewy-eyed hymn Echte Liebe, meaning True Love. On Wednesday night, 24 hours after Dortmunds first team were directly targeted by a terrorist attack that injured one of its players, a new emotion was briefly added to the yellow walls palette: vulnerability. Its difficult, said Matthias Steger, 38, walking to the stadium with his 10-year-old son, draped in Dortmunds yellow and black. I am not entirely sure if its right for our team to play so soon after a shock like that. As stadium announcer and former player Norbert Dickel said the club was going through the most difficult situation weve experienced in decades and led the crowd to chant the name of Spanish defender Marc Bartra, absent from the starting lineup after sustaining a hand injury in the attack, the yellow wall looked pale, thinning into grey on its edges. It took one of Dortmunds famed fan choreographies for the yellow wall to regain its fierce composure of old. After draping the entire terrace in a yellow and black sheath, the home support re-merged with warpaint on its face: coloured plastic ponchos recreating the clubs BVB crest short for Ballsportverein Borussiain gigantic letters. After a rousing rendition of Youll Never Walk Alone, long ago appropriated from Merseyside, the ultras facing the crowd at the bottom started banging their drums and the wall looked as insurmountable as ever. Banners were unveiled, complaining about the re-scheduling of the match: 6:45 kick-off: are you kidding? Fuck Uefa. Supporters of French club Monaco, whose regular home game attendance is less than half of the capacity of Dortmunds southern terrace, looked briefly intimidated. Luckily for them, Dortmunds team took longer than their supporters to shake off the shock of Tuesdays events. Goalkeeper Roman Brki, who had sat next to Bartra on the team bus, and defender Matthias Ginter, the Spanish internationals replacement, misplaced passes in the opening exchanges. And while Dortmunds strikers hastily placed the ball inches left and right of the upright, Monacos counter attacks were ruthlessly efficient: at half time, the French visitors were leading 2-0. The grass was too wet, the goal was too small, the ball was too round: its easy to find excuses, said Heiko Schulz, 47. But after what happened last night I think anything can be forgiven. Whether we win or lose, whats most important is that the match took place. Schulz and Sabrina Fege, 37, had both spontaneously bought tickets after hearing what had happening to the team. Where they worried? Not at all, now we have to support Borussia more than ever! Eventually, their team took their motto to heart too, with an energised, rousing second-half performance, scoring two even if Monaco managed to add a third.
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For many of the French and German fans inside the stadium, such as Monaco supporter Olivier Pourcel, the matchs emotional significance had already transcended its score at that point. After what happened last night, the fans of our two teams will have a close relationship for years to come, he said. Fabian Rustemeier and his friend Simon Ballmann had been on the way to the stadium on Tuesday night when news of the attack and the cancellation had flashed up on their phones. Over a bottle of beer at a corner shop in Dortmunds Kreuzviertel district, Ballmann commented what a shame it would be to watch their team play to a half-empty stadium on Wednesday. Cant we find beds for all the Monaco fans for the night?, he suggested. Rustemeier, 28, thought up the hashtag #bedsforawayfans and sent out the first tweet. Within minutes, responses poured in. I believe, I hope, that Dortmund stands for humanity and openness, and that maybe subconsciously last nights spontaneous action worked as a statement against the kind of mindset that led to the attack, he said.
Pourcel, 36, a sales manager for a Paris-based paper company and lifelong Monaco fan, had already tried in vain to find a hotel room for the night and started to consider heading back to France when he picked up the #bedsforawayfans hashtag. Within an hour, he had found a room with Dortmund fan Henning Krger, who lives less than a kilometre from the stadium. We were both shocked at first, but it didnt take long for us to start talking about our teams line-ups, our players strengths and weaknesses, Pourcel said. Of course the possibility that it was a terrorist attack was on my mind. In November 2015, he had been due to go to the Stade de France to watch a friendly between Germany and France but pulled out because of work commitments. One hundred and thirty people died and another 368 were injured in attacks claimed by Islamic State across the French capital that evening.
They want that buzz, they want to say: we can hit everybody at any time. Thats their message. But I am not worried about going to the match tonight. Walking to the stadium on Wednesday, Pourcel was stopped by an elderly German lady with a yellow and black scarf: Bonne chance, monsieur! Votre quipe est mon quipe. Good luck sir! Your team is my team. Source: http://allofbeer.com/borussia-dortmunds-yellow-wall-stands-tall-in-face-of-attack-on-team/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/08/23/borussia-dortmunds-yellow-wall-stands-tall-in-face-of-attack-on-team/ 7 out of around 22 famous Bahamian swimming pigs were found dead after tourists reportedly fed them alcohol. One of the pig’s owners, Wayde Nixon, told The Nassau Guardian: “The pigs were given the wrong food… We had them pigs there almost 30 years, and never has this happened before.” He added: “Right now it’s blowing out of proportion with people, anybody, bringing food there… giving the pigs beer, rum, riding on top of them, all kinds of stuff.” “The family of pigs, dubbed ‘adorable’ by tourists, locals and media alike, have become incredibly popular,” says The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism website. “They live freely on the sandy beaches… The pigs, though feral, are exceptionally friendly,” it continues, “running from under the shade of the almond trees to greet visitors that bring them treats.” However, after the recent incident, some regulations will have to be introduced. V Alfred Gray, the country’s Minister of Agriculture and Marine Resources, said from now on “people will be able to take photographs and see the pigs swim… but they will not be able to feed them things.” 7 out of around 22 famous Bahamian swimming pigs were found dead after tourists fed them alcoholImage credits: barcroft “[They] were given the wrong food… We had them pigs there almost 30 years, and never has this happened”Image credits: Nejron Photo “Right now it’s blowing out of proportion with people, anybody, bringing food there…”Image credits: EyesWideOpen “Giving the pigs beer, rum, riding on top of them”Image credits: brunodukerocco “The family of pigs, dubbed ‘adorable’ by tourists, locals and media alike, have become incredibly popular”Image credits: barcroft “They live freely on the sandy beaches… The pigs, though feral, are exceptionally friendly…”Image credits: amandachiuxo “Running from under the shade of the almond trees to greet visitors that bring them treats”Image credits: vlagios However, after the recent incident, some regulations will have to be introducedImage credits: barcroft “People will be able to take photographs and see the pigs swim… but they will not be able to feed them things”Image credits: ginaalice1 Watch the video here:
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AuthorHi my name is Samantha Roberts I am 23 years old and I just graduated with my BSN degree I love to enjoy going out with friends on my spare time and enjoying the Bachelor life. Archives
April 2019
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